Language and Consciousness: Jaynes’s ‘Preposterous Idea’ Reconsidered

John Limber, in Marcel Kuijsten (ed.), Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness (Julian Jaynes Society, 2006).

Excerpt: … Jaynes’s consciousness has definitive features that create an “analog world” with its own space, agents and objects, story-telling ability, and capacities to selectively excerpt, rationalize, and create its own inner reality distinct from the outer world. Foreshadowing Michael Gazzaniga’s left hemisphere “interpreter” or Antonio Damasio’s “extended consciousness,” J-con “is ever ready to explain anything we happen to find ourselves doing.” …