Back to Rebus – the 16th novel – they never disappoint.
Year: 2017
Biocentrism
Another ‘serious book’ – and one that was interesting for quite different reasons. I still don’t know what consciousness is – how it comes about, but this book gives an interesting – if perhaps slightly biased – view which attacks the mainstream physics view
Thought Vibration
A short book – only 105 pages. An old book – written in 1906. A fascinating book – in a time when these sort of ideas are being resurrected by the likes of Rupert Sheldrake and his morphic fields this is a real insight into a way of thinking that was seemingly abandoned – at least by mainstream thought – for much of the 20th Century. Proves once again that it is often wrong to assume that “no one has thought of this before” about ANY subject.
To Forget
There have been plenty of posts in this blog about our selective memory – the way we remember some things but not others – the way we find it difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction when looking back at past events – the way we tend to exaggerate, one way or another, those memories that we retain – the way that something someone else says or does will trigger a memory, sometimes even triggering a memory that is fictitious.
To Forgive
This post is the result of my thinking being triggered by a very specific piece of “news” (its not really news since the actual event happened many years ago – but has only recently become public knowledge). I was very unsure of how to react to this particular story – so this blog is me thinking it through.
Everyone Knows
I’ve said it before – and I will probably say it again – it is really good when you get unexpected confirmation of things that you have written. In my recent post Tell Me About It I tackled the ever more prevalent problem of what is known as the “illusion of explanatory depth” with regard to our knowledge.
All In The Presentation
“Its all just ones and zeroes” – not sure whether that quote comes from a single identifiable source, but it is often used as a way of breaking down the complexities of most computer systems to something “understandable”. The problem is that although we understand “ones and zeroes” in their own right it requires rather more to interpret the meaning of all those “ones and zeroes”.
Consider Phlebas
Having read The Crow Road a while back I reckoned I should sample some of Banks’ Science Fiction. So here I am – the previous novel was good – but away from what I would say was my “normal” reading – will be interesting to see how this stacks up (and whether I then go on to the subsequent volumes in the series.
Tell Me About It
One thing that has informed my worldview over recent years was the discovery that there exist a whole host of cognitive biases that cause us to mis-perceive everything we see, hear and think. In a previous post I linked to an article that listed no less than 58 of these – and I have a poster on my desk which lists 20. (note that these both originate from the same website)
Jumping To Conclusions
In the last few days I have seen two really good examples in social media of people bringing their own biases to discussions and replying to what they thought was written rather than what was actually written. In both cases it made them look just a bit foolish.