SPENCER: Tor, welcome to the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

SPENCER: Today, I wanted to discuss some ideas with you that you put forward, and one of them is this idea that communities need some way of enforcing things, and if you don't enforce things through rules, then you enforce things through other community members. Can you set up that idea for us?

TOR: Yeah, I feel like that's just sort of the natural state of human organization. A while ago, back when I was doing Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities as a podcast on my college radio station, long before I made the jump to YouTube, I heard about this fascinating, obscure 70s anthropological experiment, wildly unethical. It got the organizer of the experiment denounced by his university, and everything.

SPENCER: Back then, you had a lot to get denounced. They did all kinds of crazy things.

TOR: These were the days before IRBs ruled everything, and it became something of a laughingstock in the global press. Briefly, there was a whole media circus around this, but it was largely forgotten and has only recently resurfaced as a relatively well-known weird historical story on the internet. The sex raft was what the media called it, although the point of the experiment was that there was actually no sex on the raft. This guy, Santiago Genovés, a Spanish-born Mexican anthropologist, had to flee the Spanish Civil War to Mexico as a kid and had therefore developed a lifelong interest in what happens when a community collapses in on itself. How do you get people who previously saw each other as friends and neighbors to kill each other, basically? What causes such social degeneration? And how do you draw people out of it? He had also been working with Thor Heyerdahl, who was an anthropologist who tried to prove that Easter Island could have been settled by both South Americans and Polynesians. That was rejected at the time, and he was seen as basically in the same category as ancient aliens believers, but there's DNA evidence now that suggests he was probably right, that both South American natives and Polynesians settled Easter Island. He built a boat called the Kon-Tiki in order to sail across the South Pacific from South America to Easter Island to prove that it was possible using only the tools that the ancient Easter Islanders would have had access to. He proved it was possible, but still wasn't really taken seriously at the time. Then he tried to prove something that is still considered in the same category as ancient aliens, something he also believed, but has not been vindicated by history: that ancient Egyptians could have reached America. He built a papyrus boat called the Ra, which he sailed across the Atlantic from North Africa to try and reach the Caribbean. He was not successful. There were two Ra expeditions, and in both, he got most of the way across the Atlantic. The boat began to fall apart before he made landfall, and they were rescued by the UN. Santiago Genovés worked on camera for both, but definitely one of Heyerdahl's Ra expeditions, and he thought this could be an ideal venue for an experiment to test something about social degeneration, to test something about the formation of a community. The multicultural crew that Heyerdahl brought along on the Ra were all working together, despite their differences, because they all believed in this scientific project. But if you didn't have such a "we're all in this together" mentality and just put a bunch of random people on a boat to drift across the Atlantic with nobody to talk to for a hundred days, would they all kill each other? Maybe. So, let's test it. I don't know exactly how he planned to bring them back from the brink of killing each other, which suggests that he maybe didn't believe in his own hypothesis as much as he claimed he did. For whatever reason, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the main Mexican national university where he taught at the time, rubber-stamped his experiment, and...

SPENCER: Let me see the proposal.

TOR: So he sent out notices in newspapers the world over, saying that he was looking for people to participate in an experiment on world peace. It was 1973, I think. Is this the year it happened? Early 70s, either way, the hippie era was still underway, and a lot of people were interested in participating in an experiment on world peace. He got thousands of applications, which allowed him to select from a really diverse bunch of people across the world. He deliberately tried to select for the people that would make it most difficult, so he tried to have representatives of the world's most strained ethnic conflicts on the boat. He had an Arab and an Israeli, a Black American and a white American. He had all the men on the boat assigned to do menial tasks and assigned the women to be in charge, so that the men would be emasculated. He had the captain of the boat be this Swedish woman, who had recently been, I think, the first woman in the world to get an official captain's title to captain big ships.

SPENCER: This is making the Stanford Prison Experiment seem reasonable.

TOR: Right. Yeah, no kidding. Yes, Stanford, the Stanford Prison Experiment, except it was deliberately meant to turn into something like the prison experiment. I don't know how true the traditional story you get taught of the prison experiment is. It might have been exaggerated over the years; I'm sure you know better than I do, but in the traditional story of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the organizers were not expecting it to get as nasty as it did and shut it down before it was supposed to be over. But Santiago Genovés was absolutely planning a bloodbath to test his misanthropic theories about humanity.

SPENCER: Just to be clear, he was going to be on the boat.

TOR: Yes, he was going to be on the boat, which again makes me think maybe he was bluffing a little bit. Maybe he didn't truly believe they'd all kill each other, but he definitely tried to make them mad at each other all the time on the boat, so who knows exactly what he was planning. I would guess that he had some sort of contingency plan. In the Ra expeditions they had, the UN sent out a boat to rescue them when the boat started falling apart. I would guess, although I wasn't able to find references to this in any of the sources, that he had someone from the National Autonomous University tracking the boat and expected that if things really hit the fan, he could get rescued.

SPENCER: Surely, at least a month after the bloodshed started.

TOR: I know. Yeah, that's my guess. But yes, he didn't have the greatest judgment. So they left and they all just got along. They all became, everyone who was thrown together on this boat did in fact have a "we're all in this together" mentality. They did in fact form a happy, peaceful community during the hundred days that they were on the boat. To this day, those who are still alive met up several times afterwards. They saw themselves as forming an international network of friends, and they said that they would do it again if it weren't for that asshole, Santiago Genovés, lurking around on the boat. The thing is, not only did they form a community, which I think Genovés was a little too misanthropic to believe could happen that easily, they also got along; they were friends. Genovés was totally embarrassed. In that telling of the story, you have this moral that humanity is inherently peaceful, but that's not really what the true story suggests. What I said when I made an episode about this was that the real moral is when humans commit violence, we do it the same way we do everything else together, because they did actually at one point plan to kill someone. The test subjects on the raft did actually plan to commit violence, but their victim was going to be Santiago Genovés. They all hated Santiago so much that they were planning to murder him in an Orient Express-style, or like Julius Caesar-style. They were all going to each touch the same knife and stab him so that they would all be responsible.

SPENCER: See, his big mistake is he thought they had nothing to bring them together, and it was actually him that brought them together.

TOR: Yes, it was actually him that brought them together, because he was being incredibly cruel to them. He would say racist things to the black members of the crew to see if he could get a reaction, to see if they would get mad at him, and that just made everyone mad at him, because they had all formed a successful community. So that got me thinking about John Zerzan. Have you heard of John Zerzan?

SPENCER: No.

TOR: He's an anarchist thinker. He's sort of the ultimate anarcho-primitivist thinker. He was an influence on the Unabomber. He was actually suspected to be the Unabomber at one point. He definitely corresponded with the guy, but never committed any terrorism, never did anything actually bad in the real world, and he was the grandfather of a childhood friend of mine. I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, which had for a long time, especially in the 90s, a real anarchist scene, the premier anarchist scene in the US, and the doyen of that scene was John Zerzan. He hosted a radio show, and he was a fixture in a particular neighborhood there, the Whiteaker. I grew up playing D&D with John Zerzan's grandchildren, so he was someone I knew around town. He passed out at a party that my parents were hosting once, just out of dehydration. He wasn't on a hunger strike or anything; he was just old and in poor health. That's something he says; he wears glasses and relies on modern society to keep him going. He has said before that in his ideal world he would probably be dead by now, but he still believes it would be better, because he is the ultimate anarcho-primitivist. He believes that the pre-agricultural savanna is the ideal state for humanity, and that the natural state of humanity is to form truly anarchic communities, that is truly communist in the sense of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Those societies do exist. Look at the Khoisan, look at some of the pygmy tribes in Central Africa, for instance. The surviving hunter-gatherer tribes that exist on earth today do not have much of a real leadership structure at all. They often have people designated as chiefs, but they're more Dear Abby than Dear Leader. As I said in another episode of mine, they're someone who is seen as a wise community member, whom you can go and ask about issues, but can't really order people around. There are a few different reasons I still would not like to live in a society like that. So, number one, you have all these people from all over the world with different cultures and moral systems and values and beliefs all thrown together. They almost immediately hit it off, started working together as a community, and then later on, they all hated Santiago Genovés so much that they planned to kill him. Some of them talked the others out of it, but they were all on board with it for a bit. They seriously considered this. These are also normal people who would not at any point in their normal lives have plotted to murder someone. That, I think, is a manifestation of the law of the jungle, you could say, of how a community like this stays happy and healthy, because the pre-agricultural savanna was a panopticon. People who are anarchists use anarchy to mean chaos, as a synonym for chaos, and I think people who are anarchists mostly are into it because they like the aesthetic of chaos. But a truly successful anarchic society, while that can exist, would actually be stiflingly conformist. All the existing hunter-gatherer societies practice shunning. They can kick people out of the community. You still see the resurgence of mob justice every now and then in almost every society, and when you don't have a real organizational structure that tells you who has the right to do what, then that mob justice is justice. Where there are no cops, everyone is a cop.

SPENCER: If you think about why there is mob justice, why does that exist in small-scale societies? It's very easy to defect in a small-scale society if the society is not willing to enforce against the people that defect. If someone in your small community of a hundred people doesn't do their share but still eats the meat and the berries, it actually drags down the whole society. If everyone is like, "No, that's unacceptable," then if they don't improve their behavior, they get thrown out. That's necessary for the survival of the group.

TOR: Exactly, and I think they also have leveling mechanisms in hunter-gatherer societies. You can't be worse than the tribe, and you can't be better than the tribe either. In the Khoisan, for instance, in Namibia, you cannot brag about being good at hunting. If a hunter goes out and makes a big kill, he isn't supposed to talk about it; everyone else is just supposed to discover it. When he comes back to the village, suppose he has killed a wildebeest or whatever that is, and it's a particular distance away from the village, and he needs a bunch of people to help carry it back. The man will come back, and people will ask him, "Oh, how was your hunt? Did you catch anything?" He'll say, "No." Then people will sit around the campfire and ask him again, "Are you sure?" Gradually, the more people become interested, the more he will grudgingly admit that, "Okay, he might have caught something."

SPENCER: It reminds me of Australia, to be honest. They call it poppy syndrome.

TOR: Yeah. I think Aboriginal Australian societies probably practiced something similar. I would guess, I'm actually not sure about this, and I'm not sure anyone knows, but it's very much observed in existing surviving hunter-gatherer societies, and I would bet that that kind of social mechanism was very common in the pre-agricultural world.

SPENCER: But even today in modern non-Aboriginal Australian society, there's this idea of tall poppy syndrome, where if someone tries to make themselves out as better than other people, they kind of get knocked down by the tall poppy syndrome.

TOR: I've also heard in Scandinavia they talk about the Law of Jante, which is the same thing. You're not supposed to believe that you are better than us, and it's an inclusive us. I've seen people misinterpret the Law of Jante as meaning the in-group is better than the out-group, but no, it's we — including you — the community, are better than you, the individual.

SPENCER: Yeah, in America, we don't have that much. People seem to admire those who are bold and arrogant.

TOR: Yes.

SPENCER: Not everyone matters, but yeah.

TOR: Right, right, yes, and there's room in a society that has more rules for things that systematize social interaction in different ways. Yes, there's more room to be weird, but there's also more room to have power over others.

SPENCER: Yeah, that's an interesting point. So, I think your premise there is that if you have a really clarified set of rules, everyone knows exactly what they are, then as long as you're not violating those rules, no punishment happens to you, so you can kind of do whatever you want, which includes being weird in lots of ways, whereas if it's more community norms, any kind of aberration from the group can get you kind of, you fall out with the mob.

TOR: And the mob means your friends, your neighbors, but you can still fall from grace with them. I think the real reason that I believe that is the natural organizing state of humanity, and that's not necessarily good. I'm not someone like John Zerzan, who believes that we should live as we did on the pre-agricultural savanna, but I think it is sort of the default way we organize ourselves, especially in stressful situations. There's the Acali raft, and then there's the way online communities organize themselves. What we call cancel culture exists because the internet reimposes the law of the jungle onto humanity. We are in a community; we can see who we think our in-group and our out-group are. We don't really know who is in charge, and you don't see cancellations quite as much in society, in online communities where it's clear who is in charge. I just thought of this now, but I feel like that could be an answer for why there's less infighting on the far right than on the far left, because the American right is pretty much just oriented right now around loyalty to one guy. On the internet, you see people naturally forming communities and enforcing a very vague, very loosely defined set of rules that people can fall out of favor with. Maybe that's a new thing to you and me, but it's not a new thing to humanity.

SPENCER: Do you think it's fair to say that cancellation is something that only happens in the in-group, like there is no cross-group cancellation? It doesn't make sense conceptually.

TOR: Yes, exactly. Then I guess you can only be canceled or you can only fall out of favor with people who you were previously in favor of.

SPENCER: And so I guess your thesis is essentially that when you are in online communities, there typically is no clear person in charge.

TOR: Yes.

SPENCER: And so we revert to this sort of everyone is the enforcement mechanism, and we're all looking for violations of group norms, and then if someone is perceived to violate them too much, the whole group kind of mobs them, and they get kind of kicked out of the group. Is that right?

TOR: Yes, and I think that that's what kept our societies together in the old days, and it is, to this day, I think having a healthy functioning community does ultimately require some of that.

SPENCER: I think it's also interesting to think about different personality types. For example, I believe that some people are born, or maybe in early childhood, lose the ability to feel any empathy or guilt, commonly called sociopaths. I think not all sociopaths are evil, but I think sociopaths are at a much elevated risk of exploiting communities. They may have a big competitive advantage in doing so, and you can imagine historically, in ancient times, you have a sociopath in a small community, and they are really good at exploiting that community and draining resources, and also manipulating in a way where it's not as easy to tell what they're doing. There's not so obvious signs, and then you need a sort of robust defense system to develop. This is not just about everyone seeing that Joe never goes hunting; it's more subtle.

TOR: Yes, exactly. By definition, in what I would call a natural community, a community that does not form with the intention of forming a community, but is just people realizing that they're in the same space, whether in the real world or online, and seeing them as the in-group, you can't really have a systematized set of rules. I think that's sort of natural to the kind of thing I'm describing.

SPENCER: It seems like online cancellations often feel very arbitrary, and I'm wondering, is that because there are lots of micro-communities with different norms? It might seem arbitrary, but if you were to hone in on a specific community, like, "Oh the BookTok community," you'd realize they really did violate the norm of that little micro-community, or is there something more about the internet where it gets very unevenly applied because of the noise?

TOR: Yes, it's unevenly applied. I think there are interesting cases. I wish I could pull out an example of this, but there certainly are examples of cancellations that happened because someone violated the very specific, very strongly held norms of a really niche community that doesn't have that norm anywhere else.

SPENCER: Well, maybe using AI in certain book communities or something like that, right?

TOR: Yes, there are hard and fast rules like that, but I feel like what makes cancellation as a phenomenon notable is that it is really done over vibes, that it is not rightfully punishing someone for violating a rule that they knew was a rule. I feel like it's a different phenomenon.

SPENCER: I think about that case of the woman who wrote a joke while she was going to Africa on a flight, if my memory serves me correctly, so I might get details slightly wrong, but she was going to Africa on a flight, and she made a joke that she posted on social media. I think it was something along the lines of she wasn't going to get a disease because she was white or something along those lines, and she's offline for the whole flight, and then she lands, and she's been so massively canceled that you can hardly believe it by the time she's landed.

TOR: Yeah. She had lost her job or been considered on the verge of losing her job by the time she landed. Yes, that was the first case, that may have been in 2011 or something, that was an eternity ago in the age of the internet. I feel like that was the first case that led to the notion of canceling culture being something that happens. There's a good example of it being arbitrarily applied, this one random person. In a sense, I guess you're making an example of them, but nobody is consciously going through everyone's post.

SPENCER: Yeah, I could see a lot of people being like, "Well, that joke was in very bad taste, that joke may have been racist," but there's an interesting thing, whereas surely that was not in the top 1000 most racist things posted on that social media site in that week. So there's definitely this arbitrariness.

TOR: Yes, and it's especially because a fundamental detail of canceled culture, as opposed to just people not agreeing with something that someone did or someone being punished for doing something that is clearly bad, is a different phenomenon. I think a defining feature of cancel culture is that someone has an in-group reputation before they are cast out. This person gets called racist more online over minor stuff if they have a reputation before that as being anti-racist.

SPENCER: Right. It helps explain why, for example, Trump could get away with a lot of things that other politicians can't, because he never developed a reputation of not being racist.

TOR: Yes, I've seen people say this about why do I, a left-leaning person, consider the far left more annoying than the far right? I feel that a lot of people I know feel that even though we all agree the far right is much more objectively dangerous. We also have that mentality of punishing the people who have betrayed the norms because the far left claims to be good people. They claim to care about freedom, human rights, and democracy, and things that the far right openly hates. The people in Trump's administration openly endorse a sort of Nietzschean Bronze Age view of the world where might makes right, and it just feels like it doesn't feel like it's a violation of any norm when they are evil.

SPENCER: To be fair, I think every side views themselves as doing good and the other side as doing bad. I think people on the right would certainly say they believe in freedom.

TOR: Yes, of course, but it really doesn't feel like they say that nearly as much as the left does. Although maybe that's just because I interact with the far left more than the far right.

SPENCER: I think it's just there's different kinds of things that each side is saying about what is good. On the far right, I think they say, "Of course, we believe in freedom; everyone should be able to buy guns." On the left, they'd be like, "Of course, we believe in freedom; women should have the right to abortion."

TOR: Right, yeah. I was going to say that you don't see someone supporting an extremely unpopular and controversial list of things, and saying, "This is just because I'm a decent person who has empathy," but I feel right wingers actually do that kind of thing.

SPENCER: Well, I think Trump is not famous for his empathy.

TOR: Yeah, empathy in particular is more of a left-wing buzzword than a right-wing one, and so you have right wingers saying that they don't openly say that they don't have empathy, or that empathy is a left-wing buzzword. I think if you drill down, someone like Stephen Miller, for example, would say that he has empathy and truly believes that.

SPENCER: So where does that leave you in terms of thinking about communities? Because I think your thesis is that if you have the rules all written down, people can be weirder, because then everyone knows what the rules are. As long as you don't violate those, you're kind of good to go, versus everyone enforcing these kinds of norms. Do you think that means we need the rules to be written down so that we can flourish, or where do you land?

TOR: Yes, to some extent. I think we do need to have laws and an understanding of who can make those laws and who can enforce them, that people agree on in order to have a community where ideas can flourish, in order to move beyond the law of the jungle, so that you can have a society that survives and is happy and united in a world where the only justice is mob justice, and everyone enforces the social contract against everyone else. But that's insufficient, I think. That's not the world I'd like to live in.

SPENCER: Apparently the world is really good for people who are right in the middle of everything. They are very normal according to that society; they have no temptation to deviate. I think about this with groups like Mormons, for example, or Latter-day Saints, as they prefer to be called now. If you're a Latter-day Saint and you fit the mold really well, what you want in life is very similar to what they, as a group, want in life. That may be a really good lifestyle, but if you don't fit the mold, it could be an incredibly difficult lifestyle.

TOR: Yes, the Mormons are a great example of a modern-day culture that has those norms in a more systematized way, and it works really well for them. They are a tight-knit community, and I really think it is because they were persecuted early on and accordingly formed a tight-knit community, as people do in times of stress. On a larger scale in 19th century America, to this day they have such a tight-knit community. They are demonstrably better at practicing what they preach than other conservative Christians. They say they don't drink alcohol, and they don't. Utah has the lowest rate of every alcohol-related crime you can think of in the US, and the lowest rates of domestic violence and teen pregnancy as well. Things that all conservative Christians will say they're against, but if you look up the states with the highest rates of teen pregnancy, it's all southern and Appalachian states that are super Christian, and then on the far other end is Utah. They have high educational achievement and not a lot of economic inequality. So, it works really well as a society if you're willing to go along with the rules, but I feel like it raises people who have something of a "you can just do things" mentality. A lot of the smartest, most interesting, creative, independently thinking people I know are former Mormons. That is just one surprising detail that unites a lot of my closest friends, who only know each other through me. I seem to attract ex-Mormons, and a lot of them, all the ex-Mormons I know, I know there are a lot of ex-Mormons who hate Mormonism and resent being raised in the church. The ones I know don't. They say that they're glad they were instilled with those values from a young age, and they wouldn't trade it. They just can't believe the mumbo jumbo; they chafed against the requirements of their society, that they were weird compared to other Mormons, but it still set them up to live a good life consistently. I feel like some of the most truly independently thinking people I know come from a Mormon background.

SPENCER: Mormons may be a kind of funny example from the point of this conversation, because on the one hand, I think they have really strong norm enforcement coming from the group. If you violate the norms, you know it, because everyone in the group is going to force that on you. At the same time, they have a leadership that's really clear; it's a group of men, and they have literal written rules you have to follow, coming from the Book of Mormon and the kind of distillations of that.

TOR: Yes, so do most modern religions, and it's really in modern American society, it's only Mormons and maybe the Amish that are as tight-knit as they are. I think it's something other than having a detailed list of rules that keeps them a tight-knit society, and I think it is more than just the in-group, out-group mentality. I think it's the persecution that they had.

SPENCER: All right, shifting topics. What is the bicameral mind? I think this is fairly unusual, bordering on a totally crazy but fascinating hypothesis.

TOR: Alright, so a long time ago I read Scott Alexander's review of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a weird book from the 70s by psychologist and classicist Julian Jaynes, who synthesized 1950s discoveries about the functioning of the left and right brain and theories about consciousness, when people have their corpus callosum, the connections between the left and right brain severed, which is a treatment for epilepsy, surprisingly works without serious effects on mental functioning. It's kind of crazy that you can just cut the brain in half like that, and it'll still function as a roughly normal brain.

SPENCER: Just to be clear, this divides one of the major connective tissues you have. There's still some peripheral connection, right?

TOR: Yes, yes, there are quite a few. It's not entirely separated. Those happen too. You can do a radical hemispherectomy, where you literally take out half of the brain, or in some cases the inert half of the brain is just left there in the skull. Those have more side effects, but those are also done as a treatment for epilepsy, which, again, is extraordinary that that's possible. But yeah, people who have had their corpus callosum severed will be doing some things that they interpret through their right brain; they will be doing them correctly, but not consciously. If you have, let me see if I'm describing this experiment correctly. In the 50s, there was a neurologist who showed that if a subject who has had their corpus callosum cut is looking at a table of objects that they can access with their left hand, which is the side controlled by the right brain, and then they're looking through their left eye at a list of words that correspond to the objects, and their right eye is covered, so the signal is only going through their right brain. If you have a test subject with their left hand, which is the side of their body that's controlled by the right brain, on a tray of objects, now with both their eyes, they are shown some words at various points in their field of view. If you show them a word on the far left side of their field of view, that side is only being processed by the right brain. Your right brain controls the left side of your body, and vice versa. If you show them a word that corresponds to one of the objects on the far left side of the field of view, the patient will grab that object, but if you ask them why they are holding that object, they will say they don't know, and they didn't see a word. So there's thought going on in the right brain, just not conscious thought. So, Julian Jaynes, a decade or so later, looked at the results of this experiment and thought that he could map it onto something that he had found in Bronze Age literature. He was also a classicist. He had published his own translations of Homer and of a bunch of other ancient texts from the Near East, from the cradle of civilization, as it were, and he had noticed that around the time of the Bronze Age collapse, when society basically collapsed across the Eastern Mediterranean in around 1200 BC, there is a lot of literature about how the gods have abandoned us. You see that historically during times of hardship, people say stuff like that, but he thought it's all weirdly literal the way people are describing the disappearance of the gods as an independent event that everyone noticed happen before things really began to hit the fan, and the Sea Peoples started ransacking cities, and society collapsed. A lot of societies in the Bronze Age seem to have treated the disappearance of the gods as one particular noticeable historical event, and then people's mental states in writing afterward seem to be a lot more complex. There's a more visible theory of mind on display for other people's states. Jaynes made the truly striking and unusual hypothesis that before the Bronze Age collapse, everyone was basically what we would now call schizophrenic, that their conscious left brain mind was listening to and following orders from the unconscious right brain mind that they interpreted as a god. Now, Jaynes, on the one hand, says that his hypothesis is about consciousness, that people were not conscious before the Bronze Age collapsed, before we emerged from the bicameral mind into the mental structure that we have today. When people were walking around hallucinating gods all the time in the Bronze Age, which he genuinely believes happened, these people were not conscious, but I swear he has to be working with a sort of especially narrow idiosyncratic definition of consciousness, because I don't think he really thinks that humans in early civilizations were philosophical zombies.

SPENCER: Right. They couldn't, but they didn't have sensations or experiences.

TOR: Yeah, there was nothing that it was to be them. He clearly doesn't think that, but he describes the process that he claims to have discovered as the origin of consciousness.

SPENCER: What do you think he meant? What do you think he was really claiming?

TOR: Something more like a theory of mind, that the modern way we conceptualize the conscious mind as something that you have. So I thought, "Well, that's interesting; it's probably not accurate," and there are classicists who have poked clear holes in it by pointing to specific examples of people with introspective inner monologues in ancient literature, pre-Bronze Age collapse. There are definitely examples of that that Jaynes cherry-picks over. I think he's imagining ancient people's internal states to have been like there's a voice as I go through life, there is a voice in my head that is my personal god. It's telling me what to do without it, I'd be lost, because that's how I know what I'm supposed to do as a member of society. You could draw a line from this topic to the previous topic in a very speculative sense, because Jaynes says that the origin of the bicameral mind system, this is another part of his hypothesis, is that it led to the establishment of authoritarian agrarian city-states. Some people have construed that as something of a mystery: what was the draw of living in the first agricultural societies, given that at the time the potential for disease and being conscripted into war, and all these other risks were much worse for settled people than hunter-gatherers? It really seems like early on, people in the first civilizations had worse living standards than the hunter-gatherers, and a lot of people have proposed different explanations for why all of humanity gradually adopted agriculture instead. He says it's the development of the bicameral mind where your personal god is going around giving you instructions. Now, I don't think that he was right about this, but I do think — and this is something that I've come to think after I made an episode about it — that he was certainly getting at something, because there are so many unique experiences that people have reached out to me about, just fascinating experiences people have described that seem to align with either something Jaynes wrote or something somewhat similar.

SPENCER: This is a side tour. I just want to make sure, so is he claiming that it caused agriculture when people had these personal gods, or that when the gods disappeared, that's what caused agriculture?

TOR: When people had personal gods.

SPENCER: Okay.

TOR: The bicameral mind, yeah, that the bicameral mind began at the same time that agriculture began, basically in order to keep these societies functioning,

SPENCER: And when did it go away, or what happened after?

TOR: Around 1200 BC, societies became too complex for that to work anymore, and there began to be trade between different kingdoms. Having a detailed theory of mind, where you understand that everyone else has an independent conscious mind and we are not actually being puppeted by gods, became an evolutionary advantage. Although he's not saying that there's anything strictly physical or biological about this, they had the same brains — they were running different software, you could say. He says there was an evolutionary advantage to having what he would consider a modern conscious mind. One by one, people experienced the breakdown of the bicameral mind and developed into more conscious beings or beings with a more detailed theory of mind. People found that to be a profoundly disturbing experience.

SPENCER: Got it. After you made your episode about this on Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities, which is a really excellent episode, I will say, you got this outpouring of people kind of identifying with this experience. What were people saying?

TOR: I had talked about in the episode an experience that I don't know if I would map exactly onto Jaynes' theory, but it seems to be kind of reminiscent of it. Until I was late in elementary school, I had a conception of my mind as there's me, and then there's the other Tor in my mind who is giving me instructions, who is more knowledgeable about the world than I am, and who I would rely on to navigate the world. I didn't ever conceptualize other Tor as a god, but a lot of people wrote in saying that they had similar experiences and did interpret it in a religious sense. I just wasn't raised particularly religious, and I might have interpreted other Tor as a god rather than another human-ish being in my mind if I had been raised regularly going to church. One of the most interesting messages I got was from an ex-Mormon woman who said that she had a personal guardian angel just like this until she was a similar age that I was when I lost other Tor. Unlike Jaynes' claims of what happened to people during the Bronze Age collapse, I didn't find the loss of other Tor to be a disturbing experience. I found it to be sort of my life shifting into a higher gear, like, "Oh, I'm not really a kid anymore; other Tor is gone because other Tor was my own internal monologue all along. I realized that other Tor wasn't a different entity," and so I have become other Tor. Basically, that was how I thought of it when I was nine years old. Other people wrote in with other experiences. A third-grade teacher wrote in saying something along the lines of, "Oh, it's so amazing to see other people discovering this phenomenon and realizing that it's not something everyone knows about," because, to her, that was common knowledge that kids just naturally shift into a higher mode of consciousness around that age. Although I had seen other people say they had the same experience at wildly varying ages, anywhere from four to 15, the most interesting one was from this ex-Mormon woman who said that she had lost her guardian angel around the same time, and that later led her to leave the church. More recently, inspired by my episode, she began praying for her guardian angel to come back, and it came back.

SPENCER: Wow, it's fascinating. It sounds like your description is almost like a Fight Club, Tyler Durden experience.

TOR: Yes, have you connected that to this?

SPENCER: Yeah.

TOR: Yes, I have. Yes, yes, it's sort of like that.

SPENCER: Can you tell us what it was then? Elaborate on what it was like. Did you have two voices in your mind, and one of them was this other, better version of yourself or wiser version of yourself, or do you just have one voice?

TOR: No, I had one. I had one voice in my mind, and it was other Tor. Yes, and then I was the body of it, and I was carrying out what other Tor did, which is very similar to what Jaynes describes of his conception of the pre-Bronze Age collapse mental state of humanity, very similar to that, but I definitely was conscious.

SPENCER: I've never had an experience like this, but it reminds me of one of my favorite TED Talks of all time. I'll attempt it from memory, but basically it's about a woman who had some kind of voices in her mind. She grew up with these voices, and they would tend to do things like narrate what she was doing. They'd be like, "She's walking down the street, she's putting away her clothes," whatever. "She gets to college," and at one point she mentions this to her roommate, because I don't think she really viewed it as a big deal or notable that she had these voices. But when she mentioned it to the roommate, the roommate became very concerned and convinced her to go to a counselor or therapist at the school. Then when she did that, the counselor became very concerned. After that conversation, she started viewing these voices as scary, and the voices actually started becoming scary. They went from this very benign kind of narration to actually a frightening experience, and it spiraled into what most people describe as a very classic kind of schizophrenic situation, which is really fascinating, because prior to that, she really didn't seem schizophrenic. Yes, she had the voices, but she didn't seem to be having a lot of the negative consequences of it. What this TED Talk is about is how she came out of it by learning to view her voices as okay.

TOR: In Humans of New York, which is this coffee table book I have of just little one or two line interviews with random people across New York, there's one guy who says, "I cured myself of schizophrenia," and the photographer responds, "How'd you do that?" He just says, "I stopped listening to the voices." In Jaynes' book, he mentions a woman who had the classic schizophrenic symptoms, like she was hearing voices and believed that it was the government beaming messages into her head, a common Western modern conception of schizophrenic hallucinations. But she didn't want them gone. She said that they often gave her advice like other Tor, and that she was very grateful for the government for beaming these messages into her mind to improve her mental health.

SPENCER: If you could bring back other Tor, would you do it? Or are you just like, "No, that would be weird at this point?"

TOR: I would say I think I would. I was about to say that doesn't seem possible based on my conception of other Tor, because I feel like I am other Tor; I merged with other Tor. I am just as much that mind as I was the other, as I was "me" before that. But if I didn't think about it that way, if I had conceptualized it some other way when I was nine years old, I think it wouldn't be impossible for me to bring other Tor back. I can't answer the question of whether I would want other Tor back or not. I just think if I really tried, if I really applied myself, I think I could, because there are other cases of people who seem to be, if you take it in a Jaynesian sense, and I do think Jaynes's got at something here, got at some phenomenon that he didn't accurately describe, but nobody else, I think, has more accurately described. There seem to be plenty of cases of people deliberately re-bicameralizing their mind; they just don't think about it that way, like tulpas. Have you heard of tulpamancy?

SPENCER: I was about to ask you about that. Yes.

TOR: I was hoping we were heading towards a tulpamancy discussion. Yes.

SPENCER: Do you want to break out? What is that?

TOR: So, a tulpa, originally it is a concept in Tibetan Buddhist meditation. It is effectively another voice, another entity in your head. More recently, people discovered it online. There is a community of tulpamancers on the internet that have all these ridiculous stories. It's kind of treated as a meme, tulpamancy, because it's seen as something that weird people on the 4chan would do. It was big in the My Little Pony fandom for a while; people tried to create tulpas of their favorite My Little Pony character and seemed to be successful, or at least said they were. So, tulpamancy is seen by the internet as sort of a weird, jokey pseudoscience, but there is definitely something happening there, and I don't know if it's been well described.

SPENCER: Essentially, as I understand it, they're doing exercises where they imagine this being, and they imagine communicating with it, and they kind of just keep this up, and the idea is at some point somehow it sticks, where now maybe it starts feeling effortful; maybe at the beginning it feels effortful, like you're imagining it, but eventually it feels like it's just there in your mind.

TOR: Yes, eventually it's there, even when you're not thinking of it.

SPENCER: Right, or maybe it comes and goes, and this also seems to connect to this idea of what used to be called multiple personality disorder.

TOR: You have the idea, or plural systems, as some people call it. Yeah, I know people, I have friends who are plural systems, who say that they have multiple entities, multiple selves, those alters in their body that have different names and personalities, and they're not pretending, they're not keeping up a ruse in public about this. I think there might be some people on TikTok who talk about DID, who are doing it for clicks, but I know plenty of people, both online and in real life, who say that that's the way their mind works, that they are multiple individual people, and I believe them. There's clearly something going on. In the 80s, there was a huge wave of diagnoses of DID, and there was this understanding that having multiple personalities is way more common than we thought it was. Tons of people were being diagnosed with multiple personalities, and tons of people did indeed act like they had multiple personalities. I think that it's real; I think that those people really did end up having multiple selves in their brain, but that's because that's something that your brain can do if you try hard enough to think of your brain that way.

SPENCER: Well, I think this is weird selection bias where the most visible cases are going to be the most absurd and strange cases, which are going to be people making it up for clicks. I actually think that probably most of the people you see, going into all these alters, and blah blah blah, I think that's just them acting, right?

TOR: Yes. If it's theatrical, then yes.

SPENCER: But I do wonder, it seems to me clearly possible that you can have different voices in your mind, and then you can interpret them in different ways, as different versions of yourself, or as God, or as aliens, or as the government. It's obvious that you have a voice in your head, "That's me," but I just don't think that people have to see it that way. I think we have abundant evidence that people don't necessarily see it that way.

TOR: One thing that I was criticized for, actually, was one thing that I still, since that video blew up so hard, I still get at least one comment a day to this day that says something along these lines: what about people who don't have internal monologues? Because ultimately what I sort of conclude in the video is Jaynes' highfalutin theory about the origin of consciousness may not be fully correct, but it does seem to be clear that people in ancient civilizations interpreted their internal monologues in very different ways than we do today. A lot of people are like, "What about the people who all along never had an internal monologue?" And yeah, sure enough, there are studies that say some percentage of the population, like 10%, doesn't consider themselves as having an internal monologue, and I think that's also just something that is so thoroughly subjective it's very difficult to study.

SPENCER: Well, I think something about that, having talked to friends that have aphantasia, where they can't visualize, and also don't have internal monologues.

TOR: Yeah.

SPENCER: Someone like myself, who tends to think verbally, and when not thinking verbally, thinks in images, it's hard to grasp how they are even thinking. It's almost hard to even understand for someone like myself, but having talked to them about it, it almost seems like they're thinking more in pure concepts.

TOR: Yeah.

SPENCER: If they are thinking more in pure concepts in some form, maybe I'm thinking in concepts, but it's getting converted at the last moment to verbalization or an image. Maybe you can even have pure concepts that seem like they're coming from different beings; I don't see why that's necessarily ruled out.

TOR: Sure.

SPENCER: Sometimes the pure concept is coming from aliens, and sometimes it's myself, or something.

TOR: Yeah, I should have said this earlier, but I am autistic. I have been diagnosed with autism since I was a toddler, and so are most of the examples that I've talked about in this section about the bicameral mind. The people who have reached out to me with interesting stories of the way their own mind has functioned, a lot of them are autistic too. I sometimes think that the autistic mind has a much larger range of possible experiences than the neurotypical mind, that the mind we call neurotypical is just one of many types of mind, and a lot of the rest of them we draw a circle around and call it autism.

SPENCER: Oh, interesting.

TOR: Yes,

SPENCER: I think I would disagree, just in the sense that your picture you're imagining is this small circle that's neurotypical in this very large circle, autistic, and I think the one that I would draw is really large.

TOR: Basically, what I'm saying is, I think autistic people vary between themselves more than non-autistic people do, at least in terms of the way they describe their subjective mental state.

SPENCER: Yeah, so I guess what I would suggest is that actually both circles are way bigger than almost anyone realizes, both circles are so vast that it's like, "Oh, holy shit, what are we even talking about here?" This has come about for me by studying people's responses to things. We recently created this test called the Unique Traits Test that looks for 80 unusual traits about people to help them evaluate whether they have them.

TOR: What are some of the traits?

SPENCER: All kinds of things, everything from color blindness and autism, sociopathy to other things like hearing voices in your mind, getting extremely angry at the sound of people chewing.

TOR: Oh yeah.

SPENCER: Yeah, so lots of stuff. I actually think that what happens is that social norms squish human behavior to this very narrow band. Maybe this is partly what's going on, that neurotypical people, especially, are responsive to social norms, and obviously people less so, so their behavior is very squished to be very similar. I think about, you're at a wedding, and what are people doing? They're sitting and talking at the tables, or they're at the buffet eating. Nobody's ripping their clothes off and jumping on the tables, or killing anyone. It's very similar behavior, but our minds are really weirdly different from each other in ways that we almost can't fathom.

TOR: Yes, that's another reason. Harking back to our first topic of discussion, I think being autistic and being aware that I'm weird, and being raised by my parents, who — thank God, I've been very lucky — had a good understanding of autism and raised me with the knowledge that I was weird from a young age, but didn't try to totally indulge my autism, and also tried to make me a functioning member of society, which I am. That's also why the ideal peaceful anarchic community that may be the fundamental mode of human organization doesn't appeal to me, because I don't want to live in a world where everything is ruled by unspoken social norms. I'm really bad at those.

SPENCER: That's a great tie into the original conversation. The idea, if you have all the rules written down, you're like, okay, we know exactly how we need to behave, that actually creates a much more even playing field between autistic and non-autistic people.

TOR: Yes, and that also connects to what we were saying about the Mormons, because they have a very tight-knit community that practices the community norms of shunning and the Law of Jante to an extent, and then also have a very detailed set of rules. Other religions that have extremely detailed sets of rules and also fairly tight-knit communities are Catholics and Orthodox Jews. I've heard those three — Mormonism, Catholicism, and Haredi Judaism — described as the autistic religions, as the religions where, if you're the sort of autistic who wants a detailed set of rules to live by, who's just like, tell me what I have to do, that's the life for you. I've done occasional episodes on interesting Catholic-related shenanigans. I did one about weird saints at one point. I did one about this strange Catholic cult in the Wisconsin woods, and every time I do a Catholic-related episode, I get a lot of people coming out of the woodwork saying, "Hi, I love your videos. I'm an autistic, devout Catholic. It seems like this religion fits autistic people well." Yes, this is another reason why I feel like there's such a range of what autism can be. It can make you non-conformist. It can also, if it aligns with your type of autism, make you extremely conformist.

SPENCER: I was talking about something related to this the other night. I'm curious about your thoughts. It feels to me like there are reasons why things go unspoken, or let me say it again. It seems to me that there are sometimes good reasons why things are not already written down, why everyone doesn't have all the information, why things go unspoken, and they're more implicit. The classic example would be, suppose a woman is not interested in a man sexually, and the man sort of asks her if she's interested, and she perceives it could be dangerous to reject him because he might go into a rage. So the woman, instead of being direct, gives ambiguous information that's enough that he doesn't immediately pursue her, but also ambiguous enough that he doesn't go into a rage. It's like if she had to say, "Oh no, I just don't find you sexually attractive," it could create a problem for her. So I'm curious how you think about these kinds of cases.

TOR: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I think that the strongest case for not having a codified list of rules for everything is that you can't have a codified list of rules for everything. Some of the rabbis in the past went the furthest toward having a codified list of rules for everything.

SPENCER: Doesn't the Torah and the Old Testament have something like a thousand rules? I don't know exactly.

TOR: I think it's 575. It's something like 577. I think it's 577. Yeah, that's not... I'm pretty sure that that's not written down in a numbered list anywhere in Jewish scripture, but it's the list that Orthodox rabbis have agreed on: these are the important rules that we can get out of our scriptures.

SPENCER: And Protestants are like, "We'll take 10 of those, please."

TOR: Yes, some cultures do try to go pretty far towards systematizing everything, but you really can't. All the time, I find myself in various situations. I find myself having to quote the Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in his ruling on what constitutes pornography: "I know it when I see it." There's a lot you just have to know when you see it. To make a reference that I think a fair number of our listeners will get, one thing that is a community that really doesn't do much canceling or ostracism, fortunately, but is definitely an example of a tight-knit, leaderless online community that operates on that norm, that very much is who you know, who's in group, who's out group, "I know it when I see it," is teapot. I had a video explaining the rationalist community and all its related social scenes a while ago, in which I said, "What is teapot?" It's this part of Twitter; it doesn't really have a name, and that's the point: naming it . Without naming it, Potter Stewart rules, you know it when you see it.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, anything you want to touch on before we finish?

TOR: I was just thinking about what you said about aphantasia and the different ways that people can think. I've seen many autistic people say they think in pictures. Temple Grandin notably wrote a book about the way her mind works, called Thinking in Pictures. I also know a fair number of autistic people with aphantasia; I think that's also more common among autistic people than the general public. I understand the idea of Thinking in Pictures, and if I had to choose from a list, "What is your mind like?" I would say thinking in pictures, but realistically, more than that, I think in places. I see my life as a map, and when I'm trying to understand a system or understand the way something works, I often conceptualize it in my mind as a fictional map, and because I can navigate maps, that's how I systematize them.

SPENCER: Wait, can you give me an example? I just have trouble even imagining what that's like.

TOR: I've tried to explain it to other people before, but if you ask a fish to describe itself, it won't mention it's in water. I would say I'm a slightly different person depending on where physically I am. Although it's not in an other-Tor sense; it's more like I have slightly different conceptions of what makes Tor, Tor, depending on whether I'm home in Oregon or in New York or in Tennessee. I always have a sense that I have a pretty good innate sense of direction, and that feels like the best system to plot my life around because it's always relevant. There's always a direction that is north, no matter what situation I'm in.

SPENCER: You never get stuck in the center of the earth.

TOR: I had a book a long time ago, one of those 2000s Eyewitness Books about trains, and it had a spread that was the future of trains. One of the examples it gave of things that could hypothetically exist in the future was a rocket train down through the center of the earth. I was like, that's cool. That will almost certainly never exist. It will never be possible even if we have the technology. It just won't be feasible to build one of those for any reason other than because it's cool. But that's really cool. I have a sense of absolute distance, the way there are some languages that don't have a word for left or right. They define everything in terms of north, south, east, and west. If you take someone who speaks one of those languages and spin them around a bunch of times, blindfold them, and confuse them, they will still pretty easily be able to determine what is north. I have that, and I can anchor myself. Knowing where I am physically is how I know where I am in life. Once I've got my cardinal points and know which way is north, I can think about mapping the non-physical aspects of my life as well.

SPENCER: Okay, in this episode, you should coin a word for people that are like you in this way. Then we can try to figure out if there are others like you.

TOR: Yeah, well, I wrote this in my journal. I don't think I've ever said this out loud, but in my daily journal, I describe the placeness of places. A placeness can change if the emotions associated with a place strongly change for some reason. Then the placeness changes, and it feels like a different place in physical space as well.

SPENCER: The representation also depends on the emotions, not just location.

TOR: Yes, so I will describe place and placeness as two separate things.

SPENCER: What would you want to call someone who has this trait that you have?

TOR: A locator, I guess. Sure, let's say that: locator.

SPENCER: Great, we'll see. Maybe in one of my future surveys, I'll see if we can find any other locators.

TOR: Absolutely, yes, I'm sure they exist. The one thing that having a substantial internet platform has brought to me, and I think Scott Alexander has written about this as well, is that I can talk about some completely bonkers mental or physical phenomenon. I can talk about some strange experience that someone had, or the strange way someone says their mind works, and I can almost always find people who agree with them. I can almost always find other people who reach out to me saying they have the same story, which always makes one story more believable. That, "Wow, that's not just one person's subjective experience, that is a way the mind can be, and there are so many ways the mind can be." I love it.

SPENCER: Tor, thanks so much for coming on the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

TOR: Thank you so much for inviting me. Check out Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities on YouTube, and for access to the Tor's Cabinet Discord to meet a bunch of cool, weird, autistic people just like me, or perhaps nothing like me. Have a great day.