Bicameral

[NOTE 5/24/25: This post was a placeholder in 2023, so what follows is the promised rewrite.]

In 1976, Julian Jaynes wrote about the "bicameral mind" as something that emerged in the Iron Age. This was difficult to prove, at the least.

Jaynes had relied on Bruno Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes. Charles Stocking in 2023 was breaking Snell's whole edifice, as Joel Christensen substacks. For Jaynes' book in particular, Scott Alexander had trashed it in 2020.

At base, we still have the phenomenon of pre-farm Shamanism wherein schizophrenics were not selected-against, as they have been since the Neolithic. Since Jaynes: we've seen a few books explaining how humans handle abstractions. "Platonic" abstractions, as a post-Axial-Age writer might term them. Harpending and Cochran. The Great Divide over in the New World. Kugel, The God of Old and The Great Shift.