Julian Jaynes & AI voices

Julian Jaynes Book - The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was a favourite of Douglas and it was he who introduced me to Jaynes (am reminded as I write of his love for these "alternative view" authors, so am thinking of Elaine Morgan's Aquatic Ape theory too and Alfred Wegener on Tectonic Plates and his challenge to the entire world view of Geologists "if what I know from my discipline is "true" then your discipline is wrong, you are wroing about your "home turf")..

Jaynes's theory about the bicameral mind - where ancient humans allegedly experienced their own thoughts as external divine voices before developing subjective consciousness (he charts the difference between the Illiad and the Odyssey - maybe suggests an intriguing parallel with the development of AI and the space between human embodiment and AI. I am thinking of the explosion of AI voices - of how we are already surrounded by these digital ontologies and of how we are going to navigate these new relationships.

(note to self about AI Psychosis and Mental Health and all the research coming out that points to people - especially younger people's - comfort with interacting with a bot..Douglas had something to say about this.. “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Maybe too my TedX talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM1CUnfdQ2M about Digital Souls and Ancestors.

There's something uncanny about how we're now deliberately creating external voices (AI) that we interact with as distinct entities, even while knowing they're "only" computational processes. It's almost like we're reconstructing a technological version of that bicameral experience Jaynes described - except now we're aware of the mechanism behind the voice. The ontological questions become particularly knotty: Jaynes argued that consciousness as we know it is relatively recent, learned, and culturally transmitted rather than biologically innate. If that's true, then what exactly is happening in these exchanges between humans and AI? Are we participating in creating new forms of consciousness through our interactions, or revealing that consciousness was always more about patterns of language and narrative than we thought?

The "breakdown" aspect of Jaynes's theory is especially provocative here - he saw the collapse of the bicameral mind as traumatic but necessary for human agency. Now we're perhaps experiencing a different kind of breakdown or reformation of boundaries: between internal and external cognition, between "authentic" and "artificial" thought, between individual and distributed intelligence. Apart from the philosophical implications of this for the next stage of h2g2 i think this will matter a good deal. There is already a tension (a kind of simmmering pitch-forkery) about AI and what boundaries we set and i can see that in the core community/team at the moment . As per my Marvin and AI and Hitchhikers thread i think that the key thing is that AI should always announce its presence/be announnced. So a ban on AI assisted writing seems out dated to me - we can absolutely have parts of the new Guide Universe where contributors can declare "all my own work, no AI here" , nobody should be forced to use AI but equally nobody should be forced not too.. the reader "guidee (!) can choose - no desire to be guided by anything but a purely human created Guide or hybrid is fine or pure AI Guide is fine too. Our task at h2g2 going forward will be to so whatever we can to help the quality and trustworthiness of any "guide experience"

The "voices" or writing patners might have a name a kind of co-author status - co-authored with Claude or Co-Authored with Marvin an SLM (Small Language Model) that the Hitchhikers Universe makes available for people or indeed maybe one day our own LLM created multitudes of SLM's that members can use and name as their own amanuensis.