Books this year: a book diary

This book, written in 1884, is about people who live only in 2 dimensions. The author of the book, a square who had the rare opportunity to visit three dimensional space, writes to us, or anyone else who will read, about the nature of Flatland. It is a world where women are straight lines, and good people are regular polygons. The more sides a man has, the higher he is in society, until at last one obtains so many sides as to very nearly approximate the circle. At this point, you move into a sort of royal priestly class.

I’ve read about this book before that it might help with visualizing worlds with different numbers of dimensions than our own. I don’t know if it really does that all that well, particularly with visualizing worlds with more than 3 spatial dimensions. In any case, it serves its satirical purpose on social hierarchy quite well, and I think this is the main strength of the book.

So I went and read 3 plays by the moden dramatist Henrik Ibsen. They are, Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, and The Wild Duck. There’s a common thread in all three in that they each deal with marriages happy on the outside but broken in the middle.

I liked all 3 of the plays, but my favorite was The Wild Duck. I will definitely be reading more Ibsen.

I’ve wanted to read this book ever since Ken’s dad posted it on his book blog (which inspired this one). Chris has also posted it here before.

The main thrust of the book is the development of the medieval mind-model of the physical and metaphysical universe. Because this model is constantly referred to, and it is assumed everyone already knows it, it can be difficult to get on reading old texts without having at least a cursory understanding of it.

I feel I learned a lot from this. I found it interesting that the concept of plagiarism as being bad didn’t exist in medieval times, as authors constantly copied old works and changed them. One only has to look at the plethora of Arthurian stories to see this. Because there was a sort of truth to the stories, it was kind of like copying a fact rather than an original piece of intellectual property.

I’ve never really been a serious student of medieval or renaissance literature, but I would guess that the contents of this volume would probably help to catch some of the references.

This book is gives a treatment of the four major schools of economic thought, classical, Marxian, neo-classical, and Keynesian. It covers Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Mill, Marx, Marshall, Walras, Clark, Bohm-Bawerk, Wicksell, and Keynes.

What I was most impressed with is how different classical conceptions are with neo-classical ones. The economics we learn in school is much more similar to that of Alfred Marshall than it is to Adam Smith’s. Smith, and other classical thinkers, didn’t have any real conception of equilibrium prices, and instead thought of the true value of things rather than their prices. This was quite surprising to me, as I had always assumed that Smith formulated equilbrium prices.

The whole dynamical construct of free markets solving for optimal parameters is really completely neo-classical. I also still have no idea why everything thinks Keynesian economics is so great. I’d love to find something that would pursuasively argue for it. I guess I should just read Keynes.

As some of you know, Ken and I are endeavoring to finish the entire series of Durant’s Story of Civilization. This is the third volume, covering Roman history. I took the entire audio set with me to the Peace Corps as it was impractical to take the printed volumes.

The book pretty much goes chronologically through the foundation of the republic and the emperors, and the last fifth or so covers the rise of Christianity in the empire. Much time is spent on Rome proper, but, in Durant’s characteristically holistic style, some time is spent exploring the outer provinces as well. Treatment is giving to literature, philosophy, architecture and the arts as well.

I’ve been inspired to read Plutarch’s Lives and Lucretius next, but I won’t get to them for a little while. A lot of people are said to have really loved the Parallel Lives and On the Nature of Things is an amazingly accurate scientific treatise/poem for its time. I also still plan on going through Gibbon, but I won’t start it this year.
I was very pleased with the book, and will be starting the Age of Faith next month.

This is a story about bomber pilots fighting in a war. It’s a really good story about a guy named Yossarian’s struggle to avoid death by avoiding his duties as much as possible. He pretends to be sick sometimes, or goes off to Rome where there’s an apartment soldiers can stay with whores.

It’s written in a smooth, butterlike style. It’s really a joy to read, and the characterization is great. Highly recommended.

This is a selection of writings from three great stoic writers, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca. Most of the writings are excerpts, primarily because the authors repeated themselves a lot, and I think the only complete work is the Enchiridion of Epictetus.

I always enjoy a little stoicism, but I found most of this stuff pretty dry. I think Seneca’s De Ira is a masterpiece, but they didn’t include much of it. So I guess I would say going to the originals is probably better in my opinion, though I wouldn’t really know.

I got this book for Christmas one year along with quite a few others. I told my mommy that she could look on my Amazon Wish list if she wanted to know what I wanted and my parents bought me a ton of books. It was a really awesome time.

It took me a long time to get around to reading the whole thing. The bulk of the book is fairly detailed projections of a variety of aspects, centrally brain scanning and life extension.

Kurzweil seems pretty confident about most of his predictions. He gives margins of error, but they aren’t very wide. In 50 years, we’ll know if he was way off or not. Basically, he believes that the growth in technology is accelerating at such a pace that we will be able to scan our brains into computers in 20 years or so and that in this way, we will essentially conquer death. Then, only a short while later, the entire universe will be permeated with information. There’s a lot of other details I’m leaving out, but these two strokes of transhumanism and singulitarianism I think are the two most important.

I myself essentially buy everything that’s said in the book. Though many of the details of how these transformations will be effected are necessarily unknown at this time, this does not imply that a belief in their occurrence is simply blind faith. This however, is the point I have the greatest trouble with. Kurzweil answers the criticism from Malthus simply by saying that when a limit is reached, new paradigms will be found. The trouble is, we sometimes don’t know what those paradigms will be, or more often, don’t really know for sure if we can bring them about or how. For example, quantum computation is theorized to be practical, but we don’t know how to do it or even if we really can. Kurzweil answers these criticisms with a faith that we’ll figure it out. And he thinks that this faith has great historical justification.

There are a lot of other writers and speakers on the subject of the singularity. I myself haven’t perused a lot of the literature, but I have enjoyed the things Ken has forwarded me and the Singularity Summit talks I’ve seen.

Wow, what a wonderful book, and one that I’ve been looking for for a really long time. I long suspected that there was no real reason to believe the Copenhagen Interpretation, but one can easily see that just by looking up the fact that there are competing interpretations floating around. However, I also long suspected such things as that there might be interpretations that don’t involve a collapse, and that there was some kind of weirdness afoot with quantum mechanics being deterministic and random at the same time. This book showed me that my suspicions were correct.

There are 2 parts of quantum mechanics, the dynamical equations of motion which are completely deterministic, and the collapse which is probabilistic. Nobody has ever provided any way of determining when this collapse occurs. The problem of doing so is called the measurement problem, and was first elucidated by the great John Von Neumann. As some of you might have suspected, things like the “consciousness causes collapse” idea are completely speculative.

You’ll often hear people, sometime very eminent ones, making statements that the world is essentially random, and that that has been proved by quantum mechanics, which will never be overturned. It is true that most people suspect that we need a theory that makes the same predictions as quantum mechanics does. This suspicion is fueled by a very precise and unfailing accuracy in all of the predictions quantum mechanics has ever been asked to make. (People will probably only start allowing themselves to consider looking for theories that make different predictions if quantum mechanics starts making erroneous predictions, and nobody expects that to happen.) However, there are interpretations of quantum mechanics that don’t involve a collapse of the wave function, and there are other complete theories that make the same predictions as quantum mechanics, notably Bohm’s theory. These theories, because they only rely on the dynamical equations of motion of quantum mechanics, are completely deterministic.

One thing that everyone needs to know is that the Many Worlds interpretation has very serious problems. Hugh Everett III’s paper did not actually specify the Many Worlds interpretation, the Many Worlds interpretation being just one interpretation of Everett’s paper. It could also be read in such a way as to suggest that the collapse is a delusion that the dynamical laws can be shown mathematically to bring about in us. One of the most damning things about the Many Worlds interpretation is that the separate worlds that are actually generated depend on the basis in which one writes down the universal state vector. And quantum mechanics, like most mathematical theories, is invariant with respect to basis. For example, whether I specify a vector with polar coordinates or Cartesian ones, it’s still the same vector, even though I’m choosing to use two different point-sets to describe it. Nobody has come up with any way of finding some sort of canonical basis which we can use to tell which worlds are actually coming in to being, so to my mind Many Worlds is nonsensical (i.e. not well-defined). Some attempts to figure out how to construct a preferred basis have been made since the publication of this book (1994), but I haven’t evaluated all of them. Most of them have smackings of anthropomorphism, which strikes me as not the best direction to be going. As of 2001, the problem had still not been solved.

Another interesting thing that one can show is that any theory whatsoever that does not involve collapse will not be distinguishable by experiment from any other of the theories that don’t involve collapse. This means that if collapse is ever shown to not happen (and this is difficult but possible and also what I happen to believe), then there are widely varying metaphysical interpretations, each one of which is completely untestable even in principle.

In short, you can’t even begin to understand quantum mechanics until you’ve read this fascinating book.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard examines the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, in which Abraham was instructed by god to kill his son Isaac. He argues essentially that there can be no ethical justification for filicide in the context of the story, and that in fact faith rather than ethics can be the only justification.

There’s also a response to the Hegelian notion that one can somehow go “beyond” faith by studying philosophy. To my mind, it’s always been obvious that no satisfactory logical proof has been found for or against God, but I guess people really wanted to look for one for a long time, so they lost their objectivity somewhere in the process.

I really liked the idea of The Knight of Faith, i.e. someone who trusts that good things will come to him on the strength of the absurd. I think I live this courageously sometimes. I have ventured to consider the possibility of achieving things that it would be absurd for most people to even consider achieving. And further, I have then been successful. This is one of the reasons I count myself luckier (but also braver) than everyone else.