I don't think this pattern quite fits Jaynes. In his book, he suggests that early literary works like the Iliad and the Epic of Gilgamesh were written by bicameral authors. So the transition he posits occurs after the earliest written communications; the discovery of earlier literary works wouldn't necessarily have him revise his date unless those earlier works contained the sort of introspection or subjective consciousness which Jaynes says is present in the Odyssey but not the Iliad.
In his view, bicameral minds can certainly write fiction, but the fiction they write carries some evidence of their bicameralism. It all seems far fetched to me, but I don't know ancient Greek so I can hardly evaluate his claims myself.
The key problem with Jaynes' hypothesis is that it depends on there being a sharp distinction between the behaviour of the Bronze Age individuals described in the Iliad (for example) and modern people today.
But there is no sharp distinction, and I'd argue there's no distinction at all. There's a difference in the linguistic tools used by the authors, but the characters are perfectly relatable to modern humans.
The biggest problem I see is with the premise of trying to investigate the nature of the human mind in antiquity by examining a few scraps of literature. Even if we accept the premise of bicameral minds existing and these pieces of literature being written by such people, I think that tells us jack shit about the nature of the average human 3000 years ago. There's no reason to think these authors were representative of the average person in their age. These writers might have been on the autism spectrum, or had schizophrenia, or any number of other unusual mental traits that could give their literature unique quirks.
It's like reading a bunch of literature from the European middle ages written by monks, and then concluding that most people back then were celibate men. The social and cultural circumstances of an age leave a mark on what sort of literature is created and preserved.
I agree Jaynes' hypothesis is flawed, but how can you say with such confidence that:
> [...] I'd argue there's no distinction at all [...] the characters are perfectly relatable to modern humans
It can be that you find them relatable due to modern translations, or by projecting your own modern understanding of them. The whole of Jaynes' hypothesis is that they are quite alien and unrelatable, and that they don't function like you and me, and that our reading of them has been wrong.
The probable flaw in Jaynes' thought is that I don't think there is a way to test this supposition, other than time travel.
So "because there are no detective stories in the illiad there was no crime" ?
Certainly yes, a hypothesis of a rich interior model is explicit in fiction, it's tempting to theorise but to theorise a rich interior model doesn't exist is to deny the kinds of abstraction needed to eg teach somebody how to do a thing. It's weighting fiction as proof of theory of mind above all other things.
Construct an internal model where an old, blind Neanderthal explains to a young child how to hunt a bison they have never yet seen, which does not presuppose exactly the same narrative structural necessities in the legend of gilgamesh: imagined time, third party views of acts done, if this then that.. it beggars belief that Jaynes can argue otherwise and be taken seriously. All Jaynes really does is establish a time terminus ante quem so to speak. He cannot establish terminus post quem at all.
He asks questions we still don't have answers for.
His answers are probably rubbish, but that doesn't matter. Without a suggested answer, there could have been no book. The assumption is that somebody will take up the questions and get a better answer.
Similarly, the question of how we see was answered with gradually increasing merit. First rays shooting from your eyes, then rays entering your eyes, neural processing for feature extraction, and integration into the fractionated attention stream, with a wholly confabulated continuity.
I like this model of emergent (theory of) mind better. I suspect at each stage, the sensor and the sensed couple. But, I am willing to bet a snake, purely on thermal signal, can (and does) make feints to confuse prey, before striking. That means to me they have an analytical model of "if this then that" beyond the trivial.
"What it is like to be a bat" poses questions to shape and form and understanding if you intuit a higher mind lies behind the sonar.
Probably? I just don't like Jaynes and allow that to leak into a critique.
In his view, bicameral minds can certainly write fiction, but the fiction they write carries some evidence of their bicameralism. It all seems far fetched to me, but I don't know ancient Greek so I can hardly evaluate his claims myself.