@aggie-

I am so excited to hear what you have to share as I am very interested and may buy the book.  Thank you 

The User Illusion - Comments

I began this journey, seeking out some scientific explanations about consciousness after revisiting H’oponopono in Zero Limits where Hew Len suggests reading this book. A few weeks earlier, something was brought up in a class/retreat which was a quote from a Gary Weber.  And that led me to a youtube video where Weber shared how decisions are made somewhere in the brain several seconds before the person is aware of the decision. Then we claim that “we’ve” made a decision.

Last year, I took a break from Awakening Together to do some work with Liberation Unleashed after listening to a talk by Eshwar Segobind. And during that time, through my own experience, I found it impossible to witness the making of a decision, a choice.  There was just one moment I was doing this, and then the next moment I was doing that. No one there making a “decision.”

So when this book came up, I was very much drawn to it. 

The author admits that the beginning is a bit dense but it is readable for the average reader. I’m going to do my best to understand what is being shared in these pages. 

Preface

Consciousness, an experience of an ‘I’ or a decision maker, according to historical studies isn’t older than 3000 years old. And this author seems to feel that the conscious ego, “the epoch of the I is drawing to a close.” Wow. 

Research shows that we experience far more than they are conscious of and that this idea that we are in control or our actions, is an illusion. The author says this book’s aim is to combine science with everyday life. He does warn, “even though it does rather begin at the deep end,” it is understandable by most people when given the attempt.

Chapter 1 - Maxwell’s Demon 

Who would have thought of scientists as mystics? Honestly, I don’t totally get all the science being shared in this chapter but what stood out for me was that these guys are working with thoughts... and with material that they themselves, did not know the origin of. 

James Clark Maxwell, in the 1860s, a Scottish physicist did something remarkable they say. He summarized all that was known of phenomena into four short equations. Which I guess was pretty remarkable but the author adds... “He also succeeded in predicting phenomena... that were not discovered until after Maxwell’ death.”

Another physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, said of this, “Was it a god that wrote these signs?” 

Another scientist, Heinrich Herz said, “One cannot escape the feeling that these equations have an existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.”

So the question the author poses is “how could Maxwell hypothesize his way though his analogies to something nobody had yet discovered?”

When Maxwell was on his death bed he shared with a colleague, “What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me.”

Maxwell had also written a poem after his father died...

...powers and thoughts within us, that we

Know not, till they rise

Through the stream of conscious action from where the 

Self secret lies

But when Will and Sense are silent,

By thoughts that come and go....

Evidently, such kinds of mystical experiences are common among great natural scientist as the basis of their knowledge. 

“So in that sense, it was not Maxwell who wrote Maxwell’s equations. It was something greater than himself in him.”

Wow, doesn’t that sound like intuition at work?

————————————

The author then shares quite a bit about Unifying Theories...first with Newton unifiying theories of the heavens and the earth. Then the second unifying theory was Maxwell’s unification of everyday phenomena of magnetism, electricity and light.  And after the 1980s, it seemed that breakthroughs in physics started to return to issues between science and everyday life. The author states that he feels the Third Great Unification will be between science and everyday life. Answers to our everyday questions. 

So then in 1990, a small but very qualified group of scientists assembled and an imminent physicist opened the gathering with “There is no space and no time. There is no out there out there....” That must have blown a few minds!!

What this did was to get scientist to question their beliefs. Their sacred cows and it was almost like they started all over again from scratch. 

Then the author takes us into the explanation of Maxwell’s Demon, an introduction to the subject of heat, energy, entropy, second law of thermodynamics and what all that is. It’s all quite interesting but if you’re intrigued, I’m going to point you to the book. 

For me, what it all boiled down to is that once we decide we understand things the way they are, create “laws”, we are actually boxing ourselves in. We limit ourselves. But there is something else out there, in here, that is smarter than that. I’m not sure that’s where the author is taking us but that’s what I got from it. 

One other thing that caught my attention. This is a description how temperature is gauged. 

“But in matter at a given temperature, molecules evince many different speeds. Most have speeds close to the average. We find more high-speed molecules in hot matter than in cold matter. But we also find speedy molecules in cold matter and lcthargic ones in hot.

This allows us to understand evaporation. The higher the temperature, the more high-speed molecules. If we imagine evaporation as tiny molecular rockets shooting spaceward, we can see that the hotter a liquid it, the more molecules get away.

But the statistical distribution of speeds has an interesting consequence: We cannot tell from the individual molecule to which temperature it belong. In other words, the individual molecule can have no idea which temperature it is part of.

Temperature is a concept that means anything only if we have a lot of molecules at once. It it nonsensical to ask each molecule how much temperature it has. Because the molecule does not know. It knows only one speed: it own.

Or does it? After a white, a molecule in a gas will have bumped into other molecules and therefore acquired a certain "knowledge" of the speeds of the other molecules. That is precisely why matter assumes an even temperature: the molecules keep bumping into each other and exchanging speed; a state of balance is achieved.”

If we were to exchange molecule for our little selves, what would this mean to us? I’m not exactly sure but when I read it, I thought, this is about us....

Chapter 2 - Throwing Away Information

Ok, so we need to go back to chapter 1 a bit. This second chapter is about entropy and I didn’t explain what that was so I guess I should. In chapter 1 the author speaks about the laws of thermodynamics. Heat. 

The first law of thermodynamics is that the amount of energy in the world is constant. It doesn’t appear or disappear when we “consume” it. Energy simply gets converted from one form to another. On the surface this seems pretty good. You can just go back and forth from one form of energy to another. But, this is not so. As the author states, we can heat our houses with oil, but we cannot get the oil back.

So in comes the second law of thermodynamics. It says that every time we convert energy, consume energy, it becomes less available. It converts to a form of energy that is less easily consumed or converted. Heat being the least easily used. So “the energy in the world is constant, but it gets less and less valuable - less and less availble- the more we use it.”

This is called entropy. The more we use the energy available, the less available it becomes. 

In the last chapter Maxwell’s Demon, the author shared a mental exercise that Maxwell came up with that could dispel this entropy. He said if they created a room that was separated into two chambers, created a door between them, and a finite being was there, aware of the molecules of the gases in that room, the ones moving at high vibrations  and the ones ‘cooling down’ with lower vibrations, he could open and close the door so he could sort the molecules into the two chambers, maintaining two chambers with different vibrations/temperatures so that process of energy could be maintained forever. Thus entropy would not occur and the second law of thermodynamics would be disproved. And the only reason we do not have the ability to do that now, is because we are just not smart enough... yet. 

Now honestly, I’m not sure where this discussion is going but I’m hanging in there.

In this second chapter, many scientists try to disprove what Maxwell’s Demon suggests. And a lot of it has to do with the information that that Demon would have to collect. He’d have to know what the state of every molecule in the room is. That’s a lot of data. In an ordinary room there are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules. The amount of energy the Demon would have to expend to monitor all that would not make up for the activity.

But later scientists argued that it is not the collecting of data that causes the use of energy but the forgetting of the data once it is collected. Each individual piece of data isn’t important, it’s the resulting decision based on the data that is important. He uses the act of checking out at the grocery story. Once the items have been tabulated, the individual item’s cost is no longer important, only the final amount to be paid. Now all the data that had been collected to make the decision for the Demon to open or close the door would need to be constantly erased so that more data could be obtained for new decisions. THAT’S where the energy would be used up in Maxwell’s Demon.  As the author states, “Knowledge is. Not what costs. Wisdom does.”

But the change here was that these scientists were equating mental phenomena as physical qualities. The philosophers of the time took exception to this. There were a lot of arguments but I’m not sure how relevant they are to the final discussions in this book so I”m going to skip them for now. The important point to remember is that gathering information is relatively easy and doesn’t cost much in energy consumption but forgetting it once gained is costly. 

He then goes on to macrostates and microstates. “Macrostates are such things as temperature, pressure, volume. Microstates consist of accurate descriptions of the behavior of individual components. 

“The temperature of a cloud of gas is a macrostate that does not tell us about the microstates. The temperature tells us that the molecules are rushing about among each other in a highly disorganized way at an average speed that is expressed by the temperature and distribution of speeds that is statistical.... it tells us that most molecules move at a speed close to average, while a few molecules have speed much higher or much lower than average....it does not tell us very much at all about the condition of the individual molecule. As we’ve got one hundred seventeen thousand million billion molecules flitting about at one temperature, it really doesn’t matter much which molecules have which speeds, as long as all together they distribute themselves according to the statistical model.”

Then the author goes on to talk about logarithms and I got totally lost but he wrapped it with with this statement. “Entropy is a measure of how much we cannot be bothered to keep track of and why we choose to talk about one macrostate instead. Entropy is a measure of how much we cannot be bothered to keep tidy but decide to sweep under the carpet by using a general term that tells us what we need to know - e.g. a temperature.”

“The macrostate is an expression of an interest, a relevancy. It encapsulates what interests us. What we are interested in knowing”

He goes on to talk more about this and I’m not sure I understand everything he’s saying but I think what he’s getting at is that depending on what macrostate you are interested in, there is tons of information that you are not paying any attention to. 

“Philosopher Paul Feyerabend said of Boltzmann (opponent of 2nd law of thermodynamics) “With is realization of the hypothetical character of all our knowledge, Boltzmann was far ahead of his time and perhaps even of our own.” So even the scientists are not dealing with truth or reality. Depending on that observer, researcher and what they are or are not interested in, their results may be different. Sound a little bit like this world we are in?

There was so much in this chapter and so much over my head. I’m intrigued to where we’re headed with all of this in connection with the subject of consciousness... On to the next chapter.

Chapter 3 - Infinite Algorithms

I know, I know... we’re diving into deep waters here. Each chapter I read, seems to fill out some of my previous understandings of what the author is trying to share. First, science/mathematics seems to have had as its goal to be able to explain the world in as few phrases and as succinctly as possible. “The goal of science has always been to draw up the most concise description of the world possible.” But in 1930 a study in mathematics seemed to make this goal impossible with  “... a realization that forced scientists to admit that they would never be able to prove everything in this world, that human understanding of the world will forever contain intuitive insights that cannot be proved; that human beings know more about the world than they can explain via a formal system... proof that we cannot prove everything, even when we know it is true... an infinity of truth can never be embraced by a single theory.”

Up until then, and even after this through dismissal of this finding, scientists believed that if they could define the problem, they could prove the answer. There’s a lot of history of philosophy and science in this chapter. Kant, Plato who gave voice to things that existed that we could not understand rationally. Bertram Russell and others who continued to strive to prove that if they wanted to know something, it was possible. But even this was thwarted by bumping into paradoxes. One of which is the paradox of the statement, “I am a liar.” If it is true, then the statement itself is a lie and so cannot be true. On and on.  Somehow this gets turned around by another scientist, Godel who uses “I cannot be proved.” This assertion is true if and only if it cannot be proved. Aha! So this was a proof that there are truths we cannot arrive at through mathematical and logical proofs.

This then led to the assertion that standing within a system prevents one from proving it’s consistency. “Consistency and freedom from contradiction can never be proved from within a system.”

“Godel proved that people know more than they can know whence they know it. Insight reaches further than any logical recipe can lead the mind. Godel’ s theorem in an unparalleled tribute tot he creativity of the human mind.”

As a Platonist, Godel believed that “behind the reality we perceive through our senses there was an even more real reality, composed of fundamental principles, ideas, of which the reality we perceive is merely an impression. But it exists whether we realize it or not.”

Another finding that came about from the Church-Turning thesis “tells us that we can learn nothing unless it is through experience. There is no possibility of telling in advance what will happen.” 

These two combined ended up with “human thought is more complex and less mechanical than anyone had ever believed.”

Then the chapter spins off into algorithms. Again, what a challenging topic for a non-mathematical character as myself. I’m not going to go through the whole process they shared, please read the chapter for yourself if you are interested. What I got out of it was that algorithms allow you to share a lot of information in a concise phrase. For example 0.42857142857 can be written as 3/7. 

Then the difference between random numbers and ordered numbers. Random numbers cannot be described more concisely and ordered ones can...by an algorithms. The purpose of these explanations I think finally culminate in, again, that the desired belief that the universe is ordered, predictable and provable is just not true. 

“...this century has been one of shattered illusions. Cosy assumption after cosy assumption has exploded in mathematician’s faces. The assumption that the formal structure of arithmetic is precise and regular turns out to be have been a time-bomb.” 

To make the very long story short...”The completeness of a scientific theory can in principle never be proved.”    

“We can never know whether we could express (formulae) even more concisely. Not until the day we do... Life will forever be open to us. We will never know that it cannot be expressed more beautifully. The beauty in the world is growing.”

I’m confident at some point we will pull all of this together and it will make sense why the author is sharing this journey with us. Hang in there.

Chapter 4 - The Depth of Complexity

In the last chapter we talked about random numbers and ordered numbers. In this chapter that is extended to talk about order and chaos. The author points out that both order and chaos are boring. Really. If everything is the same, it’s boring. And if it is totally a mess, that’s not interesting either. So there is this space between those two extremes that is complexity. And this complexity, is what our lives here are interested in. The weather changes, landscapes, new adventures, games, entertainment... 

Now science, the laws of thermodynamics seems to say that the world is in a continual wearing down (entropy) where eventually everything will settle into a lukewarmness... sameness but our world as we see it doesn’t seem to jive with that. 

It seems as though scientists maintain the laws of thermodynamics as unchanging but only because they did not have the ability to calculate out their formulas far enough to to find out if, they indeed, never change. 

Then came the computer and the ability to carry out terrific calculations and “even the simplest equations gave rise to very complicated solutions.” “Disorder can emerge from order - the process just happens to be complex.”

“Complexity is that which is not trivial. That which is not dull. That which we all intuitively sense but which is hard to express.”

That last sentence encapsulates most of my “spiritual” experiences. Those moments when I know something but words fail to convey what that “something” is.

The author then goes on to talk about meaning or “logical depth.” “ The more difficult the sender experiences in arriving at the message, the greater its logical depth complexity is to be measured not by the length of the message but by the work carried out previously. The meeting does not arise from the information in the message but it rises from the information discarded during the process of formulating the message, which has a specific information content. What matters is not seeing as much as you can. It is thinking before you speak.

“Logical depth is a measure of the process that leads to a certain amount of information, rather than the amount of information that is produced in can be transmitted. Complexity or meaning is a measure of the production process rather than the product, the worktime rather than the work result. The information discarded rather than the information remaining.”

And so the author brings us the the “computer” of our brains. He intimates that our brains discard information that we are not even aware of. All we are left with is what is what remains. 

I’ve kind of figured out a way to understand what the chapter is about.... the end of each chapter is a short summary. Here’s what he says about this chapter.

“The depth of an object is a measure of the amount of information discarded as it came into existence. That is to say, death is a measure of how many surprises the object has been subjected to and it’s history.

Death shows that something has interacted with the world. It has changed, but it is still at cell; out of balance, but not out of itself. It has known surprises in its time. But it is still here. It has mark the world, and the world has marked it.

It has grown deep.”

I’ve often in my life yearned for “deep” conversations. I don’t really care for social events where people talk about ordinary life events. When I was trying to figure out what to do with my life when the physical therapy field collapsed because of Medicare changes, I perused the Mt Holyoke catalog and saw they would be offering a class on “What is God?” To spend a whole semester on that question seemed too good to be true. I ended up in their philosophy program and loved it. I think that’s why we read books, meditate, post in forums like this...in hopes of a deeper conversation with this world. 

Part II - Communication

Chapter 5 - The Tree of Talking

This chapter starts out with a sharing of correspondence between Victor Hugo and his publisher after the publication of Les Miserables. Victor’s letter was simply “?” And the publisher’s response was, “!”. 

The rest of this chapter is about meaning, the depth of communication and the value of “exformation.” All the information that has been discarded before the final message is written or shared. And how all that process is still, somehow, conveyed in the information is provided.

Even though I never knew these two people and their total lives, I do know about Victor Hugo and his book. I know what publishers do and what their aims are. To a small child, this interaction between these two people will not mean anything. But to most of us, we get it immediately. “What’s the status of my new book? How’s it doing? Do people like it? How are sales?” With a response that says, “Absolutely great. People love it. Sales are incredible. You are a great success.”

That interaction has depth even though it is conveyed only with 2 bits of information. A ? And a !. This is possible because we all share a vast number of experiences. 

“Exformation is what is rejected en route, before expression. Exformation is about the mental work we do in order to make what we want to say sayable. Exformation is the discarded information, everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when and before we say anything at all. Information is the measurable, demonstrable utterances we actually come out with.” 

 What this seems to be saying to me is that there is ALOT of information that we choose to let go of, decisions are made about what to include and what not to. When you are clear about what you are going to convey, those decisions are easy to make. When you aren’t sure about what you’re going to say, like me in these posts, it gets much harder. More information, more words need to be shared because I’m not sure what you know or will understand. And like these posts, I have no idea where we are going in all this so knowing what is important and what can be discarded becomes really hard. 

The chapter’s title the Tree of talking is above. The left side starts with lots of information and through decisions about what is important and what is not, the message is whittled down to the smallest statement. BUT somehow, all that discarded information is still present in the information that is shared. The right side shows the receiver. The receive the message and depending on the amount of corresponding experiences, they will unpack that message. Each word will elicit an image or understanding which will then connect with information, understanding and suppositions. If the two are like minded, they might mirror very closely the originating person’s information and exformation. But this is not always so.

Part of this chapter shares how studies that measure the blood flow in the brain show that thinking is as much an exercise, use of blood, as physical activity. It is used however, not to bring in the information but to fuel the metabolism required to allow the nerve cell to forget what it just did. 

Having a conversation requires more brain use than just simply reporting out an incident.

Because we are always trying to whittle down to the shortest statement, we are constantly asking ourselves if there is a macrostate (temperature, weather) that can be used without having to be concerned with and communicate the microstates. Clouds are in the sky, water is freezing, wind is blowing, drops of water are falling from the sky....

But the most interesting part of this chapter for me is towards the end. “... there is good physiological sense in maintaining that we must think before we speak, that dos not answer the question as to how we ever learn to talk in the first place. Where does it come from, this ability to reconstruct information not actually present in the information we receive?”

Going back to the talking tree and the author example of children being read fairy tales by their parents... “A tree shows how the narrator compresses a lot of information into very little information. It passes downward on the left hand side. Much information becomes little information. Exformation is generated. The the little amount of information is transferred through the horizontal pipe and is received unchanged. The next problem is how to associate outward and up the tree, and obtain all the associations needed to picture the princess and the prince on the white horse.

Association tracks are laid down, patterns of recognition, which the child loves practicing again and again.

But how can this be possible? How can the child guess its way to more information than is present in the narrative?...

There must have been more information present during the process than that in the words were actually spoken. Otherwise, we would never be able to guess what we were meant to think about upon hearing words...

There must, then, be something else present, something more than just words, in a context that can teach a child to speak. More than mere verbal information... is talking the smallest part of conversation?

When we talk to one another, the talking is what we are aware of. It fills our consciousness. But if most of a conversation takes place beyond the talking, and the rest takes place in our heads, what are we not aware of it? How do our thoughts get sorted out before they emerge as speech? Is consciousness only the tip of a mental iceberg?”

He ends talking about a road sign and what makes it a road sign rather than just a pole with a sheet of metal on it. “The sign tells us explicitly that it has come into existence during the conversion of information that is no longer present.” 

In our work here, we talk a great deal about unlearning, Returning to our true self. This makes me wonder if we have a real idea about how much unlearning we are not even aware of. A whole plethora of movements we are not conscious of... like the ghost in the machine...

Chapter 6 - The Bandwith of Consciousness

The overall summary of this chapter seems to be that despite our idea that we are very aware of what is going on in our presence in any given moment, we are conscious of a very, very, very small amount. “A million times more bits (of information) enter our heads than consciousness perceives.”

“Metaphorically, consciousness is like a spotlight that emphasizes the face of one actor dramatically, while all the other persons, props, and sets on the vast stage are lost in the deepest darkness. The spotlight can move, certainly, but it takes a long time for all the faces int he chorus to be revealed, one after the other, in the darkness.”

So even though all that information is available, and does enter the mind through sensory input, we are not aware of it unless we “turn the spotlight” on it. 

A line that the author seems to have just thrown away was very interesting and appropriate for our work on the spiritual path. “To be aware of an experience means that it has passed.”

So in our everyday life, we are constantly in the past. Something that no longer exists. So for me, the question rose up, how is it possible to be in the present moment? To be present for me has always been, I’m sitting here. I can feel my feet on the ground, my body in the seat.... but that is too, as I am aware of it which means, I’m aware of what is already past. Conundrum.

The author has us do a few experiments of closing your eyes, then opening them and looking around. Then try and explain what you saw. It takes a lot longer to describe what you saw than to actually see it. Consciousness is slow. There’s far more available to us than what our consciousness is aware of. 

So we have symbols that allow us to be aware of a lot of information in a short-hand way. “They help us remember masses of information, even though we can only keep seven things in our minds at once. Symbols are the Trojan horses by which we smuggle bits into our consciousness.”

Oh yeh, studies have shown that we can only hold seven things in our consciousness at once. 

And these “Trojan horses” can have links to each other, mnemonic techniques, so that one symbol will trigger the remembrance of another and another. So longer strains of information can be recalled.

Also, repetition can increase what can be recalled and acted out as well. Actually, it’s as if consciousness is not needed at all. We aren’t even aware we are processing anything. Like driving a car, or riding a bike.

Before we are conscious of it, something sorts through all this information coming in and determines what is important to the moment and what is not. 

“The remarkable thing is that the brain receives an enormous amount of information at a high bandwith but is nevertheless able to process far more information than it receives. It then releases another quantity of information to the rest of the body, roughly the same size as the amount it takes in. Fair enough. But our consciousness does not get told much at all about what is going on!”

Going back to the last chapter’s discussion about fairy tales being read to children, the author explains that it is not just the words that get conveyed to a child but all kinds of information from the adult reading it. How the adult reacts and when... all this is taken in by the child, and with repetition learns all the unsaid information that the adult has about anything in the story. “We say a great deal not said in words.”

“This notion that there are significant portions of the personality that exist out of one’s own awareness which are there for everyone else to see may seem frightening. The unconscious is not hidden to anyone except the individual who hides from himself those parts which persons significant to him in his early life have disapproved.”

“Others know more about us than we know ourselves. Because through our body language, others have access to a knowledge of the millions of bits in our brains that never reach our consciousness.… exformation is more important than information. It is more important to know what is going on in people’s heads than to understand the words they speak.” 

Another very interesting sentence was, “Consciously one can lie, unconsciously one cannot.” In other words, what we hold unconsciously within us, we communicate truthfully to the world. 

There’s tons more in this chapter, about media, why schizophrenics are the way they are which ties into the finding that you can’t lie about what you truly think and feel.  It’s a deep swim but if you feel intrigued, have a read.

Chapter 7 The Bomb of Psychology

This continues the idea that there is much that happens of which we are not aware of. AND that we are influenced by perception that does not register in our consciousness. Subliminal influences. 

“The ratio of what we sense to what we perceive is 1,000,000 to 1.” 

As far back as 1850, scientists have indicated that “most of what took place in our head was unconscious.” And “consciousness must necessarily be a result of unconscious processes, whether we like it or not.”

“The unconscious processes in the mind handle information rapidly and in parallel, while the conscious processes are slower and serial - they take one thing at a time, like an old fashioned computer.”

Harking back to the fairy tale information shared in the last chapter, that we gather and imply meaning from perceptions that do not register in our conscious mind. “Lots of experiences we undergo in everyday life may involve our recognizing something we are not conscious of recognizing.”

So Who is sorting this information that is happening beyond our conscious awareness? “There must necessarily be a degree of “wisdom” in the sorting that takes place - otherwise we would just go around conscious of something random, with no connection to what really matters.”

“Consciousness is ingenious because it knows what is important. But the sorting and interpretation for it to know what is important is NOT conscious. Subliminal perception and sorting is the real secret behind consciousness.”

Then the author moves on to the process of thinking. Schopenhauer stated, “Thoughts die the moment they are embodied by words.” “Thinking is highly unconscious... the actual process of thinking, so usually thought to be the very life of consciousness, is not conscious at all...Only its preparation, its materials, and its end result are consciously perceived.”

This is a long quote but amazing to contemplate.

“The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it. and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest Just so the world of each of us, however different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial] chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently . We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff.

Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike, embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cattle-fish, or crab.” William James 1890 

The author talks in this chapter how science has turned away from this understanding of the unconscious impact on our lives. In part because in the 50s advertising started to use subliminal messages and the public was outraged. So the research on this part of science became very sparse and quiet. 

I know that most of this is currently dealing with the physical sensations, receiving perceptions from the sense world but on another level, it is starting to sound very much like our conversations about intuition and inner wisdom. 

Chapter 8 - The View From Within

This chapter is all about our ability to see and perceive. 

“If seeing seems effortless, it is because we are not conscious of it”

In an attempt to develop artificial intelligence since the 60s, scientists have discovered that computers are very good at learning facts, but to get them to see and perceive is very hard indeed.

Much of the chapter is centered around how we do not perceive what we see. We have a blind spot in each eye, but we are not conscious of it in our everyday seeing. There is an exercise given where you can see this for yourself.

Series of lines are seen as a cube. You can’t not see it as a cube. Triangles are seen even though they aren’t really there. That they are a different color than the surrounding page even though they are on the same paper. Geometric illusions that show we think one line is longer than another because of the way it is placed in connection with other lines. Pictures that if you look at them one way, you see one thing. If you look at them another, you see something else. 

“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 processing has discarded information so that what we see is a simulation, a hypothesis, an interpretation; and we are not free to choose.”

“We do not experience the world as raw data... what we experience has acquired meaning before we become conscious of it.”

Wow. If anyone needed a good reason not to trust your thinking, this is the proof needed.

Then there’s a long section on how color is the property of the brain rather than the object. “The colors we see do not exist in the outside world. They arise only when we see them.” 

The author also explains why we love looking at a gorgeous sunset or an incredible visual landscape.... because our brains have something to process..”when our eyes are put to work, when there is information to be discarded, when the reduction of sensation to visual digestion, as pleasurable as crispy vegetables and fresh fish...” 

So enter Richard Gregory, an experimental psychologist... “It is not a great step from regarding experience as interpretation rather than a reproduction of reality.”

And people think the Course In Miracles is radical. “The dramatic insight the visual illusions provide is that we never experience things directly; we see them as an interpretation.”

Of course this book thinks of consciousness as the process of the human brain. A very highly organized and extensive super computer. But with all these great minds thinking about it, they still do not have an answer for what consciousness is. 

The section on attention is really interesting. “At any given moment, the brain contains a very large number of nerve cells oscillating in synchrony. Very few of them ever become amplified into the dominant 40Hz oscillation for even the tiniest instant (the threshold needed to gain attention). None of these oscillations will ever become the object of attention. They represent the unconscious processing of information by the brain.”

The section that stood out for me the most was, “Indications are that the very idea of an inside and an outside is heading for a fall. From physics and neurophysiology we are getting the same message, perhaps most elegantly put by John Wheeler as quoted in Chapter One; “There is no out there out there.”

Chapter 9 - The Half Second Delay

So this is a loooong chapter with lots of research and competing studies and it’s all about one finding by an American neurophysiologist, Benjamin Libet who discovered that the brain initiates action a half second before the person becomes conscious of that the decision has been made. Not only that, but the person believes, is deceived by consciousness that it made the decision a half second earlier. What?

“Our actions are unconscious. Even when we think we make a conscious decision to act, our brain starts a half second before we do so! Our consciousness is not the initiator- unconscious processes are.

“It tells us that we can decide on what we do. Yet it is apparently a mere ripple on the surface, a little tin god pretending to be in charge of things beyond its control. Our consciousness claims that it makes decisions, that it is the cause of what we do. But our consciousness is not even there when the decision is made. It lags behind, but it does not tell us that. It dupes itself.”

“The conscious experience is projected back in time... what we experience is a lie, for we experience it as if we experienced it before we experienced it.” And there is no neurophysiological process that can be defined to account for this. Interesting.

There is a question of whether a metaphysical explanation might be possible but the scientists seem little inclined to go there.

So this brings up the question of free will. “Consciousness cannot initiate an action, but it can decide that it should not be carried out.... Consciousness is the instance of selection that picks and chooses among the many options no consciousness offers up... we can control our actions but not our urges.”

 But the author ends up asking how often do we veto, consciously veto an action .2 seconds before it is carried out? “It is the highly unpleasant situations in which we are conscious of ourselves and conscious of the fact that we keep interrupting our impulses to act...Clumsy. Awkward. Strained. We interrupt ourselves because we may be uncertain of our ability to perform, or fear the judgement of others. We are afraid of being laughed at. When we are conscious, we tend to judge ourselves, to view ourselves from without, to see ourselves through other people’s eyes.”

“The veto exists even if we don’t use it. But it means only that we do not enjoy doing so; and this again means that we feel most content when our consciousness does not exercise free will. People are happiest when it is not their consciousness that selects the non conscious urges to act. People feel most content when they just act.”

Wow! 

“But the consequence of this observation is that we must face the fact that it is not our consciousness that is in charge when we’re feeling good. So we must ask: Do we possess free will only when we are feeling bad? Or do we also possess free will when we feel good? And if so, who possess it?

That’s the next chapter!!

I still am not sure where the author is headed or where this discussion is headed but it is starting to bring up the iceberg illustration. The majority of Who We Are is below the surface. And my belief system is that the metaphysical is real and active in this process. 

I didn’t mention it but these experiments they carried out proved that subliminal impulses do indeed affect us even when we don’t register them consciously.  So if you have absorbed racist behaviors, for example, you may not realize your approach to the world is racist. It all happened below your awareness but was absorbed by your unconsciousness and affects your behaviors and decisions. And unless you are aware enough, uncomfortable enough, you’re going to run on the program set out for you. A lot to consider here. 

Can’t wait to see where we go from here.

Chapter 10 - Maxwell’s Me

This chapter opens up with a story about an exceptional soccer player, Michael Laudrup,who in a match in 1983 was wide open, no defenders, so he had plenty of time to consider what he was going to do to get a goal... missed it. “Unique situations where there is time to think things over. And where things go wrong as a result.”

I had to laugh about this story because I have experienced similar situations myself. I used to play pool with my husband. He is very good. Other members of our team were very good. But I could spot every time they were not going to preform very well. And in myself as well. As soon as I saw them or myself starting to think about what they were going to do next, they’d screw up. 

This chapter is all about the difference between the ‘I’ which is conscious and the Me which is not. The Me is what takes over where there is not time to think. “We can act before we become conscious of why we act. Not only do we not know what the idea of acting is; we have not idea what made us act.”

Another interesting tidbit was the explanation why the heroes in westerns always won the gunfight. Or a theory of why it was at all possible that they would always win the gunfight even when the other guy drew first. The fact that the villain had to decide when he was going to shoot, hampered his movements. The hero on the other hand, acts reflexively and automatically the instant he sees the villain’s hand move. If we have to think about it, be conscious of what we are doing, we’re at a disadvantage,

And of course, this all refers back to the last chapter where we learned, we don’t consciously begin any action anyways. So there’s more to this ‘I’ than we are consciously aware of.

The author makes this distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’ as it relates to our free will. “I possess free will, but it is not my I that possess it. It is Me.”

“The I is the conscious player. The Me is the person in general. The I is not at the wheel in many situations; when urgency is required, for example. The I is in charge of lots and lots of situation where there is time for thought. But there is not always time.”

The author shares that the I takes credit for much of what it does not do. Taking credit for what Me does and actually mostly, refuses to even believe there is a Me.

However, this delay that we talked about in the last chapter really forces us to “face the fact that we are far more than we believe ourselves to be; that we have far more resources than we perceive; that we leave our mark on more of the world than we notice.”

There’s loads of information and discussion about free-will, and the struggle between the I, which wants to control everything, and the Me that actually does perform much of our activity. How do you get the I to give up control. Practice can develop the I’s trust in the Me activity. Training, rehearsals, training is key. Automatic skills are built that do not need conscious awareness... riding a bike, playing soccer, etc.

I think this is the “flow” we hear so much about. The I is out of the way and the Me is operating. They call it the +24 state in this chapter. “The important part about +24 is the enjoyment and the automatic nature of what one is doing plus the loss of self, selfhood, and the absence of ego.”

There’s a section where the author ties this into religious teachings... “the non-judging state of pure awareness.” And some of the techniques, mantras, prayers, actually overload the I and therefore allow the Me to come to the forefront. 

So the author states that free-will is not gone, but it is not exercised by the I, but by the Me.

He ends the chapter referring back to a statement James Maxwell (Maxwell’s Demon) made on his deathbed. “What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me.”

Chapter 11 - The User Illusion

The chapter opens up with the results of an operation on a young man to help manage his epileptic seizures. They ended up severing the connection between the two hemisphere’s of the brain. Having done that they proceeded to put together experiements to explore the effect of that on other functions of the brain.

They found out that the left side of the brain is in charge and not only that, but that when the left brain  was asked to explain why the right side of the brain pointed to the card it did, it didn’t miss a beat making up an answer to why the right side ordered the hand to pick that card even though it was not the answer. The above picture shows the experiment. 

“The knowledge gained from this and similar patients is thus the question as to how many of our everyday actions are explained in our consciousness by completely misleading rationalizations after the fact. How often do we lie to ourselves about the motives of our actions?”

Evidently consciousness will make up stories when they have done something when prompted by unconscious urges. “The conscious self thus attempts to weave a tale that it can live with.”

“The lesson we learn from studies of split-brain patients is that the self, or the “I” (as we call it in this book) lies like crazy to create a coherent picture of something it does not understand in the slightest. We lie our way to the coherence and consistency we perceive in our behavior”

“Consciousness simply does not have the capacity to convey all the activity behind the conscious experience. Therefore, the mental variety is concealed from us, so we experience a unity that is not particularity accurate.”

Ok so first free-will is essentially gone and now, we lie to ourselves. What next?

The author goes on to describe the “hidden observer” which was first realized through hypnotically induced states of deafness. Was it possible that the hypnotized patient was somehow still aware of what was going on? The same question about an anesthetized patient. Is there some part of the patient that is aware of what is happening even though it appeared they were not aware? They have found out that this is indeed true. 

This just emphasizes how little we really know about consciousness.

“Consciousness is a peculiar phenomenon. It is riddled with deceit and self-deception; there can be consciousness  of something we were sure had been erased by an anesthetic; the consciousness is happy to lie up hill and down dale to achieve a rational explanation for what the body is up to; actual perception is the result of a devious relocation of sensory input in time; when the consciousness thinks it determines to act, the brain is already working on it; there appears to be more than one version of consciousness present in the brain; our conscious awareness contains almost no information but is perceived as if it were vastly rich in information. Consciousness is peculiar.”

“The content of our consciousness is already processed and reduced; put into context, before we experience it.”

“What we experience directly is an illusion, which presents interpreted data as if they were raw. It is this illusion that is the core of consciousness; the world experienced in a meaningful, interpreted way.”

So then the author moves on to the subject of this chapter, the User Illusion, which is based off the model of the Apple Computer.  Before Apple, computers were built and used by people who knew code, so it was complicated to use one. Apple developed a system by which people who knew very little about computers would be able to use it. 

People think they are dealing with words, folders, emails, pictures, etc...but truly “there are no folders, trash cans, or pocket calculators inside. There are just quantities of 0’s and 1’s in sequence. Indescribable quantities. A computer can contain many million 0’s and 1’s. But this is nothing that bothers the user; all he needs is to extract his work when he has finished it. The user is completely indifferent to these enormous numbers of 0’s and 1’s. The user is only interested in what the user illusion presents: pages of a chapter, folders of completed chapters...”

“The user illusion is a metaphor, indifferent to the 0’s and 1’s; instead it is concerned with overall function. .. a good metaphor for consciousness. Our consciousness is our user illusion for ourselves and the world. The user illusion is one’s very own map of oneself and one’s possibilities of intervening in the world.”

“ but it is not only the I experienced as our personal identity and active subject that is an illusion. Even what we actually experience is a user illusion. The world we see, Mark, feel, and experience is an illusion. There are no colors, sounds, or smells out there in the world. They are things we experience. This does not mean that there is no world, for indeed there is: the world just is. It has no properties until it is experienced. At any rate, not properties like color, smell, and sound”

So then, what if we experienced the world without this go between “user”? The author shares some experiences researchers have had with mind altering drugs. Aldous Huxley took Mescaline and of course his experience was astounding. “This is how one ought to see.” He said again and again. 

“The function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything tha is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and the nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this massive largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.”

We don’t learn only when we are conscious of learning. Tacit knowledge is knowledge that we know but if asked about it, we can’t state it. Like skills that we have. There’s more knowledge in it than we can put into words. This is why it isn’t enough to read something but to practice and practice to absorb this knowledge that can’t be contained in mere words. 

So much information and all of it pointing to a part of us that is not something we are conscious of, aware of, that motivates us, moves us, defines our reality for us. This is an awful lot to take in. 

Chapter 12 - The Origin of Consciousness

I’m going to try and summarize this very long chapter. 

We’ve already talked about how there is an “I” which we think of as our conscious self. And there is a Me that operates very much of what happens in our body/emotions/thoughts and of which we are not aware of. 

But in 1976, Julian Jaynes from Princeton claimed that man has not always been conscious. Before 3000 years ago, man was not conscious. We had no sens of an “I” that made decisions. The bicameral brain was present. In this, the right brain talked to the left side of the brain and was like “hearing voices” that the left brain interpreted as being instructed by the Gods. 

The author uses the metaphor of us doing routine tasks, like driving our car into town. We are mostly unconscious of what we are doing. Taking a right, then a left, lifting a hand to turn the wheel, easing up on the gas pedal, stepping on the brake. No conscious thinking is going on. This is how these bicameral men lived.

It seems the first vestiges of consciousness showed up in 640 to 560 BC in Greece where the motto of “Know thyself” originated. To know yourself, to see yourself from the outside is the beginning of consciousness. They also show that religion reflects the changes of consciousness. 

“ first there is a pre-conscious phase, where people do not possess free well but act directly and without reflection upon the gods commands.(like in Ancient Greece) A socially conscious phase follows, in which Freewill is regulated via a social contract (10 Commandments) pronounced by a human being (Moses) with special abilities to hear God; focus is on the community and ceremonies. In the third phase, a personally conscious phase, the relationship between man and God is again internal (as in the pre-conscious phase) but now is conscious: free will implies the possibility of sin in mind as well as deed.“

The idea of God shows up when the I can’t explain all the aspects and actions of the unconscious Me. “The concept of God covers everything about the Me that is not the I.”

Then, human self awareness disappeared for about 500 years, no one seems to know why but interestingly enough, it reappears when the technology to manufacture mirrors in a way that accurately reflect images was possible. This was during the Renaissance and it gave people to see themselves as other see them. With attention shifting to how others see us, the I gains control. We begin to see ourselves as separate from the world and our angst begins. 

The body is the holder of much of this unconscious Me. There’s so much we don’t consciously control, and that terrifies the I. And so we see religions incorporating body postures, breathing techniques to try and tap into this Me.

“For it is not the conscious I that thinks at all, but the unconscious Me. Everything the I cannot explain.”

Chapter 13 - Inside Nothing

I’ve been hoping as I went along in this book that it would become easier to understand. Not.

But here’s the gist of what I got out of this chapter. A whole section deals with our going out into space and having the opportunity to see the world from outside of it. Similar to the span of time when mirrors became available and people began to look at themselves from outside. The emergence of the Gaia theory, that the earth is a living organism. We are all in symbiotic relationship with each other and every other organism on the planet.

Then the universe is looked at. A lot of talk about entropy, discarded information... a lot I don’t quite understand but let’s go to the end of the chapter where the origin of the universe becomes the subject.

Well, looking to measure entropy, they found that black holes allowed for that. How, I don’t understand but for me, the idea of this world, or parts of this world Being inextricably drawn into this black hole and disappear completely and can never come out...hmmm kind of sounds like that last step into awakening.

Then they get around to the moment of the Big Bang... actually the moment before the Big Bang. At that point, they actually say the whole thing was a big 0 (zero). Nothing. They actually have a theory that says something CAN come from nothing. 

“But everything adds up to a big round 0, an interesting consequence of the laws of quantum mechanics emerges. For they state that nothing - empty space- sometimes divides, and for a split second becomes something. The smaller this something is, the longer it is allowed to exist. A zero can be allowed to exist as long as it likes. So if the universe is zero, it can exist forever.”

“Tyron and Vilenkin’s theory that the universe began as a quantum fluctuation, a disturbance of Nothing, a quantum leap”

“Seen from without, there is zilch, nothing. Seen from within, there is everything we know. The whole universe.”

Then we have John Wheeler’s “There is no out there, out there.” Is illustrated by this picture. “We are participators in a universe rather than mere observers” “The universe began when nothing saw itself in the mirror” “To be or not to be is not the question; it is the answer”

The “tiny mad idea” from the Course rises up. Emptiness from the Tao matches up to the big zero of what is. Even in all these theories I cannot understand, they seem to be metaphors for much of what the spiritual path talks about. We shall see as we press on.