0519 I conclude this first look at Julian Jaynes’s breakthrough masterwork, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, with a brief summary.

I examine the First Mariner Books edition, published in 2000, which offers the advantage of a postscript… er… “afterword”, written in 1990, fourteen years after the first edition.

The afterword does not substitute for the masterwork, even though it neatly distills the complex argument into four propositions.

0520 Here are the four propositions.

0521 This examination commences with these four propositions.

Why do I pursuit of this topic?

In my view, Mithen’s 2024 work, The Language Puzzle, exhibits the hallmarks of both subjective consciousness and bicameral mind.

0522 This examination concludes with modifications on Jaynes’s four propositions.

0523 Each of these modifications have been discussed in full.

These modifications bind together Mithen’s nyet hypothesis, pertaining to the Lebenswelt that we evolved in, and Jaynes’s historical hypothesis, pertaining to our current Lebenswelt.

These modifications demonstrate that our current Lebenswelt (items in blue) is not the same as the Lebenswelt that we evolved in (items in green).

These modifications propose how the first singularity is a major cause for this difference.

The first singularity stands between the green and the blue items.

0524 Steven Mithen publishes in 2024, almost precisely five decades after Julian Jaynes publishes in 1976.  So much has happened during the past fifty years.  Also, so little has happened, when it comes to developing Jaynes’s four propositions.  How strange it is that Steven Mithen’s bicameral mind may have constructed a foreword to Jaynes’s masterwork, without the author consciously realizing it.

0525 This is precisely the irony that permeates Jaynes’s landmark work.

Who could have known? 

So concludes this first look at Jaynes’s text.