There are plenty of illiterate people (and unwritten languages) in the world today, and they're quite self-aware. So even on this re-reading, Jaynes is wrong.
If we take literacy in this context to mean 'able to read and write and thus access history', then it should surely be understood that it is possible to be illiterate today while nevertheless 'osmosing' a lot of quasi-literate understanding of the world.
Whereas in the Bronze Age, they didn't have such devices as television, radio, cartoons, etc. - or at least, there was not as wide a distribution of illiterate-usable media among the illiterate then, as there are today.
True about the media, but I don't know what that has to do with the original post in this part of the thread, which was about Jaynes' "hypothesizing essentially Bronze age peoples did not have conscious thought."
