Selim Sivad 2008-06-03

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

This book is very good insofar as it compiles some of the more interesting research from several different fields and neatly summarizes it for the lay reader. However, as an actual book, it falls a bit short of the author's goals and seems a bit aimless. Although he makes a very specific argument (Consciousness is an illusory phenomenon which appeared only a short while ago and can at times get in the way of our happiness and functionality as artists, athletes, drivers, etc.), Norretranders does a poor job of relating all his individual points to the greater argument as he makes them, resulting in a book that produces a reaction closer to "oh, that's interesting" than "wow, he just made a really good point." His writing style is also a bit jumpy and disjointed, although this doesn't necessarily get in the way of reading.

Despite these problems, I have to say that I enjoyed reading this book. It certainly gave me a new perspective on how we think that I was lacking due to not reading very much about experimental psychology. For all you philosophy nerds out there, you could more or less classify Norretranders as a materialist. Yes, he says a lot about tapping into the powers of our unconscious, trying to get free of our egos, saving this fragile planet, and other things in the vein of most New Agers, but there's no metaphysical "astral plane" or "merging with the clear light" which will reward us for doing so. In fact, based on his characterization of the divine as the part of us that is not conscious, one could say that unity with oneself is really the moral/intellectual goal to be gotten out of this book... if that's what you're looking for. I personally don't recommend that approach, though. Given the depth of his summaries and the diversity of the material covered, I'd suggest just taking in all the great ideas here (most of which are not Norretranders') and enjoying the ride.

Robert T. OKEEFFE 2008-01-08

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

Tor Norretranders' "The User Illusion - Cutting Consciousness down to Size" is a work of science-journalism that departs from the object of its reporting and spills over into philosophy and advocacy. It is a book of highly variable quality. Its focus on certain neurophysiological experiments/phenomena, especially those that relate to subliminal perception, is willfully selective, but still informative. Norretranders has come across some interesting experimental results (these are from the neuroscience of the period 1950-1990) that should stimulate a great deal of discussion about their broader implications (and they are results that should be addressed by any attempt to explain or thoroughly describe consciousness in terms of brain activity). Ideas taken from information theory are correlated with the functioning of the brain and its relationship to the whole organism in which it resides and the outside world to which it responds. He also relates both of these phenomena to the laws of thermodynamics and their disturbing implications for the universe (increasing entropy through heat death) and quizzical problems arising from them that have troubled physicists for some time (e.g., difficulties in theoretically eradicating "Maxwell's demon" and therefore the possibility of "cost-free energy", i.e., perpetual motion engines). The interesting information-theory relationship which he dwells upon is the great disparity between the large number of information bits we are always taking in - approximately eleven million bits per second when we calculate the amount handled by our human sensory apparatus - with the amount of information we can consciously process - about 16 bits per second, with an upper limit of perhaps 50 bits/second. This is the "bandwidth discrepancy" which results in the organismic "Me vs. I" discrepancy discussed below (and which, I must opine, Norretranders beats to death through repetition and over-interpretation). The millions of "missing bits" constitute "exformation", i.e., discarded information which still leaves important traces within our organism, to which we have access through unknown, unspecified, yet natural means. In his reading, exformation is organismic knowledge of the world - even wisdom -- which bubbles up to consciousness or which, subconsciously, guides the actions of the organism. They used to call this "instinct"; behavioral philosophies or ideologies built upon this foundation have a deservedly bad odor, which is perhaps why he avoids that particular nomenclature.

The particular neuroscience finding upon which he attempts to build a world-view (an epistemology, a phenomenology, and a set of ethics apposite to these) is that there is an approximate one-half second lag between "readiness potentials" (a specific, well-defined electrophysiolgical activity) that always precede conscious decisions and one's awareness of making the conscious decision (one interpretation of this is that non-willed aspects of brain activity always anticipate voluntary actions in some weird way, thus indicating that these actions are not fully voluntary in the way in which we believe them to be; the only salve for free-will is that we retain a consciously-controlled veto function over our "conscious" decisions to act, which we can implement in the last two-tenths of a second before beginning the action after it was intended to begin). This is the half-second which he feels is necessary for our nervous system to create the simulated reality which temporarily unifies all of the incoming stimuli and their associations based on our previous organism-environment history; the synthesized unified perception of which we become aware is consciousness itself. (The half-second is a much longer time, say, than one's reaction time to certain stimuli - hot stoves, pin-pricks, loud noises, etc.; many such reactions are automatic and therefore non-conscious or sub-conscious.) And it leads to the conclusion that the stream of consciousness is always about one-half second behind the outer reality which feeds it and to which it refers and on which it acts. Norretranders is very exercised by the fact that we are not conscious of this time gap in the organism-environment relationship which we call reality. He calls this gap - for purely rhetorical reasons, I believe -- the "lie" of consciousness to the rest of the organism. In this version the "I" (consciousness) is lying to the "Me" (subconscious mental activity) in order to create a narrative and an illusion of control which the "I" requires; the language he uses here - "lie" - seems overcharged and underthought. Alternatively one could say that the lag indicates a mistaken notion about the flow of real time within the organism, but one which has no consequences, since our version of the world's real time is also displaced by exactly the same amount - if everything is late to the same degree, then nothing is late, and our mistaken notion doesn't work against us. His schema describes an infinitely repeated series of natural events (for what else could the brain's sub-conscious processing of information be other than a natural event?) that produces an illusion of continuous consciousness: environmental input (from the world out there) into the nervous system, followed by internal, sub-conscious brain processing which yields us a time-displaced simulation of the outer (ultimately unknowable?) reality which we then experience. More simply put, we experience a simulation of reality created by our brains and mistake it for reality - this is the "user illusion", a term modeled on the way we think about computers that have been designed to mask their real high-speed computations on millions of ones and zeros while appearing friendly and understandable in other, quasi-human, terms to their users (i.e., we believe they are processing language, pictures, etc., rather than disassembling then re-constituting them).

Norretranders appears to be correct about the majority of human behavior not being under conscious control, and he calls this subconscious (organismically dominant) portion of our brains/minds/lives the "Me" (as opposed to the conscious "I" which imagines that it is somehow in control of the self/organism and its interactions with the surrounding environment; the bandwidth discrepancy mentioned above shows the relative proportions of subconscious "Me" vs. conscious "I" in actually "operating the organism"). It's not a bad picture and may be true in some way, but he uses this distinction as a license to make numerous general observations that appear questionable and unsupported by science, known history, intuition, common-sense, and experience, to wit: (1) There is a great deal of "I vs. Me" talk which sounds less like a description of natural events and more like psychobabble. (There is even a peroration at the end of the book that we should all "Dare to be Me", i.e., dare to allow our subconscious selves make our decisions for us - go with our "gut feelings". How to do this is not stated, but in doing this we are told that we will not only feel better about ourselves but take a step in the right direction toward solving the various crises of modern civilization. The crises are real enough, the recommended course of action sounds like an empty advertising slogan, as does his repeated mantra "More is different", a slogan meant to stand for the emergent-properties notion that wholes are different than the sums of their parts; the notion is useful, the slogan rather empty). (2) A consideration of the basis of good or effective art residing in the appropriate "I vs. Me" relations within the artist, who elicits the same balance from the audience if and when he is successful (he discusses music, theater, dance, and highly skilled athletic performances in these terms, but says very little about the plastic arts and literature, even poetry, which might be amenable to his approach, while most prose, regardless of its qualities, might not). (3) An explanation of the actual history of religious ideas/ideals based on the "I vs. Me" distinction. (4) A description of Marxist and capitalist analyses of markets/values/prices as both mistaken since they misinterpret the "I vs Me" distinctions appropriate to "natural economies". (5) A description of why current versions of holism vs. reductionism-constructionism are deficient due to their faulty apprehension of "I vs, Me". (6) And more, much more; in fact, everything under the sun and inside the skull, selected examples to be listed below. Regardless of the field of activity or thought, "Me" just keeps on beating the hell out of "I".

With regard to the history of human cosmological and religious ideas he makes a great deal of Julian Jaynes' notions presented in his book "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", which has us poor old confused humans availing ourselves of conscious thought in only the most recent three-thousand years of our history. Before this all humans were, as it were, functioning schizophrenics (all "Me", no "I", with "Me's" inner voices - organismic urges -- interpreted as gods speaking directly to us; this begs the question of how such an equation could not be a product of conscious thinking, since gods appear to be always created in man's self-image). What can one say, other than that there is ample evidence from history and anthropology that this is an extremely unsupportable claim, a sort of "just-so" story that is entertaining and even plausible in parts but not even remotely close to the true state of affairs, even if we have a very faulty picture of the true state of affairs. It does not even allude to the interesting subject of non-human animal consciousness - how it might be described or tested for, how it differs from its human counterpart, etc. With respect to the problems of knowledge caused by Gödel's theorem (the famous one concerning the ultimate undecidability of certain propositions in formal systems of logic, which Norretranders cleverly points out is mirrored by Turing's "halting problem" in his theories of computation by machines and/or man) Norretranders makes all of the now-obligatory homages to this theorem and, I would say, even finds this idea to open up liberating avenues rather than to create constraints upon the further (extra-logical?) development of human knowledge (I happen to agree with this assessment). He does not appear to think that foundational problems of knowledge have any real impact on the correctness of our ideas about evolution, which he describes as a historical and factual discipline as opposed to a theory-driven one (I doubt this distinction is meaningful with respect to the knowledge problems discussed).

And there is a surfeit of the "I vs. Me" distinction used to explain and describe everything. Norretranders being Danish also obliges him not only to consider the subconscious "Me" athletic masterworks of a particular (Danish) soccer-player, but also to drag in Kierkegaard whenever he can (whose life and existential Angst, the truth be told, have something unfailingly comical about them in the light of the philosopher's biography). When discussing mental illness he relies upon Gregory Bateson's psycho-social inner conflict model and assimilates it to control problems between the id-like Me and the social I; he does not address the biology of the disease at all or even give it a loose medical definition. And there is some totally misleading discussion of the "placebo effect", as well as broader claims about the irrelevance of current theories of disease within modern medicine. Like everyone else who beats the particular drum that it is improved sanitation conditions and not medicine that have increased human longevity, he overlooks the fact that this in fact validates the "germ theory" of disease. Reinterpreted in the light of his `Me vs. I" distinction, we get to finally understand Kant's remarks on the "Thing in Itself" vs. the "Thing for/to us". We also see how this distinction validates the "Gaia Theory" of earth as one super-organism (and the details of just what this means); naturally the "I" is responsible for pollution (the "Me" is somehow wiser about these things) and can be blamed for the prospect of self-extinction. By the way, no surprise here, straight lines and linear design features of our urban environments are bad (they don't occur anywhere else in nature or within the "Me", but have been forced upon us by the crafty yet impoverished "I"). He goes into the occasional rant about Newton's laws of motion as covering only idealized cases that we do not encounter here in our everyday lives (and yet he cherishes the concept that the surface area of that gravitational sink called a black hole is the best illustration of entropy; he likes to keep Newton handy as both genius and whipping-boy). All of these excursions and alarums seem more than a little beside the point, if the point is actually to arrive at an improved understanding of consciousness and its relation to brain-function. Having started out by giving the reader a fairly good science-journalism account of information theory, the laws of thermodynamics, and some recent neuroscience, Norretranders then lapses into frequent New Age jargon and conceits, though he forswears that he is doing this.

The book needs a lot of editing -- revisions in the direction of eliminating repetition, rhetorical cascades, and scattershot observations (it needs more "I", less "Me", a prescription the author would not like). When it comes to giving both practical and ethical advice the book is marred by self-contradictions which often occur in close textual proximity, a sign of negligent thinking or editing to begin with. One good thing about the book is that it does turn the reader's attention to some older neuroscience findings which have not become less important even though they have been temporarily ignored or put on the shelf by scientists who are wary of tackling problems related to consciousness. The B. Libet experiment locating the "pre-conscious readiness potentials" (an electrophysiological phenomenon measured by EEG recordings, both from the surface and from within the brain) is worthy pondering when formulating ideas about consciousness (Libet's article on this and numerous responses by other scientists and philosophers of mind are in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8:4, 1985). Norretranders' discussion of this is at times clear and judicious, but for him it's a launching pad into speculative territory which rapidly becomes arbitrary in the extreme. He also does some justice to the "binding problem" and to the possible relationship between 40-Herz coherent oscillations in neuron populations and their relationship to the phenomena of attention and attention-switching during conscious thinking (e.g., he uses this body of data to explain the odd involuntary switching of interpretations when we are presented with visual illusions or designs that flip back and forth in a way we can't consciously control, such as the Necker Cube and some figure-ground illusions, situations in which neither interpretation is so compelling that it becomes fixed - each interpretation has its group of oscillating neurons, neither ever wins for long, chance fluctuations - background noise in information theory -- being enough to tip our reading of the figure one way, then the other). Overall the book is interesting and provocative, but also muddled and sloppy in many places (the author himself would find its muddled, sloppy character to be aligned with the nature of reality as apprehended by the sub-conscious mind, and reflective, in some way, of an ultimate reality which is also muddled and sloppy). Paradoxically, given his "Me" bias, Norretranders often says too much about that which he believes we cannot say anything useful or true (because it is beyond conscious access), and too little about that which he believes we can.

Cecil Bothwell 2007-11-27

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

A very deep book, but not a difficult one, it is a continuation of the journey which leads through Douglas Hofstadter's GODEL, ESCHER, BACH: AN ETERNAL GOLDEN BRAID (Vintage Books, 1979), Bucky Fuller's SYNERGETICS (Macmillan, 1982) and Julian Jaynes' THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (Houghton Miflin, 1982). Norretranders launches from a discussion of thermodynamics and information theory and spins into orbit around our deepest sense of self. What is it that consciousness is conscious of? Some surprising insights pass under the reader along the way. There is more information in a mess than in order. The expensive part of knowledge is not gaining new information but getting rid of the old. Calculation involves eliminating irrelevance -- the total on your grocery bill involves less information than all of the individual item prices taken separately, and is therefore more useful. The value of any piece of information is directly related to how much exformation (discarded data) resulted during its creation. The brain receives about 11 million bits of information per second from sensory sources but conscious thought can handle -- at most -- 40 bits per second. (15-25 is more likely) There is an awful lot going on that you are completely unaware of, and which you cannot possibly ever notice. There's more, much more. Our survival depends on unconscious decisions, in fact, consciousness lags at least .5 seconds behind events. Your brain makes decisions at least .5 seconds before "you" think "you" have made a decision. Advice to "trust your intuition" is really completely silly, you don't have a choice in that matter. Kant was right -- any theory presupposes axioms accepted on faith, preconditions to the accepted truth. And Godel proved it -- his theorem established absolutely that no system of thought can be complete unless viewed from outside. There will never be a complete theory of everything. That truth, of course, didn't stop Kurt Godel's best buddy Albert Einstein from trying. The ILLUSION of this work's title is drawn from the user illusion you are experiencing right now reading this review. Beginning with the Apple MacIntosh, and extending to most modern computer screens, we wired folk deal with a graphical user interface (GUI, or "gooey"). The documents on your screen, the file folders, the cascading menus, the trash can -- even the words I am typing at this moment -- are illusory in the sense that they do not exist inside your computer. They only exist on the screen. Inside one would find a network of impossibly complicated electrical circuits processing apparently endless strings of binary numbers. As a computer user you don't care how the innards work, as long as they do. You interact with a surface illusion which allows you to accomplish work or play. The GUI doesn't need to be accurate or real, it needs to offer a manageable working hypothesis. In the same way, suggests Norretranders, our consciousness is the result of one half second of processing by the most powerful computer known -- the human brain. The world we interact with is entirely a simulation, a very detailed user interface, in which almost all inputs and computation are hidden. It is very deep, resulting as it does from the creation of massive exformation. (Remember that we process about 11 million bits of sensory input per second, plus whatever signals such input creates internally; and only consciously experience about 30 bits per second.) But we experience that depth as surface, just as we experience our computer "desktop" versus the quick flicker of binary code inside the CPU. Life is largely a non-conscious experience. Consciousness is far too slow to save us. When a car veers into your lane, you swing a ball bat, or sit on a tack, your "Me" takes over and your "I" finds out the result. The order is: input, action, consciousness. The most troubling aspect of this unfolding of modern brain research, math, physics and information theory involves free will. It turns out that conscious free will consists of veto power. Conscious thought can halt a hand, but not un-wish to slap the silly grin off a face. This is profoundly at odds with the usual illusion that "I am in charge here." (For example: it flies in the face of the Christian notion that one can choose not to think sinful thoughts.) Norretrander's concluding chapter is entitled, "The Sublime." Heaven is all around us, he suggests ... it exists one half second in your past. Just as a map offers the barest outline of a journey, and the computer screen a pleasantly gooey workplace, consciousness provides only a hint of the depth and richness and wonder of human experience. Learn why good guys in Westerns usually win, why optical illusions occur, how to use a VCR and earphones to get a glimpse of preconscious processing at work and most importantly that nothing in your awareness exists sans context. "Life is really more fun when you are not conscious of it." A masterpiece.

Marcel Kuijsten 2007-05-26

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Making sometimes difficult concepts easy to understand for the non-scientist, Norretranders presents a nice multidisciplinary approach to consciousness -- ranging from physics to psychology -- that centers on the interesting idea that consciousness may not be necessary for the majority of human behavior. Contains a good explanation of the split-brain research, the controversial research of Benjamin Libet, and I especially enjoyed his chapter on the origin of consciousness, which expands on the important ideas of Julian Jaynes.

John Falicki 2006-09-02

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

I have been an expert and wide-ranging hypnotist for 25 years, and I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in consciousness and in the sheer colossal *capacity* of the human mind. Norretranders shows just how impossibly much information we take in each moment, and how much is stored away, way more than we would ever suspect. I've witnessed this many times in my hypnotic work, the shocking capacity and depth and quality of memory that comes up in people in deep trance, even when the information is seemingly trivial. You have to experience it to believe it.