Bicameral Mind- Early Humanoids not self-conscious as us

[Rafael Thundercat]

https://journals.openedition.org/zjr/222

In this link there is a short essay on what Julian called the Bicameral mind. The hypotesis that early humanoids had no self-consciousness the way we tend to know as self-consciouness. 

Is a interesting concept. When you see a cat, dog, monkey living his life, do you think he is self-concious. At least a little similar with your own self-conciousness. But you actually dont know. You project it unto every living being the parameters of your self. At nigth I had some creazy dreams and I meet people, I wake up and I think: Who are those people in my dream? Were they aware of their doings? Were they conscious with their own singular lifes? This questions are absurd. I know that was just images inside my mind, and even to say I was a whole movie inside "my" mind already posits that I have a bicameral mind or a split on consciousness, my and the phenomena I see, hear, feel.  So who to say that was always like this? If we get the hearitage of a bicameral mind from our parents, how can we know that we are just taking this capacity for granted?  Like, yes, Of course I am self-aware, it was always like this!!

Who to say? Based in the Authority of who? We take self- awareness for granted, as a gift that just came instaled by default in us. This sense of self- control, like a game character unaware that his moves are not being made by himself but a boy moving a Joystick. How would the game character discover he is just a puppet inside a Tv screen? 

[caspex]

Jaynes doesn't say that early humanoids did not have a sense of self. His theory is simply that ancient people could not introspect into their own mental states which is so common in modern society; and that due to the lack of the ability to introspect, auditory hallucinations happened in novel and stressful situations that people considered as deities. The bicameral mind being phenomenally-conscious but not access-conscious, is his main theory, although he doesn't use these terms himself. Essentially, he proposes that a-consciousness emerged culturally and not strictly biological, which I completely agree with.

As described in the paper you provided, p-consciousness is simply the existence of qualia and personal experience for an individual, while a-consciousness is the awareness of their own mental states such as being aware that one has thoughts, emotions and memories. While p-conscious individuals use these mental states, they do not distinguish these mental states as something different than the world around them, and hence can believe internal monologue as also part of the world outside, as if a deity communicating with them.

I actually agree with this. However, the idea that a-consciousness is common and wide-spread in modern societies is false; this is only the case in the educated population. I have met and seen time and again many people in my own country who simply do not introspect and are very foreign to this idea. They understand that they exist as an individual, as a self, but they do not access their own mental states for introspection. They are essentially only p-conscious, or rather, somewhere in between p-conscious and a-conscious. There's a stark behavioral difference between an individual who is access-conscious versus only phenomenally.

The discussion in the paper about the concept of soul is also very interesting.