"Permutation City" by Greg Egan is mind-bending in a way similar to The Matrix, except taken up a few notches.
Explores the consequences of consciousness being just a pattern. Would it continue if the pattern is paused? Seems yes, since we survive being unconscious. So we move in space and time, but still consciousness feels continuous.
What if you pause it, destroy it, recreate it somewhere else. Would it not continue then as well (the classic teleporter question). But it doesn't stop here.
What if you destroy it, but it just happens to continue somewhere else? Then it should continue there as well. So if you think that teleportation would not mean death, then you kind of have to accept that if anywhere in the universe at any time the same pattern exists when you die, then you can't really die because you'll just continue on from there instead.
Not sure I accept it, but it's certainly mind-bending to think about!
For higher dimensional mind bending his Diaspora book is a must read!
For mind games: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi.
Plus for a related rabbit hole: the idea that a random pattern can just pop into existence and have consciousness is basically the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain concept.
Diaspora was going to be my answer as well, the ending in particular. It kinda forced me to accept as inevitable that at some point my consciousness will cease, in one way or another.
I can plausibly see life extension technology arising that gives me hundreds, or even thousands of extra years of life. It doesn't seem entirely impossible to extend that premise to millions of years, but at billions it doesn't really seem fathomable, and trillions seems to be well beyond what we know about the likely fate of the universe. And once I accepted that inevitability, it suddenly seemed a lot more plausible that my time left was probably closer to decades than even centuries, let alone anything beyond that. There were definitely a fair few existential crises in the weeks and months after finishing that book.
'Very far off to left field' side note: The human brain is still active during unconsciousness.
EEG traces of the brain show this. When you are awake, drowsy, asleep, or under anesthesia, the patterns of your brain waves are very different [0,1]. But, the brain is not 'paused', it's just firing differently than when you are awake or drowsy.
So, the 'pattern' is not just 3-D, it's 4-D. You need time as well. You'd need to transport the 'trace' over vast distances, scales, and times.
Sometimes I wonder if I ever actually stop thinking at night; maybe I just don't remember it in the morning? Maybe every night is just laying concious for 8 hours, thinking weird dreamlike thoughts, but being unable to form memories.
I know brain measurements show that our brains operates differently during sleep, but we may still be concious, at least internally.
Have you ever had the same "sleep stage 1" experience I have?
If I start to fall asleep in the living room around people, their voices seem to become louder, I am aware of what they are saying, their sentences make sense. Yet, if I am suddenly awaken to full alertness, I will have no memory of what they were specifically talking about, although I do remember that I heard them talking. It's as though the ability to form memories went away before full conciousness went away. I believe this is a common experience, and I was fascinated when this pattern was first pointed out to me.
This one is actually a little different. There is much much less activity under anesthetic vs sleeping. There are even theories that going under general anesthetic actually causes some small degree of brain damage due to the shutdown.
It's either this or another Greg Egan book that has simulated people reprogramming their own consciousness. Changing their thought processes, personal motivations, and memories. I think he goes into some depth on how they can do that safely and what the implications are. One character programs himself to be obsessed with carpentry and spends lifetimes of subjective simulated time trying to craft the perfect table, but has a timer to turn off that motivation after some period of time. It's a fascinating idea that has stayed with me, and I think of it every time I see another depiction of a "brain in a computer". I'm disappointed that nobody else has tackled that idea, I think people are still getting used to the concept and it will be a few years before we see something like that in some more pop-culture sci-fi.
Diaspora includes a few examples of this as well. Mathematical discoveries can only be made in the "mines", and people install these mods to make them better at mining, after working through some of the beginner steps unaltered to see if they'd like it. There's also a mod that explicitly prevents you from ever uninstalling it; I don't remember what else it even did, it seemed to spread like a slow virus through the artistic communities in the simulation.
Also I shouldn't have said "nobody else has tackled that idea", I am sure it has come up somewhere else. I am just thinking of recent examples like Black Mirror or the new Upload show on Amazon, that IMO miss opportunities to fully explore the implications of simulated minds. Stuff like that would be very difficult to film though...
Greg Egan's an impressively good author even though he's writing about the kinds of sci-fi setups that usually come hand-in-hand with bad dialogue and poor characters. I actually think Quarantine is my favorite of his that I've read so far, though the sci-fi parts are less strong than Permutation City, some of it's philosophical aspects about identity feel like they're more immediately relevant.
Also take a trip to his website [1] if you haven't yet.
Right, he came highly recommended, but he is just boring. His stories exist to present a sci-fi concept, not be a good story. Same as Neal Stephenson's later work, which is a tragedy.
Egan is a close second for my all-time favorite sci-fi author. Some of his books read like mathematical dialogues or transcriptions of lectures (lots of the Orthogonal Series is conversations between professors and their grad students reasoning about physics of a world that we don't live in), but he also delves deep into mathematics and fringe ideas and presents them in a vista where you can enjoy the absolute splendor of the abstractions.
He also never thinks small. I thought I knew "the point" of Diaspora about 6 or 7 times, but then he just "zoomed out" and made the last point look small and trivial by comparison. The opening chapter of that book is so abstract and yet describes the birth of a consciousness in a way that feels understandable, believable, and internally consistent.
If you love finding interesting puzzles to reason about, then I strongly recommend Egan's books!
I haven't read Permutation City, though. I'm bumping this one to the top of the queue :)
I think I remember reading another sci-fi book or short story that posited the classic "teleporter problem" but the device functioned by making a copy of the individual and then destroying the original, similar to The Prestige I suppose. Part of the plot centered around the original escaping that fate and then fighting for their continued existence. I think it poses a very strong argument against a copy of consciousness being a continuation since it makes no sense that there is continuity between copy and original only if the original is immediately destroyed, it just means that the copy is the only remaining instance.
Long time ago I read some idea (probably on reddit) from some guy, that was quite similar to this. The idea being is that essentially you can't die. There is no death. If universe is infinitely large and also it keeps restarting itself with big bang and some universe death all over. Then at some point. Right after you die, something exactly as you will be reborn somewhere else. Even if it takes unimaginable amount of time for that to happen. To you, that's irrelevant, you will just be immediately reborn and start again after death. Your copy might not be alive anywhere else at this moment, but it will be at some point. And well if it's exactly like you, then it's you. I found this pretty intriguing, even though I am not into any non-rational stuff. I wonder if this idea has any holes.
"Eternal return (also known as eternal recurrence) is a theory that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.
The theory is found in Indian philosophy and in ancient Egypt as well as Judaic wisdom literature (Ecclesiastes) and was subsequently taken up by the Pythagoreans and Stoics [and] Nietzsche..."
Ah jeez, I was just about to head to sleep. It’s like the library of Babel, but with universes. In infinite time with infinite random arrangements of matter, the matter will undoubtedly arrange itself exactly as it is right now. Thanks for the brain melt.
I could not think of a better answer. I've read this book 2 years ago and vowed to write a review or an interpretation of some sort when I got less excited. I didn't sleep for two days. And never wrote the review.
I find Greg Egan is also very good in small doses. I highly recommend his short story collection Axiomatic, where each story explores a different idea in brief. It's still hard sci-fi but it's chunked smaller so if you're less of a hard sci-fi fan you can still find it interesting.
After recommending it for years on every HN book thread I could find I'm happy to see it's not forgotten yet, really, Egan could have written at least 3 separate books with the content of Permutation City.
I bought this on Kindle after seeing it in another HN thread but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. After reading your comment I think I'll bump it up higher on my priority list.
I loved the concept in permutation city of simulating your own mind out of order, but I think it would only be possible if we can show that consciousness is a pure function. If consciousness isn't pure and therefore depends on some internal state, then simulating out of order isn't possible because you need to go through all the intermediate states to get the right output.
Scott's MO through all of his books is to write about free will, specifically the idea that we don't possess it and that our brain makes decisions by itself and that consciousness is an illusion.
In this theme, "The Mind's I" by Hofstadter and Dennett is an interesting combination of short-form sci-fi and philosophy of consciousness.
It presents a well-chosen sci-fi story that explores an extreme modification to one of the parameters of consciousness, followed by an essay analyzing the consequences of that thought experiment.
• "Laws of Form" by George Spencer-Brown, a little book that describes how to bootstrap the Universe from nothing. Louis Kauffman [1] has a lot of papers/writeups on it, from knot theory to quantum physics. If you ever wanted to make a pancake truly from scratch, this is a place to start.
• "The Unconscious as Infinite Sets" by Ignacio Matte Blanco. Reformulates Freud in logico-mathematical terms and establishes a formal system (bi-logic) to describe unconsciousness phenomena: in case you ever wanted to apply category theory to study yourself.
• "The Protracted Game" by Scott Boorman. Interprets Maoist's revolutionary strategies during 1927 - 1949 period as a game of Go. Interesting both from historical, military, and game-theoretical perspective; raised an appreciation of Eastern wisdom and 'board games as a tool of thought' [2] for me.
• "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering" by W. J. King. Written in 1944, but the advice is still relevant, more so to the software engineering field. Should be at least skimmed at any part of your career.
• "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Alber Camus. Unequivocally answers the most important question there is — does life have meaning, and if not, should you kill yourself over it? I read it in my teens while wrestling with existential dread, and lived a somewhat happy and interesting life ever after.
You would definitely appreciate Intelligence and Spirit, which employs game theory, linear logic, and Hegel towards a theory of artificial general intelligence.
Retroactively, I would also add "A Thousand Plateaus" by Deleuze & Guattari to this list, except that I haven't yet read the actual thing, but only dipped my toes into related studies, like e.g. "The Allure of Machinic Life" by John Johnston that traces the history of cybernetics, A-Life and AI fields and adds a Deleuzian spin on top.
This is the only case in my life where I wanted to adopt author's philosophy and learn to see the world the way they do. The content is very interdisciplinary and heavily borrows from various fields (psychoanalysis, dynamic systems theory, biology, linguistics &c) and will surely appeal to a technically minded person.
these all sound interesting but the first result of laws of form on amazon shows an edition that claims the first ever proof of the riemann hypothesis, so now i am suspicious because that is obviously a falsehood. it's possible that someone has posthumously edited the original, but either way it shows that the book attracts cranks. any thoughts on this?
i see now that wikipedia states that spencer-brown claimed applications of his approach to big conjectures that never panned out, so now i am extra dubious. it makes sense now why people would go off and try that out.
It does attract eccentric people and spiritual seekers of all sorts ([1] gives a good historical overview), but also open-minded academics, like aforementioned Kauffman; Spencer-Brown's ideas were very popular in cybernetics at the time of Macy conferences, e.g. Varela's autopoiesis was heavily influenced by LoF. I also recall reading something about how Luhmann applied it to sociology.
There are some papers/presentations about applications of ideas based on these laws: circuit optimizations, query engines, various "iconic" algebras [2, 3]; I, like you, have a hard time buying all that (ditto author's claims about Reimann hypothesis), but still, it sounds pretty damn interesting and innovative, e.g. examples of multiplication/addition in 1st vol. of "Iconic Math" were eye-opening and intuitive for me, as a person with kinaesthetic learning style, in a sense that I deeper understood what "number" and "to calculate" mean; it also promotes the invention of various ad-hoc calculi and notations, of which I am a big fan of.
For me, the greatest thing about LoF is cross-fertilization: esoterical mumbo-jumbo benefits from formalization and mathematical approach, while technical disciplines find their root in the spiritual ground; that and the thought experiment of building the world from nothing. It bridges "above" and "below", and kinda reminds me of [4].
If you want smaller, quicker payoffs (but in no way cheaper!), consider the anthologies of short stories by Ted Chiang. Most of them are 15-45 minutes to read, with a couple longer (1-2 hours).
I've read both "Stories of Your Life and Others" and "Exhalation" in the last month and I turned to my wife and said "that story just blew my mind" for probably 75% of the stories.
I read Stories of Your Life and Others, and felt he had some interesting ideas, but not very interesting characters, and pretty much all of his characters sounded like they had the same voice (Which, as a writer myself, I admit it can be difficult. I struggle with giving my characters distinct voices as well).
Made it hard for me to get emotionally invested in his stories, and I found them a bit of a slog to get through.
Not sure if I'll give his other books a read, but I might.
He has a background in Computer Science, by the way, for those that might be interested.
Give some of his newer stuff in "Exhalation" a try. He's improved with time. I seem to recall 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling' having some distinct characters, and also a really neat setting.
Social philosophy/psychology, or cultural anthropology, is mind-bending to me.
Erich Fromm's The Sane Society - on how society impacts people's mental health, and how to build towards a sane society
Fromm's The Art Of Loving - an analysis of different kinds of loves, trying to dispel pop culture's lies about love, and love is actually hard work
Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death - on how not our fear, but our complete denial of death existing leads to the weirdest outcomes in our society
Then there's political stuff -
Orwell's Essays, any large-ish collection. I find Orwell to be a much, much better non-fiction writer than fiction writer. Extremely insightful into political processes.
Robert Caro's books, perhaps the first The Years Of Lyndon B Johnson. Can't get better insights into how power works on a local and not-so-local level.
Popper's Open Society and its enemies, hard to summarise - a defense of Western society in light of the then-ongoing WW2. You probably saw the paradox of tolerance a few times pop up, that's from that book, among a ton of other stuff.
Oh if you can, try looking for similar recommendation threads from communities completely alien to you - law enforcement forums, midwife communities, car mechanics, biologists.
HN is very insular in its interests as you can see with many posts here repeating. Midwives' recommended books probably have a higher chance of truly bending your mind into novel directions.
"Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life" by Rory Sutherland
Explains why we choose brands over cheaper alternatives, why we're willing to pay a lot more to lock in a deal, why we hate registering before buying the thing (but are more than happy to do so right after), why Sony removed the record button from the first Walkman, and much more.
This book forever changed the way I think about brands, and improved my design and problem-solving skills.
A couple of Rory's rules:
• The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.
• Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will.
A couple of "mind games" from the book:
• Merely adding a geographical or topographical adjective to food – whether on a menu in a restaurant or on packaging in a supermarket – allows you to charge more for it and means you will sell more.
• "There's your problem," I said. "It doesn't matter what something tastes like in blind tastings, if you put 'low in fat' or any other health indicators on the packaging, you'll make the contents taste worse."
“Desert Solitaire” by Ed Abbey and “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn. Both are wildly different but explore the question of how different the other forms of life on this planet are from ours. “Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” By Franz de Waal et al explores this from a scientific perspective.
Abbeys about more, of course. He had that rare ability to turn his book into something that felt like a direct conversation with me, the reader. I read him in my 20s and his viewpoint definitely connects with someone wanting to examine and express his/herself first before society’s overwhelming influence. He discusses trying to free himself from the conceptual confines of the human individual and societal experience while isolated in a national park. Quinn uses a hypothetical conversation between a gorilla and a person to highlight the fundamental us versus them approach humans take with the rest of earth. Then Franz de Waal really drives home that animals are likely to be much more mentally capable than we give them credit. They’re good books if you want to know something more about the universe than what your human experience is.
If you liked Ishmael, I recommend reading The Story of B. Its subject is very similar to Ishmael but I feel that it does a better job of portraying how the us vs them is woven into the very fabric of civilization. It's also a very entertaining read.
I read Story of B as well. But I don’t have quite a clear enough memory of it to even try to summarize it as anything past a sequel. I’ll go back to revisit them some day.
This book makes every bit of life advice you receive afterwards feel shallow. It feels like a reference to western thought.
It's also very well translated and reads very easily, and is very short. I read about a chapter every morning when I feel motivated, and certain passages really stick in my head.
It also helps to read whenever you feel overcome with emotion because of something.
"Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy" by Thomas Sowell. I read this as a teenager with only limited exposure to economics and it cleared up many misconceptions I held.
"Psycho-cybernetics" by Maxwell Maltz. A plastic surgeon shares his techniques for achieving your goals in life. 95% if not more of self-help books today borrow (consciously or not) ideas discussed in this book, and often discuss them with much less depth.
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Explores the consequences of consciousness being just a pattern. Would it continue if the pattern is paused? Seems yes, since we survive being unconscious. So we move in space and time, but still consciousness feels continuous.
What if you pause it, destroy it, recreate it somewhere else. Would it not continue then as well (the classic teleporter question). But it doesn't stop here.
What if you destroy it, but it just happens to continue somewhere else? Then it should continue there as well. So if you think that teleportation would not mean death, then you kind of have to accept that if anywhere in the universe at any time the same pattern exists when you die, then you can't really die because you'll just continue on from there instead.
Not sure I accept it, but it's certainly mind-bending to think about!
For mind games: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi.
Plus for a related rabbit hole: the idea that a random pattern can just pop into existence and have consciousness is basically the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain concept.
I can plausibly see life extension technology arising that gives me hundreds, or even thousands of extra years of life. It doesn't seem entirely impossible to extend that premise to millions of years, but at billions it doesn't really seem fathomable, and trillions seems to be well beyond what we know about the likely fate of the universe. And once I accepted that inevitability, it suddenly seemed a lot more plausible that my time left was probably closer to decades than even centuries, let alone anything beyond that. There were definitely a fair few existential crises in the weeks and months after finishing that book.
https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html
The emergence of a Boltmann brain is on the scale of "all iron stars collapse via quantum tunnelling into black holes"
The next milestone is all matter decaying, and the universe being empty..
EEG traces of the brain show this. When you are awake, drowsy, asleep, or under anesthesia, the patterns of your brain waves are very different [0,1]. But, the brain is not 'paused', it's just firing differently than when you are awake or drowsy.
So, the 'pattern' is not just 3-D, it's 4-D. You need time as well. You'd need to transport the 'trace' over vast distances, scales, and times.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_oscillation
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3288763/ Figure 1, in particular
I know brain measurements show that our brains operates differently during sleep, but we may still be concious, at least internally.
Have you ever had the same "sleep stage 1" experience I have?
If I start to fall asleep in the living room around people, their voices seem to become louder, I am aware of what they are saying, their sentences make sense. Yet, if I am suddenly awaken to full alertness, I will have no memory of what they were specifically talking about, although I do remember that I heard them talking. It's as though the ability to form memories went away before full conciousness went away. I believe this is a common experience, and I was fascinated when this pattern was first pointed out to me.
This one is actually a little different. There is much much less activity under anesthetic vs sleeping. There are even theories that going under general anesthetic actually causes some small degree of brain damage due to the shutdown.
Also take a trip to his website [1] if you haven't yet.
[1] https://www.gregegan.net/
He also never thinks small. I thought I knew "the point" of Diaspora about 6 or 7 times, but then he just "zoomed out" and made the last point look small and trivial by comparison. The opening chapter of that book is so abstract and yet describes the birth of a consciousness in a way that feels understandable, believable, and internally consistent.
If you love finding interesting puzzles to reason about, then I strongly recommend Egan's books!
I haven't read Permutation City, though. I'm bumping this one to the top of the queue :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32446949-the-punch-escro...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return
"Eternal return (also known as eternal recurrence) is a theory that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.
The theory is found in Indian philosophy and in ancient Egypt as well as Judaic wisdom literature (Ecclesiastes) and was subsequently taken up by the Pythagoreans and Stoics [and] Nietzsche..."
Scott's MO through all of his books is to write about free will, specifically the idea that we don't possess it and that our brain makes decisions by itself and that consciousness is an illusion.
It presents a well-chosen sci-fi story that explores an extreme modification to one of the parameters of consciousness, followed by an essay analyzing the consequences of that thought experiment.
Deleted Comment
• "The Unconscious as Infinite Sets" by Ignacio Matte Blanco. Reformulates Freud in logico-mathematical terms and establishes a formal system (bi-logic) to describe unconsciousness phenomena: in case you ever wanted to apply category theory to study yourself.
• "The Protracted Game" by Scott Boorman. Interprets Maoist's revolutionary strategies during 1927 - 1949 period as a game of Go. Interesting both from historical, military, and game-theoretical perspective; raised an appreciation of Eastern wisdom and 'board games as a tool of thought' [2] for me.
• "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering" by W. J. King. Written in 1944, but the advice is still relevant, more so to the software engineering field. Should be at least skimmed at any part of your career.
• "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Alber Camus. Unequivocally answers the most important question there is — does life have meaning, and if not, should you kill yourself over it? I read it in my teens while wrestling with existential dread, and lived a somewhat happy and interesting life ever after.
[1]: http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Form.html
[2]: There's also "Laws of the Game" by Eigen & Winkler that describes natural phenomena as glass-bead games with various rules.
This is the only case in my life where I wanted to adopt author's philosophy and learn to see the world the way they do. The content is very interdisciplinary and heavily borrows from various fields (psychoanalysis, dynamic systems theory, biology, linguistics &c) and will surely appeal to a technically minded person.
Books like that, I think there is a lot of value in just diving in and seeing what happens. I would highly recommend it.
i see now that wikipedia states that spencer-brown claimed applications of his approach to big conjectures that never panned out, so now i am extra dubious. it makes sense now why people would go off and try that out.
There are some papers/presentations about applications of ideas based on these laws: circuit optimizations, query engines, various "iconic" algebras [2, 3]; I, like you, have a hard time buying all that (ditto author's claims about Reimann hypothesis), but still, it sounds pretty damn interesting and innovative, e.g. examples of multiplication/addition in 1st vol. of "Iconic Math" were eye-opening and intuitive for me, as a person with kinaesthetic learning style, in a sense that I deeper understood what "number" and "to calculate" mean; it also promotes the invention of various ad-hoc calculi and notations, of which I am a big fan of.
For me, the greatest thing about LoF is cross-fertilization: esoterical mumbo-jumbo benefits from formalization and mathematical approach, while technical disciplines find their root in the spiritual ground; that and the thought experiment of building the world from nothing. It bridges "above" and "below", and kinda reminds me of [4].
[1]: http://www.westdenhaag.nl/information/publications/Alphabetu...
[2]: http://iconicmath.com/
[3]: https://lof50.com/
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNCUIWhG4Ck
I've read both "Stories of Your Life and Others" and "Exhalation" in the last month and I turned to my wife and said "that story just blew my mind" for probably 75% of the stories.
You can find a few online. Here is a very short but brain-tickling example: https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679
All of his stories are good though.
I’d recommend True Names by Vernor Vinge and After Life by Simon Funk if you like Ted Chiang: https://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/
Made it hard for me to get emotionally invested in his stories, and I found them a bit of a slog to get through.
Not sure if I'll give his other books a read, but I might.
He has a background in Computer Science, by the way, for those that might be interested.
Erich Fromm's The Sane Society - on how society impacts people's mental health, and how to build towards a sane society
Fromm's The Art Of Loving - an analysis of different kinds of loves, trying to dispel pop culture's lies about love, and love is actually hard work
Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death - on how not our fear, but our complete denial of death existing leads to the weirdest outcomes in our society
Then there's political stuff -
Orwell's Essays, any large-ish collection. I find Orwell to be a much, much better non-fiction writer than fiction writer. Extremely insightful into political processes.
Robert Caro's books, perhaps the first The Years Of Lyndon B Johnson. Can't get better insights into how power works on a local and not-so-local level.
Popper's Open Society and its enemies, hard to summarise - a defense of Western society in light of the then-ongoing WW2. You probably saw the paradox of tolerance a few times pop up, that's from that book, among a ton of other stuff.
HN is very insular in its interests as you can see with many posts here repeating. Midwives' recommended books probably have a higher chance of truly bending your mind into novel directions.
Explains why we choose brands over cheaper alternatives, why we're willing to pay a lot more to lock in a deal, why we hate registering before buying the thing (but are more than happy to do so right after), why Sony removed the record button from the first Walkman, and much more.
This book forever changed the way I think about brands, and improved my design and problem-solving skills.
A couple of Rory's rules:
• The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.
• Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will.
A couple of "mind games" from the book:
• Merely adding a geographical or topographical adjective to food – whether on a menu in a restaurant or on packaging in a supermarket – allows you to charge more for it and means you will sell more.
• "There's your problem," I said. "It doesn't matter what something tastes like in blind tastings, if you put 'low in fat' or any other health indicators on the packaging, you'll make the contents taste worse."
https://bookshop.org/books/alchemy-the-dark-art-and-curious-...
Abbeys about more, of course. He had that rare ability to turn his book into something that felt like a direct conversation with me, the reader. I read him in my 20s and his viewpoint definitely connects with someone wanting to examine and express his/herself first before society’s overwhelming influence. He discusses trying to free himself from the conceptual confines of the human individual and societal experience while isolated in a national park. Quinn uses a hypothetical conversation between a gorilla and a person to highlight the fundamental us versus them approach humans take with the rest of earth. Then Franz de Waal really drives home that animals are likely to be much more mentally capable than we give them credit. They’re good books if you want to know something more about the universe than what your human experience is.
Edit-corrected book title.
This book makes every bit of life advice you receive afterwards feel shallow. It feels like a reference to western thought.
It's also very well translated and reads very easily, and is very short. I read about a chapter every morning when I feel motivated, and certain passages really stick in my head.
It also helps to read whenever you feel overcome with emotion because of something.
"Psycho-cybernetics" by Maxwell Maltz. A plastic surgeon shares his techniques for achieving your goals in life. 95% if not more of self-help books today borrow (consciously or not) ideas discussed in this book, and often discuss them with much less depth.