Professor Hunt, Meet Professor Whitehead

Abstract

Few recent developments in theoretical psychology refresh me with the same sense of portent I find in Harry Hunt´s massive reexamination of cognitive activity. His premises are faultless. Until the subject-object rift is healed and until we acknowledge the duality of human experience, consciousness will continue to yield to reductionist modeling. And because models, translated into social policy, may create the design they purport, more is at stake in this matter than the fortunes of an academic discipline. Man is adaptable and not merely in the routines that mark his immediately measurable behavior. If consciousness can be raised, it also can be lowered; if it can expand, it also can contract. It is not necessary to agree with Julian Jaynes that man was once bicameral to entertain the possibility that he might become so through applied, socalled cognitive science. And why not? It is but a short step from regarding consciousness as epiphenomenal to construing it as noise. Why not eliminate the noise and make the personal and social systems more efficient?