The Cat Is Hungry, or the Return of the Bicameral Mind

Someone posted on X recently about being woken in the night by their cat scratching at the bedroom door. Half asleep, she reached for her phone to ask AI why the cat was scratching. Too tired to unlock the screen, she did something different. She constructed an imaginary AI in her head, posed the question internally, and waited. The answer came back promptly. The cat is probably hungry. You should feed it.

She was amazed. She posted about it. She was wondering if anyone else had found that they have an ‘AI in their head’. What she had actually discovered, at the age of around 30, is that she can think.

I have been thinking about that woman ever since. I have heard about other young people like Cat Lady, who have got into the habit of using AI on their phones on a continual basis, essentially surrendering their free will, and their reason.

This reminds me of something.

In the 1970s, a psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart, or rather a character named Luke Rhinehart, in the cult classic novel Dice Man surrendered every decision in his life to the roll of a dice. What to eat. Whether to go to work. Who to sleep with. The objective was to achieve some kind of enlightenment via the deliberate abolition of agency, and the ensuing destruction of the ego. The exhausting weight of being the one who decides everything, always. The dice lifted that weight, resulting in ecstasy and liberation. Of course, it all went horribly wrong.

Cat Lady has gone further.

The Dice Man outsourced his will. She has outsourced her thinking. These are not the same thing. One is about agency. The other is about cognition. And cognition, as it happens, is the thing we most pride ourselves on as a species. We are not the strongest animal, or the fastest, or the most durable. We are the thinking ape. That’s what we do. It is our USP. If we no longer think, we are just squishy robots. Cat Lady, and presumably countless others like her have literally forgotten that they are capable of reason. The voice inside their head is silent, presumably drowned out by the constant distraction of social media, or replaced by instructions from the AI that is constantly in their hands.

Julian Jaynes, in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, argued that the experience of conscious internal reasoning, the sense of a voice in your head that is recognisably you, thinking your thoughts, is a relatively recent development in human history. Ancient humans, he suggested, did not experience cognition as internal. They heard it as external voices: gods, ancestors, oracles. The Muse dictating to the poet. The god speaking through the priest. What we would call thinking, they literally experienced as revelation from outside.

Cat Lady, and presumably countless others, have effectively reversed this process. The Bicameral Mind is back. The internal, thinking voice has been handed over. Not to gods this time, but to a product.

I should say, before anyone points it out, that I wrote this post in collaboration with an AI. We spent a pleasant Sunday afternoon shooting the breeze, thinking through the Dice Man, Jaynes, and what it means that a woman needed a tool to tell her the cat was hungry. It was a genuinely enjoyable and useful conversation. I came out of it with my ideas sharpened and refined.

So what’s the difference between this and Cat Lady asking why the cat is scratching the door? It is this. I was using the tool to think harder. She was using it to avoid thinking at all.

The world of education, of which we at Coelrind are a part, is broadly in a state of panic over AI. Students can simply use AI to cheat, to write their essays and sit their exams. So a lot of effort is going into detecting AI plagiarism, and technology like remote proctoring. But used constructively, AI is a wonderful tool for research, as a sounding board, a sparring partner, or just somewhere to try out new ideas.

So use and engage with AI, you would be foolish not to. But remember you are human, you can think. Nurture your internal voice, don’t just give it up.

Now, I have to go and feed my cat.

John Duminy is CTO of Coelrind, builders of XAMS, a regulated online assessment platform serving awarding bodies across the UK and Ireland. He has been writing software for forty years and still finds it magical.