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Comment by ColanR | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression - not having studied much about Jaynes' theory - that it is a well-regarded but falsified theory. That being said, what you describe sounds like an amazing premise for a novel.

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The most obvious refutation is that according to Jaynes' theory conciseness emerged just a few thousand years ago. Since humans took divergent paths across the globe over a hundred thousand years ago, this raises the question of how all humans developed consciousness independently and simultaneously - unless you think that consciousness is spread in a sort of memetic fashion, in which case you are asserting that aboriginal people did not have a consciousness as we would understand it prior to their contact with European colonialists, which is - to say the least - a weighty assertion to make.

Jaynes argument makes a lot more sense when you take the modern psychiatric view that the way we respond to voices in our head is socially constructed. His claim that it is literally caused by the corpus collosum was bad biology (which was not his field).

> the way we respond to voices in our head

Voices plural? I doubt most of society experiences such a phenomenon, and if they do they’re not talking about it.

The decomposition of the self into competing voices is a fairly common idea. It's present in phrases like "part of me thinks/wants X" or "I am of two minds about X". It's a key part of the whole Freudian id, ego, superego thing and related motifs like the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other.

The falsification usually hinges on discrediting the physiological aspects of the hypothesis: specifically, where the "commander" and the "actor" reside in the brain. Jaynes hypothesized that one lives in one hemisphere, and the other in the other, and commands are issued across the corpus callosum. This has since been disproven in favor of the perspectives centering the default mode network.

The other more phenomenological aspects are not easily falsifiable, nor indeed verifiable. But the arguments he provides at least itch the scratch of explaining strange behaviors and characteristics of our ancestors and the relics they left behind in a way that approaches Occam's razor.

The excellent novel "Snow Crash" was directly inspired by "The Origin of Consciousness":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

That novel looks amazing, and it's going on my reading list. Thanks!

Check also Peter Watts Firefall series.

I read blindsight in one sitting. Good stuff.

This only fiction I have read twice and made notes.

I was going to say, that theory sounds an awful lot like Stephenson's stuff about neurolinguistic programming.

Another fictional investigation of bicameral minds are two novels in the Firefall series by Peter Watts.

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