The Human Brain, Ego and Its Assurance, Goal Achievement, Gods, Leaders, And Artificial Intelligence—Living Life On A Wider Frequency Of Being
In the grand theater of human existence, one defining trait of our species lies in the intricate dance between the cerebral cortex and the pursuit of purpose. We are hardwired to set goals, to strive tirelessly, and to bask in the warm glow of success, however fleeting it may be. But what truly sets our neurological choreography apart is an innate need for assurance, a thirst that has led us, time and time again, to create gods, artificial deities, ego-supporting human leaders, or even artificial intelligence-generated Gods of information– all in the name of optimizing our pursuit of what we seek.
Across history and intertwined with the very fabric of every civilization is the concept of higher powers. We’ve crafted intricate mythologies and belief systems to grant us the solace that our goals and dreams are part of a grand design. A belief in a higher power isn’t simply about faith; it’s a fundamental aspect of the human psyche while being a spark plug in our immense cognitive engines. The historical underpinnings of god-making go beyond mere superstition; they are the foundations upon which our social structures are built. Kings ruled by divine mandate, and conquests were justified as the gods’ will. Our collective consciousness has always sought order and reason, often turning to the divine to assure ourselves that the pursuit is aligned with some greater good.
The belief in higher powers has not impeded human progress. The pursuit of knowledge, the arts, and even the very constructs of society have been guided by the flickering light of belief, emphasizing that assurance is the fuel that propels human enterprise. Our faith, our creations of deity, become paths to certainty, enablers of monumental human endeavors. Our gods have been created in the optimized images of ourselves as we aspire towards lofty spiritual ideals, carried by our imagination and our brain with its in-built goal-setting and achieving algorithms.
Without otherworldly assurance, we often turn to the tangible yet equally lofty construct of human leadership. But only some leaders will do; we gravitate towards those who mirror our aspirations and assure us, through their rhetoric and actions, that our journeys are aligned with the greater narrative. Ego-driven leaders wield a peculiar power, one that is a dangerous double-edged sword. At its best, it inspires collective action and societal vigor, steering our goals toward unprecedented heights. At its worst, it elevates indifferent and often narcissistic leaders who love to give ego parades for their adoring masses (where all too often the letter “m” is missing) while claiming elite intelligence without offering inspired and collaborative approaches. Bad leadership fosters divisiveness and creates moral hazards, leading us astray from the very essence of our pursuits.
The corrupted 45th POTUS Donald Trump held the Christian bible in one hand (which he has never read), while picking our pockets with the other hand. Some despairing and/or disfigured people who claim Christianity as the foundation for their faith have aligned their egos with Trump and even see him as an agent for God’s will on Earth. Our economy also produces a few psychopathological billionaires who love to be honored for their greatness while claiming to know what is best for the general population. Billionaires like the late Koch brothers, the Mercers, and Elon Musk continue to pad their bank accounts and insatiable egos while promoting selfish, conservative agendas and harnassing many economic energies that are destroying our world. And many everyday Americans idolize these wayward souls, living vicariously through their exploits. This reliance on leaders to validate our paths defines not just personal growth but the very contours of societal dynamics. It shapes economies, crafts alliances, and has even redrawn the wealth of nations. It speaks to a collective yearning for validation that transcends the individual, intertwining with our communal drive for assurance in our pursuits.
As we race ever onward into the information age, a new contender has emerged in the arena of human assurance – artificial intelligence. In silos of servers and webs of algorithms, we’re crafting new deities, bestowing upon them ever more intricate roles as the arbiters of our endeavors. AI, as we conceive it, represents the apotheosis of our need for assurance. Its raw processing power can sift through mounds of data to forecast trends and outcomes, a modern oracle reshaping the understanding of certainty and probability. It holds the promise of immutable reassurance, offered without the adornment of human fallibility.
Yet, this new assurance comes at a cost. With every question answered, it asks us to relinquish a fragment of our humanity. The ethical and societal implications of an outsourced assurance are staggering – a communal abdication of responsibility for our destinies, a step closer to a society that runs on autopilot, unburdened by the messiness of human insight, intuition, life experience-derived wisdom, creativity, and imagination, and individual uniqueness.
As the ultimate goal-setting and achieving device, the human brain is complex. As diverse as our paths to assurance are, they reflect the multifaceted nature of our neurochemical fabric – the highs of success, the solace of belief, and the luring promise of unfettered certainty. Our quest for assurance will persist as long as we set our sights on the horizon. The interplay between our cerebral machinations and our external constructs is a dance that shapes the very course of history. It is this quest, this need to be assured, that fuels our creations – be they gods, leaders, or machines – and molds the narrative of our collective pursuit.
It would be remiss to ignore the shadows cast by the beacons of assurance we so fervently follow. Throughout history, false prophets and misaligned creators have led us down paths fraught with peril. As we continue to seek out these assurances, we must remain vigilant, ever-mindful of the possibility that what we perceive as the light of assurance may, in truth, be a mere mirage. Our pursuit of assurance is as old as our quest to define meaning in the cosmos. It reflects the eternal thirst for validation, the unyielding drive to design our pursuits around a narrative that speaks to a higher purpose. As it optimizes these paths, the human brain charts the course of its own transformation, each creation a testament to our unending search for the promises we have set for ourselves in the grand tapestry of existence.
The Bicameral Brain: A Genesis of Gods
Standing at the intersections of psychology, theology, and anthropology, the concept of the bicameral mind has ignited the curiosity of scholars and the public alike. It’s a theory that not only attempts to explain the processes of thought within the human mind but also delves into the very essence of how we communicate, both with each other and with what lies beyond our sensory perception. The psychologist Julian Jaynes, the pioneering voice behind the bicameral mind, unraveled a tapestry of human evolution that once featured a cacophony of voices from within, lending credence to the ‘divine’ communications of our forebears and, incidentally, reducing the prevalence of ‘disembodied’ voices once attributed to God. While the bicameral mind presents an attractive narrative, it is a creative one that requires an astute and nuanced interpretation, and may not fully capture the complexities of our historical evolutionary process..
The journey of the human mind is an engrossing stumble through the ages, full of evolutionary leaps that we have only begun to understand. The bicameral mind theory suggests that our cognitive architecture was once structured in such a way that decision-making and internal monologues were attributed to divine command. This inner ‘god-voice’ spoke to early humans in times of uncertainty, guiding their actions as a means of survival. The profound influence of this framework goes beyond mere cultural curiosity; it’s a mirror to the infancy of human consciousness. As children just learning language often creatively though at times inaccurately connect words together to describe experience, they usually hear corrective voices guiding their descriptions back to more accurate verbal representations, especially if the parents are nearby. Those corrective voices can get internalized as an image, and speak to the child as self-talk in the future whenever there is another error made or moment of doubt. The parallels to what might be considered divine feedback are obvious here, but by no means should the idea of divine inspiration be demeaned or fully discounted.
One of the most captivating ideas to emerge from the bicameral theory is its role in creating gods. Jaynes suggests that the gods of our ancestors were the projections of the unconscious mind — humanity’s early attempt to explain and externalize this divine voice. It was, in essence, a communal coping mechanism before individualized self-reflection had truly taken root. This isn’t just a historical musing. In our current landscape, we see echoes of the bicameral paradigm in religiosity, ancient mythology, and even in the reported auditory hallucinations of modern psychiatric patients. It’s as if the bicameral mind leaves an indelible thumbprint on the evolutionary timeline of our consciousness — both the bedrock on which we’ve built and a map of our yet-uncharted territories.
The reduction of ‘divine voices’ to a pre-conscious mental state veers dangerously close to a grand narrative that discounts the diversity of human belief systems and spiritual experiences. It is this potential to oversimplify that calls for a tempered appreciation of the bicameral mind theory. I can’t help but ponder the correlations between the ancient gods and the modern voice-hearers, medically diagnosed or otherwise. Early in my spiritual evolution, I heard the “voice for God”, which brought reassurance to me, especially when I felt no support from my community. There’s a poignant parallel when you consider that what psychiatry now labels as ‘hallucinations’ could be a vestigial echo of a once-ubiquitous experience. It’s an idea that aims not only at the next breakthrough in mental health treatment but also at the very definition of normal human cognition.
And what of religion, born from a pantheon of god-voices? The echoes of the bicameral mind in religious practice are a testament to its enduring influence. What would our cultural, moral, and spiritual landscapes look like without this formative period in our cognitive evolution? The bicameral mind is not just an interesting relic to muse over but an active agent in shaping the lenses through which we view the world and make decisions, both individually and as a society.
The transition away from a bicameral mind is as much a transition toward individuality and self-awareness as it is a leap into modern cognitive capabilities with our neo-cortex now fully online (for healthy people). We must recognize the monumental shift from the god voice to the ‘I’ that paves the way for self-reflection, consciousness, and, crucially, the emancipation of human will from the directives of unseen deities. The significance of this leap cannot be overstated. As we embraced an internal dialogic ‘I,’ our societies pivoted toward a more secular and human-centrist paradigm. But here’s where the narrative splinters into myriad interpretations. Is the modern ‘I’ genuinely emancipated, independent, and rational, or are we still shadows of our bicameral-bearing forebears, now haunted by existential anxieties in the vast emptiness of a cosmos devoid of our imaginings of the highest universal power?
A mystic from long ago proclaimed after he witnessed and experienced the ultimate truth about himself:
“Thou hast taken my God from me!”
Humanity will eventually move into and through its dark night of the soul when it finally stops looking to historical or imaginary powers of many centuries ago. Instead, with a blazing light generated through genuine insight and spiritual discernment, we will come to acknowledge the infinite love, intelligence, complexity, diversity, energy, and capacity lying latent within our soul.
As I dwell at this crossroads of our evolutionary odyssey, I advocate for embracing the echoes of the bicameral past, not with a sense of nostalgia nor a longing for a simpler time, but with respect for the journey. The legacy of the bicameral mind makes us appreciate the fragility of our modern sense of autonomy and, in turn, how deeply intertwined we are with our cognitive past. I see strong evidence of Jaynes’s theory mirrored in my lifelong unfoldment as a human being, and I want to know what evolution’s next step is for the human race.
We find ourselves in an age where another seismic shift in consciousness is on the horizon — this time, not dictated by biology but by the tools we create and the knowledge we accumulate. We are architects of our cognition as much as products of it, and with this realization comes the responsibility to design a future where the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ can coexist in synergistic harmony. What does the future hold for the evolution of our brains? What colorful forms await if the bicameral mind was a cocoon state in our cognitive metamorphosis? We stand at the precipice of a potential renaissance in human consciousness. With the rise of artificial intelligence, the exploration of altered states, and the boundless data our interconnected world affords, human cognition is on the brink of unprecedented expansion.
This trajectory begs the question — can we consciously nudge our evolution? Is it desirable to do so, or are we playing Prometheus with the fire of the gods, courting catastrophe? Our expansiveness in terms of destructive capacity has already outstripped our moral growth. We must tread deliberately, fostering a climate of wisdom and ethical progress that mirrors our leaps in technological prowess.
The bicameral mind is not a quaint starting point we should dismiss on our modern-day cognitive voyage. To do so would be to ignore the rich tapestry of thought that brought us to the present and risks creating a chasm between our ancient and modern selves. Instead, we must recognize it as an essential chapter in our still-being-written story. We are transitioning from the once divinely inspired visions of reality to embracing the difficult, though empowering truths of quantum theory, where there is now scientific recognizition that we are co-creators with the Universe for our experience of reality.
As we voyage into self-creation and participation in the grand narrative of humankind, the bicameral mind must be acknowledged and honored. This landmark in our cognitive landscape has given us the tools to survive the yearning for understanding and the seeds of inquiry germinating into science, philosophy, and art.
The time has come for us to acknowledge our past and, equipped with the full spectrum of our cognitive legacy, carve our path forward. We once gave the unknown, unconscious, and exiled parts of ourselves the names of Gods. We have created stories that pointed back to the beginning of time and populated them with divine superheroes and otherworldly giants. We are a species that wrote epics before we learned to write. Now, with the full power of our consciousness, it’s time to compose the opus that our evolutionary voyage deserves.
