Astral Codex Ten

Julian Jaynes

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Julian Jaynes

Article

Julian Jaynes is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between April 26, 2022 and July 09, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “cf. my review of Julian Jaynes on theory of mind”; “see eg Julian Jaynes and Ethan Watters for more”; “Julian Jaynes argued that modern theory of mind … is only as old as the Late Bronze Age”. It most often appears alongside China, Freddie DeBoer, Richard Hanania.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: April 26, 2022
  • Last seen: July 09, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
April 26, 2022 · Original source
And I’m having even more trouble separating both of these stories from a third story, the story of the “mirror stage”. Imagine a baby, moving around. At some point, it sees its own hand in its peripheral vision: a pink blob. At some other point it might see its feet. Sometimes it cries, and noise comes out of it. Other times it has thoughts or feelings or something. As it grows, it might realize some correlations between all these things: for example, it can use the location of the pink blob in front of it to calibrate its aim as it reaches for a block. But this is far from having a coherent self-concept. (cf. my review of Julian Jaynes on theory of mind; Jaynes claims that eg the Homeric Greeks didn’t have a full concept of a unified mind, only various bundles of emotions and thoughts located in different parts of their bodies) At some point, the child sees itself in a mirror. This is a sort of eureka moment when it realizes it’s a united entity with a specific structure - a bunch of correlations suddenly snap into place, and it realizes it can at least aspire to coherence. But it’s not really coherent, deep down. It assumes that if it got some thing - the object of desire - then it would finally be coherent and as good as the child in the mirror, and its mother would finally love it perfectly 100%. What does it need? Probably the thing the mother wants (traditionally the phallus).
Inline links: Julian Jaynes on theory of mind
In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement
May 25, 2022 · Original source
Is all of this mealy-mouthed and post-modernist and denying the existence of ground-level truth? Sort of, but “your subjective experience of your psyche is culturally relative” is a weaker and more defensible claim than “reality is culturally relative”, and one with a lot of support - see eg Julian Jaynes and Ethan Watters for more.
Inline links: Julian Jaynes, Ethan Watters
Links For December 2022
December 28, 2022 · Original source
43: Planetary Scale Vibe Collapse, maybe the weirdest post I’ve read this year. Julian Jaynes argued that modern theory of mind, where we know we’re individuals, understand that we have minds, and can “talk” “things” “over” “with” “ourselves” “in” “our” “heads”, is only as old as the Late Bronze Age; people before that were much weirder. I always imagined this transition as gradual and hard-to-notice. The SmoothBrains blog writes about a weird anthropologist who claimed to have been on a tiny Indian Ocean island during the exact moment of a sudden phase transition from pre-Jaynesian to post-Jaynesian mental states. I am almost sure this is false, and it goes harder on the Noble Savage trope than I have ever seen anything go before - but it was still very much worth reading.
Inline links: Planetary Scale Vibe Collapse, Julian Jaynes argued
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
26: A few years ago I reviewed Julian Jaynes’ Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind, arguing that Jaynes was on the right track but disagreeing with some of his theories and terminological choices. I didn’t notice until now that orthodox Jaynesian Marcel Kuijsten has an argument here that Jaynes is right and my reinterpretation is wrong.
Inline links: I reviewed Julian Jaynes’, orthodox Jaynesian Marcel Kuijsten has an argument here that Jaynes is right and my reinterpretation is wrong
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
November 17, 2023 · Original source
So, concludes Girard, the single-victim process is the basis of all ancient civilization. The pagan myths were written by people who had recently been in the mobs. It accurately reflects their understanding of events: there was some kind of looming crisis, we figured out that an ugly foreigner was responsible, we killed him, and that solved the problem (and optionally, he might be a god). Girard insists that this process is approximately infinitely powerful. You can’t just choose to be a good person who isn’t in the mob. Everyone joins in the mob. You can’t even regret being in the mob afterwards. This is some Julian Jaynes-level stuff. Your psyche is completely shaped by the single-victim process, you are caught up in it like a leaf in the wind, and all you can do is write some myths afterwards talking about how very right you were.
Book Review: The Others Within Us
May 21, 2024 · Original source
If, as Julian Jaynes posits, the ancients thought gods were talking to them all the time, this was a different, equally-experientially-valid (though not necessarily equally-objectively-scientifically-valid) theory of mind. They would hear a voice saying “You’re terrible and should kill yourself” and viscerally perceive it as the whisperings of a god. Or they would get a great idea for a new epic poem, and viscerally perceive it as the Muse talking to them. I don’t know if they literally hallucinated or not - maybe they did - but it was a different way of binning the experiences that came into their consciousness.
Practically-A-Book Review: Byrnes on Trance
July 09, 2025 · Original source
Julian Jaynes