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 -

I’ve never read anything about religion since earlier school probably 25 years ago and my education was almost materialist-marxist-leninist. However I recently became interested in various religions mostly because of the diverse workplace and my ongoing philosophical education. I stumbled upon this book in a local shop, bought and started reading while commuting to work. Halfway through I became interested in evolutionary theory and learnt about meme. Because of so many references to Dennett’s earlier book I put it aside after I finished the first two parts and I think I come back to the last third one called “Religion Today” after I finish “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” book.

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

Reading general science books especially those bordering on philosophy requires understanding basic principles of philosophy and its logic as well as possessing critical thinking skills. The following short book which I’m half way through seems to be good:

The Philosophers Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

I’ve just finished reading this book and despite some bad reviews on Amazon I wasn’t disappointed. The author’s writing style is a bit unusual with some unknown words that you need a dictionary but after a chapter I became used to it and it wasn’t a problem anymore. If you heard about Gödel theorems before but cannot repeat precisely what they are about then this book is for you and you will find detail-free sketch of the proof very clear. I really liked the author’s attack on positivism and postmodernism especially in the light of previously read Fashionable Nonsense. I also liked the conclusion at the end of the book that the life of Gödel was “incomplete” too. The book discusses Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein, relationship between Einstein and Gödel and even some political issues in the Institute for Advanced Study related to Gödel’s life (this is why I included this book under Politics category too). One remark about bad review from the professor who participated in publishing edited works of Kurt Gödel: I can publish works of Aristotle nowadays without much efforts. Will it give me the right to judge other works and proclaim without sound justification that they don’t know philosophy?

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel (Great Discoveries)

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

When mapping one science domain to another and borrowing terminology even metaphorically one rule to follow is to provide justification. This is very important otherwise people will laugh once they recognize that terminology was just thrown without any explanation or connection. For me this book was very important reading because I also mapped some computer science and engineering technology terminology to the domain of project management. However I provided some sort of justification to my relief.

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

This one I discovered last year and just finished reading. Interesting collection of articles written in the late 70’s and early 80’s about application of mathematics. My favourite were two articles about statistics and two articles about Husserl. The article about Kant biography was nice as well.

Discrete Thoughts

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

I was always fascinated with String Theory without knowing what it was all about except the fact that in early 90s one physics professor told me that there exists the so called String Theory where a mathematical apparatus changes every 6 months… Since then I always wanted to read about that theory and in 2002 I bought and started reading The Elegant Universe book and then bought the book suitable for undergraduates called A First Course in String Theory. This learning adventure was suddenly interrupted with the arrival of two books which I finished reading last year and which opened my eyes and reminded me again that science is full of politics, influence and power games:

Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory And the Search for Unity in Physical Law

The next one is offered with great discount that I think was given the let many people to know about troubles in fundamental physical sciences:

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next

Since then I read other books about modern physics and science in general and I think I would re-read these two books because I have better background now in order to judge what authors say or complain about.

- 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 -