Anyone want to read and discuss "The Origin of Consc in the Breakdown of the B Mind ?

[Angrboda]

Sounds as though you, like Dawkins, are aghast at how speculative must be any attempts to theorize about the origins of consciousness.  - Can't help feeling some satisfaction in shipping you with Dawkins here.  

Well, I'm not of the opinion that an interior mental life appeared either suddenly or gradually; but rather that life grew into the awareness of it.

Of late I'm of the opinion that a reasonably complete interior mental life arose very early in the evolution of animals. While I'm not opposed to engaging in wild speculation, there seems to be a regrettable undercurrent of Lamarckianism to Jaynes thesis, that selective pressures 'force' an evolutionary step, and that those selective pressures come in the form of mental behaviors. It seems there's an, "if you stress it, it will breakdown" current to Jayne's hypothesis. I don't think evolution works that way. The other problem I have with Jayne is the timescale. It seems that according to his description, the change took place in the population over the course of hundreds of years. I would think that if his theory were true, there would still be populations of people behaving in the pre-breakdown way. Granted I don't know how one would tell the difference, but his thesis doesn't seem to incorporate a sufficiently large element of time to be realistic.