Link: PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness (Peter Watts)

I've been reading it, mainly because it seemed interesting and Dennett saw some merit in it (google "jaynes software archaeology"). I've finished the first section and some chapters in the 2nd and 3rd.

Unfortunately, I've put it off for a while, but here's what I remember as being impressive: Jaynes refutes a list of things people think consciousness is necessary for, citing experiments. For example, how people non-consciously learn and even act on what they learn, as shown in an experiment where people activate a nerve that's impossible to consciously control because its activation becomes correlated with attenuating an annoying sound.

I was also interested in his discussion of hypnosis, which he cites evidence for as being capable of making people do things they can't do consciously, like control eye dilation and hold their hand in ice-cold water indefinitely (which is painful but, he claims, harmless).

Finally, I was interested by his discussion of the role of metaphors in understanding new phenomena, and how we use them a lot more than we acknowledge.

I can't reach a conclusion yet on whether to recommend it though.

How does Jaynes explain the lack of this kind of thinking among peoples who have culture and genes unchanged in the last 3000 years ?

The problem is that the "conscious mind" takes exaggerated credit for a whole lot of stuff it barely intervenes to mediate and certainly doesn't micromanage (everything from picking up a cup of coffee to driving to work) and pretends away the huge workload of stuff it isn't involved in (visual processing, body language interpretation, language, etc).

When you strip out the conscious mind's delusions of command, it gets a lot harder to see what it's useful for. Hence the paper.

Done.

How does the above constitute refuting, as opposed to ignoring, the content behind the link?