The User Illusion, by Tor Norretranders
1991 (in Danish); 1st english edition 1998

The book starts with a discussion of physics and moves to information theory and 
math.

Herewith my questions and comments:

p. 72-73, "Thermodynamics does not correspond to the world...Life evolves...So 
there is something missing, something radically different, which is neither 
Newton's order nor the disorder of thermodynamics but lies in between and has to 
do with complexity. Or meaning."  
-- So the meaning of life is...meaning!

p. 83, "...one of the most promising treatises published for many years. 
(Complexity as Thermodynamic Depth)" 
-- How do you decide if a theory is promising or not? Describe your promise 
detector.

p. 102, "It is not necessary to discard information when one measures.  One can 
merely copy it, without creating entropy, without losing access to the energy 
one applied when one performed the measurement."
-- Doesn't it take time and energy to copy information? How is the copying 
process not entropic?

p. 108, "Eight times I met a fork in the road; I took route 001011101110, and 
here I am." 
-- 8 does not equal 12

p. 121, "How can one couple the sender's information to recalled, excited 
exformation in the receiver?...go ask the kids." (Re puzzling over how people 
learn to talk and to understand.)
-- Dictionaries help. Words are defined from more basic words, etc.

p. 174, "We cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious."
-- assumes consciousness is either on or off (digital); might it be analog, 
consisting of shades of gray or levels?

p. 175, "...words are...absent...when I really think."
-- any musician or visual artist will agree you don't need to think in words.

p. 210, "Consciousness lags behind. The only question is by how much. A pretty 
disturbing question." 
-- Why?  I don't find it particularly disturbing.

p.227, "Without a doubt, this raises considerable...problems for common sense."
-- What problems?

Chapt. 10, entire discussion of "free will" vs Libet's 0.5 second delay
-- If unconscious decisions incorporate data obtained from the conscious mind 
(stored feedback in memory) then consciousness DOES play a role in 
decisionmaking, regardless of the 0.5 second delay.

Chapt. 12, "Origin of Consciousness"
-- If the purpose of alcohol and drugs is to loosen the hold of consciousness, 
then if the Greeks used it, they must have been conscious, eh?  Or how would you 
explain the Greeks' use of alcohol if you accept that they had bicameral 
(preconscious) minds?

p. 318, "Consciousness does not accept that it does not have control..." 
"...hence monotheism."
-- What about atheists?  Would you agree that they are conscious?

p. 323, "What really terrifies is everything you cannot control..."
-- If this is true, why are there conscious people who are happy and well 
adjusted?  Maybe terror is not the only response, eh?

p. 324, discussing different functions performed by "consciously controlled 
body" vs "the other body" (Olav Storm Jensen)
-- A question: which of the 2 bodies feels pain? If it is the conscious body, 
then is there a way to dispel it?

p. 328, "God: 'yes, it was me.'"
-- So god is the unconscious?

p. 340, "The earth caught life."
-- Very nice way of putting it.

p. 344, "...distances are growing; more space is appearing...Things are becoming 
more difficult to describe."
-- A non-sequetor; 'nothing' is EASY to describe (since there is nothing to 
describe); hence if the amount of nothing is increasing...

p. 344(2), "There is somewhere into which all that information can be pitched."
-- Also very nice.

p. 347, "(10 -43 second..."
-- Missing close parenthesis (typo)

p. 354, "The universe began when nothing saw itself in the mirror."
-- OK, where did the mirror come from?

p. 359, "...se can never understand the world exhaustively without understanding 
the whole world exhaustively."
-- OK fine, but we can continue to learn more about the world than we currently 
understand (increase our understanding) without reaching the point of 
exhaustion...and this is a good thing...so why worry about reaching totality? 
(Holism) Suppose holism only claimed there is value and insight in the bigger 
perspective of relating systems. Would holism still be "profoundly reactionary"?

p. 359, "...consciousness regaining composure throught the recognition of the 
noncouscious..."
-- What do you mean by "regaining composure"? What composure, and when was it 
lost? (When did consciousness lose it? When did computer formalism lose it? 
etc.)

[All through the book] Re "discarding information"
-- A minor point, but I find "processing" a more descriptive word than 
"discarding".  If I erase a hard drive or burn down a library am I discarding 
information? If you took the time to distinguish between discarding and 
destroying perhaps I would not have this problem but you do not.  "Processing" 
to me implies the extraction of value or at least synthesizing an abstraction or 
symbol from what is processed, rather than "discarding" which to me does not 
convey that anything was retained or affected (state change).

p. 368, re discussion of irreversibility ("Newton's laws, which are so beautiful 
and reversible in time...")
-- Are these laws reversible simply because the exclude memory (history)?  If 
the concept of time is included, then the 'reversibility' feature applies only 
to a subset of the universe, the objects and space the objects exist in.  
However the moment in time after which the reversal has taken place is different 
from the moment in time when the situation was first configured.  Perhaps there 
is a more clear way to explain this.  Reversibility can only be applied to a 
subset of things in the universe, never the entire universe.  Only be excluding 
such basic things as time can one define reversibility.  In other words, 
reversibility would require time to run backwards which is outside our 
experience.  But when time does run backwards, everything is reversed, which 
makes it pointless.

p. 383-85, re straight lines, civilization & boredom
-- (1) I was taught in school that a straight line was "the shortest distance 
between 2 points."  Why not teach the longest distance between 2 points?
-- (2) re technology making things "predictable and repeatable"
-- What about symbolism and building levels of abstraction upon levels of 
abstraction? Culture and entertainment certainly benefit from this.

p. 392, re "pure randomness..." and "pure order..." , "The ideal is not lines 
with as much information as possible..."
-- What ideal?  From whence this ideal?

p. 394-95, re the collapse of communism as a result of the limited bandwidth of 
consciousness
-- What a hoot!  Unique theory.

p. 399, "...HIV and any other differentness."
-- HIV is a disease which kills people. To use it to illustrate "differentness" 
is inappropriate.

p. 414,
-- So you have come not to praise consciousness, but to bury it!

p. 415, "But consciousness is...the method by which...we dare to give."
-- Was there no giving in the days of the bicameral mind, before consciousness 
came on the scene?  Hard to believe.

p. 415,
-- We have gone hundreds of pages without use of the word "dare" -- now it 
appears 7 times in 4 paragraths!  Is the author daring us to accept his 
theories?

p. 417 (the end)
-- So the whole point of the book is that the unconscious is richer than the 
conscious?  Kind of a letdown if this is not news.

I would have expected a bit of discussion of the phonomenon of
personality, its role in the conscious and unconscious.  It appears to
be another proof of the unconscious, perhaps a gateway between the
conscious and unconscious, and certainly an interesting thing.  Whatever.