Book

Enjoyed, a few points that stuck out to me. If people with high IQs learn to practice emotional intelligence or EQ then we are all screwed -Unlike IQ there is no test (author claims there might never be) to measure EQ. -The way your brain works against itself will never stop being interesting. -EQ seems like the alpha version to something that better quantifies the right brains responsibilities.

So, in this surprising newsflash, we feature a story about how Ernest Hemingway is actually a really good writer. This story was set in the Spanish civil war where a mix of communists and republicans were fighting an established fascist government. The book follows an American named Robert Jordan who is fighting for the communist resistance. He is employed as a dynamiter and instructed to blow up a bridge behind enemy lines. There were two things that stuck out to me from this book. First is that Hemingway is probably the manliest man I’ve ever read. But in the best way possible. In my opinion this book is a great antidote to “toxic masculinity”. There is no machismo, chest thumping or other forms of “compensation”. Instead, there is a confident determination to carry out one’s responsibilities and to not be found wanting when the key moment arises. The main character is a blueprint of competency without arrogance. He managed to do that as well as write two female characters that seemed complex and layered. Hats off to you sir. The second thing was, it has been a while since I’ve read a book where I felt like I could see exactly what the main character was seeing. Hemingway manages to describe the setting and scenes so well I felt myself in the pine forests in the mountains of Spain. Or as an eyewitness to a massacre perpetrated by victorious rebels. This book makes you feel a full range of emotions.

I listened to this whole book, then went back and listened to the first half again, to try and cement an understanding of his argument which could be fairly complicated. The goal of the book was to give a convincing explanation of Scientific Materialism. So instead of “A Case for Christ” this would be “A Case for Darwin”. It was pretty nice to hear the best arguments for materialism from a guy who has spent much of his life studying the problem, but it took extra concentration to keep up as the reasoning was so different from the usual hippy pan psychic stuff I’ve been reading of late. Here are some thoughts, ...

I did this so you wouldn’t have to, and now you can at least take one book off your list. Gargantua and Pantagruel was written by François Rabelais in the 1500s. While the term “renaissance man” is often over-used it really applies to Rabelais. He was a genius walking contradiction. A Frenchman, a Greek scholar, a learned physician, a monk, a humanist, and is best known for his risqué satirical songs and writing. Whatever box you try to put him in, he seems to pop out of it. His characters have a love for life that flies in the face of the reserved stoicism that we generally associate with the 1500s. Whether it is taking a piss or reading Apollodorus each is treated equally in this book. Appearing in 5 books, the reader follows the adventures of Gargantua who is a giant, and his son Pantagruel who is also a giant. The book is filled to the brim with sex jokes and bathroom humor. Here is my favorite of each, for bathroom humor Gargantua is talking to his father about all the different objects he has used for toilet paper in his search for the perfect wiping sensation. The list includes but is not limited to old hats, slippers and velvet gloves. But his favorite is… ...

Consistently rated as American’s favorite book second only to the Bible, Gone with the Wind has undeniably shaped America’s culture and helped serialize the romantic ethos of ‘The South’. Written in 1936 it was an instant hit, selling more than a million copies before being turned into arguably the first blockbuster film three years later. Gone with the Wind follows the life of Scarlett O’Hara for around 15 years observing the start of the civil war and the tumultuous reconstruction that followed. This book has often courted controversy and how could it not? This is a story of the south, by someone who loved the south. —-Main Characters—- Scarlett The epitome of a southern belle, except that her charms are only skin deep. A beautiful headstrong girl who has always been the center of attention, surrounded by suitors and always pampered. As a main character I have never liked anyone less. The whole book is from her point of view which in the early part of the book is the same as being stuck inside a ditzy 17-year-old girl’s head. Scarlett isn’t stupid per se, but nothing abstract interests her, as such, much of the philosophy of the South is omitted from the book and instead is presented through motifs. Honestly this might be for the best, as because of this the book seldom gets bogged down in preaching for a way of life that we as a society have decidedly rejected. Scarlett may not be stupid in a classical sense, but she is clueless how to live life and to know what she really wants. In many ways she is the most believable of the main characters and while it is often not pleasant to be stuck in her head, I feel the same way about being stuck in my head sometimes. ...

I inherently don’t trust people who are named Dr. ‘X’, but they always seem to become popular. In a single sentence I would say that the book is full of BS that probably works. There were things in the book that triggered the Hank Hill “now that’s just asinine” response, but then she would follow it up with an explanation that would end up making a lot of sense. The foundation of this book is the idea that everyone is “Good inside”. She puts an emphasis on the idea that we are not our actions. A what she calls “two things are true” attitude. You did something that you aren’t proud of, but you are good inside. She takes this approach because she believes that people can’t change their behaviors until they believe they are good inside. She is anti-shame, so anything that promotes shame (like thinking you are bad inside) must go. So basically, a childhood completely opposite from the one I had. She promotes viewing everyone, but especially your kids through a “most generous interpretation” lens. The main role of the parent is to create an environment that is safe for the child to learn how to self-regulate emotions. So instead of shutting down kids’ feelings you are supposed to acknowledge them and let the kid feel them, so they know how to deal with their emotions instead of repressing them……sounds demonic. So, an example would be if your child is afraid of the dark, instead of trying to convince them they are not, you should approach things from a “trying to understand” way and ask why questions. Then you would tell your child, that you believe they are afraid, and that it isn’t bad or wrong to feel that way. You could then work together on trying to find solutions to mitigate the fear, instead of just telling your kid to not be “so dramatic”. That’s pretty much it, any feeling your kid has, you tell them that it is okay to feel that way, while holding boundaries. Overall, this book made me realize that I had been thinking through parenting through too much of a “me-centric” viewpoint. Focusing on what I can do instead of thinking through things from the child’s point of view. What is it like to be told what to do all the time? What is it like to have no control over your activities? How can we promote autonomy in such a structured environment? How can we learn to regulate feelings we aren’t allowed to have? So just take a moment, put your hand on your heart, deep breath in, close your eyes and say “I’m good inside”

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: ...