I'm not alone in this opinion, by the way. For one thing, Gödel, Escher, Bach won a Pulitzer Prize. Or just pick a random scientist and ask ver what vis favorite book is, and 1 out of 5 will say: "Gödel, Escher, Bach". No other book even comes close.
It is saddening to contemplate that every day, 150,000 humans die without reading what is indisputably one of the greatest achievements of our species. Don't let it happen to you.
Sure, if you're just an average person, you might not understand everything in this book - but when you're done reading, you won't be an average person any more.
Then along came a book called "Great Mambo Chicken". As I recall, it was taken out as a library book and given to me, for the duration of the loan, by a grand-uncle. Undoubtedly attracted by the title, of course. And inside this book was...
Cryonics! The colonization of space! Fun with high explosives! Humanity's conquest of the Universe! Artificial intelligence! Genetic engineering! Nanotechnology! The Omega Point! Ultratechnologies by the dozen!
I knew, in that moment, that I'd be doing one of those things for my career. (I thought it'd be nanotechnology, actually; I didn't get converted over to AI and cognitive science and computer programming until I read Gödel, Escher, Bach.) I read this book, and I realized it was possible to solve all the problems of the world, that nothing was beyond the reach of intelligence, that my generation and maybe even my grandparents' generation was going to be immortal, and I decided that I was going to help make it happen, and that's what my life would be.
The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology is about, you guessed it, evolutionary psychology - the origin of our-modern day emotions as the frozen strategies of survival and reproduction from the days of the hunter-gatherers.
Knowing what's in your mind, knowing exactly where it comes from and why, is the first step towards self-alteration. This book gives the lie to the late twentieth-century American stereotype that to be logical is to lose the ability to understand your own emotions. Armed by the high quest of science, it's possible to attain a greater understanding of emotion than pop psychoanalysts or folk psychologists ever will.
"Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding."One book, picked up on a whim in a public library. Sixty-five words. Five seconds.
-- Vernor Vinge, True Names and Other Dangers, p. 47.
My feeling at that moment is hard to describe; not wild enthusiasm, just a vast calm feeling of "Yep. He's right. Well, now I know how I'll be spending the rest of my life."
I've been a Singularitarian ever since.
Five years later, I've never looked back.
All explained in an utterly clear, utterly readable, utterly accessible style, completely open to the average reader in every way, assuming no prior knowledge. It provides the best introduction I've ever seen to any of the above subjects, not because the author is writing a textbook, but because the author wants you to see how much fun they are.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: Read it! Read it! Read it!
I suppose some people would think it depressing to see the puppet strings on which we all dangle, think that bad old science made the magic go away. But in my experience, like I said, seeing the puppet strings is the first step towards cutting them and getting on with your life.
And this is the book that started it all.
(If you want the technical stuff, see Dr. Drexler's Nanosystems, published years later. Engines is the futurist's version, from before there was the technical stuff.)
Somewhere in this book is a short summary of almost every subject in cognitive science that I've ever been interested in. Some hint of the vast depth of the field of cognitive science can be gained by reading an entire book whose concepts are summarized in a two-page article in MITECS, then realizing that MITECS has 471 articles. Not that MITECS is a shallow book: If 90% of the usefulness comes from 10% of the information, then this book tries to give you 40% of the usefulness with 1% of the information, and often succeeds. And MITECS is enormously powerful in combination with Google. MITECS tells you that there's something you need to know about, and Google hunts down online research papers.
The price Amazon currently quotes is $165, but I bought mine for $90 at our local Microcenter. Is it worth it? Definitely. If you want to become a cognitive scientist, there is no other book on Earth that will move you closer to this goal, not even Gödel, Escher, Bach. If you have to choose either a college curriculum in cognitive science or reading MITECS cover to cover, pick MITECS.
The book is a collection of chapters by specialists in various fields of evolutionarily grounded cognitive science; the authors listed are simply the editors.
The most wonderful chapter was definitely The Psychological Foundations of Culture, by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. To describe the forces that generate a culture, you need to describe the evolution of the psychology that composes the culture, the environment and cultural environment that created the selection forces that drove the evolution, not to mention the evolution of the cultural memes themselves. So they did. It's all in here. All the interactions. All the causality. Laid out in neat little paragraphs.
There's also an amazing little gem about the human visual system. Why is the sky blue? Yes, because the air scatters blue light - but why does the sky look blue? Why do we see blue as a pure, beautiful color? Would any sky look the same to the creatures that evolved underneath it? Why are there three types of cones (color receptors) in the retina, and not four or two? Why those three cones? And why is purple the strangest of all colors?
Why are flowers pretty?
What makes a landscape interesting?
To find out, you'll just have to read the book.
Penrose's philosophical arguments are flawed, and his sections on Gödel's Theorem are eminently skippable - but physics! There's where Penrose shines. The book is well worth reading, simply for the exposition on quantum physics and relativity. Even Daniel Dennett (philosophical archnemesis of Penrose's crowd) recommends the book on those grounds.
It's remarkable how clear explanations can become when an expert's trying to persuade you of something, instead of just explaining it.
Can you imagine a book where the premise is that human beings have been scanned into computers as virtual Copies? "Darn it," you cry, "now you've spoiled it for me!" Oh, no, I haven't. Can you imagine a book where this concept is introduced on the first page?
That bit about Copies? That's not the plot. That's just the starting assumption. The surprises this book delivers are unbelievable. It shocked the living daylights out of me.
But I wouldn't want to spoil it for you. So if you want to know more, read the book.
There's always one moment in a Greg Egan novel when you understand, and there's just nothing that compares to that feeling - except, of course, for the thrill of scientific discovery. We can't all win a Nobel Prize, but we can all read Greg Egan, and we probably should.
A Fire Upon the Deep is probably the best of these; it comes right out and shows you the Transcendents, awesome, moving on a galactic scale. And oh, yes, it won a Hugo.
Walter John Williams has written many excellent books, but this is indisputably the best. It deserves a Hugo, a Nebula, and possibly a Pulitzer.
For poetry on the galactic scale, you can't beat Neverness. (The next three books don't meet the amazingly high standards of Neverness, however. Be warned.)
If I had to choose one poster child for the dictum that the technology creates the society, this would be it.
Consider Phlebas is also pretty good.
2: Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman
3: Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis
4: The Tao is Silent by Raymond Smullyan
5: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
6: The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett
(Sourcery,
Mort,
many many others)
1: Space Cadet by Robert Heinlein
2: Interstellar Pig by William Sleator
3: Support Your Local Wizard by Diane Duane
(So
You Want to be a Wizard, Deep
Wizardry, High
Wizardry)
4: The Harper Hall Trilogy by Anne McCaffrey
(Dragonsong,
Dragonsinger,
Dragondrums)
5: The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper
(The
Dark is Rising, Greenwitch,
The
Grey King, Silver
on the Tree)
6: Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy
Hickman
(Dragons
of Autumn Twilight, Dragons
of Winter Night, Dragons
of Spring Dawning)
7: Dragonlance Legends by Margaret Weis and Tracy
Hickman
(The
Time of the Twins, The
War of the Twins, The
Test of the Twins)