The Return on the Bicameral Mind

I can't think of any bad book which has had the enduring influence of that by Julian Jaynes. If we've gotten anything out of Derrida it is just how easy it is to get away with making trash like that, much like Carlos Castenada's works of fiction that earned him a PhD in sociology. (... at least people seem to have forgotten Velikovsky completely but boy the word "consciousness" still sucks people in today )

I like the analogy with pet ownership, especially, as it relates to how we deal with AI.

If my cats suddenly tense up and look somewhere, I'll look with them - did something fall in another room that I didn't hear, did someone come into the house?

But they're fallible. If I turn on the vacuum and they tense up, I know there's nothing to worry about, the same way I know to second-guess an AI's output, or a GPS's directions that are steering me towards a boat ramp.

One of the key takeaways from Jaynes' work for me is the idea that our minds and "selves" are not singular but in fact a constellation of subsystems all working in concert with one another to form the totality of our phenomenological experience. Not all of these subsystems are always within the focus of the center of our attention, hence the development of ideas such as the {sub,un}conscious, various triadic models such as the id/ego/superego and the Platonic rational man/lion/monster model described by Vervaeke in his "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" [0] series, which also bears relations to (and shares Greek terminology with) the Iliadic models of the self and language of nous/thumos/phrenes/psyche that Jaynes discusses in Book I of his 1976 work.

Most crucially is the language of Hermetic Qabalah outlined by Aleister Crowley which sought to unify these varying languages and models of the self into a single glyph, a "Rosetta Stone" of the world's spiritual/psychological traditions inspired by the cultural crossover of ancient Hellenistic society and Greco-Egyptian syncretism. From the Hermetic Tree of Life it becomes possible to translate the language of the Abrahamic traditions to the Hindu, Buddhist, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian pantheons and vice-versa.

In a similar way to how the ancient Greeks had far more nuanced and granular language to refer to different types of love (as in agape, eros, philia), systems such as the Hermetic Qabalah offer a far richer and more expressive vocabulary with which to describe the landscape of the self and its component subsystems of unconscious, dreamlike content; emotion; rationality; egoic, "self-conscious" drive; morality; and archetypal influence that is part of our cultural and psychological inheritance as human beings.

The general project of all the world's spiritual traditions is the orchestration of all these component subsystems into a unified whole capable of functioning in symphony as opposed to dissonance and discord; where all the component drives, sub-goals, and motivations of the human can be directed at a singular purpose instead of being at odds with one another and running off into different (or even diametrically opposed) directions.

The opening of a dialogue with these dormant, "unconscious" aspects and subsystems of man's psychology, the co-creation of an inner mind which we develop into one capable of wisdom, is precisely the object of the spiritual quest; heavens and angels in the sky are simplistic misinterpretations of what is fundamentally a psychological operation taking place in one's mind.

The fundamental schism that Jaynes describes between modern, egoic (self-)consciousness and the archetypal forces of gods who dispensed wisdom and guided man's every action in antiquity is that which is repaired by the spiritual quest, the alchemical magnum opus of "solve et coagula," the "union with God" which man has laboured for centuries to attain and developed innumerable divinatory and ritualistic practices to achieve: the washing of the mouths of idols and statues so that the auditory hallucinations that ancient man attributed to "gods" could be more clearly heard; the hypnotic induction of the oracles (at Delphi); the reading of omens, and the practice of augury and sortilege. The crying out for answers in the Psalms is a plea for long dormant aspects of the psyche, which once spoke to man and gave him comfort and inspiration and advice during the trials and tribulations of his life, to awaken again and guide his hand, for the fallibility and vulnerability of egoic man was found lacking in the face of a threatening and astronomically large world beyond his comprehension.

[0] https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-5-plato-and-the-cave/