Accompanying PDF

Please remove the unnecessary repetition of "can be found in the accompanying PDF" when in same sentence or paragraph.

Otherwise great book!

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Which you will find in the accompanying PDF...

This book is not well-suited for an audiobook. Also, what was that last chapter? You had me and made such good points and then you just got carried away by the writing itself. You "bequeathed" this chapter on us as a means of showing lots of fancy words? Really hard stop to an intriguing beginning

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1 Person fand das hilfreich

Some interesting points

The many examples of perceptual illusions are a bit tiring. The most interesting point of the hypothesis, namely what a "conscious agent" might actually be, remains elusive. I haven't really learned anything fundamentally new.

The speaker has an agreeable voice, but he sounds continually astonished, and keeps stressing the wrong words, which makes it seem that he hasn't understood the text he is reading.

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Big claims with barely any science to back them up

The authors makes huge claims about the nature of reality and how we perceive it but provides not even remotely convincing enough scientific evidence to back these claims

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Sounds brilliand, but drifts into pseudo-science

The first 7 chapters document some scientific concepts about what consciousness fundamentally is. This part seems well documented and soundly sourced. Hoffmann also brings in his own thinking concepts, such as FBT (Fitness Beats Truth) and ITP (Interface Theory of Perception). In brief: Evolution has NOT equipped its creatures with sensory organs to perceive reality, but to assure survival and procreation. ITP explains that biological creatures perceive only symbols or pointers to reality, not the reality itself. Both principles are pretty obvious, though sometimes ignored in human thinking.

Chapters 8-9 are a complete anticlimax: Human perception biases, and optical illusions, that are also (mis )used in marketing. The author even admits he counselled marketing agencies in this field. Welcome back down to the earth…

The final and lengthy chapter 10 about the "the network of conscious agents" theory is a desperate attempt to clear the way to ultimately explain the universe (including its origin, origin of life and consciousness, religions, God and - … everything we never dared asking…). Pseudo-scientific approaches go wild. Intellectual shortcuts proliferate. Virtual reality in gaming, aliens and cryptocurrencies appear alongside quantum theory, Darwinian evolution and neuropsychological concepts of consciousness. All this is fed into an intellectual food processor, making us believe that the outcome must be healthy, because the ingredients were genuine…

Serious scientists explicitly warn about intellectual shortcuts, e.g. finding parallels between quantum mechanics and human perception: These connections, however interesting and seemingly plausible, are fundamentally WRONG. Other examples in Hoffmann's book: Darwinian evolution as a general principle of reality, applicable also to cosmological and cultural evolution ??? Or: Twin Quasars, seen as one or two, according to observation methods, depicted by Hoffmann as a cosmological implementation of the Delayed Choice Quantum eraser Experiment ???

Instead of admitting "we cannot know", as serious scientists do, Hoffmann drifts into pseudo-scientific waters, no better than Helena Blavatsky a century before. - I wish he had observed Wittgenstein's citation which leads into his final chapter: "…whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent."

AUDIOBOOK: As others wrote, the over-repeated reference to the "accompanying pdf" is annoying. Furthermore, that document It is not even correct (e.g. figure 13). The speaker does his best, but the language chosen by the author, full of acronyms and references, is meant for reading, not hearing (at least in the first part). I had to buy the kindle edition alongside, to clear up misunderstandings.

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