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

Sure, the author takes a while to get onto the subject of consciousness, but I found the early detour on thermodynamics and information theory to be interesting in its own right. The author a has a penchant for being scrupulously thorough in his discussion of a subject, whatever subject that may be, and I therefore found the book to be extremely satisfying. Eventually, he does find his way to the subject of consciousness, and the thorough discussion of Benjamin Libet's brain stimulation experiments was much appreciated. These experiments had been referenced in other books I've read, but here the experiments and their implications were discussed in detail. Overall, this was a great read. (Hardcopy Edition)

I recently bought and read this book convinced it was a recent work. As it turns out it is a recent translation of an original published in the early nineties and my notion was surely enforced by the number of recent books on the same "theme" namely the apparently novel revelation that the greater part of our mental activity is not directly accessible to our consciousness! This is the bottom line of such instant best-sellers as "Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior" by Leonard Mlodinow, "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business" by Charles Duhigg, Jonah Lehrer's "Imagine: How Creativity Works" and, perhaps to a less extent, "Ignorance: How It Drives Science" by Stuart Firestein! There is clearly some trend here as James Atlas underscored it in a recent opinion column of the NYTs where he labelled these "Can't-Help-Yourself" books. That may be a bit harsh but what I find more intriguing is that all of these people appear genuinely surprised by a finding that is over 100 years old harking back to Sigmund Freud who made his fame by plunging psychology into the depths of the unconscious. Remember? In any case Tor Norretranders appears to have had one hand and a couple of decades on all these noveau retro-sensationalists and his book is a worthy read even if long and often repetitive. He covers an impressive amount of research covering the last quarter of the 20th century and manages to tie it together though the devices he introduces for the purpose are shallow and mostly misapplied. The first is the word "exformation" which is meant to designate the information that is discarded by a physical system, a correlate of Brilloin's Negentropy which was meant to label successfully eliminated entropy. Unfortunately for both it is quite self-defeating to try to define a system in terms of something that it no longer contains. The same can be said about his revival of that old William James' canard, the distinction between the I (conscious) and the Me (unconscious). Norretranders uses and abuses it to the point that these two sound more like an old married couple bickering about who is in control! Even Freud showed a bit more finesse introducing a distinction between the Ego, the Id AND the SuperEgo! Finally, his appropriation of the User Illusion, a term from software engineering, quickly fizzles maybe because the author did not really know what to do with it. Still most of the many subjects he addresses remain interesting as one can gather from this new wave of writing on the subject though my guess is that these people should have read Norretranders before they penned their own versions of his material. In spite of the problems I list the book is worth the effort or I would not have finished it.

In full disclosure I should point out that, in the middle of reading "The User Illusion" I recalled, from a particularly memorable anecdote it tells, that I have met the author -- in fact had lunch with him -- long time ago, during the first Workshop on Artificial Life in Los Alamos in 1987 or so. What little I remember of my interaction with him left me a positive impression which probably propelled my reading beyond the annoyances I describe. I recall that most of the scientists did not payed much attention to him but were quite impressed with the fact that James Gleick was also attending and he was using an intriguing new device that was to be later named a "laptop computer". Given that Gleick just published "The Information" which, again, appears to cover most of the same terrain, I can't help feel a bit more admiring of Norretranders! Unfortunately neither he nor Gleick seem to realize that the scientific notion of Information is, by itself, quite uninformative! They are not alone in this...

Absolutely outlook-changing for me. Having worked most of my life as a physicist, I could manage the basis of what goes on in this book (some may have trouble). I came away with a newly-integrated understanding of things.

The author (actually, the author & translator) did an excellent job explaining concepts in this book. I ordered the paperback but realized that this was going to be a keeper so I ordered the hardback copy. I'll give the paperback to someone who will enjoy the topics as a gift. I highly recommend this book because it is written in plain language and not full of academic bloat, although one could use this as a reference for academic reports or papers.

This book should be used as educational resource material as early as it can be appreciated.... I'm almost certain that very few that have this kind of responsibility would agree with me, since it would overturn so much of the current mythology of the "I/Me".. As a species that has adopted a sort of self destructive brinkmanship as its culture, based on a simple misunderstanding of the nature of our cognitive processes, we could stand a little help with a reassessment of both where our strengths and weaknesses lie in how what we call the "I/Me" actually works...

The author has done an excellent job bringing to our attention both the miraculous and deceptive nature of perception and shows many examples of how to begin an examination of these issues for ones self, if so inclined...

Great book if you are trying to understand what you are without woo.

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.

If you have consciousness, you need to understand how it works. Reading this changed everything.