Late bronze age collapse - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

Julian Jaynes speculates that the Late Bronze Age collapse may have put extremely different people in contact with each other. These people looked familiar, but were culturally so radically different that this may have been the original source of mind-body dualism, and therefore the source of the sense of self.

First, you see others who don't believe according to the strict hierarchical rules that you assumed were God-given. Then, you start to wonder if they're different inside. This wondering actually creates your own interior space.

As he puts it at the end: We do not have a consciousness which then develops theory of mind for others. We first develop theory of mind, and it is this theory that generates our own mind.

The observation of difference may be the origin of the analog space of consciousness. After the breakdown of authority and of the gods, we can scarcely imagine the panic and the hesitancy that would feature human behavior during the disorder we have described. We should remember that in the bicameral age men belonging to the same city-god were more or less of similar opinion and action. But in the forced violent intermingling of peoples from different nations, different gods, the observation that strangers, even though looking like oneself, spoke differently, had opposite opinions, and behaved differently might lead to the supposition of something inside of them that was different. Indeed, this latter opinion has come down to us in the traditions of philosophy, namely, that thoughts, opinions, and delusions are subjective phenomena inside a person because there is no room for them in the ‘real,’ ‘objective’ world. It is thus a possibility that before an individual man had an interior self, he unconsciously first posited it in others, particularly contradictory strangers, as the thing that caused their different and bewildering behavior. In other words, the tradition in philosophy that phrases the problem as the logic of inferring other minds from one’s own has it the wrong way around. We may first unconsciously (sic) suppose other consciousnesses, and then infer our own by generalization.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston New York: Mariner Books, 2000).