Daniel A. Demski

Really delivers

Revisado: 06-12-21

E William Brown is at their best when the protagonist is stuck deep in enemy territory. This book is full of interesting world building and satisfying schemes.

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Not quite rationalfic

Revisado: 06-09-21

Hits a lot of the notes of something like Mother of Learning or HPMOR, but doesn't quite deliver. The character tirelessly tries to powergame through the challenges of the fantasy setting, sure, but to my eye at least there are a couple things which changed since book 1to keep things challenging. Also the main character is repeatedly separated from his invincibility-granting amulet and hasn't yet thought of putting it inside his body somewhere.

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Interesting, but a little dissatisfying

Revisado: 04-06-21

His Holiness starts out asking "teaching questions" as if he's trying to guide science to come to his own view, and by the end he's frequently relaying 'ghost stories', by which I mean secondhand accounts of supernatural events (possession, oracles, ghosts) which don't fit well in either the Buddhist framework or the Western. In between, there is certainly genuine Buddhist teaching and some genuine dialogue between the two cultures.

The scientists, for their part, do manage a middle ground, being respectful while asking some of the incisive questions a sceptical Westerner naturally has. However, as a group they often quickly forget careful distinctions that are introduced, most annoyingly continuing to bring up comparisons between ordinary orgasm and death well after it's clarified that the traditional Buddhist comparison extends only to a special ritual involving orgasm.

The Buddhist practices and beliefs which are discussed all relate to very specific convictions about reincarnation and how it comes to pass. How do Buddhists come to know these things, and why are they so certain? The challenge is never quite put to them.

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Not great

Revisado: 02-19-19

This is a very shallow sort of meditation, often focused on repeating and believing words rather than building deeper awareness. Just focus on the actual sensations of the breath, or try Shinzen Young or even Headspace.

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A very human book about the nature of time.

Revisado: 02-05-19

This book manages to be a somewhat technical discussion of the nature of time without forgetting the human experience and human meaning of the subject matter. It constantly refers to poetry and philosophy, and these passages are read in a way that makes you appreciate them. (If I'd read it as a book I might not have thought much of the old odes.)

The book presents material which ranges from firm science to speculative. The speculative portion introduces some interesting ideas, but ends up claiming that time's directionality ultimately derives from coincidence (or the anthropic principle). There's a bit more to it than that, but I'm not sure how much the distinctions improve the situation: rather than a low-entropy big bang occurring by coincidence (as Boltzmann thought), we're told we observe a low-entropy big bang by coincidence. (The data which reaches us happens to be simple.)

The larger thesis, that there's something radically subjective about time, seems right to me; but I think different details are necessary to make it a useful idea. What is this "us" whose perspective generates time? Rovelli speaks of the present-day physical system which happens to have interacted with very low-entropy components of the distant past. But physical interaction, as we know it, seems to be very promiscuous. Maybe what provides the limitation is itself abstraction ('blurring' as he puts it). We exist as part of a blurring which happens to blur out the past's complexity.

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More mad science than I expected

Revisado: 11-23-18

About a fourth of the way in, I realized Damasio's views were a little crazy and all-encompassing. I certainly don't mind a bit of Mad Science, and frequently read it on purpose (think 'New Kind of Science' or 'Semantic Biology'). It's a bit rarer to happen on it by accident, and adjusting to the newly clear context took me a bit.

Then, two-thirds through, it became clear that the book was an attempted solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness - one similar in some ways to Thomas Metzinger's 'Being No One'. Specifically Damasio expands on what Metzinger called the Adaptivity Constraint. Damasio asserts that what makes consciousness compellingly 1st person is mental images of body-based 'feelings', all of which are positive or negative, ie, aimed at or against some state.

One aspect of this which makes the claim unique is the way in which feelings are "in the body". Sadness, even when mentally generated, is provided via the body; a frown, muscle tightness, or even hormone imbalances and unhealthy immune responses can be recruited as vehicles for the representation. This leads to feelings acting as a coordination mechanism - sadness is the body saying, "I'll keep hurting myself if you don't fix this". The same is true for all feelings. Feelings aren't just data or programmed responses; they strengthen or weaken the substrate, the organism itself.

All this is, at least, true. Whether it supports any of the speculations about society and technology is another matter.

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Great conceptual stew

Revisado: 10-30-18

...But could've done with more examples. There's fascinating discussion of how different scientific fields have different ideas about what an "explanation" is, yet we don't get to see what individual fields look like. Kuhn's concept of "paradigm shift" is discussed without any evocative cases being given. When examples do occur, they're the standard philosophical examples (ravens, emeralds) which the author admits are bad examples.

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Great novel, middling reading.

Revisado: 09-04-18

Permutation City is, to me, still Egan's best novel. Though I don't buy the dust hypothesis, or implicit permutations of it which show up in Part 2, surely something resembling it (but a bit tamer) must be true.

The reading could have been better. Certain words were always mispronounced; other words were misread entirely.

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Mostly very critical

Revisado: 03-06-18

I was hoping to find out a little bit about why some people *like* Heidegger. This summary criticizes Heidegger's use of language, and is unsure he can really be said to mean anything behind the words. It notes that Heidegger ultimately didn't try to answer his chief questions about Dasein within his own lifetime. But surely Heidegger got somewhere in demonstrating that progress could be made within his conception of the problem.

Basically, I've heard three minute summaries of Heidegger which were more informative.

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Solid principle, iffy details

Revisado: 03-04-18

Coincidences are everywhere, and this book has some good thoughts on why they're there and what it means. However, the principles the book argues for are at times very vague. Some vastly different things are counted as examples of the selection effect. Frequently the author claims two principles are "reinforcing one another" when they're not; a phenomenon can merely be classified as a case of either principle because there's overlap. (There are plenty of cases where the principles *would* reinforce one another. The author's just not careful about when this happens vs. doesn't.)

You'll also hear several times about the author's dice collection. It's relevant, sure, but he seems a little overly impressed with it.

Besides the core material, the book contains a lot of introductory-level information on probability, statistics, and the psychology of human bias and irrationality.

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