A YEAR IN BOOKS

Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy

“Simulations are not illusions. Virtual worlds are real. Virtual objects really exist.”

Meta Intelligence: Why it matters more than IQ or EQ

“The solutions required to solve complex problems will require innovative thinking on a level that only meta intelligence can provide.”

Consensual Illusion: The Mind in Virtual Reality

“Virtual reality is a tool enabling a unique kind of extension: it extends not only the space in which participants can act, but also their sense of corporeality and more generally the sense of who they are.”

The Age of AI and Our Human Future

“In our period, new technology has been developed, but remains in need of a guiding philosophy.”

Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension

“Despite their ubiquity on the number line, transcendentals are surprisingly hard to pin down. It took until 1873 to prove that e was transcendental, making it the first number we knew for definite was. The poster-child of maths, pi, didn't join the transcendental fold until 1882.

The Music of the Primes

“The scientist does not study Nature because it is useful. He studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.”

The Art of Thinking Clearly

“Verbal expression is the mirror of the mind. Clear thoughts become clear statements, whereas ambiguous ideas transform into vacant ramblings.”

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

“Personal Identity depends on Consciousness not on Substance.”

Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority

“The relation to infinity cannot, to be sure, be stated in terms of experience, for infinity overflows the thought that thinks it. Its very infinition is produced precisely in this overflowing.”

Being and Time

“What could be more alien to the "they", lost in the manifold 'world' of its concern, than the Self which has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown in the "nothing"?”

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.”

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything

“If AR is ubiquitous, your perception of reality is hackable. And so are the perceptions of people and groups around you.”

The Book of Equanimity

“There is a place beyond the color white. Keep getting in touch with that place.”

Psychocybernetics

“A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment… For imagination sets the goal ‘picture’ which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of ‘will,’ as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.”

Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension

“The rather obscure laws of the weather are easy to understand from space. Facts that were impossible to understand in a flat world suddenly become obvious when viewing a three-dimensional earth. Similarly, the laws of gravity — they obey different physical assumptions and mathematics. By adding a fifth dimension, to the four dimensions of space and time, then the equations governing light and gravity appear to merge together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

The Joy of Abstraction

"Abstraction is about digging deep into a situation to find out what is at its core making it tick."

Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Russia

Mikhail Popov, organizer of the world's first interplanetary exhibition on what it felt like to step into the display hall, 1927: ‘By taking a pair of steps, I crossed over the threshold from one epoch to another, into the space [era].'

Nonlinear Dynamics and Quantum Chaos

“A formal proof is found based on the fact that every point in phase space has a unique time evolution.”

Idealization in Physics

“The claim that for any object, some sort of fundamental, standards-free mathematical description of that object exists, strikes me as a meta-physical conjecture.”

Out of Control

“In the Network Era — that age we have just entered — dense communication is creating artificial worlds ripe for emergent coevolution, spontaneous self-organization and win-win cooperation. In this Era, openness wins, central control is lost and stability is a state of perpetual almost-falling ensured by constant error.”

Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence: A Critique of the Mechanistic Theory of Mind

“The existence of thinking is same as the existence of a subjective thinking, because it is the subject, who thinks. All these subjective activities are non-computational because subjective activity presupposes semanticity. It opposes the idea of mind as computational because mind is beyond the computational processes.”

Mathematical Anti-Realism and Modal Nothingism

“If physicalism were true, then the truth would require the existence of a massive infinity of physical (mental) objects. But (a) it seems likely that there just aren’t that many physical objects in the entire universe; and, more importantly, (b) the truth actually doesn’t depend on the existence of a massive infinity of physical objects.”

The Art of Being

“People are confused and unsure, they seek answers to guide them to joy, tranquillity, self-knowledge, salvation―but they also demand that it be easy to learn, that it require little or no effort, that results be quickly obtained.”

The Question Concerning Technology

“Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens.”

The Structure and Dynamics of Cities

“[Observations made by Christaller] are an interesting example as it makes the connection between a classical approach in regional science and properties of disordered systems. In particular, it highlights the importance of considering null models when discussing empirical data.”

The Philosophical Works of David Hume

“It must necessarily, indeed, be allowed, that, in order to carry our intention beyond the present course of things, or lead them into any inference concerning invisible intelligent power, they must be actuated by some passion, which prompts their thought and reflection; some motive, which urges their first enquiry.”

Ready Player One

“I don’t know, maybe your experience differed from mine. For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking.”

What Is Life?

“In brief: consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution. This world lights up to itself only where or only in as much as it develops, procreates new forms. Places of stagnancy slip from consciousness; they may only appear in their interplay with places of evolution.”

The Universal One

“Creation is transmutation, or integration, of the one simple indivisible substance, into the appearance of many complex substances and things.”

Reality Transurfing

“To let go of guilt, it is enough to give yourself permission to be yourself. No-one has the right to judge you. You have the right to be yourself.”

Printed Physics: Metalithikum I, Applied Virtuality

“…this is about discussion of developments in information technology that make the physical behavior of matter technologically programmable, allow for its factual construction, industrial production and its determination with symbols. Is it possible that a revitalization of the field of physics looms in the future similar to that which took place with geometry in the 19th century?”

The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything

“A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”

Phenomenology of Spirit

“…it is necessary to come first to an understanding concerning knowledge, which is looked upon as the instrument by which to take possession of the Absolute, or as the means through which to get a sight of it.”

The Architecture of the Jumping Universe

“The laws of nature are written in subtle languages, many of them counter-intuitive, but a shared narrative has indeed emerged […]. It shows that the exploding universe continuously reaches higher levels of organization. This plot shows the earth co-evolving with our knowledge and civilization.”

Mathematics and Metaphilosophy

“The problem of mathematical knowledge, and its broader philosophical ramifications — it argues that the challenge to explain the justification of our mathematical beliefs arises insofar as disagreement over axioms bottoms out in disagreement over intuitions.”

48 Laws of Power

“If you’re not in danger, do not fight.”

Psyche and Matter

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. [The only way] is for the dual opposites, conscious and unconscious, to meet. It is like a reaction of two chemical substances: both will be transformed.”

Animus and Anima: Two Essays

“The shadow can be realized only through a relation to a partner, and anima and animus only through a relation to a partner of the opposite sex, because only in such a relation do their projections become operative.”

The Ethics of Consciousness

“The two components of awareness shape normative judgments about how ordered, disordered, altered, restored, diminished and suppressed conscious states can benefit or harm individuals. They also influence moral judgments about whether intentionally causing these states is permissible or impermissible and how these states can affect behavior.”

The Art of Thinking Clearly

“It is much more common that we overestimate our knowledge than that we underestimate it.”

The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul

“If we reject this epistemological circularity, we are left with two opposing camps: a physics with a claim to completeness because it describes all of nature, and a psychology that is all-embracing because it deals with the mind, our only source of knowledge of the world. Given the problems in both of these views, it is perhaps well to return to the circle and give it more sympathetic consideration.”

Aristotle's Theory Of Substance: The Categories And Metaphysics Zeta

“In a way, then, the primary substance overcomes the difference between particulars and universals that seemed unbridgeable. For it is at once a concrete particular and the starting-point of all scientific knowledge. It thereby unifies not just being, but the scientific knowledge of it as well, insuring that the latter fits the former in the way that realism requires.”

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.”

Structure and Equivalence

“…we should not expect that merely moving to a more abstract, category-theoretic perspective will free us from troublesome questions of interpretation. Instead, that perspective gives us new tools with which to articulate those questions.”

Buddhist Epistemology

“…every experience has a built-in transphenomenality or self-transcendence, it is not always guaranteed that it would adequately and faithfully reveal its object. This possibility of error in experience necessitates an inquiry into its veracity. […] Thinkers belonging to the Buddhist tradition also, therefore, attempt to provide a firm epistemological basis for their theory of reality.”

Clarity & Connection

“Happiness is not fulfilling every pleasure or getting every outcome you desire. Happiness is being able to enjoy life with a peaceful mind that is not constantly craving more. It is the inner peace that comes with embracing change.”

Altered Traits

“Some important components of contemplative practice are not meditation per se. In the deep paths, meditation represents just one part of a range of means helping to increase self-awareness, gain insights into the subtleties of consciousness, and, ultimately, to achieve a lasting transformation of being. These daunting goals require lifelong dedication.”

How to Create a Mind

“The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.”

Politics of Outer Space: Regime Theory Perspectives

“It has been estimated that the asteroids in the orbit of Mars and Jupiter would collectively be worth $100 billion for every person on earth. While governments have invested some funds in researching mining potential, it has often been entrepreneurs and space activists who advocate mining as part of the wider movement for greater commercialization and deregulation of space, and the implementation of private property rights in space.”

The Little Book of Black Holes

“At least to current understanding, there is nothing beyond the four dimensions of spacetime for it to curve into. Good questions about curvature in general relativity are ones that can be answered referring to geodesics in four-dimensional spacetime.”

The Mathematical Reality

“Solvable or not? All these questions are ignored in classical mathematics only by saying not solvable! In fact, non-solvable equation systems are nothing but Smarandache systems, i.e., contradictory systems themselves, in which a ruler behaves in at least two different ways within the same system, i.e., validated and invalided, or only invalided but in multiple distinct ways.”

Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

“One must distinguish, it seems to me, between “head pattern” and “heart pattern”, or, in more objective-sounding terms, between syntactic pattern and semantic pattern.”

Atomic Habits

“a·tom·ic / an extremely small amount of a thing; the single irreducible unit of a larger system; the source of immense energy or power

hab·it / a routine or practice performed regularly; an automatic response to a specific situation”

Quantum City

“About the contempt for intellect and the absence of any celebration and appreciation of intellect, by and large, in our settings of urban convenience. About the power we give to machines and about simplistically assembled statistics; about the factual, the suggestive, the persuasive. About the lack of research, in favor of development.”

Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

“Quantum Mechanics doesn't deserve the connotation of spookiness in the sense of some ineffable mystery that it is beyond the human mind to comprehend. Quantum Mechanics is amazing. It is novel, profound, mind-stretching and a very different view of reality from what we’re used to.”

Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virutal and Real Space

“Space, in effect, is matter or extension, but the ‘schema’ of matter, that is, the representation of the limit where the movement of expansion would come to an end as the external envelope of all possible extensions.”

Structures, Fictions, and the Explanatory Epistemology of Mathematics in Science

“I go on to contrast this metaphysical approach with an epistemic conception of the contribution of mathematics to the success of science. Even when mathematics is not playing the metaphysical role of isolating fundamentally mathematical structures inherent in the physical world, it can still be making an essential contribution to the success of science.”

Nadja

“It would be hateful to refuse whatever she asks of me, one way or another, for she is so pure, so free of any earthly tie, and cares so little, but so marvelously, for life.”

Algorithmic Theories of Everything

“At the age of 17 my brother Christof declared that the universe is a mathematical structure inhabited by observers who are mathematical substructures.”

The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory

“From this point of view it appears that the word "intelligence" has two valuable meanings: One is (A) an innate potential, the capacity for development, a fully innate property that amounts to the possession of a good brain and a good neural metabolism. The second is (B) the functioning of a brain in which development has gone on, determining an average level of performance or comprehension.”

Manifestoes of Surrealism

“The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise. Kill; plunder more quickly, love as much as you wish. And if you die, are you not sure of being roused from the dead? Let yourself be led. Events will not tolerate deferment. You have no name. Everything is inestimably easy.”

The Monadology

“We may also hold that this supreme substance, which is unique, universal and necessary, nothing outside of it being independent of it — this substance, which is a pure sequence of possible being, must be illimitable and must contain as much reality as is possible.”

Mad Love

“The greatest hope, I say, is the one in which all the others are met, is that it exists for everyone and that for everyone it lasts. That the absolute gift of one being to another, which can exist only in reciprocity, be in the eyes of everyone the only natural and supernatural hanging bridge cast across life itself.”

Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature

“Mathematics is sometimes called the quest for patterns. But is it possible to classify all the possible patterns that could be found in nature? Is there a limit to what patterns we might find? Could we even make a list of all these possible symmetries? For the mathematician, the pattern searcher, understanding symmetry is one of the principal themes in the quest to chart the mathematical world.”

The Sphere and the Labyrinth

“May Sekler has furthered the formal reading of the Carceri, identifying in it a constant disintegration of the coherence of structure that, nonethe­less, has a precise function. It is, in fact, just this disintegration that in­duces the spectator to recompose laboriously the spatial distortions, to reconnect the fragments of a puzzle that proves to be, in the end, unsolva­ble.“

Handbook of Self and Identity

“Separate from people's perceptions, it seems reasonable to ask whether the self is a stable mental construct. Most comprehensive social science theories of the self articulate both stability and fluidity as aspects of the self. Thus, identity and social identity theories describe the self as including both a stable set of evaluative standards and a fluid, ever­ changing description in the moment.”

Personality and the Environment

“The scientific study of personality acknowledges that persons are extraordinarily complex and multidimensional entities. The search for salient dimensions of personality and the development of techniques for measuring individual variations in them are among the field’s major endeavors.”

I am a Strange Loop

“Saying that studying the brain is limited to the study of physical entities would be like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth.”

Quantum Physics of Consciousness

“Since the universe, by definition, cannot have any other matter in it, it becomes essential to postulate a mechanism other than that of physical laws, which permits the state function to reduce. This other mechanism may be the working of the “consciousness principle” which can just by the process of “observation” increase entropy.”

Space and Spatial Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

“The concept of space attracts everyone's intuition. Henri Poincare aptly articulated his philosophical views to a deep reflection on geometry. Jean Piaget's work provides the most solid argumentation in support of the psychological foundations of geometry. It is in continuity with Poincare's postulate that the mathematical construction of geometry relies on contents provided by human intuition.”

The Intentional Stance

“Once the intentional strategy is in place, it is an extraordinarily powerful tool in prediction — a fact that is largely concealed by our typical concentration on the cases in which it yields dubious or unreliable results […] Even when the intentional strategy fails to distinguish a single move with a highest probability, it can dramatically reduce the number of live options.”

Müdigkeitsgesellschaft

“Das Übermaß an Positivität äußert sich auch als Übermaß an Reizen Informationen und Impulsen. Es verändert radikal die Struktur und Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit. Dadurch wird die Wahrnehmung fragmentarisiert und zerstreut. Auch die wachsende Arbeitsbelastung macht eine besondere Zeit- und Aufmerksamkeitstechnik notwendig, die sich wiederum auf die Aufmerksamkeitsstruktur auswirkt.”

Consciousness Explained

“If the concept of consciousness were to fall to science, what would happen to our sense of moral agency and free will? If conscious experience were reduced somehow to mere matter in motion, what would happen to our appreciation of love and pain and dreams and joy? If conscious human beings were just animated material objects, how could anything we do to them be right or wrong?”

The Parallax View

“When, after being engaged in a fierce competition for a job promotion with my closest friend, I win, the proper thing to do is to offer to withdraw, so that he will get the promotion, and the proper thing for him to do is to reject my offer. What we have here is symbolic exchange at its purest: a gesture made to be rejected; the point, the "magic" of symbolic exchange, is that, although at the end we are where we were at the beginning, the overall result of the operation is not zero but a distinct gain for both parties, the pact of solidarity.”

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it's a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers — of persistence, concentration, and insight — to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems. Make art, think deeply.”

Raumtheorie: Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften

“Ich habe mehrfach betont, dass ich den Raum ebenso wie die Zeit für etwas rein Relatives halte; für eine Ordnung der Existenzen im Beisammen, wie die Zeit eine Ordnung des Nacheinanders ist.”

Analysis of Beauty

“Simplicity, without variety, is wholly insipid, and at best does only not displease; but when variety is joined to it, then it pleases, because it enhances the pleasure of variety, by giving the eye the power of enjoying it with ease.”

Theorie der Avantgarde

“Die Realität ist immer eine vermittelte, durch den Prozess der Signifikation. Das Gefühl, dass man die Realität fassen kann, geht verloren. Die Derealisierung und Dezentrierung der subjektiven und kollektiven Wahrnehmung ist die Folge. Folgen für die avantgardistische Kunst: Desemantisierung und Performativität. Ereignis, Wirkung und Präsenz statt Bedeutung und Repräsentation.”