The book(s) may be related to your profession or not at all. The thing that matters is that it caused a paradigm shift in your mental model of the world or a topic or whatever?
Mine was Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs or SICP.
There are a lot of stories of people who hate their jobs and make a switch.
One was a lawyer who became a truck driver.
A doctor who became a programmer (iirc ... I do remember she was in tears because she didn't want to disappoint their family not sure if she wanted to be a programmer or not).
This book gave me the courage to leave engineering field and become a firefighter paramedic. 1st best career decision I made at the time
Probably reading GEB and The Illuminatus! trilogy at the same time, switching from one to the other when my brain couldn’t handle any more of what I was currently reading.
Something about the combo helped me disconnect from the religion I had been raised in, and helped me see that there are many ways to view the world and life.
"The Dawn of Everything" by the Davids, Graeber and Wengrow.
It's a little dense and a bit meandering at times, but the core idea behind it: we have a strong bias in believing that civilization comes in stages. We believe we go 'hunter/gatherer/primitive' -> agriculture -> 'real' civilization. Basically, this is totally false.
Not only is it totally false, but one of the reasons we might have this bias is because, while the native Americans were being eradicated, Western thinkers and theologians had to justify why Western civilization was 'better', despite native Americans basically giving Westerners the seeds for individual liberties and social blueprints for the Western Enlightenment...
It really uprooted my deepest beliefs about human history, civilization, and (most importantly for me) what I believe "the future" should look like. Mind-expanding for sure.
The thing that I think about from them is the 'Reverse Fermi Paradox'. We've been humans for ~200k years now. Just in the last 10k or so have we had 'civilization'. What were we doing for the other 19/20ths of our time here? Ice ages don't account for all that time and there were warm periods in them. What was going with us all that time?
I think about it a lot also in context of their reviews of different cultural models. It seems we spent a lot of time experimenting and trying out a bazillion different ways to organize and have families and be in a tribe. Since we've no record of it, I'm fascinated by how our deep ancestors lived as a culture and how different it was.
The book makes a good and strong case for it... though it's almost a side-note in the bigger scheme of what the book is trying to show: that we had civilization (and not even in some relativistic 'you have to squint to see it' way) all throughout our history.
You do realize that the author is a noted left wing activist/anarchist and affiliated with the Occupy movement? The Economist reviewed his prior book rather critically. Too many books are published these days masquerading as scholarly when they are actually nothing more than agitprop. This is one of them.
1975 ACM Turing Award Lecture on "Computer Science as an empirical inquiry: Symbols and Search" by Herbert Simon & Alan Newell (inventors of list processing).
On the non fiction front one that comes to mind is
The economics anti textbook (hill and myatt).
Though this was 12 years ago, public discussion of economics has progressed a little bit since, so it may not have quite the same paradigm busting feeling it did for me back then, but it's still pretty good.
Other mind expanding non fiction...
Feynman lectures (all 3 volumes)
Design patterns (don't hate me lol. Obviously less revelatory if you've already absorbed the knowledge by other means. And for flip's sake don't overdo them! )
Ashtavakra Gita(Ancient hindu philosophy poem) : It really opened a new dimension of thinking for me. It's main message of identifying yourself as the witness consciousness is quite trippy and the sanskrit used is quite powerful. It plays around with the concepts of soul , karma and concept of non-duality in quite radical ways. I found it quite an empowering way of going about life, one can only imagine how it must have felt for the original author/s who discovered it as an "insight" on the reality of life. Such people nowadays would be called delusional though.
>Such people nowadays would be called delusional though.
Not necessarily, at all.
Advaita is supposed to be very rational and logical, and not require faith. Faith belongs to the path of Bhakti Yoga (faith/devotion to God), while Advaita is about the path of Jnana Yoga, the path of knowledge.
Also, the Wikipedia article about Advaita Vedanta seems to me to be somewhat poor, and factually wrong in parts, IMO, though I am not an expert on this. I may think this way because my family has some background knowledge about Advaita, Adi Shankara, Sanskrit and related subjects related to Hinduism, going back some generations, so I may have picked up some stuff by osmosis, apart from what I have read and studied and practiced myself.
Also check out Drg Dryshya Viveka (Discrimination between the Seer and the Seen), another fundamental Sanskrit text about Advaita. English translations should be available for both it and the Mandukya.
Thomas byrom's "The Heart of Awareness" is a popular translation for a quick read.
If you want something denser with commentaries and explanations, Swami Nityaswarupananda's translation is great. Another good translation keeping western audiences in mind is Duet of One by Ramesh Balsekar.
There should be but I don't have the name handy right now. Check out translations of Advaita and other Hinduism scriptural books by the Ramakrishna Math.
The Bible. I was just sitting reading the book of Revelation considering how many movies lift images directly from this book of the Bible. Then I read from Proverbs that charm is deceptive and beauty fades away. I regularly need reminded not to assign more value to good lookers. This being ironic, as I am no David Hasselhoff. The Bible has been shifting my paradigm for 30 of 50 years.
BTW, there is another music-related "EGB" that Hoffy missed!
The keys G, B and Eb (separated from each other by a major third) used in John Coltrane's "Giant Steps". Major-third-spaced tonality changes, particularly masked by ii-V-I cadences, became known as Coltrane Changes.
This was a long time ago, but the book was beautiful right off the shelf and it made so much immediate, intuitive sense. It also came at just the right time in my life when I needed to focus on broad outlays of information, but didn't yet realize it, or how to do it.
Later on I developed my own method but I still go back and browse the book from time to time. A few years after my first reading, I used mind mapping to help me with a very stressful job and was able to get weeks ahead of my work there, using the extra time to learn about interesting new tech.
But beyond the principles/methods themselves, the book opened my mind to the idea that one could find ways to work with additional inspiration and productivity in the ideas & concepts space, which I built on as a foundation later as a professional trainer and coach.
The author's lecturing presence and style was also pretty unique. He was a broad thinker by nature, and was able to impart the beauty of such as quite uniquely different from the deeper sort of thinking.
a book by science history writer James Gleick. The guy who wrote « chaos ».
It’s not about « computer », but rather the inevitable march toward our now ( with computers )
Each chapter break down a particular advance, or area of science that was changed by information theory ( before information theory was a thing )
Some titbits :
until the telegraph, the second faster way to carry meaning was putting a bunch of guys on horses.
The fastest was using drums over a river.
—
Talking about telegraph, the French had something innovative going on just a few years before it’s invention. Based on tower relay and a elaborate flag code.
Note that I quickly deviated from any expected norms of "dear diary, today _____ happened and it made me feel ______", and instead simply decided to write, whatever cames to my mind, every day, no matter how nonsensical. Most of it is pointless and cringe, but there's some brilliant opinions, descriptions of values, and even poetry in there.
A diary is, after all, literally an expansion of your mind into the physical realm.
[1]
>The moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.
[2]
>Birth is not merely that which divides women from men: it also divides women from themselves, so that a woman's understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed. Another person has existed in her, and after their birth the live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.
[3]
>The terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.
[4]
>Showing aggression is the simplest way to assert patriarchal manhood. Men of all classes know this. As a consequence, all men living in a culture of violence must demonstrate at some point in their lives that they are capable of being violent.
The Law of One, a set of channeled transcripts by an entity named Ra (in congruency to the sun god Ra of Egyptian times) proclaiming to be three levels of densities, or major evolutions, ahead of our own as humans.
Great read whether it sticks around as a belief for you or not, akin to any other religious text in my opinion.
Can be read for free at lawofone.info
Definitely read the intro before jumping into the meat of it for the great context provided by the L/L Research team for what comes after.
Even if you are a die-hard pessimist it will open some cracks and plant seeds on your mind. Disguised as a physics book - not an easy read - this is a treaty on optimism.
Around the World in Eighty Days, from Jules Verne. I read that when i was a child and blowed my mind with glimpses from other countries, other cultures and the joy of reading.
I think that after that book i had the question: how 100 years ago he was able to write about those places?. Then i never stopped to read. After that i started to develop the addiction i have about knowledge.
EDIT: oh, and the final plot twist.., was amazing.
The soul of the new machine.
Prompted me to complete the hardware part of nand2tetris and now looking for something between it and rigid textbooks such as Computer Architecture.
I've been a very prideful person nearly my entire life. This book really opened my eyes and also led me to Christian faith. I highly recommend it, even to children like my older son that also struggle with humility.
Also, of course, I'd recommend reading the New Testament, as it is the source for much of the material in Humility.
Happy to see you mention the latter. I read Neverness as a teenager, and have re-read the book several times over the years. It influenced the way I see the world, and many of the ideas and phrases have become part of my own life narrative. I definitely count it as one of the most mind-expanding books I've read.
1000 Years of Non-linear History by Miguel De Landa was a read from a long long time ago that was a good materialistic philosphy read, that helped me see & feel the world as morpholically advancing. It gave me a sense of what shifts & changes are, how they occur, and gave a narrative for many of the changes that reshaped humanity across the last 1000 years. Used a neat lense of geomorphology that was entertaining.
Non-zero: the Logic of Human Destiny was anothrr very good materialistic philosophy read for my impressionable young mind. Talking about human cooperation & emergence of civil order. Not nearly as in depth but I think of it as also quite related to the History of Everything, mentioned in other comments here.
Permutation City by Greg Egan. I actually didn't like the story that much, but the book is just dense with ideas that I keep thinking about years later.
This book turned me into a rabid RAW fan... which in turn lead me to Discordianism. That journey then led me to Rev. Ivan Stang and the Church of the Subgenius. So pretty much, RAW and Robert Shea directly made me the weirdo I am today.
His other stuff can be of interest too, like Prometheus Rising and Cosmic Triggers. It’s not that what he writes about is necessarily scientific or rigorous, but he offers a bunch of worldview building blocks that one can try and find very useful.
Perhaps, read it when I was 15 years younger and haven't reread it. "Set and setting" is more important than age in some sense, age is more important than "set and setting" in some sense, and "set and setting" and age is equally important in some sense.
The revolutionary thesis here is…
Genes aren’t a way for people to make more people. Rather, people are a way for genes to make more genes. (Selfishly).
Really an astounding re-framing of biology, and one of the best books of science literature I’ve read in my life.
Quite a bit! I read and listened (podcasts) all I could find about it, in addition to all surrounding context, from all points of view (supporters and detractors). Fascinating case.
Unfortunately what it all comes down to is experiential testimony, and I still believe that without physical evidence or extraordinary film footage of some kind (which apparently exist but haven't been released due to "reasons"), all attempts to rationalize the existence/non-existence of this phenomenon will remain speculative (I'm aware it's not exactly easy to prove non-existence).
I actually find this whole topic a wonderful epistemic exercise; initially everything is trivially dismissible so you Bayes weight to impossible and crazy, but as you dive into all the accounts throughout history you really can't be so sure of your initial assessment anymore.
What will move the needle to improbable is if we "solve" physics (QM vs gravity, theory of everything etc) and definitively rule out all mechanisms in support of high strangeness phenomena (i.e., there really is only 4 fundamental forces, no extra physical dimensions, etc).
Until then my head cannon for all this might just be we're being toyed with by unthinkingly scientifically advanced entities.
Or.. spirits and the supernatural is real and is entirely non physical, the phenomenon is itself intelligent, and thus cannot be studied by conventional scientific methods (but even then I'd think the scientific process should work).
Ah well, see how fun it is to speculate :). Hopefully with the recent shift in government attitude towards UAP we'll see some hard data released soon and make more accurate assessments.
Does body expanding also count if you are a philosophical monist? ;) Overcoming Gravity 2 - buy this book and a pair of gymnastic rings and you are set for life in terms of fitness (...ok, you should also do squats and deadlifts with weights)
For this year, mine was Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
TL;DR - the book explains how humans are predictably irrational and how seeming cognitive ease in decisioning is simply laziness in action since the brain will substitute a tough decision for a similar but easy one! It has made me reflect upon why I think the way I do, helped me to remove most bias from my actions, and also has a great suggestion that you should ask others to check you if you sound stupid, which is not great for your ego but is necessary nonetheless.
The Phantom Tollbooth. Hands down. Yes, it helps if you read it before you are 10, affecting dramatically more of your life than anything read as an adult.
Metamagical Themas from Douglas R. Hofstadter. I even have both a soft and a hard cover copy on my shelf. This book opened my mind on a lot of subjects big time.
I have it too, of course. It's a very similar book, but with different examples and thought experiments. I'm sure it would have been my choice if I had read them in the opposite order.
This was the single book that helped me establish a regular meditation practice working up to 35-45 mins/day. Very precise and clear instructions. Don’t have to read all of it. There is a shorter version with compact instructions as well
Some of the progression is very subtle, but I have found noticeable differences in each stage. For example, I see myself around Stage 6 since major distractions have ceased and I am working on dullness - this has lead to a much deeper meditation practice and I didn't fully realize dullness was a challenge until I followed this guide. Granted, the practice can be dry sometimes, so I like to sprinkle in guided meditations from the "Waking Up" app or "Insight Timer". I also HIGHLY recommend Yoga Nidra practice for those who have a difficult time falling asleep.
The Book of Mormon (with the Bible). After decades of reading it repeatedly, it does not run out of ways to comfort, strengthen, give direction & confidence & pea ce, and help me want to be a better person. Cover to cover, amazing to me.
Also Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Be proactive; Begin with the end in mind; Put first things first; Think win–win; Seek first to understand, then to be understood; Synergize; Sharpen the Saw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effecti...).
1. Felix Denk - Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall
2. Brian Greene - The Fabric of the Cosmos
3. Jürgen Teipel - Waste your Youth
There are a lot of stories of people who hate their jobs and make a switch.
One was a lawyer who became a truck driver. A doctor who became a programmer (iirc ... I do remember she was in tears because she didn't want to disappoint their family not sure if she wanted to be a programmer or not).
This book gave me the courage to leave engineering field and become a firefighter paramedic. 1st best career decision I made at the time