Mike CernovichVerified account

Snow crash is a great book by a great author. The book that inspired the main plot element of snow crash, "the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind", however, is a breath taking work of scholarship that will change the way you see religion and language

to say nothing of psychology, history, and the ancient world. A week doesn't go by that I don't run my mind over some part of it.

The central assertion of "the bicameral mind" (just remembered that Westworld also draws on that book for its theory of consciousness") is that the conscious thought process is only about 3000 years old. So we had most of the elements of civilisation, including literature, ...

art, city living, ... well before we had a conscious thought process. He gathers evidence for this thesis from lots of different places, but the most compelling lone of argument is where he compares the use of language in the illiad versus the Odyssey and the early versus ...

late books if the old testament (the book of amos versus ecclesiastes). The differences in writing styles (whether thoughts and feelings are described in any depth or not) is striking. We tend to think of our internal dialog with ourselves, the hallmark of consciousness, as

required to drive reasoning, problem solving, planning, negotiation and most of what our minds do. Julian Jaynes (the author), summarizes fascinating experiments in psychology that showed that hardly any of that requires consciousness. 99% of thought occurs subconsciously ...

with very spooky implications. Just to summarize one of those, a psychology professor tells his students to, for a week, compliment every woman they run across who is wearing something red, but not mention the reason. By the end of the week, the cafeteria is a sea of women ...

wearing red. Upon being interviewed, and asked why they put on something red that day, most of the women had no idea why. That particular mechanism is called signal learning, and occurs without our conscious awareness.

I just finished this. Phenomenal

Dune

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