Tor NørretrandersBesprekingen

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

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...

An excellent analysis of the scientific basis for understanding the relationship between conscious and subconscious minds.
A bit of a tough read at times - the first 2/3rds were a bit of a grind, but the last 1/3rd was marvellous.

Advance uncorrected proofs. Not for sale. Missing the index, copyright page. No translator listed.

A bizzare non musical review of maybe two dozen other popular science books

A spectacular book that has completely changed my understanding of the mind and consciousness. I poured through this 400 pages in just a few days - I couldn't set it down.

The critical arguments in this book are:

1. Research shows that your unconscious processes a huge amount of sensory information; your conscious, on the other hand, processes only a tiny fraction of it (roughly 1 millionth).

2. This implies that the unconscious is responsible for an enormous percentage of your thinking: it decides what data to pay attention to and what to discard. A large part of our life experience - what we enjoy, how we learn, etc - is completely unconscious (e.g. body language, enjoyment of music, sports).

3. In fact, the unconscious may even decide what actions you will take: numerous studies show that actions that feel intentional are actually triggered before you are consciously aware of having made the decision to act. This is hard to believe, right? However, the studies have been replicated many times. The implication is that the unconscious not only feeds a highly filtered view of the world to your conscious - it also feeds actions and decisions to it. The conscious can veto the decisions, but not initiate them!

4. There is also ample evidence that the conscious is not fed a filtered list of raw data, but rather, a simulation of the real world. That is, the unconscious receives tons of raw data, figures out what to keep or discard, produces a simulation, and feeds the simulation (but not the process of how it was created!) to your conscious.

5. Think over what it means for your conscious to be exposed to a simulation rather than raw data. This has deep ties to optical illusions, humor, sleeping, perception, learning, and more.

6. The user illusion is our belief that this simulation *IS* life. But it is merely our internal model of it: useful and coherent, but definitely not accurate.

I can't recommend this book enough.

And now, a huge list of quotes from the book. I had to force myself to not stop every 5 paragraphs and write these down, as the book is full of insight that changes how you think.

"A mess is hard to describe. Especially in detail."

"There may be an enormous amount of work or thought behind a given message or product. Yet it may be invisible. Making things look easy is hard."

"The least interesting aspect of good conversation is what is actually said. What is more interesting is all the deliberations and emotions that take place simultaneously during conversation in the heads and bodies of the conversers."

"The main thing in music is not the sound waves. It is that the composer/player converts a number of mental states into a pattern which evokes the same (or different) mental states in the listener."

"The bandwidth of consciousness is far lower than the bandwidth of our sensor preceptors."

"Only one millionth of what our eyes see, our ears hear, and our other senses inform us about appears in our consciousness."

"Fairy tales are not meant for children, you see. If they were, they would not work. For the true power of the fairy tale comes because children and grown-ups can together experience the wonder of the narrative."

"Stories read aloud are a matter not of words but what words do to people. Live concerts are not about music but about what the music does to people. Football matches watched at the stadium are not about football but what football does to people."

"Albert Einstein, who wrote 'The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thoughts.'"

"The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest."

"Pablo Picasso was once asked in a train compartment by a fellow passenger why he did not paint people 'the way they really are.' Picasso asked what the man meant by the expression. The man pulled a snapshot of his wife out of his wallet and said, 'That's my wife.' Picasso responded, "Isn't she rather small and flat?'"

"Our experience of reality is in a sense an experience of our simulation of what goes on out there."

"The desire to carry out an action becomes a conscious sensation long after the brain has started initiating it."

"In other words, the conscious experience is projected back in time in exactly the same way as a stimulation of the sensory cortex is projected onto the body."

"Consciousness cannot initiate an action, but it can decide that it should be carried out."

"Our consciousness lags behind because it has to present to us a picture of the surrounding world that is relevant. But it is precisely a picture of the surrounding world it presents us with, not a picture of the superb work the brain does."

"As British biologist Richard Dawkins puts it, 'Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself.'"

"Alan Kay writes: 'The user experience was once the last part of a system to be designed. Now it is the first. It is recognized as being primary because, to novices and professionals alike, what is presented to one's senses is one's computer. The 'user illusion' as my colleagues and I called it at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, is the simplified myth everyone builds to explain (and make guesses about) the system's actions and what should be done next.'"

"The user illusion, then, is the picture the user has of the machine. Kay and his colleagues realized that it does not really matter whether this picture is accurate or complete, just as long as it is coherent and appropriate."

"People do not merely see. We simulate; make models so that we can compare."

"When we dream, we may well be carrying out a simulation: We visualize something and understand (often weird) connections in it."

"Science is a collective project aimed at knowing the world in a way we can tell each other about. Knowledge becomes scientific knowledge only after it is told in a way that allows other people to reproduce that knowledge. In an unambiguous way."

"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."

"Everything is connected, so we cannot comprehend anything exhaustively at all unless we comprehend everything exhaustively. But this raises the problem that such a totally exhaustive description necessarily contains just as much information as what it describes; a complete description of the world takes up just as much room as the world itself. [...] The only map that displays every detail of the terrain is the terrain itself."

"In other words, we have to know everything a person has learned, and undergo all the experiences a person has undergone, before we have enough information to compute what that person will do. Everywhere that person has been, we must have been; everywhere that person has acted, we must have acted. But in that case we must necessarily be that person ourselves."

"Hofstadter's point is that even a fully defined and determined system of simple rules can display such complex behavior that it is meaningful to describe it in terms of decisions and will, quite irrespective of the fact that the laws affecting the simple level govern completely. A completely implemented version of a set of simple rules can display properties we cannot find in the rules themselves; the reason we cannot find the properties in the rules is a general condition of the world that is described in Godel's theorem and Chatin's extension of it."

A bizzare non musical review of maybe two dozen other popular science books

Indeholder "Begyndelse", "Den mørke himmel", " Keplers kvababbelser", " Bondis betegnelse", " Poeten Edgar Allen Poe", " Lysets tøven", " Stjernernes styrke", "Den kosmiske himmel", " En stor opdagelse", " Peebles' pointe", " Langt fra ligevægt", " Himmelhvælvet", "Den blå himmel", " Den blå bølgelængde", " Solnedgangens farver", " Den levende planet", " Livets himmel", " Bevidstheden", "Den syvende himmel", " Fermis paradoks", " Det kosmologiske princip", " Civiliseret adfærd", " Ved planeten at blive", "Lysets langmodighed (digt)", "Litteratur", "Indeks".

Bogen behandler på et meget læsbart dansk problemet om hvorfor himlen er blå. Hvis universet var uendeligt stort og uendeligt gammelt burde vi se stjerner hvorhen vi end så, dvs himlen burde være lysende hvid (Olbers paradoks).

Nogenlunde ok, men uden den store dybde

Nye forskningsresultater om lykke og glæde videregivet på en letlæst og god måde.

Låt oss börja med det bästa. Det är otvivelaktigen kapitlen om hur man via experiment kom underfund med hur hjärnan fungerar, hur bilden av medvetandet skapas i denna, samt hur medvetandet bara behandlar en mycket, mycket liten del av alla sinnesintryck som vidarebefordras till hjärnan (även om jag ställer mig tvivlande till det meningsfulla i att försöka uttrycka detta i ›bits‹). Detta bygger på ett resonemang om hur god kommunikation baseras på att innehållet i det kommunicerade – det rent semantiska – utgår från de associationer som skapas.

Detta resonemang har dock i boken föregåtts av ett om termodynamik och den besläktade vetenskapsgrenen informationsvetenskap, och detta är betydligt sämre, ty det bygger på en del missförstånd, och den som är van att tänka i sådana termer får ofta tillfälle att låta tanken springa iväg från textens fåra och underkänna denna.

Dessutom verkar han hämta tankar från olika håll utan urskiljning. Värst är det hemska kapitel som gör gällande att medvetandet (det vill säga uppfattningen att det finns ett medvetet »Jag«) uppkom för en tretusen år sedan, och att man innan dess hade fått motsvarande instruktioner från något man uppfattade som gudar. Till skillnad mot de i empiri stadigt förankrade kapitlen om hur hjärnan fungerar så verkar detta kapitel endast bygga på tilltron till Julian Jaynes. Som den refereras verkar teorin alltigenom fnoskig, baserad främst på allegorisk läsning av Odyssén och Bibeln, och man undrar vad den ha i boken att göra. I det därefter framförs Gaia-teorin som ovedersäglig sanning. Skriver man populärvetenskap bör man verkligen se till att hålla isär vad som är intressanta teorier och vad som är sanning på ett bättre sätt.

Nä, den som vill läsa något intressant om hur medvetandet fungerar med kopplingar till diverse andra områden bör nog hålla sig till Gödel, Escher, Bach. Denna bok saknar förvisso inte goda stycken, men det är tveksamt om 150 bra sidor är tillräckligt för att motivera läsandet av 350 halvtaskiga och 50 rent usla.

Aktuel, vedkommende og velskrevet! Virkelig interessant læsning om, hvordan verden ser ud, hvad vi kommer fra og hvor vi kan være på vej hen. Det synes endvidere svært at finde værkets tilgrundsliggende litteratur uinteressant.