I would like to follow up on what "incomprehensible" mean in that case.

Understanding another person can be a range of things. Attributing coherent motives for observed action might be on the one end of the scale. Feeling exactly what they are feeling might be on the other.

Even for other people today it can be hard to bridge that gap. We can imagine ourselves in their positions, trying to feel what they are feeling. Some dimension of their inner life will doubtlessly escape us.

However even with the ancients, we can in most cases understand why they did what they did. People are puzzled by details like the "wine-dark sea" exactly because they understand many other parts of the Iliad and Odyssey quite well.

There are about 90 generations separating us from Homer. Quite a lot changed in that time, but these are mostly humans like ourselves and we can relate to them ok.

Also for Julian Jaynes, "schizoid puppet" is a bit over-dramatized for his (theorized) lack of self-awareness in Bronze Age or older people, for context, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

I read the book a few years back. It was far more out there than any of the summaries I'd read of it years prior. Chapter after chapter, he made the case that no one in the ancient world ever used a word that indicated they had any will of their own. That they never had epiphanies or insights or even true thoughts.

That when they did act, it was a big booming voice inside their head that they took to be the voices of various gods and deities, guiding them through life via micromanagement.

The wikipedia article does not really do it justice.

I wish I could dismiss it as woowoo nonsense. But far more recently, there are credible reports of circumstances where because a bunch of people were dancing, those who came near them and noticed started dancing uncontrollably themselves, for days on end. Some even dying of exhaustion.

The software that is the human mind is buggy as shit, easily put into bad states, and networked enough that glitches are apparently contagious.

The Bicameral Mind really is a fascinating theory. I wish there was more evidence for or against it either way. The absence of text on free will does not really convince me, because there might be a number of reasons for that and there is not much text anyway for the bronze age and earlier. But it sure would explain all kinds of religious experiences and texts, so who knows.

Surely the difference between modern people and ancient Greeks is just a matter of culture. We can understand ideas from other cultures today. Why would it be any different trying to understand ancient thoughts? I think it’s more likely we are just missing some context.

Surely. I doubt there are any significant biological differences going back even tens of thousands.

But that just makes it weirder. If culture alone lets you see colors differently... then what other basic, fundamental experiences are subject to being so wildly different?

> The part that everyone wonders, but can't bring themselves to say aloud for risk of sounding silly, is this:

> Could the mode of thought of the ancients have been so alien to us, that (at least some aspects of) their minds are no longer comprehensible?

While it's an interesting question — I find myself musing on what it might mean for some thought to be literally un-thinkable for some specific human — I think most people have the opposite problem.

Then again, perhaps I'm projecting that assumption: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy