Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Liberating, 4 Nov 2003
I agree that the comments on religion are baseless, but nevertheless this is one of my favourite books ever. Its insights into consciousness, psychology and, not to beat about the bush, what it's like being human, have made a practical difference to the way I see things. I find it most liberating to realise that I'm not really in control of my life. Responsible for it, certainly, but it's extremely reassuring to find out that the best advice is often to simply do what you are inclined to do, with as little worry and doubt as you can. Not that I would give that advice to smokers, sociopaths, paedophiles, suididal people or the chronically indolent - but the message that you can trust your unconscious mind to do a better job of living than your conscious cogitation is an opportune rehabilitation of the irrational. It's not all obsession, greed and violence. It is also where the richness of life resides. I have also picked up in various New Scientist articles notions about 'the universe as information' that I confess I do not yet understand but might make a fascinating extension of the information-theory sections of the book. Yes, it could have been much shorter, but I was sometimes glad to be told the same thing three times. If I got it the first time, I would skim over the re-presentations, but for difficult concepts I think it's better to give the reader a few different ways of looking at a subject than to leave them to pore over a tangled paragraph until spots form before their eyes - which is the usual modus operandi of philosophical writers.
|
|
|
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
today's Godel, Escher, Bach, 28 Dec 1998
By A Customer
An invaluable book analyzing consciousness from the prespective of information theory. Author unites physics, theory of computation & neuroscience through, still widely misunderstood, information theory. In a very clear, and at times entertaining language, the author delivers to the reader an epitome of exceptional quality. Beautiful and simple idea of discarding the information is fundamental to our understanding of the world and ourselves.
|
|
|
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Essential addition to the literature on consciousness, 18 Nov 1998
By A Customer
Norretranders does a thorough, thoughtful, and excellent job explicating what may be revolutionary ideas about consciousness. True: he tends to repeat the same thought as many as four times in a row to make sure the reader understands a new concept; but this annoying habit does help convince the reader of a number of unfamiliar ideas that are often the opposite of common sense.Norretranders tends to build his concepts one on top of the other, chapter by chapter, leading to what one expects to be a final tying-up of what consciousness really is, with clues as to how we might modulate our actions using this new information.But he doesn't wind up where he seems to be going. Starting with a theory of how consciousness is a kind of summary of millions of bits of information reduced to a mere handful, he ends up by luxuriating poetically in a warm and fuzzy vision of sublime peace and brotherhood.Along the way to this disappointing conclusion, he splits the function of the brain into two parts, which he calls the "I" and the "me."The "I" is the source we take to be our focus of attention and "will." But through an extensive discussion of the work of (and private letters and conversations with) the pioneer neuroscientist Benjamin Libet, Norretranders argues that the "will" is an illusion (like an icon on a Macintosh computer, it is a "user illusion"). We actually start doing things, he claims, before we "want" to do them. We merely assume that we "wanted" to do what we just did. Norretranders's (and Libet's) inference from this theory is that "free will" can exercise nothing more substantial than veto power.Norretranders's "me," on the other hand, is a kind of glorified noble savage made up of all the input that travels through the brain, the vast majority of which remains unconscious. (It is like the flow of electrons that eventually condense into a computer screen icon.)This division of the brain's functioning into two parts reminds one of the recently fashionable "dichotomania" that divided the brain into "left-brain" and "right-brain" thinking. It turned out (Norretranders recounts) that the brain's structure is far more complicated than such a dichotomy will allow. It may be that Norretranders's "I" and "me" division will turn out to be an equally naive notion; and that the true divisions of the conscious-unconscious brain are more than two, and more complicated than Norretranders makes out.Where do those moments belong that we sense but don't pay attention to, then are able to recall seconds later when we realize their importance? (For example, crossing a street and not "really" hearing an automobile horn until we realize too late that it was honking at us!) Are those preliminary moments "conscious," "unconscious," "preconscious," examples of short-term memory, dreams, or a combination of many elements?Where is the grandeur of consciousness when appreciating great art or beauty? Norretranders would classify such moments (which he calls "sublime") as property of the unconscious "me"; and would relegate moments of "I"-consciousness downward toward the awkward self-conscious fidgets that embarrass a stage actor who forgets his lines. This dichotomy seems backwards and anti-intellectual.Finally, the use of "I" and "me" to label parts of a dichotomy is unfortunate in that those words are parts of speech, one a subject and one an object. Consciousness can't really be divided that way.Despite these arguments, the book remains an essential one for anyone who's interested in the subject of consciousness; certainly as important as Pinker's or Dennett's recent works.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Mabel Katz
by DM Wegner
