Recommended Reading

“The Fabric of Reality” is my “Book of My 4th Decade,” the most important book I’ve read thus far in my 40s and one of the most important works of metaphysics that has ever been written. Deutsch is a supreme intellect and his worldview changing approach to the universe shows a comfort with the widest range of human knowledge including quantum mechanics, computation (both classical and quantum), biology, and philosophy and the creativity to weave these together into a fully functioning set of arguments for not only the way the world works but also the importance of knowledge and selection for life.

Deutsch first takes on the age old search for the GUT, the General Universal Theory, as uninteresting and mostly solved by quantum mechanics. The QM of “The Fabric of Reality” utilizes the Many Worlds Interpretation of QM. The multiverse is completely well-described and forms the basis for the computational universal model that Deutsch adds on top, utilizing his groundbreaking work in development of the Turing algorithm for quantum computation to speculate on a model for the universe that involves the massively parallel processing of universal wavefunctions that we tap into with our quantum computations, hence their speed from their parallelism with other quantum computers in other near-parallel universes!

Given this phenomenal computational power, the resource availability, and ability to construct technology from this knowledge and resources, epistemological knowledge is a force capable of creatively and infinitely changing the universe. His second book, “The Beginning of Infinity” goes into how we can reliable change the universe only limited by the laws of physics, simply by continuing to solve the problems of the day. His optimism is rooted in the fact that, “problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable.”

Overall, the “Fabric of Reality” challenges our limited place in the universe by giving us a role in the progress of human knowledge and a roadmap, through quantum computation design, to improve on our lives and the survivability of posterity.

There are books that have come along at a periodicity of 1/decade or so that have completely captivated and changed my way of thinking, that are more than intellectual lightning rods, but instead are supernova rods, capturing with so much creativity and skill, an essential human insight -- "The Beginning of Infinity" is such a book.

Deutsch's work in epistemology is crystal clear and filled with optimism, a much needed commodity at this time. He starts by mowing down bad explanations and bringing us to the enlightenment, one beginning of infinity where humans again captured a brief understanding of our abilities as universal creators and utilizing our ability for abstract thought, creativity, and error correction to solve problems like food and electrical production and distribution, governance, transportation, computation, and a beginning of the understanding of the deeper laws of physics, evolution, etc. Then he takes off his shoes and socks and starts to play with his thinking about thinking!

He takes us to "Infinity Hotel" where he begins to describe the mathematical concept of infinity and show its usefulness (and again optimism) in the realm of epistemology. There are no limits and we will always be nearer the beginning of infinity, always solving new problems, and finding ways to create meaning, information, and humanity out of even the most devoid places in space. Next, we take an interesting venture into "Socrates' Dream" where the god Hermes (initially mistaken to be Apollo) and Socrates discuss the fault of the Oracle at Delphi (inability to predict the future) and improvements that can be made in epistemology (deliberate experimentation and error correction). Finally, Deutsch finishes his playful chapter-after-chapter of paradigmatic thought by explaining his concept of the multiverse by utilizing the concept of the fungibility of material and its histories through the Many Worlds theory of Quantum Mechanics.

Deutsch is an amazing thinker, truly something different awaits the reader in every chapter. If I can recommend one book, this is it.

One of the best books on the link between quantum physics, computation, and dynamic systems since Deutsch's "Fabric of Reality!" Lloyd makes a mighty effort to explain the qubit-wise computation happening at the fabric of reality and utilizes these quantum distinctions to arrive at larger systems of computation, thermodynamics, quantum gravity!, and ultimately selection and order. While I got lost in some of the early circuitry descriptions, Lloyd works through them numerous different ways to help the reader get to the basic level of understanding necessary to see how classical and quantum computation differ and how quantum computation can be used to arrive at physical, chemical, and ultimately more complex systems.

Lloyd's circuit diagrams of quantum computation AS quantum gravity and the randomness of qubit flipping AS the "monkeys typing on computers" ultimately being responsible for the instructions that led to the universe we have and the complex nature of the present age of the universe are masterstrokes of explanation and truly place this work as a fundamental read for anyone curious how existence generated the reality we live in.

As with the books by her mentor and now contemporary, David Deutsch, Marletto's "The Science of Can and Can't" will absolutely increase your knowledge of existence and epistemology. Marletto deftly gives an overview of Constructor Theory's key epistemological component, the counterfactual, the ability for problems in physics, biology, and philosophy to go beyond the deterministic physics that require initial conditions to solve key problems and sets a new course for the science of entropy, computation and the philosophy of knowledge.

In this short book, Marletto stakes a claim as the heir apparent to Deutsch and a deep thinker in her own right. The conception of constructor theory has never been more clearly laid out for the layperson and counterfactuals can take their place next to the Quantum Turing Machine proof and the evolution of the collaborative forces in "The Fabric of Reality" (many worlds quantum theory, computational science, evolutionary selection, and epistemology). While I don't think the "stories" are instructive, they don't degrade the book. It rightfully is placed in with Deutsch's thoughts, the highest bar for me.

"The Order of Time" is a great layperson's physics book, full of surprise deep thoughts about approachable, everyday (every instant really) concepts like time. Rovelli takes you through the time of pure physics which is reversible, the time of events and their causes (which must follow the Second Law), and human time with moments that extend long enough for us to tell a story about them. Rovelli introduces the idea that time and the entropic arrow might be parochial and may not work the same everywhere in the visible universe (mind blown!) and that our conscious experience is only possible through a memory of and an interaction with events of the near-past. Being in the present, requires having a flow, some sequence of events perceived as present-ish and so the mental model of self is just this time memory, integrated POV, and our neuroplastic association of our self as we see other selves to be. This squares the circle of the non-dual nature of consciousness, the narrative nature of our cortex, our memory, and our self-conscious association with others to better interact as social primates. Beautifully written, this is a must have next to Deutsch, Greene, Sagan, and Hawking.

Rereading books that were important to me in university yields important insights into that time of my life and my evolution as a thinker to now. "Chaos" weaves together the story of the vanguard of complexity theory as it reclaimed science from the singularly deterministic to the more adventurous grounds of non-linear systems in math, economics, and natural systems. Scientific adventure stories-like Gleick's "Chaos"-make the discoveries and the process of scientific advancement come to life.

Waldrop does a great job of exploring the start of the Santa Fe Institute and the development of Dynamic Systems in life, economics, and the physical sciences. While it is at times a bit light on the science and more on the dynamics of the discoveries and the personnel behind them, there is enough here to kickstart a keen inquisitor into the world of complexity.

Imari Walker's book is an instant classic in the genre and a great introduction into Assembly Theory, which like Deutsch and Marletto's Constructor Theory, offers explanations across fundamental physics AND complex systems like epistemology, life, and consciousness. Imari Walker does a magnificent job in supporting her conjectures with clear descriptions of the theoretical formulations and experimental evidence for the arising of emergence through selection, the assembled history required for there to be other intelligent life in the universe, and why it might not be detected with machines being built without Assembly Theory in mind. This is a must read.

A tour-de-force through the workings and relations of different levels of reality all the way "up" from the quantum foam to our cultural systems. Interrelationships between these various levels has been fraught for scientists but Theise uses complexity science to tie them all together with terrific appeal to an audience steeped in the language of physics, biology, and mathematics.

This is a beautiful homage to science and the natural world, to the life of the mind, and to Zen practice. I believe Theise to be a bit misguided on the nature of conscious observation being required to collapse the wavefunction, but there are many ways that others, most notably Chalmers in his book "Reality+" arrive at a level-0, continuum consciousness that is consistent with quantum physics and computation. This is the only stumbling point in this beautifully illuminating idea!

A very insightful book that presupposes the GenAI revolution by a number of years and still gets so much right about the current moment. Tegmark is one of our most brilliant voices and creative thinkers on physics, scientific thinking, and technology, everything he writes is an instant classic.

He has me convinced--literally against all odds--that abiogenesis is rare even in this expansive universe of billions upon billions of galaxies and that our conscious and cosmic endowment is of extraordinary importance and a considered approach to superintelligent AI alignment is a critical scientific problem. Well worth the read to understand how we get there from a "here" that is further along than many, but not Tegmark and the Future of Life Institute have prepared us for.

Imari Walker's book is an instant classic in the genre and a great introduction into Assembly Theory, which like Deutsch and Marletto's Constructor Theory, offers explanations across fundamental physics AND complex systems like epistemology, life, and consciousness. Imari Walker does a magnificent job in supporting her conjectures with clear descriptions of the theoretical formulations and experimental evidence for the arising of emergence through selection, the assembled history required for there to be other intelligent life in the universe, and why it might not be detected with machines being built without Assembly Theory in mind. This is a must read.

A tour-de-force through the workings and relations of different levels of reality all the way "up" from the quantum foam to our cultural systems. Interrelationships between these various levels has been fraught for scientists but Theise uses complexity science to tie them all together with terrific appeal to an audience steeped in the language of physics, biology, and mathematics.

This is a beautiful homage to science and the natural world, to the life of the mind, and to Zen practice. I believe Theise to be a bit misguided on the nature of conscious observation being required to collapse the wavefunction, but there are many ways that others, most notably Chalmers in his book "Reality+" arrive at a level-0, continuum consciousness that is consistent with quantum physics and computation. This is the only stumbling point in this beautifully illuminating idea!

One of the most impressive paradigms of thoughts that I’ve ever read, comparable to David Deutsch’s “The Fabric of Reality.” Hoffman pulls off a very compelling case for what used to be called Idealism, the ontology that says that consciousness is the fundamental constituent of reality. He does so by taking down the reality we think we see by invoking natural selection and evolutionary computation to arrive at a new theory of perception that “fitness beats truth.” This leads Hoffman to analogize our perception of the world to the Graphical User Interface (GUI) on your computer. A GUI offers you a way to use your computer to ever expanding fitness without having to know the device physics behind the integrated circuits that store the memory or enable computations. A file in the middle of your screen is not actually a little white page with lines on it in the middle of your computer, but instead a sequence of circuits containing an array of cells with or without charge, indicating bits of information that are compiled into your file. While Hoffman does not deny that there is an objective reality, the Interface Theory of Perception does claim that the reality we see is just an interface to the true objective reality, constructed by natural selection incentivized by the improvement in fitness of the interface over truth.

So what is the true nature of reality if objects and even spacetime are just an interface constructed to improve fitness? Hoffman does not go so far as to deconstruct the Standard Model of Quantum Physics but definitely takes a turn away from this sort of materialism to an idealism based in the Interface Theory of Perception, starting in on his current research that consciousness is the fundamental component of the universe. He uses the idea of fitness seeking conscious agents to construct and underlying conscious context from the relationships of their shared or intersubjective perceptions. Almost how loop quantum gravity takes the relationship between quantum fields to be most fundamental, Hoffman stays close to the initial interface thesis in not projecting a consciousness independent of conscious agents, but instead setting their relationship as the ontological center for his new breed of idealism, Conscious Realism Theory.

In this highly compelling work, Hoffman uses science and evolutionary computer simulations to descend back into the depths of the Cartesian pit of skepticism, one where evolutionary fitness and not truth, are the nature of reality; yet, he attends to our angst, again using scientific modeling and the nature of shared conscious perception, and helps us rise to ultimately build a reality not out of objects or spacetime, but information and one shared consciousness. I hope that Hoffman’s efforts here continue to bear paradigm changing fruit in the computer laboratory he is working in.

Damasio has condensed his work on consciousness into “Feeling and Knowing” to enable the reader to understand his theory. Consciousness is based in a brain and body connection that gives rise to feelings or better felt experience, especially of the interior of the body, that in more robust information processing systems can be known to be part of a unique conscious entity. The centrality of feelings as a motivating factor for the entity to understand and overcome movements away from homeostasis is core to Damasio's thesis and strikes a distinct position away from consciousness as a mystical component of all of reality, as in panpsychism, but instead as an emergent property that arises in some organisms that combine felt motivations with an identifying knowledge of the body-proper and a memory of what to do about it.

Damasio understands the answer to the “hard problem of consciousness” than to be not solely a brain-based one, but involving the entire nervous system, especially the components of the nervous system that make up the whole of our felt sense of our internal viscera (digestive and endocrine systems) and our musculoskeletal structure. While the mechanistic missing link is not fully described, Damasio leaves the door open for a Penrose-like quantum mechanism that is a special sauce to the quality of feeling that motivates and causes this knowledge of the selection pressures on our self at this moment in the presence. This no-nonsense theory leaves little to be debated from either a biological or experiential standpoint, anyone who has wondered at the nature of consciousness and sat for days in silent meditation can recognize bodily sensations as a fundamental part of what experience is and what its motivations are—for me to sit straighter or leave the cushion for lunch!

The homeostatic imperative is the foundation for the “Strange Order of Things” that Damasio convincingly holds the readers hand from the advent of life against entropy, forward to the motion under stimulus, cooperation of single-celled organisms to make multicellular organisms, the rise of body scans, the use of body maps to embodied feelings, and a subjective sense of felt experience. The icing on the cake, at least for humans, is the narrative sense of self and its ability to both appreciate our own individual story and work together through culture and creativity.

Consciousness is a difficult subject, rife with mystery, but Damasio’s speculations on the evolution of consciousness and therefore its roots is engaging and seems very true to the form of life’s combat against equilibrium, human’s twist on subjectivity including awareness and states of profundity, and our newfound need to create knowledge to move, as Deutsch says, to the Beginning of Infinity.

Damasio’s strange order of things development of culture and consciousness takes on Harari’s conception of the end of humanism, challenging the limitlessness of intelligence without consciousness. Damasio argues that the ‘box’ we have put our greatest computers into, a box that has no homeostatic imperitive, will keep them incapable of gaining the kinds of intelligence that life has evolved, intelligence types that will ultimately keep them functioning as tools and restrict their ability to outperform humans not only in emotional intelligence but in higher metacognition that could lead to superintelligence in game theory and other domains that create existential threats for humanity. Damasio is one of the few neuroscientists on this side of the debate but his development of the mechanism of individuality, creativity, and culture through evolution against entropy (the advancement of homeostasis) has great credence against others in the debate that take on a bit of the “hot hand” argument that predicts continued intelligence gains in the future solely based in the vector of the present.

Reminds me of A. Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams." High praise!!! Magical metaphors that are so well written they take over consciousness and leave it with something indelible. House extracts all of the poetic marrow out of consciousness' hard problem, formlessness, what-it-is-likeness, complexity, and self-ish-ness and leaves us asking for more. When he describes the complexity of the interactions as the tortuous surface of a fishbowl with hundreds of goldfish rising to the surface to feed, you recognize the presence of a metaphoric maestro. "19 Ways" looks at consciousness with a mirth and magic that entertains and adds explanation beyond what would be possible just by telling you what is scientifically or subjectively so.

Dawkins writes brilliantly on the nature of how we come to understand what is real through the use of the scientific method and how these discoveries in physics, biology, and sociology construct our magical universe. Dawkins intersperses mythical explanations alongside the scientific to show how they often fail to construct anything near the vibrancy and depth (even in combination) of the scientific explanation.

As someone who reads lay science regularly, their were many concepts covered in depth that have their best treatments in this work. Seasonality is extremely well-done and of course evolution and the nature of genetics is masterfully covered. Having two readers, Dawkins and Lalla Ward made it feel like a conversation in the audiobook.

I listed to Waking Up again after spending the last few years in daily meditation and dharma study on "The Waking Up App" by Sam Harris. Waking Up is still such a clear and compelling perspective on mindfulness practice and its use to illuminate the ordinary moments of life. Harris is so clear, so intellectually honest, and ultimately persuasive that spending long hours in silent meditation in order to have a relationship w/ the mind seems obvious. Waking Up is worth a re-read every few years to center your practice within a secular and loving-kind frame.

Full of insight, approachable, and limited in esoterica. "On Having No Head" is cut from a different cloth than most other books on mindfulness in the clarity of its pointing out instructions and of course in the title idea, the idea that one has no head from a first person subjective perspective. This obvious fact of our headlessness is all the more profound because we have forgotten it, we go around mindless of how even our most ordinary experiences are illuminated in the formless expanse of consciousness. Where we assume an ordinary head is instead filled with the whole world.

When I first heard of Harding and headlessness, I was on a run with my dog on a beautiful spring afternoon. Sam Harris said something essentially like what I said at the end of the last paragraph, that instead of a head, there is space for the entire world, and I was floored. I'd been an on-again off-again meditator and had studied many Buddhist texts but still the succinct and obvious nature of the marvel of first person felt experience had never been so clearly stated. After years now of consistent headless practice, there is no easier way to drop into mindful loving awareness than to recognize my headlessness. The "mindfulness for the marketplace" usefulness of headlessness in any setting can eliminate the unsatisfactoriness of most of life's normal boredom, the line at the DMV is not judged but instead challenges our ability to be consciousness in each moment.

As with all great teachers, there is much much more to learn from Harding. The headless way is not just about out looking, but also looking in, toward the still center where consciousness expands to even greater depths. "It is consciously being what we really are--capacity for things--the space in which each of them is allowed to arrive at its peculiar kind of perfection. It is consciously viewing everything from its Source, reuniting it with the Infinity that lies this side of it."

On this side of it, as Harding so eloquently says, we are able to be the eyes of the world, experiencing and appreciating existence for its grandeur, but also creating its profundity, the meaning and beauty we attribute to existence is thanks to our conscious experience of it, our "lending it unlimited enchantments."

With a pandemic raging and all of us physically distancing, I needed to figure out a way to put on a brave face in front of a faux beach backdrop. I needed to find some way to come to terms with my fears and, if possible, to appreciate life even as death was all around. I wanted to honor the dead with a life newly invigorated, not as some invective useful to prove a point.

So I turned to a book (recommend on the Waking Up app and Making Sense podcast by Sam Harris), to an author who has served as a witness and a guide to thousands dying at the Zen Hospice Center he founded. Frank Ostaseski wrote the book Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully from his thirty years serving in hospice care. During the pandemic, it is a balm for all of our souls caught up in a global cycle from loss through losing, loosening, to a wiser form of living.

The remainder of this review is available in long form at https://www.justinaharnish.com/post/pandemic-life-lessons

A quick listen with a lot of insights. Unlike a lot of self-help, I don't think this overstepped its historical relevance or how much it can contribute to improving happiness and reducing suffering. The Four Agreements are very common sense and I also enjoyed the mythical nature of how the Toltec warrior would go about executing to them. Well worth the read and the place on the shelf.

“The Immortality Key” by Brian Muraresku makes the claim that the psychedelic funeral beers and psychedelic Dionysian wines of Greece were plagiarized by early Christians in order to attract followers. It was a progression from secretive sects performed only at certain times to a greater democratization of such “mysteries” that was occurring at the same time as Christ was teaching the gospel. This psychedelic eucharist seems much better than a blood rite, it is an apotheosis, a becoming the godhead in your own rite (spelling mistake on purpose!). This is the conception of “you are it” —the holiness of aware conscious humans—that Alan Watts over and over suggests is at the bottom of the Christ story. The eucharist is you experiencing the divine, and in the olden days, through direct psychedelic experience. There is plenty to challenge in the final archeology and biological findings to tie all of this together, but it seems like a very reasonable explanation for pagan continuity in early Christendom and the emergence of Englighment ideas in Ancient Greece. A very fun read!

The greatest book of poetry and the spiritual value of words ever written! Each word takes you on a journey of presence, relationship, knowledge, experience, love, and loss. Whyte is a genius.

Sam Harris is the clearest intellectual we have the pleasure of reading and listening to today. He is astute, honest, and highly-logical writer and rhetorician. In the Moral Landscape, he delivers a true path forward for an improved human morality that leads to the consequence of greater well-being. The Moral Landscape is choppy at times since it is an edited thesis and needs to cover belief, neuroscience, and ethical philosophy in a more approachable manner but any one of Harris's arguments on these items is worth a separate critical read/listen. A capstone work on a scientific realist ethic.

Extraordinarily optimistic thesis for these times that reviews the data and shows that the enlightenment activities of reason, science, humanism, and progress are improving the world and that the only threat to continued advancement is our complacency to their continued success. Pinker shows how the anti-intellectualism coupled with fear-mongering of the issues we do face is leading to complacency where we could actually be triaging the problems and solving them, as we have with difficult problems before like food scarcity, disease epidemics, and domestic/international violence. Read to have your mind reset to the problems of nuclear proliferation and climate change AND the solution -- enlightenment thinking.

Pinker is at his best in "Rationality," clearly taking the reader through the logical, game theoretic, and causal traps we fall through and, ultimately, showing us how even with our partisan emotion and reckless web rhetoric, in the modern day, we are better at rationality than at any other time and have massive opportunity to keep improving. This book is an essential reference for any technical managers to ensure that data is reviewed and decisions are made with rationality (not what we "think" it is, but with all of the traps well displayed in front of us). I listen to the Audiobook and have gone back and ordered it from my local bookstore to have in my library… to keep me honest!

Such a good problem solving book for things in life from finding parking to love (both "look versus leap" problems best solved with optimal stopping algorithms!). The authors do a masterful job of stringing together a narrative of the "discovery" of these algorithms alongside the use of these algorithms in life. A necessary read for that geek in your life that loves life hacks! After the audio book, I bought the hardcover for reference!

In the "Madman Dreams of Turing Machines", a novel by physicist Janna Levin, we follow the novelized supernova of genius of Alan Turing and Kurt Godel.

"Then an idea fills him, presents itself to him, as if from nowhere. It is original, he thinks. And then he thinks about the thought. And then he thinks about thinking about the thought, about originality, about what it means that it's his thought. A product of his mind, a firing of a neuron, a picture in his eye, a fixed consequence of the push of a button. A reaction to mud. An algorithm executed by a machine... There must be an algorithm for playing chess or having an idea or for thinking itself."

Turing is presented as a beautiful scientific mind fraught with hard metaphysical speculation and socialization issues. In the above passage from the book, he solves the enigma code with his design of the first cryptographic computer, while moving toward the alley of seeing processes not as something discoverable from a grander universe, but mechanisms to be described; a subtle but important misstep in finding an all-natural process ontology (a.k.a Whitehead) from computation and instead staying staunchly materialistic in a necessary and ultimately tragic response to his Christian upbringing.

"The liar says 'This statement is false.' There is a mathematical equivalent, a statement that also makes an unsolvable claim about itself. It translates to, 'This statement is unprovable.' I encode the sentence, 'This statement is unprovable,' into numbers--no words, just numbers."

Kurt Godel is all the more tragic in his madness and its ability to sap his potential. His Incompleteness Theorem is one of the most profound achievements in human thought but his inability to overcome paranoia robbed humanity of one of its greatest minds. Levin in the above quote clearly articulates the importance and simple elegance of the Incompleteness Theorem but the true genius of the book is in showing how it plays a huge ontological significance in the difference between Godel and Turing and later, IRL, Primroses thoughts on the non-computational, Incompleteness-based nature of consciousness, and developments in AI from strictly materialistic neural networking.

Levin's book is a fascinating read for any scientist struggling with their own private ontological questions of meaning, their place in the universe, the ability to creative and build temples of thought that discover some natural truth, and how it all fits together in a single life.