Sometimes “consciousness” is just used as a lofty synonym for “intelligence”… But there are three more specialized meanings…

One is self-knowledge… including the ability to use a mirror… Because it is so easy to say something about self-knowledge, writers can crow about their “theory of consciousness”

Hmm. Jaynes?

A second sense is “access to information”… As with self-knowlsedge, there is nothing miraculous or even mysterious about it…

Finally, we come to the most interesting sense of all, “sentience”: subjective experience, phenomenal awareness, raw feels, first-person present tense, “what it is like” to be or do something, if you have to ask you’ll never know.

Could you provide us with your exact definition of consciousness?

I’m not offering an exact definition as I make clear: In my view consciousness is not a yes/no phenomenon, but a sliding scale with beetles, dogs, chimps, human babies, and human adults all exhibiting it to a greater or lesser extent. You can draw the line anywhere you like

Factors which I’d consider to contribute to the relative darkness of the shade of grey would include: the ability to *feel* (pain, fear, desire, love and other sensations and emotions), self-knowledge (including factors like awareness of our own existence as a being like but distict from others, and the ability to use a mirror), the knowledge that one day we will die, the ability to form an abstract picture of the world from the available sense-data, and so on. This is the usual stuff. Notice that the ancient Greeks are unlikely to fail on any of these counts.

As I say you can set the bar as high or as low as you like, and decide (by experiment) that e.g dogs or 2-year old humans are or are not “conscious” accordingly. My own view is that the interesting stuff happens quite low down, so I would wish to call dogs “conscious”. I recommend this to you if only as a way of offending religious types.

Of course other people want to set the bar higher and include things like the ability to use language in their definition: fair enough. But to set the bar so high that many adult humans fail to be “conscious” by your definition, is not sensible. It is enormously disingenuous, arrogant, and dangerous.

Jaynes should use another term to discuss the phenomenon he’s interested in (the move away from the bicameral mind, or whatever) because the the word “consciousness” already has a good and useful meaning (if not a precise one, namely it corresponds to setting the bar somewhere miles below where he’s setting it), and that meaning is not his to play with and change beyond all recognition.

As a result I am happy to present you with an uncontroversial fact: around the time of the Trojan War, humans were conscious and had been so for hundreds of thousands of years.

Could you provide us with your exact definition of consciousness?

What???

I see two possibilities here. One is that Jaynes (and you) are simply talking spectacular nonsense.

The second (and more charitable) interpretation is that Jaynes is making a reasonable point, but choosing unreasonable language to make it, by way of livening it up and selling more books.

It all depends on what working definition of “consciousness” you’re using. In my view consciousness is not a yes/no phenomenon, but a sliding scale with beetles, dogs, chimps, human babies, and human adults all exhibiting it to a greater or lesser extent. You can draw the line anywhere you like, and then perform experiments to see what lies over it, and what falls short. But experimentation can’t tell you where is a sensible place to draw the line to start with.

Jaynes is clearly working with an extremely narrow definition of consciousness, I would say far, far too narrow a definition to be even remotely sensible.

I’m quite happy to give serious consideration to the proposition that the flowering of *some new mental agility* (related to the use of language, the ability to think metaphorically, and the move away from the “bicameral mind”) led to Greece’s golden age. But to call that new mental agility “consciousness” strikes me as highly unreasonable, and very far from the meaning that we give that word in every day usage. It strikes me as blatent sensationalism.

After all if the Greeks were not “conscious” in 3000 BCE, then surely it’s not plausible that everyone alive now is conscious, is it? After all there’s been no significant evolutionary change since then. I’d guess by Jayne’s definition large swathes of contemporary humanity must still be “unconscious”.

Does that seem reasonable to you? It doesn’t to me. Apart from anything else it sounds like a licence to commit genocide.

For a website dedicated to pointing out the stupid things that other people say and believe, you should take special care in future not to talk such total and utter nonsense yourself.