# When did we start thinking in first person? **URL:** \ **Category:** General Philosophy\ **Tags:** literature\ **Created:** [October 30, 2026, 8:45pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852 "2026-10-30T20:45:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Friend0fDiotima](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/friend0fdiotima/32/1690_2.png) [@Friend0fDiotima](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Friend0fDiotima)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2026, 3:01pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/21 "2026-10-31T15:01:36Z")
If we look at Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind through a lens of Wittgenstein’s quote “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." it make more sense and give me a deeper understanding of human intelligence over time as for the dates it is a type of archaeological and is behavioral modernity that is a slow, cumulative cultural process rather than a sudden archaeological milestone. Language and particularly the lexical metaphor, which is sort of like the foundational operation of language in Jaynes’ view, it does not just describe things, it actually generates new conceptions of things. Generating new viewpoints. Jaynes wrote "Each new stage of words literally created new perceptions and attentions, and such new perceptions and attentions resulted in important cultural changes, which are reflected in the archaeological record.” ---
**Author:** ![Baden](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/baden/32/109_2.png) [@Baden](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Baden)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2026, 4:44pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/22 "2026-10-31T16:44:09Z")
> [@Wayfarer](#): > > I certainly don’t think that Julian Jaynes is ‘a crackpot I don’t either, but I can see, reading his paper, how his approach could be confusing. When he says “consciousness” he’s referring to reflectivity, that is, the aspect of consciousness that is grounded in a linguistically founded subjectivity mediated through a transcendental “I”—a view from nowhere where the nowhere is the critical link that founds self-identity. He brackets this out from other forms of awareness that can get on very well reactively, i.e. without reflection, and makes a good point with regard to the largely reactive nature of communication, which is kind of counter-intuitive and worth stressing. But he dives in, in the paper at least, in a way that almost presumes the kind of orientation to the problem he wants to establish through argument. And I think there are better ways of explaining the distinctions he wants to make. Anyway, interesting so far. It would take a lot to convince me his bicameral mind thesis holds up, especially given the necessary thinness of evidence, but I think he’s more or less going the right way about things by establishing a potential developmental distinction that allows for a story about how language could scaffold its way into creating subjectivity. ---
**Author:** ![Ecurb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/3ec8ea/32.png) [@Ecurb](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Ecurb)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2026, 7:00pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/23 "2026-10-31T19:00:32Z")
> [@Friend0fDiotima](#): > > Jaynes wrote "Each new stage of words literally created new perceptions and attentions, and such new perceptions and attentions resulted in important cultural changes, which are reflected in the archaeological record.” Does language _create_ perception, or does perception create language. One cross-cultural study that speaks to that is Berlin and Kaye’s _Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution_. The researchers took 180 “color chips” (I’m guessing at the number) and showed them to Native Speakers of almost every known language. They used statistical methods to determine which color terms native speakers could agree on. The number of color terms “basic” to a language varied between 3 and 11 (American women had 17 or so, but when men were added in the number reduced to 11). The spectrum was not always divided vertically. Those languages with 3 basic terms had “dark”, “beige”, and “light” as the translations. The interesting bit: every language that had the same number of basic color terms divided the spectrum almost exactly the same way. Those languages that agree on 3, 5, 7 or 9 basic color terms, had the same 3. 5,7. or 9. This would seem to suggest that perception has a tyranny on language instead of (as Sapir-Whorf suggested) language having a tyranny on thought. Of course this is not definitive. Language structures (tenses, etc.) may still affect how we see the world. ---
**Author:** ![Friend0fDiotima](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/friend0fdiotima/32/1690_2.png) [@Friend0fDiotima](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Friend0fDiotima)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2026, 9:51am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/24 "2026-11-01T09:51:15Z")
Language and perception feed into each other in a continuous, interactive loop. Humans are born with pre-verbal sensory systems and biological baselines. Infants can categorize colors and shapes before they learn any words for them. Lera Boroditsky is famous for her extensive research showing that the languages we speak don’t just express our thoughts—they actively shape how we perceive reality, time, space, and color. She frequently describes this relationship not as a one-way street, but as an active, continuous feedback loop where cultural language shapes our sensory attention, and our sensory experiences in turn shape how language evolves. ---
**Author:** ![bongofury](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a87d85/32.png) [@bongofury](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/bongofury)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2026, 11:31am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/25 "2026-11-01T11:31:41Z")
Loved the book. As did Dennett. However, > [@Friend0fDiotima](#): > > When did we start thinking in first person? Can’t recall if Jaynes puts it like that, but anyway I would put it more like “when did we start thinking that thinking in first person is a thing we do?”. And I guess the answer must be, as soon as we started doing what we actually do, which is a thing demanding a better description. I would offer: rehearsing likely dialogue (plus random heckling) between ourselves and others. Which might not seem very different, but is hopefully true enough but less pregnant with phenomenological complexity. (Be it Cartesian subjectivity or godly communion.) I recall (probably falsely, but vividly, the road I was walking along e.g.) wondering about this as a child. If thoughts are words in the head, what would be an example? Let’s examine a thought as soon as I have it, then. But of course as soon as I tried to, I was aware of several possible commentary-thoughts about the process of trying, and the clear impossibility (or inaccuracy) of identifying actual thoughts or comments in the stream. That’s perhaps a problem with looking too closely, though. Introspecting at arm’s length, as an adult, I’ve become aware that a large proportion of my verbal ‘thoughts’ are in other people’s voices. ---
**Author:** ![Friend0fDiotima](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/friend0fdiotima/32/1690_2.png) [@Friend0fDiotima](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Friend0fDiotima)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2026, 12:10pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/26 "2026-11-01T12:10:18Z")
> [@bongofury](#): > > That’s perhaps a problem with looking too closely, though. Introspecting at arm’s length, as an adult, I’ve become aware that a large proportion of my verbal ‘thoughts’ are in other people’s voices. Bongofury, I use other people’s voices also. When I was studying naval architecture, engineering and designing a sailboat. I had a boat in my head and in the boat were different scientist and designers. If one of them became worthless and just added deadweight to the product I would make them walk the plank. aargh Here I did a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci to help me with my portrait drawing. I gave him a Mona Lisa smile and his eyes track you as you change your view from side to side. ![image](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/uploads/thephilosophyforum/original/2X/4/462251cbe3dce99a988a010255e600f3adc815d0.jpeg) ---
**Author:** ![Friend0fDiotima](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/friend0fdiotima/32/1690_2.png) [@Friend0fDiotima](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Friend0fDiotima)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2026, 2:27pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/27 "2026-11-01T14:27:23Z")
From the king of satire. “It was a big mistake for me to take a degree in anthropology anyway, because I can’t stand primitive people — they’re so stupid.” Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country “I think there for I am”. The time line is not so cut and dry. Jaynes’s theory is a mixing of gains and losses over time and not all was lost and not all was gained. If you use this as a starting point for reading Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind in his seminal 1976 book, _[The Origin of Consciousness the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind](https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=%2Fm%2F06r0zwj&q=The+Origin+of+Consciousness+in+the+Breakdown+of+the+Bicameral+Mind)_, It just seems more palatable. ---
**Author:** ![Mww](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d26b3c/32.png) [@Mww](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Mww)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2026, 4:59pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/28 "2026-11-01T16:59:16Z")
When did we start thinking in first person: If the first person is the thinker, when was thinking in first person **NOT** the case? We didn’t start thinking in first-person; we never didn’t, so the question should really be, if there must be one, when did we start thinking. Which, of course, has no incontestable affirmative answer. ---
**Author:** ![bongofury](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a87d85/32.png) [@bongofury](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/bongofury)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2026, 6:33pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/29 "2026-11-01T18:33:55Z")
> [@Mww](#): > > If the first person is the thinker, when was thinking in first person **NOT** the case? Pardon please if I jump in. Having failed to address this as explicitly as I intended, when I said I don’t know if Jaynes did address it this way. I’m assuming that thinking in first person might include such sub-vocal verbals as “Ooh poor me I’ve got such a headache”. Or even, “I’m thinking, aren’t I, therefore I am”. Whereas thinking in third person might be “Ooh poor Tom he’s got such a headache.” And thinking in neither might be “oh wow what a stinker of a headache.” Or “thoughts are evidently flowing, therefore something is.” Offhand I don’t know the grammatical term for this. Nor, neither, for “well you wouldn’t have a headache if you’d plowed the field as you oughta.” Like a heavenly admonition, as per Jaynes’s speculation. The first version, that is, thinking in first person, I find counter to my intuitions. Unless I begin to colour it in as a speech to an imagined interlocutor in a hypothetical or predicted dialogue. ---
**Author:** ![Frank](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/frank/32/216_2.png) [@Frank](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Frank)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2026, 6:46pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/30 "2026-11-01T18:46:25Z")
> [@Friend0fDiotima](#): > > Consciousness is not all of mentality. There are things that the nervous system does automatically for us. All the variety of perceptual constancies, all done without any help from introspective consciousness. I think a dog has some sense of self (if not the ability to rationally reflect on it). They know their names and they have instinctive behaviors that signal identity within a hierarchy. If you’re Japanese or Korean, you have the same behavioral signals that allow you to identify yourself relative to someone else. It’s built into the language to say: I’m younger, I’m not in charge, I defer to you. But at the same time, these signals can eclipse personal identity because the speaker steps into a pre-existing role. You might end up identifying with the role. The issue of identifying with a role came to the fore during the Nuremberg trials when Nazis suggested they weren’t responsible because they were soldiers, and soldiers do what they’re told. It’s true that soldiers do what they’re told, but humans are supposed to have the freedom to leave a role behind and take up another. It’s in the light of that freedom that a person is responsible for her behavior. So the status of identity is in flux. It’s experienced differently depending on culture, on social rank, on the emphasis placed on freedom and autonomy. It may be impossible to pick a certain point in history when it appeared. Canines have been around for 35 million years (not that we descended from them, but we’re psychologically kin.) ---
**Author:** ![Ecurb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/3ec8ea/32.png) [@Ecurb](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Ecurb)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2026, 7:54pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/31 "2026-11-01T19:54:19Z")
As I understand it, inability to think in the first person is not the essence of Jaynes’ bicameral mind theory. Instead, the two hemispheres of the brain did not communicate well. So planning for the future was difficult. One hemisphere (I forget if it was the left or right) communicated by generating auditory hallucinations experienced as the voices of Gods. So although people had self-awareness, they sometimes experienced their own thoughts as “voices”. Of course it is still true that people experience auditory hallucinations – it’s called schizophrenia. Do schizophrenics have bicameral minds? Maybe. ---
**Author:** ![Frank](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/frank/32/216_2.png) [@Frank](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Frank)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2026, 8:07pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/32 "2026-11-01T20:07:13Z")
> [@Ecurb](#): > > Instead, the two hemispheres of the brain did not communicate well. So planning for the future was difficult. One hemisphere (I forget if it was the left or right) communicated by generating auditory hallucinations experienced as the voices of Gods. You’re probably right. I did read part of that book a long time ago. I didn’t make it all the way through. I’m familiar with the idea that the Iliad and Odyssey may be depicting a semi-alien way of comprehending motive. Apparently female deities create bad motives, but male ones create good ones. I wonder if women would have had that reversed. Btw, serial killers have been noted to be unable to provide coherent motives for their crimes. They love talking about them, but they can’t explain why they did it. Maybe they’re also throwbacks to a time when the concept of motive wasn’t formed in the way we know it. ---
**Author:** ![Mww](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d26b3c/32.png) [@Mww](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Mww)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2026, 8:21pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/33 "2026-11-01T20:21:34Z")
> [@bongofury](#): > > The first version, that is, thinking in first person, I find counter to my intuitions. Unless I begin to colour it in as a speech to an imagined interlocutor in a hypothetical or predicted dialogue. I’m from a far different position myself, demonstrated by addressing the thread title rather than comments related to it. That being said, whatever thinking is, pure thought, in and of itself, is far easier to defend as a first-person activity, iff it doesn’t have any language contained in it. ---
**Author:** ![Paine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5daacb/32.png) [@Paine](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Paine)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2026, 3:12am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/34 "2026-11-02T03:12:42Z")
One problem I have with the examples from the Homeric epics is that the narrator speaks from a point of view that includes mortals and immortals. Different motives are ironically counterpoised in ways that lead to terrible consequences. The stories are not transcriptions from a tape recorder. Odysseus travels to Hades to listen to Achilles express regret. The power of women in the divine realm illuminates the limits of mortal women. The descriptions of violence are intertwined with references to natural beauty. I will leave it there. ---
**Author:** ![Friend0fDiotima](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/friend0fdiotima/32/1690_2.png) [@Friend0fDiotima](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Friend0fDiotima)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2026, 3:53am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/35 "2026-11-02T03:53:44Z")
What does it take for a human to flourish mentally and physically? ---
**Author:** ![Wayfarer](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/wayfarer/32/123_2.png) [@Wayfarer](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Wayfarer)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2026, 6:01am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/36 "2026-11-02T06:01:17Z")
> [@Mww](#): > > If the first person is the thinker, when was thinking in first person **NOT** the case? If you read the lecture given in the OP, you’ll see that Jaynes has an answer to that. But then, that is dependent on the way he uses the word ‘consciousness’. Jaynes defines **consciousness** (what he calls the subjective conscious mind) as a language-based analog world—a constructed mind-space constructed out of metaphors and analogies—in which an analog “I” operates, allowing **introspection** , **decision/volition** , and **narratized** inner experience. It is not mere sensation, perception, learning, or even thinking, all of which can occur without consciousness in the sense he uses the term. I don’t find it at all difficult to believe that pre-moderns lack the continuous ‘stream of consciousness’ that characterises our mental life. I mean, our minds are continually absorbing and reacting to words and images in a way that must be utterly different to the ‘mind-space’ of a nomadic hunter-gatherer or early agriculturalist. I don’t think we can imagine their reality, at least, not easily. ---
**Author:** ![Baden](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/baden/32/109_2.png) [@Baden](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Baden)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2026, 11:03am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/37 "2026-11-02T11:03:40Z")
I think that’s right, and it may be that we don’t need to go that far back in time to discover societies that are less narratized or in which introspection plays a less important role. I once watched a documentary where individuals from a hunter gatherer society were asked questions such as “What makes you happy?” and “What happens when you die?” Roughly. the answer to the first question was “meat” and the answer to the second was “we are put in the ground”. Fairly straightforward and sensible and more probing didn’t result in much more. ---
**Author:** ![Friend0fDiotima](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/friend0fdiotima/32/1690_2.png) [@Friend0fDiotima](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Friend0fDiotima)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2026, 11:08am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/38 "2026-11-02T11:08:36Z")
Jaynes’s redefined many words and mashed others together that never were before to form his theories. This require the reader to unlearning prior assumptions and applying newly acquired logic. Jaynes’s did frame the first person view but writers like William Burroughs later engaged with Jaynes’s ideas by viewing language itself as a kind of social control or “virus” infecting the human mind giving rise to a first-person point of view. William S. Burroughs’s concept of language as a virus directly mirrors and expands upon Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind. While Jaynes argued that consciousness was learned through language and metaphor, Burroughs took this a step further, treating language as a literal parasitic organism that artificially constructed the modern “I” (the first-person point of view) to enforce social control. ---
**Author:** ![Baden](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/baden/32/109_2.png) [@Baden](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Baden)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2026, 11:38am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/39 "2026-11-02T11:38:02Z")
I think there’s growing support for Burrough’s view. It can be framed through developments in systems theory, for example. where language can be viewed as a kind of autopoietic organism that operates to maintain and produce itself and for which human beings are the environment and substrate. Luhmann’s version posits society itself as the autopoietic organism, and symbolically mediated communications as the means by which it produces and maintains itself. The way in which human emotions are narrativized is also relevant. Much work has been done that demonstrates that what determines a particular human emotion conceptually, e.g. as guilt, shame, anxiety, fear etc lies in the narrative wrapping rather than the actual underlying phsyiological corollary. The variation and nuance is culturally conditioned and linguistically mediated. What we tell ourselves about what we are experiencing emotionally is as much a part of the phenomenal reality as the biological activity, which is much more homogenous than we might imagine given what (we think) we feel. All this is to say Jayne’s work is maybe not so far “out there” in the context of modern theorizing as it might initially appear. ---
**Author:** ![Friend0fDiotima](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/friend0fdiotima/32/1690_2.png) [@Friend0fDiotima](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Friend0fDiotima)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2026, 12:09pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852/40 "2026-11-02T12:09:00Z")
Baden, Your post was brilliant and insightful. [Previous page](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852.md?page=1) [Next page](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/when-did-we-start-thinking-in-first-person/3852.md?page=3)