Consciousness pours into available sense organs

The great majority of the terms we use to describe our conscious lives are visual. We ‘see’ with the mind’s ‘eye’ solutions which may be ‘brilliant’ or ‘obscure,’ and so on. Vision is our distance receptor /par excellence./ It is our sense of space in a way that no other modality can even approach. And it is that spatial quality, as we have seen, that is the very ground and fabric of consciousness.

It is interesting to note parenthetically that there is no hypostasis for hearing as there is for sight. Even today, we do not hear with the mind’s ear as we see with the mind’s eye. Nor do we refer to intelligent minds as loud, in the same way we say they are bright. This is probably because hearing was the very essence of the bicameral mind, and as such has those differences from vision which I discussed in I.4. The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory mind to a visual mind.

– The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes