Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aipna!jeff
From: jeff@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Thought/Emotion/Feeling
Message-ID: <440@aipna.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 9 Jan 89 18:51:13 GMT
References: <569@epicb.UUCP> <1146@arctic.nprdc.arpa> <1152@arctic.nprdc.arpa> <496@uceng.UC.EDU> <1154@arctic.nprdc.arpa> <1867@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU>
Reply-To: jeff@uk.ac.ed.aipna.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: Dept. of AI, Edinburgh, UK
Lines: 17

In article <1867@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> geb@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu (Gordon E. Banks) writes:
>Now I know where that idea about language and consciousness
>evolving in the last 10000 years came from!  Jaynes' thesis is
>considered quack by every anthropologist I have talked to.

I'm not sure why you think anthropologists are the right people to ask.

Disagreements on this subject are often due to different ideas about
what "consciousness" means.  Many people think animals are conscious, which
seems rather unlikely given how much of our internal experience involves
language.  I'm not sure what it means to say a rat is conscious.  But
some people think consciousness is something rats might have, and they
would certainly disagree with Jaynes.  But then I'd say they were talking
about different things.

And, in any case, Jaynes says some interesting things about consciousness
that seem to be independent of his "bichameral mind" ideas.