There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. The Jaynes hypothesis, as I understand it, is that in early civilisations the majority of the population heard voices and it was considered normal.
If you see a reference in literature to a god speaking to someone, you can't easily tell whether that's fiction, metaphor, an exaggeration, a lie, a narrative style, or a literal description of a real experience.
For me one of the biggest problems with the theory is how people's perception (whether they hear voices or not) could change en masse, presumably because of a change in culture or education, because I don't believe there can have been a biological change over that period. Therefore, if people educated in the right way could hear voices I'd expect there still to be groups of people (members of some religious sect perhaps) who hear voices. So I'd like to see a detailed description of one of those groups. Then I could perhaps believe that the phenomenon was mainstream in ancient Greece.
If you see a reference in literature to a god speaking to someone, you can't easily tell whether that's fiction, metaphor, an exaggeration, a lie, a narrative style, or a literal description of a real experience.
For me one of the biggest problems with the theory is how people's perception (whether they hear voices or not) could change en masse, presumably because of a change in culture or education, because I don't believe there can have been a biological change over that period. Therefore, if people educated in the right way could hear voices I'd expect there still to be groups of people (members of some religious sect perhaps) who hear voices. So I'd like to see a detailed description of one of those groups. Then I could perhaps believe that the phenomenon was mainstream in ancient Greece.