The reel of consciousness

Nearly 40 years ago, the Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes opened his extraordinary book, The origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind , with a lavish item of purplish prose on the phenomenon of higher order human consciousness: ‘O. what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theatre of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can …’ (Jaynes, 1976) The intervening decades have seen a prodigious circuit of academic monographs and popular books, as well as thousands of articles in periodicals such as The Journal of Consciousness , attempting to explain what philosophers would describe as the ‘hard’ problem. How can objective descriptions encapsulate subjective states? The many stratagems—from brutal frontal attacks to stealthy tunnelling—have been reminiscent of a prolonged siege on an impregnable citadel.The expanding discipline of neuroscience, aided by new scanning technologies, and experimental work on Artificial Intelligence, gave fresh impetus to the task, especially during the late 1980s and the 1990s, the so-called ‘decade of the brain’. At the same time, a new breed of neuroscientifically informed philosophers of mind had arisen, their qualitative conclusions prompting remarkable contradictions, antagonisms and best-selling books. They can roughly be divided into those who insist that consciousness remains an intractable mystery, resistant to scientific probing; and those who maintain that consciousness is really no big deal—that we have pretty well cleared up most of the difficulties and could even replicate the phenomenon in an artefact.![Graphic][1] ![Graphic][2] Now come two prominent veterans, a … [1]: /embed/inline-graphic-1.gif [2]: /embed/inline-graphic-2.gif