Was consciousness invented at the Bronze Age collapse?

For a long time I avoided reading beyond the first chapter of a book with the clunky title The Origins of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind, written by a psychologist called Julian Jaynes and published in 1976. After a new reminder I actually read the book.

The hypothesis of the book is that the most advanced stage of human consciousness is learned behavior that only occurred at the Bronze Age collapse 3200 years ago. Before that, everyone believed that their inner voice was the voice of a god, who spoke directly to them, Julian Jaynes claims. They didn’t think, because for them, the process we call thinking was interpreted as a god talking directly to one’s mind. Since people didn’t view themselves as independently reasoning subjects, they couldn’t think of other people as such. Thereby, they lacked what we call a theory of mind. Instead, they assumed that others also were slaves to the voice of a god. Schizophrenia is the clearest vestige of this lost age. According to Julian Jaynes, once upon a time, everyone was schizophrenic.

Richard Dawkins once called the book “one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between!”1 I disagree. I think it is both a heap of complete rubbish and a work genius.

Let’s start with the way this is rubbish. If people think that I make too many, too bold guesses when I write, I understand what they mean. Still, even an avid producer of guesses like me feels baffled by Julian Jaynes’ level of guesswork. Not only is the basic concept, the idea that all people were hallucinating like schizophrenics until a few thousand years ago, a very bold guess. He also makes bold guesses in the detail level, for example the following line of reasoning about when humans started to identify individuals with personal names:

“It is somehow startling to realize that names were a particular invention that must have come into human development at a particular time. When? What changes might this make in human culture? It is, I suggest, as late as the Mesolithic era, about 10,000 B.C. to 8000 B.C. when names first occurred.”2

And then a long rationalization why human culture had developed enough for names to be necessary about ten thousand years ago. I was genuinely surprised by the boldness of this ...