Books Part I

One of those chain-letter style posts going around on Bluesky has people posting, one after another, books that have been especially significant to them, and I thought *hey, I'd like to do that*, but just for my own edification, and also I don't want it to just dissolve into the Bluesky history, so *this* is the place for it. Also, here I can write a short comment on each. Also, I guess I don't care if anyone ever reads any of it (I don't think anyone reads anything I write here, though.. if you are reading this, then ok!)

Books that have expanded or altered my worldview, that I can think of (and in the order that I thought of them). Some are old, some are new; some I read long ago, some recently. Seems a solid spread.

1. The Demon Haunted World (Carl Sagan)

• Read this in my 2nd/1st year of college (my 2nd year, but my first at UT, i.e. the first year of my second attempt at college). I can credit this book with finalizing my transition from a half-religious, magic-minded pop-science enthusiast to a solid scientific mindset about the world. Thank you Carl Sagan!

2. Asimov on Numbers (Asimov)

• My grandmother gave me this when I was in middle school, I can't say what age - 12 or 13 maybe? I read it over and over and over. It's a collection of magazine essays Asimov wrote on math topics - each goes over some interesting math stuff along with some historical explanation. Why are there leap years? What is a number series? What are imaginary numbers? Stuff like that. This book is the foundation (Asimov joke) of my mathematical mind, such as it is.

3. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong)

• Around 6th grade, I somewhere acquired a Nintendo game: "Shingen the Ruler", which I enjoyed for hours and hours and hours. One of those map-strategy games, based on the pre-Togukawa civil wars in medieval Japan (I had seen a repeat of the Shogun miniseries on TV in 4th or 5th grade, I remember, so I was primed for this stuff). Looking for more, I found KOEI's "Romance of the Three Kingdoms". What was this about? Who were all these people? How do I pronounce these names!? I quickly learned this game was based on a book. How do I get this book? I went to the Kingston Springs library and asked the librarian to find it - it was loaned in 2 volumes from a library in Memphis. I read it all (even though the names were all in Wade-Giles, not modern Pinyin, format). My grandmother got me a stack of language manuals so I could try to learn some Chinese, which did at least teach me to pronounce all those names. Changed my life in many ways, I gotta say. 

4. The Histories (Tacitus)

• With my first IPad, back around 2012 or whenever, came my first experience with e-books. I found that you could read all these public domain books for free - I read Plato's republic, Livy's histories (I had read some Herodotus and Plutarch already so I was primed) - random Aristotle, this and that. Sometimes fascinating, sometimes boring. But Tacitus's "The Histories" was solidly amazing. The story of the short civil war that ensued after the Roman emperor Nero died, covering just over a year of history. Full of thoughtful commentary, complex heroes and villains, twisted politics, horrific battles. Awesome! Tacitus observes these events (they happened in his lifetime) with as much objectivity as he can, but I remember being struck by how modern his thinking was - which made me realize, for the first time in that particular way, that *of course he was, he's a human being, we are all "modern"* - it's just that he was a great writer and was able to transmit his thoughts with such clarity across that 1900 year gap. I had never had that feeling of connection with the author of these classical texts, and I got it with Tacitus...

5. Shi Ji (Sima Qian)

• Which then leads me to Sima Qian and the Shi Ji. This is a lot, and I had to read it in sections over a few years, borrowed from the Boston public library. Sima Qian was also an excellent writer, who both reported events and commented on them (in his particularly conservative, judgmental fashion). Not only do you learn all these fascinating stories (told Plutarch-style, which is also a standard Chinese style, as biographies of individuals, which intersect and interweave as you go from one to the next), you feel a real connection with this persecuted scholar who is convinced that this, his life's work, even though it has caused him *immense* suffering (he was tortured and *castrated* for some of his work), will be worth it because, he believes, it will be remembered and appreciated by future generations. Suffice to say, dude was correct. Probably tone of the greatest books ever written.

6. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)

• Idunno, I hate British-style silly names ("Dumbledore", "Rincewind", and yeah "Slartibartfast"), and I don't really enjoy reading satire or silly stuff. But I've read the Hitchhiker's Guide a dozen times. It's one of those things you can just pick up and open to a random page and go. It helps that there's space travel and robots and all kinds of mind-bending weirdness. I don't need to explain this one, everyone has read it, haven't they?

7. The Fall, or Dodge in Hell (Stephenson)

• The most recent on my list, maybe (this or Death's End, below)? I read a review of this book in Nature magazine, I think - the description of the 'road trip' sequence clinched it for me, I had to read it. This book is two things: First, Stephenson's plausible (to me) picture of the near future of the USA (and civilization in general, I guess), in a stable state of AI misinformation-suffused collapse significantly modified the way I think about the world today and where it's going. And second, it's a very unique sci-fi story about life after death for machine-simulated consciousnesses based in brain scans, which is great fun and very thoughtfully done (I actually wrote more about it here).

8. The Origin of Species (Darwin)

• Like, of course Darwin is famous for being maybe the greatest scientist of all time, being the one that explained one of the most important natural facts there is. But a good part of his fame must also come from the fact that he was a great writer: Origin of Species, Descent of Man, and other books by Darwin are all great reads. The big and small ideas are clearly explained, and you come to see exactly how he arrives at his conclusions, as he describes a vast array of biological facts and phenomena. Like, yeah, Darwin is great.

9. The Road (McCarthy)

• Only Cormac McCarthy book I've read, just a couple of years ago. Gosh what an ordeal. I don't need to explain anything, but this is a harrowing, soul-crushing story that somehow ends both in catastrophe and with some impossible hope. Never read anything like it. I finished the last pages in tears, with my 1-year old son bouncing his diapered butt on my face.

10. The Stranger (Camus)

• One of those books everyone has heard of but not many have read - I assume. It was true for me, at least, and I just read it this past summer as I was turning 45. Before that I read a book of his short stories, 'The Exile and the Kingdom', which I want to reread - I need a copy of my own. And afterwards I read 'The Myth of Sisyphus', which was what I was actually working towards (long story). The Stranger of the title is, somehow, one of the most recognizable literary characters I've ever come across. Like, I really felt him, like I could be the Stranger. Does everyone who reads it have that experience? Or maybe I am also some kind of Stranger? Would explain a lot. 

You know, this is actually getting to be a lot. And yes I recognize that it is quite a sausage fest. I'm going to save entries 11-20 (already decided, and just deleted from below, but happening to contain no fewer than two women, but yes quite a blind spot revealed here) and do those in the next post. Take a breather.

Book Review: Fall (or, Dodge in Hell) by Neal Stephenson

 Not really a book review. More like, some thoughts on this book. It was long and not so straightforward as most books I read, so there was something to think about rather than just be awed (like with the Three Body books I finished last year - awesome books, huge ideas, but it was all there on the page - nothing to figure out, or reflect on, as far as I could tell).

I read this because of a review I read when it came out in 2019. There's an early section that I think got most of the attention of reviewers, where the characters go on a road trip through a post-truth America, which sounded most interesting to me. In the world of the book (or at least of this section - the story seems to span a century, and this is the only discussion of the world outside the immediate experiences of the main characters) the American hinterlands have devolved into a confused tribal culture where all belief systems are focused on the noise-filled descendant of the social-media internet we have today, and every belief is a false conspiracy theory of one sort or another. The city-classes rely on special tools, namely human editors, to keep their information accurate. That's a neat idea, and it barely has anything to do with the rest of the book!

I wasn't disappointed, though. Because while the whole back half of the book seems unrelated to this road trip, I realized after finishing the story that there was a serious connection to make. In the world of the road trip, it's pretty clear that the populace's disconnection from reality is a Bad Thing: the lives of people are brutal and confused and social progress is made impossible. It's suggested that this is because they are all exposed constantly to these noise-filled media channels where all content is false, generated by algorithms with varying hidden motives. The obvious implication is the what keeps the lives of the city people better is their connection to reality and true information - keeps them healthy, safe, and allows for progress.

The back half of the book isn't about the real world at all, though. It's about a digital afterlife where human consciousnesses* are uploaded after people die. This world begins when the first uploaded person (Dodge) finds himself exposed directly to world of chaos, that he learns to shape into meaningful things, thereby becoming the creator god of a new plane of existence. It's never said outright, but the chaos is various cloud-based (i.e. internet-based) computational activity, which means nothing at all to a human mind that is connected to it without an interface; by molding it into meaningful stuff (from Dodge's perspective), this computational activity is being replaced with new computational activity (from the outside-world perspective).

At first I thought that the book would get into an actual connection between this cloud-world of noise and the garbage-information world of the hinterland. But that connection never happens, and after a while I stopped expecting it and forgot about it. But after finishing the story I realized a different connection: the people of the digital afterlife are themselves all exposed to a false world - it's a computer game, basically - but it's ok, a Good Thing, and the ultimate meaning of the story is found there. Is it an inversion of the situation revealed in the road trip?

Sort of, I think. But also it's a comment on curation: the world Dodge creates is real in that everyone that inhabits it experiences it the same way. There are actual truths there, though they are ultimately shared psychological truths - at one point Dodge discovers that he can't change the world if other people are watching. 

This sets up a very different situation, but with obvious parallels to and deviations from the road trip world. In the real world, truth is essentially a physical thing: things exist physically, or events happen physically, and that's what makes them real, and what makes ideas about them true. People in the hinterland have beliefs that are largely false, because they are about things and events that don't exist or didn't happen. 

In the afterlife, there is no physical existence in the normal sense - physically, all the objects and places that people experience are actually processes running on vast banks of quantum computers. So strictly speaking, the things people believe in are all false, or at least not true. Not only that, but people in the afterlife have no knowledge of the 'real' world on the outside. Truth in the normal sense is impossible. Yet, because everyone agrees on this reality, we can think of beliefs in this world as having a kind of second-order truth value. Beliefs are at least meaningful and grounded, even if they are grounded in something (seems-to-be rocks and trees) that is not what it actually is (seems-to-be computers in buildings).

So then I wonder - is this a comment on the earlier part of the story? Because we can see the degenerated people of the American hinterland in the same way: their beliefs might be shared delusions or hallucinations, or vast conspiracy theories, but if they are meaningful and grounded, isn't that as good as what people have in the digital afterlife? Or, are the afterlife people in just as dire and meaningless a situation as the hinterlanders?

The book doesn't try to make this equation, I'm the one making it. The digital world is portrayed as wonderful for some, and nightmarish for many others, while the hinterland is depicted (indirectly) as more uniformly nightmarish. But again, maybe there are those in the hinterland that are living well, living their best lives despite their detachment from the larger realities. Is Dodge equivalent to a benevolent pirate king living out in the Nebraska wasteland?

At any rate, I was surprised at these connections, how they started to creep up on me.

*Re consciousness. I think that Stephenson is sufficiently vague about exactly how consciousnesses are simulated that I could suspend disbelief, or fill in the blanks myself. It sounds like the idea is that, with the connectome of a human brain, you just simulate the network on a massive parallel computer, giving each neuron its own computer processor. Maybe in some version of that, IIT consciousness might be possible (though I think probably not - but maybe)?

A bigger problem with the idea as he describes it is that a connectome could not be enough to simulate a brain, even if you had the connectome right down to every synapse, and even if (as we think is true) neurons connected with synapses are actually the right substrate of consciousness. That's because you don't know the rule for each neuron. A neuron has all these inputs, thousands of synapses on its dendrites, but what does it do when the neurons on the other side of those synapses are in whatever state? The connections don't tell you anything about that - you have to know something about how each neuron works, and what makes it harder is that there are so many kinds of neurons, so many kinds of synapses, and they might all follow different rules.

But those are details that could be filled in with enough imagination.

It was a great book, enjoyed it. 9/10. (minus 1 for being too long or too short - there's a bit more that could have been explained just about how the world worked, and the connections between the inside and outside of the afterlife, giving us a nice 1200 page book, or a part 1 and part 2 - or it could have been pared down to lessen expectations for those kinds of details. and the ending, considering how much we built up to it, was awfully abrubt, but good.)