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I never came across The Origin of Consciousness - what makes it "monumentally good" in your opinion?

• anigbrowl 13y ago
  Oh dear, I can't easily sum it up in a couple of sentences. It's just a completely different way of thinking about how the mind works, the construction of personal identity, and the interaction between the individual and the rest of the world as to induce an acute sense of vertigo if you've grown up taking the Cartesian model for granted. There's a summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_... but relying on the summary is like me telling you that Beethoven's 5th symphony is in C minor, opens with a distinctive motif, and is generally quite dramatic sounding...all true, but absolutely nothing like the experience of actually listening to it. The book provided me with a completely different model for examination of the world, which is pretty unusual. While I don't feel wholly committed to Jaynes' model, I've found it enormously useful, in the same way as Understanding Media.