Matthew Gasda
In his seminal version and vision of the evolution of human psychology, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), Julian Jaynes argues that even well into the Bronze Age, and beyond, human beings interpreted the “voices” in their heads as the voices of the gods or demigods—as the utterances of external forces penetrating the skull. The metacognitive idea of a mostly coherent, self-contained self, with an I-voice, Jaynes argues, happens very late—the product of technologies, norms, philosophy, literature: a barely stable concept of a stable self. The fractured, schizophrenic mind of early civilization, which gives names to its different impulses and talks to itself like it were talking to the divine, is never far away; it is more natural, perhaps, than the name-surname, therapy chair self which understands mental chatter as purely native to itself.
I’ve been thinking about Jaynes’s thesis recently in relation to two broad, overlapping developments: (1) our convergence with LLMs; (2) our convergence with each other via groupchats and workchats like Slack. In a difficult to measure, but still meaningful sense, the West is experiencing a return, unknowingly, to the Bronze Age consciousness theorized by Jaynes—one in which different voices pulse through a bicameral mind, which struggles to unify them. I saw an advertisement, recently, on X, which showed the evolutionary development from four-legged creature to homo sapiens to … a group of homo sapiens.
I would like to argue that this meme represents (1) an accurate trend in our social psychology; and (2) a terrible trend in our social psychology. Descriptively, our behavior is trending away from silence, privacy, inner meditation and mediation (mastery of inner coherence–which requires practice) and towards an outsourcing of the self towards groups. These include groups which are partly human and partly synthetic—think of groupchats where everyone is feeding AI into the conversations. This trend is baneful not only because talking to LLMs can produce schizophrenic breaks (cases where people come to believe the model is sentient, in love with them, their best friend, their demon), but because of the moral and political repercussions of the loss of cognitive autonomy, depth, and dexterity that habitual outsourcing and groupsourcing produces (overreliance on AI for decision-making and creativity of all kinds).
So while, under this new cognitive regime, only a small portion of users will “lose their minds” in the sense of experiencing delusional fantasies connected to LLMs, many more will lose them in another sense—their minds will no longer be theirs, but subject to the opinions, the folk beliefs, the dopamine pathways produce by the digital crowds they run with.
I would suggest that the high modern self, the humanistic self—the self-mastering self that comes through in Montaigne or later in Thomas Mann’s novels, to give two canonical examples—poised between Bronze Age schizoid violence and the smartphone loaded with apps, including AI, is preferable to its pre- and post-cursors. Only an autonomous, self-determining subject can be the basis for liberal government, for tolerance, privacy, and decency. Civility is possible only when you understand why you are giving care or attention, not when you are responding to a bewildering array of scolding voices.
Anecdotally, I have noticed that many younger people can’t make decisions related to love, work, or creativity without checking in with the groups and LLMs that live on their phone. Any kind of meaningful boundary or gate between self and world seems out of the question. Groupchats are not just passive entities for sharing information; they are active hiveminds which monitor their individual members: modifying, scolding, enforcing group norms. It has become hard to go on a date with someone; today, one goes on a date with the broader, hovering world around the other person (or so it feels). And while courtship has never occurred in a social vacuum, and has always been an object, maybe the object, of social speculation (gossip), the constant, omnipresent immediacy of the group chat or socials feed suggests a difference of kind, rather than degree. The Enlightenment subject struggles not to report itself, to resist observation and commentary, in real life. But when the phone is always on hand, the mind becomes preoccupied with what the phone is “thinking”; the mind simulates the collectivized moral judgement of the chat in the same way, I speculate, that the Bronze Age mind simulated the voice of the gods.
It is difficult, too difficult, too impractical, to be friends, collaborators, co-workers when every interaction is shot through with this anxious awareness—certainly in the United States at least, certainly in New York City, where I live—of what the social cloud will think, or how it will respond. We might then think of the spread of these behaviors on the backs of technology as the spread of a neurotic coastal elitism and status obsession to places that developed no immunity to them. The fractured, bicameral mind of the Zoomer media elite aspirant presages a wider trend—especially among rising generations everywhere where phones are second-nature, extensions of the brain—where no thoughts are truly our own.
Moreover, if the modern self was conditioned by recourse to private institutions like confession, social clubs, guilds, salons – often with wiser, older people taking prominent mediating roles – the present self is conditioned by same-age peers; ideas aren’t means-tested so much as recirculated, gaining power not through their pragmatic relationship to what serves people, but the deeply unpragmatic relationship to what feels good, what produces dopamine, on a screen.
Thus, to internalize these voices, to think of what the group, or the LLM, will think before you think about what you think, is to adopt many of the features of the old Bronze Age mind, as theorized by Jaynes, which cannot distinguish between inside and outside, and without even the creative primitiveness of believing you’re talking to a god. There is something at least invigorating, electrifying, about believing that the divine speaks within; but you do not get the same salutary side-effect from internalizing the punitive, small-minded voices of immediate peers (the internalizing of algorithmic morality as divinity). The Enlightenment mind, in which Reason speaks within, has been traded for a mechanized, undivine and banal chatter.
The evolution of the high modern, liberal individual into the techno Bronze Age conglomerate person, who is constantly conscious of what voices from the internet might say, means that human beings can simultaneously, and perversely, look forward to more banality and more chaos in their lives. Because they aren’t in control of their own inner-dialogue, AI and group chat-addicted persons cannot even validly predict and anticipate their own behavior. And because their behavior is sculpted by a censorious, collectivized, algorithmic opinion, it will conform to tighter ranges of action. This is the banality of the hive.
Humanists must not only hold out but re-strategize. As Jaynes writes, “language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication”. The way we experience language internally, our cognition of language, organizes our perceptions. To be unable to turn off the influx of external voices, to resist the penetration of those voices, and fusion with those voices, is to experience a severe de-organization of perception.
Why are relatively affluent, secure Westerners depressed and atomized, despite constant contact with each other? Because that contact destroys the boundaries, silences, and creative elisions between selves; increasingly, thoughts are vomited into the common without purposiveness. Thinking alone—on your own—has become a forgotten skill. As Pascal wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”.
Rather than more therapy, more advice, more feedback, more information, we need less, far less; the networked mind evolves proportional to a loss of soul.
Thankfully, cures are cheap: ignoring stupid people, reading books, going for walks, listening to music, staring at clouds and trees and bodies of water. The more something doesn’t talk back, the more it has to offer. The tragedy of the cognitive commons is how common, in the end, people are when they try to think as one.
*Matthew Gasda is a critic, writer, and director. He is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research. His novel The Sleepers has just appeared with Skyhorse Publishing.
Source: https://cafeamericainmag.com/our-minds-are-no-longer-ours/
