The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (Penguin Press Science S.)

Rating:
Summary: Informative, not about consciousness, and dated.
Review: This book is a bit dated, and not really illuminating for someone interested in consciousness studies or behavioral/brain sciences. The only science that the author discusses that really is about consciousess, is Libet's work. Now, this does not mean that the book itself is not informative. I'm just saying that it really does not explain consciousness, and I doubt it was really meant to. If there is one thing one can get out of the book, concerning consciousness, it is that it has limited capacity, and most processing is unconscious. But this is not really an eye-opening revelation. The book is a great piece of popular science, that is sure enough.
The author gets everything mixed in a blend of cahos, complexity, computability, formal systems, a bit of neuroscience and cognitive science, physics, information theory, and social science speculation. The result is not that interesting, but the journey itself is great. The explanation of information theory is really simple and, well, informative. The chapters on physics and chaos are not really very good, and serve only as steps towards one of the main ideas of the book, namely, that subjectivity is important in an understanding of the physical world. Libets work, dealing with processing time for consciousness, is discussed but not very skillfully. There is so much bits and pieces of diferent subjects in this book, that it is hard ro see how it all comes together.
In the level of style, I have to say I found the book a little anoying. Repetition after repetition of the same idea in different sentences goes on forever. There is hardly a well constructed paragraph in the whole book. One-liners abound, and it makes one want to read the newspaper instead. No great conclusions are made, nor are there hipotheses or predictions put forward, no real science. At the end it seems the author wanted to comvey his awe for consciousness, information theory, and complexity without going into the details. But saying that there is more to the mind than consciousness is not really new, nor astonishing. And this is apparently all there is to the user illusion.

Rating:
Summary: Human consciousness as a metaphor of the computer age
Review: 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.