With respect to Jaynesās basic confusion of āconsciousnessā and āself-concept,ā we can thus assert something different. Asserting it will require fewer speculative moving parts than Jaynes does. Hearing voices generates anxiety, which generates more voices, which leads to humans believing in one or two of them, taking them literally: early agrilogistic societies tended to believe that the king was the sole or privileged receiver of the voice(s) of god(s). While Jaynes holds that the modern mind has priority over civilization, it makes more logical sense and requires less cognitive machination to argue that the agrilogistic program has priority.50 What structures thought is agrilogistics, not the other way around. The voices didnāt just show up out of the blue. They had always been there. What changed was our attitude toward them. And this is tantamount to peeling consciousness apart from a self-concept: on the ecognostic view, you can have consciousness without a specific idea of āyou.
Excerpt From: Morton, Timothy. āDark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence.ā
