Julian Jaynes's book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," has a lot of good parts.
We've taken ONLY those good parts while ELIMINATING the bad parts, the boring parts, etc.
Instead of reading nearly 500 pages, this...
The toppled idealism after World War I created a revolutionary age demanding new philosophies.
The intriguing successes of physics and general technology presented both a model and a means that seemed more compatible with behaviorism.
The world was weary and wary of subjective thought and longed for objective fact.
And in America objective fact was pragmatic fact.
Behaviorism provided this in psychology.
It allowed a new generation to sweep aside with one impatient gesture all the worn-out complexities of the problem of consciousness and its origin.
We would turn over a new leaf.
We would make a fresh start.
And the fresh start was a success in one laboratory after another.
But the single inherent reason for its success was not its truth, but its program.
And what a truly vigorous and exciting program of research it was!
With its gleaming stainless-steel promise of reducing all conduct to a handful of reflexes and conditional responses developed from them, of generalizing the spinal reflex terminology of stimulus and response and reinforcement to the puzzles of headed behavior and so seeming to solve them, of running rats through miles and miles of mazes into more fascinating mazes of objective theorems, and its pledge, its solemn pledge to reduce thought to muscle twitches and personality to the woes of Little Albert.
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In all this there was a heady excitement that is difficult to relate at this remove.
Complexity would be made simple, darkness would be made light, and philosophy would be a thing of the past.
From the outside, this revolt against consciousness seemed to storm the ancient citadels of human thought and set its arrogant banners up in one university after another.
But having once been a part of its major school, I confess it was not really what it seemed.
Off the printed page, behaviorism was only a refusal to talk about consciousness.
Nobody really believed he was not conscious.
And there was a very real hypocrisy abroad, as those interested in its problems were forcibly excluded from academic psychology, as text after text tried to smother the unwanted problem from student view.
In essence, behaviorism was a method, not the theory that it tried to be.
And as a method, it exorcized old ghosts.
It gave psychology a thorough house cleaning.
And now the closets have been swept out and the cupboards washed and aired, and we are ready to examine the problem again.
Julian Jaynes. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (14-15)
