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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

The book is 45 years old now. How well have the ideas in it aged?

As one big, falsifiable scientific hypothesis... not well. It wasn't all that strong to begin with, in this sense.

As a collection of fascinating ideas about the development of modern human consciousness... fantastically well. Modern ideas from all over the place: science fiction, human history, philosophy, spiritualism and even computer science have broadly moved closer to Jaynes' way of thinking.

One exception is his definition of consciousness. We still don't really have a single definition, and every "theory" tends to define it different. But overall, Jaynes' doesn't mesh too well with most current definitions. We're much more likely to consider animals conscious today, for example. You might substitute "introspective consciousness."

In particular, modern notions that "consciousness is a simulation/projection" work well with Bicameral Mind.

And taken to the extreme by groups like the Monroe Institute and their experiments with the U.S. D.O.D. on altered states of consciousness they state as a result of their method of synchronizing brainwaves between the two hemispheres akin to various forms of meditation.

For the rabbit-holers:

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

Well put. The book has pride of place on my ‘wonderful bullshit’ shelf - while not particularly believable, it’s still intellectually compelling.

They didn't. How has Mozart aged?

If you're worried that science had made this book obsolete in any way - don't. It's philosophy, not applied science.

Lots of philosophy ages badly too.

Or, in other words, becomes science.

Philosophy is full of demonstrably false ideas where science has caught up and been able to test and find the truth of something, especially in the areas of philosophy of mind.

Granted, popular opinion on consciousness has changed since this was written, but what scientific finding has changed since that contradicts the book's ideas?

I'd recommend the book Consciousness and the Brain for a recent-ish (2014) take on what science currently knows about the easier problems of consciousness at least.

Thank you for your recommendation. I read it. I don't see how it contradicts anything in the book.

How well do you think Jaynes's discussion of schizophrenia holds up?

Even philosophy can age badly, so I'm not sure that holds. But I think of Jaynes's book as if not science, at least science-adjacent. It's definitely on the wild, fuzzy, not-even-proper-hypotheses end of the scale. Maybe we can compromise on the old term "natural philosophy".

Which is fine, honestly. Somebody else here compared him with Freud. Exploratory thinking about the natural world can still be worth reading even if much of it later turns out to be incorrect.

The Wikipedia page says it is a popular science book.

I think the modern pop-science book (eg this or Thinking Fast and Slow) is more or less the same thing as older natural philosophy writing (eg Origin of Species).

Wikipedia can literally say anything.

Quite badly actually.

I heard about the book when I watched Westworld, but apparently all the theory is based on some historical stories, of which no ones how accurate they really are.

Have you read the book?

All of these stories were already ancient when this book was published 4 decades ago. So in that sense, it hasn’t aged at all.

But it is also not true that it is only based on that. It also builds on then-contemporary research about schizophrenia, hearing voices, and other things.

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