| HN Mirror

Well Pirsig's Zen and the other ones related to eastern religions and science, are around the idea that there is no locus of reality or meaning, the reality is how everything interrelates. It's kind of like word2vec, the context of other words and real-world situations in which each word is used tells you everything about what it means. Take away a particle's charge and mass and the other numbers we associate with it, and is it still a particle? Those numbers describe how it interacts and all we can really say about it is how it interacts. Plato was off the mark when he talked about the ideal form of different objects. There is no ideal form of a chair, except that chairness is an abstract idea about how things (asses and furniture) interact.

Then I think that Grammatical Man and Penrose are around the nature of information, and what can be communicated and understood. And I sort of think that question is at the top of the tree of abstraction about what we think about. Then comes computer science and math which are about any symbolic systems or formal systems that can be computed and reasoned about. Then most everything else is applying those systems to various problems.

Then I think The Naked Ape and Hayek and Flow are around the notion that humans are their own thing. They are tribal and hierarchical and territorial and violent and not nearly as self-aware or even aware of our surroundings as we think we are. You get a lot more mileage out of just observing what they do than about listening to the rationalizations of why they say did it, things like God and blood and soil, i.e. superstitions and us-and-them-ing arbitrary physical features of a pack of mongrels and arbitrary lines on maps. Invitation to Sociology by Berger was another big one on those lines.

And the Heilbroner and Durant are basically inventories of major mental models that people have come up with in philosophy and economics.