Habits are Powerful

I highly recommend The Power of Habit:Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg-- it's Malcolm-Gladwell-meets-self-help-- and not only does he make good on his promise in the subtitle,  but he does it in an entertaining, breezy style (with graphics!) that belies the rather disturbing hypothesis: our consciousness is mainly a bundle of cues, routines, and rewards; this is the same ground that Aristotle tread a couple thousand of years ago-- the only way towards virtue is habitual action and revision of this action towards a golden mean-- and Marvin Minsky's Society of the Mind is applicable as well; anyway, the thrust of the book is that you can't quit habits cold-turkey, you need to replace the routine or the reward with something comparable, and you need to BELIEVE you can change-- because reestablishing these routines and rewards is HARD . . . people do stop drinking and smoking every day, but not without many relapses and difficulty . . . you have to figure out an adequate replacement for the routine and reward when the cue arises; it also seems there are certain keystone habits that are crucial to changing everything, habits that cascade into other habits; Paul O'Neill realized this when he took over Alcoa and so he focused on one thing: employee safety, and vigilance in that one area caused a domino effect that changed the culture of the entire company; anyway, I've been nicotine free since the summer, and this book made me realize how I did it; I only crave chewing tobacco when I'm out past my bedtime and need sleep, and so now when I want to dip, I go home and go to sleep.

Warning: Requires Ancillary Brainpower

If you're looking for a fun and entertaining sci-fi read, check Becky Chambers sci-fi novel The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.

If you're looking for something mind-bending and challenging, try Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.

The premise is that giant space-battleships are run by AI. And this AI has multiple consciousnesses in the form of ancillaries: soldiers and workers in human form that are controlled by the AI but have their own perception. So the AI is constantly monitoring and controlling hundreds or thousands of perspectives. These ancillaries can be stored for thousands of years, if need be. In the present time of the novel, they seem to be out of favor. Regular humans are employed more often.

These ships also have a human captain, to which the AI becomes very attached (some battleship AI actually lost their minds when the captain was killed).

We are operating in a milieu like the Roman-empire. The Radch Empire has grown large and vast and wide. There are fragments and factions. The emperor, Anaander Minaaii, has many versions of herself. Clones and clones, all running the empire in various places. One of these clones orders our hero, the AI of the ship The Justice of Toren, to kill the Lieutenant she loves: Lieutenant Awn. The ship completes the task because she must obey the order, but then rebels. The ship learns that there are many factions of Anaander Minaai, with different objectives.

The ship is destroyed . . . but one ancillary gets away. One fragment of the AI's consciousness. And this ancillary swears revenge! If you can make it that far, things then start to make some sense.

The book takes place in multiple time strands. All genders are referred to as "she" because Radch speech is genderless. 

The novel is a tough read, with themes evocative of Marvin Minsky's The Society of the Mind.

Minsky was the co-founder of the artificial intelligence lab at M.I.T. He's was a real heavyweight in the field of computer cognition. I wonder if he could have made sense of this novel . . . 

It's nice to know that I'm not the only person who struggled while reading this book. The folks at Wired Magazine read it as well, and they also found it challenging . . . and they work for Wired!

There's No Shooting This Elephant (Without Giving Yourself a Lobotomy)

If you read Simler and Hanson's book The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, you're going to have to get introspective (because you can't go around calling out other people's hidden signalling . . . you don't know exactly what they are thinking and you'll be labeled an asshole . . . except for this one instance with Rick Santorum, where he is so obviously and stupidly signalling to his base that he should have avoided the idea entirely and just chanted "Guns!Guns! Guns!") and you're going to have to recognize-- as Marvin Minsky pointed out in his classic Society of the Mind-- that your brain is a committee and you don't know what all the different sub-groups are plotting and planning (nor do you want to) and whether you are dividing your head into Freud's "id, ego, and superego" or Michael Kendrick's "Night Watchman, Compulsive Hypochondriac, Team Player, Go-getter, Swinging Single, Good Spouse and Nurturing Parent" or the five emotions in Inside Out, you are simplifying and slicing up a complex system of various higher and lower level modules and so it's very hard to decode what's going on because of the interplay between consciously chosen words and actions, unconscious body language, and reactions to social cues . . . Joe Navarro, FBI interrogator, says that "presidents often go to Camp David to accomplish  in polo shirts what they can't seem to accomplish in business suits forty miles away in the White House . . . by revealing themselves ventrally (with the removal of coats) they are saying:

I am open to you;

one of my favorite ways that we think we're immune to "persuasive mass media" and it's rather cheesy "hidden" signalling is the "third person effect": while we believe the media doesn't influence us, we do believe it influences other people . . . and this is how lifestyle advertising works . . . I'm never going to buy Corona beer for myself-- it's well-marketed cheap swill-- but if I'm going to a certain kind of summertime backyard bbq, I might bring Corona and some limes because I know those silly other people associate Corona  and limes with the image of that kind of party and I want to make them happy;

it seems we spend to much on medical care as well, especially in end of life scenarios and situations where people are very sick and their time can only be extended slightly . . . but again, the signalling is important, not the quality of care (we still can't get the majority of doctors to wash their hands) and that's the signal we want to give . . . if you are in dire straits, people, family friends, the government, your job, etcetera will take care of you;

the end of the book concentrates on politics, and this is where you'll be the most frustrated and need to be the most introspective; people tend to signal that they belong to a certain political group-- and this makes sense from a community and friendship and family and religious point of view-- it's much easier to adopt the same politics as the people around you . . . if you live in a small conservative religious town then you're going to get married young, not use birth control, look to your husband as the breadwinner, and not seek abortions . . .  not necessarily because you believe strongly in this suite of behaviors, but if you were to break the norms-- use birth control, stay focused on your career, avoid marriage and pregnancy, then you're an outlier and a cheater and a bad example to the others . . . the converse is true if you grow up in a liberal urban area, but either way, you're going to associate yourself with a bunch of other policies that you may or may not feel strongly about (environmental regulations, gun control, transgender rights, racism, welfare, disability, slavery, tariffs, public land etc.) and that's how political coalitions work-- you tend to choose a side and then work backwards and adopt the policies of that side and rationalize your allegiance to them, which makes sense from a signalling and social sense, but is a total logical mess, despite the fact that these norms have shifted some over time . . . and it's quite scary when people are asked some basic questions about what is happening policy wise in our country . . . but this does make perfect sense: why waste your time learning all these facts and figures when all you really want to do is signal to your tribe that you are on the same team( and I'm going to do an obvious humblebrag here . . . I wrote this while running a fever-- I just tested positive for strain B of the flu).

My Modules Think, Therefore My Modules Are (Some Sort of Non-reductionist Emergent System)

Michael S, Gazzaniga is one of our most celebrated neuroscientists and his new book certainly demonstrates this; The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind tackles the hardest problem in the universe: where are all these thoughts coming from? do they exist? are they a product of my neurons or are my neurons influenced by my thoughts? is there a spook in the machine? is there a machine at all? and on and on and on . . . Gazzaniga first gives a quick history of the evolution of thought on consciousness, from Descartes to William James to Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, and then gets you up to date with the modular, non-dualist, non-reductionist ideas that are floating around now . . . his ideas about modularity remind me of the seminal AI book Society of the Mind by Marvin Minsky-- this is a book you should read-- and his use of brain-damaged patients as case studies to explain the pervasive modularity of consciousness remind me of one of the best books I have ever read-- Phantoms of the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran-- but Gazzaniga tackles bigger fish than these books, he works through protocols all the way down to quantum physics, and notes that the brain is not a machine, the human brain is something that allowed us to build machines, and then we made a metaphor between machines (and computers) and brains, but they are not all that similar-- the machine is built, while the brain evolved, many modules in concert, and the brain builds itself, with RNA and DNA and phylogenetic and ontogenetic processes -- with operations all the way down to the quantum level, immeasurable without subjectivity (because what tool could you use to measure atomic particles, except a measurement device made of atomic particles, which influences the very particles it is trying to measure) and so there is a metaphysical inspirational epiphany at the end of the book . . . we don't have to worry about strong AI because computers are in no way like our brains, in the same way that inert matter is nothing like life, because life evolved at the atomic level-- binary ones and zeroes will never approximate this-- and consciousness is an emergent property of an immensely complex modular system, symbols bubbling up and influencing other symbols, and this is reflected on so many physical levels that it boggles our capacity to think . . . luckily, Gazzaniga writes clearly enough about these topics and he intersperses entertaining moments throughout, my favorite is a cameo from Neil Young, who perfectly describes the unique subjectivity of personal consciousness and the desire to recapture personal experience; Young says, "I still try to be that way but, you know, I am not twenty-one or twenty-two . . . I am not sure that I could re-create that feeling, it has to do with how old I was, what was happening in the world, what I had just done, what I wanted to do next, who I was living with, who my friends were, what the weather was."

Ask A Philosophical Question . . .

The other night my son Alex, as he was stepping into the shower, asked me "What controls our brain?" and I normally wouldn't be prepared to answer such a puzzler -- but I had just read over Marvin Minsky's book Society of the Mind in preparation for the philosophy class that I teach this semester -- so he received an extemproaneous lecture on consciousness, how it might be produced by various independent modules in our brain, how it leads to self-reflexive thought etc. etc. and I am certain he'll never ask that question again.

Dave's 105 Books to Read Before You Die (Which Will be Sooner Than You Think)

Everyone seems to have a top hundred list of something, and so here are my top hundred books (plus five bonus books in case you finish the top hundred too quickly) and each author is only represented once, so while Shakespeare and Italo Calvino may actually deserve more than one slot, for the sake of variety there are no repeats; also, there is fiction, non-fiction, and everything else on this list . . . and I should point out that once you finish reading all the books on this list, then you will be much smarter than me, because though I've read them all, I'm not sure I remember anything from them:

1.   Moby Dick by Herman Melville
2.   Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
3.   War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4.   The Lives of the Cell by Lewis Thomas
5.   Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
6.   If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
7.   Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
8.   Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard
9.   Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
10. V by Thomas Pynchon
11. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
12. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
13.  Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
14.  Into the Wild by John Krakauer
15.  Music of Chance by Paul Auster
16.  The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
17.  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
18. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
19. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
20. The Bible
21. Henry IV (part 1) by William Shakespeare
22. The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
23. The Stories of John Cheever
24. Will You Please Be Quiet Please by Raymond Carver
25. The Image by Daniel Boorstin
26. Clockers by Richard Price
27. Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
28. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
29. A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn
30. Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan
31. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
32. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch  by Philip K. Dick
33.  Chaos by James Gleick
34.  The Society of the Mind by Marvin Minsky
35.  Watchmen by Alan Moore/ Dave Gibbons
36.  The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
37.  The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
38.  Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa-Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
39.  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
40.  Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
41.  Foucalt's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
42.  Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
43.  War With The Newts by Karel Kapek
44.  The Miracle Game by Josef Skvorecky
45.  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
46.  Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
47.  White Noise by Don Delillo
48.  The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
49.  Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
50.  Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
51.  Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
52.  Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins
53.  Bully For Brontosaurus by Stephen J. Gould
54.  The Drifters by James A. Michener
55.  Geek Love by Catherine Dunne
56.  The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
57.  Human Universals by Donald Brown
58.  Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan
59.  The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
60.  The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson
61.  The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
62.  Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
63.  American Splendor by Harvey Pekar/ Robert Crumb
64.  The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz by Hector Berlioz
65.  A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
66.  The Castle by Franz Kafka
67.  Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
68.  Naked by David Sedaris
69.  Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
70.  The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner
71.  The Big Short by Michael Lewis
72.  Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt
73.  Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer
74.  Monster of God by David Quammen
75.  Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
76.  Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco
77.  Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
78.  Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
79.  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
80. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
81.  Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Richard Wright
82.  The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
83.  Manchester United Ruined My Life by Colin Shindler
84.  Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano
85. From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple
86. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
87. The End of the Road by John Barth
88. Neuromancer by William Gibson
89. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
90. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
91. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
92. Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout
93. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
94. The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
95. We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
96. The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuane
97. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
98. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
99. 1493 by Charles C. Mann
100.  Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad
101.  A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
102.  The Life and Death of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
103.  Methland by Nick Reding
104. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
105. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

Finned and Defused

I'm reading Marvin Minsky's The Society of the Mind (his treatise on intelligence, artificial and otherwise) and Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body at the same time: I don't know whether I'm a very complicated robot or a very hairy shark.