I have finished The User Illusion, Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, by Tor Norretranders and, as some of the reviewers said, it's a real tour-de-force of some of the major controversies in science of the past 150 years or more, especially biology and physics.
The author, an internationally-known Danish science writer is trying to show why some of the basic conflicts in the history of science turn on what we mean by information, communication, entropy, and consciousness, and this in turn requires us to understand how our brains work in its transactions with the world.
As it turns out, consciousness plays an almost negligible role in communication, understanding and learning. Most of this work is accomplished by our vast unconscious.
Consciousness is something of a fraud, as Norretranders argues, largely a bystander to the work of our larger unconscious, our bodies and our brains as they conduct the huge bulk of our transactions with the world moment by moment.
And as most in neuroscience now agree, the Me or our unconscious self controls up to 98 percent of our lives, including nearly all our basic decisions.
Norretranders refers to this embodied exchange with the world as the work of the unconscious "Me" and contrasts it with the conscious "I". Our Me is our embodied selves of brains and senses and limbs that are a miracle of learning, adapting, and rejecting the millions of bit of information that come to us constantly.
Norretranders begins the book with a quote from one of the great figures of science, James Clerk Maxwell, something he is reported to have said on his deathbed.
"What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself within me."
Many scientists, including Einstein, report that some of their most important insights seem to come to them unbidden, something of a gift from within as Maxwell reported.
Norretrander's book demonstrates the truth of what Maxwell was pointing to and also why all of science must take into account the role of our brains and of information in coming to know what we mean by "reality."
Our Me is not some kind of mystical "higher self" that is not in touch with an eternal reality that we can tap into and derive miraculous powers. This Me is is earth-bound, material, and physical and it's abilities are nothing short of miraculous, even more so if we can learn to get out of its way.
Some of Norretranders favorite examples of how the Me works are taken from soccer and other sports; many leading players report that they play “unconsciously”, without conscious thinking.
In my own life, I am trying to puzzle out the implications of these findings for learning a foreign language; clearly we need to get out of the way of the unconscious in learning a language. This doesn't mean that we don't need practice, and a lot of it. I think it does mean that we need to keep on practicing, with the conscious and measuring eye of our conscious I kept in abeyance, letting our unconscious slowly but surely build a new vast way of thinking and speaking.
Despite its subordinate role (as a kind of after the fact veto power) Norretranders doesn't argue for the abandonment of the I; rather he argues for coming to terms with its far more minor role in understanding the world around us and what this means for everyday life and for science itself. That's what he means by his subtitle, "Cutting Consciousness Down to Size."
Norretranders even discusses (briefly) how religion, at its best, is a strategy for engaging our "Me" with meditation, ritual, and mantras.
While the role of the conscious I is subordinate, mainly serving as an after the fact veto power over the results of the unconscious, the I of consciousness can come to haunt our daily life, up in our heads, with thoughts, fears, and apprehensions that are often wildly out of touch with reality. Here again we must "cut consciousness down to size" by understanding that these thoughts and thinking are often what the unconscious rejects as unneeded or "false." And we must find strategies for keeping in touch with reality and the truth.
One of the take away lessons I find in Norretrander's book is that our Higher Power turns out to be our Lower Power and it is miraculous indeed and sadly unknown. We are Strangers To Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, as the psychologist Timothy Wilson argues.
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