Is human a conscious, rational being? Can we explain everything that happens to us or around us? Are all our(re)actions, decisions, choices in life done consciously? One would be taken aback if I were( sorry if the author and the science) were to tell you that consciousness plays hardly any role in our lives.
"To be aware of an experience means that it has passed"
How do you explain dreams? Am sure all of us would have at least one dream that came true. Not day dreams, but dreams - things that we saw, felt or perceived when we were asleep - unconscious. How do you explain that? How about De Ja Vu? What about the first impressions that we frame of people? Without knowing a thing about a person, what is it that tells us about the person that lets you perceive and frame an impression? When we see a thing or place, how much of it is from our memory or from first hand perception?
"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"
Why are we so good are doing automated, repeated tasks, say driving/ cycling? Are we consciously driving all the time? All these automated tasks are best done when we are unaware/ unconscious. The moment we become conscious, we in fact falter( that is what happens when we are under pressure). Say if you were to consciously speak in a foreign language that you recently learnt, you would fumble.
"The words are merely references to something not present"
Sleepwalking, Blindsight, Love at first Sight, and many more things are really not results of consciousness. All these happen without your conscious. You are conscious of only the problem and the solution, but the process of arriving at solution is not through conscious. That is consciousness is only an implementer, there is something else, a silent, hidden observer that really is taking decisions.
In effect consciousness is discarded/ filtered information, that is important to you. But the filtering is not done by consciousness. If things were so simple, Artificial Intelligence could have handed over mental activities from human to machines. No machine is as intelligent as a man is. All they are good at is "Computation".
"It is not what we say to each other every day that establishes all the meaning and beauty and truth, it is everything we think before we speak"
Well that is a load of information or processed discarded information? Too many questions. I happened to stumble upon this book through Quora. I was following a post on a lazy day and many mentioned how insightful this book "The User Illusion" by Tor Norretrandes is. And happened to get hands on this book in a completely unexpected way. This books is very intriguing, though at times it gets into too much theory, science and even history. The book is divided into four parts - Computation, Communication, Consciousness and Composure. First two chapters are tough to get through. Many a times it was too much for me to read or process all that data. The author tries to explain about consciousness from different scientific fields - Thermodynamics, Information Theory, Psychology, Chaos Theory etc. This is where he walks us through the history of science and how that the theory of consciousness was born way back during 1850’s as Maxwell’s Demon.
"Is talking the smallest part of conversation?"
Third chapter is the real gist of this book. He explains about Consciousness, the half-a-second delay, how much time the consciousness lags behind. Our reactions, decisions are lot quicker but till we are aware of them we cannot act. There is a hell lot of information that gets into the brain through different senses(over 11 millions of bits of information every second), eye, skin, ear, nose, and mouth whereas our consciousness can only process 40 bits per second. Hence the brain processes all these information filters most of it, and gives us(consciousness) only what is important to us. And the process of this ex-formation( filtering information) happens unconsciously. Most of our what we experience, and most of what we do is unconscious. Isn’t that surprising?
“Civilization is about removing information about our surroundings; discarding information about nature so our senses are not burdened with all that information and our consciousness can concentrate on other matters.”
Last chapter is about how we perceive world and what it really is. As humans we tend to seek predictability. We want to have a theory to everything, reason out and if possible find a formula which can be applied to give expected results. But this is not true. Consciousness is gating the tremendous possibilities. Consciousness is everything put in order, Subconscious is chaos. Can we manage Chaos? Is a human being more than what he thinks he is, is he more than what is his consciousness? Is consciousness an evolution to cope up with the complex world?
"A thing not structured and organized contains more information, because it is more difficult to describe"
"You sense far more than you are conscious of. Whether you want to or not"