Questioning Society discussion

Please see the unusual books: http://unusualbooks-koma.blogspot.com/

*goes to read*

Dan wrote: "Please see the unusual books: http://unusualbooks-koma.blogspot.com/"

Still learning the ropes here just joined

I don't really view Lovecraft as "questioning society", although they are fun, no doubt. Note well that all of Lovecraft's works are now out of copyright and you can get them for free at e.g. Project Gutenberg or one of the other big free ebook sites, no need to pay for them in paper unless you want to. I have all of Lovecraft on my Kindle at this point for free.

Here are some books that DO question society, or make you question it, or raise your awareness, or something like that...;-)

Misquoting Jesus -- well worth reading.

The Lucifer Principle -- one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read, and I read a lot (as in, I read lessee six books over the weekend).

Guns Germs and Steel -- not as good a book as The Lucifer Principle, but still worth a read.

Those are all pretty accessible, although you might be justified if you read only the first 1/3 to 1/2 of Guns, Germs and Steel, since somewhere in there he starts repeating his hypothesis and we get it, we get it. I'm not sure I agree with his hypothesis, but it there is probably some truth in it.

A more difficult set of books for the philosophically inclined. These books basically outline the mathematical and metaphysical basis of knowledge and reality. Not for the faint of heart, but the reward for working through them is vast. You will never again wonder why or how you know what you know; you will have an absolutely sound foundation for self-knowledge and knowledge of other, which provides you with the ultimate basis for "questioning society" with a solid, defensible worldview. A lot of this will eventually be summarized in a book I'm working on, but in the meantime:

An Investigation of the Laws of Thought by George Boole.

The Algebra of Probable Reason by Richard Cox.

Probability Theory the Logic of Science by E. T. Jaynes.

Information Theory Inference and Learning Algorithms by David Mackay.

(Mackay's book is online for free -- download the PDF ebook image for your computer -- although it is well worth buying. Lots of math in it, be warned, but it describes way cool stuff like compression algorithms, transmission on noisy channels and information theory, and how Bayes is God... so to speak. Which is really the theme of all of these books in sequence.)

rgb

I've heard of Probability Theory the Logic of Science by E. T. Jaynes. before. Is it good?

♥ Bella♥ {Hold Me: I’m a Fermata} wrote: "I've heard of Probability Theory the Logic of Science by E. T. Jaynes. before. Is it good?"

It is awesome. Like, the basis for all human knowledge, that kind of awesome. Even if you just get through the first couple of chapters, it is worth it.

rgb

*goes to add to to-read list*

And if you want the free version(s) if this book, visit here:

http://omega.albany.edu:8008/JaynesBo...

and the famous Mobil talk (a very early and compact version of the book):

http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/m...

The toplevel site:

http://bayes.wustl.edu/

is worth a visit -- there's a list of his articles.

Finally, the (free pdf ebook) you can download from here:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/ma...

is butt-kicking good, especially if you're mathematically inclined and know what information theory is, maybe know a bit of programming, and want to learn more about the fundamental nature of reality and thought.

rgb

Thx!

Hey, that member got deleted1

Probably was identified as non-Goodreads spam -- that was what it looked like. If you're a mod, maybe you can edit the initial post and make it something like:

"Post books that make you think about or question society below, plus any short reviews or recommendation comments you might choose to make."

rgb

Advertising, I don't think it's allowed. But then, just delete the post, not the member. O.o

I read an excerpt from guns germs and steel at the beginning of the year in world studies. And we talked about the ideas for a while. It was interesting.

But you really must mention Brave New World (which, for those of you who don't know, is by Aldous Huxly). Although it is in a futuristic society, certain things don't seem so far away. Like manufacturing babies. (which I really hope never happens. I'm counting on people keeping their morals.)

Roni wrote: "I read an excerpt from guns germs and steel at the beginning of the year in world studies. And we talked about the ideas for a while. It was interesting.

But you really must mention Brave New Wor..."

It's all in how you depict the manufacturing of babies. Making babies the old fashioned way is dangerous to baby and mother. Right now, baby-making suffers from the following problems:

a) Beyond the one step over which you have a choice (mate selection) it is random. You're basically rolling dice and hoping that the chromosomes match up and that they don't contain randomly defective genes. Often, of course, they do.

Many couples have amniocentesis so that their fetuses can be karyotyped at a stage where they can still easily abort if the fetus has Down's syndrome or spinabifida, but there are so very many, very tragic, birth defects and chromosomal defects out there in the world.

Currently, the only solution is to peek at the hand you (and your potential offspring) are dealt and if it is a Yarborough or Milhouse, throw it in for a redeal -- basically practice unnatural selection. "Manufacturing" promises, especially for couples where one of the partners has a known genetic disorder such as hemophilia or hemochromotosis or BRCA-1 -- to have children that don't inherit the defect without the trauma of abortion.

b) Human evolution is limited by the size of the baby's head at the time it has to pass through the birth canal. As it is, humans are born less "wired" than almost any other species, but many women have narrow pelvises and end up trying to deliver big-headed fetuses. In the "old days" -- which weren't that long ago -- woman and baby just plain died when this sort of combination (or breech presentations, or many other things) occurred. Now the babies are born via cesarean section or the babies are inverted with forceps.

This is a good thing (he says, with one son born normally/vaginally, one son born after being flipped with forceps because he was a whopping 9 pounds 14 ounces at birth and while he wasn't breech, he was upside down and his head just wouldn't "slot" into the birth canal on contractions, and one son born via cesarian because he did flip into breech position literally two days before a scheduled induction (to prevent another ten pounder) and they failed to note it before beginning). But it does remove the natural selection that provided evolutionary direction towards matching increases in pelvic capacity and baby's head capacity and size. Without the selection, undirected random walk is the rule and we can expect humans to gradually evolve to where very few women will be able to deliver all their babies "naturally".

c) Every year, probably every day, we face circumstances where a woman has a wanted baby on board but is diagnosed with a health problem where the pregnancy puts the life of the woman and/or the fetus at great risk. Breast cancer, for example, or anything for which the treatment is teratogenic drugs. In these cases hard choices must be made -- to abort the baby (and have a chance to save the life of the mother, who can then try again) or to keep the baby but leave the condition untreated, sacrificing the mother. Neither choice is appealing -- it would be lovely to have a third in the form of popping the fetus into a gestation chamber.

I should note that at this point when babies are born at the end of their second trimester, they go into intensive care that is as close as they can get to just this sort of thing (and which costs a million bucks by the time the baby is released to "normal" care). I personally think it would be lovely if artificial wombs were invented that could complete this process far more cheaply.

If you want to read some books wherein gestation units of this sort are standard operating procedure but where babies are not generally mass-produced, consider Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series. In this series, the "Betans" are her vision of a rational superculture, the extrapolation of America as it were to a state of complete personal freedom and responsibility. In this culture, everybody uses gestation units so that chromosomal defects can be corrected in utero and to eliminate all risk to the mother. The babies are "manufactured", sure, but not at the expense of the family unit or individual responsibility for raising your own offspring.

In Betan culture there is also a bit of tinkering with the species genotype, but surprisingly little. Elsewhere in the galaxy, notably on Jackson's Whole (a bit of a feudal dive) they make a big business out of cloning and genetic modification, with the usual attendant tragedies (some of which form themes for whole books in the series).

I do love Brave New World; don't get me wrong. But its dystopian vision is exaggerated and artificial, just like Ayn Rand's vision in Atlas Shrugged, like Farenheit 451, like 1984. It is difficult to pull out a single "dimension" from these works (like wall-sized TVs in Farenheit 451) and say "this is evil" divorced from the rest of the context of the story. Mind control is bad, illiteracy is bad, sure. But television itself, wall sized 3d screen with surround sound or not? I don't think so. It is far too complex to be "good" or "bad" as a sweeping judgement.

So it is with gestation units. Misused, they could be a great evil (or at least, a pathway to a very different sort of humanity). Used well, they could be a great good and eliminate a lot of senseless and real tragedy from the lives of real human beings that currently suffer from their absence.

Ever since the first of our primate ancestors picked up the first piece of flint and shaped it into a tool, that ability has been able to be used for good -- scrapers, arrowheads, axes used to gather or produce food or shelter -- or ill -- to build arrows that can kill humans from a distance, stone axes that are optimally designed for use in war. Yet is it our ability to build such tools that makes us who we are.

rgb

Roni wrote: "But you really must mention Brave New World (which, for those of you who don't know, is by Aldous Huxly). Although it is in a futuristic society, certain things don't seem so far away. Like manufacturing babies. (which I really hope never happens. I'm counting on people keeping their morals.)"

The manufacturing babies thing can also be seen in the movie Gattaca (not a book, but still interesting).

rgb, you're a hero.

Emily wrote: "rgb, you're a hero."

Awwww, now you're going to make me blush...:-)

Although I'm not sure what was heroic in that last reply...;-)

rgb