Rating: 
Summary: I learned more from reading the other reviews here !
Review: As one who consumes information voraciously, primarily in the form of books, and is fascinated by the role of language in human thought, I have always been surprised by how boring I find so-called "information theory." I keep trying. There ought to be something there? So, combining with a more recent interest in "consciousness studies", I expected great things from this book.I was quite disappointed. You might not be. Since I see lots of other positive reviews here that also outline the book's content, I'll focus more on style issues, since it was those which mostly left me out of gas after 100 or so pages. Perhaps you can determine if these same concerns would affect your appreciation of the book. The writing in this book never captivated me, frankly never even engaged me; and the ideas, however powerful, stayed submerged. Its not that I need a Hemingway to craft an essay on consciousness in order to be gripped by it; witness my high rating of Evan Walker's "Physics of Consciousness", with its bumpy, sometimes windy style and odd rhetorical devices. And, having worked my way through Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", I know its not that I shy away from complex ideas. I just need, like a radio station, a strong carrier frequency to modulate the message. Dennett accomplishes this with a quite engaging style that Nrretranders lacks - possibly a dilution effect of translation. Walker manages the same, frankly, by having eminently (and evidently) skippable passages. While reading this book, my own skip/scan reading engine kept reacting to the mushy, swampy places by making the jump, but rarely found a solid place to land. Like many books that seek to bring the "lay" reader into a realm defined by the outposts of modern science, this book lays down a substantial prologue seeking to introduce many complex concepts. I usually try to read most of this section on the theory that I might not know quite as much as I think. But I usually can realize when I am plowing a field in which my level of knowledge is up to the level of the presentation. At that point I look to skip ahead and seek rhetorical or syntactic guideposts to indicate the next island for my leap. In "User Illusion" there was something blurry about the whole first part; never a sense of discrete elements and hence no way to untangle the well-known from the new. Finally, in frustration, I went to an extensive scan-ahead; flipping and scanning the middle third of the book to try to find where it was headed, to find the big ideas. (I rarely "read" this way. It's a measure of my high expectations for the content that I resorted to such perfidy.) All I could find was an apparent circling-around of the "half-second delay" discovery of Libet mentioned in other reviews. Since I had already encountered that in Dennett (not as a central point but as a marker on the road to a more powerful argument), I called it quits. Fans of the book might, correctly, argue that I missed its point. How can I argue since I never discovered that it? But it wasn't for lack of trying. If you know you're a reader who can abide exciting ideas portrayed without excitement you might be rewarded by reading this book. I remain suspicious that the central (and perhaps powerful) idea of this book could be stated in several pages than in the form provided. You might learn more from reading the reviews right here on Amazon; then plow into a few listmania! lists on cognitive science, or (is there one?) information theory!
Rating: 
Summary: Way ahead of its time
Review: First, I must agree that the first hundred pages are tough going and the last chapters may get too metaphysical, but the central theme of the book that our brain presents us with a user interface much like a computer does -- delayed in time, compressed, summarized, edited, incomplete -- has not been discounted in the ten years since the book was written. In fact, more and more experiments reveal the truth of this view. In a December 2001 Nature letter (Nature 414, 302 - 305, Illusory perceptions of space and time preserve cross-saccadic perceptual continuity), another experiment showing that our unconscious gives us delayed and edited information confirms that we exist in a User Illusion. Many of our behaviors, phobias, neuroses, psychoses, and human interactions can be analyzed in terms of this powerful illusion. And learning to understand and program our unconscious is the purpose of life.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best explanations of conscious awareness so far
Review: I'm a big fan of the recent books attempting to explain consciousness: Dennett, the Churchlands, Owen Flannagan, Damasio, Edleman, Crick, Calvin, and so on. "The User Illusion" is unique among this crowd in two ways. First, it builds from a broader base of support, in information theory and thermodynamics. Second, it does not focus on the brain, but on the experience of consciousness. This seems at first to be a weakness, but it turns out to be a strength because what the author attempts to explain is how the experience of consciousness relates to the reality around us. In this book, a number of different lines of evidence converge on the profoundly scientific but uncomfortably counter-intuitive conclusion that conscious awareness is an extremely narrow bandwidth simulation used to help create a useful illusion of an "I" who sees all , knows all, and can explain all. Yet the mental processes actually driving our behavior are (and need to be) far more vast and process a rich tapestry of information around us that conscious awareness cannot comprehend without highly structuring it first. So the old notion of an "unconscious mind" is not wrong because we have no "unconscious," but because our entire mind is unconscious, with a tiny but critical feature of being able to observe and explain itself, as if an outside observer. This fits so well with the social psychological self-perception research, and recent research into the perception of pain and other sensations, that it has a striking ring of truth about it. This does lead to some difficult conceptual problems. A chapter is devoted to the odd result discovered by Benjamin Libet (also featured prominently in Dennett's Consciousness Explained, but not explained nearly so clearly there). Libet observed that the brain seems to prepare for a planned action a half second before we realize we have chosen to perform the action. This dramatically makes the author's point that human experience proceeds from sensing to interpreting teh sensation within a simulation of reality, to experiencing. If we accept that the brain has to create its own simulation in order for us to experience something, there's no reason why the simulation can't bias our perception of when we chose to act. So we act out of a larger, richer self, but experience ourselves as acting from a narrowly defined self-aware self with no real privileged insight into the mental processes behind it. This may well be the best discussion of conscious awareness yet presented in a generally readable form. But it does have some glaring weaknesses. The author takes great pains to build this model of conscious awareness from the ground up, but then applies it in a brief and haphazard manner to all sorts of things that deserve much more thought, such as religion, hypnosis, dreams, and so on. Even with the few weaknesses, the case made for the author's view of conscious awareness is both compelling and useful for further discussions, because it is built on a solid scientific and mathematical foundation, and the author manages to remain within areas that are already well studied. It isn't clear whether the author's model makes many testable predictions beyond those made by the underlying theories of perception, but it does provide a larger explanatory framework that is at once sophisticated and comprehensible.
Rating: 
Summary: Thoughtful
Review: Many readers appear to seek a scientific work here, a scientific theory with solid evidence to back it up. This approach is too tight. The book is more fun and more useful as an elaboration beyond the provable of titillating facts from many disciplines. When all is said, the information from the various sciences is not just about engineering, but about our view of ourselves and where we fit into the universe. This book helped me reflect upon these matters, and brought to my attention information that had slipped by unnoticed.
Rating: 
Summary: Lacks rigour
Review: Nrretranders is not a scientist or researcher, but rather a science journalist. That isn't necessarliy a bad thing in itself, but his book clearly suffers for his lack of scientific training, and the rigour it would have introduced. User Illusion reads like a series of breezy, vastly oversimplified pop-sci articles. His concepts - ranging from info theory to thermodynamics, are strung together with the loosest of connections. For example, he compares the information intake of our senses with that processed by our consciousness in terms of bits. But, he clearly has no formal definition of a bit in mind, using it to refer to anything from an actual binary bit, all the way up to an entire piece of music. This makes it impossible to take his comparison seriously. Consciousness itself is never even formally defined. His treatment near the end of the earth's energy intake, and even dirty diapers, in terms of information theory is laughable. The only useful take-away here is the reminder that there is a lot more going on inside our heads than we are consciously aware of. A useful reminder, but that should not be news to anyone. User Illusion also makes a good index of current (in 1991) 'sexy' science topics such as complexity.
Rating:
Summary: Lacks rigour
Review: Nrretranders is not a scientist or researcher, but rather a science journalist. That isn't necessarliy a bad thing in itself, but his book clearly suffers for his lack of scientific training, and the rigour it would have introduced. User Illusion reads like a series of breezy, vastly oversimplified pop-sci articles. His concepts - ranging from info theory to thermodynamics, are strung together with the loosest of connections. For example, he compares the information intake of our senses with that processed by our consciousness in terms of bits. But, he clearly has no formal definition of a bit in mind, using it to refer to anything from an actual binary bit, all the way up to an entire piece of music. This makes it impossible to take his comparison seriously. Consciousness itself is never even formally defined. His treatment near the end of the earth's energy intake, and even dirty diapers, in terms of information theory is laughable. The only useful take-away here is the reminder that there is a lot more going on inside our heads than we are consciously aware of. A useful reminder, but that should not be news to anyone. User Illusion also makes a good index of current (in 1991) 'sexy' science topics such as complexity.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating but uneven
Review: The thesis is fascinating, and really got me (oops.. *I*) thinking about the role of conscious thought vs. non-conscious action in my own experience: all the places my conscious mind wanders while I'm (somehow) playing a familiar (but not memorized) piece on the piano, or while driving through traffic to the grocery store. The analysis depends crucially on scientific experiments by Benjamin Libet, whose methodology may be open to criticism. Nørretranders defends the methodology (and I believe it) but the arguments are far from air-tight. I have long believed that consciousness is an illusion, a subjective property that can potentially emerge (and be useful -- even adaptive) in any sophisticated information processing system. I do not, however, buy the argument of Jaynes that consciousness is only a few thousand years old (and may have disappeared in the Middle Ages). This view of consciousness is of course problematic for the notion of free will. If my brain initiates a movement half a second before I consciously "decide" to move, how can *I* be in control of myself? Nørretranders tries to rescue free will with a conscious "veto". The connection he makes to Christian vs. Jewish theology here is interesting but unconvincing -- but then, I'm an determinist/atheist. My biggest complaint: did Nørretranders have to meet a page quota? Part one, about thermodynamics, computation, and information theory introduces some requisite concepts, but they drag on too long. I would prefer that he clearly explain the thesis and some if its ramifications up front; THEN, take guide us through some of the prerequisites, periodically tying them back to the thesis. Also, most of part four was irrelevant. Stop reading after chapter 12 and skip to the last subsection of chapter 16.
Rating:
Summary: Mind opening
Review: The User Illusion is easily one of the best books I have come across in quite some time. It leaves you seeing the world very differently, realizing you don't have control over nearly as much as you think you do. The first hundred (or so) pages of the book don't mention conciousness at all. Instead they take you through a tour of how different fields deal with the notions of information, complexity and order. These are all woven together as the discussion of how our conciousness works begins. As the book progresses the author spends some time on philosophical issues, which seems to come out of left field but are actually very interesting. For example, he spends some time look at how the current views of conciousness apply to religion. Other reviews have mentioned that the material in this book is nothing new. Perhaps this is true. If you have done other reading in this area this book may be of less interest. However, if you're new to this area (as I was), this book provides a very thorough foundation of current thought.
Rating:
Summary: How scientific is this book ?
Review: This book contains some fascinating theories that I didn't know yet, or had never looked at it that way. For instance the part about thermodynamics and the connection with information theory and probability theory I found very interesting,although it has little to do with consciousness. I have one serious problem with the book : Norretranders is not intellectually honest. He attempts too much to force his theory upon his readers, all the while oversimplifying, using suggestive language (the word 'information' is used in different contexts, with different meanings and it doesn't become clear from reading the text), and avoiding problematic questions.
The result is that the book is very tiresome to read, and its conclusions cannot be trusted.
It raised some interesting points though, that's the reason why I 've continued reading.
Rating:
Summary: Unsatisfying
Review: This book demonstrates first hand the difficulty of attempting singlehandedly to come to a "solution" to consciousness by merging several disciplines. I was amazed at the author's quick acceptance of certain interpretations of cognitive psychological experiments. For example, take Miller's experiments on the magic number 7 (plus or minus 2). Nrretranders interprets this and other like minded experiments that measure cognitive capacity to mean that we have a limit of what we can experience consciously of somewhere between 1 and 40 "bits" (and most likely around 16 "bits"). Now, if you read the literature carefully, and if you use some common sense, you will find out two things. First of all, there is the widespread problem of memory that has never been dealt with satisfactorily. There is an inherent problem with trying to measure the contents of consciousness with some kind of report from the subject -- they will always be reporting on their memory of the event, and not the event itself. Since it is the contents of phenomenological consciousness that we care about (and not the total processing, conscious and unconscious), it may be unknowable what the precise contents of consciousness are at a given moment, at least using current techniques. There is also a second and more damaging critique of Nrretranders' calculations of the number of "bits" available to consciousness. That is this: Is one unit of information about the perceptual stream only a single bit? Take for example the percept of seeing a full color photograph. What are you conscious of when you see it? In Nrretranders' estimation, only a couple of things at a time -- say the redness of a shirt, the expression of a face, etc. And there is of course evidence that you do not apprehend (or commit to memory, anyway) a large majority of the information that enters the senses. But this does not account for the richness of the percept, for example, of "the expression of a face". Is this expression one bit? Or is it the summary of hundreds of complex apprehension, recognition, and association bits of information? What does it mean for something as complex as consciously perceiving a face to be reduced to a single bit of information? The problem with this book, as with many of the books to come out recently on the topic of consciousness, is that the author has spelled out in a clear thesis what consciousness is, and how it can be characterized in such a way so that it will be easily understandable. And of course, that is what all good scientific theories strive to do -- reduce complex phenomena to something that is manageable and predictable. However, there is a failing here in that so much of the description and experience of consciousness has been lost by estimating how many bits it consists of. Consciousness is a notoriously changing and nebulous thing. Things can be nearly conscious, and percepts and ideas can lie on the fringe of consciousness -- this much has been well accepted since the time of William James. There is no clearly defined, perfectly stable box of consciousness, within which 16-40 bits of information reside. The thesis is an interesting one. But the support for it is not there. Every interested person in this topic seems to have his or her favorite simplification of what consciousness is (40hz activity in the brain, a winner-take-all network, a global workspace, and now a user illusion). I suspect the answer that is needed to really satisfy as a useful scientific theory will end up to be more complex and involved than any of these simplifications. Each has a certain draw to it, but it becomes confusing when you get scraps of the puzzle that each claim to contain the entire picture. Final analysis: there is no convincing reason to believe this view of consciousness over any other one, and the lack of rigerous scholarship (i.e. in-depth analysis of the research) discourages me from looking closer in this direction.
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