I found The Little Prince pretty mind bending.
Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
91–100 of 747 posts
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you may have missed the point? It's not about genes for selfishness.
I didn't get that impression at all. What I walked away from was a feeling of dire unease at the popularity of Dawkins' opinion that human beings are machines that can be broken and manipulated by their environment, and that social scientists can exploit this fact to their own ends, in industry, culture and war. It may be 'true' inasmuch as the fact that applying his theories give predictable results, but even the mo…
Just because someone writes a long analysis of camera work, color correction and sound recording in Shawshank Redemption, doesn't mean that they don't believe that there are emotional and philosophical aspects to the movie also. Just that the object of that work was a particular kind of analysis.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#93Guns, Germs and Steel. Actually, any well researched history book. View on the world gets changed drastically, and usually for better.
And potentially misfocused. Read The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch for a counter point.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#94All the things by Christopher Alexander(Start with timeless way...explore the pattern language...move on to Nature of order...then others.)
Zen and Lila by Pirsig
Beginning of Infinity by Deutsch.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#95In no particular order:
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...
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#96https://www.amazon.co.uk/Leadership-Self-Deception-Getting-O...
life changing, I reread it every now and then
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#97Maybe try something/anything by Douglas Hofstadter. 'Godel, Escher, Bach' gets most of the attention, but I also found 'The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul' (with Daniel Dennett), and 'Metamagical Themas' fascinating.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#98• "Laws of Form" by George Spencer-Brown, a little book that describes how to bootstrap the Universe from nothing. Louis Kauffman [1] has a lot of papers/writeups on it, from knot theory to quantum physics. If you ever wanted to make a pancake truly from scratch, this is a place to start.
• "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.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#99Highly recommended for everyone: "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahenman. 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
"Thinking, Fast and Slow" is a book I buy for every person for their first birthday after I met them. It is the book that has had the most profound impact on me thus far.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#100"Permutation City" by Greg Egan is mind-bending in a way similar to The Matrix, except taken up a few notches.
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!