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The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size
As John Casti wrote, "Finally, a book that really does explain consciousness." This groundbreaking work by Denmark's leading science writer draws on psychology, evolutionary biology, information theory, and other disciplines to argue its revolutionary that consciousness represents only an infinitesimal fraction of our ability to process information. Although we are unaware of it, our brains sift through and discard billions of pieces of data in order to allow us to understand the world around us. In fact, most of what we call thought is actually the unconscious discarding of information. What our consciousness rejects constitutes the most valuable part of ourselves, the "Me" that the "I" draws on for most of our actions--fluent speech, riding a bicycle, anything involving expertise. No wonder that, in this age of information, so many of us feel empty and dissatisfied. As engaging as it is insightful, this important book encourages us to rely more on what our instincts and our senses tell us so that we can better appreciate the richness of human life.
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
About the author
Tor Nørretranders
38 books58 followersTor Nørretranders is a Danish author of popular science. His books and lectures have primarily been focused on light popular science and its role in society, often with Nørretranders' own advice about how society should integrate new findings in popular science. He introduced the notion of exformation (explicitly discarded information) in his book The User Illusion.
Academic background:
cand.techn.soc. (M.Sc.) from Roskilde University 1982 (philosophy and sociology of science applied to socio-economic planning). Academically employed at Technical University of Denmark (1982-83), Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (1990-91), Risø National Laboratory (1993). Director of the Mindship Foundation (1995-96). Adjunct Professor of the Philosophy of Science at Copenhagen Business School from 2003.
Journalistic background:
Science writer at leading Copenhagen daily and weekly newspapers (Information, Weekendavisen, Børsens Nyhedsmagasin, Politiken) and the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (Danmarks Radio), hosting the tv-show “Hvælv”. Received the non-fiction prize of the Danish Writers Union, 1985, and the publicist prize of of the Danish Publicist Club, 1988.
Academic background:
cand.techn.soc. (M.Sc.) from Roskilde University 1982 (philosophy and sociology of science applied to socio-economic planning). Academically employed at Technical University of Denmark (1982-83), Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (1990-91), Risø National Laboratory (1993). Director of the Mindship Foundation (1995-96). Adjunct Professor of the Philosophy of Science at Copenhagen Business School from 2003.
Journalistic background:
Science writer at leading Copenhagen daily and weekly newspapers (Information, Weekendavisen, Børsens Nyhedsmagasin, Politiken) and the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (Danmarks Radio), hosting the tv-show “Hvælv”. Received the non-fiction prize of the Danish Writers Union, 1985, and the publicist prize of of the Danish Publicist Club, 1988.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 89 reviews
September 6, 2015
I promised myself years ago that I'd finally stop reading this sort of book, had been sticking to it pretty well (just a couple of regrettable lapses during the 1990s) and had fair warning about this one: standing in the bookshop leafing through its pages, I spotted the word "exformation" - a sort of counterpart of "information" of course - yet still bought the thing anyway. I think I might need professional help (or Bookaholics Anonymous).
You could summarise The User Illusion's thesis on a single page. 1, what we call "the conscious mind" doesn't do any of the following: it doesn't feel, dream, remember, imagine, think, decide or act; all these, everything the mind does in fact, are done non-consciously. 2, the reason consciousness doesn't do any of these is because it doesn't exist - the "I" and the conscious realm it seems to inhabit are an illusion analogous to the "user illusion" of computer terminology. Now as it happens, having mulled it over for years myself, I pretty much agree with 1 (although not 2); the most obvious problem with this thesis, though, is that you can't publish a book only one page long, so you pad it out (sorry, prepare the ground) with a series of huge digressions into anything even remotely fashionable at the time: information theory, Godel's Theorem, chaos, fractals, Julian Jaynes, left-versus-right cerebral hemispheres, some nice optical-illusion drawings you've seen a hundred times before...Gaia...Zeno's paradoxes...
Won't tell you how my head feels this morning. Never again...
You could summarise The User Illusion's thesis on a single page. 1, what we call "the conscious mind" doesn't do any of the following: it doesn't feel, dream, remember, imagine, think, decide or act; all these, everything the mind does in fact, are done non-consciously. 2, the reason consciousness doesn't do any of these is because it doesn't exist - the "I" and the conscious realm it seems to inhabit are an illusion analogous to the "user illusion" of computer terminology. Now as it happens, having mulled it over for years myself, I pretty much agree with 1 (although not 2); the most obvious problem with this thesis, though, is that you can't publish a book only one page long, so you pad it out (sorry, prepare the ground) with a series of huge digressions into anything even remotely fashionable at the time: information theory, Godel's Theorem, chaos, fractals, Julian Jaynes, left-versus-right cerebral hemispheres, some nice optical-illusion drawings you've seen a hundred times before...Gaia...Zeno's paradoxes...
Won't tell you how my head feels this morning. Never again...
December 11, 2021
My mind has been blown, this is a great work! It has opened my eyes to new possibilities; and has given a new impetus to my thinking and has changed how I view this world. I totally loved every moment spent reading this one. It has truly been a life changing experience.
February 5, 2012
I found this book really hard to put down. It was surprisingly one of the better written texts describing Entropy I have encountered and I felt like the writer pulled from some magnificent sources for this work. It covered a broad number of fields from consciousness of course to philosophy, communism, cosmology, history, computer science and a whole host of other disciplines. There were really only three main points to it which in some instances became fairly repetitive but the scope of what he was trying to convey in through these other disciplines I thought was laudable and well conceived. It really made me want to pick up Julian Jaynes work which I have had on my to read shelf for awhile. I thought this was really good to be honest it was a lot of good brain candy. Its a completely different way to view the ego in representation to both the social community and to the unconscious "me" that presides over much of our actions. I feel both more and less of a human for the "I" and the "Me" that this body I have contains.
November 20, 2012
Still good, still thought-provoking after many years.
I bought this about the time it first came out, and recently finished a re-read of it.
Some parts of it are a bit dated, some parts are perhaps a bit uneven, and the book is arguably as much philosophy as it is science. That said, it's still a good book, good enough to definitely not deserve the 1- and 2-star ratings. So, even though for me alone, it's probably closer to 4 stars, I give it a 5-star rating.
That said, philosophy and science can both be provocative at times. Quantum theory still is today. As is general relativity. As is existentialism. As is the question of "what is consciousness."
It's not a "fault" of Norretranders if he doesn't precisely answer that; rather, today even, it's a question of "can consciousness be precisely defined"? And, books by Dan Dennett and Steve Pinker aside, I say the answer is still no. Or, at best, like Potter Stewart on pornography: We know consciousness when we experience it.
As for claims that the central idea is dated? Tosh.
Dan Wegner and others go beyond where Dennett stops and refuses to go further, and note that "no Cartesian consciousness" also means "no Cartesian free willer." This book is exactly in line with that, with the whole idea of "user illusion." The reader is invited to wrestle along with Norretranders as to what this all means. Godel's incompleteness theorem, the recursiveness behind Mandelbrot's fractals and other ideas in the book all connect to that "user illusion."
Yes, he could have cited Kierkegaard less, and other existentialists more. Yes, he comes a bit close to, though never going into, New Ageiness here and there on occasion.
It's still a very good book
I bought this about the time it first came out, and recently finished a re-read of it.
Some parts of it are a bit dated, some parts are perhaps a bit uneven, and the book is arguably as much philosophy as it is science. That said, it's still a good book, good enough to definitely not deserve the 1- and 2-star ratings. So, even though for me alone, it's probably closer to 4 stars, I give it a 5-star rating.
That said, philosophy and science can both be provocative at times. Quantum theory still is today. As is general relativity. As is existentialism. As is the question of "what is consciousness."
It's not a "fault" of Norretranders if he doesn't precisely answer that; rather, today even, it's a question of "can consciousness be precisely defined"? And, books by Dan Dennett and Steve Pinker aside, I say the answer is still no. Or, at best, like Potter Stewart on pornography: We know consciousness when we experience it.
As for claims that the central idea is dated? Tosh.
Dan Wegner and others go beyond where Dennett stops and refuses to go further, and note that "no Cartesian consciousness" also means "no Cartesian free willer." This book is exactly in line with that, with the whole idea of "user illusion." The reader is invited to wrestle along with Norretranders as to what this all means. Godel's incompleteness theorem, the recursiveness behind Mandelbrot's fractals and other ideas in the book all connect to that "user illusion."
Yes, he could have cited Kierkegaard less, and other existentialists more. Yes, he comes a bit close to, though never going into, New Ageiness here and there on occasion.
It's still a very good book
April 11, 2011
This book has some really interesting stuff in it, but it was just plain a slog to read through. The chapters have loads of details that are of, at best, passing interest, and it feels as though the book could have been condensed immensely. I found myself zipping through other non-fiction reads by comparison.
If you know how to speed read or how to skim effectively then this book is a bit better of a read. Things improved when I stopped trying to read every word cover to cover and just skimmed through the pages picking up the important details as I went. Moreover, it is around the last hundred pages of the book where the truly interesting information is held -- up to this point mostly deals with the history of various scientific fields that build up to this point.
Though there is a lot of interesting science in this book, it's worth noting that there's also a bit of supposition. Ideas like consciousness only arising within the last few thousand years makes one wonder, if true, how it was that it did so everywhere on the globe at once. Evolution would not act in that way -- such evolutionary traits would develop within larger regions, but clearly consciousness developed in North America, Asia, Europe, Australia (the native tribes thereof), etc. without any interbreeding taking place. At the very least, it still holds burden of proof.
That said, many of the ideas set forth do make perfect sense under today's science and knowledge, and the book contains enough of these to be more than worthwhile, if you can manage to dig your way through enough of it to get at them.
If you know how to speed read or how to skim effectively then this book is a bit better of a read. Things improved when I stopped trying to read every word cover to cover and just skimmed through the pages picking up the important details as I went. Moreover, it is around the last hundred pages of the book where the truly interesting information is held -- up to this point mostly deals with the history of various scientific fields that build up to this point.
Though there is a lot of interesting science in this book, it's worth noting that there's also a bit of supposition. Ideas like consciousness only arising within the last few thousand years makes one wonder, if true, how it was that it did so everywhere on the globe at once. Evolution would not act in that way -- such evolutionary traits would develop within larger regions, but clearly consciousness developed in North America, Asia, Europe, Australia (the native tribes thereof), etc. without any interbreeding taking place. At the very least, it still holds burden of proof.
That said, many of the ideas set forth do make perfect sense under today's science and knowledge, and the book contains enough of these to be more than worthwhile, if you can manage to dig your way through enough of it to get at them.
December 15, 2010
This is one of those books that makes me lose all interest in writing or saying or thinking about anything, since everything I was cooking up has already been done here.
December 15, 2017
Tor Norretranders is Denmark’s leading science writer with a track record of best sellers. It follows that his book is a well written compilation of diverse scientific theories and findings, all presented in a chatty style and broken into short chapters and sections that help to keep our interest alive. For anyone who reads a fair number of popular science books there are a lot of familiar names, typically well explained and often presented in an original way or with genuinely useful insights. This alone is a good enough reason to read this book for pleasure. For today’s army of internet warriors, it will have many sharp points that help in debates on diverse topics. To keep us on our toes, it also includes a few seriously defective ones which may impress the unwary, the most egregious being the very poorly supported claim that humanity first became conscious about 3,000 years ago. That is one piece of spurious misinformation we must all now work to forget. In addition we need to be aware that the age of his book means it has no references to MRI brain scans, which open up entirely new ways to investigate the particular phenomena he describes.
Science writers typically seem to go into paroxysms when trying to explain or discuss the phenomenon of consciousness. They insist that the topic is enormously complex and its solution is utterly beyond our reach, the ultimate puzzle of the universe, and for this reason they throw into the basket everything they know, some of which is even relevant. It provokes a tendency to mistake word games for poetry, clever twists of language for deep philosophy, geeks for creative artists.
On the theme of consciousness, Norretranders has his own interesting twist, which is to argue that consciousness is far less central to the way our minds function than we may imagine; he virtually suggests that our conscious mind is a passive observer of the work done out of awareness by the unconscious mind. He makes a good case but I think he is wrong; he gets too lost in the sheer quantity of his material and fails to focus on the argument itself; he presents mountains of evidence to support his case and fails to appreciate that it is more important and more useful to pay attention to the material that calls it into doubt. Firstly, we have Popper’s concept of scientific method to remind us that no amount of supporting evidence can outweigh evidence of being wrong. Secondly, we have Norretranders’ own argument that a large quantity of information is no better than noise; it only becomes meaningful after most of it is discarded, selectively, and reduced to a simple product of reasoning, which becomes its point or its meaning.
Worst of all, he tries to simplify a biological and psychological phenomenon into the language of physics and mathematics, in the form of information theory, and even his own material in this book is sufficient to tell him that this is a doomed assignment from the outset. Yes it is possible to reduce consciousness (for example) to a simpler, physical or mathematical description, but only by throwing away most of what we know, and we cannot reconstruct consciousness from the resulting simplistic description. He is just plain wrong; his argument can only work to the extent that there is a conscious mind available to read and consider his argument, which already demonstrates that his argument does not work after all.
Some quotes from the book:
The interesting things in life may not be the ones that take long explanations to describe but those that take many experiences to get to know. [p80]
A biological creature is the result of a very long evolutionary computation. ... A “yes” or a “no” may be the result of a whole mass of hard-won experience. [p81]
The concept of information is a very bad one if it is taken at face value. If you suppose that the information in information theory is about meaning, ... you are in for a disappointment. ... Because it is not what we say to each other every day that establishes all the meaning and beauty and truth our everyday conversations contain; it is everything we think before we speak. [p98]
The interesting thing about words is not that they can be said but that there was something that could be said. The interesting thing about speech is not how we speak but that we have something to say. [p106]
The American anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson ... wrote in 1966 ... “As mammals we are familiar with, though largely unconscious of, the habit of communicating about our relationships... Like other terrestrial mammals, we do most of our communicating on this subject by means of kinesic [movement] and paralinguistic signals, such as bodily movements, involuntary tensions of voluntary muscles, changes of facial expression, hesitations, shifts in tempo of speech or movement, overtones of the voice and irregularities of expression...” ... The problem is that in practice we humans do not wish to admit that we are animals. We think our consciousness is identical with ourselves. So we tend to believe that everything we say lies in the words. We take ourselves literally. We think information is the important part of a conversation.[p149]
The insight that consciousness plays a smaller role in human life than most of us would believe may be vital because it is the only insight capable of transforming a culture that has serious viability problems. [p161]
If all the information that thunders through our senses is merely discarded, apart from the bit we are aware of, how can we tell that the bit we are aware of is the right one? [p173] ... If consciousness selects at random from what comes in, it really is not much use. There must necessarily be a degree of “wisdom” in the sorting that takes place – otherwise we could go around conscious of something random, with no connection to what really matters. [p173] ... Consciousness is based on an enormous discarding of information and the ingenuity of consciousness consists not of the information it contains but of the information it does not contain. [p173]
We do not see what we sense. We see what we think we sense. Our consciousness is presented with an interpretation, not the raw data. Long before this presentation, an unconscious information processing has discarded information so that what we see is a simulation, a hypothesis, an interpretation, and we are not free to choose. [p187]
What we experience has acquired meaning before we become conscious of it. [p187]
The problem of other minds is closely related to the problem of the existence of the external world. How can we say there even is one. A Danish philosopher, Peter Zinkernagel, has solved this problem by pointing out that we cannot say there is no external reality: language breaks down totally if we assert that language does not have anything to talk about. ... But this is not proof that there are other minds (or an external reality, for that matter). It is merely a stating of the fact that here is a problem we cannot discuss... unless you acknowledge the existence of other minds, you have nobody to talk to about this point of view of yours. [p196]
Human consciousness possesses a high degree of complexity. It is a phenomenon of considerable depth. A great deal of information is discarded in its making... We must therefore now ask: does creating consciousness take time? Does discarding most of the sensory information before we experience also take time?” Well, it must. So the real question is how long it takes... because we sense constantly and we are conscious – almost – all the time. So if consciousness takes time, it must constantly lag behind! [p209]
An actor has a much higher bandwidth than language does. There are gestures and gesticulations, intonations, movements, glances, and charisma; a series of monverbale communications which the audience perceives more or less consciously. Similarly, the musician does not merely deliver the score but hopes to transform it into notes that supply it with pauses, accents, phrasing and other goodies. [p263]
The theme of psychotherapy can be formulated as the I’s acceptance of the Me: the acceptance of the fact that it cannot control the real subject of an act even though our entire culture tells us we can if only we try to be a bit pious and holy. The point of psychotherapy for the individual is the lesson: I accept my Me. [p271]
Heidegger expressed the angst at the way the world can be freely interpreted but experienced only through interpretation: the angst of the I at not being the Me. [p274]
In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard describes the feeling of despair which comes at three levels: ... “The despair of not being conscious that one has a self; the despair of not wishing to be oneself; the despair at wishing to be oneself.” [p275]
The content of our consciousness is already processed and reduced, put into context. Conscious experiences possess depth: They have been put in context; lots of information has been processed but is not presented to us. A mass of sensory information has been discarded before conscious awareness occurs – and this sensory information is not presented. Yet the experience itself is based on the discarded information. [p288] ... We experience not the raw sensory data but a simulation of them. The simulation of our sensory experiences is a hypothesis about reality. This simulation is what we experience... It takes time to achieve this depth... There are bundles and bundles of intermediate calculations that are not relevant to our actions in the world. We have to solve the binding problem before we can experience anything at all; we have to form a hypothesis about where the sound came from before we hear it. [p289]
The bandwidth of language is far lower than the bandwidth of sensation. Most of what we know about the world we can never tell each other. [p309]
The holism – reductionism controversy today is a debate that may be said to be passé; false opposites. Actually, none of the parties to this debate had grasped the real point, which P.W.Anderson had already formulated in his slogan “More is different,” which originated from a lecture he gave in 1967. “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.” ... Anderson’s point, therefore, is that reductionism does not necessarily conflict with the view that complexity exists and new natural phenomena arise every time we step up the scale and study new layers of the universe. [p356]
The road to complexity is simple but long. When simple rules are allowed to beaver away long enough in time or in a sufficient number of component parts, completely new properties appear; they emerge, break out, pop up, come into view. These emergent properties cannot be found by studying a small collection of component parts. They can be seen only when there are so many parts that collective influences, group properties, can occur. Temperature for example is a property that yields no meaning if we observe very few molecules. A large number is required before temperature is present. We cannot see from the individual molecules what temperature it is part of, for temperature is a collective property manifested as a statistical relation: A temperature describes the distribution of velocities among lots of molecules... [p364]
Life is an emergent property of matter, not a property of matter’s component parts.[p385]
Consciousness must make do with very few bits per second for nourishment. It is like fast food: There is almost nothing to digest, no bones and fibre to discard during and afterward. [p397]
Science writers typically seem to go into paroxysms when trying to explain or discuss the phenomenon of consciousness. They insist that the topic is enormously complex and its solution is utterly beyond our reach, the ultimate puzzle of the universe, and for this reason they throw into the basket everything they know, some of which is even relevant. It provokes a tendency to mistake word games for poetry, clever twists of language for deep philosophy, geeks for creative artists.
On the theme of consciousness, Norretranders has his own interesting twist, which is to argue that consciousness is far less central to the way our minds function than we may imagine; he virtually suggests that our conscious mind is a passive observer of the work done out of awareness by the unconscious mind. He makes a good case but I think he is wrong; he gets too lost in the sheer quantity of his material and fails to focus on the argument itself; he presents mountains of evidence to support his case and fails to appreciate that it is more important and more useful to pay attention to the material that calls it into doubt. Firstly, we have Popper’s concept of scientific method to remind us that no amount of supporting evidence can outweigh evidence of being wrong. Secondly, we have Norretranders’ own argument that a large quantity of information is no better than noise; it only becomes meaningful after most of it is discarded, selectively, and reduced to a simple product of reasoning, which becomes its point or its meaning.
Worst of all, he tries to simplify a biological and psychological phenomenon into the language of physics and mathematics, in the form of information theory, and even his own material in this book is sufficient to tell him that this is a doomed assignment from the outset. Yes it is possible to reduce consciousness (for example) to a simpler, physical or mathematical description, but only by throwing away most of what we know, and we cannot reconstruct consciousness from the resulting simplistic description. He is just plain wrong; his argument can only work to the extent that there is a conscious mind available to read and consider his argument, which already demonstrates that his argument does not work after all.
Some quotes from the book:
The interesting things in life may not be the ones that take long explanations to describe but those that take many experiences to get to know. [p80]
A biological creature is the result of a very long evolutionary computation. ... A “yes” or a “no” may be the result of a whole mass of hard-won experience. [p81]
The concept of information is a very bad one if it is taken at face value. If you suppose that the information in information theory is about meaning, ... you are in for a disappointment. ... Because it is not what we say to each other every day that establishes all the meaning and beauty and truth our everyday conversations contain; it is everything we think before we speak. [p98]
The interesting thing about words is not that they can be said but that there was something that could be said. The interesting thing about speech is not how we speak but that we have something to say. [p106]
The American anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson ... wrote in 1966 ... “As mammals we are familiar with, though largely unconscious of, the habit of communicating about our relationships... Like other terrestrial mammals, we do most of our communicating on this subject by means of kinesic [movement] and paralinguistic signals, such as bodily movements, involuntary tensions of voluntary muscles, changes of facial expression, hesitations, shifts in tempo of speech or movement, overtones of the voice and irregularities of expression...” ... The problem is that in practice we humans do not wish to admit that we are animals. We think our consciousness is identical with ourselves. So we tend to believe that everything we say lies in the words. We take ourselves literally. We think information is the important part of a conversation.[p149]
The insight that consciousness plays a smaller role in human life than most of us would believe may be vital because it is the only insight capable of transforming a culture that has serious viability problems. [p161]
If all the information that thunders through our senses is merely discarded, apart from the bit we are aware of, how can we tell that the bit we are aware of is the right one? [p173] ... If consciousness selects at random from what comes in, it really is not much use. There must necessarily be a degree of “wisdom” in the sorting that takes place – otherwise we could go around conscious of something random, with no connection to what really matters. [p173] ... Consciousness is based on an enormous discarding of information and the ingenuity of consciousness consists not of the information it contains but of the information it does not contain. [p173]
We do not see what we sense. We see what we think we sense. Our consciousness is presented with an interpretation, not the raw data. Long before this presentation, an unconscious information processing has discarded information so that what we see is a simulation, a hypothesis, an interpretation, and we are not free to choose. [p187]
What we experience has acquired meaning before we become conscious of it. [p187]
The problem of other minds is closely related to the problem of the existence of the external world. How can we say there even is one. A Danish philosopher, Peter Zinkernagel, has solved this problem by pointing out that we cannot say there is no external reality: language breaks down totally if we assert that language does not have anything to talk about. ... But this is not proof that there are other minds (or an external reality, for that matter). It is merely a stating of the fact that here is a problem we cannot discuss... unless you acknowledge the existence of other minds, you have nobody to talk to about this point of view of yours. [p196]
Human consciousness possesses a high degree of complexity. It is a phenomenon of considerable depth. A great deal of information is discarded in its making... We must therefore now ask: does creating consciousness take time? Does discarding most of the sensory information before we experience also take time?” Well, it must. So the real question is how long it takes... because we sense constantly and we are conscious – almost – all the time. So if consciousness takes time, it must constantly lag behind! [p209]
An actor has a much higher bandwidth than language does. There are gestures and gesticulations, intonations, movements, glances, and charisma; a series of monverbale communications which the audience perceives more or less consciously. Similarly, the musician does not merely deliver the score but hopes to transform it into notes that supply it with pauses, accents, phrasing and other goodies. [p263]
The theme of psychotherapy can be formulated as the I’s acceptance of the Me: the acceptance of the fact that it cannot control the real subject of an act even though our entire culture tells us we can if only we try to be a bit pious and holy. The point of psychotherapy for the individual is the lesson: I accept my Me. [p271]
Heidegger expressed the angst at the way the world can be freely interpreted but experienced only through interpretation: the angst of the I at not being the Me. [p274]
In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard describes the feeling of despair which comes at three levels: ... “The despair of not being conscious that one has a self; the despair of not wishing to be oneself; the despair at wishing to be oneself.” [p275]
The content of our consciousness is already processed and reduced, put into context. Conscious experiences possess depth: They have been put in context; lots of information has been processed but is not presented to us. A mass of sensory information has been discarded before conscious awareness occurs – and this sensory information is not presented. Yet the experience itself is based on the discarded information. [p288] ... We experience not the raw sensory data but a simulation of them. The simulation of our sensory experiences is a hypothesis about reality. This simulation is what we experience... It takes time to achieve this depth... There are bundles and bundles of intermediate calculations that are not relevant to our actions in the world. We have to solve the binding problem before we can experience anything at all; we have to form a hypothesis about where the sound came from before we hear it. [p289]
The bandwidth of language is far lower than the bandwidth of sensation. Most of what we know about the world we can never tell each other. [p309]
The holism – reductionism controversy today is a debate that may be said to be passé; false opposites. Actually, none of the parties to this debate had grasped the real point, which P.W.Anderson had already formulated in his slogan “More is different,” which originated from a lecture he gave in 1967. “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.” ... Anderson’s point, therefore, is that reductionism does not necessarily conflict with the view that complexity exists and new natural phenomena arise every time we step up the scale and study new layers of the universe. [p356]
The road to complexity is simple but long. When simple rules are allowed to beaver away long enough in time or in a sufficient number of component parts, completely new properties appear; they emerge, break out, pop up, come into view. These emergent properties cannot be found by studying a small collection of component parts. They can be seen only when there are so many parts that collective influences, group properties, can occur. Temperature for example is a property that yields no meaning if we observe very few molecules. A large number is required before temperature is present. We cannot see from the individual molecules what temperature it is part of, for temperature is a collective property manifested as a statistical relation: A temperature describes the distribution of velocities among lots of molecules... [p364]
Life is an emergent property of matter, not a property of matter’s component parts.[p385]
Consciousness must make do with very few bits per second for nourishment. It is like fast food: There is almost nothing to digest, no bones and fibre to discard during and afterward. [p397]
April 20, 2012
Conscious thoughts on consciousness.
September 3, 2023
Overall an interesting read with a lot of compelling ideas. It also took me almost three months to read this book, and that's mainly due to the first few chapters feeling a bit slow. Doesn't help either that ultimately they're not nearly as interesting or relevant to the later more potent theories and ideas Nørretranders posits. He also makes a few points that the last 30 years of research/societal development have rendered moot.
That being said, I think that a lot of the ideas, namely what he discusses in the last several chapters are crucial for the continued development of our world. It's honestly a bit disheartening that what I took as the main point of the book: that we should allot less attention to our conscious I and let our unconscious Me work its magic without so much question, that our society needs to deemphasize silly fallacies such as the focus on consciousness when all that does is ensure that our confusion in feeling this Other (which is in fact our unconscious Me) while being resolute in our belief that it is the conscious I that is in control. He puts forward many reasons as to why this is not the case.
Interesting take on our lack of free will that is neither disheartening nor necessarily inspiring which I appreciate more than trying to swing the other way. Worth a read for the sheer amount of experiments, ideas, thinkers, and more that the author discusses. Lots of room for personal research to go even further.
That being said, I think that a lot of the ideas, namely what he discusses in the last several chapters are crucial for the continued development of our world. It's honestly a bit disheartening that what I took as the main point of the book: that we should allot less attention to our conscious I and let our unconscious Me work its magic without so much question, that our society needs to deemphasize silly fallacies such as the focus on consciousness when all that does is ensure that our confusion in feeling this Other (which is in fact our unconscious Me) while being resolute in our belief that it is the conscious I that is in control. He puts forward many reasons as to why this is not the case.
Interesting take on our lack of free will that is neither disheartening nor necessarily inspiring which I appreciate more than trying to swing the other way. Worth a read for the sheer amount of experiments, ideas, thinkers, and more that the author discusses. Lots of room for personal research to go even further.
January 5, 2021
Hold da op...
Sidder med en følelse af at jeg har læst noget der til at begynde med var over mit niveau, men at Hr. Nørretranders stille og roligt, omend aldeles udfordrende, hjalp mig til at forstå hvad det er han forsøgte at forklare..
Du er ikke kun dit bevidste Jeg, langt fra, du er mere Mig, end et Jeg.
Information er nødvendigvis tættere på kaos end på orden. At der ikke er så meget information i orden som i uorden og at når vi insisterer på orden får et liv der ikke er nær så spændende som liv med information.
....
Men behøvede han at bruge så mange sider på at forklare mig det???
Sidder med en følelse af at jeg har læst noget der til at begynde med var over mit niveau, men at Hr. Nørretranders stille og roligt, omend aldeles udfordrende, hjalp mig til at forstå hvad det er han forsøgte at forklare..
Du er ikke kun dit bevidste Jeg, langt fra, du er mere Mig, end et Jeg.
Information er nødvendigvis tættere på kaos end på orden. At der ikke er så meget information i orden som i uorden og at når vi insisterer på orden får et liv der ikke er nær så spændende som liv med information.
....
Men behøvede han at bruge så mange sider på at forklare mig det???
June 14, 2019
I enjoyed every moment of this book! And it was a long read. The author introduces known concepts in a vivid manner and talks about them in a novel way, adds some of his own new concepts and builds it into a coherent logic, a lens you can view the world with.
My favourite excerpt is the Exformation of phone call, brilliant observation, hidden in plainsight!
My favourite excerpt is the Exformation of phone call, brilliant observation, hidden in plainsight!
December 24, 2012
"Mærk verden" af Tor Nørretranders er uden tvivl blandt det bedste faglitteratur jeg har læst. Af flere årsager.
Vores bevidsthed er enormt facinerende i dens ubeskrivelighed. I Mærk Verden sætter Nørretranders fokus på bevidstheden og dens forudsætning for vores oplevelse af vores eksistens, og dermed som mediet hvorigennem vi tillader os selv at mærke verden... på godt og ondt.
Nørretranders skriver i et samlet og flydende sprog, hvor der veksles fint imellem faglitterære og lægmands termer, hvilket er med til at trække stoffet ned hvor det skal bruges, i ganske almindelige liv; hjemme i sofaen, i køen i Netto, på skovture med familien osv. Og det er en væsentlig bedrift, for i sin beretning om bevidsthed trækkes på tunge videnskabelige erfaringer, som kræver sin vidensskabsjournalist at tæmme.
Det formår Nørretranders rigtig godt; og han når oven i købet ud i rigtig mange videnskabelige kroge på jagt efter begreber, der på smuk vis gennem bogen bruges til at beskrive den ellers så ubeskrivelige bevidsthed. Og naturligvis også begreber til at beskrive det ubeskrivelige ved bevidsthed osv... ;)
Bogen er opdelt i 4 dele: Beregning, Betydning, Bevidstehed og Besindelse. Rejsen bringer dig forbi emner som termodynamik (2. lov), informations- og eksformationsteori, matematikkens begrænsninger, erkendelsesteori, bevidsthedens båndbredde, logisk dybde, perceptionslære herunder også subliminal perception, neuropsykologi og godt med kaosteori. Der er kildeanvisninger gennem hele bogen.
Mange blive skræmt af bogens første del, som handler om teoretisk fysik, termodynamik, matematiske teorier og kompleksitet som begreb. Jeg har hørt om flere som surt nok aldrig når til 2. del. :( Der er godt nok allerede i 1. del hints til hvor Nørretranders vil hen med hans gennemgang af de 'tunge emner', men det er nok først til sidst i bogen, når han er helt færdig med at tegne sit komplekse portræt af bevidstheden, at man (forhåbentlig) forstår sammenhængen. Og det er virkelig et betagende billede.
Alt i alt, en sublim bog.
Vores bevidsthed er enormt facinerende i dens ubeskrivelighed. I Mærk Verden sætter Nørretranders fokus på bevidstheden og dens forudsætning for vores oplevelse af vores eksistens, og dermed som mediet hvorigennem vi tillader os selv at mærke verden... på godt og ondt.
Nørretranders skriver i et samlet og flydende sprog, hvor der veksles fint imellem faglitterære og lægmands termer, hvilket er med til at trække stoffet ned hvor det skal bruges, i ganske almindelige liv; hjemme i sofaen, i køen i Netto, på skovture med familien osv. Og det er en væsentlig bedrift, for i sin beretning om bevidsthed trækkes på tunge videnskabelige erfaringer, som kræver sin vidensskabsjournalist at tæmme.
Det formår Nørretranders rigtig godt; og han når oven i købet ud i rigtig mange videnskabelige kroge på jagt efter begreber, der på smuk vis gennem bogen bruges til at beskrive den ellers så ubeskrivelige bevidsthed. Og naturligvis også begreber til at beskrive det ubeskrivelige ved bevidsthed osv... ;)
Bogen er opdelt i 4 dele: Beregning, Betydning, Bevidstehed og Besindelse. Rejsen bringer dig forbi emner som termodynamik (2. lov), informations- og eksformationsteori, matematikkens begrænsninger, erkendelsesteori, bevidsthedens båndbredde, logisk dybde, perceptionslære herunder også subliminal perception, neuropsykologi og godt med kaosteori. Der er kildeanvisninger gennem hele bogen.
Mange blive skræmt af bogens første del, som handler om teoretisk fysik, termodynamik, matematiske teorier og kompleksitet som begreb. Jeg har hørt om flere som surt nok aldrig når til 2. del. :( Der er godt nok allerede i 1. del hints til hvor Nørretranders vil hen med hans gennemgang af de 'tunge emner', men det er nok først til sidst i bogen, når han er helt færdig med at tegne sit komplekse portræt af bevidstheden, at man (forhåbentlig) forstår sammenhængen. Og det er virkelig et betagende billede.
Alt i alt, en sublim bog.
March 19, 2012
This is an explanation of consciousness via a tour of;entropy,information theory,thermodynamics,philosophy,computing,Godel's theorem and experimental neuroscience,to name but a few of the subjects employed.The result is an understanding of consciousness that is compelling,informative and which is entertaining enough to overcome any dryness caused by some of the more technical areas covered.The author is a Danish science writer and seems to know his readership well and I didn't find his style as trying as other reviewers claim to have, although some paragraphs need to be reread from time to time, but one would expect this when reading this type of material.
Overall an enlightening read that causes you to shift your viewpoint and gain insight into the mechanisms of reality simulation and information transferal.The only thing that stopped me giving it 5 stars was that the final chapters,although interesting, tended to veer towards philosophy and personal viewpoint, which was somewhat at odds with the rest of the book.
Overall an enlightening read that causes you to shift your viewpoint and gain insight into the mechanisms of reality simulation and information transferal.The only thing that stopped me giving it 5 stars was that the final chapters,although interesting, tended to veer towards philosophy and personal viewpoint, which was somewhat at odds with the rest of the book.
August 22, 2019
Human consciousness as a metaphor of the computer age
This is a wonderful book translated from the Danish by Jonathan Sydenham, written more or less from a quantum physicist's point of view by a science journalist, but very readable, marred slightly by a Western bias.
One of the things learned here is that it takes half a second for our consciousness to be aware of what we're doing. We don't notice this time lag because the mind back-peddles and makes it appear that we are on sync. The mind must backtrack so that our system will know when in real time an event took place. Reactions to things like removing a hand from a hot stove occur faster than our consciousness has time to be aware. So the mind just reconstructs the event and there is the illusion that we were aware in real time. We weren't.
On page 256 is the example of a bicycle accident which happens too fast for the "I" to make a decision. The decision is made for the "I." So, is the "I" of consciousness really in charge or is that an illusion? The book's title gives Norretranders's opinion. I tend to agree. This is similar to the Buddhist idea that the ego-I of consciousness is an illusion.
Norretranders makes a distinction between the "I" that is conscious and has a short bandwidth of perhaps 16 bits and the "Me" that is nonconscious and has a bandwidth of millions of bits. The "I" thinks it is in charge, but all it has is a slow-moving veto. On pages 268-269 Norretranders talks about how to get Self 2 (corresponds to the Me) "to unfold its talents." One method is to overload the "I" so that the "Me" is allowed to come to the fore. Give it "so many things to attend to that it no longer has time to worry" or "veto." Then the inner Me comes forward and plays beautiful music, etc. Similarly, we could say that the use of mantra, e.g., is effective as a meditation tool since it keeps the very verbal "I" occupied and allows the inner "Me" to come forward.
Norretranders believes along with Julian Jaynes that consciousness arrived during recorded history or at least sometime during the first millennium B.C. He also believes that the use of mirrors helped to develop that consciousness. He notes (page 320) that "The use of mirrors became widespread during the Renaissance" which he says is "characterized by the reappearance of consciousness." (Thus we have our Western bias.)
On the subject of the half-second delay in our conscious recognition of what is happening to us (discovered by Benjamin Libet): "If there were not half a second in which to synchronize the inputs, [from our senses] we might, as Libet puts it, experience a jitter in our perception of reality." (p 289)
In reference to the title metaphor, we find on page 291: "The user illusion, then, is the picture the user has of the machine" [ i.e., his body and brain] "...[I]t does not really matter whether this picture is accurate or complete, just as long as it is coherent and appropriate. It is better to have an incomplete, metaphorical picture of how the computer works than to have no picture at all."
On the 16-second bandwidth of consciousness: "The bandwidth of language is far lower than the bandwidth of sensation. Most of what we know about the world we can never tell each other."
Norretranders believes that our religions reflect our level of consciousness. There is, he writes, "a preconscious phase" characterized by polytheistic religions; a socially conscious phase, characterized by religions like Judaism; and a personally conscious phase, of which "Protestantism is a pure cultivation." (from page 317)
I don't necessary buy this (nor his time table of consciousness: I believe that cats and other animals have a rudimentary consciousness, and more so did the australopithecine); nonetheless the idea that Christianity is a religion of consciousness because it says we have sinned in our hearts while Judaism, for example, is only concerned with actions, is an interesting, if perhaps trivia, idea. Norretranders notes later on that, in this, Christianity may be out of bounds since the half second delay means that our consciousness has no control over what the Me or our nonconscious selves may be thinking. We can't blame the I for the impulses of the Me since the I only has a veto, as it were, and can't initiate actions or thoughts.
This is an interesting schemata that he is drawing up, and like that of Freud it is clearly metaphorical and linguistic and not descriptive. Nonetheless, I think it has value in helping us to understand how our systems work.
On pages 319 and 320 we have consciousness arising before Christ and then being lost for the middle ages and then recurring again with the birth of the renaissance. I would wonder what Norretranders thought was happening at the time in e.g., China and India? I think his (and Jaynes's) time table is too recent and much, much too fast. If consciousness is a cultural manifestation of our evolutionary abilities—an "emergent property"—then I would prefer a cultural/evolutionary development that began around 100,000 years ago.
In the chapter entitled "On the Edge of Chaos" Norretranders cites Doyne Farmer and Aletta d'A. Belin as saying that "Life is a pattern in space and time rather than a material object (after all, atoms keep getting replaced)..." This is profound.
Consciousness is restricting. It discards information from the environment and returns a distilled essence. We miss a lot because there is no evolutionary necessity that we be aware of what our Me experiences. The vast amount of information would only confuse us, or at least make us less efficient. So consciousness is the veil of illusion that yoga, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. talk about. The user illusion is maya.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
This is a wonderful book translated from the Danish by Jonathan Sydenham, written more or less from a quantum physicist's point of view by a science journalist, but very readable, marred slightly by a Western bias.
One of the things learned here is that it takes half a second for our consciousness to be aware of what we're doing. We don't notice this time lag because the mind back-peddles and makes it appear that we are on sync. The mind must backtrack so that our system will know when in real time an event took place. Reactions to things like removing a hand from a hot stove occur faster than our consciousness has time to be aware. So the mind just reconstructs the event and there is the illusion that we were aware in real time. We weren't.
On page 256 is the example of a bicycle accident which happens too fast for the "I" to make a decision. The decision is made for the "I." So, is the "I" of consciousness really in charge or is that an illusion? The book's title gives Norretranders's opinion. I tend to agree. This is similar to the Buddhist idea that the ego-I of consciousness is an illusion.
Norretranders makes a distinction between the "I" that is conscious and has a short bandwidth of perhaps 16 bits and the "Me" that is nonconscious and has a bandwidth of millions of bits. The "I" thinks it is in charge, but all it has is a slow-moving veto. On pages 268-269 Norretranders talks about how to get Self 2 (corresponds to the Me) "to unfold its talents." One method is to overload the "I" so that the "Me" is allowed to come to the fore. Give it "so many things to attend to that it no longer has time to worry" or "veto." Then the inner Me comes forward and plays beautiful music, etc. Similarly, we could say that the use of mantra, e.g., is effective as a meditation tool since it keeps the very verbal "I" occupied and allows the inner "Me" to come forward.
Norretranders believes along with Julian Jaynes that consciousness arrived during recorded history or at least sometime during the first millennium B.C. He also believes that the use of mirrors helped to develop that consciousness. He notes (page 320) that "The use of mirrors became widespread during the Renaissance" which he says is "characterized by the reappearance of consciousness." (Thus we have our Western bias.)
On the subject of the half-second delay in our conscious recognition of what is happening to us (discovered by Benjamin Libet): "If there were not half a second in which to synchronize the inputs, [from our senses] we might, as Libet puts it, experience a jitter in our perception of reality." (p 289)
In reference to the title metaphor, we find on page 291: "The user illusion, then, is the picture the user has of the machine" [ i.e., his body and brain] "...[I]t does not really matter whether this picture is accurate or complete, just as long as it is coherent and appropriate. It is better to have an incomplete, metaphorical picture of how the computer works than to have no picture at all."
On the 16-second bandwidth of consciousness: "The bandwidth of language is far lower than the bandwidth of sensation. Most of what we know about the world we can never tell each other."
Norretranders believes that our religions reflect our level of consciousness. There is, he writes, "a preconscious phase" characterized by polytheistic religions; a socially conscious phase, characterized by religions like Judaism; and a personally conscious phase, of which "Protestantism is a pure cultivation." (from page 317)
I don't necessary buy this (nor his time table of consciousness: I believe that cats and other animals have a rudimentary consciousness, and more so did the australopithecine); nonetheless the idea that Christianity is a religion of consciousness because it says we have sinned in our hearts while Judaism, for example, is only concerned with actions, is an interesting, if perhaps trivia, idea. Norretranders notes later on that, in this, Christianity may be out of bounds since the half second delay means that our consciousness has no control over what the Me or our nonconscious selves may be thinking. We can't blame the I for the impulses of the Me since the I only has a veto, as it were, and can't initiate actions or thoughts.
This is an interesting schemata that he is drawing up, and like that of Freud it is clearly metaphorical and linguistic and not descriptive. Nonetheless, I think it has value in helping us to understand how our systems work.
On pages 319 and 320 we have consciousness arising before Christ and then being lost for the middle ages and then recurring again with the birth of the renaissance. I would wonder what Norretranders thought was happening at the time in e.g., China and India? I think his (and Jaynes's) time table is too recent and much, much too fast. If consciousness is a cultural manifestation of our evolutionary abilities—an "emergent property"—then I would prefer a cultural/evolutionary development that began around 100,000 years ago.
In the chapter entitled "On the Edge of Chaos" Norretranders cites Doyne Farmer and Aletta d'A. Belin as saying that "Life is a pattern in space and time rather than a material object (after all, atoms keep getting replaced)..." This is profound.
Consciousness is restricting. It discards information from the environment and returns a distilled essence. We miss a lot because there is no evolutionary necessity that we be aware of what our Me experiences. The vast amount of information would only confuse us, or at least make us less efficient. So consciousness is the veil of illusion that yoga, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. talk about. The user illusion is maya.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
March 3, 2020
This is currently my favourite kind of book, and possibly exactly what I needed to read right now.
I usually say that the reason I prefer non-fiction over fiction is because there are so many recurring characters. ("It's like, they are all part of the same universe!" ^^) And this book brings together so many favourite people. I love it.
It also provides solid and clear as well as comprehensive explanations of ideas and discussions concerning Entropy, Information, Complexity, Communication, Consciousness and the Human Condition.
Much in line with my own interests and understandings of the world at the moment. Makes me really curious about what a more updated version of this book would have more to tell. I mean, it has been almost 30 years.
Also, the language and style is really... friendly? I like it :)
I usually say that the reason I prefer non-fiction over fiction is because there are so many recurring characters. ("It's like, they are all part of the same universe!" ^^) And this book brings together so many favourite people. I love it.
It also provides solid and clear as well as comprehensive explanations of ideas and discussions concerning Entropy, Information, Complexity, Communication, Consciousness and the Human Condition.
Much in line with my own interests and understandings of the world at the moment. Makes me really curious about what a more updated version of this book would have more to tell. I mean, it has been almost 30 years.
Also, the language and style is really... friendly? I like it :)
May 25, 2016
Fabulous book that cuts the primacy of our opinion of what we think. Turns out what we think is mostly a story we create depending on how aware we are of what we feel through the body. In fact the body is shown to be the REAL source of our intelligence. Dense, interesting and highly recommended read that could radically transform your life. If this book convinces you that your body and movements is the source of intelligence then another book called Move to Excel shows you how to cultivate body intelligence to think better.
June 28, 2010
The hard science version of Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink." The premise of the book is that our brains evolved to show us less, not more, information, much the same way our computer desktops spare us from all the code and computing going on under the hood ("User Illusion" is apparently a programming term for that sort of user interface.)
An absolutely mind-blowing book (no pun intended) and must-read for anyone interested in brain science and perception.
An absolutely mind-blowing book (no pun intended) and must-read for anyone interested in brain science and perception.
January 21, 2009
I read this years ago and thought it engrossing and fascinating. It was blurbed along the lines of "if you read a single book about consciousness, make it this one." The only thing making it 4 star and not 5 was that I recall during the final chapter(s), where Norretranders started talking about a topic I actually knew about, it made me question the reliability of what I had read before...
December 9, 2021
Notes on the book for myself:
First 4 chapters are a slog, Pictures and Diagrams are sometimes useless and often not well incorporated into the text
-Most energy is spent on discarding information, not storing it.
-Information increases in depth not with details contained but with details discarded/not mentioned (like a compresson of several newspaper articles to one or the associations linked to the word “horse“)
-We can only consciously take in a very limited amount of information, which is why it is so valuable to package it as information (a word becomes a single piece instead of a row of letters)
-Das was wir Bewusstsein nennen ist nur ein sehr kleiner gefilterter Teil, aller von uns wahrgenommenen Informationen. Dabei schafft es das Unterbewusstsein Dinge zu Filtern die gerade in diesem Moment wichtig sind (so sehen wir die Welt an anderen Tagen tatsächlich mit anderen Augen)
-Wenn wir denken, können wir nicht auf unser Bewusstsein zugreifen. Deswegen nutzen wir u.a. Fremdwörter wie ähm, wenn wir nachdenken.
-Sense->Simulate->Experience/Act
-Half second delay from “readiness potential“ to conscious experience
-if sensation shorter than 0.5 seconds then doesn't reach consciousness
-Question of free will: “Consciousness cannot initiate an action, but it can decide that it should not be carried out.“ (“Free will operates through selection, not design.“) [“We can control our actions but not our urges.“]
-“Awareness occurs half a second after skin stimulation. But it is experienced as if it occurs when the brain puts out an evoked response. A subjective relocation in time occurs...“
-“Stimulation of the sensory cortex on the other hand is not equipped with such a relocation in time. It is experienced when half a second has passed and half a second after it started.“
-“If subjects are asked to carry out an action in response to a stimulus, but the stimulus is masked, can they react nevertheless? The answer was yes. We can react to a stimulus we are not conscious of.“
-“This allows us to formulate a solution to the problem of free will: I possess free will, but it is not the I that possesses it. It is Me. [...] The I is the conscious player. The Me is the person in general.“
-“But there is a profound point here: Part of what gives us humans the greatest pleasure is doing things we don't need to control consciously the whole time...“
-“The problem is that I wants badly to control and decide everything. But it is the Me that carries out the performance as a tennis player or a music maker.“
-“Angst, nausea, alienation, dislocation, unheimlichkeit, all the uncomfiting experiences of existentialism can be interpreted as the I's lack of contact with the Me.“
-“Why do we not merely experience what we sense? Because we sense far too much, millions of bits a second.“
-“Therefore we can only talk about what matters when we do not talk but act [...] The I may say “I can ride a bike“ but it cannot. It is the Me that can. [...] “Those who know do not talk. Those who talk do not know.““
-“The explanation, Jayne thinks, is a general pattern in which a common faith is expressed through specially chosen individuals, who can, through rituals and trances, establish contact with powers (in themselves) with which other people are no longer in contact. The whole range of sorcerers, medicine men, oracles, witches, fortune tellers, and their modern successors express a longing for the contact the bicameral mind had with the gods.”
-There is nothing linear (as in “straight line”) in nature, everything is infinitely more complex and impossible for us to describe. “Yet there is a limit. Linear civilization is very boring to look at. It’s cities easily become sterile, empty settings, which do not supply the eye with any experiences or the mind with any relief. So we go on holiday, to places overgrown by nature, and enjoy chopping firewood and wielding the sickle. [...] Civilization is about removing information about our surroundings, discarding information about nature so our senses are not burdened…”
-”Granted, many people are already complaining that information society means far too much information. But the opposite is true: Where man is equipped to manage millions of bits per second in a meaningful way, he now processes only a few bits a second from the computer monitor. The sensuality of material processing has been stripped from the work process, and consciousness must make do with very few bits per second for nourishment. It is like fast food: There is almost nothing to digest, no bones and fiber to discard during and afterward.”
-“Complexity grows on the edge of chaos.“
-The User Illusion describes what the user of a computer is seeing vs what is actually going on in the machine. Before OS’s made it easy for anybody to use a computer, one had to know specific commands to make the machine do what one wanted. Now most users don’t know what’s actually happening inside the machine, they are just happy to use it for their needs. This is where the parallel to consciousness can be drawn. We all suffer from the user illusion. We have no idea of all the information our senses register and all the data being constantly processed. We just take the bits that seem useful and use them, thinking that’s all there is.
First 4 chapters are a slog, Pictures and Diagrams are sometimes useless and often not well incorporated into the text
-Most energy is spent on discarding information, not storing it.
-Information increases in depth not with details contained but with details discarded/not mentioned (like a compresson of several newspaper articles to one or the associations linked to the word “horse“)
-We can only consciously take in a very limited amount of information, which is why it is so valuable to package it as information (a word becomes a single piece instead of a row of letters)
-Das was wir Bewusstsein nennen ist nur ein sehr kleiner gefilterter Teil, aller von uns wahrgenommenen Informationen. Dabei schafft es das Unterbewusstsein Dinge zu Filtern die gerade in diesem Moment wichtig sind (so sehen wir die Welt an anderen Tagen tatsächlich mit anderen Augen)
-Wenn wir denken, können wir nicht auf unser Bewusstsein zugreifen. Deswegen nutzen wir u.a. Fremdwörter wie ähm, wenn wir nachdenken.
-Sense->Simulate->Experience/Act
-Half second delay from “readiness potential“ to conscious experience
-if sensation shorter than 0.5 seconds then doesn't reach consciousness
-Question of free will: “Consciousness cannot initiate an action, but it can decide that it should not be carried out.“ (“Free will operates through selection, not design.“) [“We can control our actions but not our urges.“]
-“Awareness occurs half a second after skin stimulation. But it is experienced as if it occurs when the brain puts out an evoked response. A subjective relocation in time occurs...“
-“Stimulation of the sensory cortex on the other hand is not equipped with such a relocation in time. It is experienced when half a second has passed and half a second after it started.“
-“If subjects are asked to carry out an action in response to a stimulus, but the stimulus is masked, can they react nevertheless? The answer was yes. We can react to a stimulus we are not conscious of.“
-“This allows us to formulate a solution to the problem of free will: I possess free will, but it is not the I that possesses it. It is Me. [...] The I is the conscious player. The Me is the person in general.“
-“But there is a profound point here: Part of what gives us humans the greatest pleasure is doing things we don't need to control consciously the whole time...“
-“The problem is that I wants badly to control and decide everything. But it is the Me that carries out the performance as a tennis player or a music maker.“
-“Angst, nausea, alienation, dislocation, unheimlichkeit, all the uncomfiting experiences of existentialism can be interpreted as the I's lack of contact with the Me.“
-“Why do we not merely experience what we sense? Because we sense far too much, millions of bits a second.“
-“Therefore we can only talk about what matters when we do not talk but act [...] The I may say “I can ride a bike“ but it cannot. It is the Me that can. [...] “Those who know do not talk. Those who talk do not know.““
-“The explanation, Jayne thinks, is a general pattern in which a common faith is expressed through specially chosen individuals, who can, through rituals and trances, establish contact with powers (in themselves) with which other people are no longer in contact. The whole range of sorcerers, medicine men, oracles, witches, fortune tellers, and their modern successors express a longing for the contact the bicameral mind had with the gods.”
-There is nothing linear (as in “straight line”) in nature, everything is infinitely more complex and impossible for us to describe. “Yet there is a limit. Linear civilization is very boring to look at. It’s cities easily become sterile, empty settings, which do not supply the eye with any experiences or the mind with any relief. So we go on holiday, to places overgrown by nature, and enjoy chopping firewood and wielding the sickle. [...] Civilization is about removing information about our surroundings, discarding information about nature so our senses are not burdened…”
-”Granted, many people are already complaining that information society means far too much information. But the opposite is true: Where man is equipped to manage millions of bits per second in a meaningful way, he now processes only a few bits a second from the computer monitor. The sensuality of material processing has been stripped from the work process, and consciousness must make do with very few bits per second for nourishment. It is like fast food: There is almost nothing to digest, no bones and fiber to discard during and afterward.”
-“Complexity grows on the edge of chaos.“
-The User Illusion describes what the user of a computer is seeing vs what is actually going on in the machine. Before OS’s made it easy for anybody to use a computer, one had to know specific commands to make the machine do what one wanted. Now most users don’t know what’s actually happening inside the machine, they are just happy to use it for their needs. This is where the parallel to consciousness can be drawn. We all suffer from the user illusion. We have no idea of all the information our senses register and all the data being constantly processed. We just take the bits that seem useful and use them, thinking that’s all there is.
Read
August 12, 2010Didn't read it through completely. It is interesting, but it didn't really grab me. I think it is the journalistic style, the style of an uninvolved observer, which makes it difficult to stay with the narrative for a long time. Maybe I will come back to it in the future.
Want to read
October 22, 2014I am certainly not a fan of Nørrestranders and his views on life but that doesn't mean I won't try to understand his thoughts.
June 23, 2023
Fascinating. The scope of the book is enormous. Norretranders doesn't even begin discussing consciousness until about halfway through (the first half is largely dedicated to the theory of information), and when he finally begins discussing it he regularly digresses into ethics, politics, economics, etc. While I appreciate the scope, I wish it was a bit more focused. Still, Norretranders discusses a number of interesting philosophical questions and problems that I have never thought about before.
The basic idea behind the book is that our consciousness actually plays a very limited role in what we do and who we are. We like to associate consciousness with "I," as if the essence of "I" is our consciousness. We tend to think of ourselves as consciously going out into the world, consciously evaluating situations, and then consciously acting on them. In reality, though, we are conscious of very little. Most of what we do is done instinctively. Norretranders calls this part of us the "me" (whereas the "I" represent the conscious self). The "me" is actually closer to our real selves, since it acts immediately to its surroundings without first going through a conscious process. Because the conscious process that the "I" goes through requires time (a half a second, according to Norretranders, which he backs up with a number of studies), our conscious experience of the world is actually delayed. You think you are experiencing the "now," but any time you are conscious you are actually experiencing the past. Moreover, what you are experiencing according to Norretranders is not the "real" world but an illusion. This is because in order to process the vast amount of information that we are confronted with at any moment, our brains must "choose" what is most relevant and discard the rest. This discarded information is called "exformation." Our consciousness only deals with information, but most of what we do and think and say is not based on information but exformation--data that the "me" takes in but which the "I" never consciously registers.
Norretranders argues that exformation is far more valuable to us than information and says that education, among other things, wrongly values information over exformation. And the problem with information is that the thing "choosing" what to focus on and what to discard cannot be our consciousness but must be something else, for if it were our consciousness then we would have to be conscious of all of the information that is discarded--but we are not. We are only conscious of the tiny bit that is presented to our consciousness. But if the consciousness is not the thing doing this sifting, then it raises the question: how can we be sure that our consciousness is not being duped by what it is told is the most relevant information to focus on? This is the "user illusion." We think "we" are the ones sifting all of the information presented to us, but this cannot be the case if "we" means conscious selves. This leads to two possibilities: either we have no free will, or what we think of as "ourselves" must be more than consciousness and even more than "will." And if it is the latter, it raises many ethical questions, among others. For example, should a person be held accountable for an action he committed which he did not perform consciously? We tend to answer no because we associate a person's real "self" to his "conscious" self, and if he did something unconsciously, then "he" was not really the one doing it. Norretranders will make you question this assumption.
I disagree with a number of Norretranders's assumptions and conclusions. One of the more outlandish claims he makes is that man has only been conscious for the last 2500 years or so and that before that, he had no sense of "self." There were no "I"s but only "me"s acting strictly on the basis of intuition and exformation (Norretranders seems to suggest that this is preferable). It was those pesky Greek philosophers who introduced the idea of consciousness and tried to persuade us that we are essentially conscious creatures. This idea was further developed by Christian philosophers, who tried to convince us that our conscious selves had control over everything we say and do.
Even though I disagree with much in this book, I found it intellectually stimulating. It made me not only want to study consciousness more but also information theory. I also think Norretranders is essentially right that we are more than our consciousnesses and even that exformation is in many ways more formative than information. But I think the ancients recognized this as well, which is why they cared so much about things like rituals, rites, habits, etiquette, and so forth, which act on us in subtle but powerful ways and which we generally engage with unconsciously.
The basic idea behind the book is that our consciousness actually plays a very limited role in what we do and who we are. We like to associate consciousness with "I," as if the essence of "I" is our consciousness. We tend to think of ourselves as consciously going out into the world, consciously evaluating situations, and then consciously acting on them. In reality, though, we are conscious of very little. Most of what we do is done instinctively. Norretranders calls this part of us the "me" (whereas the "I" represent the conscious self). The "me" is actually closer to our real selves, since it acts immediately to its surroundings without first going through a conscious process. Because the conscious process that the "I" goes through requires time (a half a second, according to Norretranders, which he backs up with a number of studies), our conscious experience of the world is actually delayed. You think you are experiencing the "now," but any time you are conscious you are actually experiencing the past. Moreover, what you are experiencing according to Norretranders is not the "real" world but an illusion. This is because in order to process the vast amount of information that we are confronted with at any moment, our brains must "choose" what is most relevant and discard the rest. This discarded information is called "exformation." Our consciousness only deals with information, but most of what we do and think and say is not based on information but exformation--data that the "me" takes in but which the "I" never consciously registers.
Norretranders argues that exformation is far more valuable to us than information and says that education, among other things, wrongly values information over exformation. And the problem with information is that the thing "choosing" what to focus on and what to discard cannot be our consciousness but must be something else, for if it were our consciousness then we would have to be conscious of all of the information that is discarded--but we are not. We are only conscious of the tiny bit that is presented to our consciousness. But if the consciousness is not the thing doing this sifting, then it raises the question: how can we be sure that our consciousness is not being duped by what it is told is the most relevant information to focus on? This is the "user illusion." We think "we" are the ones sifting all of the information presented to us, but this cannot be the case if "we" means conscious selves. This leads to two possibilities: either we have no free will, or what we think of as "ourselves" must be more than consciousness and even more than "will." And if it is the latter, it raises many ethical questions, among others. For example, should a person be held accountable for an action he committed which he did not perform consciously? We tend to answer no because we associate a person's real "self" to his "conscious" self, and if he did something unconsciously, then "he" was not really the one doing it. Norretranders will make you question this assumption.
I disagree with a number of Norretranders's assumptions and conclusions. One of the more outlandish claims he makes is that man has only been conscious for the last 2500 years or so and that before that, he had no sense of "self." There were no "I"s but only "me"s acting strictly on the basis of intuition and exformation (Norretranders seems to suggest that this is preferable). It was those pesky Greek philosophers who introduced the idea of consciousness and tried to persuade us that we are essentially conscious creatures. This idea was further developed by Christian philosophers, who tried to convince us that our conscious selves had control over everything we say and do.
Even though I disagree with much in this book, I found it intellectually stimulating. It made me not only want to study consciousness more but also information theory. I also think Norretranders is essentially right that we are more than our consciousnesses and even that exformation is in many ways more formative than information. But I think the ancients recognized this as well, which is why they cared so much about things like rituals, rites, habits, etiquette, and so forth, which act on us in subtle but powerful ways and which we generally engage with unconsciously.
July 18, 2023
I admit that I more or less skimmed through it. But I thought about this book aplenty.
It's been recommended by Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau, and the basic thesis is extremely stimulating: modern man has assumed that he is simply his consciousness.
The problem, asserts Nørretranders, is that man is more than his consciousness.
Nørretranders doesn't write so much as dance. I skimmed the book for a definition of consciouness, but as near as I can tell, for Nørretranders, the consciousness is the part of human beings that receives a small amount of information and perhaps vetoes whether to receive some of it or to resist it in some way.
Nørretranders makes the compelling point that something in human beings must be getting rid of tons of tons of information. For instance, our senses provide so much information to the body that something has to be filtering out all the other stuff--and it can't be the consciousness since it is not really dealing with that much information.
In a fascinating bit of the book, he discusses Benjamin Libet who asserts that whereas Judaism is concerned purely with actions, Christianity sent us on the hopeless road of taming the unconscious-that by definition which is not controlled by the real me.
Nørretranders's thesis is that to reduce one's self to the consciousness is absolutely futile. In a move that has obvious Freudian/Jungian parallels, he says that the most important thing we can do is accept that the unconscious is part of me, just as the conscious is.
While Nørretranders might use this to move away from personal responsibility, it is striking that he does not: "The problem for the individual is therefore that the Me acts, while the I is accountable to society. The I has to take responsibility for things it is not fully in charge of. The law prescribes that hte individual must learn the important lesson I take the responsibility for myMe.
This is powerful and, I think, thoroughly biblical given Romans 7.
At the same time, I still agree with Doug Wilson's post here that sin demands some sort of conscious action: https://dougwils.com/books-and-cultur...
I think the most healthy way to look at this is to see the parts of us which seem to burst on us in the moment (i.e., anger or lust), should be accepted as part of ourselves which are unclean or defiled or polluted (think Leviticus here), and should be dealt with long-term, via habits, repeated choices, and asking God for help. Also, what does Paul mean by the flesh in his writings? Maybe we need to do more thought on what those pesky "passions of the body and the mind" are.
There are a lot of cool experiments in this book. It's a rich book, but sometimes frustrating because he dances more than he asserts propositions. I can't actually find a definition of consciousness, which gives the book more plausible deniability than perhaps we have a right to.
But still, the book got me intrigued about anthropology in a way that makes you want to rethink everything over a beer. It's all another way of saying that human beings are myseries even to themselves.
It's been recommended by Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau, and the basic thesis is extremely stimulating: modern man has assumed that he is simply his consciousness.
The problem, asserts Nørretranders, is that man is more than his consciousness.
Nørretranders doesn't write so much as dance. I skimmed the book for a definition of consciouness, but as near as I can tell, for Nørretranders, the consciousness is the part of human beings that receives a small amount of information and perhaps vetoes whether to receive some of it or to resist it in some way.
Nørretranders makes the compelling point that something in human beings must be getting rid of tons of tons of information. For instance, our senses provide so much information to the body that something has to be filtering out all the other stuff--and it can't be the consciousness since it is not really dealing with that much information.
In a fascinating bit of the book, he discusses Benjamin Libet who asserts that whereas Judaism is concerned purely with actions, Christianity sent us on the hopeless road of taming the unconscious-that by definition which is not controlled by the real me.
Nørretranders's thesis is that to reduce one's self to the consciousness is absolutely futile. In a move that has obvious Freudian/Jungian parallels, he says that the most important thing we can do is accept that the unconscious is part of me, just as the conscious is.
While Nørretranders might use this to move away from personal responsibility, it is striking that he does not: "The problem for the individual is therefore that the Me acts, while the I is accountable to society. The I has to take responsibility for things it is not fully in charge of. The law prescribes that hte individual must learn the important lesson I take the responsibility for myMe.
This is powerful and, I think, thoroughly biblical given Romans 7.
At the same time, I still agree with Doug Wilson's post here that sin demands some sort of conscious action: https://dougwils.com/books-and-cultur...
I think the most healthy way to look at this is to see the parts of us which seem to burst on us in the moment (i.e., anger or lust), should be accepted as part of ourselves which are unclean or defiled or polluted (think Leviticus here), and should be dealt with long-term, via habits, repeated choices, and asking God for help. Also, what does Paul mean by the flesh in his writings? Maybe we need to do more thought on what those pesky "passions of the body and the mind" are.
There are a lot of cool experiments in this book. It's a rich book, but sometimes frustrating because he dances more than he asserts propositions. I can't actually find a definition of consciousness, which gives the book more plausible deniability than perhaps we have a right to.
But still, the book got me intrigued about anthropology in a way that makes you want to rethink everything over a beer. It's all another way of saying that human beings are myseries even to themselves.
December 7, 2014
A spectacular book that has completely changed my understanding of the mind and consciousness. I poured through this 400+ pages in just a few days - I couldn't set it down.
The critical arguments in this book are:
1. Research shows that your unconscious processes a huge amount of sensory information; your conscious, on the other hand, processes only a tiny fraction of it (roughly 1 millionth).
2. This implies that the unconscious is responsible for an enormous percentage of your thinking: it decides what data to pay attention to and what to discard. A large part of our life experience - what we enjoy, how we learn, etc - is completely unconscious (e.g. body language, enjoyment of music, sports).
3. In fact, the unconscious may even decide what actions you will take: numerous studies show that actions that feel intentional are actually triggered before you are consciously aware of having made the decision to act. This is hard to believe, right? However, the studies have been replicated many times. The implication is that the unconscious not only feeds a highly filtered view of the world to your conscious - it also feeds actions and decisions to it. The conscious can veto the decisions, but not initiate them!
4. There is also ample evidence that the conscious is not fed a filtered list of raw data, but rather, a simulation of the real world. That is, the unconscious receives tons of raw data, figures out what to keep or discard, produces a simulation, and feeds the simulation (but not the process of how it was created!) to your conscious.
5. Think over what it means for your conscious to be exposed to a simulation rather than raw data. This has deep ties to optical illusions, humor, sleeping, perception, learning, and more.
6. The user illusion is our belief that this simulation *IS* life. But it is merely our internal model of it: useful and coherent, but definitely not accurate.
I can't recommend this book enough.
And now, a huge list of quotes from the book. I had to force myself to not stop every 5 paragraphs and write these down, as the book is full of insight that changes how you think.
"A mess is hard to describe. Especially in detail."
"There may be an enormous amount of work or thought behind a given message or product. Yet it may be invisible. Making things look easy is hard."
"The least interesting aspect of good conversation is what is actually said. What is more interesting is all the deliberations and emotions that take place simultaneously during conversation in the heads and bodies of the conversers."
"The main thing in music is not the sound waves. It is that the composer/player converts a number of mental states into a pattern which evokes the same (or different) mental states in the listener."
"The bandwidth of consciousness is far lower than the bandwidth of our sensor preceptors."
"Only one millionth of what our eyes see, our ears hear, and our other senses inform us about appears in our consciousness."
"Fairy tales are not meant for children, you see. If they were, they would not work. For the true power of the fairy tale comes because children and grown-ups can together experience the wonder of the narrative."
"Stories read aloud are a matter not of words but what words do to people. Live concerts are not about music but about what the music does to people. Football matches watched at the stadium are not about football but what football does to people."
"Albert Einstein, who wrote 'The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thoughts.'"
"The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest."
"Pablo Picasso was once asked in a train compartment by a fellow passenger why he did not paint people 'the way they really are.' Picasso asked what the man meant by the expression. The man pulled a snapshot of his wife out of his wallet and said, 'That's my wife.' Picasso responded, "Isn't she rather small and flat?'"
"Our experience of reality is in a sense an experience of our simulation of what goes on out there."
"The desire to carry out an action becomes a conscious sensation long after the brain has started initiating it."
"In other words, the conscious experience is projected back in time in exactly the same way as a stimulation of the sensory cortex is projected onto the body."
"Consciousness cannot initiate an action, but it can decide that it should be carried out."
"Our consciousness lags behind because it has to present to us a picture of the surrounding world that is relevant. But it is precisely a picture of the surrounding world it presents us with, not a picture of the superb work the brain does."
"As British biologist Richard Dawkins puts it, 'Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself.'"
"Alan Kay writes: 'The user experience was once the last part of a system to be designed. Now it is the first. It is recognized as being primary because, to novices and professionals alike, what is presented to one's senses is one's computer. The 'user illusion' as my colleagues and I called it at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, is the simplified myth everyone builds to explain (and make guesses about) the system's actions and what should be done next.'"
"The user illusion, then, is the picture the user has of the machine. Kay and his colleagues realized that it does not really matter whether this picture is accurate or complete, just as long as it is coherent and appropriate."
"People do not merely see. We simulate; make models so that we can compare."
"When we dream, we may well be carrying out a simulation: We visualize something and understand (often weird) connections in it."
"Science is a collective project aimed at knowing the world in a way we can tell each other about. Knowledge becomes scientific knowledge only after it is told in a way that allows other people to reproduce that knowledge. In an unambiguous way."
"The bandwidth of language is far lower than the bandwidth of sensation. Most of what we know about the world we can never tell each other."
"Everything is connected, so we cannot comprehend anything exhaustively at all unless we comprehend everything exhaustively. But this raises the problem that such a totally exhaustive description necessarily contains just as much information as what it describes; a complete description of the world takes up just as much room as the world itself. [...] The only map that displays every detail of the terrain is the terrain itself."
"In other words, we have to know everything a person has learned, and undergo all the experiences a person has undergone, before we have enough information to compute what that person will do. Everywhere that person has been, we must have been; everywhere that person has acted, we must have acted. But in that case we must necessarily be that person ourselves."
"Hofstadter's point is that even a fully defined and determined system of simple rules can display such complex behavior that it is meaningful to describe it in terms of decisions and will, quite irrespective of the fact that the laws affecting the simple level govern completely. A completely implemented version of a set of simple rules can display properties we cannot find in the rules themselves; the reason we cannot find the properties in the rules is a general condition of the world that is described in Godel's theorem and Chatin's extension of it."
The critical arguments in this book are:
1. Research shows that your unconscious processes a huge amount of sensory information; your conscious, on the other hand, processes only a tiny fraction of it (roughly 1 millionth).
2. This implies that the unconscious is responsible for an enormous percentage of your thinking: it decides what data to pay attention to and what to discard. A large part of our life experience - what we enjoy, how we learn, etc - is completely unconscious (e.g. body language, enjoyment of music, sports).
3. In fact, the unconscious may even decide what actions you will take: numerous studies show that actions that feel intentional are actually triggered before you are consciously aware of having made the decision to act. This is hard to believe, right? However, the studies have been replicated many times. The implication is that the unconscious not only feeds a highly filtered view of the world to your conscious - it also feeds actions and decisions to it. The conscious can veto the decisions, but not initiate them!
4. There is also ample evidence that the conscious is not fed a filtered list of raw data, but rather, a simulation of the real world. That is, the unconscious receives tons of raw data, figures out what to keep or discard, produces a simulation, and feeds the simulation (but not the process of how it was created!) to your conscious.
5. Think over what it means for your conscious to be exposed to a simulation rather than raw data. This has deep ties to optical illusions, humor, sleeping, perception, learning, and more.
6. The user illusion is our belief that this simulation *IS* life. But it is merely our internal model of it: useful and coherent, but definitely not accurate.
I can't recommend this book enough.
And now, a huge list of quotes from the book. I had to force myself to not stop every 5 paragraphs and write these down, as the book is full of insight that changes how you think.
"A mess is hard to describe. Especially in detail."
"There may be an enormous amount of work or thought behind a given message or product. Yet it may be invisible. Making things look easy is hard."
"The least interesting aspect of good conversation is what is actually said. What is more interesting is all the deliberations and emotions that take place simultaneously during conversation in the heads and bodies of the conversers."
"The main thing in music is not the sound waves. It is that the composer/player converts a number of mental states into a pattern which evokes the same (or different) mental states in the listener."
"The bandwidth of consciousness is far lower than the bandwidth of our sensor preceptors."
"Only one millionth of what our eyes see, our ears hear, and our other senses inform us about appears in our consciousness."
"Fairy tales are not meant for children, you see. If they were, they would not work. For the true power of the fairy tale comes because children and grown-ups can together experience the wonder of the narrative."
"Stories read aloud are a matter not of words but what words do to people. Live concerts are not about music but about what the music does to people. Football matches watched at the stadium are not about football but what football does to people."
"Albert Einstein, who wrote 'The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thoughts.'"
"The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest."
"Pablo Picasso was once asked in a train compartment by a fellow passenger why he did not paint people 'the way they really are.' Picasso asked what the man meant by the expression. The man pulled a snapshot of his wife out of his wallet and said, 'That's my wife.' Picasso responded, "Isn't she rather small and flat?'"
"Our experience of reality is in a sense an experience of our simulation of what goes on out there."
"The desire to carry out an action becomes a conscious sensation long after the brain has started initiating it."
"In other words, the conscious experience is projected back in time in exactly the same way as a stimulation of the sensory cortex is projected onto the body."
"Consciousness cannot initiate an action, but it can decide that it should be carried out."
"Our consciousness lags behind because it has to present to us a picture of the surrounding world that is relevant. But it is precisely a picture of the surrounding world it presents us with, not a picture of the superb work the brain does."
"As British biologist Richard Dawkins puts it, 'Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself.'"
"Alan Kay writes: 'The user experience was once the last part of a system to be designed. Now it is the first. It is recognized as being primary because, to novices and professionals alike, what is presented to one's senses is one's computer. The 'user illusion' as my colleagues and I called it at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, is the simplified myth everyone builds to explain (and make guesses about) the system's actions and what should be done next.'"
"The user illusion, then, is the picture the user has of the machine. Kay and his colleagues realized that it does not really matter whether this picture is accurate or complete, just as long as it is coherent and appropriate."
"People do not merely see. We simulate; make models so that we can compare."
"When we dream, we may well be carrying out a simulation: We visualize something and understand (often weird) connections in it."
"Science is a collective project aimed at knowing the world in a way we can tell each other about. Knowledge becomes scientific knowledge only after it is told in a way that allows other people to reproduce that knowledge. In an unambiguous way."
"The bandwidth of language is far lower than the bandwidth of sensation. Most of what we know about the world we can never tell each other."
"Everything is connected, so we cannot comprehend anything exhaustively at all unless we comprehend everything exhaustively. But this raises the problem that such a totally exhaustive description necessarily contains just as much information as what it describes; a complete description of the world takes up just as much room as the world itself. [...] The only map that displays every detail of the terrain is the terrain itself."
"In other words, we have to know everything a person has learned, and undergo all the experiences a person has undergone, before we have enough information to compute what that person will do. Everywhere that person has been, we must have been; everywhere that person has acted, we must have acted. But in that case we must necessarily be that person ourselves."
"Hofstadter's point is that even a fully defined and determined system of simple rules can display such complex behavior that it is meaningful to describe it in terms of decisions and will, quite irrespective of the fact that the laws affecting the simple level govern completely. A completely implemented version of a set of simple rules can display properties we cannot find in the rules themselves; the reason we cannot find the properties in the rules is a general condition of the world that is described in Godel's theorem and Chatin's extension of it."
January 30, 2022
At times it felt like one of those books that is hard to read, slowly progressing through it. Time passed by and barely any progress.
But for sure an interesting material. It tries to connect knowledge from physics (thermodynamics and entropy) , to information science and transmission and biology.
It will definitely leave you with some question, it will leave its mark on how little we know and how much goes by next to us and we are completely oblivious to it. If our sensors receive almost 11 million bits of information every second , and our consciousness can barely process 16-40 of them, one could only imagine how different the world looks to each one of us, and how much of our perception is just a simulation made by our brains.
Lots of interesting stories or concept. I will definitely remember the one about the shortest conversation in history, between Victor Hugo and his editor. The mail exchange between them was only 2 characters long, but both of them managed to get the full meaning of it.
But for sure an interesting material. It tries to connect knowledge from physics (thermodynamics and entropy) , to information science and transmission and biology.
It will definitely leave you with some question, it will leave its mark on how little we know and how much goes by next to us and we are completely oblivious to it. If our sensors receive almost 11 million bits of information every second , and our consciousness can barely process 16-40 of them, one could only imagine how different the world looks to each one of us, and how much of our perception is just a simulation made by our brains.
Lots of interesting stories or concept. I will definitely remember the one about the shortest conversation in history, between Victor Hugo and his editor. The mail exchange between them was only 2 characters long, but both of them managed to get the full meaning of it.
February 2, 2022
This book is an essential summary of western scientific thought about the most important aspect of design: the illusion of a subject we design for. It is deep, revealing, interconnected. One of the most satisfying reads… I could not finish it in one go, I came back many many times to read and re-read and integrate. At some point, this book helped nudged me towards essential personal discoveries.
I recommend it to anyone who designs for people. Also, if you do read it, please let me know if you find a contemporary book of similar breadth and depth on the same subject. I wonder what next on this subject and would love to read another summary like this if it did emerge in the last two decades.
Thank you.
I recommend it to anyone who designs for people. Also, if you do read it, please let me know if you find a contemporary book of similar breadth and depth on the same subject. I wonder what next on this subject and would love to read another summary like this if it did emerge in the last two decades.
Thank you.
November 30, 2018
This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read and I don’t really think it’s close.
It is the most inter-disciplinary yet cohesive book I’ve ever encountered. It is, however, dense at times (especially in the beginning) so if you struggle reading non-fiction in general or don’t have at least some science background it can be a difficult read but it is so worth it. In spite of the heavy science (I can’t be more specific than ‘science’ because it covers too many individual fields to try and number them) subject matter, many times it reads closer to prose than nonfiction.
It is the most inter-disciplinary yet cohesive book I’ve ever encountered. It is, however, dense at times (especially in the beginning) so if you struggle reading non-fiction in general or don’t have at least some science background it can be a difficult read but it is so worth it. In spite of the heavy science (I can’t be more specific than ‘science’ because it covers too many individual fields to try and number them) subject matter, many times it reads closer to prose than nonfiction.
December 28, 2018
The best book! Not an easy read though, but nicely written science. For those who want to learn about conscious mind, read pure scientific view of it’s power, limitations, history and the planet itself. Often this type of books draws rather paranoid view on this topic or lack of fair arguments. But this one is not only rich of facts, but also delivers the message of how human is connected to the planet and how conscious mind is deriving the world. I am not the one who reads same book again, but “The User Illusion” is worth to be read multiple times.
April 16, 2022
Jeg synes den kunne have startet et lidt andet sted; når en bog starter i den tunge ende og ikke formår at give særlig meget mening, mister man som læser hurtigt læselysten. Forfatteren formår dog at komme langt omkring i videnskabshistorien, fysik, interessante teorier, psykologi, hjernevidenskab og meget mere.
Der er en fin balance mellem egne tanker og facts, og bogen gav mig en ny måde at tænke og opleve verden på.
Der er en fin balance mellem egne tanker og facts, og bogen gav mig en ny måde at tænke og opleve verden på.
October 3, 2013
Are you more than your Consciousness?
Is human a conscious, rational being? Can we explain everything that happens to us or around us? Are all our (re)actions, decisions, choices in life done consciously? One would be taken aback if I were ( sorry if the author and the science) were to tell you that consciousness plays hardly any role in our lives.
" To be aware of an experience means that it has passed"
How do you explain dreams? Am sure all of us would have at least one dream that came true. Not day dreams, but dreams - things that we saw, felt or perceived when we were asleep - unconscious. How do you explain that? How about De Ja Vu? What about the first impressions that we frame of people? Without knowing a thing about a person, what is it that tells us about the person that lets you perceive and frame an impression? When we see a thing or place, how much of it is from our memory or from first hand perception?
"The least interesting aspect of good conversation is what is actually said. What is more interesting is all the deliberations and emotions that take place simultaneously"
Why are we so good are doing automated, repeated tasks, say driving/ cycling? Are we consciously driving all the time? All these automated tasks are best done when we are unaware/ unconscious. The moment we become conscious, we in fact falter( that is what happens when we are under pressure ). Say if you were to consciously speak in a foreign language that you recently learnt, you would fumble.
"The words are merely references to something not present"
Sleepwalking, Blindsight, Love at first Sight, and many more things are really not results of consciousness. All these happen without your conscious. You are conscious of only the problem and the solution, but the process of arriving at solution is not through conscious. That is consciousness is only an implementer, there is something else, a silent, hidden observer that really is taking decisions.
In effect consciousness is discarded/ filtered information, that is important to you. But the filtering is not done by consciousness. If things were so simple, Artificial Intelligence could have handed over mental activities from human to machines. No machine is as intelligent as a man is. All they are good at is "Computation".
"It is not what we say to each other every day that establishes all the meaning and beauty and truth, it is everything we think before we speak"
Well that is a load of information or processed discarded information? Too many questions. I happened to stumble upon this book through Quora. I was following a post on a lazy day and many mentioned how insightful this book "The User Illusion" by Tor Norretrandes is. And happened to get hands on this book in a completely unexpected way. This books is very intriguing, though at times it gets into too much theory, science and even history. The book is divided into four parts - Computation, Communication, Consciousness and Composure. First two chapters are tough to get through. Many a times it was too much for me to read or process all that data. The author tries to explain about consciousness from different scientific fields - Thermodynamics, Information Theory, Psychology, Chaos Theory etc. This is where he walks us through the history of science and how that the theory of consciousness was born way back during 1850’s as Maxwell’s Demon.
"Is talking the smallest part of conversation?"
Third chapter is the real gist of this book. He explains about Consciousness, the half-a-second delay, how much time the consciousness lags behind. Our reactions, decisions are lot quicker but till we are aware of them we cannot act. There is a hell lot of information that gets into the brain through different senses (over 11 millions of bits of information every second), eye, skin, ear, nose, and mouth whereas our consciousness can only process 40 bits per second. Hence the brain processes all these information filters most of it, and gives us(consciousness) only what is important to us. And the process of this ex-formation( filtering information) happens unconsciously. Most of our what we experience, and most of what we do is unconscious. Isn’t that surprising?
“Civilization is about removing information about our surroundings; discarding information about nature so our senses are not burdened with all that information and our consciousness can concentrate on other matters.”
Last chapter is about how we perceive world and what it really is. As humans we tend to seek predictability. We want to have a theory to everything, reason out and if possible find a formula which can be applied to give expected results. But this is not true. Consciousness is gating the tremendous possibilities. Consciousness is everything put in order, Subconscious is chaos. Can we manage Chaos? Is a human being more than what he thinks he is, is he more than what is his consciousness? Is consciousness an evolution to cope up with the complex world?
"A thing not structured and organized contains more information, because it is more difficult to describe"
"You sense far more than you are conscious of. Whether you want to or not"
Is human a conscious, rational being? Can we explain everything that happens to us or around us? Are all our (re)actions, decisions, choices in life done consciously? One would be taken aback if I were ( sorry if the author and the science) were to tell you that consciousness plays hardly any role in our lives.
" To be aware of an experience means that it has passed"
How do you explain dreams? Am sure all of us would have at least one dream that came true. Not day dreams, but dreams - things that we saw, felt or perceived when we were asleep - unconscious. How do you explain that? How about De Ja Vu? What about the first impressions that we frame of people? Without knowing a thing about a person, what is it that tells us about the person that lets you perceive and frame an impression? When we see a thing or place, how much of it is from our memory or from first hand perception?
"The least interesting aspect of good conversation is what is actually said. What is more interesting is all the deliberations and emotions that take place simultaneously"
Why are we so good are doing automated, repeated tasks, say driving/ cycling? Are we consciously driving all the time? All these automated tasks are best done when we are unaware/ unconscious. The moment we become conscious, we in fact falter( that is what happens when we are under pressure ). Say if you were to consciously speak in a foreign language that you recently learnt, you would fumble.
"The words are merely references to something not present"
Sleepwalking, Blindsight, Love at first Sight, and many more things are really not results of consciousness. All these happen without your conscious. You are conscious of only the problem and the solution, but the process of arriving at solution is not through conscious. That is consciousness is only an implementer, there is something else, a silent, hidden observer that really is taking decisions.
In effect consciousness is discarded/ filtered information, that is important to you. But the filtering is not done by consciousness. If things were so simple, Artificial Intelligence could have handed over mental activities from human to machines. No machine is as intelligent as a man is. All they are good at is "Computation".
"It is not what we say to each other every day that establishes all the meaning and beauty and truth, it is everything we think before we speak"
Well that is a load of information or processed discarded information? Too many questions. I happened to stumble upon this book through Quora. I was following a post on a lazy day and many mentioned how insightful this book "The User Illusion" by Tor Norretrandes is. And happened to get hands on this book in a completely unexpected way. This books is very intriguing, though at times it gets into too much theory, science and even history. The book is divided into four parts - Computation, Communication, Consciousness and Composure. First two chapters are tough to get through. Many a times it was too much for me to read or process all that data. The author tries to explain about consciousness from different scientific fields - Thermodynamics, Information Theory, Psychology, Chaos Theory etc. This is where he walks us through the history of science and how that the theory of consciousness was born way back during 1850’s as Maxwell’s Demon.
"Is talking the smallest part of conversation?"
Third chapter is the real gist of this book. He explains about Consciousness, the half-a-second delay, how much time the consciousness lags behind. Our reactions, decisions are lot quicker but till we are aware of them we cannot act. There is a hell lot of information that gets into the brain through different senses (over 11 millions of bits of information every second), eye, skin, ear, nose, and mouth whereas our consciousness can only process 40 bits per second. Hence the brain processes all these information filters most of it, and gives us(consciousness) only what is important to us. And the process of this ex-formation( filtering information) happens unconsciously. Most of our what we experience, and most of what we do is unconscious. Isn’t that surprising?
“Civilization is about removing information about our surroundings; discarding information about nature so our senses are not burdened with all that information and our consciousness can concentrate on other matters.”
Last chapter is about how we perceive world and what it really is. As humans we tend to seek predictability. We want to have a theory to everything, reason out and if possible find a formula which can be applied to give expected results. But this is not true. Consciousness is gating the tremendous possibilities. Consciousness is everything put in order, Subconscious is chaos. Can we manage Chaos? Is a human being more than what he thinks he is, is he more than what is his consciousness? Is consciousness an evolution to cope up with the complex world?
"A thing not structured and organized contains more information, because it is more difficult to describe"
"You sense far more than you are conscious of. Whether you want to or not"
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