largely aimed at zip4096, but you can chime in too!

For our psychology-learned readers out there: do you kids know about this fellow Julian Jaynes and bicameral mind theory? What do you guys think about this? Is the idea that consciousness as we understand it is a relatively recent development not terribly, terribly unnerving?

Also: if it turns out that this was the case, and there's some particular (apparently adaptive?) set of genes that turns on the "brain links in a particular way to produce self-awareness"... then what if not everybody has those genes yet? Three or four thousand years, on an evolutionary scale, is not a long time in the slightest.

It's also totally possible that this is all bunk. But Ashwin seems to think that it's an interesting theory, at least...