Category: Book review

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Book review

Distress

by Greg Egan

Distress by Greg Egan

Andrew Worth, a journalist burnt out by his last expose on the abuses of biotech, persuades his boss to let him take over an assignment from another editor about a physics conference on the Theory of Everything. This conference is to take place on a human-created tropical island in the Pacific, which Andrew imagines will be just the tonic he needs. What could possibly go wrong? Other than nearly dying from a synthesized cholera virus, death threats to the Noble Prize winning Violet Mosala (whom Andrew is following through the conference), being held at gunpoint and kidnapped, the paradise itself being attacked, and the potential ending of the entire universe as we know it?

So it’s a busy old time for Andrew, and the plot moves along at pace, with great twists and turns. However, this isn’t just a great techno-thriller: it’s a brilliant exploration of the edges of modern physics, combined with some philosophical probings of what it is to be a separate self, set in a near future where the cults of scientific ignorance that we see today have gained dangerous power, and aren’t embarrassed to use the technologies that science has given them to further their aims. In its time, this was I suppose on the edge of cyberpunk, but there are also shades of Michael Crichton in the detailed use of science and technology as central to the plot, but not overwhelming it.

One of the things that amazed me about this book was just how good these technological predictions are. It’s set in 2055, but it was written in 1995, and it reads astonishingly well today. It could easily have been written in the last couple of years. The technology – gene splicing, virtual reality, machine/brain interfaces, instant worldwide data access – is all spot on for today, as are the concerns around climate change, online cults, and sexual identity. As a trivial example, there are seven identified sexes, with gender-neutral pronouns universally used. Pretty much the only flat note from a tech point of view is the use of infrared as a short-distance communications channel for device-to-device communications.

A solid five stars from me – I’ll be digging out more of Egan’s back catalogue asap!

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Book review

Synners

by Pat Cadigan

Synners

This is another early cyberpunk work – I seem to be having a couple of months where classics like this are appearing in my to-read queue! Pat Cadigan writes beautifully, and she brings more to the individual characters than many of the other early cyberpunk authors. See this insight into the mind of one of the lead characters:

She had the guilts over the coffee even as she couldn’t wait to drink half of it at one gulp. Modern life was making her sick by trying not to make her sick.

The underlying theme is our interactions with our technology – how much do we change for it, as opposed to changing it to work better for us. Gabe, the protagonist, is a “synner” – a synthesizer, who can take images from the brains of artists and spin them into a media package suitable for mass consumption. Here he is, spinning off down this thread when he’s standing in front of a vending machine, and someone says he looked like he might need a few coins for it:

‘Ah. I thought you looked like you needed, um, change for the machines.’ Gabe shrugged self-consciously; he could feel the entire common room watching. The man’s smile was unexpectedly broad and sunny. ‘That’s a good way to put it. How did you know?’ Gabe had the sensation of going over a mental speed bump. ‘Excuse me?’ ‘My whole life has been, “Okay, change for the machines.” Every time they bring in a new machine, more change.’

In this future, a new technology – called sockets – is emerging, which allows people to plug themselves directly into the “dataline” – what we might call the Web. Synners who can do this become vastly more capable, and more commercially valuable. But is it dangerous? – what if there are monsters out there?

Neurons start firing in patterns over and over, and if they’re bad patterns, well, that’s too bad. You people got no shields. You put in sockets, but you forgot about the watchdogs and the alarm systems and the antivirals and the vaccines.

Reality isn’t out there, it turns out, it’s in our heads. The line for Gabe and his friends becomes increasingly blurred, and the action increasingly frenetic. Great stuff, from one of the founders of cyberpunk.

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Book review

On Having No Head

by Douglas E. Harding

On Having No Head by Douglas E. Harding

This is a true gem of a book – it sparkles in the light and when viewed from some angles it is beautiful indeed, but there are some sharp pointy bits, and it’s quite hard. I first read it more than 30 years ago, borrowing a copy from the local library. It stayed with me ever since, and it’s recent return to fame (being liberally quoted by Sam Harris) has caused me to re-read it.

If it seems like I took the whole “gem” metaphor too literally there, then that’s what this book does, with its own metaphor of we ourselves having no head, using it to drive home some very deep points.

From where we look out to the world, Douglas Harding points out that we quite literally can’t see our own head. There’s this vague pink cloud which on other people seems to form a nose, but from where we look, it’s translucent and appears either on the left or the right, depending on which way we’re looking, so that doesn’t seem to be like other people’s noses. If we see our head in a reflection, we aren’t seeing our head itself, we are seeing a reflection – often distorted, in water, at an angle on glass, in a shiny door knob or the back of our spoon. Which of these is the real shape of our head? We are indeed unreliable witnesses:

If I fail to see what I am (and especially what I am not) it’s because I’m too busily imaginative, too “spiritual”, too adult and knowing, too credulous, to intimidated by society and language, too frightened of the obvious to accept the situation exactly as I find it at this moment.

Which is the start of the deep points that are being made. We seem, if we look from this point of view, to be directly connected to the whole world. The whole world is where we used to imagine our head was, and we are deeply, intimately, as one with that world:

There are no obstructions here, no inside or outside, no room or lack of room, no hiding place or shelter: I can find no home here to live in or to be locked out of, and not an inch of ground to build it on.

Douglas Harding had these revelations on his own, and his pursuit of others who might at least understand what he was talking about led him eventually to Zen Buddhism. This short book, then, is really about the Zen experience from an intensely first-hand point of view. Harding found that the Heart Sutra, daily recited in Zen (and other Buddhist) monasteries, declares that the body is just emptiness: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form”, it famously declares. This is the profound experience of Zen. Hardin quotes the 16th-century Zen master Han-shan:

“I took a walk. Suddenly I stood still, filled with the realization that I had no body or mind. All I could see was one great illuminating Whole – omnipresent, perfect, lucid, and serene. It was like an all-embracing mirror from which the mountains and rivers of the earth were projected… I felt clear and transparent”

This is the direct experiencing of non-duality, of Advaita, as the Buddhists call it, the Zen experience of Satori It’s not a Zen or a Buddhist concept alone, either – you see it in Christian mystics, in the writings of Hindu and Muslims as well. Even Shakespeare knew of it, when in Measure for Measure he has Isabella say, in a much-quoted speech:

…man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape

This is indeed a short, but profound, book, directly confronting our inner angry ape. Harding ends with a sketch of a path, of experiences and exercises, that might help us along our way to finding this truth at the heart of reality. He achieved the “direct path” to this insight, and I toil along the lower slope of the mountain daily, with rare glimpses of the glorious peaks when the clouds break. But Werner Erhard, self-help guru and founder of the est movement, at least had it right with this line:

This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what’s so.

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Book review

Group Theory and Physics

by Shlomo Sternberg

Group Theory and Physics by Shlomo Sternberg

In this book Professor Sternberg of Harvard University takes a fairly detailed look at the deep links between mathematical group theory and the underpinnings of much of modern physics. It’s heavy going in many parts, requiring at least an undergraduate degree in mathematics (one containing lots of group theory) to even vaguely follow it. If you can at least follow along (and I was very much reduced to skimming the deeper technical material), then you’ll find beauty, and deep truth. Eugene Wigner talked about the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics in explaining the physical world, and that’s what you will find herein.

In Chapter 1, Prof. Sternberg introduces key ideas like the action of a group on a set, and uses them to classify the finite subgroups of O(3), the orthogonal group of order 3 (i.e. the group of ways in which you can transform things in three dimensions such that distances between things are preserved). There is an immediate physical application in crystallography, and Prof. Sternberg takes us through this, introducing me at least to some marvelously-named crystals and compounds (iodosuccinimide, diaboleite, or wulfenite, anyone?)

Chapter 2 introduces representation theory for finite groups, which is a way of representing abstract objects as matrices, with the operations on those objects as equivalent to things like matrix multiplication. Using these techniques, you can produce character tables, which are a simple two-dimensional table that can capture much of the deep structure of a particular group. This material is set up for use in the following chapters.

Chapter 3 starts to build on this, first with a simple physical model of molecules as point masses connected by springs, and then adding in some quantum mechanics. This allows us to look at the ways in which such model molecules would “resonate” in vibration, which in turn leads to direct physical applications in spectrography. (Appendix F contains an interesting, detailed, and entirely non-technical review of how spectography evolved through the 19th century – one of the highlights of the book, for me.) This leads to a discussion of the symmetries of space-time, and out of this emerges a very natural representation of the fundamental properties of subatomic particles. Finally we come to Wigner’s truly remarkable 1951 paper in which he identifies these subatomic particles “as” the irreducible representations of the group. By doing this, Wigner was able to lay out a model that has directed particle physics for at least the last 60 years – he earned the Nobel Prize for Physics for this in 1963, and subsequent modifications of his work by Gell-Mann and others have lead to further Nobel Prize level discoveries.

It’s worth pausing on this point: here we have a use of the most abstract parts of mathematics, out of which directly flows deep and powerful results about the universe in which we live. It’s not that we can (say) simply model a molecule as a bunch of weights joined by springs: the types and properties of the most fundamental things we know about in the world spring directly from this abstract mathematics. It’s truly a remarkable, and very beautiful, thing.

Chapter 4 continues the journey, moving on to compact groups. From this we get models which apply directly to the hydrogen spectrum, models of atomic nuclei, and the group underlying the periodic table. Again, we see the powerful linkages back to Wigner’s work on the Poincare group.

Chapter 5 moves on to quarks, and the predictions of and subsequent discoveries of the elements of quantum chromodynamics. Because this book was written in the early 1990s, it doesn’t include any discussion of grand unified models or sypersymmetric models like string theory or quantum gravity, which is a shame, as once again we see the mathematical and group theoretical underpinnings.

There is much to like about this book, and I enjoyed the journey. However, I spotted a number of annoying typographical errors, and I very much fear that if I’d been able to follow some of the denser passages, my journey would have been made harder by further typos. The index is also weak, and I was often reduced to paging back and fro to find what a particular notation or definition was. I also felt that since this book set out to link group theory and physics, I was often not at all certain what the point of a particular mathematical section was – a brief up-front discussion of the motivation would have been very helpful to me. The fact that it ends in the mid-1990s also means it doesn’t cover a lot of recent, equally interesting, work in theoretical physics.

Finally, to be honest, a lot of the book was somewhat beyond me: the author says “a course in multivariate calculus and linear algebra, together with an elementary physics course, should suffice”. It’s been a few years since I took my courses in these subjects, but I have very good retention of them, and they in no way adequately prepared me for some of the long technical passages!

Three stars for me – quite possibly more for you, if you’re further along the maths curve than I started.

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Book review

The Daily Stoic

366 Meditations for Clarity, Effectiveness, and Serenity

by Ryan Holiday

The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

There’s been a huge revival in the Greek and Roman philosophy of Stoicism in the past few years, and this book is a good example of what it yields. It’s a series of daily quotations from the great Stoic philosophers such as Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus. Each quotation is accompanied by a paragraph or two of discussion, underlining the key points. It’s well done, with readable and un-stuffy new translations of the originals, and the presentation is good.

I read this book at the average pace of the one meditation a day for which it was written, although I must admit I would sometimes loose track for a week or ten days, and then do some catching up. If one can hold a thought in one’s head, and follow through on it for the day, it’s hard to see the day not being the better for it. There’s a reason why these observations have lasted nearly two thousand years.

My qualms, such as I have them, are I suppose based on an underlying niggle of disquiet. Look at the philosophers quoted: Marcus Aurelius – very successful general, somewhat reluctant but well-regarded emperor; or Seneca – senator, playwright, adviser to the emperor Nero. These are powerful men, at the top of whatever power hierarchy was going. Is this a philosophy for the rich and powerful, enabling them to keep what they have with a clear conscious, thinking they could give it all up if they had to (although, mostly, they don’t…)? And all the while lecturing us that we, too, should be content with what we have? Sometimes it seems that way: on June 23rd we have Marcus Aurelius telling us:

You could enjoy this very moment all the things you are praying to reach by taking the long way around – if you’d stop depriving yourself of them

Epictetus, to be fair, was born a slave, and grew up crippled (and Seneca was exiled, and eventually forced to take his own life when accused of plotting against Nero). Although none of Epictetus’ writings survive directly, we do have several volumes of his discourses from his pupil, including a “best of…” compilation known as the Enchiridion. It is this work that perhaps is most responsible for the modern revival of Stoicism: James Stockdale, the vice presidential candidate of Ross Perot, was shot down in the Vietnam War and spent seven and a half years in captivity, which included torture and four years of solitary confinement. He had read the Enchiridion at college, and credits it with enabling him to survive this horrific ordeal in his book Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior. There are a good few Epictetus quotes in The Daily Stoic; for January 19th, for example, we have Epictetus saying:

A podium and a prison is each a place, one high and the other low, but in either place your freedom of choice can be maintained if you so wish

Focus on what is in your control, as opposed to what is not. Good advice, however and wherever you are living.

In the end, it is to Epictetus’ quotations that I was perhaps most drawn. And he won’t care that I rounded my 3 1/2 star view of this book down to 3 stars, for the disquiet. “Not things, but opinions about things, trouble men”, he once wrote. Enough said.

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Book review

Conscious

A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

by Annaka Harris

Conscious by Annaka Harris

This is a brief introduction to the mysteries of consciousness, with much to commend it. It starts a conventional definition, after Thomas Nagel: “An organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism”. From this starting point, Annaka Harris takes us via an interesting series of viewpoints to a view of consciousness that she acknowledges isn’t really the mainstream view – that of “pan-psychism”, which is that consciousness may be an inherent quality of matter even down to the smallest levels – electrons may be, in some tiny atomic way, conscious. From these small components, consciousness as we know and experience it as humans is produced.

The route to this conclusion covers some ground that may be familiar to many readers, such as David Chalmers’ “philosophical zombies” – people who look and act exactly like you or I, but who (by definition) do not have conscious experiences. It also covers some territory that was new to me, such as the discussion about trees and how they seem to communicate via their roots tapping into underground mycorrhizal networks. This was fascinating to me, and lead me off to all sorts of interesting searches – this was a nice summary I found.

The argument is overall well put, but I felt there were difficulties that had either been skipped for simplicity, or simply weren’t acknowledged. For example, Harris says that “as far as consciousness is concerned, there is nothing, then suddenly, magically, at just the right moment …. something!”. It’s not clear to me that this has to be the case. Introspectively, I am conscious at some moments to a greater degree than others. When I fall into a deep sleep, does my consciousness finally switch off at a defined point, or is it more like sunset on a cloudy day: it gets darker and darker, and eventually it’s definitely completely dark, but there was no one moment when the last light was extinguished. It seems to me consciousness is more like this – continuous, not discrete. And if the claim is that it’s discrete, I’d hope for a discussion of the point.

As another example, one of the traditional arguments against panpsychism is discussed in the book – the “combination problem”:

The problem is that this is very difficult to make sense of: “little” conscious subjects of experience with their micro-experiences coming together to form a “big” conscious subject with its own experiences

Harris argues that this problem isn’t present in versions of panpsychism in which consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, as consciousness is not interacting with “itself”, as it would be if it were combining. Think of gravity: individual atoms have a tiny amount of mass, and thus of gravitational attraction, and they can combine perfectly happily to produce a large planet with its own gravity.

This argument, it seems to me, can apply just as well to the “emergent” view of consciousness, where consciousness emerges as the appropriate kinds of information processing capabilities combine in an appropriate way. But Harris has already dismissed the possible emergence of consciousness by saying that it doesn’t really explain it at all:

…when scientists assume they have bypassed the hard problem by describing consciousness as an emergent property – that is, a complex phenomenon not predicted by the constituent parts – they are changing the subject …. If some matter has experience and some doesn’t (and some emergent phenomena entail experience and some don’t), the concept of emergence as it is traditionally used in science simply doesn’t explain consciousness.

But simply defining consciousness as something that all matter has, it seems to me, isn’t a good way out of this problem. Announcing that everything has consciousness, down to electrons and protons, and therefore some things get to be what we call conscious, is either a way of hiding from the hard problem (“everything is conscious, so no wonder we are”), or just causes the emergence problem to emerge in a different place (how does what we historically cause consciousness appear from combining a lot of this subatomic consciousness – and you can’t use emergence as you’ve already dismissed this!).

In the end, there was a lot to like about this book, and I found it hard to pick a final star rating. This is a three-and-a-half star book for me. Lots to like, some interesting new ideas, really nice to see a readable book on such a complex issue, although it was too short to do enough justice to all of its subject matter, even for a self-confessed “brief guide”. In the end, I have gone with four stars, to encourage Ms Harris to write more on this, and to guide readers to an interesting book.

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Book review

The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus

The Mathematics of Christmas

by Hannah Fry

The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus by Hannah Fry

Very nice little book of mathematics, as applied to various Christmas problems.

Although this is in the long tradition of seasonal stocking-fillers, the execution was great: the maths was non-trivial, but not so hard as to require a degree in the subject (although there were extra-hard sums in the footnotes, where appropriate), and the whole subject was treated with the appropriate degree of tongue in cheek sillyness:

Maybe that’s how we should see Santa. An undecidable being. You can’t prove his existence one way or the other, you just have to close your eyes and decide for yourself.

In the meantime, everything from simple geometry to Markov chains was used to solve various seasonal sillynesses. Excellent!

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Book review

True Names

by Vernor Vinge

True Names by Vernor Vinge

A classic story from the early days of Cyberpunk, when the internet was a thing known only to a few academics and scientists, from 1987 and the dawn of the World Wide Web.

We meet hackers – Mr Slippery is the main protagonist – and we meet them as they fight their way across the global networks, or the Other Plane as it’s known. The fight each other, they fight cyber criminals, and they fight the government. But Mr Slippery finds himself arrested – or threatened with arrest – unless he helps the government (the NSA?) fight back against the Mailman, an international dark hacker, or Warlock, who is recruiting other Warlocks to his side.

The title comes from the believe that you need to keep your true name secret, for it will give others power over you. Mr Slippery’s true name becomes known to the government, giving them a hold over him. Now he must find the Mailman’s name, and protect his own.

The book is one of the defining works of “cyberpunk”, perhaps with less “punk” than William Gibson, but a full dose of “cyber”. It hasn’t lost its power, either way.

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Book review

A Christmas Carol

by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

From the famous opening line – “Marley was dead, to begin with” – Dickens announces that this isn’t your everyday ho hum Christmas tale; indeed the full title stakes its claim: “A Christmas Carol: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas”.

But it’s more than that, of course. It’s a story that kicked into life the Victorian version of Christmas (apparently turkey sales rocketed at Christmas, while sales of the traditional goose dived correspondingly). It’s another chance for Dickens to talk about the appalling poverty and deprivation which lived on the doorsteps of his middle class readers: the ghost of Christmas yet to come takes the reader to this scene –

The ways were fouls and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleyways and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth and misery.

Dickens was a marvelous writer, and A Christmas Carol contains many great lines, from Scrooge’s “Bah, humbug”, through Marley’s Ghost’s “I wear the chain I forged in life”, to Tiny Tim and somewhat saccharine “A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears! God bless us every one!”. You can read the scenes even now without our modern detachment hiding their power from us. Even the two children clinging to the second Ghost “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility” still just about land this side of my irony detector.

Ultimately, though, it sets the template for the Christmas tales of redemption. This appears in all our favourite Christmas stories and movies, from “The Grinch” to “Elf” to to “Die Hard”. Like many of these tales the story hangs on the credibility of the transformation of the hero (well, perhaps not with “Die Hard”…). On this re-read, I found Scrooge’s transformation entirely credible. Although only one night has passed in the real world, in the ghostly world Scrooge visits, he spends at least twelve nights in the company of the Ghost of Christmas Present, where the moral is pounded repeatedly into his head:

Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood beside sick-beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by struggling me, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was rich. In almshouse, hospital, and gaol, in misery’s every refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door, and barred the Spirit out, he left his blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.

Perhaps a little over the top to modern ears, but in the renowned psychiatrist Stephen Grosz’s book The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves he talked of using A Christmas Carol to show how we really can change – but the motivation needs to be strong enough. By the end of the second ghost’s visit, Scrooge is ready to change, and by the end of the third, he knows he must. He sees what his death may be otherwise, how his cooling body is picked over for change, how the shirt is literally taken from his corpse’s back in exchange for a few pennies from a rag and bone merchant. Buddhists will spend days meditating in charnel grounds to come to terms with their own death and motivate their change in life. One can but hope that humankind in general does not need the lesson so brutally told.

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Book review

Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives

by David Eagleman

Sum by David Eagleman

This is a book of 40 short chapters, just a few pages each, each one an alternative story of what might happen after we die. In one, it turns out we are actually God’s organs, how she feels and knows and interacts with the world; in another, you find the afterlife is terribly bureaucratic and we have to queue for everything, because God put us in charge when he found himself increasingly overwhelmed by his creation.

So some of the stories are rather clever – my favourite is that we are organic supercomputers, created by small, slow, creatures to answer the big questions of life – only they are too dim to understand our responses to their questions. Others are neat enough, but left no imprint on me.

Overall, it’s a nicely done short book, with a very interesting idea and some definite bright spots: three and a half stars, rounded down to three as in the end I’m not sure enough of the stories stuck with me, in the end.