Part 1 of an eight part Q&A session on our latest book, “Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind: Interviews with Leading Thinkers on Julian Jaynes’s Theory,” with Marcel Kuijsten, Brian McVeigh, Jan Sleutels, Bill Rowe, Boban Dedovic.
Hosted by Marcel Kuijsten. Including introductory remarks and commentary by Boban Dedovic on his research on the development of mental language in “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey,” and “The Story of Sinhue.”
Order your copy of Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1737305534/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/book/conversations-on-consciousness-and-the-bicameral-mind/
Watch all eight parts of the Q&A Session by becoming a Sustaining Member of the Julian Jaynes Society.
Learn more about Julian Jaynes’s bicameral mind theory at https://www.julianjaynes.org/.
Transcript Excerpt:
Welcome everyone. It’s great to have all of you with us today. So for those of you who don’t know me, my name’s Marcel Kuijsten. I’m the Founder and the Executive Director of the Julian Jaynes Society. Today, I’m excited that we have with us four of the other interviewees from our latest book Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind.
These are some great thinkers in terms of theorizing on Julian Jaynes’s theory — and a lot of related topics — and I’m really grateful and honored to have them with us today. If you haven’t yet read the new book, you definitely want to check it out. It delves into a lot of different aspects of Julian Jaynes’s theory. It answers a lot of the questions that people have about the theory after they’ve read Jaynes’s book, and I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails from people who read it and I’m getting a lot of really positive feedback. So, definitely check that out. It’s on Amazon, it’s on our website, and you can get it internationally as well through pretty much any bookstore via special order.
I hope you’ve had a chance to read the panel bios on the website, but I’m just going to take a quick moment to briefly introduce everyone right now. Boban Dedovic is with us today. He’s an interdisciplinary technologist and researcher. He studies ancient languages with an emphasis on the development of mental language in ancient history. His master’s thesis is from the University of Chicago on the evolution of mental language in the ancient Egyptian story of Sinuhe and his interview in the new book is titled “The Evolution of Mental Language in the Iliad and the Odyssey.” So, anything having to do with that aspect of Jaynes’s theory would be a good question for Boban.
Brian McVeigh is with us. He’s an anthropologist, a mental health counselor, and a scholar of Jaynesian theory. His PhD is from Princeton University, where he knew Julian Jaynes. He’s published numerous books and articles on Jaynes’s theory, and has several interviews in the new book, including “Evidence for Bicameral Mentality in the Bible,” which talks a lot about the evidence for bicameral mentality in the Old Testament and the New Testament based on the research that is in his recent book, The Psychology of the Bible. So, if you’re interested in the biblical aspects of Jaynes Jaynes’s theory and that evidence, you definitely want to check out his book, The Psychology of the Bible, as well.
Bill Rowe is here. He retired from UC Santa Cruz, where he worked as a research associate for the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics. He published a four-part article on Jaynes’s theory in the American Journal of Psychology. His interview in Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind is titled “The Development of Consciousness in Children.” And he’s spoken at our last big conference back in 2013 on this topic, and several of his parts of his article were also published as chapters in our Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind book. So, we’re glad to have Bill with us today.
We’ve got a lot of great people in attendance today, too. And I know a bunch of you, but many of you I don’t know. So, again, just big welcome to everyone.
Well, just to get things started here, Boban, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your research on the ancient Egyptian story of Sinuhe, and how that relates to Jaynes’s discussion of the preconscious hypostases and the evolution of mental language in the Iliad and the Odyssey?
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