My impression was very different: to me it seems that the modern fans of the book close their eyes to the blatantly silly parts that make up the vast majority o

My impression was very different: to me it seems that the modern fans of the book close their eyes to the blatantly silly parts that make up the vast majority of the book and pretend that it's only really about the 'consciousness as a software' idea that makes up a tiny fraction of it. This quote from Daniel Dennett is very revealing: "Now you might think that if you throw out his account of hallucinations you haven’t got much left of Jaynes theory, but in fact I think you would, although he would probably resist throwing that part away" If you throw out the hallucinations part and the stuff built on top of that then 90% of the book is gone, and he kind of admits this. This is like saying that I want to build on Darwin's work from the Origin of Species, but throwing out his account of natural selection. The Däniken comparison comes from the way in which the writer shows you some ancient painting or statue and then claims that it "obviously" depicts how the king or his servants were controlled by hallucinations. I was having flashbacks to when Däniken was doing the same thing with similar artifacts from the same era saying that it must depict "aliens". And I would argue that the theory of a society where everybody is schizophrenic and sharing a collective hallucination of the king while the king is controlled by a hallucination of the previous king, is more complex and creates more unexplained questions than what it's trying to explain - just like saying "the aliens did it".