at some point in the introduction of this book, jaynes describes cutting a worm in half and the tail end (the end not containing the brain) wiggling in agony bc it got disconnected from the brain end and then he says something like “the agony of the tail end is our agony, not the worm's” presumably because like the tail end of the worm, we are not in touch with our consciousness??? (i might have misinterpreted this) (and later in a footnote, jaynes claimed both ends of the worms would regenerate supposedly into two new worms which i'm pretty sure is not what happens — the head part might regenerate, the tail part most definitely does not)
anywho, this whole worm example/metaphor felt like my experience attempting to read this book; for the most part, i was the tail end (not wiggling in agony but maybe just wiggling in great confusion/skepticism) because the theory was pretty unconvincing for me as this is definitely one of those popular science books where there's some research but it's primarily just jaynes rambling about his own theories and other theories he doesn't buy into and history that seemingly supports his theories and contemporary (for the time this was written) examples that might suggest his theories, but then sometimes i was the brain end in terms of the rambling kind of made sense and i can rationalize why jaynes felt the need to write a whole book on this theory which is interesting to think about whether it's true or not and the perspectives on history that he had were kind of enlightening but also kind of crazy. but overall it's still that the worm got cut in half and there's a gross brainless wiggly tail part and the head part that is likely functioning fine but still missing the severed tail part, and it's hard to ignore the wiggly tail part and worms are just not that great in general so i don't think i would recommend the full experience of reading this book the same way i wouldn't recommend cutting a worm in half.