Explores the consequences of consciousness being just a pattern. Would it continue if the pattern is paused? Seems yes, since we survive being unconscious. So we move in space and time, but still consciousness feels continuous.
What if you pause it, destroy it, recreate it somewhere else. Would it not continue then as well (the classic teleporter question). But it doesn't stop here.
What if you destroy it, but it just happens to continue somewhere else? Then it should continue there as well. So if you think that teleportation would not mean death, then you kind of have to accept that if anywhere in the universe at any time the same pattern exists when you die, then you can't really die because you'll just continue on from there instead.
Not sure I accept it, but it's certainly mind-bending to think about!
• "The Unconscious as Infinite Sets" by Ignacio Matte Blanco. Reformulates Freud in logico-mathematical terms and establishes a formal system (bi-logic) to describe unconsciousness phenomena: in case you ever wanted to apply category theory to study yourself.
• "The Protracted Game" by Scott Boorman. Interprets Maoist's revolutionary strategies during 1927 - 1949 period as a game of Go. Interesting both from historical, military, and game-theoretical perspective; raised an appreciation of Eastern wisdom and 'board games as a tool of thought' [2] for me.
• "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering" by W. J. King. Written in 1944, but the advice is still relevant, more so to the software engineering field. Should be at least skimmed at any part of your career.
• "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Alber Camus. Unequivocally answers the most important question there is — does life have meaning, and if not, should you kill yourself over it? I read it in my teens while wrestling with existential dread, and lived a somewhat happy and interesting life ever after.
[1]: http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Form.html
[2]: There's also "Laws of the Game" by Eigen & Winkler that describes natural phenomena as glass-bead games with various rules.
I've read both "Stories of Your Life and Others" and "Exhalation" in the last month and I turned to my wife and said "that story just blew my mind" for probably 75% of the stories.
You can find a few online. Here is a very short but brain-tickling example: https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679
Erich Fromm's The Sane Society - on how society impacts people's mental health, and how to build towards a sane society
Fromm's The Art Of Loving - an analysis of different kinds of loves, trying to dispel pop culture's lies about love, and love is actually hard work
Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death - on how not our fear, but our complete denial of death existing leads to the weirdest outcomes in our society
Then there's political stuff -
Orwell's Essays, any large-ish collection. I find Orwell to be a much, much better non-fiction writer than fiction writer. Extremely insightful into political processes.
Robert Caro's books, perhaps the first The Years Of Lyndon B Johnson. Can't get better insights into how power works on a local and not-so-local level.
Popper's Open Society and its enemies, hard to summarise - a defense of Western society in light of the then-ongoing WW2. You probably saw the paradox of tolerance a few times pop up, that's from that book, among a ton of other stuff.
Explains why we choose brands over cheaper alternatives, why we're willing to pay a lot more to lock in a deal, why we hate registering before buying the thing (but are more than happy to do so right after), why Sony removed the record button from the first Walkman, and much more.
This book forever changed the way I think about brands, and improved my design and problem-solving skills.
A couple of Rory's rules:
• The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.
• Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will.
A couple of "mind games" from the book:
• Merely adding a geographical or topographical adjective to food – whether on a menu in a restaurant or on packaging in a supermarket – allows you to charge more for it and means you will sell more.
• "There's your problem," I said. "It doesn't matter what something tastes like in blind tastings, if you put 'low in fat' or any other health indicators on the packaging, you'll make the contents taste worse."
https://bookshop.org/books/alchemy-the-dark-art-and-curious-...
Abbeys about more, of course. He had that rare ability to turn his book into something that felt like a direct conversation with me, the reader. I read him in my 20s and his viewpoint definitely connects with someone wanting to examine and express his/herself first before society’s overwhelming influence. He discusses trying to free himself from the conceptual confines of the human individual and societal experience while isolated in a national park. Quinn uses a hypothetical conversation between a gorilla and a person to highlight the fundamental us versus them approach humans take with the rest of earth. Then Franz de Waal really drives home that animals are likely to be much more mentally capable than we give them credit. They’re good books if you want to know something more about the universe than what your human experience is.
Edit-corrected book title.
This book makes every bit of life advice you receive afterwards feel shallow. It feels like a reference to western thought.
It's also very well translated and reads very easily, and is very short. I read about a chapter every morning when I feel motivated, and certain passages really stick in my head.
It also helps to read whenever you feel overcome with emotion because of something.
"Psycho-cybernetics" by Maxwell Maltz. A plastic surgeon shares his techniques for achieving your goals in life. 95% if not more of self-help books today borrow (consciously or not) ideas discussed in this book, and often discuss them with much less depth.
For instance, what is the point of empathy/friendship/love in a technologically advanced society? These were very useful things for our ancestors to help each other battle the harsh environment, but we have mastered our environment, so why waste brain power on empathy now?
The Wikipedia summarizes the books discussion of conciousness very well:
"The novel raises questions about the essential character of consciousness. Is the interior experience of consciousness necessary, or is externally observed behavior the sole determining characteristic of conscious experience? Is an interior emotional experience necessary for empathy, or is empathic behavior sufficient to possess empathy?
> To Mock a Mockingbird and Other Logic Puzzles: Including an Amazing Adventure in Combinatory Logic (1985, ISBN 0-19-280142-2) is a book by the mathematician and logician Raymond Smullyan. It contains many nontrivial recreational puzzles of the sort for which Smullyan is well known. It is also a gentle and humorous introduction to combinatory logic and the associated metamathematics, built on an elaborate ornithological metaphor.
Here's an example puzzle from the first half (the second half deals with combinatory logic):
> Suppose I offer to give you one of three prizes-Prize A, Prize B, or Prize C. Prize A is the best of the three, Prize B is middling, and Prize C is the booby prize. You are to make a statement; if the statement is true, then I promise to award you either Prize A or Prize B, but if your statement is false, then you get Prize C-the booby prize.
> Of course it is easy for you to be sure to win either Prize A or Prize B; all you need say is: "Two plus two is four." But suppose you have your heart set on Prize A-what statement could you make which would force me to give you Prize A?
Fun book.
For fiction, “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy, “100 Years of Solitude” by Marquez, and “Song of Solomon” by Toni Morrison (or really anything by Toni Morrison, it’s all amazing).
Also, Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of the Heart Sutra, “The Other Shore”, gave me a much deeper understanding of my meditative practice and the way I understand consciousness.
I read Decartes in high school during the teenage existential crises we all go through and it blew my mind. Opened me up to the power of thinking from first principles and a love of philosophy and questioning everything. Cogito, ergo sum!
"Atlas Shrugged" gets a lot of hate, but it's a phenomenally important book. It was one of those that completely consumed me during the read. I could not put it down – stayed up late, work up early, and rushed home from work to get back to it.
"Rework", "Getting Real", the other books by the old 37signals crew, and of course "The Lean Startup" really changed the way I thought about software development and business. I credit them for much of my startup/programming success.
Taleb's Incerto series changed how I thought about investing, risk, and life in general. "Fooled by Randomness" and "Antifragile" are especially good.
A powerful excerpt from the book: 'So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces the right values, the right values produce the right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.'
Infinite Jest is also great, if you haven't read it. It gets a lot of bad press mostly due to being fetishized by a particular type of insufferable person. The book has its flaws, but is a great piece of writing and (depending how old you are, where you are in life, etc) may offer a different lens. Also, the writing is excellent.
[1] "So Good They Can’t Ignore You" by Cal Newport. It changed the way I look at my career and how I view my personal development.
[2] ADP 6-22 Army Leadership and the Profession by the US Army. Looking past the militaristic stuff, it made me change the way I see leader/subordinate relationships and how to start becoming a person others can depend on and look up to.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/14555091...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Army-Doctrine-Publication-Leadership-...
If you have difficulty interacting with people
1. How to win friends and influence people (Easy read) 2. Seven habits of highly effective people (Harder read)
To learn how to write well: On writing well
To understand how large products are made: Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Seriously. Read it. The horrors of war leaked into your brain through a sci-fi novel. If you enjoy that, try Player Piano, a moral discourse on technology and its social effects. Even though it is old, the social complications are familiar.
To keep your brain busy, anything by Umberto Eco, but this would be my order: Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before.
The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E. B. White. I liked writing since I learned how to. I didn't find this book until I was 17, and it unlocked me to write in a way that better helped others.
The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker. I guess I like writing and language. Like C. S. Lewis, Steven Pinker has a way of writing about hard things that makes them easy to understand, even enjoyable. The subject matter is also news to most people, I think, who don't appreciate just how much that language is built in to the human mind from conception.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Perennial_Phi...
For sheer scale and sensawunda - A Fire Upon the Deep and Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
The book is written to convince the reader that evolution is valid.
But to me, the shocking thing was to really understand the religious argument for the first time, and understand why evolution challenges that world view.
In a nutshell, there is a web of related arguments which support the belief that God exists. One of them is that the eye is so complicated, that it must have been designed from the beginning by an intelligent being. Therefore God exists.
But Darwin showed that many small random changes plus natural selection are sufficient to explain the eye's complexity.
Why was this shocking at the time?
Just imagine you are walking around with a vague gut feeling that God must exist every time you see a beautiful bird or a flower. You figure that something intelligent must have designed that beatiful, complex living thing. You see another complex wonder of nature, and feeling gets stronger. Perhaps it becomes the main reason that you believe that God must exist.
Then one day, wham! Darwin releases his book, and it becomes clear that there is a valid scientific explanation for the complexity of that flower which does not require a supernatural designer.
Instantly your whole world view collapses. There's nothing in the science that says that God does not exist. Science only says that other explanations are sufficient. And yet, just that is enough to collapse that entire line of thinking. There are still other arguments for the existence of God. But the one you felt most strongly is gone.
Reading the book gave me a detailed understanding of that religious line of reasoning, and what it might feel like to lose it. It gives me some understanding of why people, even today, have a desire to reject the scientific idea of evolution.
Hui-Neng's "Your Minds Move"
The wind was flapping a temple flag, and two monks started an argument. One said the flag moved, the other said the wind moved; they argued back and forth but could not reach a conclusion.
The Sixth Patriarch Hui-Neng said, "It is not the wind that moves, it is not the flag that moves; it is your minds that move."
Joshu sees the Hermits
Joshu went to a hermit's cottage and asked, "Is the master in? Is the master in?"
The hermit raised his fist.
Joshu said, "The water is too shallow to anchor here," and he went away.
Coming to another hermit's cottage, he asked again, "Is the master in? Is the master in?"
This hermit, too, raised his fist.
Joshu said, "Free to give, free to take, free to kill, free to save," and he made a deep bow.
One of the tenets of getting your mind bent is reading things that are antithetical to your own world view. For this reason I read and had my mind bent by Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind - Graham Hancock.
Finally, I offer The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber. I have read a lot about food, nature, etc. but Barber nails the heart of the problem with our current (really recent past, in light of the pandemic) food culture. From farms and restaurants to the consumers (we are not just eaters) he shows how there could be another way that is more sustainable, as well as being more delicious.
Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (Keith Johnstone)
The Master and His Emissary (Iain McGilchrist et al.)
Emissary’s guide to worlding (Ian Cheng)
I want to go off-topic and recommend a non-book, Learning to Fly by Missing the Ground[0] (Venkatesh Rao).
And further off the topic, the discussions in The Midnight Gospel were the closest to qualifying as mind-bending experience recently.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/11/20/learning-to-fly-by-mis...
It's basically a method that helps you find what exactly get you on, what you get energy from, and how to reach it. Of course it requires a lot of introspection but the book helps you there.
It sounds cheesy I know, but that book had enough impact that it really changed the way I worked, and make sense of why I was so frustrated at times. Couple months after reading the book, the company I work with offered me a tailored job because I was finally able to clearly communicate what it is that was driving me.
Many people think of themselves as rational and have mastered the basics (understand the scientific method, know how to systematically solve difficult problems, etc) but are still constantly fooled by their human, imperfect brains into irrational thoughts and actions - both in day-to-day life and when pondering larger questions (science, engineering, policy, philosophy). Many aren't aware (just as I wasn't) that there are many more levels of rational thinking to unlock, that mistakes and biases can be identified and reduced. The book is adapted from a series of blog posts so lacks a bit in coherence (can be hard to get into), but stick with it for a bit, and I guarantee the ideas presented will be well-worth it.
"The Psychology of Everyday Things" by Don Norman, will change your mind about user interfaces.
"Manufacturing Consent" by Noam Chomsky to change the way you see the world.
I can't say I've read it cover-to-cover, but it really is an excellent, approachable electronics resource for enthusiasts and professionals alike.
I would summarize core ideas as "To live is to suffer, but you have to carry on no matter what. This is what everybody does." and "an ode to humanity", but it really is so hard to put the experience into words. You have to live it yourself.
Link on VNDB: https://vndb.org/v92 There are also various streamers who streamed the whole story on Twitch after its popularity blew up, e.g. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/390581022
Not mind bending. No Twists. No roller coasters. Just a calm conversation with the author and yourself.
And yet, it had a profound impact on me.
One poem I revisit every once in a while: https://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=119749
If you understand German, I do believe it needs to be read in its original tongue. The translations I found thus far were not entirely convincing.
Prose poems, short 1-2 page descriptions of fictional cities. It’s a good gift to give and I like to pick it up at random, open to a random one, and sit with the imagery it conjures.
If I had a ‘you could bring one thing to a deserted island’ then that would be it.
- The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt. Really deepened my understanding of how Western and other cultures think about moral and ethical issues.
- The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan. It's a feminist book that is very non-ideological, and helped me, as someone born in the 80's, appreciate some very real and practical issues that feminism has helped us address.
Zen and Lila by Pirsig
Beginning of Infinity by Deutsch.
Three quick tips to gain an instant charisma boost:
1. Lower the intonation of your voice at the end of your sentences.
2. Reduce how quickly and how often you nod.
3. Pause for two full seconds before you speak.
From this summary: https://github.com/benigeri/books/blob/master/The%20Charisma...
Those tips are in the introduction of the book so you can see if it works for you and decide if you want to continue reading the rest.
Personally, when I started doing only those 3 things, weird things happened that completely changed the behavior of other people towards me and then how I felt about other people. Worth a try.
I don’t think I really ever grasped the concept of relativity fully until reading that book — at least the aspects of time. [edit: well, not “fully”, I’m sure — but at least a lot more than I have in the past.]
At the same time I read the Dalai Lama’s, “Universe in a Single Atom”, which focuses on his love of science / physics, and was a very good pair to Rovelli’s book. It made me really think about the role of subjectivity in terms of Relativity. It also made me think about life, and consciousness, broadly.
That led to the Dalai Lama’s other book, “A Profound Mind”, which helped me really understand the Buddhist concept of “Emptiness” for the first time.
Thinking Fast and Slow
The Organized Mind
The Vital Question by Nick Lane.
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
AlphaZero teaches Stockfish a lesson in the French Defense https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ebzevCLGbQ
Mississauga: Density Without Urbanism https://granolashotgun.com/2014/01/15/77/
Masked 1: Rise to the Rubedo Stage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWNPN6PtuUc
From the blurb:
"...includes landmark discoveries spanning 2500 years and representing the work of mathematicians such as Euclid, Georg Cantor, Kurt Godel, Augustin Cauchy, Bernard Riemann and Alan Turing. Each chapter begins with a biography of the featured mathematician, clearly explaining the significance of the result, followed by the full proof of the work, reproduced from the original publication, many in new translations."
My absolute favorite is Descartes Geometrie. Reading the original humanizes him. He is at once humble and yet confident that he'd discovered something important. Today, we take Descartes ideas completely for granted, and even find them trivial, and yet to realize the immense shift in thinking it represented in his time, makes it all the more impressive. I would even argue that Descartes' ideas were more important than any save Euclid in forming the foundation of modern math and physics - he was the one that divorced the notion of "quantity" from "length of a line segment"! It's just so great to read the original.
Interestingly, Riemann got almost all of his papers included in this book, the most pages by far of any author. Clearly Hawking loved Riemann - and no wonder. Riemann was the one who truly generalized geometry, and its interesting that his work in that area was mostly ignored until 50 years after it was published, when Einstein used it for General Relativity. He made enormous contributions to lots of other fields, too.
Oh, and it was really cool reading Boole's words, and recognizing that he was explicitly talking in terms of creating a calculus of thought!
So, yeah, I love this book because we often talk about "the shoulders of giants" but we rarely actually read them directly. And it's amazing, inspiring, and wonderful to relate to them!
Completely changed my world view. As someone who loves science, this book shows that Buddhism is not about belief but a way to look at the world. And that view might be closer to reality than the current one.
https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Buddhas-Teaching-Transforming-L...
Both dramatically formed by world view.
"Philosophy and the Matrix". Part of a pop culture series that takes popular art and has different philosopher break down it into different philosophies. A good way to realize that the same work of art can mean vastly different things depending on the frame of reference.
"Tribe" by Sebastian Junger. The seemingly disconnect that people felt happier when they were experiencing a traumatic event, like war, mainly because they were relying on each other and counted on each other.
"The Social Leap" by William von Hippel. How we went from just another mid-sized ape on the plains of Africa to the most successful large mammal on the planet earth in a few million years. His theory is focused on the social adaptations of early hominids and how that affects us to this day.
The general population is rarely important in this process, and of course (if you are among those accreting power) you want keep them in the dark. The illusion of participation is very important to the institutionalization of power for yourself in any kind of system, especially ones that think they are democracies.
As might be expected, to the degree they are good at it, the less the governing class needs to concern themselves with good governance or policy. And again, in the "real" Gov 101 its rule #1 that the populace doesn't understand that.
Mind bending? I think so, but I appreciate even more as a mental/citizen level up.
These are the principles they should teach kids in government class in elementary school. History without understanding this is just a database of facts.
The free sample is enough to get the core message: the Konmari method can also apply to obligations, not just objects. It's not a fascinating book, just an interesting concept. Most of the book covers the exceptions and caveats of its own technique, a rare approach in this genre. Its premise is similar to Mark Manson's "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck", but without the aggressive self-help bro tone.
"No More Mr. Nice Guy"
This book is for nice guys who never get what they want. The answer isn't "be a selfish asshole for once", but "if you want something, ask for it" and "don't expect unsolicited generosity to be rewarded in specific ways". This book is a healthy fix to an unhealthy behaviour.
"Influence: Science and Practice"
The gang of four made a book about programming design patterns. Cialdini made a book about influence design patterns. It's easy to read, and full of examples.
Cialdini, Robert (2006) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Guinn, Jeff (2017) Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple
Ekman, Paul (2007) Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life
Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow
Mitnick, Kevin and William Simon (2002) Art of Deception
Navarro and Karlins (2008) What Every Body is Saying: Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887) On the Genealogy of Morals
Rhodes, Richard (1986) Making of the Atomic Bomb
Sun Tzu (c. 400 BCE) Art of War
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2005) Fooled by Randomness
Wright, Lawrence (2013) Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief
The origins and history of consciousness - mircea eliade
Cosmic symbolism in genesis - mattheiu pageau
If you want to get deep into opinions on making art, symbolism is a great rabbit hole.
An economic history of the species, more academic than "Guns, Germs, and Steel", without the flashy zebra bites. Not as meta as "Sapiens".
Radicalizing, even if one believes one already knows.
In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1101904224/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_HY...
Another good one from the same author - Recursion: A Novel https://www.amazon.com/dp/1524759783/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_G0...
In keeping with the preposterous title, it uses sci-fi tropes to illuminate the ways in which the modern scientific community is heading in a preposterous direction.
It is sort of like the Princess Bride of sci-fi.
Permutation City is also great, as mentioned by others.
Framework for a happy life in any context.
Phantoms in the Brain by V S Ramachandran - a book about how the brain organises itself in bizarre edge cases. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human by the same author is also worth reading.
Admissions by Henry Marsh - An experienced neurosurgeon's account of how his job has changed over the decades. Really interesting discussion of what's important and how people react in a real crisis.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. More of a collection of interesting curiousities but does an amazing job of humanising the discussion of brain.
I'll be the first to tell you I started watching their "crash course" expecting it to be BS but it is very compelling and explored ideas that I knew about intellectually but had never thought all the way through. I HIGHLY recommend people check this out and if you think they are wrong or going to far please feel free to respond or email me (email in profile), I am 100% willing to be proven wrong. Anyways I've shared this with a couple of close friends and we have all agreed that we can't continue living the way we were before having watched/read it (crash course/book).
[0] https://www.peakprosperity.com/freebook
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRgTUN1zz_oeQpnJxpeaE...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRgTUN1zz_ofJoMx1rB6Z...
I got that feeling from reading Montaigne's Essays.
Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton and Samuel Johnson's essays also are effective in a similar vein.
Plutarch's Parallel Live's is the essential book on politics, after reading it, when you read the newspapers you get a feeling that there is nothing new under the Sun, in politics.
It was the first history/sociology book I read that I really enjoyed. I came away with a clarity that there is an essential character to American politics and discourse that has been constant throughout its history.
Decades later it is still one of the most clearly written books I've read. It reminds me of reading an elegant proof.
Or anything Vonnegut or Philip K Dick
A personal "brain expanding" book for me was The Miracle Planet but timing is everything, as an 8 year old who had only been reading children's books it taught me that you can read through anything with persistence
The Bible has a lot of mind games & plot twists. I read it as an atheist seeking better perspective on a couple thousand years ago
Science Fiction:
Ursula le Guin - The Found and the Lost - this one will be higher impact if you're North American, but it works anywhere. Pretty much any of her books are mind bending and perspective opening. Not that they'd help become a better computer developer say - but you'd probably be a wiser person for the exposure.
C.J.Cherryh - Cyteen - on individual, on programming personality and more.
C.J.Cherryh - Voyager in Night. (on a perspective on alien thinking)
(author has a lot of excellent books as writes for an intelligent and well educated audience. I will note neither are easy reads and the second might be harder to get through)
Nonfiction:
T.E.Lawrence - 7 pillars of wisdom. (watching "Lawrence of Arabia" doesn't hurt either, they sync reasonably well). He was a deeply cynical atheist in a whole series of very violent episodes that shape life in the modern world more than you'd think. This one more for a perspective on history than changing one's own view of the world.
(edited for presentation only)
What it helped me see is that we aren't necessarily born with world class abilities but that we can achieve them by working hard. I know there have been criticisms about the methods Gladwell outlines towards achieving mastery but the basic message about working hard towards mastery is valid.
It completely changed my view on why people become Masters in their field.
1. The Vital Question - An explanation of the genesis of complex life through bioenergetics. Explains why complex life is likely very rare in the universe.
2. Power, Sex, Suicide - Why mitochondria are awesome, and also responsible for the emergence of sex, cancer, and mortality.
I'll second the suggestion for "The City & The City", another real mind-bender.
The Three-Body Problem & The Dark Forest.
Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian is better, stylistically, but changed me less as a person)
The Alchemist and The Fifth Mountain, by Paulo Coelho
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Tribe, by Sebastian Junger
The best teachers (that could be books) will find you when you're ready. Other people's milestones are theirs, not yours. The best way to use this list is to pick a book by gut feeling. That said, I'll leave my candidate: "The Presence Process" by Michael Brown.
> Written pseudonymously by "A Square", the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture, but the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.
Outsold only by the bible in 1880s/1890s [1]
Especially if you live in SV, as it's the perfect demonstration of rich landlords and deep poverty, as "society" gets richer.
My contribution: If you're not familiar with Quantum Physics, do check out 'Through Two doors at once'. There were numerous instances while reading the book that I had to just put it down and think deeply - mostly philosophical thoughts around what we are and how magical nature is. The subject matter is very very approachable - even to someone like me who hasn't read a physics book in like a decade.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38527619-through-two-doo...
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529343/how-to-chang...)
Fellowship of the River by Joe Tafur, MD (https://www.drjoetafur.com/the-fellowship-of-the-river)
A life changing book!!! about sailing, freedom and Life.
https://www.amazon.com/Tamata-Alliance-Bernard-Moitessier/dp...
It gives you an alternative perspective on art, school, charity, politics (including office politics), religion, and, well, yourself. This book will likely make you revise at least some of your beliefs.
You say "anything that transforms me into a smarter, wiser person" so I'll add Eliezer Yudkowsky's fanfic _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (http://www.hpmor.com/) The whole HP universe is re-imagined, except Harry is smart, a scientist, and empowered with rationality. It is both entertaining and an introduction to the art of rationality.
Stranger In A Strange Land
Solaris
The Fall
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Seveneves (a bit silly but definitely fun and will set you to thinking)
This book has more profundity than anything I've ever read. The type of sentences which cause you to stop and think, woah, what did I just read. The type of sentences where it is obvious the author has understood something you don't, but not obvious exactly what. The type of sentence that is short and simple in what it says, but with great depth in its meaning.
I'm about done with this book and I already want to re-read it. I've decided I'll read it once every few years. To remind myself of the important parts of living. The parts that are easy to figure about going about living day to day.
Something upbeat I came across recently was Naval Ravikant's ideas on philosophy happiness and how to get rich. Not a book but you can see him on Rogan 1309 and google the get rich tweets / podcasts.
"Aczel's compact and fascinating work of mathematical popularization uses the life and work of the German mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918) to describe the history of infinity--of human thought about boundlessly large numbers, sequences and sets." (https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-56858-105-7)
This popularization makes an effort to explain truly mind bending ideas of infinity.
Ingram is one of the most advanced meditation practitioners in the west, and this book is a painstaking mapping of the development of attention. I’ve read nothing like it.
It's one of those books that's full of anecdotes and padding out though, so if you want a summary the author's also made blog posts and a TED talk that summarize the subject well enough.
If you just need a book to boost your courage read “The alchemist” from Paulo Coelho.
Anything by John Twelve Hawks, but especially The Traveler: his works got me thinking about the role technology plays in the world and especially the balance among surveillance and privacy.
Pure by Linda Kay Klein: perhaps only interesting if you were raised in the Church's purity culture, but this also talks about the role religion plays in society as a whole.
14 Lessons in Yogi Philosophy: really opened my mind to Eastern ideas about living a spiritual life.
They permanently changed how I think about cognition, consciousness and how fragile and small a thing conscious life is and that we have to protect it.
Other notable authors, titles, and subjects, some that others have already mentioned: Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Khalil Gibran, sufism, The Philokalia, etc.
I would add "The City And The City" by China Miéville. A delightful read and it changed the way I look at the world a little bit.
The Demon Haunted World (Carl Sagan) — although I was already a skeptical thinker, this book opened me up to how critical thinking can enhance your spiritual side as well as your intellectual side.
Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hofstadter) — this book added color to a lot my intuitions about the deeper connections of patterns we see throughout reality.
Truth & Power (Michel Foucault) — I'm not a fan of most so-called continental philosophy, but Foucault's ideas about cultural structures has always stuck with me.
The Allegory of the Cave (Plato; section in The Republic) — classic; some might say the basic idea underpinning all philosophical and scientific inquiry.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Ludwig Wittgenstein) — I'll admit I never quite understood this book from reading it, but it definitely changed how I thought about philosophy, consciousness and spirituality.
Charles Sanders Peirce essays — it's been a long time, so I don't remember the specific texts, but he did fascinating work in semiotics. One essay in particular was critical in how I think about communication and consciousness.
Fact, Fiction, Forecast (Nelson Goodman) — Goodman is brilliant and is great at relaying philosophical problems as puzzles. He's a great writer and turns the problem of induction on its head in this one.
Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco) — I don't read a lot of fiction, but this book is amazing. There's a lot of history, so you may need to keep an encyclopedia nearby, but this one will really get you thinking about how the autonomy of memes. Probably quite relevant at the moment.
Any number of books and essays by great analytic philosophers: Saul Kripke, W.V.O. Quine, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, Carl Hempel, John Campbell, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Dan Dennett, David Lewis, etc.
- All You Zombies is a short story that makes use of one of the most ingenious and mind-bending time travel conundrums to reflect on the nature of personal identity.
- The Door Into Summer is about the effects of suspended animation on personal relationships.
- Anything written by Philip K. Dick.
https://www.notion.so/moderndesert/List-from-Hacker-new-chan...
Both these books drastically changed my perception of technology. The role we think it has and the effects and consequences it does have.
The main take away is that a technology contains an implicit bias that is absorbed by the user. More plainly put "to someone with a hammer, everything is a nail" applies to all technology.
Actually, any well researched history book. View on the world gets changed drastically, and usually for better.
This is a seriously mind bending book. You will never again see the world the same way. Not an easy book to read though. You will need to follow the references (and they are many), as otherwise you will refuse to believe what you are reading. Also, it is not a "pleasant" book to read. The author is not a great writer, only a great scholar.
A guide to the good life, the ancient art of stoic joy
Framed as a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the book is a series of vignettes describing fantastical cities Polo has visited in his travels.
https://www.fullmoon.nu/Resurrection/PrimarySpecies.html
It’s a play made for radio about a scientist who brings his father back to life (digitally) as the first test of “resurrection” technology.
The book goes through the second person point of view of a young boy born into a village outside of a major Asian city. Each chapter is a time jump to a different point of their life. I believe I heard of this from an interview with Marc Andreessen.
Maybe not mindbending, but a must read for us engineers prone to burning the midnight oil.
I’m a heavy duty skeptic but these books pushed me over the edge away from scientific materialism towards a broader view of reality where consciousness survives death.
Excellent Well executed research.
Entertaining style, and amazing at conveying very complex ideas. I had understood recursion for years prior, but this really showed me what it was to truly "think" in recursion, and to understand the Y Combinator and its significance.
life changing, I reread it every now and then
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie 10% happier by Dan Harris Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Will forever change how you look at humanity, society, and technology. Lot's of eye openers and in general it causes you to shift your frame of reference entirely.
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
Parkinson's Law, and Other Studies in Administration + The Peter Principle
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts
The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas
The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter by Rupert Spira
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram
Read the reviews on Amazon to see what it’s all about
I read it a few years ago and I’ve read quite a few books that changed how I view the world but none as much as this book
"DMT: The Spirit Molecule", by Dr. Rick Strassman
"The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge", by Jeremy Narby
"The Law", by Frederic Bastiat
I'm kind of shocked that it wasn't cited already.
I know public sentiment for Napoleon Hill is not positive overall, but I definitely recommend this one.
Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach for its captivating presentation of some very complicated ideas (at least to the 17 year old kid who read this for the first time). This book was published around the time that I was growing from hobby programming to writing software as a career, and it exposed me to non-trivial proofs, LISP, and recursion in general.
Vernor Vinge's The Peace War. It's a bit stupid, but . . . I want to make the tech in this book become reality :-) Bobbles are sheer fantasy, of course, but the Tinker tech stack would be a lot of fun.
...The Necronomicon!
Sam is a neuroscientist and meditation devotee who offers a cunning and life-altering exposé on the mysteries around consciousness and the investigations and learnings therein. One mind-bender from the book: some people have undergone a procedure to separate the left and right sides of the brain as treatment for rare disease. Following this procedure, the left and right sides can independently answer questions (sometimes simultaneously) posed by researchers, frequently offering conflicting answers. Interestingly, the right brain alone cannot speak but can answer questions by drawing or choosing letters/cards. Thus, it would appear that following the procedure, each side of the brain is conscious, yet unaware of the consciousness inside the other side.
to simply be smarter (but maybe not wiser), the art of learning by josh waitzkin. if you are interested in optimizing anything, why not learn how to optimize optimization?
It's also a great aggregator book. It introduced me to the works of Kahneman, Tetlock, Poincare and Mandelbrot.
It's a guide to meditation, without the religious parts.
"The Opposable Mind", by Roger Martin
"Antifragile" by Nassim Taleb
"The Conscious Universe" by Dean Radin
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F * ck
- Everything Is F * cked
They have absolutely changed my life. I can't recommend them enough.
1) Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society (La Technique)": https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
2) Jacques Ellul "Propaganda" https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512
3) Robert Cialdini "Influence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini#Theory_of_infl... <- could probably be described as a modern / dark adversarial take in "how to make friends and influence people" and should be read with Kahneman & Tversky's books/papers.
4) James C. Scott "The Art of Not being Governed" https://libcom.org/files/Art.pdf
5) Dickens "Hard Times" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Times_(novel) <- for it's description of the effects on peasant communities during industrialization, which is also a theme in "La Technique" above
6) George Orwell "Down and Out in London and Paris" https://archive.org/details/DownAndOutInParisAndLondonGeorge...
7) M. Scott Peck "The Road Less Traveled" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck#The_Road_Less_Tr...
8) Introducing Psychology of Relationships - A Practical Guide by John Karter https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Psychology-Relationships-...
9) Lion Feuchtwanger "Goya" https://www.amazon.com/Goya-Lion-Feuchtwanger/dp/8476408838
10) Thomas Ligotti "The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror" https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-against-Human-Race-Contriv...
11) Plato "The Republic": https://archive.org/details/PlatoRepublic/mode/2up
12) Lewis Mumford "The Story of Utopias": https://archive.org/details/storyutopias00mumfgoog/page/n9/m...
13) the major works of: Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault, Chomsky, Zizek
Short:
- Peter Wessel Zapffe "The Last Messiah": https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah
- Lion Feuchtwanger "Power": https://archive.org/details/powerbookbylionf00zieliala/page/...
- Samuel Becket "Waiting for Godot": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot
- Fyodor Dostoevsky "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man": https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Ridiculous-Man-Fyodor-Dostoyevs...
Dune (all 6)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
Manufacturing Consent
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
If This Is a Man, Primo Levi
Light, M. John Harrison
Jocko Willink's "Extreme Ownership"
Collective activity, ie the bedrock of humans human-omg, has not looked the same since
Non-fiction: The Brain That Changes Itself
Fiction: The Way of The Peaceful Warrior
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge: explore the far future in a space opera dreamed up by a computer science professor turned sci-fi author. This book literally inspired the first IoT sensor "motes" created, and we haven't come close to achieving the vision he explores just as texture in this rich book with fascinating characters. Not my favorite wordsmith, but one of my favorite idea-smiths.
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter: create a new mathematics from the axioms up, while strolling along with a wise tortoise and a hare who share fascinating ideas and connections from art and music to number theory, incompleteness, and consciousness.
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand. Love her or hate her, she makes you think.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things - This is a great book about building businesses, and business in general.
Capital in the 21st Century - One of the greatest books about economics and capital written ever - let alone in the last decade.
The Intelligent Investor - This is Buffet's favourite book, and regardless of how many times I read it, I still learn more. One can never digest it in full.
Predictably Irrational - This excellent tome makes behavioural economics digestible outside of economics. It's enlightening, though provoking, and turns several accepted truths on its head, purely by being written at all.
Nexus (Ramez Naam) - This science fiction book explores transhumanism and would it could mean in the near future. It's both light and pulpy, but at the same time makes you think about the outcomes of technological progression.
Systemantics
A farewell to entropy
The nature of technology - what it is and how it evolves
On being wrong
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Basically a unified theory of consciousness. 100% must read.
* (Theory) The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
A bit long winded but it really changes the way you think about the voice in your head, about consciousness in general. Pairs well with Surfing Uncertainty
* (Self Help) Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg Really wakes you up to the domination language that rules our interactions and provides an alternative framework. Its even great if you don't plan on implementing NVC, just to understand what non nonviolent langue is. Pairs well with Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness for understanding how language formed our minds and our societies.
* (Theory) The Force of Nonviolence Judith Butler Wakes you up to the highly dominant and persistent narrative of violence. Provides frameworks for something else. If this doesnt blow your mind im not sure what will.
* (Theory)Staying with the Trouble by Donna J. Haraway The name says it all. Ways to stop trying to wipe the slate clean, to start from scratch, but instead to "stay with the trouble" and make new things WITH. Wakes your mind up to disrupting in whole new ways.
* (Theory) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein Another book that helps you see the world through different eyes, or even if I dare, to see the world more clearly. Pairs nicely with the unnecessarily long winded "Fall" by Neal Stephenson for understand a post truth world, specifically the idea of "Edit Streams"
* (Scifi )The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton This one game me a framework for science and spirituality to coincide
* (Scifi ) Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie Questions everything, blows your mind on multiple levels.
* (Self Help) She Comes First by Ian Kerner Wakes you up to the massive comfort imbalance in sex between genders and provides simple ways to help fix it (for heterosexual)
The first book really tears apart several of the "foundations" of economics. For instance, the creation of money as portrayed by Adam Smith? It's a myth, and no single place like he described ever existed.
Bullshit jobs is about the myriad bullshit managerial jobs we have and how we really shouldn't have them. It's capitalism, it's supposed to be efficient and yet, when he published a piece about bullshit jobs in an obscure anarchist magazine in 2013, it made so much impact The Economist wrote a response!
Systems Thinking: A Primer by Donella Meadows is also an incredibly thought-provoking non-fiction book, that really makes you think about the world and the systems we create differently.
It changed the way I think about how society today is structured and showed me that something different is possible.
Twains Pudd'head Wilson and "The Corruption of Hadleyburg"
Ayn Rand et al "Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal"
Peter Kropotkin "Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution"
Tannehill, Morse "The Market for Liberty"
Albert J. Nock "Our Enemy the State"
Stephan Wolfram "A New Kind of Science"
Another recommendation is "Quantum Genesis: Speculations in Modern Physics and the Truth in Scripture" by Stuart Allen. QG is a relatively deep pop sci look at physics, computation, and several related fields where the author points out that the original translation of the creation myth in Genesis 1 matches up extremely well with a modern understanding of quantum physics and simulation theory. (disclosure: a family member is the author).
Thinking Fast and Slow. (Recommended in other responses but I’d have to second this one. Incredible for reasoning about your own reasoning).
What the Buddha Taught: (Walpola Rahula): a short intro to Buddhism. There are some really powerful ideas from this age old religion, that can definitely help you think about your own happiness and what material possessions actually give you.
The Innovators Dilemma: a must read for startup founders, I think it’s the best model for thinking about technology and why startups and adoption often fails.
Atlas shrugged (Ayn Rand): completely transformative book for looking at our world, America particularly. Th perspective it gives you may not be in the best, or most human way, but I’ve found no other book that forces you to empathize with capitalism like this one.
Surely expanded my brain. But then again I was 16 and stuck on a train for 3 days and it was my only entertainment.
"The Bible" (New International Version)
“Capitalism and Freedom” by Milton Friedman
“Imperial Ambitions” by Noam Chomsky
“Evolution and Religion: A Dialogue Book" by Michael Ruse
“The Value of Free Thought” an essay by Bertrand Russel
“The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” by Daniel Bell
“Stalking the billion-footed beast” an essay by Tom Wolfe
“Propaganda” by Edward Bernays
“Bonfire of the Vanities” by Tom Wolfe
“Walden” by Henry David Thoreau
“30 Satires” by Lewis H. Lapham
“Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut
Above, in chronological order, are the books that changed my life. It is weird looking at that list, as each book is tied to such a fundamental shift in my life. They each taught me about something fundamentally new and different. Faith, spirituality, economics, thought, power, society, nature, technology. It should appear obvious by looking at the list, there are plenty of opposite pairs, dipole books if you will, present. Bending one’s mind has multiple phases, first when one goes from knowing nothing to knowing something. Depending on what was learned, this can definitely be mind bending. But not everyone rides the second phase, going from knowing something to learning that it wasn’t the whole thing, or wasn’t the only way to interpret such a thing, or wasn’t entirely correct, or perhaps, in our largely subjective world, is not true at all.
Certain books can only speak to certain people at certain times of their life. It’s just the beauty of the whole thing. And to the core of this thread, one actually has to believe something, truly and passionately, in order for them to then have their world view bent and turned on its head. This is the hardest lesson that many won’t really ever opt to face. The core of truth, learning, and wisdom comes when you finally read (and thus think) something that takes a belief you previously held as passionately true, unalterably true, core-to-identity true, and made you wrestle with the reality that it may, perhaps, not be. That’s the biggest mind f* of them all.
One’s entire worldview is constructed of things they believe. But those things you believe come, for some more than others, from what one read, purposefully or not. Seek books that challenge what you believe and enjoy the ride.
Read anything written by Ancient Greeks; Aristotle, the Iliad, Herodotus, Plato. There's a reason people still read these dead white guys, and there is a reason that peak times of excellence in Western Civilization have been peak Ancient Greeks. It will make your thinking three dimensional, and give you perspective as to the world you live in today as a software engineer.
It's hard to tell whether you want a mystery/thriller book or a book on logic or a self help book. If you want to be more intelligent or aware of culture, then read the bible. You'll be surprised how almost everything you read, watch or listen to is tied to the bible. Almost every book listed in this thread will have references to the bible. You really can't be culturally intelligent without having read the bible - at least in the US or Europe. If you want a mystery, can't go wrong The Name of the Rose. Also, a book isn't going to transform you into a smarter, wiser person. The countless shelves of self-help books should be evidence enough.
Also, I love this quote from einstein:
"Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life."
Intellectually very challenging.
Even though it is a religious book for many people, it can be read as just a normal story.
It teaches one about how to live life, not by set of defined rules, but by providing a proper explanation and through understanding.
It's a book which is usually dated to 5000 years or 7000 years.
It`s a very well-balanced story, one can ignore parts which are not relevant to present society.
I recommend this order:
The Murder of Rodger Ackroyd
And Then There Were None (also titled Ten Little Indians)
Murder on the Orient Express
If you are a teenager it will definitely make you think and likely leave an impact on you. It's not a typical novel, more like philosophical ideas presented in the form of a novel. Ideal characters placed in real life. You will also understand why the world is divided into Ayn Rand lovers and haters.
It questions how the world works, how it should work, how people live their lives, and how they should live their lives, etc, etc.
Warning you, it's not filled with plots twists.
* Read any book you want
* Don't read books that you don't want to
* Get on with your life
For me, the books which had the most impact on my life were those which were exploring systematically something I had a confuse idea of and seemed rather unorthodox. When you get that feeling that "oh great, if I'm insane, I'm not alone", it immediately organizes your thought process and allows you to go further.
Of course, there is always the risk of an "echo chamber" effect, but on the other hand, there are some ideas that you can't get if you're not in a given predisposition, so better maximize the usefulness of your reading time (and explore introduction to alien ideas through lighter sources, like small articles).