This might be old hat for the crowd here, but I’ve just discovered Karl Popper and I’m working through his collection of talks and essays, “Conjectures and Refutations.” It contains a lot of very clear insights about the philosophy of science and its application to political and historical questions; the two most interesting pieces to me so far were one on Hume’s problem of induction, discussing the difference between acceptance and logical certainty, and one on the development of the scientific mindset in Greek-era philosophers. I strongly recommend it if you’re interested in such topics.
I also recently read Marvin Minsky’s “Society of Mind”, which is just a fantastic book. It’s a very fleshed out introduction to some of Minsky’s ideas about how surface-level phenomena of the mind like memory, learning, and volition can be explained through a model of the mind as a hierarchy of tiny agents with very specific goals that communicate among themselves. It’s amazingly written; completely accessible, written in simple language, but every paragraph has a thought-provoking concept about something or other. (The single flaw is that it doesn’t really reference a lot of actual research or data; it’s more or less just laying out some food for thought based on our intuitive understanding of our mind.) I would pretty much recommend it to anyone at all.
Finally, I read Hermann Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game”—although Hesse has been a favorite of mine for a long time, I never got around to that one—and I found it to be the best fiction I’ve read in a year or two. You can head to wherever for a summary, but I highly recommend it to anyone. I suspect the premise will especially appeal to the sort of systematizing, truth-seeking folks around here.
Funny. I love Hesse, but found “The Glass Bead Game” to be incompetent SF by a literary genius who unfortunately thought that he was inventing the genre and thus didn’t know how it should be done. OTOH, in general I find that when established literary authors dabble in sf they usually botch it terribly while winning great acclaim for it.
Minsky is fabulous. Popper is fairly interesting, from a historical perspective.
I also have a pretty jaded opinion of that same category of dabblers in science fiction, but I didn’t really perceive Hesse in that light.
I identify “science-fictiony” books as being not only about technology, but about unusual, daring ideas taken to their logical conclusions; e.g. Borges and Calvino would usually qualify. But I didn’t find Glass Bead Game to be focused on that; I found the most gripping parts of the book to be Knecht’s intellectual and spiritual development, and how each of the characters negotiated the balance between a life of the mind and the rest of the world. Not very SF.
However, it’s true that the big “idea”, the Game itself, was immensely attractive to me, in a science-fictiony way, and maybe in a narcissistic way. I wish Hesse had been alive to learn computer programming; perhaps he would have had something to say about that.
Makes sense. I suppose that my objection is not to idea fiction being done by literary types (I like Borges a LOT) but to world-building done by literary types (other than David Foster Wallace, but he’s more the ‘genius-polymath’ type), which is what I really think gets the critical acclaim despite being pretty uniformly awful when compared to even competent SF.
This is the nth time someone recommends me Borges. Although I have never felt particularly attracted to his writings by sampling pages of his books, I am reaching some kind of irresistible threshold I am about to cross. Will read something from him.
This might be old hat for the crowd here, but I’ve just discovered Karl Popper and I’m working through his collection of talks and essays, “Conjectures and Refutations.” It contains a lot of very clear insights about the philosophy of science and its application to political and historical questions; the two most interesting pieces to me so far were one on Hume’s problem of induction, discussing the difference between acceptance and logical certainty, and one on the development of the scientific mindset in Greek-era philosophers. I strongly recommend it if you’re interested in such topics.
I also recently read Marvin Minsky’s “Society of Mind”, which is just a fantastic book. It’s a very fleshed out introduction to some of Minsky’s ideas about how surface-level phenomena of the mind like memory, learning, and volition can be explained through a model of the mind as a hierarchy of tiny agents with very specific goals that communicate among themselves. It’s amazingly written; completely accessible, written in simple language, but every paragraph has a thought-provoking concept about something or other. (The single flaw is that it doesn’t really reference a lot of actual research or data; it’s more or less just laying out some food for thought based on our intuitive understanding of our mind.) I would pretty much recommend it to anyone at all.
Finally, I read Hermann Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game”—although Hesse has been a favorite of mine for a long time, I never got around to that one—and I found it to be the best fiction I’ve read in a year or two. You can head to wherever for a summary, but I highly recommend it to anyone. I suspect the premise will especially appeal to the sort of systematizing, truth-seeking folks around here.
Funny. I love Hesse, but found “The Glass Bead Game” to be incompetent SF by a literary genius who unfortunately thought that he was inventing the genre and thus didn’t know how it should be done. OTOH, in general I find that when established literary authors dabble in sf they usually botch it terribly while winning great acclaim for it.
Minsky is fabulous. Popper is fairly interesting, from a historical perspective.
I also have a pretty jaded opinion of that same category of dabblers in science fiction, but I didn’t really perceive Hesse in that light.
I identify “science-fictiony” books as being not only about technology, but about unusual, daring ideas taken to their logical conclusions; e.g. Borges and Calvino would usually qualify. But I didn’t find Glass Bead Game to be focused on that; I found the most gripping parts of the book to be Knecht’s intellectual and spiritual development, and how each of the characters negotiated the balance between a life of the mind and the rest of the world. Not very SF.
However, it’s true that the big “idea”, the Game itself, was immensely attractive to me, in a science-fictiony way, and maybe in a narcissistic way. I wish Hesse had been alive to learn computer programming; perhaps he would have had something to say about that.
Makes sense. I suppose that my objection is not to idea fiction being done by literary types (I like Borges a LOT) but to world-building done by literary types (other than David Foster Wallace, but he’s more the ‘genius-polymath’ type), which is what I really think gets the critical acclaim despite being pretty uniformly awful when compared to even competent SF.
I generally agree (but not about Hesse).
This is the nth time someone recommends me Borges. Although I have never felt particularly attracted to his writings by sampling pages of his books, I am reaching some kind of irresistible threshold I am about to cross. Will read something from him.
I liked “Glass Bead Game” very much (but not as much as “Anathem”).