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.
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’.
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.
“The Psychology of Money” is acknowledged as a game changer. It gave me fresh perspectives, validation, and the confidence to continue on the path I had set out on financially. So it wasn’t surprising that I was looking forward to Same As Ever.
To begin with, I think you shouldn’t expect the refreshing sense you’d get from the previous book. This is even more so if you’ve been reading the Collab Blog. The book’s cover promises ‘timeless lessons on risk, opportunity, and living a good life’ and to some extent, delivers on all. There are many extremely good insights and the pithy ways in which Housel articulates profound truths continue to be a source of ‘aha’.
What I missed though was the smooth flow of the previous book. It doesn’t help that many of the chapters seem to be force fitted into a narrative, and many anecdotes and other content are from the blog. Housel does go for a structure but I think it might have helped if this were presented as just a series of essays. He does say that these are standalone but then also proceeds to try connections at the end of each chapter. The overall experience therefore is a little jarring.
Having said that, Same As Ever is a useful book to read, with some great but lesser-known anecdotes, and indeed, timeless insights.
Notes and Quotes “Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything” ~ Carl Richards “Invest in preparedness, not in prediction” ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb Money brings happiness the same way drugs bring pleasure: incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough. “The majority of Americans were likely than their descendants to be dogged by the frightening sense of insecurity that comes from being jostled by forces – economic, political, international – beyond one’s ken. Their horizons were close to them.” ~ Frederick Lewis Allen (1900) People don’t want accuracy. They want certainty. If you have the right answer, you may or may not get ahead. If you’ve the wrong answer but you’re a good storyteller, you’ll probably get ahead (for a while). If you’ve the right answer and you’re a good storyteller you’ll most certainly get ahead. “Humour is a good way to show you’re smart without bragging” ~ Mark Twain “The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the more you can see his ass” ~ T. Boone Pickens “A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
I have to confess, I will need to read this again. I also want to. For two reasons. First, the subject is something I feel is important – understanding consciousness through the lens of a scientific method. Second, grasping all of the material in Anil Seth’s fascinating exploration, I feel, is impossible with a single read. Having said that, the first read of Being You is indeed enlightening.
Being ourselves is not something we are always conscious of.* Anil Seth sets out to explore how billions of neurons within the brain end up creating a conscious experience – a uniquely personal, first person experience. Being You is divided into four sections – defining the ‘problem’ and showing the approach to the scientific exploration of consciousness, looking at it through how it relates to ‘content’ and external phenomena, and then going inwards to the experiences of conscious selfhood, and finally applying the learning to non-human entities – animals and AI.
In the first section, Seth brings up the ‘hard’ and ‘real’ problems of consciousness. The first (David Chalmers) is focused on how consciousness happens, how it is related to our biophysical machinery and how it is connected to the universe at large. On the other hand, the ‘real’ problem is how the ‘primary goals of consciousness science is to explain, predict and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience.’ i.e. why is a particular experience the way it is, and what is its relation with what is happening with the brain and body. In other words, deeply understanding the connection between mind and matter. The latter approach would need measurement.
This begins with understanding ‘conscious levels’ – complete absence (e.g. coma) to light sleep to waking states. Conscious content is what we are conscious of – sights, smells, emotions, moods, thoughts, beliefs – all sorts of perception. There is a very interesting part on how psychedelic states are at a conscious level well above waking state, and have the maximum algorithmic complexity (a measure of the diversity of signals). Another interesting proposal is how all conscious experiences are informative and integrated, (red ball vs red and ball separately) leading to the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness, an axiomatic approach that starts with theories and use them to support claims on what properties the mechanisms underlying the experiences will have.
The next section is about conscious content and then the experience of a conscious self. Here’s where the idea of perception gets upturned. Perception is a ‘controlled hallucination’ (phrase by Chris Frith), an active construction as opposed to a passive registering of an external reality. The brain constantly makes predictions about the causes of its sensory signals through a Bayesian process in which the sensory signals (also) continuously rein in the brain’s various hypotheses. Perception is a continual process of prediction error minimisation (reducing the difference between what the brain expects and what the signal provides).
Reality is an interpretation, and the entire process is not optimised for accuracy, it is designed for utility. ‘We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us.’ A mechanism of making it seem real so we respond to it. Not to know the world, but to survive it! There is the fascinating part on colour – an object is not objectively ‘red’, redness is just the way in which it reflects light, and how the brain perceives it. And this applies to all of our perceptions. Mind effing bending! A great distinction here (John Locke) is on why that train is not just a perception and you shouldn’t jump in front of it. Objects have primary qualities that exist independently of an observer (e.g. space it occupies, movement, solidity), and secondary qualities that depend on the observer (e.g. colour)
The self, as shown in the next section, is also a perception, a controlled hallucination. To begin with, selfhood is divided into an embodied (being a body), perspectival (having a first-person perspective), volitional (having ‘free will’) and narrative (personal identity and deep emotions), social (how I perceive others perceiving me). The link between perception and the body and its physiological processes exist in all these forms. When we flip the learning from the previous section inwards, we understand that we do not perceive ourselves to know ourselves, we do it in order to control ourselves’. The entire panorama of experience and the mental life and thus its perceptions and cognitions stems from a deep-seated biological drive to stay alive.
I found the part on why we think we are stable and unchanging over time, very interesting. Perceptual inference is about finding out things about the outside world. Interoceptive inference is about controlling things – physiological regulation. In the latter, the prediction error minimisation happens by acting to fulfil top-down predictions of the brain. The brain, for survival, desires predicted ranges of physiological viability and thus the need for strong, precise and self-fulfilling predictions. And if it comes to that, the brain will (and does) systematically misperceive.
The end of the section also brings in the complex but fascinating FEP (free energy principle) and specifically how it applies to living systems and consciousness. In this context, it boils down to this – being alive means being in a condition of low entropy. Any living system, to resist entropy, must occupy states which it expects to be in. Free energy here approximates sensory entropy, and apparently, it amounts to the same thing as prediction error. Broadly, that connection with physics and the universe, and the brain’s regulation of the perception of the worlds outside and inside! Appealing, but they’re still ironing out many wrinkles.
I found the last parts – free will, and consciousness in animals and AI to be areas which are still under much (more) debate, and therefore more descriptive than insightful. That is not to say that it does not merit a read! It is just that the 200+ pages before were so rich and intense that on a purely relative scale, this seemed less so.
As I said, Being You is most definitely not an easy book, but it does such a fantastic job of providing that glimpse and promise that we might actually get answers to our most basic and profound questions that one automatically cheers for the understanding that each chapter provides. Also the kind of book that makes me wish I were smarter – to really grasp the entirety of it! It also made me think of how science and spirituality seem to converge – the latter’s approach to reducing wants and desires, and increasing mindfulness as a means to prediction error minimisation. 🙂
This was part of my Bibliofiles 2024 list, and in fact, my favourite read of the year.
Notes and Quotes “The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process..” “Wherever there is experience, there is phenomenology, wherever there is phenomenology there is consciousness.” Deductive (reaching conclusions by logic), inductive (extrapolating from a series of observations) and abductive reasoning (the best explanation from a series of observations)
*now that I have read the book, I am analysing this sentence!
