Literate Scientist

Robert Rosen mentioned this book in his Essays on Life Itself which I’m reading now (Chapter 9, Genericity as Information) and I immediately ordered it. It arrived today and a brief glance at it convinced me that I shall start reading it now as it might give some additional insight into Rosennean Complexity. I hope to write more about this book and ideas it will have brought to me when I finish reading it.

Structural Stability And Morphogenesis (Advanced Books Classics)

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

This is my second Rosen’s book and I started reading on 1st of September, 2008, a year after I read “Life Itself”. Essays were written after the latter book and were intended to clarify it. Therefore if you are about to start reading Rosen’s works it is probably better to read essays first. I’m almost halfway through it and particularly like the discussion about mimesis, its roots and history. This is highly recommended book to read and if you were trained in chemistry, physics and computer science like myself you would find revelations on every page and would never look at modern science with the same eyes again.

Essays on Life Itself

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

Thorough understanding of evolutionary theory and its applications to other disciplines was one of omissions in my education besides vague recollection of what I learnt at school 20-25 years ago. I actually remember pictures from Darwin’s books I looked at when I was a child I bought this book and started reading after seeing many references to it in Breaking the Spell from the same author. Currently I’m halfway through it. As far as I understand Dennett’s view of evolution is the computational one. Anyway there is much to learn from this book.

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

Just finished reading it. In summary: Everything is Nothing as their complexity measure is the same. Interesting short and small book to read if you have never heard of computationalism, many world interpretation of quantum mechanics, anthropic principle, self sampling assumption and quantum immortality. Discusses everything briefly and provides bibliography. However I think I should have read David Deutsch’s “The Fabric of Reality” book first which I bought recently and put on my reading list. The number of new concepts introduced was too overwhelming so I consider to read “Theory of Nothing” second time after finishing some other related books. 

Theory of Nothing

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

This one finished reading yesterday. I don’t want to repeat my review you can find here:

Review of Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

Just want to add that I carried it in my pocket during flight that evening and perhaps avoided black swans. Knowledge-driven superstition…

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

After reading Rosen’s book “Life Itself” I became very interested in non-reductionist thinking and found the book from Alwyn C. Scott. It is an excellent overview and the last 30 page chapter “Reductionism in Life” is worth the whole book:

• Newton’s Legacy
  • The Reductive Program
  • Supervenience and Physicalism
  • Practical Considerations
• Objections to Reductionism
  • Googols of Possibilities
  • Convoluted Causality
  • Nonlinear Causality
  • Time’s Arrow
  • Downward Causation
  • Open Systems
  • Closed Causal Loops and Open Networks
• Theories of Life
  • Artificial Life vs. Autopoiesis
  • Relational Biology
  • Mechanisms
  • Complex Systems and Chaotic Emergence
  • What Is Life?

The Nonlinear Universe: Chaos, Emergence, Life (The Frontiers Collection)

Highly recommended especially if you were trained as a physicist or a chemist like myself.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -