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The Voice in Our Head

Julian Jaynes "speculates that until late in the second millennium B.C. men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods."

But that would depend on how we define the word "gods."

If by "gods," we mean Jupiter, Zeus, Allah or Yahweh, as "beings" that are actually entirely separate beings from ourselves, then we would still have to question if we have anyway of determining the difference between that, and "gods" we only think of in those terms, that are simply the product of own ideas alone.

And we would have to separate both of these from those other "identities" that we are equally as addicted to as God, be they our politics, nationality, ethnicity, and so on.

This thought leaves us to wonder, however, if the kind of consciousness we experience today is an altogether different kind of consciousness from what previous generations have experienced. Not simply because of our technology, which no doubt contributes in quite significant ways, but that we have categories that were wholly unavailable to previous generations, like "homosexual" and "heterosexual" or even the id, the ego and the superego, to say nothing of the higgs boson, the mulitverse, cosmological pluralism, or m-brane theory. 

How much control do our ideas have over our own mind? How much do those ideas control what we think more than we do? And how do we determine the difference ? Or can we?

"Bueller?...  Bueller?...  Bueller?.."

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