I had heard this book mentioned a couple times and so I had it on my list for a month or so and finished it in one sitting. Very entertaining, the mood was very tense. It reminded me a little of Lovecraft’s style. The story follows a captain of a steamboat for an ivory trading company that goes up a mysterious river in Africa. The plot started to feel familiar to me about halfway through. Turns out it inspired the movie Apocalypse Now which I had just seen for the first time less than a week prior, one of those rando coincidences. So, there are many similar themes between that movie and this book. Here are some notable quotes to summarize the feeling: ...

Living in the fictional small town in Kentucky named Port William from shortly before WW1 to the 70s the industrialization and with it, the destruction of small communities in America functions as a backdrop in this story. The main character, Jayber a name the locals gave him converted from his original name Jonah, is sent to the orphanage at 10 years of age. He has vague memories of his parents and images he has seen of the terrible war, he finds himself alone in a situation that is outside his control. This will be a theme in the story, the idea that life often just happens to you and is seldom what one plans. Without spoiling the plot too much, he feels that he is “called” to be a Baptist minister, although deep down he was never quite sure, but he joins a Bible college that convinces him that he was not meant to be a pastor. He decides to “make something of himself” by going to the big city (Lexington in this case) and get a college degree, but much like his biblical namesake he gets vomited back onto the shores of Port William sometime later. He ends up living his life in this small town as a barber and outsider. The writing was beautiful, many of the themes of Unsettling of America are worked out in the narrative by the characters. A swan song to when the farmer was one that “tends” the earth instead of “mining” it. Reminds me of some of the supposed writings of the Indians as they watched in detached depression the once thriving balanced ecosystem they knew get turned into a sex-worker. Apparently, this is just one book of ~50 that Berry has written set in the fictional town of Port William. I guess he really liked that DnD map and didn’t want to leave it. I would recommend this to be added to the reading list but not urgently. ...

Another round from Dennett attempting his best materialistic explanation of the mind. This seems to be his main goal in life. To cut to the chase I would recommend “From Bach to Bacteria and Back” as it is newer and more convincing than this book. The main message of this book is that we should stop anthropomorphizing things, or at least be more self-aware when we do. Specifically, around the experiences of animals. He argues that questions like “what is it like to be a spider, bat, etc” makes a huge assumption, viz that being the creature in question is like anything. He has some interesting thought experiments to feel this out. For example, were your arm to get amputated and you brought it to the doctor to slap it back on you should the doctor give both you and the amputated arm pain killers? Were we to find something so big and complicated in the wild we would probably assume that it would be wrong to dice it up as it would appear to have nerves, etc. etc. Furthermore, if the amputated arm DID feel pain how would it communicate it? The example obviously has gaps, considering that there is “no brain” for the arm, but is the presence of the brain where we assume pain comes from? He then uses the example of rolling over in your sleep to relieve pain or discomfort on your limbs. Do you experience this pain? The big difference between animals and humans (according to Dennett) is language. All creatures receive information through their senses, but his idea is that this information is tokenized in a storable form vis-à-vis words. Consider words to be additional layer on the operating system that allows a system to start labeling nodes in the brain that were just “instinct”. (I’m going into non canon examples here, but I think he would agree) Consider various things we all do out of habit, like driving. Have you ever driven a common route and been so up in your head that you were a little surprised when you pulled into work? You were functioning on a sort of auto pilot, much like your heart, digestive system, and most other functions in your body do 24/7. Is it “like” anything to be your heart? Maybe? but we don’t offer it the same affordances when it is on the surgery table as we would a cat. Now say that as you are driving your ‘attention’ comes back to driving. You experience driving, what is it that you are doing when you are experiencing? Perhaps no more than tokenizing incoming visual/audio/olfactory data from related nodes inside your neural meat case to words that act as a sort of post it note to various states. He isn’t trying to argue that we should treat living things as automata, but his point is there probably won’t be some clean line between organisms that experience human like pain and ones that don’t. In fact, I think he would go so far as to say the evidence is indicating that no animals experience pain “like” we do. Another example from the book was a Rhesus Macaque monkey was observed to have one of its testicles bitten off in a fight, but showed few signs of pain and the next day was observed mating again (what a chad), but does that mean Rhesus monkeys don’t feel pain? Probably not, but they definitely don’t feel pain in that one scenario the same way as humans, which is surprising given their other human like behaviors. He also had a quote in talking about perceptual biases that was worth sharing ...

This book has been on my list for a long time, as it could be considered one of the most influential texts in shaping the western world. Written in 1651 Hobbes gives his views on political philosophy and touches on almost everything else along the way. Ghosts, validity of scripture, hell and truth. The central tenant of the book is his view on men in a “state of nature” which is synonymous with the state of “war of all against all”. He famously said that in this state “life of man, (is) solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” The book is broken into 4 parts and the first deals with this as well as an overview of Hobbes’ philosophic framework with which he is operating. Hobbes is a materialist and Christian in that way a sort of relic of his time. He discounts all events supernatural excepting a small handful which God did during biblical times. In the first part of the book, he describes man as a machine, tossing the platonic idea of soul out the window as silly. His logic is incisive and leaves little room for grey areas. In some ways it feels like you are indulging a senile old man who still believes that truth can be got at by “precise” definitions and clear statements, but on the other hand, it is hard to knock the man’s models as we live in a world partially built by him. If nothing else, he seemed to have a clear view of human nature. The crux of this book is that he believes (much like Sam Harris) that it is best to start considering political philosophy from the worst-case scenario. To him the worst-case scenario is a state of nature. This means that any government, no matter how tyrannical is preferable to the state of nature and therefore all efforts should tend towards preserving governments. To Hobbes a government at its core is always representational. A group of people agree to give up their right of ruling to a person or group of persons in order to avoid the state of nature. The person or group of persons is the embodiment of the people (book’s cover photo), otherwise known as the commonwealth. This brings about some other interesting conclusions from Hobbes’. Again, viewing the world in black and white terms, he believes you are either part of the commonwealth or not. If you are, then you agree to give up your representation to whoever your leader is. Since you’ve done this, you (and everyone in the commonwealth) could be considered to be the authors of the leader’s actions. This in turn means that the sovereign cannot do anything considered unjust as like God, justice is defined by the sovereign and the sovereign owns the agency of the subjects. To be brief Hobbes feels that the worst thing in the world is to be in a state of anarchy and the best defense against that is a strong united government, otherwise known as the leviathan. Something that everyone works to preserve to make it as difficult as possible to kill. Whatever consequences the ruler imposes the subjects should consider worthy sacrifices to avoid the state of nature. He finishes the book by trying to couch his principles in Biblical terms. He, unperturbed by the millions of scholars before him, wades into the murky depths of exegesis and comes out on the other end with his political philosophy intact. I was quite glad to finish this one as the last half was quite dry and I thought a little pointless as once a person with a brain turns 16, they stop being convinced by other people’s readings of scripture. I will say that his incisive logic did not sleep on religious matters either though as he brought up some really good problems overlooked by many. Like this thought on divine inspiration: ...

Lost in the Cosmos is a uniquely styled book. It loosely follows the theme of modern alienation. In most chapters Percy sets up a scene, asks a question, and then provides multiple choice answers leaving it to the reader to decide. I can see how the format could be a turn off for some, but I found the whole exercise very interesting although I admittedly never stopped to formulate my own answers. He also takes a detour into semiotics (the study of signifiers and signified) which never fails to get into the weeds but provides a context for many of his thought experiments. The central thesis of the book is that humans are “naming things”. We live in a world full of objects that we name and put inside boxes. This is all well and good but something uncanny happened when we became self-aware. We found that in a world full of named things we are unable to name ourselves. Everything is something to the subject, but the subject is nothing to itself. The attempt to say who you are is like trying to see the back of your head. This creates alienation in the individual that used to be salved by religion naming you as a creature, brahman, atman, something is better than nothing but now we live in an age where it is extraordinarily difficult to believe in those stories so most jettison the whole thing leaving themselves alone in the cosmos. To further illustrate this idea the book opens with a beautiful quote from Nietzsche: ...

This book tried to capture the zeitgeist of the 1950s and therefore by necessity over-simplified and added artificial narratives to the decades preceding it. This narrative laid the preamble for the book by arguing that different ages had had different defining psychological hang ups. Whether this is true or similar to a horoscope reading it is up for debate. As a psychologist coming at the problem of identity from an existential viewpoint authentic individuality was the focus of the book. Some points that stuck out to me are: ...

The author is a neuroscientist and psychologist who is also a concentration camp survivor. The first half of the book is split between an autobiographical description of his experience in the camps as well as some psychoanalysis on himself and other inmates and guards. After being released he founds a new school of psychology called “logotherapy”. The second half of the book talks more about what this school of psychology is and how it works. To boil down this guy’s philosophy is as follows: ...

At times illuminating, frustrating, thought provoking, unrelatable Roland Barthes has a different understanding of what myth is than most. He feels as if no one is intentionally creating myths anymore but they are being creating all the same via social values. This book is broken into two parts the first part is a collection of essays he wrote where he analyses various events and things in the modern day and explains the modern myth that is attached to them. This branch of study is I guess called semiology, basically it looks at things in the world and looks for things that carry more meaning than their essence. For example, he breaks down different portraits styles of French politicians to explain why they were cropped just so, looked in such and such a direction, wore just such a suit etc. etc. etc. All choices deliberately made to communicate more than just happenstance random choice but instead a specific meaning. He saw myth as an organizational tool used to maintain and justify a given social order. As indicated in this quote: ...

The only surviving work of the Roman Poet Lucretius, ‘On the Nature of things’ was written about a hundred years before Christ. The goal of the book was to try and explain Epicureanism to the Romans. I was surprised to learn that Epicurus was born about 300BC. This book explains pretty much every phenomenon you can think of from sweet vs bitter tasting things to why we sleep. Of course, the caveat being that it explains everything from a perspective of a guy two thousand years ago, so he was bound to have made a lot of mistakes. That being said it was impressive some of the things that he got right. For example, he argues that at a tiny level the most abundant thing must be nothing or void. If this was not the case movement would not be allowed. This of course turns out to be true as the closer you look at something the more space you start to see. The temptation is to read something like this from an angle of superiority, but while reading this instead of thinking “how far we’ve come” it kept making me feel like we haven’t come that far. Or rather we still barely know anything. A phrase from Foucault has been in my head for the last few weeks. He basically says that there are certain words that get used in science as definitions that aren’t actually definitions. They act instead as boxes that hide things we don’t understand. This seems very applicable here as many of the things Lucretius talked about, we now have better names and smaller boxes for, but there is still a lot of boxes. Lucretius essentially gives the basis of a mechanical viewpoint of the world that was free from the influence of gods. Where particles interacted with particles and the shapes of particles largely influenced the reaction. For example, he theorized that foods that were sweet had round smooth shaped particles while bitter food must have hooked and rough shaped particles. This viewpoint of bodies effecting bodies for all interactions remained the only answer in science until newton came along 300 years ago (Epicurus to Lucretius is the Same time as Newton to us) and turned everything on its head by introducing the concept of i.e., a box for something we don’t fully understand. As foundational of a text as this is, I wouldn’t necessarily say it needs to be on your must-read list. Probably the most interesting section in this book to me was a section on the mortality of the soul. Where the definition he gives of the soul is pretty much the same one modern science gives. Here modernity has not learned a single new thing since his time. In fact, we’ve probably forgotten some things.

When I bought the Symposium, it came in a two pack with Phaedrus as its second. I was glad to find out that this book too revolved around pederasty(sarcasm). Essentially, Phaedrus runs into Socrates walking in the country after hearing a speech by Lysias on reasons why a boy should only lend his favors to a lover (older man) who is not in love with him. The text is lighthearted and has many jokes as Socrates then makes a better speech which agrees with Lysias impressing Phaedrus, but eventually reveals he believed Lysias’ speech to be pretty lame and he didn’t agree with his own. The book finishes with him giving a rebuttal speech and then he focuses on the art of rhetoric and the dangers and pitfalls that are in it. My favorite quote is in regard to (ironically) writing: ...