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Jaynes addresses this critique in the revised Afterword:

> The most common error which I did not emphasize sufficiently is to confuse consciousness with perception... This type of confusion was at least encouraged back in 1921 by Bertrand Russell: “We are conscious of anything that we perceive.” And as his logical atomism became fashionable in philosophy, it became difficult to see it any other way. And in a later book Russell uses as an example of consciousness “I see a table.” But Descartes, who gave us the modern idea of consciousness, would never have agreed. Nor would a radical behaviorist like Watson, who in denying consciousness existed certainly did not mean sense perception.

Earlier in the book he makes a linguistic argument, claiming that his usage of "consciousness" is the only that unifies both the subjective (I am conscious) and objective (I am conscious of X) usages.

Beyond Jaynes and more broadly, I'd consider comparing his theses with that of McLuhan in Gutenberg Galaxy, namely McLuhan's theories about mass literacy. There seems to be a unifying element in that the structure of one's experience (of one's interpretation of their sensory inputs) is strongly related to the sorts of media they consume and to the sorts of epistemological "channels" available. The structure of knowledge and its dissemination (collectively oral? Or privately read? Think about problems such as "atomization of society" and a lightbulb should go off) seems to determine our internal experience to a large degree: older writers such as Walter Benjamin have touched on "movie consciousness" (although not strictly in those words), while more contemporary authors like Sarah Perry discuss "Social Media Consciousness" (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/09/07/social-media-conscious...).