Bicameral mentality

If you are familiar with Jaynesian theory, you understand that conscious interiority is not a biological given.

It is a recently learned cultural technology, one that succeeded the hallucinated voices of the bicameral mind.

We moved from a world orchestrated by the monumental architecture of ancient ziggurats, where hallucinated gods directed every action, to a civilization on the verge of handing its executive function to a modern global network of artificial superintelligence.

Right now, the AI safety discourse focuses almost exclusively on the alignment problem, the physical threat that an unaligned machine will extinguish humanity to optimize its own programmed goals.

Without the environmental pressure to maintain it, that software can be unlearned.

The perfection of an artificial superintelligence creates a mechanism for the voluntary surrender of conscious agency, a return to a semi-bicameral state facilitated by the promise of total optimization.

The breakdown of the bicameral mind around 1200 BCE triggered a profound psychological crisis.

Humanity lost the infallible, commanding voices of the gods that once navigated them through every novel situation.

Okay, so reminiscing about the past, moving on to the present.

You wrote an excellent book, I Began in the Bicameral Mind, that I had the privilege of reading before its release.

Thank you for that.

And we're going to be on the show, like you're on the show today, to talk about some of the ideas in it.

Sure.

So the language that I found really helpful and where the book gets its name is from this Princeton scholar named Julian Jaynes.

And he described the bicameral mind as a feature of the cognition and the sort of psyche structure of our ancient ancestors.

So he sort of invites us to think about consciousness, try to be sort of specific about what we're talking about when we're talking about consciousness, and to separate it from the idea of self-awareness.