[thanatos519]

I wonder if he took any inspiration from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat? which was a contemporaneous idea. Extending the question to "What was it like to be an ancient human?" forces us to consider the too-neglected question "What is it like to be this human?"

While reading Jaynes' book and traveling to LinuxTag many years ago, I found that the voices of others began to echo strongly in my mind, just as the book described. Alone again on my way home it was most vivid.

I'll add my voice to the sentiment that it's a work of genius and that its truth is irrelevant: there is great benefit in considering the ideas!

[gjm11]

https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/articles/the-origin-o... implies (if I'm understanding correctly what it is) that in 1973 Jaynes was saying that he had already been thinking for many years about "a new theory of consciousness".

Nagel's paper was published in 1974.

So unless the thing Jaynes said in 1973 he'd been thinking about for a long time was something quite different from what he published a book about in 1976 (which seems super-unlikely to me), Nagel's paper can't have had much to do with it.