The Bible is a trite answer, but a true one.
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.
Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
121–130 of 747 posts
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#122Try Julian Jaynes book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". Whether his conjectures are right or wrong, their scope is mind-blowing. Don't be put off by the title - it became a surprise hit as a popular science book.
Likewise Dennett's "Consciousness Explained." I don't agree with a lot of what he lays out, and it doesn't quite accomplish the title, but it challenges a lot of common intuitions about consciousness in a way I found productive.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#123• "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 fo…
The Myth of Sisyphus was so helpful to me when I was a young person.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#124Mark Manson's books:
- 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.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course it's degrading, but it's true and it's the world we live in. It's okay if you want to put your hands over your ears and keep your eyes closed, but don't expect others to do the same, and don't be surprised when they have a better grip of reality.
Ah, there you go, exhibiting precisely the moral authority I find repugnant in followers of the Dawkins cult. What makes it true?
I can't speak for what your parent poster is trying to say, but I can tell you what I mean when I say the same thing.
Let me use a specific example. I often say that capitalism is terrible for workers. Yet I work for a capitalist company that is--in my opinion--quite good to its workers.
Being a "realist" has told me that when looking for a job, I should be careful to avoid toxic cultures, exploitative management, and being underpaid relative to whatever I consider the fair market value of my labour.
But being a realist has also told me that toxicity, exploitation, and stinginess are unevenly distributed, and therefore it is a wise thing to shop around and negotiate for what I want.
I would NEVER say, "Toxicity is just how all businesses work. Demeaning and bullying people is just how company cultures are. Exploiting workers is what businesses do. If you can manipulate someone into working such long hours their health suffers, good for you. And negotiating is impossible, all companies push their workers around."
Being a realist means acknowledging what is in the universe, but it also means acknowledging that the universe contains variety and that almost everything is unevenly distributed.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#126Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#127"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig takes you deep into the philosophy on what is 'quality'. Once you see it you can't unsee it.
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.'
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course it's degrading, but it's true and it's the world we live in. It's okay if you want to put your hands over your ears and keep your eyes closed, but don't expect others to do the same, and don't be surprised when they have a better grip of reality.
Certain things are so true they're tautological. Science is observational. It doesn't give us rules we must follow, it describes the behaviour of things in the universe. So if someone* says, "People do selfish things, that's science," true! But if they also say, "Therefore, it's ok to kill your neighbour and take their house, see all of recorded history, colonialism, &c." I stop them. Science teaches us that people k…
Science has concluded that some human genotypes are, by scientific standards "lesser" than others. This can be - and has been - used by atheists and religionists alike to justify crimes against those people. Without a moral sense there is little holding back inhumanity from consuming itself. Science hasn't found a gene for morality, and doesn't seem to be on the hunt for it. So we therefore need our cultures to help us prevent calamity - which would require, by necessity, ignoring the scientists clamouring to explain from their pulpit that some humans are simply lesser than others, and "they have the science to prove it".
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#129I would recommend Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter if you haven't already read it.
I am of the generation that fixated upon GEB as some sort of deep wisdom, and I have a nostalgic fondness for it. I certainly credit it for sparking a lot of my curiosity about Lisp. But in hindsight, its value to me was not in the content of the book, as much as in communicating the kind of delight and curiosity around programming that has kept me interested in the subject since 1972 or so. Other books have done the…
It's interesting that despite Hofstadter having negative interest in computing himself, he inspired so many people in the field.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#130Anathem by Neal Stephenson features a bifurcated world where a scholar-monk-class of mathematicians lives in walled-off areas that mingle with the rest of the world only on fixed dates. Some every year, some every ten years, and others only every 100 years. There is a lot more to it, but I don't want to give anything away.