A list of books that I've read since I started this page on April 28, 2024. Epistemic Status: I don't spend very much time on actually writing the reviews. I'm mainly keeping this page up to have a list of books that I've read with my high level thoughts on each.
Permutation City, Greg Egan. Finished on 5/10/2024. 9/10. The beginning of the book felt so real that I didn't need to suspend any disbelief. All of the events felt so plausible that I felt they could have happened in real life. The theory of consciousness and world-formation is very similar to my best guess of what is actually true so the book felt like it was just speculative fiction that could actually happen. Then towards the end, things started happening that I didn't think would actually happen in real life. Like the computers stopping working, world falling apart, etc. I guess this book's fatal flaw is that it was too realistic. For most science fiction, I just suspend disbelief. But Egan's writing and ideas were so good that I could actually think critically about the science and philosophy. When things started to not be realistic towards the end, I got disengaged. But this book is still better than most sci-fi because it was so realistic for so long.
I really loved the premise and it has basically stopped me from writing about this general topic of consciousness and computation because I feel that Egan has explored it thoroughly enough that I don't have much to add. I finally feel free to ignore the blog post on this topic that's been sitting in my drafts for almost a year. My main remaining question is: Why do you need computers to start simulations? If they are just math, shouldn't the math exist independently of any physical reality? What does adding a physically realized Turing Machine thing to the system do? My best guess is that all mathematically possible universes exist and that we are just living in one of them (this is Tegmark's Mathematical universe hypothesis). I'm still quite unsure though.
Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card. Finished on 5/13/2024. 10/10. This book was so good I messed up my sleep schedule for it and read it in two days. I don't even regret it. I had originally read this book 4 years ago it is every bit as good as I remember it to be (I didn't remember anything about the plot, only that it was insanely good). It doesn't have the thrill of Ender's Game, and is nowhere near as epic, but it makes up for that with emotional depth and plot. There were a few points where I felt that the characters should have made better decisions, but looking back on it, I think those points made Ender even more powerful. Why doesn't Novinha look into what was in her files to understand what made Pipo and Libo die? She's a scientist. Once Ender understood the Piggies and told them that humans don't have a third life, all the problems were solved. This struck me as "irrational" and "weird." But maybe Card included this part to show just how "stuck" Novinha was and to accentuate the "savior" complex of Ender.
Some parts hit me really hard, especially towards the end, and there was definitely a strong religious undertone. This was the first Card book I read after reading Daystar Eld's analysis of his views towards gay people . I knew that he was Christian. And Christianity (Catholicism) does play a big part in the book. But I was surprised (and delighted) with how self-aware he was about it. Ender is an agnostic, although he seems to be on the path towards conversion the whole book, and I could appreciate how Card invented his own religion of speaking. Either Card is much less one-sided than I previously thought or he is really good at compartmentalizing. I hope it's the former.
Naive Set Theory, Paul R. Halmos. Finished on 6/5/24. 7/10. This was a fun book to read. This is also probably the slowest book that I have read cover-to-cover. I'd estimate I took on average twenty minutes per page. I can't know for sure since I only started time-tracking after starting this book. It also was my first pure math textbook that I finished cover to cover. I did all of the exercises and for around the first half of the book, whenever the author started to prove a theorem, I would look away, write a proof, and then compare my proof with the one in the book. In the latter half of the book, the proofs both got harder and I was getting impatient so I stopped doing this. Sometimes my proof and the one from the book were the same, but oftentimes they were totally different. In general, I felt like my proofs were sometimes lacking rigor. I didn't sweat it too much since this was my first pure math book and I figured I'd have lots of time to learn how to write airtight, rigorous proofs later (and I was mainly aiming to learn set theory concepts).
ChatGPT was extremely helpful in explaining concepts to me and checking if some of my arguments were valid. I would often ask it something like "give a concrete example of a partially ordered set" and it would gracefully reply with a few examples that I could use to build my intuition.
I'd say the main drawback of the book was it's age. Some of the terminology used is standard today (for example one-to-one instead of injective and onto instead of surjective) which made it a little harder to look stuff that I was confused about up, but otherwise it was fine. Also, a few parts of the book were probably more confusing than they needed to be. For example, transfinite induction and recursion were quite confusing to me. Then I looked them up on YouTube, watched a lecture by a UC Berkeley professor, and got much less confused. I think this is a general lesson that I can apply: if I'm finding a concept confusing, I should just look up a different formulation of it instead of struggling from the book. I've heard/read others say this and I think I internalized it towards the end of this book.
Overall I'm glad that I read this book, but now I'm ready to move into more useful branches of math like Linear Algebra with more modern textbooks.
The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann, Ananyo Bhattacharya. Finished on 7/18/24. 8/10.
A pretty good book. I learned a lot about Von Neumann. He was a pretty smart guy. He just loved to think. I wish we had more people like him around today. Or maybe we do, but we just don't know who they are. Maybe they're working in the big AI labs or on Wall Street instead of for the military. It's hard to tell.
It's pretty sad how young he died so young at 53 without getting to see the applications of his work on computers take hold. I also feel the same way about Turing.
Overall, the book itself was pretty good with each chapter focusing on an element of his life. It was well-written and engaging. And the explanations of the science seemed spot-on which was super nice. I've realized that I like biographies a lot, so I want to read about Lyndon B. Johnson next.
Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder. Finished on 11/21/24. 9/10
This book was a delight to read in both content and format. It reminded me of discovery fiction, although it's a bit different because Sophie does get lectured on philosophy instead of discovering it herself. Yet the lectures always felt very exciting to me. I got the book last spring for my birthday and read it on and off for a period of about six months (I was really busy over the summer and then I accidentally left it at home when I went to college).
The book reminded me a lot of Gödel Escher Bach: there were explanations interspersed with story, and there was always at least one level of meta going (sometimes more!). I really enjoyed thinking about free will in relation to one of the meta levels (the one where the major writes Sophie and Alberto pondering their own free will). I think more exploration into the meta would have been cool, but I can understand why Gaarder chose not to. In general, I really enjoyed how most of the concepts explicitly mentioned were also allegorically shown through the story.
I kind of wish I had put some of the objective facts into Anki so that I would remember them, but it would have also made the book less enjoyable to read. I think I now have enough of an overview of different types of philosophy that I can read more about them if I want to.
Ending spoilers: I felt that the ending was a bit weird. After it was revealed that the major was writing the story, thinking about it through that lens was quite fun. But then towards the end of the story the lens flipped and Sophie and Alberto were outside of the book inside the book. One hypothesis I have is that Gaarder was trying to illustrate that both stories really happened in his mind, but this is a bit confusing to reason about since I thought the 'outer' story was taking place in a physicalist world, not a magic one. Maybe Gaarder made it ambigious to make the reader think.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl. Finished on 12/11/24. 8/10.
The book started slow but then gradually picked up pace and felt like a thriller towards the end. It's both a coming of age novel and a mystery novel, and the ending made me think more than most endings. The character development throughout the whole book was exquisite; every time I felt like I knew a character, a new detail would come up that would throw me off guard. I was constantly getting surprised by new details, which don't only develop the characters but also provide evidence for the mystery.
I do want to do a more thorough re-read at one point, since (spoilers for ending) the answer to the mystery is not actually revealed at the end. I have some guesses about what happened, but they are only guesses. I think doing a second pass with all the context of the ending would be enough to solve it, since I would be looking at every detail and questioning it. It reminds me a lot of other rational fiction that I've read like HPMOR that foreshadow key details from the very beginning (thinking back on how the book starts, I am having lots of 'a-ha' moments and places where I should have noticed confusion). Given how much I resonate with this type of fiction, it's funny that I got this book from my high school's English Department as a graduation gift. After I finished the book, I sent a thank you email to my english teacher, since I really liked it (and messed up my sleep schedule for a day over it).
Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, Ed Regis. Finished on 12/26/24. 8/10
This book was quite entertaining to read and I appreciated how it gave a sort of intellectual heritage for some of the circles that I find myself in. As I was reading the book, I started to become disillusioned with transhumanism, or at least the version the book presented — it seemed like a bunch of the characters were kind of out of their minds and way too idealistic. I don't think that nanotechnology will solve literally all problems that are in the laws of physics, but some people in the book sure seemed to think so. However, when criticizing a movement like this, it's important to make sure that you're criticizing the strongest argument in favor of it (to be charitable), yet I don't think this book is that strong of an argument in favor of transhumanism (I've felt much more moved by various blog posts). Maybe it isn't trying to be, and that's okay. It was quite entertaining, and the history was illuminating.