Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 747 posts

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#671

Post by kangnkodos »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #407
kangnkodos wrote: post #250

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins 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…

The foundations of peoples' beliefs are not tied to logic or truth, it is tied to time, effort, character and way of life. Any change in belief that will influence their way of life will raise psychological shields. People will very readily change their logic to maintain a belief if that meant preserving other other aspects of their lives that they have put time and effort into. This book is written for people who al…

Haha. You are much better at psychology than I am. You are so right that logical arguments just make people cling to their old beliefs harder.

But then...

What is the purpose of the book? Is it just to give scientifically oriented people a playbook of arguments to use against anti-evolutionary bible thumpers when debating school curriculum? I'll accept that.

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#673

Post by stutonk »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #388
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #153

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram. 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.

This book was really interesting, and ultimately made me decide meditation wasn't worth it for me. (I'm not saying it isn't worth it for others, just that the outcome of meditation that he describes doesn't seem like something I want).

Just out of curiosity, what was the purported outcome/why wasn't it worth it?

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#674

Post by torstenvl »

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, by Robert Sapolsky

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

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#675

Post by tim333 »

fit2rule wrote: post #15
zedr wrote: post #8

The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. It describes what science believes life to be, and it can be very upsetting. Understanding it, however, made me a more confident and happier person than I was before.

I found this book completely degrading, even to the point of nauseating .. it discounts tens of thousands of years of human experience with describing itself, producing a taxonomic monster that is of very little actual use to the common man beyond providing a convenient excuse for ones failings and for the nature of humankinds more banal spirit. Science can be repressive. Dawkins is a classic example of the iron fist…

I agree that it has an unnecessarily downbeat take on the whole business. You can believe in science and evolution and have an "isn't it wonderful" attitude like say Feynman rather than the "We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes" attitude of that book.

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#676

Post by kangnkodos »

kangnkodos wrote: post #669
james_s_tayler wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read that particular book of Dawkins, but I have encountered a mathematical argument I find somewhat troubling, though I don't have the background to really examine it in depth. It's discussed in this interview here: https://youtu.be/noj4phMT9OE Essentially the number of possible configurations of the sequence of a piece of genetic code required to produce the instructions for producing a usable protein are…

I dunno. In the one Dawkins book I read, the mathematical part definitely gets addressed. It may change your mind about the mathematical part. I once read elsewhere that almost all the specific details Darwin came up with have been overturned by other scientists. But the new scientific results prove evolution and natural selection even harder. My own personal speculation is that there may be many simple proteins that…

Have you looked at this four part article? I haven't read it yet.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamined/2019/08/a-respon...

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#678

Post by ianai »

bcassedy wrote: post #518
ianai wrote: post #482

“Desert Solitaire” by Ed Abbey and “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn. Both are wildly different but explore the question of how different the other forms of life on this planet are from ours. “Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” By Franz de Waal et al explores this from a scientific perspective. Abbeys about more, of course. He had that rare ability to turn his book into something that felt like a direct conv…

If you liked Ishmael, I recommend reading The Story of B. Its subject is very similar to Ishmael but I feel that it does a better job of portraying how the us vs them is woven into the very fabric of civilization. It's also a very entertaining read.

I read Story of B as well. But I don’t have quite a clear enough memory of it to even try to summarize it as anything past a sequel. I’ll go back to revisit them some day.

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#679

Post by nilsocket »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #374
nilsocket wrote: post #351

C Radhakrishnan - Bhagavad Gita_ Modern Reading and Scientific Study. 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 sto…

Might as well recommend the Holy Bible or the Koran. Also good books with good stories.

If one is reading Holy Bible or Koran, one needs to adhere that they are the only god.

But in nowhere in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, ... Or any other religions from Indian origin claim their's is the only truth.

All of them are completely fine with different view points.

For example Hinduism is too broad, it literally accepts everything.

For Ex: There is only one God, there are many gods, there is no God. One can be an atheist and be a good Hindu. You need to pray to god, you shouldn't pray to god.

But there is an unification among all Indian religions. For ex: All religions go in search of God/Truth.

Any how, Bhagavadgita, should rather be looked up-on like a more of philosophical text rather than religious book. It is the essence of MahaBharata, yet another religious text book.

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#680

Post by davidgould »

cstrahan wrote: post #319

"To Mock a Mockingbird" by Raymond Smullyan. From Wikipedia: > 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…

“I have a gun.”
Post reply on HN