The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (Penguin Press Science) Paperback – August 1, 1999

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.

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.

I agree with the one reviewer who says this is one of the best explanatory efforts regarding consciousness. I've perused quite a few offerings on this topic and Norretranders' interpretation comes pretty close to hitting home. One other reviewer suggests all Norretranders has done is regurgitate the work of others and repackage it. Ahem! that's about what a good science writer is supposed to do. The author isn't a neurobiological researcher, he's a science writer. Unlike a full blown scientist, Norretranders can take literary liberties to try and describe what may not in fact lend itself easily to description. He has no theory to sell, just the thesis that what we generally perceive as 'self' isn't quite what we envision it to be. It is true that this is a well trodden path, as seen in the thought of Kant, James, Lewis Thomas, Edelman, and Dennett, to name a few; it's just that Norretranders does a more artful job of describing a phenomenon that is undoubtedly understood better by others. He syncretizes the extant body of knowledge more delicately than his epistemological superiors in this subject; or perhaps it's his Scandanavian mode of expression. There's something about this book that made the Edelmans, Damasios, etc., of the bio-cognitive milieu more comprehendable. Consciousness is a unitary experience and at the same time a highly complex, composite event. Like many contradictions it does not lend itself readily to the expositor's voice. Norretranders does the topic honorable justice in my opinion.