Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Wayrad has a point: I have a hard time seeing this as particularly conducive to survival or civilization-building, either. And I especially don't see how minds that functioned like this would be able to consciously pass on learned information to others, meaning civilization couldn't have even started until this physiological trait was bred out of the gene-pool...
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I must confess I do not understand why. (i.e.: I am confused as to why you feel the way you stated--no disrespect meant.) Have you read the book? You should, as it explains everything far more elegantly than I possibly can.
But imagine the will-less slave-self as an incredibly complicated stimulus-response machine,
literally a creature of habit (and nothing else) that is able to learn (learning is not a matter of consciousness, as Jaynes painstakingly demonstrates in the first dozen or so pages of the book) anything that involves sufficient routine. And the God-self guides the slave-self to making the "right" decision whenever there is a decision to make... but while perhaps not chattering away incessantly, the God-self is ever-present and it also learns from all the experiences of the body it shares with the slave-self, and in fact it learns far more from each experience for having higher level analytical skills that the slave-self lacks. If and when the slave-self does the wrong thing or is so blatantly confronted by a decision that he/she is paralyzed, the God-self advises and the slave-self obeys.
Learning both through experience and also through observation and/or instruction is perfectly reasonable even for such a (to us) unusual mentality.
- Ahi