/lit/ - Literature

>>20945901
Not quite. More like the people of today who still have internal monologues driving their behaviour, with even less ability to internally reflect.

>>20945904
So like the minority population of people who can't hear voices in their head?

>>20945901
They weren't atomized enough to develop an internal monologue. They were closer to God.

>>20945913
>>20945904
Kek I guess I'm a p zombie I literally read your post without reading your post and posted the same thing.

>>20945913
No. If you have an internal monologue you are closer to a bicameral than a truly conscious subject.

>>20946105
Literally the entire theory is that they WERE hearing internal voices

>>20946183
>>20945901
I always suspected this whole internal monologue/NPC meme was an alt right gaslighting attempt to make liberals feel insecure about their intellect. Ive never thought aloud in words and didnt realize until college that some people apparently can. Asked my parents about it and neither of them can and they assured me it was perfectly normal, but I've always felt bad about it.
Feels fucking good to be vindicated and to know that not only is being able to hear voices in your head uncommon, it's a sign that you're an unevolved caveman, so conservatives in a nutshell basically.

>The lack of an inner monologue has been linked to a condition called aphantasia — sometimes called "blindness of the mind's eye." People who experience aphantasia don't experience visualizations in their mind; they can't mentally picture their bedroom or their mother's face. Many times, those who don't experience visualizations don't experience clear inner speech, either, Lœvenbruck noted (2018).
Difference between internal monologue in the very ancient world and ours is that those who have an inner monologue today are well aware that they are the ones controlling the "speech"
In ancient times, they thought it was the gods

>>20946386
>Yeah hallucinating 24/7 is totes normal guys. I'm not a nazi or anything just someone trying to deny the lived experience of millions of POC worldwide under the guise of science
Fuck off

>>20946398
I guess neurology is nazi now? how tf is this even political?

>>20946398
Imagine thinking being able to visualize is hallucination. How do people like this even function? What do they even "think"? Are they even capable of imagining, "simulating" their ideas and thinking about the world? Hell, since we're on /lit/, how do they even perceive the content in the books, the ideas and scenarios in them? Is this where the hatred for fantasy among a lot of people here comes from, because they literally can't imagine and visualize all the "vistas" that are in fantasy and fiction books?

>>20946189
The entire point is that they were HEARING internal voices, not making them consciously like we do. Because they were only beginning to develop modern consciousness.

SHAKA ZULU'ED!!!!

>>20946189
We can guess the voices came from one side of the brain, but it can be reasoned this was a medium between God and man—that the right-hemisphere's accumulation of experience and delivering of commands was the work higher beings, and with the emergence of the moralistic metaphorical mind-space/struction-making internal monologue (what Jaynes means by consciousness), man needed Christ to guide him in a world deaf to God.

BY SHAKA ZULU!

>>20946698
Perhaps the Christ = Logos people are onto something.

>>20946349
>I'm a liberal and my parents are liberals and none of us have internal monologues which DEBUNKS the crazy alt right theory that we're actually NPCS

>>20946349
Holy kek the memes are true

>>20946398
Nice, lol.

>>20945901
There's so much we take for granted and we never needed to think about that we get through some kind of cultural osmosis. There are examples of tribes with no direct contact with the modern world that when contacted reveal they still know the moon is a material place because the dominant myth is that some man somewhere has been there.
Where does the voice in your head come from? It comes from literacy and mass media. If you had only been exposes to a few voices like your extended family those are the actual voices that would play in your head. Your father, the tribal leader, the nagging wife etc. Even when contemplating a problem you're facing alone in the jungle the voices you would use to help you figure it out would be based on the people you know.

>>20947000
The voice in my head doesn't sound like anyone, my internal monologue isn't a literal voice I hear in my head it's just words that I intuitively know are being spoken.

>>20946349
>I do not possess a consciousness and am a phenomenological animal
Okay, cool.

>>20947008
Which is a sense developed by using words a lot, specifically through literacy and media. It's a thing you train yourself to do, you're not born with the voiceless voice. I was taught reading by sounding out the letters, over time as I read more I established well trained pathways to represent words without needing any connection to sound. For most of history most literate people could not do that, they only read out loud. Reading without moving your lips was considered heavy stuff.

>>20946564
Part of the reason "representation" is "important" nowadays is because there's a good chunk of the population (some populations more than others) who literally lack the capacity to empathize with those even slightly different from themselves, or place themselves within a story if the characters aren't perfect reflections of their lives. These are the type of people who would claim fiction is a waste of time because "it isn't realistic".

>>20947109
I don't really buy that. Anyone you are describing would be literally sub-human. I could read from other perspectives as an 8 year old. Are you sure such people actually exist?

>>20946725
In the Beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God, and without the Logos, not one thing came into being

>>20947134
If only you knew how bad things really are

>>20947239
I deal with stupid people a lot. What this immediately reminds me of is interacting with women.

>>20945901
Obviously the entire internal monologue thing is just a trojan for 'language' to worm its way into the more subtle aspects of your being until you have no vital animation left. That you can talk about these metacognitive aspects 'yourself' in such a public-roman-toilet-esque way is fucking proof that if the self hasn't already been killed then it's simply being changed in the 'report' to 'never existed lol.'
Telepathy is going to become true in the way that microprocessors are just a bunch of really small gates, by turning your own sense of being inside out: open source internal monologue - you suck my cognitocock, and I'll suck yours... yay, we're both HUMAN. I'm done. Done with this gay world.
Just so you know guys, we never stopped making fertility statues. Now they're just invisible. Those memes they make about a bunch of skinny brown manlets walking around with sticks - that's you - in the sense that you're a collective egregoric entitity with a monomind set on becoming more and more productive. You're a bunch of gimps giving your souls to the gigantic fat mommyspirit - the internet turns into a middle aged womans wine and bitch circle, pretending to have thoughts just so you can criticise them. Well guess what asshole? FUCK YOU! I stand with the gorillas:A HHA HHAH HAHHH OOH OOOOHHHHO OOOOOOOOO consciousness isn't a-AH AH AHH AH AH O OOO H OHOH mistake, it's an EMBARASSMENT!

>>20947727
The Ancients.... The Ancients are dead. The Ancients remain dead. And we have killed them. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become Modern simply to appear worthy of it?

>>20946183
We all have two brain hemispheres, does bicameral mean something else?

>>20946349
Spatio-visual thought is intelligence as such. 'Inner monologue' and word-thinking is the NPC mark. It's not that they lack one, it's goldfish levels of RAM to the point they forget.

>>20947239
I tried the story teller thing. Its funny how my mind went about it by forming a 2d map first with each couple in a single row, the storry teller on the left side.

this is total horseshit hypothetical musings without an ounce of empirical evidence. astrology for midwits

>>20947813
Define evidence. Let me guess: the fruit is only true when it hangs really low?

>>20945901
No, they were human.

>>20948111
>they were human
So they *were* p-zombies.

>>20945901

>>20947761
In psychometrics today, the division that's recognized as *real* isn't actually between verbal and visuo-spatial. That's just a construct of the most common tests (because of the nature of the *testing* apparatuses and not of *thinking*), it's not the way our mind's processes actually divide.

Internal monologue is slavery to society and its constructs. No monologue = not an NPC

>>20946349
>IT'S DA JOOOOOOOS
>IT'S DA NAAAAAAZIS

>>20946386
I always thought I had Aphantasia until I spent some time actually working on it. Visualization until I could see it daily. Have gone from 5 to 3 and it's only improving. I unironically believe aphantasia is not a thing, or at least not something people are born with or stuck with. Some people can clearly visualize better than others genetically, but visualization is a muscle and those who don't do particularly artistic things or were very imaginative as children slowly lose the ability to visualize well.
I dunno what this "alt-right haslughting against liberals shit" is about, but I think it is internet gaslighting to make people feel like they're genetically stupid when really they have just neglected something that the modern world has little use for.

>>20946349
>to make liberals feel insecure about their intellect.

>>20949900
I should also say a lot of it is people not understanding the question. I think a lot of people who claim aphantasia actually can visualize, but the image almost makes it look like that should be hallucinating an apple in their vision like they took some weird psychedelic with closed eye visuals, when visualization takes place in the minds eye.

>>20947737
Retard

>>20947761
I don’t really agree. I’ve met plenty of wordcels and high verbal IQ people who are terrible drivers or have bad spatial intelligence but are smart. Accomplished in their fields.

>>20949900
im going to pursue building memory palaces to improve my ability to visualize. this is not to say i lack the ability (often in my childhood i would be disappointed by movies/shows about books i loved compared to how i imagined them playing out) but i also seek to improve it. spatial memory is far more efficient as well

>>20946349
>Feels fucking good to be vindicated and to know that not only is being able to hear voices in your head uncommon, it's a sign that you're an unevolved caveman, so conservatives in a nutshell basically.
You work in a 9-5 while eating goyslop.

>>20945901
Miscellaneous thought errors: there is a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that was popular in the 1970s and continues to have a residual influence. A typical argument derived from it: the Homeric heroes lived permanently in something like a “flow state” (e.g. the absorption found in piano playing); they had no sense there was an “I”, they lived in permanent continuity with reality—except for occasional communications from “gods” which were in fact what we call “thoughts”, since we have internalised this process as part of the creation of the “I”. Except, this being so, why did they record individual heroes at all? They would have had no sense there was “an Achilles” to celebrate.

As with Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values, “bicameralism” assumes that humans change our fundamental nature more than we really do—in this case that we had a radically different conception of self only 3,000 years ago. My view, derived my the slowness of linguistic change, is that we haven’t changed in fundamental orientation for a long time—hence the Homeric world isn’t alien to me, rather it’s completely familiar. Really, bicameralism is an attempt to get back to religion via a materialist quasi-Zen route. Yet Homer was like us—values have not transvalued, although the emphasis on certain values has changed.

Second miscellany: Hervey Cleckley, who popularised the term “psychopath”, argued against a hereditary explanation on the grounds that about 57% of the public, when canvassed, could identify at least one “psychologically unstable” relative. Cleckley just begged the question: alternatively, 57% of the public are hereditarily mad to some degree. Indeed, this was just the figure for the 1940s. Today, it could be more like 63% or even 78%. And why not? Don’t Darwinians say we have suffered severe dysgenic stresses for at least as long as since the Industrial Revolution? If at least 57% of people are psychologically unstable to some degree it would certainly explain a lot about our world.

>>20950871
You can't be completely sure how much you're relating to Homer and how much you're projecting.
The word used is schizo not psycho, as in hearing and listening to voices. Aristotle and Alexander talked about listening to their "demon". You can translate that to your experience but it was certainly somewhat different, even the way people count in their heads today varies by person to person. When one says he's counting in his head you imagine he's doing what you do but depending on the person he may be doing something completely different and you can analyze the differences.

>>20945913
>minority

Not for long.

>>20946398
>so ignorant of visualization, person-body of coloured persuasion thinks its hallucination

Yeah we are not the same species.

>>20947239
This got me to write my own shitty recursive story. Here you go frens.
https://pastebin.com/ZEShfqkE

>>20945901
Nobody is considering the simple possibility that the ancients might have simply deluded themselves into thinking that some God talked to them. Or maybe they were just lying

>>20946698
Based

It would make sense. Intellectually they were closer to cavemen than they were to Plato.

>>20951075
>Aristotle and Alexander talked about listening to their "demon".
And you interpret that as them talking to a spirit? We still talk today about listening to our conscience, or inner voice. Or 'talking' to deceased relatives. Doesn't mean you're experiencing these personalities as a separate being, whether embodied or disembodied, who talks to you like another person does. It's a figure of speech.

I'm looking for NP-zombies actually

>>20945901
https://www.gematrix.org/?word=everysinglesoulwithoutexemptionfromcaliforniaandmichiganaredamnedto+the+lake+of+fire+upon+death+in+reality+not+a+videogame+art+project+or+a+simulationtheywillbedissolvedtotheirquarksprimamateria&save=+Add+It+

>>20951877
FOR NP-ZOMBIES ONLY!!

>>20951581
I disagree that it makes any amount of sense. What's more likely is that a vanishingly small number of humans even begin to understand the mindset of the ancients because they're so deracinated from their traditions. Everyone is opining about gods they don't believe in and building up theories and conclusions on that foundation. Jaynes's thesis that these people literally could not identify their own thoughts as such is prima facie ridiculous for this reason, that he is assuming they must be less conscious and intelligent than him.

>>20946349

Cope on a rope

>>20951914
That anon you replied to is trolling, how the fuck are you people this stupid.

>>20951850
>And you interpret that as them talking to a spirit?
I don't know, read the post. That is how they phrased it.

>>20951959
And I gave you present day examples of the same thing using different words. What you're doing is like reading Freud 3000 years from now and thinking the superego is a spirit that he believed talks to people with a real voice, like with vocal chords.

>>20951973
>What you're doing
What I'm doing is saying you don't know. You pretend to understand completely because you relate the words to your experience but just like the counting example you don't actually know. There are very likely large common factors but we don't know how they thought of these things. They had no reason to conceptualize any of it even close to how we do. There's no easy obvious answer to where these voices "come from". They did think differently, the question is how differently. Claiming you know the differences are minor is pretty deranged, it means you have no grasp on how much you're shaped by modern culture.

>>20952051
This whole thread is people like you assuming the ancients were either talking to ghosts or were schizophrenic because they believed they were talking to ghosts. And then connecting this to the internal monologue/NPC meme because it seems like people are butthurt they don't have one so they prefer to believe it's indicative of a primitive level of consciousness. That is modern culture deranging (You).
Obviously I can't understand completely. What I'm saying is the differences are more so a matter of cultural perspective than of our neurology having evolved to the extent of being different creatures, and that we could better engage with them if we didn't start from a point of assuming they were insane or had no sentience. We are still them, we live in their culture, we use their language.

God, this book is so good
>I am saying—and finding it work to believe myself—that all this highly patterned legend, which so clearly can be taken as a metaphor of the huge transilience toward consciousness, was not composed, planned, and put together by poets conscious of what they were doing. It is as if the god-side of the bicameral man was approaching consciousness before the man-side, the right hemisphere before the left. And if belief does stick here, and we are inclined to ask scoffingly and rhetorically, how could an epic that may itself be a kind of drive toward consciousness be composed by nonconscious men? We can also ask with the same rhetorical fervor, how could it have been composed by conscious men? And have the same silence follow. We do not know the answer to either question
>But so it is. And as this series of stories sweeps from its lost hero sobbing on an alien shore in bicameral thrall to his beautiful goddess Calypso, winding through its world of demigods, testings, and deceits, to his defiant war whoops in a rival-routed home, from trance through disguise to recognition, from sea to land, east to west, defeat to prerogative, the whole long song is an odyssey toward subjective identity and its triumphant acknowledgment out of the hallucinatory enslavements of the past. From a will-less gigolo of a divinity to the gore-spattered lion on his own hearth, Odysseus becomes ‘Odysseus’.

>>20952106
>We do not know the answer to either question
>But so it is.
This guy is writing prose poetry, not positing a serious theory.

>>20952104
>This whole thread is people like you assuming the ancients were either talking to ghosts or were schizophrenic
You're unable to understand anything I write in plain English. What are the chance you can grasp even a bit of what someone thousands of years ago wrote?
>we could better engage with them if we didn't start from a point of assuming they were insane or had no sentience
Not related to anything I posted. The bicameral guy seems wrong about a lot but his intuition also seems to be pointing at something with some validity. The idea is more interesting than anything illiterate autists like you will ever bring to the table.

>>20952121
What is this post? If his poetry points at something real is it less real because he didn't present the ideas "seriously" enough? We're talking about the contents of ancient minds, you think that kind of discussion can be strict and empirical?

>>20952121
Why do you posit the two as mutually exclusive?

>>20952151
>The first who dispensed knowledge to the people from the gods were poets
>Should we not also strive today to dispense knowledge not sterilely but beautifully?

>>20945901
Mesopotamians had SOVL. They were the Ur cultural-explosion city-state-society a la Renaissance Italy or classic Greece. Egyptians, on the other hand, content for millennia to be bootlicking slaves to one Oriental Despot.... yeah those are p-zombies.

>>20946398
This is good bait. Well done.

>>20945901
Are there other books on this topic? Or consciousness in general?

>>20953144
skim the book for its sources retard

>>20953144
mcgilchrist, master and emissary is basically the modern good version of jaynes' book

>>20945901
No, it's just the hubris of moder man that makes them look at people of the past as if they were less than beasts.
They know not that if their places where switched nothing would change

>>20953877
People project all these motives on him I just don't see. Jaynes doesn't even count ancient man as inferior. They were limited to operate within simple societies, but could carry tasks just as well, could talk in verse with ease, and were generally more peaceful than early conscious man. Counting humanity a stagnant creature is the height of ignorance.

>>20955008
Exactly.

>>20945901
I thought this too. Reading about Egypt reminds me of an old Sega game where you just order these funny looking lemmings around and they build things for you and repeat the same word over and over again.

>>20948122
So the bicameral mind is where your internal monologue is external? So it's literally schizophrenia?

>>20945901
Yup

>>20945901
Stupidest midwit shit I've read.

>>20947727
Holy shit. Ingest the pharmaceuticals.

>>20958066
filtered

>>20956600
Schizophrenic people piss DMT, without taking DMT. They're not insane, they're just tripping 24/7 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1070024/

>>20948122
>no more internal monologue
>spirits give you advice

what? these seem contradictory. i'm a diagnosed schizo and basically how my shit works is i am always thinking in words (constant stream of consciousness in my brain of my thoughts unless i am writing something like this post in which case my mind just repeats the entire thing at x1,000 speed over and over again until i quit writing) and then occasionally when i think certain words, another "voice" will jump in to comment on the words or answer a question, presumably my subconscious. it is like having a constant dialogue happening in your imagination. i only mention all this because i was actually completely un-self aware of this until like a month ago, i thought my schizo diagnosis was bullshit but now i wonder if the doctors actually clocked me and know that i think this way

so does this mean i'm a wordcel or a shape rotator? this image kinda seems to weirdly imply both, i guess i don't understand this meme like i thought i did

>>20958413
presumably it's if a thought did come to you mind you might think it was a spirit talking to you