A Few Good Books

I just copied a new page to my Symptoms of My Encroaching Insanity blog that reminded how much I like all of these books. They are related to each other. The first two are by Douglas Hofstadter. Gödel, Escher, Bach is about art, Gödel's Incompleteness theorum, music, language, symbology, recursiveness, the concept of self, and how the mind deals with information. Metamagical Themas is a collection of columns that he wrote for Scientific American on similar topics, but it also contains columns on other topics as well. That really just skims the surface. These books are playful, deep, long-winded, and mind expanding.

The Mind's I is very similar. It is a collection of essays and fiction edited by Daniel Dennet and Hofstadter on mind and consciousness. Two works in here are by one of my favorite writers, Jorge Luis Borges. There are a few that really stuck with me, particularly the thought experiments on separating "mind" from "body" and the possibilities (or impossibilities, to some) of artifical intelligence.

The essays in The Mind's I must have stuck with science fiction writer Greg Egan as well. His novel, Permutation City, is a direct examination of several of the essay topics from The Mind's I in a very entertaining science fiction novel. A few of the ideas from this book still occasionally give me headaches, particularly the idea of the universe as quantum dust and our perceptions of time and reality being non-linear states within it (Egan and the essayists in these books describe it better than I can).

No mind altering substances are required and all of these folks are well-grounded and scientifically minded - it isn't just a bunch of New Age woo-woo stuff. That being said, all of these books are kind of like a stoned/tripping bull session from college with a few radical scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists.