The following is currently a list of books I recommend (in rough order) if you want to better understand where I am coming from. If you have a suggestion, please add it to the comments at the bottom. Note, some links are to meta-info about the book, but you should read the book itself. Also, if there’s no link there, or the title or author is slightly off, see the ground rules for an explanation of why; I trust you know how to use Google or Amazon :-) Eventually I will turn this list into an eigenpoll so I no longer control it.
- The Chaos Point (Laszlo)
- Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff & Johnson)
- Complexity
- Conceptual Foundations for Multidisciplinary Thinking (Kline)
- A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bryson)
- At Home in the Universe (Kauffman)
- The Origin of Wealth
- Influence (Cialdini)
- Tipping Point (Gladwell)
- The Wisdom of Crowds
- Powershift (Toffler)
- The Black Swan
- Complex Adaptive Systems (Miller and Scott)
- From Molecule to Metaphor
- Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity
- The Happiness Hypothesis
- The Crisis of Global Capitalism (Soros)
- Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
- The China Study
- A New Kind of Science (Wolfram)
- Evolutionary Dynamics (Nowak)
- Stumbling on Happiness (Gilbert)
- Cure (Glazier)
- Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
- Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Postman & Weingartner)
- Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems (Holland)
- The Emergent Ego: Complexity and Coevolution in the Psychoanalytic Process
- Evolution of Information Processing Systems
- New Theories of Everything (Barrow)
My Current Queue of Topical Reading
- Generative Social Science (Epstein)
- The Omnivore’s Dilemma
- Phantoms in the Brain
- The Power Broker
- The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil)
- Applied Nonlinear Control by Jean-Jaques E Slotine and Weiping Li
- Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky
- Cambrian Intelligence by Rodney Brooks
- The Scientist as Rebel (Freeman Dyson)
- Mismatch: Why Our World No Longer Fits Our Bodies
- Freedom & Neurobiology (Searle)
- The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina
- Collapse (Jared Diamond)
- The Man Who Tasted Shapes (Cytowic)
- The Quark and the Jaguar (Gell-Mann)
- The Normal Personality (Reiss)
I did not find A New Kind of Science very useful.
A professor once recommended I read Applied Nonlinear Control by Jean-Jaques E Slotine and Weiping Li when I talked about wanting to learn more about the sorts of topics you are interested in. It is advanced material and I have not made much headway into it. If you want to add it to your reading list, I would certainly value someone else with whom to study it.
Hi, nice page. Might I suggest “The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and Complex,” by Physicist Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel laureate and “father” of complexity science at the Santa Fe Institute.
Based on your future topics for discussion, in particular ‘belief systems as evolutionary’, you might want to add some Daniel Dennett to the list. _Freedom Evolves_ is probably closest to the stuff you’re thinking about.