A list of books that I've read since I started this page on April 28, 2024.
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 (Catholocism) 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.