The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size

Description

The "user illusion" of this groundbreaking book's title comes from computer design and refers to the simplistic mental image most of us have of our PCs. Our consciousness, says Nørretranders, is our user illusion of ourselves. During any given second, we consciously process only sixteen of the eleven million bits of information our senses pass on to our brains. In other words, the conscious part of us receives much less information than the unconscious part of us. We should trust our hunches and pursue our intuitions because they are closer to reality than the perceived reality of consciousness. 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. Since this discarding takes time, there's a half-second delay between reality and our perception of it. If a baseball player thought about swinging at a pitch, he'd never hit the ball. 'The User Illusion' makes the case that humans are designed for a much richer existence than processing a dribble of data from a computer screen, which actually constitutes a form of sensory deprivation. That there is actually far too little information in the so-called Information Age may be responsible for the malaise of modern society, that nagging feeling that there must be more to life. There is—but we have to get outside and live life with all our senses to experience it more fully. Drawing on wildly disparate areas of scientific research, Tor Nørretranders has made a compelling case for putting consciousness in perspective and embracing all that the world has to offer. TOR NØRRETRANDERS is Denmark's leading science writer and the award-winning author of more than ten books, many of them bestsellers. He has hosted numerous television programs on science and science-related topics and established a major cooperative network of scientists and artists. He lives north of Copenhagen. The User Illusion Contents Preface PART I COMPUTATION CHAPTER 1: Maxwell’s Demon CHAPTER 2: Throwing Away Information CHAPTER 3: Infinite Algorithms CHAPTER 4: The Depth of Complexity PART II COMMUNICATION CHAPTER 5: The Tree of Talking CHAPTER 6: The Bandwidth of Consciousness CHAPTER 7: The Bomb of Psychology CHAPTER 8: The View from Within PART III CONSCIOUSNESS CHAPTER 9: The Half-Second Delay CHAPTER 10: Maxwell’s Me CHAPTER 11: The User Illusion CHAPTER 12: The Origin of Consciousness PART IV COMPOSURE CHAPTER 13: Inside nothing CHAPTER 14: On the Edge of Chaos CHAPTER 15: The Nonlinear Line CHAPTER 16: The Sublime Notes Bibliography Index