Is the concept of the bicameral mind developed by Julian Jaynes important to developing artificial general intelligence?
There are two important points to explore and contemplate with the material below. The first is a lack of introspection in contemporary society. We are spending more and more time in front of screens which gives us less time for introspection. The second is that understanding the metaphorical nature of language is a key to developing artificial general intelligence.
So, in 2010, Steve Jobs, when he was releasing the iPad, described the iPad as a device that was “extraordinary.” “The best browsing experience you’ve ever had; way better than a laptop, way better than a smartphone. It’s an incredible experience.” A couple of months later, he was approached by a journalist from the New York Times, and they had a long phone call. At the end of the call, the journalist threw in a question that seemed like a sort of softball. He said to him, “Your kids must love the iPad.” There’s an obvious answer to this, but what Jobs said really staggered the journalist. He was very surprised, because he said, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
Now, what I’m going to do is show you how much of that space is taken up by screens across time. In 2007, this much. That was the year that Apple introduced the first iPhone. Eight years later, this much. Now, this much. That’s how much time we spend of that free time in front of our screens. This yellow area, this thin sliver, is where the magic happens. That’s where your humanity lives. And right now, it’s in a very small box.
The red represents how much time people spend in front of a screen.
One thing you can do is ask yourself: What goes on during that time? How enriching are the apps that we’re using? And some are enriching. If you stop people while they’re using them and say, “Tell us how you feel right now,” they say they feel pretty good about these apps — those that focus on relaxation, exercise, weather, reading, education and health. They spend an average of nine minutes a day on each of these. These apps make them much less happy. About half the people, when you interrupt them and say, “How do you feel?” say they don’t feel good about using them. What’s interesting about these — dating, social networking, gaming, entertainment, news, web browsing — people spend 27 minutes a day on each of these. We’re spending three times longer on the apps that don’t make us happy. That doesn’t seem very wise.
The type of analysis explained in the video below could be important in developing artificial general intelligence.
[D]oing some form of psychological analysis of some of the most ancient books of human culture, Julian Jaynes came up in the ’70s with a very wild and radical hypothesis: that only 3,000 years ago, humans were what today we would call schizophrenics. And he made this claim based on the fact that the first humans described in these books behaved consistently, in different traditions and in different places of the world, as if they were hearing and obeying voices that they perceived as coming from the Gods, or from the muses … what today we would call hallucinations. And only then, as time went on, they began to recognize that they were the creators, the owners of these inner voices. And with this, they gained introspection: the ability to think about their own thoughts.
~ Mariano Sigman
So we just ran this same analysis on the Judeo-Christian tradition, and we got virtually the same pattern. Again, you see a small increase for the oldest books in the Old Testament, and then it increases much more rapidly in the new books of the New Testament. And then we get the peak of introspection in “The Confessions of Saint Augustine,” about four centuries after Christ. And this was very important, because Saint Augustine had been recognized by scholars, philologists, historians, as one of the founders of introspection. Actually, some believe him to be the father of modern psychology.
~ Mariano Sigman
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