Name: The web of life
ISBN: 9780002554992

The web of life

In The Web of Life Capra offers a radical synthesis of such recent scientific breakthroughs as the theory of complexity, Gaia theory, chaos theory and other explanations of the properties of organisms, social systems and ecosystems.

What Hacker News says

wunderlustSep 2022

My field of study (what I really like to think and learn about) isn't my field of work, but I like the question so I'll spill some thoughts.

I spend a lot of time thinking about philosophical-ish stuff, so here are some books that have had the strongest residual effects (whether that's changing how I think, changing what I think about, changing my values, or simply getting the thought ball rolling faster):

Ishmael (Daniel Quinn)

1984 (George Orwell)

Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hofstadter)

The Republic [imp. "the allegory of the cave"] (Plato)

The Genealogy of Morals (Friedrich Nietzsche)

The Social Construction of Reality (Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann)

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (L. Wittgenstein)

Dissemination [imp. "The Pharmakon"] (Jacques Derrida)

The Quest for Reality (Barry Stroud)

Languages of Art (Nelson Goodman)

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn)

Concepts (Jerry Fodor)

The Web of Life (Fritjof Capra)

Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco)

Naming and Necessity (Saul Kripke)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)

There are others, and a lot of essays (by thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Carl Hempel, Hilary Putnam, WVO Quine, Karl Popper, Alfred Tarski, Gottlob Frege, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Mikhail Bakunin, CS Peirce, and David Hume, among many others), but these seem apropos as they most readily came to mind.

thread

sentientforestDec 2019

On my list to read in 2020:

    The Visual Display of Quantitative Information 
    The Rust Programming Language 
    Progressive Web Apps 
    Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability 
    Farming the Woods 
    Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms 
    Affinity Designer Workbook 
    The Age of Surveillance Capitalism 
    Walden 
    A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration 
    Ernest Hemingway On Writing 
    The Two Hands of God (Alan Watts) 
    The Anarchist's Design Book and/or With the Grain: A Craftsman's Guide to Wood 
    Dune 
    Some other fiction reading I'll decide on after I finish Dune

Books/Authors I've read that I would recommend:

    Tao of Physics, Web of Life, Systems View of Life, etc. (Fritjof Capra) 
        ^Capra's work has heavily influenced my worldview and ability to think in systems

    Designing Data Intensive Applications (just finishing this week)
    Permaculture One & Two, Gaia's Garden, Edible Forest Gardens I&II
    Black Swan, Antifragile, etc. (Nassim Taleb) 
    Cloud Hidden: Whereabouts Unknown (Alan Watts, written late in life) 
    Ishmael, Story of B, etc. (Daniel Quinn) 
    You are Not a Gadget, Who Owns the Future, etc. (Jaron Lanier) 
    Goethe's Italian Journey   
    Vonnegut, Hemingway, Steinbeck 
    The Wheel of Time

thread

pbhjpbhjSep 2017

The synoptic gospels and NT, but to choose one book from the NT, ...

The Epistle of James - as it has some strong counterpoints to other parts of the NT particularly the contrast of Pauline notions of grace with charity/works.

Emperor's New Mind, Penrose - probably my biggest take away from it was to consider how human perception works alongside, and co-mingles with, physics.

Web of Life, Capra - considering holistic nature of life, one's connection to the World at large; emergent patterns, complex structure birthing from simplicity (goes well with what I recall of Gleick's Chaos).

Zen and the Art ... - what is value, what is valuable to me, whither/whence/wherefore value; how should I relate to my children (long before i had any) and how to challenge them philosophically.

Republic, Plato - the first book that really set me thinking about the structure of society, about inequalities. And of course about stepping out of The Cave.

Koran & Hadith (partial readings, ie whole sections; couple of major hadith only) - [redacted]; but greater understanding of Islam and of religion in general; taught me to watchfully avoid being tainted by the labels people give themselves and look instead to their actions.

Mein Kampf (partial reading) - ideas have intrinsic moral value, that we should judge ideas on their merits and not by who has them; we should be careful about tarring people by simple association.

Art of War - preparedness, looking to supply lines, avoiding conflicts, not entering "battles" you know you'll lose (which I'd take as 'learn nothing from').

Christianarchy - what it means to be a Christian, who is and isn't "in".

Agrarian Justice, Paine - what is my place politically and economically in the world, whence do I derive the 'rights' to own what I do, whether such ownership is good.

Worth noting here that the ideas and impressions I got are unlikely to be what you will get, we react to books based on who we are, our frame of mind, moods, etc.. Most of these books I read as a late teenager, that at least in part boosts their impact. The impact is not necessarily the purpose of the book, quite the opposite in some cases.

thread

naradaellisOct 2010

I got very excited a while a go when I found out that this book existed, and that it was Capra who wrote it (the Web of Life was great), but the top amazon reviews at the time were pretty disparaging. Looks like the top reviews have shifted since last time I was there though, I'll probably give it a try.

thread

pbhjpbhjAug 2021

I was going to note this (first learnt about it in Capra's "Web of Life", IIRC), but they did already:

>Abiotic, or nonliving, chemical processes can also form structures that look surprisingly similar to life, adds Rachel Wood, a carbonate geologist at the University of Edinburgh. "She [Turner] may be right. But I think you really have to explore and disprove all the other possibilities to make such a really strong claim like this." So for now, Wood says, "I don't think that she's really nailed that these are sponges."

>Only further analysis can resolve the debate. Wood notes that crafting three-dimensional models of the tube network would help give a more detailed look at the structures. And Riding hopes the new study will inspire more scientists to take a closer look at other stromatolites to search for more of these meshy structures.

thread