Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
5people
2015–2026years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Another fictional investigation of bicameral minds are two novels in the Firefall series by Peter Watts.
- Check also Peter Watts Firefall series.
- These books really challenge your thinking or force you to think hard and/or see things through another lens. They are also really good reads that are very hard to put down.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Firefall series by Peter Watts (Blindsight & Echopraxia) Axiomatic by Greg Egan N.N. Taleb's books
These are all books I had seen written about in previous HN threads like this and ended up reading, so glad I did!
- Recently is a very relevant term, and honestly I'm not sure it matters much as.
I'll answer mostly to the "thought provoking part" of your question.
* Egan, Greg - Permutation City, Diaspora, and basically everything
* Liu, Cixin - The Three Body Problem (trilogy)
* Rajaniemi, Hannu - Jean le Flambeur (trilogy)
* Watts, Peter - Firefall (series)
* Chiang, Ted - The Lifecycle of Software Objects
* Liu, Cixin - The Wandering Earth (short stories)
I know quite a few people in love with Neal Stephenson, but I can't really muster his style. Check out Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age.
- According to his blog, Peter Watts is currently writing the 3rd book of the Firefall Series. It'll be titled "Omniscience", no release date has been set yet.
- Great point. Humans growing up without others we call "feral"
Have you read Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral mind? A psychologist analyzes historical signs of "consciousness", like the transition in the Ilyad of men's motivations shifting from parts of their bodies & god puppeters to their "will".
One of his interesting conclusions is that schizophrenic voices were these connections, or in hackerspeak, daemons or programs running. With so many programs competing for attention at once, the "consciousness" program was formed to "decide" how to spend its newly alloted attention.
Peter Watts, marine biologist, explores this in his Firefall series (fiction) - the idea of consciousness arising out of conflict. It fits nicely with the folk wisdom that in "Flow", there is no sense of self.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618057072? : Origins of Consciousness http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765328038 : Sci-fi featuring Consciousness as conflict as a central theme
.. why do I feel like this exact discussion has been repeated on HN before? Like different neurons of the HN-brain are running across this idea of "automatic decision making" and sending it up to the neo-cortex (front page), again, and again..
