Finished in 2024
There are 19 items here.
Notes on Complexity
Author: Neil TheiseFinished: 2024-10-29
Status: Read
It felt significant to proceed through a big-ideas science book like this and grapple with it the whole way, in light of other reading and thinking I’ve done myself on the wide range of topics it presents. Making a point of taking notes while I read, treating it as an interactive process that makes a permanent mark, has been a major development for 2024. Compare this heap of notes to what remains of, say, my 2003 read-through of The Selfish Gene: a vague sense that it was a great, life-changing book and that genetics is really important.
As typed up on the flight back from Silicon Valley, where I discovered and bought this portable volume at Kepler’s Books.
Not sure I understand this definition of complexity even a little; it’s the “edge of chaos” where stability and chaos “pull in opposite directions”, but it’s actually more unpredictable than chaos?? And how can a computer simulation with the same starting conditions “never be predicted”?? How does a different outcome arise each time?
Argument that there’s no such thing as top-down control, ever: all interactions are local.
Systems need a little randomness to reach into the adjacent possible: consider this for your own life!
Cells move by “aiming” existing Brownian motion, not by moving per se!?
Flight attendant gives a mischievous smile while asking, ラーメンなどは召し上がりますか？
From this perspective, then, are we living beings moving around upon this rock we call Earth? Or are we in fact the Earth itself, whose atoms have self-organized to form these transitory beings that think of themselves as self-sufficient and separate from each other, even though they only ever rose from and will inevitably return to the atomic substance of the planet?
She called me Van-sama and invited me through the galley where all the ladies were working, to use the opposite bathroom.
I’m not convinced that the randomness of quantum fluctuations is, complexity-wise, the same as the randomness of ants not following the same trail… but maybe kind of. I can sort of see how each level “uses” randomness to achieve enough interestingness to build up to the next level.
I’m not convinced of the Copenhagen interpretation and the way it centers consciousness, but I see how consciousness is what makes quantum world splitting “feel” random. It’s just an interpretation after all, solving the Schrödinger equation in another way, right? Still I’m with Tegmark and Carroll on what’s really going on.
I do appreciate the reminder of everything emerging from spacetime itself, as all one vast whole. Zen indeed.
Getting a bit woo with the holarchy argument here, unnecessarily if you ask me. The universe can be purely physical and still a living whole, buddy, without complaining about “western biases”.
Here we get to zen: interdependence, impermanence, and emptiness.
Emptiness for me is about how everything emerges from, and ultimately equates out to, zero.
Idealism: the universe emerges out of a grand whole Consciousness, and out of that emerge our little local consciousnesses. Maybe! Kinda still seems to be shifting the problem to a different level tho.
Thinking again about decoherence, and starting to understand it as a ramp depending on scale, which quite rapidly slams into a maximum where fields appear to reduce to points (thus settling which branch you’re in); but below that scale they can remain wavy. “Randomness is what branching feels like.”
Infinitely throat-clearing ojisan
Thinking again about the mathematical universe hypothesis, in light of Godel’s mathematical platonism: Does each universe comprise both rules (code) and conditions (data)? Like, there can just be some constants defined at the front of the file for conditions, right?
As typed up after landing, at baggage claim and such.
Not sure I like this invocation of Gödel to claim that “intuition” is as important as science and mathematics, or that the Copenhagen interpretation is inescapably true.
Also thinking about the way the world unfolded in real life in the 20th century (Godel’s long escape from Austria) but unfolds online now (Trump’s campaign and MSG rally today)
I don’t know how I feel about this suggestion that because of decoherence, we can’t measure things and do experiments well enough to understand the universe, so we need “metaphysics” instead.
I do appreciate the illustration of how our universe needed a stack of such narrowly complexity-compatible infrastructure. Most mathematical structures probably don’t give rise to much of interest?
Plenty in here about the Eternal tho, which I’m enjoying. Taking it in that light without fuzzy claims about mapping to science, I’m on board.
And as handwritten while waiting for my driving test at the Samezu Licensing Center, where no electronic devices are allowed.
I appreciate the complementary view of science, philosophy, and spirituality including Zen, for personal spiritual purposes.
I don’t buy the idea that “Consciousness” is somehow prior to physical existence, as it doesn’t seem to solve infinite regress problems (which Tegmark does more satisfyingly) and it smells like trying to bend science to confirm ideas you find comforting.
リカバリー カバヒコ
Author: 青山美智子Finished: 2024-10-28
Started: 2024
Status: Read
At the Katsushika Central Library, in the foreign language section looking for children’s books in English for my son, I discovered a display explaining a language learning method called “tadoku” (多読), or “copious reading”. Its principles include proceeding quickly through material that’s easy enough for you to enjoy, not referring to a dictionary when you do encounter unfamiliar words, skipping sections that are too hard, and guiltlessly setting aside anything that you’re not fully enjoying.
That day I set aside the hefty Japanese fantasy novel I’d been struggling through and went to my neighborhood shop Daiwa Books to find something I could proceed through more casually and briskly. Robin Sloan had recently recommended Aoyama’s What You Are Looking for is in the Library, in English translation, so I recognized her name on a new book in the recommendation display near the entrance.
The book comprises five loosely connected short stories revolving around an urban legend about a hippo statue in a local playground: if a part of your body is troubling you, touch the statue on that same part and you’ll be cured. Five people partake in the practice to heal various problems in their lives that are literally or figuratively associated with the brain, the eyes, the ears, et cetera. Each one then experiences a healing process which, of course, was actually about mending relationships, refreshing the perception of the self, or some other motion of the soul.
This is an archetypical example of the trend of modern Japanese “healing” fiction, books meant (and explicitly advertised in train cars and such) to be calming and restorative to the stressed and anxious modern mind. A mental prescription akin to a Spotify playlist to help you study, for better or for worse.
I did appreciate having something written in typical modern colloquial Japanese about modern Japanese people having recognizable everyday problems, if only for the language-learning benefits rather than as a great work of literature. Dashing through this got me back on track with reading Japanese as a smooth and pleasurable activity, and afterward I was much more prepared to finish out that hefty fantasy novel….
Forlesen
Author: Gene WolfeFinished: 2024-10-13
Started: 2024-10
Status: Read
This may be my favorite Wolfe short story yet. It came with a somewhat infamous reputation from Wolfe circles online, but I couldn’t remember why and can’t seem to dig up any of those discussions now. The blend of Wolfeian mystique, weird religiosity, and absurdly hilarious Kafka/Gilliamesque bureaucracy made for a satisfyingly surreal meal.
Postscript of January 2025 — I watched the television show Severance since reading this story, and just all of a sudden put the two together. Could there be an inspirational connection?
Blood Sisters
Author: Greg EganFinished: 2024-10
Started: 2024
Status: Read
A fine thought experiement in scientific and medical ethics, with a bit of the grimy 90s Egan edge.
The Caress
Author: Greg EganFinished: 2024-10
Started: 2024
Status: Read
What made us so fixated on “art-crime” in the 90s? This story, se7en, Bowie’s “Outside”, and so on. For some reason we thought that what we ought to be afraid of was the disintegration of restraint in creative expression, and that the scariest villains were going to be brilliant and well-resourced artists!?
The Safe-Deposit Box
Author: Greg EganFinished: 2024-10
Started: 2024
Status: Read
A little too dualist, “ghost-in-the-machine” for me, though there’s a bit of believable Permutation City dust theory in the mechanics of how the consciousness-untethering works. A philosophical sketch that was worth following along on. You could make a movie out of it.
The Lathe of Heaven
Author: Ursula K. Le GuinFinished: 2024-10-09
Started: 2024-09-29
Status: Read
While in Seattle for work, I met up with my best bookfriend and we walked to the Elliott Bay Bookstore. I invited him to choose any book in the store for me to buy and bring home, and he found Le Guin’s Lavinia. (We had an existing connection over her Always Coming Home, which we’d read through together a few years back.) Not far from it on the shelf was a Library of America compendium of five novels spanning her career and culminating in Lavinia, her last. So I chose that superset and committed to reading through them all. This was the first in the collection, from 1971, a sweet spot in the New Age era that I’d been freshly interested in since reading Anthony’s autobiography in which he eye-rollingly claimed that Le Guin had won a Nebula that was rightfully his; and had been craving more of since discovering Priest’s Inverted World.
In any case, the experience was thrilling from the level of the sculpting of individual sentences, all the way up to the Taoist theme running through the whole thing. I felt the moral questions and frequently paused to contemplate how one might even begin to formulate an algorithm for answering them.
“Come on up with me,” he said. “It’s raining already.” In fact it was, the endless warm drizzle of spring— the ice of Antarctica, falling softly on the heads of the children of those responsible for melting it."
The moral architecture of problems that extend beyond the current universe, or even planet: Is an ordinarily immoral act moral when it shifts the entire existence that generated our moral foundations in the first place?
I need you to the extent that-if your sense of obligation to me as a friend, and to the pursuit of knowledge, and to the welfare of all humanity, isn’t sufficient to keep you here-then I’m willing to compel you to serve a higher cause. If necessary, I’ll obtain an order of Obligatory Ther—of Personal Welfare Constraint. If neces-sary, I’ll use drugs, as if you were a violent psychotic. Your refusal to help in a matter of this importance is, of course, psy-chotic. Needless to say, however, I would infinitely rather have your free, voluntary help, without legal or psychic coercion. It would make all the difference to me."
This imagery:
One of these shops under the ramp was a secondhand store; the sign above the windows said ANTIQUES and a poorly lettered, peeling sign painted on the glass said JUNQUE. There was some squat handmade pottery in one window, an old rocker with a motheaten paisley shawl draped over it in the other, and, scattered around these main displays, all kinds of cultural litter: a horseshoe, a hand-wound clock, something enigmatic from a dairy, a framed photograph of President Eisenhower, a slightly chipped glass globe containing three Ecuadorian coins, a plastic toilet-seat cover decorated with baby crabs and seaweed, a well-thumbed rosary, and a stack of old hi-fi 45 rpm records, marked “Gd Cond,” but obviously scratched. Just the sort of place, Orr thought, where Heather’s mother might have worked for a while. Moved by the impulse, he went in.
These unconventional moments of infatuation:
“This is Heather Lelache,” said a soft, suspicious alto. An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind. “Hello,” he said again.
He liked the way she began her fierce, scornful sentences so often with a weak, conciliatory “well.” She cut the ground out from under them before they ever got going, let them hang unsupported in the void. She had courage, great courage.
Original Love
Author: Henry ShukmanFinished: 2024-11-11
Started: 2024-08-16
Status: Read
Shukman has been my main conduit to Zen, and I’ve recently shifted from Sam Harris’s Waking Up course to his The Way course for a more focusedly Zen-based practice. I picked this up at the Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, partly to have an excuse to look around for something there on my second visit in two nights, during a precious two-night stay there for work, my first time really spending time in the city since moving away eight years ago. This was a fine tour of the concepts undergirding the practices of The Way, and left me with even more of an appetite to find the right text for getting deeply into kōans, preferably in (modern) Japanese. I’ll treasure the memory of reading this with Robert Wyatt’s Comicopera in my AirPods at the Kanamachi McDonald’s, where I’d stopped for a maximally quick meal before picking up my kid at school: the pleasant discord of the Wyatt particularly amenable to blending with the background music and advertisements — logos and mythos; mind and soul.
Some say other life-forms are practicing too: trees are masters of stillness, fortitude, and graceful acceptance, and whales move through the seas suspended in oceanic awareness, communicating with one another across vast distances. Even smaller creatures move through their lives with the focus and intention of master meditators: ants tirelessly follow the call of their nature, and mice, moths, and patient cattle all practice and implicitly trust the life they are given.
We were hungry for inspiration. We tracked the contemporary poets we loved and then tracked the thread back to the poets they had loved: to Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and the Imagist poets of London just before the First World War. From them, we followed their provenance back to Wordsworth and Shakespeare, but also to ancient China, to the Tang dynasty poets they had loved and translated to Hanshan, the “Cold Mountain” poet, and Tu Fu, Li Po, and Wang Wei, who had wandered the ravines and cloud-wrapped peaks of the Middle Kingdom, stalked by vagabonds and monks who had given up on urban life and taken to the hills. There, entranced by lakes and streams, gazing at waterfall, drifting deep into the forests or high into the mountains, they wrote their clearest poetry. They drank wine and shed tears for lost friends. They also sat still in meditation, losing themselves, dissolving their minds into the peaks, becoming part of the land itself.
Instead, there is just this. Boundless. Perfect. Fully realized, fulfilled. Totally accomplished already. You. You yourself. Forever this. If you don’t feel the love, if you’re not quite getting it yet, then no worries. All of us will. We surely will.
So why is emptiness about love? It sounds more like the absence of anything at all, including love. There are two possible answers here. The first is that our human response to finding this basic emptiness is an eruption of joy. It triggers a state of blessedness. It’s like finding that all our life has ever been is an unconditional goodness. Somehow, stripped of all its show and disguises, bare existing itself is an unalloyed goodness. As if the most basic reality of all, beneath and behind every other, is a total absence, and to touch or taste it is to find the ultimate relief from all suffering. It is to find a truth that can’t be reduced or damaged or corrupted in any way. And it is to find that it is the ultimate core of our being. All else — all our life — is secondary.
Inverted World
Author: Christopher PriestFinished: 2024-09-28
Started: 2024-09-14
Status: Read
After my reread of Bio of an Ogre, I was in the mood to better understand the New Age era of SF, and to find better specimens of its wild and challenging explorations of possible universes than Anthony. I had never heard of this book, nor of Priest himself, but upon hearing the briefest introduction decided that I ought to plunge in before learning anything further. As with music, it seems that somehow the 1970s just keep on giving.
Reading this over a Mexican burger at Brave in Kanamachi ended up being one of the more vivid reading experiences I’ve had, enshrined alongside The Source of Magic on the plane to San Jose as a kid, Children of the Mind in the De Pere bunk bed, A Fire Upon the Deep in Ballard after getting my wisdom teeth out, and so on. I look forward to the stores of pleasure waiting for me in the rest of Priest’s corpus. I particularly enjoy the mental state of being led through an aesthetically potent world, feeling just at the edge of having any idea of what’s going on, but trusting that something coherent is, in fact, going on.
Matter
Author: Iain M. BanksFinished: 2024-09-14
Started: 2024-06-08
Status: Read
Banks is a heavy meal, which I’m always glad to have enjoyed but reluctant to enjoy more than one of within the span of a year or two. The idea density is satisfyingly high, and I enjoyed a number of moments of staring off into space, savoring an evocative, galaxy-scale notion. But I did once again find myself wishing that the ever-building tension was toward something deeper, more universally philosophical, than the human adventure it ended up as. It does seem to me that Banks writes “true” sf, in a galaxy that is likely to really be out there and operating according to these principles in some corner of the greater multiverse.
Bio of an Ogre
Author: Piers AnthonyFinished: 2024-09-14
Started: 2024-08-12
Status: Read
A lightly edited account from messages to a dear book-friend, on why I worked through a distant reread of this book over the course of a couple months’ worth of nights waiting for my kid to fall asleep.
So I’m semi-hate-rereading Piers Anthony’s autobiography
Because it was the first memoir I ever read, at probably about age 11, and I wanted to do a bit of personal archaeology on that time
(screenshots of the 1969 Nebula incident)
🙄
The whole book is a heap of grievances spanning from “one time I got in this argument with a guy in the line to pick up our kids at school” to “Le Guin stole my Nebula”; boasts of what a genius he is but in a world where nobody is smart enough to recognize it; and non-sequitur objectification of women
All the same, I can’t help being compelled by the stories of his upbringing and early struggles as a writer — getting thousands of words out per day, in pencil on a clipboard on his lap while wrangling his infant daughter; adding another yet-unsold novel to the pile, while his wife worked to support the family for another month…
Getting in disputes in fanzines and writers’ conferences; it’s heady sci-fi new wave era stuff
Plus, he’s the guy who introduced me to fiction not-strictly-for-kids, which will always be a warm association
Remembering going on my first “long” flight at 9 years old, Chicago to San Jose, and my brother-in-law put his The Source of Magic in my hand to read on the plane
Which I did, the entire way, prolly accompanied by unlimited 7-Up or whatever
Later on, my dad brought me to Father Steve, the “cool” priest at our church, and prodded me to tell him who my favorite author was. “…Piers Anthony…”, at which he perked up and started telling me all about the other authors I should get into next. Not long after, he had a huge box of sci-fi for me, insisting I take the whole thing home and enjoy it.
It was an intimidating collection of books, and while I looked at them and flipped through them a lot, I only really got into a small fraction of them. I didn’t have the attention span, especially versus all the other entertainments of the early 90s, for much that was deeper than Xanth.
In retrospect, he recognized Anthony as an experimental 60s–70s new wave guy, and I knew him as an 80s settled, formulaic fantasy potboiler guy
Sure wish I had that few shelves worth of books now, tho
Or even that I could remember most of what was on it
I Am A Strange Loop
Author: Douglas HofstadterFinished: 2024-05-27
Status: Read
Finished this while technically still in the middle of Gödel, Escher, Bach, the message of which this book was conceived to more succinctly and clearly convey. I’d like to spend more of my life in mental modes like Hofstadter seems to inhabit: his particular formula of deep scientific understanding, philosophical import, genuinely warm emotion, and general joie de vivre.
I was especially struck by the arguments and personal stories about identity and even consciousness being distributed across brains (and other substrates) via the influence we impart — a Dawkinsesque “extended phenotype” of the self.
Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality
Author: Max TegmarkFinished: 2024-06-04
Status: Read
Third read, this time with a solid foundation of having lived by the philosophy contained within for nearly ten years. Took my time, highlighting passages with particular philosophical or spiritual resonance, and writing many interrogatory notes. This remains the most important book to me, and one I hope to return to again and again.
Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons
Author: Ben RiggsFinished: 2024-01-01
Status: Read
This was precisely the book I wanted after Game Wizards: an account that covered the culture, creativity, and business surrounding D&D during the formative era when I discovered and devoured it. I came away with the impression that tabletop roleplaying is such an extraordinarily powerful and important technology that it shone through even the abysmal environment and practices of the company where it was invented.
The Vanishing Tower
Author: Michael MoorcockFinished: 2024-04-15
Started: 2023-01
Status: Read
This one was a bit more of a slog than the other Elric I’ve read so far, but I do have pleasant memories of reading it on my phone in the back of an eight-person van carting two families around Tokyo in the earliest months of our arrival there.
The World Before Us
Author: Tom HighamFinished: 2024-03
Started: 2024-02
Status: Read
Some exhilarating moments of truly being able to imagine the deep history of humanity, especially the simultaneous existence of distinct human species. In particular, I was dizzied by the colliding of history and prehistory in the story of Eugene Dubois who was working in Indonesia to discover human species from millions to hundreds of thousands of years ago, but whose work was interrupted by the Japanese occupation in World War II, and required him to hide specimens until they could be safely studied.