[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks ClearCase_guy et al, there hasn't been a Jaynes discussion on FR in at least a few years (or, everyone kept it quiet so I wouldn't storm on in). Makes this topic pingworthy, it looked ludicrous otherwise. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[Cicero]

I don’t remember whether I actually read Jaynes’ book back in the day, or just read some discussions about it. It didn’t strike me as worth much thought.

Of course, you could certainly say that we have bicameral minds—left side of the brain, and right side, one primarily intellectual and the other primarily emotional, and so forth. (Although there, again, I believe that one should distinguish the brain from the mind. The mind uses the brain, but is not the same thing.)

Still, I have always found it difficult to believe that “evolution” could have changed humanity in such a short time, merely a few thousand years. That always struck me as a delusion of the 19th-century mind, which developed the idea of “progress.” It seems to me that the Greeks and Romans—or the Chinese—were much the same as we are, and just as smart.

Why so much science and technology in the modern world, then? That’s another story, in which—contrary to the usual modernist view—Christianity and its view of the world played a major part. But it’s preposterous to think that people a few thousand years ago were differently screwed together in their heads.

[colorado tanker]

I enjoy good historical fiction, but this looks like something to pass on.