The Jaynes Legacy

This book is a more idiosyncratic approach to Jaynes by an author with degrees in physics, philosophy and medicine. The first three chapters provide a synopsis and assessment of Jaynes' book, followed by an interesting discussion of the role of Reissner's fibre in mystical cognition, although I am sceptical of the author's thesis that the great works of Taoism, Hinduism and Kabbalah 'are based on interoceptions by a few rare individuals for whom the fibre persisted into adulthood.' Here he proposes that the quantum world is real and that Reissner's fibre 'as a macroscopic quantum system allows the direct supersensory consciousness of it.' This seems to me a collapse of the supersensory into the quantum substrate, conflating what Ken Wilber calls subscendence with transcendence. However, all this is discussed with great sophistication within an overall theory that consciousness is coeternal with the initial singularity giving rise to space-time - an increasing number of thinkers are speculating along these lines. There are fascinating discussions of the relationship of Freud and Einstein and their position vis-a-vis their Jewish heritage; also of the insights of Swedenborg into the role of a fibre in his own subtle perceptions. Perhaps one of the most important points to emerge from this book is a refined understanding of historically different states of consciousness, although such work has also been pursued by Erich Neumann and Jean Gebser.