Re: [silk] What book changed your mind?

2014-11-16 Thread John Sundman
I was happy to see The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind on the list in the Chronicle (although it's more than 30 years old. Closer to 40, I think.) I remember reading it shortly after it came out, and while some of its conclusions seemed a bit of a stretch, it was

Re: [silk] What book changed your mind?

2014-11-16 Thread Charles Haynes
Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama by Daniel Goleman As a rationalist and skeptic, I had been extremely suspicious of woo woo claims about meditation, but I was interested is Dan Goleman's research into meditation and stress and I was intrigued by the scientific

Re: [silk] What book changed your mind?

2014-11-16 Thread Tim Bray
The most important book in my life was Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, which I read in my teens. Because while I’ve always read obsessively, all I read up till then was formulaic sci-fi, often re-reading the same one over and over. It taught me that other kinds of books

Re: [silk] What book changed your mind?

2014-11-16 Thread Udhay Shankar N
On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 3:59 AM, Thaths tha...@gmail.com wrote: Which book made *you*, dear Silk lister, change your mind? How? Rudy Rucker's _Infinity and the Mind_. 1. It kicked off a lifelong fascination with the concept of infinity. 2. It provided an accessible introduction to Godel's

Re: [silk] What book changed your mind?

2014-11-16 Thread Joy Bhattacharjya
Godel, Escher Bach. Douglas Hofstadter. Read it when I was seventeen, understood very little, but was absolutely staggered by what little I did understand. Godel's Incompleteness theorem changed my life view, if math could not be 'perfect,' what could?