Tor Nørretranders

Indeholder "Forord", "Beregning", " 1. Maxwells dæmon", " 2. Bortkastning af information", " 3. Uendelige algoritmer", " 4. Kompleksitetens dybde", "Betydning", " 5. Talens træ", " 6. Bevidsthedens båndbredde", " 7. Psykologiens atombombe", " 8. Udsigten indefra", "Bevidsthed", " 9. Det halve sekunds forsinkelse", " 10. Maxwells mig", " 11. Bruger-illusionen", " 12. Bevidsthedens oprindelse", "Besindelse", " 13. Indeni intet", " 14. På kanten af kaos", " 15. Den urette linie", " 16. Det sublime", "Henvisninger", "Citeret litteratur", "Billedkilder", "Register".

Beregning handler om Maxwells dæmon og den fysiske baggrund for at den ikke kan lade sig gøre.
Betydning: Telefoner, musik, Peter Bastian, hjernen, vi behandler ca 40 bit pr sekund. Bevidstheden er 1/2 sekund bagud. Synsillusioner.
Bevidsthed: EEG, Benjamin Libet, Hjernens kort over kroppen. Hjernens krop. Bloom og Lazerson. Niels Bohr, George Gamow, Bohr som cowboy-helt. Louis Armstrong, Besindelse: James Lovelock, Hofstadter, Cellulære automater, Fraktaler, Mandelbrot, Landkort i 1:1 fra Lewis Carroll.

Bogen handler om tjah, tjoh. Alt i alt en landtrukken gang ordævl… (meer)

I promised myself years ago that I'd finally stop reading this sort of book, had been sticking to it pretty well (just a couple of regrettable lapses during the 1990s) and had fair warning about this one: standing in the bookshop leafing through its pages, I spotted the word "exformation" - a sort of counterpart of "information" of course - yet still bought the thing anyway. I think I might need professional help (or Bookaholics Anonymous).
   You could summarise The User Illusion's thesis on a single page. 1, what we call "the conscious mind" doesn't do any of the following: it doesn't feel, dream, remember, imagine, think, decide or act; all these, everything the mind does in fact, are done non-consciously. 2, the reason consciousness doesn't do any of these is because it doesn't exist - the "I" and the conscious realm it seems to inhabit are an illusion analogous to the "user illusion" of computer terminology. Now as it happens, having mulled it over for years myself, I pretty much agree with 1 (although not 2); the most obvious problem with this thesis, though, is that you can't publish a book only one page long, so you pad it out (sorry, prepare the ground) with a series of huge digressions into anything even remotely fashionable at the time: information theory, Godel's Theorem, chaos, fractals, Julian Jaynes, left-versus-right cerebral hemispheres, some nice optical-illusion drawings you've seen a hundred times before...Gaia...Zeno's paradoxes...
   Won't tell you how my head feels this morning. Never again...… (meer)