41–50 of 170 posts
Gabriel Garcia Marques, One hundred years of solitude.
Practically all of Jorge Luis Borges' short stories. Mind-bending.
Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Michael Ende's Never Ending Story.
Enjoy!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_...
On a related note, a novel that looks at some interesting very long lived organizations and has some interesting philosophical components I'd recommend Neal Stephenson's Anathem:
"God's Debris" by Scott Adams. Yes the Dilbert guy. It's available for free download http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_Debris .
HN is cleansing the apostrophe in the url. It is god's rather than gods.
Safehold Series by David Weber is worth the time
"The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values" by Sam Harris is a new release which falls into the category of philosophy, remarks on human behavior, and is bound to reference Bertrand Russell. Harris, who has trained both as a philosopher and a neuroscientist, argues against the popular notion that science can have little or nothing to say about morality. Necessarily, he confronts related ideas like m…
The core question for most prescriptive action is often simply determining the limits of the self, that is, how do we delimit the boundary between the self vs. the other, and what are the bounds that we choose to extend empathy to?
Is the near-self or that which empathy extends to everything that biologists have classified as homo sapien? Is it confined to ourselves and a handful of close friends? Is the boundary defined at humans sharing similar values, goals, and culture? Is it extended to all animals with a central nervous system? How can we determine what this value ought to be scientifically?
"The seperation between science and human values is an illusion, and actually quite a dangerous one at this point"
This seems to ignore historically that, more often than not, science is used as ex post facto justification. Darwinism and natural selection is a true scientific observation with mountains of supporting evidence. It was also later adopted as a central logical doctrine for the most abhorrent policies of Nazism. A logical argument for eugenics could be made, but remains abhorrent because in Nazism, the near-self vs other distinction drops off in a freefall across subsets of humanity. This contrasts strongly with today's average definition of near-self considered to be the set of all that is homo-sapien.
The set, degree, and unit by which we extend empathy in the self vs. other distinction IS the core of human values and he does not offer a derivation.
I suppose I should reserve final judgement until I investigate his book you mentioned more thoroughly.
It can be pretty revelatory.
http://www.amazon.com/RISK-SCIENCE-POLITICS-DAN-GARDNER/dp/0...
Explains an ethical viewpoint in a very clear style. Changed the way I think about human progress.
Fiction: "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell
I'm going to assume that you've read Crytonomicon and Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson, but if not... they are #1 on any list.
http://www.kk.org/cooltools/the-best-magazi.php
Plus http://longform.org/ and http://givemesomethingtoread.com/ are both excellent.
Neal Stephenson's "Mother Earth, Mother Board: Wiring the Planet" in particular was formative for me as a teenager.
Someone mentions Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" below - which is very good. However, can I strongly recommend his book "Collapse" - which is rather thought provoking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_... On a related note, a novel that looks at some interesting very long lived organizations and has some interesting philosophical components I'd recommend Neal Stephenson's Anathem: h…