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RobinZ comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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Hi, everyone, you can call me Gigi. I'm a Mechanical Engineering student with a variety of interests ranking among everything from physics to art (unfortunately, I know more about the latter than the former). I've been reading LW frequently and for long sessions for a couple of weeks now.
I was attracted to LW primarily because of the apparent intelligence and friendliness of the community, and the fact that many of the articles illuminated and structured my previous thoughts about the world (I will not bother to name any here, many are in the Sequences).
While the rationalist viewpoint is fairly new to me (aside from various encounters where I could not identify ideas as "rationalist"), I am looking forward to expanding my intellectual horizons by reading, and hopefully eventually contributing something meaningful back to the community.
If anyone has recommendations for reading outside LW that may be interesting or relevant to me, I welcome them. I've got an entire summer ahead of me to rearrange my thinking and improve my understanding.
Many people here loved Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. It's quite a hodge-podge, but there's a theme underlying the eclectic goodness.
I have a peculiar fondness for Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, which I find to be an excellent attempt (although [edit: I suspect] obsolete and probably flawed) to provide a reductionist explanation of an apparently-featureless phenomenon - many people, including many people here, found it dissatisfying.
I cannot think of other specifically LessWrongian recommendations off the top of my head - as NancyLebovitz said, elaboration would help.
Gödel, Escher, Bach is definitely a good recommendation, at least it appears to be from my cursory research on it.
As to what sort of recommendations I am looking for, I've noticed that LW appears to have a few favorite philosophers (Dennett among them) and a few favorite topics (AI, bias, utilitarian perspective, etc.) which I might benefit from understanding better, nice as the articles are. Some recommendations of good books on some of LW's favorite topics would be a wonderful place to start.
Thanks much for your help.
I'm a fan of Consciousness Explained as well, though that may be partly nostalgia as in some ways I feel it marks the beginning of (or at least a major milestone on) my rationalist journey.
Wow, I'm surprised to hear that two people referred to Consciousness Explained as obsolete. If there's a better book on consciousness out there, I'd love to hear about it.
I didn't intend to imply I thought it was obsolete, just that I may hold it in higher regard because of when I read it than if I discovered it today.
As would I, actually. I guessed "obsolete" because the book came out in 1991 (and Dennett has written further books on the subject in the following nineteen years). I've not investigated its shortcomings.
Good point: thanks. Dennett wrote Sweet Dreams in 2005 to update Consciousness Explained, and in the preface he wrote
I highly recommend Sweet Dreams to Gigi and anyone else interested in consciousness. (It's also shorter and more accessible than Consciousness Explained.)
Thank you for the updated recommendation. I will probably look into reading Sweet Dreams. Would I benefit from reading Consciousness Explained first, or would I do well with just the one?
I'd recommend reading them both, and you'd probably benefit from reading CE first. But I'd actually start with Godel, Escher, Bach (by Hofstadter) and The Mind's I (which Dennett co-wrote with Hofstadter).
Oh, The Mind's I was excellent - it is a compilation of short works with commentary that touches on a lot of nifty themes with respect to identity and personhood.
A while back, colinmarshall posted a detailed chapter-by-chapter review of The Mind's I.
Oh, and also Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas. (Yes, that's the correct spelling.)
The title - being the title of Hofstadter's column in Scientific American (back when Scientific American was a substantive publication), of which the book is a collection - is an anagram of Mathematical Games, the name of his predecessor's (Martin Gardner's) column. That, too, is an enjoyable and eclectic read.