These issues are only going to be more complex as time marches onward. Our understanding of neuroscience and the mind are just getting out of infancy with the optogenetic and CRISPR revolutions. It's going to be pretty cool to see how our definitions change as the science marches onward.
I'll give a concrete example: Persistent vegetative states. Prior to some recent research [0,1], people in these states were thought to be just, well, akin to vegetables. However, under MRI, it was found that there were conscious people 'trapped' in these bodies. Not for all, but for some. Communication out of their 'locked-in' state is now possible. In terms of Jaynes, this means that the acts of perception, concept formation, learning, thinking, and reasoning are not all directly linked; they can occur independent of each other.
Sure, you can argue if these people are conscious still or not, just like with Ulysses. But what we are now seeing is that the seat of the mind, our brains, can be parceled out. Bits of it can act independent of the other parts. That a mind is kinda, sometimes, in specific cases, sorta like Legos. That a human mind is divisible, that the idea of a mind is likely to encompass more than just humans, and that we're just in a small sub-set of 'minds'.
So, it's going to be fun to watch how our ideas of a 'mind', of 'consciousness', of 'personhood', all change as the data keeps rolling in.
I'll give a concrete example: Persistent vegetative states. Prior to some recent research [0,1], people in these states were thought to be just, well, akin to vegetables. However, under MRI, it was found that there were conscious people 'trapped' in these bodies. Not for all, but for some. Communication out of their 'locked-in' state is now possible. In terms of Jaynes, this means that the acts of perception, concept formation, learning, thinking, and reasoning are not all directly linked; they can occur independent of each other.
Sure, you can argue if these people are conscious still or not, just like with Ulysses. But what we are now seeing is that the seat of the mind, our brains, can be parceled out. Bits of it can act independent of the other parts. That a mind is kinda, sometimes, in specific cases, sorta like Legos. That a human mind is divisible, that the idea of a mind is likely to encompass more than just humans, and that we're just in a small sub-set of 'minds'.
So, it's going to be fun to watch how our ideas of a 'mind', of 'consciousness', of 'personhood', all change as the data keeps rolling in.
[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4913176/
[1]https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/74/11/1571