A very interesting discussion. I must first confess that I haven't read the book in question, but plan to purchase a copy. Tor, BTW, reminds me very much of a "Tor" I have, in the past, encountered in another discussion forum, and who was very interested in Jaynes' theory.
Having not read the book, I plead ignorance as regards any rating of the veracity of the work.
The discussion of "illusion", in particular, interests me. Perhaps the devil is in the details of one's definition of the word "illusion", but I tend to think of any virtual construct ( idea, metaphor, the idea that a map represents) as being a form of illusion. Mind you, some ideas in the head might be more in tune with real events in reality. And, of course, some might not. Some are thus better predictors of potential future events. But, all ideas are virtual constructs, and not the reality they are meant to represent. Some illusions, then, are more useful than are others.
Fiction, I think, is not necessarily the same thing as is a lie. A fiction might be a story one tells not with the intention of asserting that the described events actually happened as stated. Rather, the story might be told to represent relationships one has actually observed in reality. A lie, OTOH, is a deliberate attempt to assert something that one knows is not true, and is thus a form of dishonesty ( a trait, according to Jaynes, I think, that is one of the earmarks of consciousness).
Consciousness, it would seem, is not an actual thing, but rather, a *way* in which a brain equipped with the necessary hardware, and then tweaked to use the hardware in the appropriate way, operates. As such, it might be referred to as an illusion of sorts, as no such physical entity called consciousness may be observed - only the footprints of the process. Perhaps, at best, we could call it the "software" running in our brains. As such, "it" is not a "lie" (although we could use the process to tell a lie), but is, rather, a sometimes useful illusion. The objective reality is the neuro-electric activity. The experience arising from that activity in a conscious individual is not "out there" in the world to be observed; it is the subjective, virtual construct that we fabricate, sometimes to our advantage, if we have done our homework well.
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