Although end of year book reviews tend towards the circle-jerky, I like reading others’ reading lists, and I read a bunch of really good books this year, so I figured I’d take the risk and share them. They’re in no particular order, and range from sci-fi to economics to history to politics to litfic to philosophy. I didn’t include publisher info but it’s all easily googleable.
1. Permutation City, Greg Egan (1994)
This book to some extent convinced me I was immortal. That’s a very weird thing to say, I know, but it seems to follow from the following argument the novel dramatises. Assume that your conscious experience is grounded in your brain, but that identical experience could be grounded in some other physical structure. Assume that, in some sense, it’s sufficient for there to be a life that there be a sequence of conscious states related the way our conscious states are (e.g. some states contain memories of having experienced what’s experienced in some other ones). Assume, slightly less clearly and convincingly, that the order, relative to some external viewpoint, that those conscious experiences occur in doesn’t matter: my experience consists of this experience and then that experience, but all that’s required for the ‘then’ness is that the latter experience contains memories of the former.
If that is so, then the external order of the experiences, and thus the external order of the occurrence of the instantiations of the physical structures, doesn’t matter. If my this experience — that experience sequence is grounded in state s1 and s2, it doesn’t matter if s2 precedes s1 in real life, as long as the experience associated with s2 appropriately follows the experience associated with s1 (for example, that s2’s experience contains memory of s1’s).
That gives us a lot of room to instantiate lives. Consider a creature that has two seconds of conscious experience, and assume implausibly experience is broken down into one second chunks. Then provided, somewhere in space and time, there are two states that instantiate those experiences (and they don’t have to be in order), then that experience will be instantiated also in those states. But space and time are very very big and very very small, and the possible physical realizations are very very many. So it seems not implausible that there are such states (maybe in atoms, maybe in galaxies, maybe in both), and so not implausible that that creature’s experience is also instantiated in them. Then again from the size of space and time, it doesn’t seem so implausible that we can find states in space and time that instantiate my much longer experience. So I should expect my experience to be instantiated elsewhere, and, again by the same reasoning, we should expect experience like mine except, where my experience stops through death, this experience continues indefinitely also to be instantiated, and that experience will have all my memories and so forth, and that will be the experience of an immortal me, so I expect to experience immortality.
So, yeah, it’s a pretty interesting novel that I recommend.
2) Radical Markets, Posner and Weyl (2017)
This one’s even weirder: it convinced me that I was a free marketeer. Not a free marketeer anything like the ones that are around now, or even the ideal types you might find some libertarians defending, but a new sort of free marketeer who is concerned to produce and justify equality, social security, immigration, and in general the good stuff we progressives like.
The book is short and highly readable, presenting some familiar material about the growth of inequality and other things before suggesting market-based solutions. I intend to write more fully about it at another time, but it argues for, among other things, the thought that private property is bad and should be taxed in a new and interesting way that would redistribute wealth from its possessors to the dispossessed, and the thought that the problems associated with immigration could be resolved if the people whom immigrants tend to be displace were instead to benefit from them. More generally, it presents a model of how markets could bring us together rather than apart, and I found it inspiring.
3) The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe, Stiglitz (2016) /Europe isn’t Working (2016), Europe Didn’t Work (2017), both Elliott and Atkinson (I finished neither but only because I was reading them in a library and they vanished)
It’s all to easy to look at the odious and opportunistic face of the Brexit campaign — the Johnsons, the Rees-Moggs — and conclude that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and that the EU is thus my friend. Of course, things aren’t quite so simple, and these books present the problems with the EU as well as the case for lexit, or left-wing brexit.
While I don’t think Brexit should happen, because of the uncertainty and the fact that the people running it are dreadful and incompetent, nor do I think the EU is great, and these books explain why. But the real reason to recommend them is that reading it one realizes how central the European project is not only to economics but also to politics: that it was a union to ingeniously secure political stability through economic interdependence. If it contains to be unpopular across the continent, and we’re to face an ununified Europe, this is a piece of history that might be impressed upon the top of our mind soon, and these books help do so.
4) How to Make Your Own Neural Network, Rashid (2016?) / But How Do it know? The Basic Principle of Computers for Everyone, Clark Scott (2009)
The first of these books, as its title suggests, presents the theory behind simple neural networks as well as how to implement one in python. It’s a pretty easy but also informative book, not shirking the maths and explaining it pretty well (at a couple of places I struggled because of what I take to be notational ambiguity). In addition to all those ridiculous beliefs above, I also think AI is important and that it will revolutionise our life (I was partly convinced of this, not by fancy theorizing, but by watching Westworld and it ringing true). I do thus somewhat in earnest believe that the first is a book that gives you a recipe for building a mind, or at least tells you what such a recipe might look it.
The second book is a bottom up explanation of how computers work, starting from logic gates and thence proceeding to the components of a simple computer. The more canonical book, I think, is Petzold’s Code, but this was cheaper and I’m happy with my purchase and recommend it.
5) Bitcoin And Cryptocurrency Technologies, Narayanan, Bonneau, Felten, Miller, Goldfeder (2016), freely downloadable **here.**
Yet another unpopular opinion: I’m a blockchain true believer, and this book, available freely online, explains the history and theory behind blockchains and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. In general, I try to read anything about money I can get my hands on because money is probably the most important concept that philosophers bizarrely seem not to care about. I’m interested in blockchains for the same sort of reasons I like the radical markets book — because the question of how to form new and better social groups (and the interconnections a shared currency creates is one such) is, I think, maximally important, and the possibility of blockchains to create worldwide groups (groups including those previously excluded — ‘banking the unbanked’, as the slogan goes) is inspiring.
I even like that blockchains are based on work: on each of us contributing to some public good, and while that might be a pun given the current state of bitcoin mining (which goes by something called ‘proof of work’), I don’t think it need be a pun, and this book will explain why.
6) Flatland, Abbott Abbott, 1884
I only recently discovered this book but it’s great. Written by a Victorian vicar, it’s a sort of speculative fiction/satire/maths lesson that presents a two dimensional world. Its inhabitants’ social class is a function of their shape: while the clergy are sufficiently many sided as to be essentially circular, and less refined but still respectable people are squares, the lower classes are isoceles triangles and woman — and I think the author is being satirical here — are like needles, a fact which makes them both weak and dangerous in various ways. The cleverness with which the conceit is carried through, and the mileage in terms of social satire he gets from shape are both impressive, and engaging with it really helped me understand dimensionality better than many physics books. Finally, it suggest a very interesting project I want to carry out: for fun, people have developed theories of what two-dimensional physics would look like. I want to develop a theory of what two-dimensional culture — art, religion, language, etc. — looks like, and hope to do so.
7) The Last Samurai, DeWitt (2000, rereleased (iirc) 2018)
There are many things to like about this novel. Roughly, it’s about the very smart child of a very smart mother who goes on a quest to find his father. It’s about, I think, deprivation. Of not having money, heat, a coherent Other in one’s life. It’s also about excess, and in particular having an excess of talent or brains or imagination. It also has exactly what one would want from a novel — and I don’t mean this pejoratively, it’s by no means off the shelf lit. fic. — it’s moving, funny, rhythmically very good, and creates a world you want to stay in (I’m an awful reader of fiction, but once I finished this I went straight back to bits I’d skipped.)
Its use of philology, too, is untimely in the best way. Mother and son are linguistic prodigies, and it reeks of a world very different to ours, in which the aim of smart people was not to synthesize vast swathes of data to make predictions about the future, but was rather to drill down, into the past, and its texts, and particular words in those texts and and to find them in the Lydell and Scott Greek dictionary, find everywhere where they occur, and capture them precisely. To see eternity in a grain of sand, I think, is philology’s aim, and it’s one of the appealing things of this book that it captures this.
8) Ages of Discord, Turchin (2016)
Does history obey laws, or is it, as a famous person said, just one damn thing after another? The work of Peter Turchin suggest the former. The field he created, cliodynamics, is concerned with working out the laws of history by trying to find patterns in the increasingly detailed data sets available to us. He proposes a theory of secular cycles, according to which political instability and stability alternate in waves and in this book he attempts to show how it can explain American history. He made the popular press a few years back with claims that he foresaw Trump and his theory predicts Bad Things Are Coming. While very speculative, it’s fun to think about.
9) One: Being an Investigation Into the Unity of Reality and of Its Parts, Including the Singular Object which is Nothingness, Priest, 2014
I’m a philosopher by occupation, but the first draft of this list, somewhat disconcertingly, didn’t have any philosophy on it (well, academic philosophy: I would think of pretty much all of the above as philosophy in a wider sense). But then I remembered this book. It’s pretty wild. It synthesizes work on dialetheism (the idea that there are true contradictions), Russell’s problem of the unity of the proposition, Heidegger on nothingness, Buddhist ethics, and much, much more, into a sweeping and interesting view of reality.
Opinions may rightly differ as to the worth of philosophy in general and this extremely speculative sort of philosophy in particular. My perspective is pluralist: we should allow for perhaps implausible yet aesthetically satisfying theories like Priest’s alongside the more pedestrian fare that fills journals. In any event, this is a great example to show someone who says contemporary analytic philosophy can’t be simultaneously technically informed, historically attentive, and about things that actually matter to people.