The User Illusion

This is a Simulation - The NY Times

"It took a century for scientists to realize fully what was wrong with this picture. In ''The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size,'' the Danish science writer Tor Norretranders uses the story to launch an all-out assault on the worshipful place so often awarded to human awareness. Consciousness is not only powerless to overcome the entropic slide, he says, but incapable of giving more than the roughest sense of what is going on around us. The world as it appears is a paltry simulation. And the biggest illusion is that we trick ourselves into believing we experience the world's full glory."

The User Illusion, by Tor Norretranders

"Norretranders postulates that most of the work is done at a subconscious level. Nothing too surprising, there. But what was interesting to me was the approach he used. In his theory, the whole point of the subconscious parts of the brain is to reduce the information flow into and out of the brain down to a rate which our feeble 20 bits/sec consciousness can handle. He points out that we perceive about 12 million bits/second (10 million from vision, 1 million from touch, and the rest scattered among the other senses). That's an enormous amount of information to process. But when we look around, we don't see 10 million pixels. Looking from my computer chair, I see my computer, my desk, the windows of the room, etc. He calls this phenomenon chunking information into symbols. To quote him, "symbols are the Trojan horses by which we smuggle bits into our consciousness."