Category: Philosophy & Worldview

  • The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It

    Will Storr

    The Status Game had been on the list for a long while before I managed to get to it. Though there were a few perspectives that I had already read about in other books, most notably Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World, and to some extent Wanting by Luke Bergis, I found the overall narrative compelling and insightful.

    In The Status Game, Will Storr explores the deep-rooted human drive for status, which has existed since our hunter-gatherer days, and makes a case for how it is one of the fundamental motivators of human behaviour, and how status-seeking influences everything from our personal health, happiness and identities to cultural and societal structures.

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  • Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence

    Sara Imari Walker

    A lot of the books I have read in the recent past have to do with trying to get a working definition of life and/or consciousness. I picked up ‘Life as No One Knows It’ to get more perspectives in that direction, but it gave me something else by shifting the frame. At exactly halfway through the book, there is a line that goes “what will really be alien are examples of life (biological or technological) that have traversed a completely different evolutionary trajectory than we have.” And that’s important because if we keep looking for markers based on life on earth, we may not find it anywhere else in the universe. It’s thus important to find a framework that is agnostic of life as we know it, so that we have a measurable way of recognising and classifying signs of life/intelligence when we come across it.

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  • The Tao of Physics

    Fritjof Capra

    The Tao of Physics was first published in 1975, and I’d say that it’s even more relevant now in the context of science and the direction of human advancement in general. As the subtitle of the book states, the idea is to explore the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism. 

    Both science and religion/philosophy are trying to get to the reality that lies beyond our senses. One approaches it predominantly through rational means, the other through a non-intellectual experience by quieting the mind with meditation and fine tuning intuition. Broadly, it turns out that many Eastern philosophies/religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Tao, Zen – had already reached the understanding that modern (in the 80s) science later discovered. 

    The Tao of Physics is divided into three elegant sections – the way of physics, the way of eastern mysticism, and the parallels. Capra begins by summing up the evolution of physics from the time of the Greeks to its modern formulation in the form of Descartes’ philosophy – the separation of mind and matter, which influenced not just the development of modern physics but also the general Western way of thinking – a mechanistic world. On the other hand Eastern philosophies have emphasised the unity of not just mind and matter but the individual and the universe at large. 

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  • Alchemy: The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity

    Rory Sutherland

    I think Alchemy is the first book I’ve read by anyone associated with marketing/advertising. For anyone involved in selling anything, I’d say this is a must-read. You should also read this if you’re intellectually curious, because in essence, this is a behavioural science book. It is even more relevant now because of the obsession with data. It isn’t that you should not look at data, but as Rory says, if you’re only using data, it’s like playing golf with only one club. “Logic should be a tool, not a rule”. This book is about the magic, which I think we’re forgetting in the fixation for data. Rory calls it psycho-logical, which is the way we make decisions in daily life.

    Thanks to books like Donald D. Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality and Andy Clark’s The Experience Machine, the hypothesis is that our entire biological system (body and mind) are built to navigate the world, and we only see a version of reality. The brain predicts based on its experience and hypothesis and we fill in the details. When we do not have a complete understanding of decisions we ourselves take, it is hubris to think that we completely understand the motivations of others. Especially without considering nuances beyond data. “By using a simple economic model with a narrow view of human motivation, the neo-liberal project has become a threat to the human imagination’.

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  • Having and Being Had

    Eula Biss

    If I had to sum up Having and Being Had, it is Eula Biss having a conversation with capitalism -trying to understand its origins, its ethos, and its insidious and pervasive role in our lives. The only hint of structure are broad sections – consumption, work, investment, and accounting. But really, everything flows into everything else. I made up the narrative that she has ‘consumed’ her home (or the other way), she needs her work to pay for it, but also needs to make investments for her future – each piece complex in itself, their mutual relationships, and their relationship with her, and this is her account, and she has to account for everything. Everything is connected by capitalism. Having and Being Had reminded me of God, Human, Animal, Machine, which was reflections about consciousness itself.

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