The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality (*****)
Egginton, William
This is a challenging book to summarize in a short writeup, and even more difficult to be rated by stars.
It is an intelligently written book about three geniuses and their ideas -- Borges, the writer; Heisenberg, the physicist; and Kant, the philosopher. The author does an excellent job of describing their respective lives and connecting that to the revolutionary ideas they brought forth. That in itself is enough to justify reading this book. None of these ideas are easy, and the reader should be prepared to put in significant effort to digest all this.
The book also tries to tie these ideas together into a cohesive narrative. In some ways, it reminded me of another such book -- Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter. In that book, the connection seemed unforced and natural. It came out as a revelation. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about this one. I often felt that the author was stretching things too far to make the connection. One example that comes to mind is the analysis of Borges' library in terms of the number of possible permutations and the comparison of the structure of the library as a hypersphere. Maybe Borges thought of all that, but I doubt it. The metaphor of this library remains just as poignant without overloading it with extra meaning.
Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being (*****)
Theise, Neil
The first half of the book was excellent. One of the most insightful explorations of complexity. It mostly deals with the very basic, but anyone reading it should get a clear idea of the big ideas, though not the technical details. Some of his examples are so powerful that it is hard to resist repeating them during a chat with friends. For example, when we look at a flock of murmuring sterlings, they look like a single organism, until we look closely and notice the individual birds. We, you and I, have a definite boundary, inside of which it is 'me', and outside is the rest of the world. But if we get closer and look through a microscope, we cannot see such a sharp boundary, but just a collection of individual cells interacting with each other. So, is there a 'me' or just a collection of individual cells? Both these views are correct -- it depends on the scale of our observation.
So far, so good. However, the author then takes a philosophical turn and starts making a series of dubious connections between complexity and consciousness and panpsychism, religion, and other forms of metaphysics. Nothing wrong with making these connections if they are well-argued. Unfortunately, I found his arguments weak, hand-wavey, and sometimes completely wrong. The collapse of the wave function in Quantum Physics does not require a 'conscious' observer, but just any observer will do. A bunch of metal and silicon chips will do unless, of course, you believe in panpsychism and see a little bit of consciousness in a hammer.
How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (*****)
Barrett, Lisa Feldman
This was a hard book to digest. The author is challenging many ideas that we intuitively took for granted and were supported by many earlier researchers. Most of us feel that basic emotions are universal, a property of humankind. We also think we can read, to some extent, the emotions of a person in their face and in their body language. Many earlier research also confirmed this view. So, when the author challenged this notion, my first reaction was skepticism.
This reaction was also enhanced by the confident tone in which it was expressed. I do not believe scientists should be that sanguine about any of their ideas. This self-doubt is what separates science from all other modes of thinking. As scientists, we should know what seems true today may, and most probably will, get challenged tomorrow. That is how science progresses. Unlike religion, where there is a single immovable truth, science feeds on constant doubt. Therefore, when the author sounded so confident about everything she said, that made me uncomfortable. Perhaps she took this tone to combat the opposition from earlier thought leaders. Her arguments would have been more persuasive if she had shown the typical humility we expect from great scientists.
Once I could go beyond my initial reaction, I started to see the power of her argument and the neurobiological experimental data she put forth. I am no expert in the field to judge the accuracy of her findings. Still, I was gradually convinced by her argument that emotions are largely created by culture and language. They are constructed by our mind rather than biologically programmed. This is a hard pill to swallow, but I am grateful to the author for planting this idea in my mind. As I thought more, I could see this perspective makes sense in many cases.
However, I am also left with many doubts. If there are no correlations between facial expressions and actual emotional states, why are we so profoundly affected by acting in movies? How do great movies carry meaningful and similar emotions to audiences across the globe? Is it only due to the proliferation of Western culture globally? That is hard for me to accept. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between.
In any case, I believe it is an important book that anyone interested in the science behind the human mind would benefit from reading.
Wind, Sand and Stars (*****)
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de
Ever since The Little Prince hypnotized me, I wanted to know more about the author. Many decades later, I finally got down to reading his memoir.
This book is just as mesmerizing as that fictional tale. The author can dive deep and discover fundamental truths about humanity that can survive time and space.
I will not try to describe this book because it is hard to describe. Of course, it is about the experience of a pilot in the early days of flight when flying was unbelievably risky and a lonely profession. But it is so much beyond that. It is a celebration of humanity -- deeply felt and beautifully expressed.
Trout Fishing in America (*****)
Brautigan, Richard
Not all books survive the test of time. This is probably one of them. To appreciate it, I had to constantly reorient my mind to a state that existed in the sixties and early seventies of the last century when the book was written. It is still funny in parts and still poignant in some respects, but less relevant. I'd love to know how readers who did not have a personal or acquired memory of that period react to this book.
In contrast, the last book I read was also partially centered on that period of history. It was Annie Ernaux's The Years. That book, I believe, had the power to transport a younger reader to the sixties, but I doubt this one can. Still, I am glad I read it.
The Years (*****)
Ernaux, Annie
What a remarkable book! Easily one of the best books I have read in recent years.
It is a memoir, but detached and unsentimental. The author talks about her own life, perhaps slightly fictionalized, but it is not really about the details of her life. She is using her life as a mirror of the world she lived in -- mostly France, but also the whole world. It starts in 1941 and ends in 2006.
She picks up little artifacts of memory -- a photograph, a film, a song -- and she talks about the life of a girl, a young woman, a middle-aged person, and finally, someone in her sixties, all through referring to herself in the third person.
The focus is never on the details of her personal life but on how the world around her was changing and the marks it left on her own thinking and her attitudes and values. It reminds us of the illusion that we live one continuous life with the same "me" when we are the amalgamation of many selves, smoothly dovetailing into each other where the transitions become impossible to see anymore.
She was born 14 years before me in a country that is so very different from my home. Yet, we shared similar shifts in history and attitude at different ages. She talks of the 1968 Paris revolts when she was in her late twenties, convinced the world was about to change. At the same time, Calcutta was going through similar unrest. We also heard of Paris, but did they hear of Calcutta? I was fifteen, and we, too, believed that the world was about to change.
The possibility of revolutionary change fizzled away, but not completely. We both saw changes in our local governments, and there was hope. Slowly, we were disillusioned. Our personal focus shifted, but the regrets remained. Again and again, the world events that affected and changed her also changed me and us. That is where the book resonates so well across cultures. The story of humanity is often tied together with the same strings. The book ends before the recent pandemic, but that has been the most unifying experience in human history. Even the two world wars did not touch the entire planet, but this one did.
The book will resonate with people many years from now because the nature of psychological, political, and moral time will remain relatable and universal.
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (*****)
Klein, Naomi
I started this book knowing very little beyond the summary, and for some reason, I believed it was more of an experiential/psychological book on someone discovering a doppelganger. So, I was a little disappointed soon after starting the book and realizing that was not the case. But I am so glad I stumbled on the book.
Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf are similar in age and probably in looks, and they both started as liberal thinkers and writers. People would often confuse them, not so much because they are like identical twins, but because of their parallel trajectories, and of course, their first names. However, at some point, Wolf changed her political position and joined the far right. That is the starting point of this book.
The author then starts exploring why and how people can reverse their position and why that is not so unusual in our current environment. What follows is a highly intelligent and insightful exploration of what she calls the shadow world. It goes from the follies of capitalism to the myths of individualism we are all indoctrinated into. She expands her argument to show why many of us reacted the way we did to the pandemic and why a large fraction was not convinced that they have a societal responsibility to protect others through vaccination or wearing a mask.
She sees a manifestation of the same shadow world in the Israeli mindset when it comes to Palestine. or our general callousness towards global warming.
What I found surprising was how she could knit it all together from the starting premise of a doppelganger. The book made me think, and it changed some of my beliefs. My only complaint is that the book could have been much shorter without losing its argumentative power.
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