(June 19, 2017 at 1:08 pm)Whateverist Wrote: Julian Jaynes* hypothesizes that consciousness itself began as a hallucination of the voice of a god. Actually it's more complicated than that. But if any of it makes sense then the voice of god has always been a hierarchal affair. The highest priest/king would still hear the voice of the last one emanating from a stone figure commanding him what to do and everyone below him would hear the voice of god when he spoke. That voice would continue to resonate with them even when he wasn't there by way of their own capacity to hallucinate. The capacity to have a voice of ones own would have been and some degree of will as an individual would have been a later development. So if he were right about this, the priest class wasn't a scheme of a conniving individual; it was instead part of a process which led to individual consciousness of self. But god only knows what he may have been huffing.
*The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
The claim that the brain didn't have as many connections as it does now (the corpus callosum was smaller?) is sort of what Jaynes was driving at, IIRC. I don't know the biology of that, though. It's also been a long time since I read the book. In any event, my personal thinking is along the lines of a person having a problem to solve, and he thinks long and hard about it. Sort of equivalent to praying for a solution, but without the woo. When a solution presents itself, the religious person may consider it "divine inspiration" instead of just realizing that it comes from his own mind. As in, "How did I ever come up with that solution?". I do not ascribe to a divine source.
If you get to thinking you’re a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else’s dog around.
