Dennett’s Missing Origin Story: How EToC Updates Jaynes and Explains the Narrative Self

TL;DR

• Dennett treats the self as a “center of narrative gravity”—a useful abstraction built by culturally scaffolded storytelling rather than a homunculus Dennett, “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity” (1992).
• He also praises Jaynes’ shape of explanation: a post-language “software revolution” must have occurred, even if Jaynes’ specifics are wrong Dennett, “Julian Jaynes’s Software Archeology” (1986).
• Jaynes makes that “revolution” extremely recent—roughly 1000 BC in the Middle East—explicitly as a strong-form claim Jaynes, Origin of Consciousness… afterword (1976 ed.).
• Eve Theory of Consciousness (EToC) is a candidate for Dennett’s missing mechanism: a culturally diffusing package that creates the narrative “I,” then feeds back into biology via selection on social cognition and self-modeling Cutler, “Eve Theory of Consciousness v3.0”.
• EToC also reframes the “Jaynes event” as mythic/memetic diffusion rather than a single late historical cliff, and explicitly plugs into dual-inheritance theory (gene–culture coevolution) rather than fighting it Henrich & McElreath, “Dual-Inheritance Theory” (chapter PDF).

“…there has to have been a revolution—almost certainly not an organic revolution, but a software revolution—in the organization of our information processing system, and that has to have come after language… if Jaynes is completely wrong in the details, that is a darn shame, but something like what he proposes has to be right…”
— Daniel C. Dennett, “Julian Jaynes’s Software Archeology” (1986) PDF

Dennett’s model: the self as a useful fiction with real causal bite#

Dennett’s big move is not “consciousness is an illusion” (a slogan that confuses more than it clarifies), but: don’t smuggle a Cartesian Theater into your theory. Instead of a central inner screen where “it all comes together,” he treats minds as distributed processes whose products become narratable, reportable, and socially legible. In that frame, the “self” is an abstraction you can track—like a center of gravity—because tracking it compresses prediction and explanation.

Dennett’s canonical phrase is that the self is a “center of narrative gravity,” i.e., the stable character your brain keeps inferring and revising as it tells and retells its own story Dennett (1992). This also dovetails with his methodological posture: treat first-person reports as data about the subject’s apparent world, not as incorrigible access to metaphysical inner stuff (his heterophenomenology program is the cleanest statement of this vibe) Dennett, “Heterophenomenology reconsidered” (PhilPapers entry).

So far, so good. This is why serious cognitive science can exist without kneeling before ineffable qualia like a medieval guild.

The open question Dennett leaves dangling (by design)#

Dennett is strong on what the self is like (an abstraction maintained by narrative competence and social interaction) and on how to study it (third-person plus disciplined use of reports). He is notably less committal on a particular origin story for the narrative self:

• Which cultural inventions did the heavy lifting?
• How did those inventions diffuse across populations?
• When did they become universal enough to rewrite “human nature” (not by magic, but by selection pressures in social life)?
• Why did symbolic culture explode when it did, rather than trivially scaling from earlier language?

Dennett gestures toward cultural evolution and “memes” (in the broad Dawkins sense), but gestures are not mechanisms. This is exactly the gap Jaynes tried to fill—too boldly, too late in time, but in the right explanatory register.

Jaynes: wrong date, right kind of story (and Dennett basically says so)#

Jaynes’ strong-form claim is deliberately shocking: introspective consciousness (as he defines it) arrives astonishingly recently, with a Middle East anchor around 1000 BC, and a breakdown beginning about 1200 BC Jaynes (1976 afterword). He contrasts this with a “weak form” that pushes consciousness back toward early language or ~12,000 BC, and then dismisses that weak form as nearly unfalsifiable Jaynes (1976 afterword).

It’s easy to attack Jaynes on archaeology, neurology, and (especially) the implausibility of so-total a mental rewrite happening globally in a blink. But Dennett’s response is more interesting than dismissal: he treats Jaynes as offering a software archaeology proposal—consciousness as a culturally driven reorganization of cognitive “modules” that leaves only indirect “printouts” in texts, artifacts, and social practices Dennett (1986).

That’s the key: Jaynes is an existence proof that the form of explanation can be coherent even if the modules are wrong.

A bridge that actually fits: EToC as “the software revolution that must have happened”#

If you already buy Dennett’s picture of the self as narratively maintained, then you implicitly accept that:

1. Narrative competence is culturally scaffolded, not merely genetically preloaded.
2. A sufficiently powerful cultural scaffold could create a new psychological attractor: a stable “I” that experiences itself as an internal narrator rather than a bundle of impulses and perceptions.
3. Once such a package exists, it should diffuse (horizontal transmission beats genes at sprint distances), then feed back into genetic selection (social advantage, coordination, prestige, mating, parenting, coalition dynamics).

This is exactly the conceptual space EToC tries to occupy—explicitly—while also staying inside the dual-inheritance framework rather than pretending culture floats above biology like a Platonic fog Cutler, “Eve Theory of Consciousness v3.0”; see also standard treatments of dual inheritance Henrich & McElreath (PDF), Boyd & Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (publisher page).

EToC’s pitch, in Dennett-friendly terms, is:

• The “narrative center of gravity” did not gradually ooze into existence as vocabulary expanded.
• It snapped into cultural reality via a memetic boot sequence: a transmissible set of concepts and rituals that reliably produces self-modeling, moral agency, and the phenomenology of being a subject.
• After that, humans are not just “language users,” but self-narrators—and myths record that transition because myths are the compression algorithm for civilizational software updates.

Genetic Eve/Adam vs memetic Eve (why “software” should be younger than genes)#

EToC’s adjacent “Memetic Eve” framing makes a clean point Dennettans should appreciate: memetic lineages travel differently than genetic lineages. Y-chromosomal Adam (~200,000–300,000 years ago) and mitochondrial Eve (~150,000–200,000 years ago) are deep genetic roots—but a foundational cultural package could be far more recent because ideas can jump across lineages and spread rapidly once the cognitive substrate exists Cutler, “Memetic Eve Solves the Sapient Paradox”.

Cutler defines Memetic Eve as: “The person to have the first sapient thought and manage to share that with others such that it became the foundation of human culture.” Cutler (2024). He argues—plausibly, even if you contest the particulars—that there are a priori reasons a memetic “root” should be younger than genetic ones: teaching beats reinventing; and ideas can cross genetic boundaries at scale Cutler (2024).

That’s Dennett’s “software revolution” with a real diffusion logic attached.

EToC vs Jaynes: same genre, better constraints#

Jaynes anchored his transformation near the Bronze Age collapse and early Iron Age textual shifts. EToC tries to make the transformation older, more gradual in diffusion, and more compatible with known timescales of gene–culture feedback. It shifts the burden from “sudden global rewiring ~1000 BC” to “a culturally transmissible self-modeling package that becomes universal, then leaves mythic fossils.”

Jaynes himself points out the use/mention trap and even cites Dennett approvingly in his afterword discussion (a nice historical loop) Jaynes (1976 afterword).

Where EToC is attempting to improve the constraint set is:

• Timeline plausibility: cultural revolutions can be fast; biological evolution is slower; gene–culture coevolution sits between. Dual inheritance theory exists precisely to model this interaction Henrich & McElreath (PDF).
• Diffusion realism: myths, ritual technologies, and social institutions can spread horizontally and persist as universals once discovered (language recursion, pronouns, moral categories, creation myths) Cutler, “Memetic Eve…”.
• Artifact expectations: “software doesn’t fossilize,” but its printouts do—ritual objects, iconographies, myth motifs, and dramatic discontinuities in symbolic behavior are the kind of evidence you’d expect Dennett’s own “software archaeology” to rely on Dennett (1986).

None of this proves EToC. It does put it in exactly the niche Dennett carved out: tell me a better module set.

The core claim: EToC answers Dennett’s “how did narratization evolve?” question#

Dennett can describe the narrative self without telling you how it got into the world. EToC offers a direct answer-schema:

1. Preconditions: language, social learning, and the ability to represent others’ minds (theory of mind) already exist as a substrate.
2. Innovation: a compact, teachable set of concepts appears—something close to “I am” / moral agency / death awareness—and is embedded in ritual and story such that it becomes learnable at population scale Cutler, “Memetic Eve…”.
3. Bootstrapping: once internal narration exists, it rewrites planning, deception, coalition strategy, identity, and norm enforcement—creating strong within-group advantages.
4. Selection + diffusion: the cultural package spreads (horizontal), and then genes that better support the package’s demands gain advantage (vertical selection over many generations), yielding the familiar “humans are weird” outcome dual-inheritance theorists model Henrich & McElreath (PDF).

This is Dennett’s functionalism plus Jaynes’ evolutionary storytelling, constrained by gene–culture mechanics.

A concrete fingerprint: “printouts” in myth as compressed cognitive history#

EToC leans hard on myths not as childish fictions but as high-loss compression of psychological transitions: narrative selfhood, shame/nakedness, moral knowledge, and the sexed social politics of norm enforcement. It’s an attempt to treat myth diffusion as evidence—imperfect but nontrivial—rather than as decorative post-hoc poetry Cutler, “Eve Theory…”.

Dennett’s own software-archeology metaphor basically licenses this move (with the usual caveat: you can overfit stories to shards).

Subheading B: Comparative map (Dennett vs Jaynes vs EToC)#

What would make EToC scientific in Dennett’s sense?#

Dennett tolerates bold “just-so” stories only when they sharpen into discriminating predictions. In that spirit, EToC earns seriousness (not truth—seriousness) insofar as it can cash out into constraints like:

1. Geographic diffusion patterns: if a “boot package” spread, we should see correlated motif clusters and ritual technologies with plausible transmission routes, not random independent invention everywhere (EToC claims certain artifacts are unusually diagnostic).
2. Archaeological discontinuities: the transition should track shifts in symbolic behavior, norm enforcement, and long-horizon planning tools (burial practices, art, initiation rites, etc.).
3. Developmental signatures: if the self is culturally booted, there should be learnable developmental scaffolds that, when absent, lead to systematically different self-modeling.
4. Gene–culture correlations: over long timescales, alleles supporting social learning, norm psychology, language processing, and self-control should correlate with culturally induced pressures (the dual-inheritance research program already targets this class of claim) Henrich & McElreath (PDF).

EToC’s wager is that myth is not just narrative decoration, but one of the only surviving trace media for psychological software upgrades.

FAQ#

Q1. Did Dennett really endorse Jaynes in any strong sense? A. Dennett explicitly says Jaynes’ core idea—a post-language “software revolution” needed for human consciousness—is “absolutely wonderful,” adding that even if Jaynes is wrong in details, “something like what he proposes has to be right” Dennett (1986).

Q2. What exactly is the “open question” EToC claims to answer for Dennett? A. Dennett characterizes the self as a narrative abstraction but largely leaves unspecified which concrete cultural inventions and diffusion dynamics originated narrative selfhood at population scale; EToC proposes a specific memetic/ritual “boot sequence” plus gene–culture feedback as that missing origin story Dennett (1992), Cutler, “EToC v3”.

Q3. Isn’t Jaynes’ 1000 BC date basically fatal to any “Jaynes-like” theory? A. It’s fatal to Jaynes’ strong-form dating, but Dennett’s point is that the explanatory shape—a culturally driven cognitive reorganization after language—remains plausible and demands better modules rather than abandonment Jaynes afterword, Dennett (1986).

Q4. Why should “memetic Eve” be more recent than mitochondrial Eve? A. Because memes can spread horizontally across genetic lineages and can be learned once invented, a single foundational cultural package can become universal far faster than genetic lineages coalesce—making a recent memetic “root” a priori plausible even if genetic roots are ~150,000–300,000 years old Cutler, “Memetic Eve…”.

Footnotes#

Sources#

1. Dennett, Daniel C. “Julian Jaynes’s Software Archeology.” Canadian Psychology 27 (1986): 149–154.
2. Dennett, Daniel C. “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity.” In Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992.
3. Dennett, Daniel C. “Heterophenomenology reconsidered.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (2007): 247–270.
4. Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Afterword excerpt, 1976 ed.).
5. Cutler, Andrew. “Eve Theory of Consciousness v3.0.” Vectors of Mind (Feb 27, 2024).
6. Cutler, Andrew. “Memetic Eve Solves the Sapient Paradox.” Vectors of Mind (Jun 26, 2024).
7. Henrich, Joseph, and Richard McElreath. “Dual-Inheritance Theory: The Evolution of Human Cultural Capacities and Cultural Evolution.” (chapter PDF).
8. Boyd, Robert, and Peter J. Richerson. Culture and the Evolutionary Process. University of Chicago Press, 1985.