Steven W. Smith (2)

I discovered this book because the author published an open book on DSP that is really good (http://www.dspguide.com). His expertise in DSP led me to believe this book would contain many interesting ideas. Without a doubt, this book is stimulating and thought provoking, but it is sometimes a bit difficult to completely buy into the author's development of "theorems" about consciousness and why it feels different to see consciousness from the outside and feel it as a conscious being. I feel that the author's desire to make a Copernican or Darwinian breakthrough to unseat us once again from a privileged position in the universe causes him to hand wave to get there.

My negative opinion has less to do with being uncomfortable with the ideas (though the idea that "consciousness is a limitation" can be difficult) than it has to do with the lack of rigor. While the author attempts to develop "theorems", I perceive them as only superficial. They are not real theorems in a rigorous sense. The author states in the preface that he does not want to bog the book down in rigor in order to make the ideas stand out more clearly. That choice makes sense, but I feel this makes the ideas less credible.

The best parts of the book were those passages where the author's experience in engineering, electronics, and signals/systems lent some insights about the brain. For instance, he counters the belief that the mind receives *all information* from the environment, removes the noise, and processes it. Instead, he puts forward the idea that the mind works more like a phase-lock loop, or in other words that the mind deals with noise by generating its own reality based on the partial, noisy information it receives from the world. The images in our mind that we take for reality are simply nudged by input from the world and we fill in the rest.

I don't regret reading this book and I still take this author's ideas with some weight given his expertise as an engineer, however I need more argument to completely believe the ideas.… (plus d'informations)