Gary Kasparov and Stuart Russel on Machine Intelligence

This is a great talk by Kasparov, the chess master who "lost" to the Deep Blue computer.

Stuart Russel has more to say on the subject.

Stuart Russell is a professor (and formerly chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California at Berkeley. His book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI; it has been translated into 13 languages and is used in more than 1,300 universities in 118 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, global seismic monitoring and philosophical foundations.

He also works for the United Nations, developing a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty.

Intelligent machines (or even dumb ones) are a model of the human mind, or, more exactly, a model of certain capabilities of the human mind. Russel's talk begins with the notion that "soon", intelligent machines will have read everything humans have ever written and understood it all. It would be hard to find a clearer statement of what computers are and what their capabilities might ultimately be. I'd say that the computer models human language - ultimately all human language, along with the complex structure of metaphor that underlies language. The question is, could a machine understand language? Or, to put it another way, what is it to understand?

In "Surfaces and Essences", Hofstader points out that our linguistic categories that underly language are ultimately rather arbitrary and based on situations encountered in human life. This would seem to be a problem for a machine that can obviously never encounter anything like human experience. If this problem is to be dealt with, perhaps Jaynes provides a clue as to the kind of "experience" that the computer must use as the basis for metaphorical "boot strapping". This would include things like the human perspective of being in a specific place at a specific time, along with a "narrative" about what is going on there and why. 

The biggest challenge for a computer will be to model the non-linguistic part of the human mind, including recognition of objects and general "situations" -- in other words, the context of the computer's actions. It seems like a stretch for us to model this in a computer, which is more and more "cloud based" (no location) and (with Russel's assumption) "aware" of all human history. How is this moment different? What is the "situation"?

Perhaps the trickiest thing to "model" (hinted at by Russel) is that the human experience always involves lack of knowledge and massive uncertainty. What would the computer need to "forget" in order to "understand" a human "situation"?

What is "Truth"?

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.”

As Dennett hints (with typical subtly), there is a lot of "junk philosophy" around the subjects dear to Jaynes' heart. In this post, I'd like to extract one of Jayne's ideas and wipe a bit of "junk" off it to see where it gets me.

At the center of Jayne's theory is the "bicameral mind", which is firmly based on the idea that we have a "right brain" and a "left brain" with notably different capabilities, each capable of acting somewhat on their own. The "right brain" is good at seeing the "big picture" and sends its judgments to the left brain, where they are perceived as speech - sometimes the speech of the Gods. As things get historically more complicated, we evolve our present day "inner chatter", no longer attributed to the Gods (if we are sane), but now called "reason". Jaynes regards this as the emergence of consciousness itself, which is not what I want to take up in this post. What I like about Jaynes is that he sees language in a dynamic light, evolving and building up over time toward some critical point where the modern mind (along with "civilization") emerges.

There is no particular reason to locate these two faculties at some location in the brain and this is perhaps Jaynes main mistake - built in to his terminology. But we can understand his arguments very well without referring back to his neurological ideas. In fact, he rarely does so himself. You could go through his book and translate "Left Brain" as "Kidney" and "Right Brain" as "big toe" without impacting the meaning of what he's saying.

What we regard as "truth", at least in the Western traditions, is a linguistic concept. The "most" true statements are those of mathematics, which can be "proven". As Wittgenstein famously pointed out, such proofs are basically moves in a language game, where everyone agrees to the rules and agrees about what is "proven" in dialogue. As Hofstadter points out in Surfaces and Essences, the concept of language can be broadened to include the "models" of Physics - the underlying idea is metaphor and analogy.

Jaynes, Hofstadter and others point out that language is a huge labyrinth of metaphor. We "bootstrap" our store of metaphors as children (Jaynes is particularly good at describing how this bootstrap process works) and we proceed to produce the vast store in our heads - tens of thousands of words. It is in this language that our "inner voice" speaks. If our inner voice proclaims something to be true, it does so according to the impenetrable rules of the language that has been programmed into our brains. In the vast majority of cases, the beleivability of that inner voice comes from uncounted assumptions and analogies buried in the language it speaks. For example, if my inner voice calls someone a "nigger" in my head, that one word carries centuries if history and thousands of voices. It will make no sense to me to say to the inner voice: No, that person is not a "nigger". In fact, given the language that is being spoken, such a question makes no sense.

If you think that "1" is a solution to "x squared minus one equals zero", you speak the language of mathematics. If it seems sensible to say "I think, therefore I am", you have learned to talk like Descartes. Like him, you will regard that statement as self-evidently true. Those who fail to see the statement as self-evident are used to speaking a different language in a whole different culture which, for example, may regard the "self" as an illusion. Such a statement would make no sense to Descartes. It's not a matter of "truth" outside of the rules of the "language game". Descartes spoke the language of the religion of his time, which regarded the soul as the "self" -- the "self evident" starting point for any discussion of what is "real".

Is there any other way we can reach the "truth"? Jaynes says there is: that "right brain" which sees the truth but speaks it to the "left brain". It's better to characterize this source of perception as some kind of holistic or aesthetic sense that goes beyond language and perhaps precedes language historically. It is an open question whether this "right brain" (or big toe) processing works according to analogy. I think it's better to say it works by hard wired recognition of symmetry, but that is another topic.

For example, this "right brain" truth pops up when we say a certain combination of notes "sounds right" or a scene is breathtakingly beautiful. It certainly shouts loudly at us when we judge another human being to be beautiful, honest or friendly.

This simple observation leads me to some wide-ranging conclusions.

• By definition, we cannot expect language to reach into non-linguistic "truth". Western philosophy, including that of Dennett, even when purged of "wild junk", has nothing to say about "truth" revealed by our innate mental capacity to judge certain experiences as special and valuable.
• Zen, emphasizes direct aesthetic perception and takes pains to isolate and ignore the "inner voice". There is no reason to prefer one path over the other. In fact, I'm perfectly happy to leave the whole idea of "truth" to the language experts and seek for other words that reflect the judgement of my "right brain". This consideration is a much needed justification for being open to Zen.
• Our "right brains" have a shared language, a culture and a history of their own, referred to as "art". I would also contend that they have a built-in "language" of their own - perhaps reaching back far into the past, perhaps part of the very definition of life itself. Even when the "art" in question is expressed in language (the novel for example), quality judgement are made by standards that are difficult to express in the language of logic, although critics struggle endlessly to do so.
• We need to distinguish between what is "real" and what is "true". Truth is the umpire's call in the language game. Reality is what remains after all alternatives are ruled out.

There is another road to "truth", described in our language as "Science". Advances in Scientific knowledge are made chiefly through language - vigorously expanding our vocabulary. There are maybe 180,000 words in the English language (give or take). Scientific journals add a few more with every published article. Moreover, Science is constantly adding new models of reality. The first of these was "Euclidean Space". More recently, Feynman Diagrams have added to our ability to "picture" and discuss quantum reactions. Many things are easily "said" with pictures but almost impossible to "say" with words. However, these pictures ("maps") obey the same principles as language as discussed by Hofstadter and Jaynes. All lovers of maps and models will agree that there is a strong element of aesthetic beauty in a good map. 

There is also a strong aesthetic motive in Science as a whole, most eloquently described in "The Beautiful Question" by Frank Wilczek. Wilczek makes a strong case that the universe really is governed by symmetric principles, which also appeal strongly to our sense of what "looks right" (this is a right-brain kind of "looking right"). In other words, our taste for symmetry is a reliable guide to what is real.

So, in Science all three roads to the truth come together. 

The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: a critical reappraisal of Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis

I have copied this review article into the blog as a good summary of contemporary opinion about Jaynes' theories. It seems that his main contribution has been, as I mentioned in a previous post, to ask "impertinent questions" and open up new avenues of investigation. His specific ideas, especially the "bicameral mind" and the idea that early man was not conscious have not fared well.

The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: a critical reappraisal of Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis

There’s a blind man here with a brow

As big and white as a cloud.

And all we fiddlers, from highest to lowest,

Writers of music and tellers of stories,

Sit at his feet,

And hear him sing of the fall of Troy.

Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (1916)

Andrea Eugenio Cavanna^a,b

Michael Trimble^a

Federico Cinti^c

Francesco Monaco^b

a Institute of Neurology, London, UK

b Department of Neurology, Amedeo Avogadro University, Novara, Italy

c Department of Classical Philology, University of Bologna, Italy

Reprint requests to: Dr Andrea Eugenio Cavanna

Amedeo Avogadro University

Corso Mazzini, 18 - 28100 Novara - Italy

E-mail: acavanna@ion.ucl.ac.uk

Received: October 2006

Accepted for publication: January 2007

Summary

In 1976 Julian Jaynes published his controversial book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, introducing the hypothesis of a two-chambered brain-mind model that preceded the evolutionary development of the conscious mind. Jaynes’ speculative model gave rise to a huge debate, which has reverberated throughout the current neuroscientific and neurophilosophical literature. Has the bicameral mind stood the test of time? To answer this question, the present paper adopts a multidisciplinary perspective and, after briefly summarizing Jaynes’ hypothesis, addresses two main critical issues: the neurological basis of the bicameral model and the philological accuracy of Jaynes’ arguments. Finally, the concept of a non-unitary Self is presented as one of the most relevant contemporary legacies of the bicameral mind.

KEY WORDS: bicameral mind, consciousness, qualia.

Introduction

It is now thirty years since Julian Jaynes first proposed his model of the bicameral mind, based on a wealth of archeological, anthropological, psychological, and neurological data (1). Not surprisingly, Jaynes’ thought-provoking and pioneering work in the field of consciousness studies gave rise to a longlasting debate, with contributions from a wide spectrum of disciplines (2-4). Even today, it has been argued that a multidisciplinary approach to the problem of consciousness and its development in the evolutionary process that shaped Homo sapiens cannot leave out an analysis of Jaynes’ theory of the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the preconscious bicameral mind (5,6). The present paper provides a brief summary of the bicameral mind model, followed by a critical reappraisal of some theoretical issues in the light of more recent acquisitions on the putative cerebral basis of bicamerality.

Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind

The background of Jaynes’ evolutionary account of the transition from bicamerality to the conscious mind is the claim that human consciousness arises from the power of language to make metaphors and analogies. Metaphors of “me” and analogous models of “I” allow consciousness to function through introspection and self-visualization. According to this view, consciousness is a conceptual, metaphor-generated inner world that parallels the actual world and is intimately bound with volition and decision. Homo sapiens, therefore, could not experience consciousness until he developed a language sophisticated enough to produce metaphors and analogical models.

Jaynes recognizes that consciousness itself is only a small part of mental activity and is not necessary for sensation or perception, for concept formation, for learning, thinking or even reasoning. Thus, if major human actions and skills can function automatically and unconsciously, then it is conceivable that there were, at one time, human beings who did most of the things we do – speak, understand, perceive, solve problems – but who were without consciousness. Man’s earliest writings (hieroglyphics, hieratic and cuneiform) are quite difficult for us to translate and understand in depth, especially when they refer to anything psychological. Thus, if we want to look for any historical evidence of consciousness – an analogous “I” narrating in a mind-space – we should go to a language with which we have some cultural continuity, and that is ancient Greek.

According to Jaynes, the earliest Greek text of sufficient size to test the question of whether there is any evidence of consciousness is the Iliad. In fact, the Iliad does not seem to mention any subjective thoughts or the contents of anyone’s mind. The heroes of the Iliad were not able to make decisions, no one was introspecting or even reminiscing. Apparently, they were noble “automata” who were not aware of what they did. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no internal mind-space to introspect upon. Some lexical oddities in the Homeric text (such as the absence of a single word translating “consciousness”, “mind”, “soul”, or even “body”) led Jaynes to formulate the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by nonconscious minds, which automatically recorded and objectively reported events, in a manner rather similar to the characters of the poem. The transition to subjective and introspective writings of the conscious mind occurred in later works, beginning with the Odyssey.

In short, Jaynes claims that men in the age of the Iliad learned to speak, read, and write, as well as conduct their daily lives, yet remained nonconscious throughout their lives. Being nonconscious, they were not responsible for their actions. Who, then, made the decisions? Jaynes’ answer is that whenever a significant choice was to be made, an auditory hallucination intervened, telling people what to do. These voices, in the Iliad always and immediately obeyed, were called Gods. Before the cultural evolution of consciousness, the human brain was organized in a bicameral fashion: the right hemisphere (the synthetic, poetic, “god-brain”) used to transmit hallucinatory verbal instructions to the left hemisphere (the analytical, rational, “man-brain”), especially in response to unusual or stressful situations. It follows that human mentality was divided into two parts, a decision-making part (located in the right hemisphere) and a follower part (in the left hemisphere), and neither part was “conscious”. According to Jaynes, the bicameral mind is to be observed not only in the most ancient literature but also in the contemporary examples of throwbacks to bicamerality, such as hypnosis and schizophrenia, since auditory or verbal hallucinations (VHs) can be regarded as a remnant of this early mentality. Moreover, the bicameral mentality allowed a large group to carry around with them, in the form of VHs, the directions of the king. The leaders used these stress-generated “voices” to lead the masses in cooperative unison. The bicameral mind enabled men to build societies and the earliest civilizations (the Near East, Egypt, Southern Africa, India, China, Mesoamerica) developed through common hallucinating voices attributed to Gods and other rulers – i.e. external “authorities” – and to various symbols, such as graves, temples, and idols.

Finally, Jaynes speculates that the development of modern human consciousness began as late as around 1400-600 B.C., when men were evolutionarily forced by the chaos of huge migrations induced by overpopulation and natural catastrophes, and by the widespread use of writing, to change their mentality.

While innovative and thought-provoking, Jaynes’ sophisticated hypothesis presents several difficulties, as shown by the criticism it attracted from different angles. The next two sections will summarize the main streams of the critical arguments, focusing respectively on the neurological and philological substrates of the bicameral mind. Some of the most important contemporary legacies of Jaynes’ model will be presented in the final section.

The bicameral brain

The first line of critical argument arises when considering the theory of the bicameral mind from a neurophysiological and neuropsychological perspective. Jaynes’ neurological model for the bicameral mind relies on the structural and functional differences between the two cerebral hemispheres that emerged from brain laterality studies. The notion of the right hemisphere as a generator of hallucinatory experiences derived from the well-known experiments involving the electrical stimulation of the brain of patients with epilepsy (7). This was the only neurobiological knowledge about the “silent areas” of the right temporal lobe available around 1970. The role of the right-sided areas corresponding to Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas is still not completely clear, but recent functional neuroimaging findings (8-10) seem to confirm the hypothesis that the right middle temporal gyrus represents the source of auditory hallucinations in at least some schizophrenic patients (11). Arguably, this lateralization pattern could well be the reason why these inner voices lack the characteristic of being self-generated (12). According to Persinger and Makarec (13), the “feeling of a presence”, a subjective experience that characterizes periods of profound literary or musical creativity, could be attributed to a concomitant increase in the individual’s access to meaningful nonverbal representations held in the right temporal structures. However, the variety of hallucinatory phenomena observed in normal subjects and different neuropsychiatric disorders, ranging from schizophrenia to epilepsy, suggests that the stress situations proposed by Jaynes are far too simplistic to be a valid model for common aetiological processes (14).

Furthermore, Jaynes’ speculations appear to be shaped by the striking insights derived from the early studies on “split-brain” patients by Sperry and colleagues (15,16). The unexpected findings about the independent functionality of the two hemispheres after the surgical removal of the corpus callosum (commissurotomy) led some neuroscientists to postulate the coexistence of two parallel streams of consciousness (17,18). Likewise, Jaynes’ bicameral model requires some sort of underlying functional interhemispheric disconnection in the brain architecture. However, from an evolutionary perspective, it seems very unlikely that such a dramatic remodelling of extensive neural networks could have come about in the space of three millennia or so – the time taken, according to Jaynes’ theory, for the transition from the bicameral mind to the modern conscious mind. Furthermore, Jaynes’ idea that somehow there is an emergent function that is phylogenetically discontinuous is a position that few neuroscientists would buy.

On the whole, neurophysiological data provide weak support for a bicameral structure of the preconscious mind. Indeed, significant paradigm shifts regarding the concept of consciousness took place in ancient times, as documented in literary texts. To use the brain-computer analogy, Jaynes’ theory could, at best, account for some software (=cultural), rather than hardware (=structural), developments of the brain/mind continuum (2).

Consciousness and bicamerality

The second line of argument concerns the philological and anthropological basis of Jaynes’ archeopsychological investigation of the earliest Western literature. The Iliad is a collection of oral poetry composed by a millenary succession of “aoidoi” or bards from different traditions, and then assembled around 700 B.C. (19-21). This heterogeneity is the most likely explanation for the numerous incongruities that classical philologists have detected in the text (22,23). Indeed, several passages appear to confirm Jaynes’ hypothesis about the bicameral mentality of the represented characters, and the leading role of VHs in determining their actions. One striking example is the celebrated episode of the anger of Achilles against Agamemnon being checked by the hallucinatory vision of Athena (Book I). However, considered as a whole, the narration of the Iliad is not always consistent with the thesis of the noble “automata”. Crucial decisions, such as Hector’s decision to take on Achilles, do not seem to be inspired by anything other than the heroes’ conscious volition (Book XXII). Arguably, it might have proved more useful to restrict any speculation on the preconscious mentality to specific passages of the poem and to the oral traditions they stemmed from. As a consequence, the hypothetical transition from the bicameral mind to modern consciousness would have been shifted indefinitely backwards.

Besides these philological considerations, some important conceptual issues should be highlighted. From a psychological and philosophical perspective, Jaynes’ definition of consciousness appears to be quite limited, since it does not take into consideration the existence of any subjective, “phenomenal” experiences – or “qualia”, according to the philosophical jargon (24) recently translated into the neuroscientific lexicon (25). Philosophers of mind use this technical term to refer to the subjective texture of experience, which is the essence of the qualitative dimension of consciousness. Roughly speaking, a quale (singular of qualia) is the “what it is like” character of mental states: the way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc. Therefore, qualia are experiential properties of sensations, feelings, perceptions and, more controversially, thoughts and desires (26). From this perspective, the most difficult challenge to the scientific explanation of consciousness is represented by the “hard problem” of qualia, as opposed to the “light problems” of explaining the neuronal substrate of specific cognitive functions, such as memory, learning, and attention (27). The status of qualia is hotly debated in both philosophy and neuroscience, largely because it is central to a proper understanding of the nature of consciousness (28). On the other hand, Jaynes’ concept of consciousness seems to provide the backbone for a theory of higher-order awareness involving self-representation, while leaving such subjective experiences aside. In this sense, bicameral-minded people could be said to lack some sort of self-monitoring accessory function, rather than consciousness as a whole, including qualia.

Furthermore, Jaynes’ assumption that consciousness depends on language-driven metaphors involves the seemingly endless philosophical debate on the role of language in conscious thoughts. Which came first? Contrary to Jaynes’ claim that consciousness ultimately depends on inner language skills, both neuroscientists and philosophers of mind now tend, much more, to assume that language simply contributed to some higher faculties of consciousness (see, for example, 29), rather than being an essential prerequisite for any kind of conscious experiences. Romantic love, for instance, could represent a by-product of language, whilst sexual attraction apparently does not need any verbal component.

Overall, the attitude of philosophers of mind towards the plausibility of a bicameral mind has been controversial. For example, in his review of Jaynes’ book, Block (30) argued that even bicameral-minded people could have been conscious – in the phenomenological sense – long before they acquired the concept of consciousness. On the other hand, according to Dennett (2), since mental phenomena like consciousness are partially created by the arrival on the scene of a certain set of concepts, there is no space for conscious experiences unless the concept of consciousness has been developed. In short, the ambiguities that surround the exact meaning and the use of the term “consciousness” seem to play a central role in further entangling the philological and philosophical views on the putative bicamerality of the characters featuring in the Iliad.

The cultural legacy of the bicameral mind

Despite the above-mentioned limitations, Jaynes’ composite picture of the bicameral mind has had widespread influence and undoubtedly shaped to a considerable extent subsequent reflections on the biological and cultural underpinnings of human consciousness. The most remarkable achievement of Jaynes’ theory is that it bridges the gap between distant disciplines, establishing intriguing links between some of their unsolved issues. It has been mentioned that the exact role of the right temporal lobe of the brain is not fully explained. The issue of the development of a conscious mind, from a phylogenetic perspective, is one of the key topics of current philosophical and neuroscientific debate. Another compelling mystery is the unique Iliadic view of man as an aggregate, both physical and psychological – a problem already raised by some prominent classical philologists of the past century, including Bohme, Snell, Dodds, Onians, Frankel, and Adkins (31-36). Unlike later writings, the Iliadic vocabulary lacks a single word for the concept of consciousness, or even mind (37,38). Instead, there exists a multitude of terms, referred to by Jaynes as “preconscious hypostases”, that are thought to relate to physiological processes associated with mental life (39,40). These “preconscious hypostases” are expressed by words like “psyche” (the living breath departing from the dead) (41), “thumos” (either the blowing breath or the flowing blood) (42), “phren” (almost always in the plural form “phrenes”: presumably, the inflating lungs) (43), among others. Such lexical oddities apparently disappeared in subsequent milestones in Western literature, beginning with the Odyssey. The deep psychological analysis and the rich mental vocabulary that characterize Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Euripides’ Medea (V-IV century B.C.), for instance, do not show any significant difference from what is found in most modern and contemporary literature. This is not the case for the composite text of the Iliad, which is peculiarly devoid of any psychological insight. As such, it stands out as a unique and unexplained model in Western culture (38).

Similarly, it has been pointed out that in early Mycenaean figurative art, the human body was depicted as a curious aggregate of limbs, with marked joints and a fairly inconsistent trunk (32,44). Greek classical art, on the other hand, closely resembled more recent figurative styles.

Quite surprisingly, this non-unitary concept of the Self happens to converge with some of the findings that have emerged from cognitive neuroscience studies during the past few decades. Theories involving concepts such as “society of mind” (45), “modularity” of brain functions (46), and “cognitive homunculi” (47) have been thoroughly investigated and discussed by both neuroscientists and philosophers of mind. According to Baars’ “global workspace theory”, for instance, consciousness emerges as a result of the highly integrated activity of multiple unconscious brain processes (48). Baars claims that the prefrontal areas involved in the regulation of selective attention are the brain module playing the key role of the “internal observer” in the “theatre of consciousness”. In addition, a growing body of psychiatric literature has focused on the fragmentation of the Self, through the recognition and description of dissociative disorders, that in the most recent APA classification (49) comprise depersonalization disorder and dissociative identity disorder, formerly called “multiple personality syndrome” (37). Therefore, the debate raised by Jaynes’ hypothesis seems to support some contemporary attempts to deconstruct the concept of a unitary Self – a coherent centre of consciousness and engine of human actions. Converging evidence suggests that our common sense-based intuition of the unitary Self could be considered an illusion created by Western cultural and social paradigms, developed after the Homeric ages and philosophically enhanced by Plato’s thought in terms of mind-body dualism (47). Apparently, both religious belief and Cartesian doctrine deepened this misleading way of thinking of ourselves, which historically shaped folk psychology and pervaded most theoretical reflections on consciousness.

References

1.         Jaynes J. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston, MA; Houghton Mifflin 1976

2.         Dennett DC. Julian Jaynes’ software archeology. Canadian Psychology 1986;27:149-154

3.         Jaynes J. Consciousness and the voices of the mind. Canadian Psychology 1986;27:128-139

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Julian Jaynes - The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.”

(one might say the same of Dennett, but that is another essay ...)

"Origin" is an important book. It inspires more notes than will fit in a single post. A sympathetic portrait of the rather quirky Julian James can be found here. Jaynes was somewhat obsessed loner -- a "one book wonder" -- who spent his life chasing a rather off-beat idea of what it is to be conscious.

As his title indicates, Jaynes tackles the issue of consciousness. The "Hard" problem of Consciousness is, Why does it feel the way it does? How can a lump of "stuff", no matter how complex its structure and function feel anything?

I agree with the general consensus that Jaynes doesn't solve or even address the hard problem but, like the others, comes closer by helping to understand what consciousness is in the first place. His book is full of remarkable insight into the way his mind works, along with the results of a massive research project conducted mostly on his own, involving sources one suspects are "cherry picked" to support his thesis.

Jaynes' theories are complex, deep, well-documented and surprising. A summary can be found here.

For the moment, I'd like to focus on one of his central ideas, that consciousness (for most of us) consists of a constant chatter "in our heads". Who is the speaker? Who is the listener? Jaynes was a clinical psychologist and suspects that there is a relationship between the hallucinatory voices heard in schizophrenia and these voices that chatter endlessly in the heads of ordinary people. He refers extensively to left brain/right brain ideas that were current at the time, but there is no strong reason for preferring his neurological "explanation" of the voices - the voices are undoubtedly there and undoubtedly have some neurological underpinning - the exact nature of this underpinning can await modern FMRI studies which typically don't shed a great deal of light on the "big picture". I should parenthetically mention Hofstadter's "I Am  A Strange Loop", which has something to say about the ability of the mind to host or "boot up" virtual people. Hofstadter's insights are valuable but make no reference to brain structure.

Jaynes has a deep appreciation for metaphor and how language is "boot strapped" from analogy. This insight is worked out in detail in Hofstadter's "Surfaces and Essences". Strangely, Hofstadter makes no references to Jaynes in his otherwise massive index and notes, but if there is credit to be allocated for this fundamental insight, it would seem to go to Jaynes. Jaynes makes a serious effort to dig into the evolution of language based on metaphor, showing how our common language has roots that go back thousands of years to language that was, in many ways, simpler and more literal. We see the modern perception of "self" as, for example, as being in a space behind the eyes, as something that emerged over time. As with Jaynes' excursions into neurophysiology, the details are not as important as the insight itself. These metaphors didn't come from nowhere. They evolved over time. The language that we now take for granted has vast and deep roots in the past. The fascinating corollary is that there must have been a time when language lacked such vast and deep roots. Jaynes asks, What would it be like to be a primitive human when these "voices" started to talk in your head? It is a classic example of an "impertinent question" that leads to some surprising perspective. As the title hints, it provides a way to reconstruct the history of consciousness, or at least the history of a very important component of consciousness - that inner voice. Along the way, Jaynes develops a radically original theory of the history of religion. He believes that the "inner voices" were originally perceived as very intimate personal or tribal "gods" - the voice of the dead "king". This is what he calls the "bicameral" mind - one consisting of the "voice" (perceived as external and independent) and the "listener". This mode of perception broke down as societies became larger and more complex (the "breakdown"), leading to the gods becoming more remote - their "voices" being heard only by special individuals (the priesthood). For students of religion, this is a valuable addition to the way we think of how religions come to be. Anyone who studies religion sees historical evolution as an important aspect of the subject.

It is possible to challenge Jaynes' insight or at least to ask if our modern dialogue with this "inner voice" is "consciousness". Mindfulness meditation is specifically aimed to distance the "mind" (whatever that is) from that inner chatter. It does so not by silencing the chatter, but by creating a state of mind that observes the chatter dispassionately, in effect recovering the ability to "be" the listener and simply be aware of the chatter coming from the internal "speaker". This results in a state of consciousness that is aware of all the other "contents" of the mind - sensations and observations that are stripped of the judgement inherent in the chatter of the inner voice. All this means that Mindfulness has something to say about Jaynes' theories and vice versa.

Jaynes claims that humans were not conscious prior to the appearance of primitive language. Before consciousness could emerge (defined by Janyes as identical to our dialogue with the "inner voice"), there was a period where the "inner voice" simply told the person what to do. The listener simply obeyed the inner voice without question. That was the period of "the bicameral mind". However, it would seem that Jaynes has made the error that philosophers often do: identifying
"thinking" with language and thinking with consciousness. Once the philosopher can think of a few hundred pages of detailed things to say about language, he feels he has "solved" the problem of consciousness. We see the same problem in Dennett's efforts (Dennett actually does reference Jaynes). But this begs the  question, Is consciousness more than language? Does it provide the answer to the question, what is it like to be a dog? Jaynes would seem to say that dog and a paleolithic human would have pretty much the same experience of "consciousness", namely none. Philosophers have a blind spot similar to those who imagine that all of us have an "inner eye", in which we can call up a picture of an imagined scene. Most of us do, many of us don't. The same goes with the centrality of language to "thinking" and consciousness itself.

Jaynes provides unique and valuable insight into what is, for humans at least, an important component of consciousness and the mind in general. The language component of consciousness (the inner voice) makes human consciousness a societal, cultural phenomenon. The inner voice is "programmed" with millennia of deep, convoluted metaphors - many totally lost to history.. When  "think" or speak, I do so with a language that has embedded housands of metaphors reflecting the insight of generations that went before me. This is an important reason - perhaps the reason - why the human mind is so remarkable - it's not just one mind but many. We can also see why it was necessary for the "many mind" effect to take root in a large and relatively stable population before it could become as deep and powerful as what we now regard as a "language". There was a critical mass that may have been reached (as Jaynes would claim) about the time humans invented agriculture. Before that, what we see in archaeology is a very slow progress in technology presumably reflecting a slow progress in the effectiveness of the human mind, quite possibly a symptom of a primitive, limited language. Before that, for a long time, humans were learning from each other the way Chimpanzees so - by imitation ("instrumental" learning)./ I imagine that a relatively small tribe could develop rudimentary language only to be wiped out by any number of factors, breaking the continuity of metaphor-building so essential in deep language.

We see the same effect in computer software, where each generation of programmers can access the "subroutines" developed by others to solve new problems without being concerned with how or why the details are being worked out "under the surface". This leads to an exponential growth in the expressiveness and power of computer programming. :"Critical mass" is achieved when the vast number of programmers are working with a common "class library" that embodies the continuous efforts of thousands of forgotten individuals who solved the basic problems that "stay solved".

Bottom line, Although taken seriously in Jaynes' lifetime and still popular in pop psychology, "bicameralism" is no longer taken seriously in professional circles. But I think that Jaynes opened up the dialogue about "mind" in very promising directions. Perhaps he will eventually be seen like Freud and Columbus - wrong about most details but right in setting off in new directions.