Tor Norretranders is Denmark’s leading science writer with a track record of best sellers. It follows that his book is a well written compilation of diverse scientific theories and findings, all presented in a chatty style and broken into short chapters and sections that help to keep our interest alive. For anyone who reads a fair number of popular science books there are a lot of familiar names, typically well explained and often presented in an original way or with genuinely useful insights. T

Tor Norretranders is Denmark’s leading science writer with a track record of best sellers. It follows that his book is a well written compilation of diverse scientific theories and findings, all presented in a chatty style and broken into short chapters and sections that help to keep our interest alive. For anyone who reads a fair number of popular science books there are a lot of familiar names, typically well explained and often presented in an original way or with genuinely useful insights. This alone is a good enough reason to read this book for pleasure. For today’s army of internet warriors, it will have many sharp points that help in debates on diverse topics. To keep us on our toes, it also includes a few seriously defective ones which may impress the unwary, the most egregious being the very poorly supported claim that humanity first became conscious about 3,000 years ago. That is one piece of spurious misinformation we must all now work to forget. In addition we need to be aware that the age of his book means it has no references to MRI brain scans, which open up entirely new ways to investigate the particular phenomena he describes.



Science writers typically seem to go into paroxysms when trying to explain or discuss the phenomenon of consciousness. They insist that the topic is enormously complex and its solution is utterly beyond our reach, the ultimate puzzle of the universe, and for this reason they throw into the basket everything they know, some of which is even relevant. It provokes a tendency to mistake word games for poetry, clever twists of language for deep philosophy, geeks for creative artists.



On the theme of consciousness, Norretranders has his own interesting twist, which is to argue that consciousness is far less central to the way our minds function than we may imagine; he virtually suggests that our conscious mind is a passive observer of the work done out of awareness by the unconscious mind. He makes a good case but I think he is wrong; he gets too lost in the sheer quantity of his material and fails to focus on the argument itself; he presents mountains of evidence to support his case and fails to appreciate that it is more important and more useful to pay attention to the material that calls it into doubt. Firstly, we have Popper’s concept of scientific method to remind us that no amount of supporting evidence can outweigh evidence of being wrong. Secondly, we have Norretranders’ own argument that a large quantity of information is no better than noise; it only becomes meaningful after most of it is discarded, selectively, and reduced to a simple product of reasoning, which becomes its point or its meaning.



Worst of all, he tries to simplify a biological and psychological phenomenon into the language of physics and mathematics, in the form of information theory, and even his own material in this book is sufficient to tell him that this is a doomed assignment from the outset. Yes it is possible to reduce consciousness (for example) to a simpler, physical or mathematical description, but only by throwing away most of what we know, and we cannot reconstruct consciousness from the resulting simplistic description. He is just plain wrong; his argument can only work to the extent that there is a conscious mind available to read and consider his argument, which already demonstrates that his argument does not work after all.



Some quotes from the book:



The interesting things in life may not be the ones that take long explanations to describe but those that take many experiences to get to know. [p80]



A biological creature is the result of a very long evolutionary computation. ... A “yes” or a “no” may be the result of a whole mass of hard-won experience. [p81]



The concept of information is a very bad one if it is taken at face value. If you suppose that the information in information theory is about meaning, ... you are in for a disappointment. ... Because it is not what we say to each other every day that establishes all the meaning and beauty and truth our everyday conversations contain; it is everything we think before we speak. [p98]



The interesting thing about words is not that they can be said but that there was something that could be said. The interesting thing about speech is not how we speak but that we have something to say. [p106]



The American anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson ... wrote in 1966 ... “As mammals we are familiar with, though largely unconscious of, the habit of communicating about our relationships... Like other terrestrial mammals, we do most of our communicating on this subject by means of kinesic [movement] and paralinguistic signals, such as bodily movements, involuntary tensions of voluntary muscles, changes of facial expression, hesitations, shifts in tempo of speech or movement, overtones of the voice and irregularities of expression...” ... The problem is that in practice we humans do not wish to admit that we are animals. We think our consciousness is identical with ourselves. So we tend to believe that everything we say lies in the words. We take ourselves literally. We think information is the important part of a conversation.[p149]



The insight that consciousness plays a smaller role in human life than most of us would believe may be vital because it is the only insight capable of transforming a culture that has serious viability problems. [p161]



If all the information that thunders through our senses is merely discarded, apart from the bit we are aware of, how can we tell that the bit we are aware of is the right one? [p173] ... If consciousness selects at random from what comes in, it really is not much use. There must necessarily be a degree of “wisdom” in the sorting that takes place – otherwise we could go around conscious of something random, with no connection to what really matters. [p173] ... Consciousness is based on an enormous discarding of information and the ingenuity of consciousness consists not of the information it contains but of the information it does not contain. [p173]



We do not see what we sense. We see what we think we sense. Our consciousness is presented with an interpretation, not the raw data. Long before this presentation, an unconscious information processing has discarded information so that what we see is a simulation, a hypothesis, an interpretation, and we are not free to choose. [p187]



What we experience has acquired meaning before we become conscious of it. [p187]



The problem of other minds is closely related to the problem of the existence of the external world. How can we say there even is one. A Danish philosopher, Peter Zinkernagel, has solved this problem by pointing out that we cannot say there is no external reality: language breaks down totally if we assert that language does not have anything to talk about. ... But this is not proof that there are other minds (or an external reality, for that matter). It is merely a stating of the fact that here is a problem we cannot discuss... unless you acknowledge the existence of other minds, you have nobody to talk to about this point of view of yours. [p196]



Human consciousness possesses a high degree of complexity. It is a phenomenon of considerable depth. A great deal of information is discarded in its making... We must therefore now ask: does creating consciousness take time? Does discarding most of the sensory information before we experience also take time?” Well, it must. So the real question is how long it takes... because we sense constantly and we are conscious – almost – all the time. So if consciousness takes time, it must constantly lag behind! [p209]



An actor has a much higher bandwidth than language does. There are gestures and gesticulations, intonations, movements, glances, and charisma; a series of monverbale communications which the audience perceives more or less consciously. Similarly, the musician does not merely deliver the score but hopes to transform it into notes that supply it with pauses, accents, phrasing and other goodies. [p263]



The theme of psychotherapy can be formulated as the I’s acceptance of the Me: the acceptance of the fact that it cannot control the real subject of an act even though our entire culture tells us we can if only we try to be a bit pious and holy. The point of psychotherapy for the individual is the lesson: I accept my Me. [p271]



Heidegger expressed the angst at the way the world can be freely interpreted but experienced only through interpretation: the angst of the I at not being the Me. [p274]



In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard describes the feeling of despair which comes at three levels: ... “The despair of not being conscious that one has a self; the despair of not wishing to be oneself; the despair at wishing to be oneself.” [p275]



The content of our consciousness is already processed and reduced, put into context. Conscious experiences possess depth: They have been put in context; lots of information has been processed but is not presented to us. A mass of sensory information has been discarded before conscious awareness occurs – and this sensory information is not presented. Yet the experience itself is based on the discarded information. [p288] ... We experience not the raw sensory data but a simulation of them. The simulation of our sensory experiences is a hypothesis about reality. This simulation is what we experience... It takes time to achieve this depth... There are bundles and bundles of intermediate calculations that are not relevant to our actions in the world. We have to solve the binding problem before we can experience anything at all; we have to form a hypothesis about where the sound came from before we hear it. [p289]



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. [p309]



The holism – reductionism controversy today is a debate that may be said to be passé; false opposites. Actually, none of the parties to this debate had grasped the real point, which P.W.Anderson had already formulated in his slogan “More is different,” which originated from a lecture he gave in 1967. “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.” ... Anderson’s point, therefore, is that reductionism does not necessarily conflict with the view that complexity exists and new natural phenomena arise every time we step up the scale and study new layers of the universe. [p356]



The road to complexity is simple but long. When simple rules are allowed to beaver away long enough in time or in a sufficient number of component parts, completely new properties appear; they emerge, break out, pop up, come into view. These emergent properties cannot be found by studying a small collection of component parts. They can be seen only when there are so many parts that collective influences, group properties, can occur. Temperature for example is a property that yields no meaning if we observe very few molecules. A large number is required before temperature is present. We cannot see from the individual molecules what temperature it is part of, for temperature is a collective property manifested as a statistical relation: A temperature describes the distribution of velocities among lots of molecules... [p364]



Life is an emergent property of matter, not a property of matter’s component parts.[p385]



Consciousness must make do with very few bits per second for nourishment. It is like fast food: There is almost nothing to digest, no bones and fibre to discard during and afterward. [p397]

