Reading Group 2017

Home , David Buss, Robin Dunbar

A reading group is an important part of the information exchange process, provoking essential dialogue designed to promote, exercise, and enlarge the powers of the mind. Usually, a reading group discusses (great) academic papers or a book chapter on a weekly basis, allocating 45-50-60 minutes to each piece of work. This reading group is different! The goal is to “Read for Honours” but without the examination... We will only meet once per month, namely on the last Friday of the month (except December), to unplug from the day-to-day activities. We will meet for a period of around 5 hours (4-9PM, Z808) and will hopefully continue for after-hours discussions somewhere in the city (it’s Friday night for Christ’s sake  ). Why hopefully around five hours? There was a time when scholars sat for hours (sometimes daily…) in coffee houses to discuss problems (see, e.g., Stanislav Ulam’s experience as a student in Poland (Adventure of a Mathematician)). Ulam was surprised by what he experienced as a Harvard Junior Fellow: “I had my meals at Adams House, and the lunches there were particularly agreeable. We sat at a long table – young men and sometimes great professors; the conversations were very pleasant. But often, towards the end of a meal, one after the other would gulp his coffee and suddenly announce: “Excuse me, I’ve got to go to work!” Young as I was I could not understand why people wanted to show themselves to be such hard workers. I was surprised at this lack of self-assurance, even on the part of some famous scholars. Later I learned about the Puritan belief in hard work – or at least in appearing to be doing hard work. Students had to show that they were conscientious; the older professors did the same. This lack of self-confidence was strange to me, although it was less objectionable than the European arrogance. In Poland, people would also pretend and fabricate stories, but in the

1 opposite sense. They might have been working frantically all night, but they pretended they never worked at all. This respect for work appeared to me as part of the Puritan emphasis on action versus thought, so different from the aristocratic traditions of Cambridge, England, for example” (pp. 87-88).

The goals of this reading group are to provide not only a critical discussion of the content of the books but also to discuss open research questions, scientific puzzles, big picture questions, and perhaps even potential collaborative attempts. There are quite a large number of books listed per session (it would be possible to fill an entire year of discussion on the books allocated for one session…or a year for an entire book (particularly for Marvin Minsky’s books1)). If you are keen to participate just read what you can and what you are interested in: try to see the reading list as a potential roadmap (the reading group should not be a stressful experience…). Regular attendance would be great to develop a “common language” over time but if you just show up for a particular topic that is okay too. Naomi Moy ([email protected]) will very kindly organise the books and will coordinate the lending/borrowing process (please cooperate to help that flow smoothly, as there are a large number of books). If you would like to discuss a particular book let us know. It would be wonderful to see students attending. I will organize pizzas and drinks. Thus, for each month please let Naomi know whether you are going to attend. I will continue the reading group in 2018 with new topics and I will send you the list earlier (within the next 3-4 months hopefully). The selection (or perhaps better the elimination) process of the books is quite time consuming…It reminds me of Hugh Lofting (Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo): “What to leave out and what to put in? That’s the problem”. We will start in April to give you some time (although not a lot…) to start reading. If you have further questions feel free to send me an email: [email protected]. Thanks.

1 His lectures (see link provided later) are worth a thousand books (or more).

April 28

Behind the Scenes Night Part I: The History, Psychology and Sociology of Science (and Survival Tips)

Foundations

1. Rudolf Carnap (1995). An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. Dover book.

Rudolf Carnap has deeply influenced a very large number of excellent scholars. Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, for example, mentioned that Carnap was one of three major influences for him when he was a Chicago graduate student. The book covers important topics such as laws, explanation, and probability, measurement and quantitative language, or causality and determinism. The book is strongly linked to physics but still very important for any (social) scientist.

2. Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Ian Hacking introduces this book with the following: “Great books are rare. This is one. Read it and you will see”. A big picture book that becomes very relevant, more so in the Publish or Perish environment in which we currently live. The book helps to understand the nature of discoveries, revolutions, paradigms, or crises.

3. Karl Popper (2002). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Taylor & Francis Group. A classic in the thinking of science and knowledge. Peter Medawar calls the book one of the most important documents of the twentieth century. An important introduction to the logic of science and the theory of theories. His autobiography (Unended Quest) starts with: “When I was twenty I became apprenticed to an old master cabinetmaker in Vienna whose name was Adalbert Pösch, and I worked with him from 1922 to 1924, not long after the First World War. He looked exactly like Georges Clemenceau, but he was a very mild and kind man. After I had gained his confidence he would often, when we were alone in his workshop, give me the benefit of his inexhaustible store of knowledge. Once he told me that he had worked for many years on various models of a perpetual motion machine, adding musingly: “They say you can’t make it; but once it’s been made they’ll talk different!” (“Da sag’n s’ dass ma’ so was net mach’n kann; aber wann amal eina ein’s g’macht hat, dann wer’n s’ schon anders red’n!”) A favourite practice of his was to ask me a historical question and to answer it himself when it turned out that I did not know the answer (although I, his pupil, was a University student – a fact of which he was very proud). “And do you know”, he would ask, “who invented topboots? You don’t? It was Wallenstein, the Duke of Friedland, during the Thirty Years War.” After one or two even more difficult questions, posed by himself and triumphantly answered by himself, my master would say with modest pride: “There, you can ask me whatever you like: I know everything.” (Da können S’ mi’ frag’n was Sie woll’n: ich weiss alles.”). I believe I learned more about the theory of knowledge from my dear omniscient master Adalbert Pösch than from any other of my teachers. None did so much to turn me into a disciple of Socrates. For it was my master who taught me not only how very little I knew but also that any wisdom to which I might ever aspire could consist only in realizing more fully the infinity of my ignorance” (p. 7).

4. Friedrich A. Hayek (1979). The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason Nobel laureate Hayek, economist and philosopher, impresses with his intellectual power. This book is a compilation of essays covering interesting subjects such as the influence of natural sciences on social sciences, the problem and the method of the natural sciences, the subjective character of the data of the social sciences and many more topics.

5. Robin Dunbar (1995). The Trouble with Science. Harvard University Press. Dunbar, one of the most creative contemporary scholars, provides an excellent overview of the nature of science.

History, Sociology, Economics, and Psychology of Science

6. Robert K. Merton (1979). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago Press. Robert K. Merton2 is regarded as the father of the sociology of science (and a founding father of modern sociology). The book is a collection of his key papers. It covers many interesting topics such as sociology of scientific knowledge, the processes of evaluation in science and the reward system of science.

7. Bruno Latour (1987). Science in Action. Harvard University Press. Latour is a famous French scholar, and one of the most cited scholars in social science (this book has been cited more than 22,000 times (Google Scholar)). A valuable source to understand social context and content and scientific activity.

8. Paula Stephan (2012). How Economics Shapes Science. Harvard University Press. Stephan is one of the dominant forces in the economics of science. In this fact-driven book she focuses on some key factors of interest to economists, such as the production of research, funding, the market for scientists or the relationship of science to economic growth.

2 Father of Robert C. Merton.

9. Abraham H. Maslow (1969). The Psychology of Science: A Renaissance. Gateway Edition. The reading list has so far given voice to sociologists, philosophers and economists. Now it’s time for a psychologist. When you think of Maslow you can’t escape the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. His intuition and unconventional thinking is impressive. In this book he focuses on science as a product of the human nature of a scientist.

10. Alfred North Whitehead (1925). Science and the Modern World. The Free Press. We all know Whitehead. He wrote Principia Mathematica 3with his former student Bertrand Russell. From the back cover: “Presaging by more than half a century most of today’s cutting-edge thought on the cultural ramifications of science and technology, Whitehead demands that readers understand and celebrate the contemporary, historical, and cultural context of scientific discovery”.4

3 Peter Medawar in Memoir of a Thinking Radish: “I think my determination to master Principia Mathematica was more a matter of vanity than anything else: I wanted to be able to say of myself – as a character in one of Aldous Huxley’s novels said to himself: that there was nothing any man had written or thought that I could not master if I chose to give my mind to it. This was a test case and my prowess satisfied my pride and gave me much pleasure of the kind people usually get from chess or crossword puzzles. Although there is nothing much in real life that lends itself to symbolic formulation and strictly deductive development, I do believe that my lengthy and difficult exercises in mathematical logic had a profound effect on my prose style and my style of philosophic thinking. It was, however, a great distraction from my proper business which, I had resolved, was to try to use tissue-culture techniques to solve a number of problems in developmental physiology” (p. 65). Herbert Simon in Models of my Life: “Dear Earl Russell: Mr. Newell and I thought you might like to see the enclosed report of our work in simulating certain human problem-solving processes with the aid of an electronic computer. We took as our subject matter Chapter 2 of Principia, and sought to specify a program that would discover proofs for the theorems, similar to the proofs given there. We denied ourselves devices like the deduction theorem and systematic decision procedures of an algorithmic sort; for our aim was to simulate as closely as possible the processes employed by humans when systematic procedures are unavailable and the solution of the problem involves genuine “discovery.” The program described in the paper has now been translated into computer language for the “Johnniac” computer in Santa Monica, and Johnniac produced its first proof about two months ago. We have also simulated the program extensively by hand, and find that the proofs it produces resemble closely those in Principia. At present, we are engaged in extending the program in the direction of learning (of methods as well as theorems) and self-programming. Very truly yours, Herbert A. Simon. Russell’s answer: “Thank you for your letter of October 2 and for the very interesting enclosure. I am delighted to know that Principia Mathematica can now be done by machinery. I wish Whitehead and I had known of this possibility before we both wasted ten years doing it by hand. I am quite willing to believe that everything in deductive logic can be done by a machine. Yours very truly, Bertrand Russell” (pp. 207-208). 4 Herbert Simon in his autobiography (Models of My Life, chapter: Education in Chicago): “Part of that exposure was arranged by the university, through the distinguished visitors it brought to the campus. The English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead was the first of these that year. I repaired to Mandel Hall, the first row of the balcony, to hear his public lecture. I listened intently for an hour, and didn’t understand a word. I attributed my difficulty, modestly, to my lack of education, but after reading several of Whitehead’s books in later years, I now wonder whether that was a wholly correct assessment” (p. 38).

Advice and experience from the masters

11. William Ian Beardmore Beveridge (1957). The Art of Scientific Investigation. Blackburn Press. W. I. B. Beveridge, an Australian animal pathologist, wrote a wonderful and timeless book worth reading and discussing. He writes on topics such as experimentation, chance, hypothesis, imagination, intuition, reason, observation, difficulties, or strategy.

12. George J. Stigler (1985). Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist. Basic Books. Nobel laureate Stigler, one of the original leaders of the Chicago School, was famous for his witty remarks, breadth of knowledge as an historian of economic thought, and for his honest statements. Here is an example from George Loewenstein’s book Exotic Preferences: “Perhaps because he [Stigler] hated the paper so much that he didn’t know where to begin, or perhaps to preserve collegiality (U of C-ers tend to be nicer to their colleagues than they are to the outsiders they regularly demolish at seminars), Stigler did not tear the paper apart. However, in his brief and rather friendly commentary he did note that if William Stanley Jevons had written the words I attributed to him in 1932, it would have been “the event of the century” since at that point Jevons had been dead for almost fifty years. When I tracked down the problem I discovered that the statement I quoted was not from the great economist William Stanley Jevons, but his son, Herbert Stanley Jevons whose career provides unneeded support for the concept of regression to the mean. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately from the perspective of forensic academics, my chapter was published by the time I discovered the error” (p. 386)5. Easy to digest, we get an idea in Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist about Stigler’s experiences and insights.

5 He continues: “Academics are, of course, supposed to attribute the source of their quotes, with a “quoted from..” in cases where they obtain the quote from a secondary source rather than from the original. They (and I) do sometimes cites sources in this fashion, but mainly when no one would reasonably believe that they had chanced upon the identical quote on their own. However, in cases where one could have plausibly come across the original source, academics often cite the original source, regardless of where they actually discovered the quote. I am aware of this not only from my own reprehensible behavior, but from the number of people who have attributed exactly the same words as I did to William Stanley Jevons, with no mention of my paper. Of course, it is possible that they also accidentally chanced upon the book by his son and made the same error as I did….” (p. 386).

The following three short books by two Nobel laureates (the visionary Ramón y Cajal and the elegant and witty Medawar) and by the eminent Wilson provide wonderful insights on how to conduct research, all of which will provide us with a good foundation for our discussion. Students are encouraged to read those books.

13. Peter B. Medawar (1979). Advice to A Young Scientist. Basic Books. 14. Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1999). Advice For a Young Investigator. MIT Press. 15. Edward O. Wilson (2014). Letters to a Young Scientist. Liveright.

May 26

Behind the Scenes Night Part II: Science, Creativity and Education

You will see a very diverse set of books on this list. It will give us the chance to cover a lot of ground.

1. Jonathan S. Feinstein (2006). The Nature of Creative Development. Stanford Business Books. An incredible tour de force. One of the most important books on creativity. Please allow enough time to read it.

Two books written by Dean Keith Simonton who has dedicated his career to understanding genius and creativity:

2. Dean Keith Simonton (2004). Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius, and Zeitgeist. Cambridge University Press. 3. Dean Keith Simonton (1999). Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity. Oxford University Press.

4. Tim Harford (2016). Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World. Little, Brown. I am sure you have heard of Harford, the undercover economist, and a great communicator. This is his recent book, which you can complement with the TED talk based on the book.

5. Jacques Hadamard (1945). An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field. Dover Publications. The child prodigy Norbert Wiener6 writes in his autobiography “I Am a Mathematician”: “Professor Jacques Hadamard, of Paris, played a great part at the congress. He was then only in his middle fifties, but his reputation had been well established before the end of the nineteenth century, and to us fledglings he was a great historical landmark”. This short book is full of fascinating insights.

6. Gerald Holton (1996). Einstein, History, and Other Passions. Harvard University Press. Holton is a physicist, one of the most influential historians of science, and an expert on Einstein. In this book he employs an engaging style to discuss topics such as the public image of science, the evolution of trust in scientific findings, or the imagination in science, and provides insights into what we can learn from Einstein.

7. Joi Ito and Jeff Howe (2016). Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future? Grand Central Publishing Why is the MIT media lab so creative? Joi Ito, the current director of the MIT Media Lab points out that in one of the primary meeting rooms at the Media Lab you see the following message on the screen: Disobedience over Compliance. How is possible that you can organize a conference entitled Forbidden Research? A testament of the power of “antidisciplinarity”, positive deviance, breaking rules, freaks,

6 Stanislaw Ulam in Adventures of a Mathematician on Wiener: “I had heard of Wiener before this meeting, of course, not only about his mathematical wizardry, his work in number theory, his famous Tauberian theorems, and his work on Fourier Series, but also about his eccentricities... Absentminded and otherworldly in appearance, Wiener nevertheless could make an intuitive appraisal of others, and he must have been interested in me. Great as the difference in age between us was (his forty to my twenty-six years), he would seek me out occasionally in my little apartment in Adams House, sometimes late in the evening, and propose a mathematical conversation. He would say, “Let’s go to my office, where I can write on the blackboard.” This suited me better than staying in my rooms, from which it would have been difficult to put him out without being rude. So he drove me in his car through darkened streets to MIT, opened the building doors, turned on the light, and he started talking. After an hour or so, although Wiener was always interesting, I would almost fall asleep and finally mange to suggest that it was time to go home. Wiener seemed childish in many ways. Being very ambitious about his place in the history of mathematics, he needed constant reassurance about his creative ability. I was almost stunned a few weeks after our first encounter when he asked me point blank: “Ulam! Do you think I am through in mathematics?” Mathematicians tend to worry about their diminishing power of concentration much as some men do about their sexual potency. Impudently, I felt a strong temptation to say “yes” as a joke, but refrained; he would not have understood. Speaking of that remark, “Am I through,” several years later at the first World Congress of Mathematicians held in Cambridge, I was walking on Massachusetts Avenue and saw Wiener in front of a bookstore. His face was glued to the window and when saw me, he said, “Oh! Ulam! Look! There is my book!” Then he added, “Ulam, the work we two have done in probability theory has not been noticed much before, but see! Now, it is in the center of everything.” I found this disarmingly and blessedly naïve” (pp. 93-94). More on Wiener and here remark of Mary Catherine Bateson (see p. 35 of this document): Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, used to stop by, smoking smelly cigars and pouring out his latest idea to Larry or Margaret, not much interested in listening to their responses”.

hackers, misfit ideas, experimentation, and the four Ps of creative learning – Projects, Peers, Passion and Play.

In Whiplash, Joi Ito points out that leading the Media Lab “is more like being a gardener than being a CEO – watering the plants, tending to the compost, trimming hedges, and getting out of the way so that the explosion of creativity and life of all of the plants and wildlife in the garden are allowed to flourish”. Books that discuss how to reform universities are rare. The oldest university in the world was founded in Bologna (1088). But there is no guarantee that universities (as any institution) will survive another 1000 years. We will see what we can learn from the following two books. 8. Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring Zu (2011). The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Insight Out. Wiley. 9. Holden Thorp and Buck Goldstein (2010). Engines of Innovation: The Entrepreneurial University in the Twenty-First Century. University of North Carolina.

10. Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Harriet Zuckerman, Jeffrey A. Groen, and Sharon M. Brucker (2010). Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities. What do we know about doctoral programs? What can we learn from America’s doctoral programs? What are the facts and figures? The economist Ehrenberg together with other scholars will provide some answers.

11. Howard Gardner (2011). The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach. Basic Books. It is hard to discuss education without looking at Gardner’s work and many of his books should be added to the reading list.

12. Seymour Papert (1993). The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. Basic Books. Papert, a mathematician and visionary pioneer on learning (influenced by Piaget’s work) shares his insightful thoughts. He was also a founding faculty member of the MIT Media Lab. Here is a link to a video on learning from Seymour Papert.

13. Jean Piaget (1948). To Understand Is To Invent: The Future of Education. Grossman Publishers. The famous pioneer of field of child development7 is full of wisdom. In this book he discusses the foundation of education.

14. Richard Sennett (2008). The Craftsman. Yale University Press. Prologue: “Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake”. This is seen as one of Sennett’s key books. Sennett, one of the most interesting scholars in social sciences.

15. Robert Maynard Hutchins (2009). The Higher Learning in America. Transaction Publishers. As a president of the University of Chicago (1929–1945) he pushed for the Great Books Program, which has been discussed and criticized by many brilliant scholars, including economists, in their autobiographies (requiring to go through the Great Books as students). Here we will discover Hutchins’ thoughts on higher learning (see also The Learning Society).

16. R. Buckminster Fuller (2010). Education Automation: Comprehensive Learning for Emergent Humanity. Lars Müller Publishers. In this book, Bucky (who many have called the Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century) communicates his thoughts on education.

17. Edgar Morin (2001). Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future. Unesco Publishing. UNESCO invited Morin to express his ideas on the essentials of education for the future. In this short book he communicates his thoughts.

18. Kenneth E. Boulding (1961). The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. University of Michigan Press. “Behavior depends on the image – the sum of what we think we know and what makes us act the way we do”. Boulding was one of the greatest social scientists of the 20th century, forgotten by many economists despite having won the John Bates Clark Medal. In this book, he proposes a new science.

7 Check also Minsky’s Lecture 2 (check link on p. 28 (this document). Papert and Piaget (time: around 26:20 into the lecture).

19. Michael Polanyi (1962). Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. University of Chicago Press. Not an easy book to digest. Amartya Sen mentioned once: “what we get from Polanyi are rather rapid- fire sequences of insights – often deep insights – without much pause for examining alternative interpretations and possible counterarguments”. Polanyi was a polymath and a prominent figure, and was seen as an extraordinarily innovative scientist in the area of physical chemistry. He left that field to focus mainly on his philosophical work8.

8 Mark T. Mitchell (book: Michael Polanyi): “[I]n 1948 Polanyi assumed the Chair of Social Studies (with limited teaching duties) and turned his full attention to nonscientific matters. As E. P. Wigner and R. A. Hodgkin describe it, ‘some scientific friends found the perspective that he was beginning to describe both profound and inspiring; others regretted his shift of interest and saw it as a loss to science and a darkening of reason’. Isaiah Berlin was not impressed: ‘These Hungarians are strange…here is a great scientist giving up the Nobel to write mediocre work of philosophy.’ Polanyi himself, however, was quite clear about the importance of his change of tack and subsequently referred to 1946 as the year in which ‘I found my true vocation’ as a philosopher. And unlike those who lamented his turn away from science, Polanyi understood his years in the laboratory as essential preparation: ‘an experience in science is by far the most important basic ground for developing philosophic ideas’” (p. 17). P.S.: His son John Polanyi won the Nobel Prize.

June 30

Behind the Scenes Night Part III: Method

1. George C. Homans (1967). The Nature of Social Science. Harbinger Book.

One of the giants of social science discusses “discovery and explanation”, “general propositions” and the “difficulties of explanation”. He starts with: “For our purposes – my readers’ and mine – the social sciences include psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, history, and probably linguistics. These sciences are in fact a single science. They share the same subject matter – the behaviour of men. And they employ, without always admitting it, the same body of general explanatory principles. This last truth is so obvious that it is still highly controversial”.

2. Kenneth Craik (1943). The Nature of Explanation. Cambridge University Press. Craik, was a brilliant mind who died too early. This is his only book, and one that we can enjoy as we read about the importance of explanation, relational and descriptive theories, causality and the nature of thought.

3. Mary S. Morgan (2012). The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think. Cambridge University Press. Morgan has written extensively on the history of economics and econometrics or statistics. According to Roger Backhouse this book offers the best analysis to date of how economists work with models.

4. C. H. Waddington (1977). Tools for Thought: How to Understand and Apply the Latest Scientific Techniques of Problem Solving. Basic Books. As you can see, this book was written many years ago by Waddington but still very informative.

5. Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein (1999). Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People. Mariner Books. A book about creative thinking, looking at elements such as observing, imaging, abstracting, analogizing, modelling, playing, synthesizing and more.

6. Daniel Friedman and Shyam Sunder (1994). Experimental Method: A Primer for Economists. More and more economists are using experiments as a source of investigation. The book provides a good overview of what is needed to conduct experiments.

7. James Robert Brown (1991). The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences. Routledge. As social scientists, we are not used to thought experiments, which is more reason to take a closer look.

8. Alan S. Gerber and Donald P. Green (2012). Field Experiments. Design, Analysis, and Interpretation. W. W. Norton. Two political science scholars provide a concise text on an important method.

9. Fritz Zwicky (1957). Morphological Astronomy. Springer. Zwicky was an astronomer, and a household name at Caltech for many years. Zwicky even appears in Vernon Smith’s autobiography “Discover – A Memoir”, about his experience of majoring in physics at Caltech. Zwicky was a strong advocate of morphology as a tool of thought, discovery, and invention, emphasizing that it can be applied to all situations in life. Interestingly, the morphological approach has been widely disregarded and not many books are available on this method.

10. Gary King, Robert O. Keohane and Sidney Verba (1994). Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton University Press. 11. Henry E. Brady and David Collier (Eds.) (2010). Rethinking Social Inquiry. Rowman & Littlefield. King, Keohane and Verba’s book is seen as a fundamental point of reference on methodology in social sciences (in particular political sciences). The second book is an edited volume that contributes to the discussion and controversies on method.

12. Rex B. Kline (2013). Beyond Significance Testing: Statistics Reform in the Behavioral Sciences. Springer. A timely book dealing with the overreliance on significance testing as the way to evaluate hypotheses.

13. Charles F. Manski (2013). Public Policy in an Uncertain World: Analysis and Decisions. Harvard University Press. For those applied economists who are involved in policy evaluations. Here is the key message: “I hope to move policy analysis away from incredible certitude and toward honest portrayal of partial knowledge”.

14. Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke (2015). Mastering Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect. Princeton University Press. A couple of years have passed since they gave us Mostly Harmless Econometrics. This is their recent book, which is even more quirky and witty than the first one (image below, p. xiv).

15. Roy J. Epstein (1987). A History of Econometrics. North-Holland. A book written out of a PhD thesis at Yale University under the supervision of Phillips. It is good to take a look at the history of econometrics and there are not that many books on it (others to consider are written by Qin Duo and Mary Morgan or the edited volume by de Marchi and Gilbert).

16. Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan (2011). Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks. Oxford University Press. Roxy Peck: “Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks by Gelman and Nolan could have also been appropriately named Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Teaching Statistics, but were Afraid to Ask!”.

17. Charles Wheelan (2013). Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread form the Data. W. W. Norton. An homage to the famous How to Lie with Statistics by the economist Wheelan, with a particular focus on intuition.

For further books on method see the October and November reading list in particular.

July 28

Back to the Roots Night Part I: Human Evolution and Human Nature

1. Joseph Henrich (2016). The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, Princeton University Press. Henrich’s recent book is probably the best one on human evolution so far. It covers a broad range of topics, such as the origin of faith, prestige, dominance, taboos, norms, or communication. He is able to successfully integrate insights from social and biological sciences when studying human nature and human evolution.

2. Edward O. Wilson (2004). On Human Nature. Harvard University Press. Edward O. Wilson is the founding father of sociobiology, known today as evolutionary psychology. His seminal work Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, published in 1975, answers a key question that is also relevant to economics: how altruism can evolve by natural selection, which may nonetheless reduce personal fitness. This exploration of diverse social species – including social insects (ants are his speciality), cold- blooded vertebrates, birds, elephants, nonhuman primates, and humans – raised substantial controversy and a firestorm of suspicion, resentment, and protest from those who opposed his arguments for human instinct and gene-based nature. Public demonstrations demanded his dismissal from Harvard, his classes were interrupted, with one individual even pouring ice water over his head as he lectured, making Wilson

(as he delighted in recounting for interviewers) probably the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea. Feeling misunderstood, he was persuaded to delve deeper into the behavioural genetics of human nature, producing the 1977 book On Human Nature, which earned a Pulitzer Prize.

3. R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin (1984). Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature. Pantheon books. The opposite camp. A powerful attack against biological determinism and sociobiology.

4. Paul R. Ehrich (2002). Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect. Penguin Books. Jared Diamond defines Paul Ehrich’s book as the “The one book to read on human evolution”. It provides a lot of information and is well written. “Evolving Brains, Evolving Minds”, “From Grooming to Gossip”, “The Dominance of Culture”, “Gods, Dive-Bombers, and Bureaucracy” or “Evolution and Human Values” and more.

5. David Buss (2012). Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. Pearson This is one of the most prominent textbooks in the field of evolutionary psychology. Thus, it is worth reading in order to get a good understanding of the foundation of the discipline.

6. Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown (2011). Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour. Oxford University Press. A well-crafted introduction to the ideas, methods, and findings of an evolutionary perspective on human behaviour.

The following are two interesting books by Henry Plotkin:

7. Henry Plotkin (2004). Evolutionary Thought in Psychology: A Brief History. Blackwell Over the years, Plotkin has acquired an impressive amount of knowledge in the area of human cognition and behaviour, which he nicely integrates in this historical overview.

8. Henry Plotkin (1998). Evolution in Mind: An Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology. Harvard University Press. Another read to increase the understanding of the evolutionary bases of human cognition and behaviour and challenges faced by the field of evolutionary psychology.

9. David Buller (2006). Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. MIT Press. A critical discussion arguing that the conventional wisdom in evolutionary psychology is misguided.

10. Jared Diamond (1992). The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. Harper. Diamond – the man with the bird’s-eye view of a great naturalist – gives us a book that explores what it means to be human.

11. Clive Gamble, John Gowlett, and Robin Dunbar (2014). Thinking Big: How Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind. Thames and Hudson. When the British Academy celebrated its centenary, the authors of this book won funding to draw together the humanities and the social sciences. The goal of the book is to better understand the past and the present, where we come from and why we act the way we do.

12. Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd (2005). Not By Genes Alone: how Culture Transformed Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press. A book by the two leading figures on culture and evolutionary process.

13. Steven Pinker (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial Human Nature. Penguin. Pinker is one of the most dominant intellectual forces of the last few decades and an excellent writer. In this book he takes a closer look at human nature.

14. Jonathan B. Losos and Richard E. Lenski (Eds.) (2016). How Evolution Shapes our Lives: Essays on Biology and Society. Princeton University Press. Insightful edited book covering many aspects such as human evolution, evolution in health and disease, evolution in agriculture, computing, conservation, and climate change, or evolution in the public sphere. The editors argue that we are in a golden time for evolutionary science in which understanding evolution has never been more important.

15. Rob Brooks (2011). Sex Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World. University of Hampshire Press.

Brooks has visited QUT in the past and is collaborating with members of the QuBE. In this book he explores several issues of modern civilization, applying key principles of evolutionary psychology. The book is well written, easy to digest and fun to read. It was awarded with the 2012 Queensland Literary Award (Science Writers prize).

16. Robin Dunbar (2010). How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks. Harvard University Press. A series of articles that Dunbar wrote for the New Scientist magazine and the Scotsman newspaper, offering a colourful discussion of topics around the evolutionary study of human behaviour. You will enjoy the power and wittiness of a clear thinker.

17. Roy Baumeister (2005). The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life. Oxford University Press. Baumeister just recently moved to the University of Queensland. A highly cited psychologist (more than 118,000 citations on Google Scholar), he is an expert on human motivation, emotions, and self-regulation. Here he tries to provide a comprehensive picture of human nature.

18. Robert N. Bellah (2011). Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Belknap Press. A wide-ranging and rich (746 pages) tour de force.

August 25 Back to the Roots Night Part II: Cooperation, Altruism, Morality, Communication and Deception

1. Paul Seabright (2012). The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present. Princeton University Press. Some may recall that Seabright has visited us in the past. He is an economist who can write books and here he provides a valuable contribution to a better understanding of the essence of life: conflict.

2. Christopher Boehm (2012). Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. Basic Books. Jonathan Haidt praises the book stating that “[a]stronomers have the Hubble telescope to look back through time, and social scientists have Chris Boehm”.

3. David Sloan Wilson (2015). Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others. Yale University Press. Wilson looks at various aspects such as psychological altruism, altruism and religion, altruism and economics or altruism in everyday life.

4. Alexander Field (2007). Altruistically Inclined? The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity. The University of Michigan Press. Highly acclaimed book that won the 2003 Alpha Sigma Nu National Book Award in the Social Sciences. Elinor Ostrom referred to it as a feast for scholars who are trying to develop a coherent theory of human behaviour grounded in evolutionary biology.

5. Frans de Waal (1996). Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Harvard University Press. One of the most influential primatologists makes the case for a morality grounded in biology.

6. Michael Tomasello (2009). Why We Cooperate. MIT Press. A short book based on the 2009 Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Stanford. Tomasello derives interesting conclusions based on research on young children and chimpanzees. The book is supplemented

with forum comments by Joan Silk, Carol Dweck, Brian Skyrms, and Elizabeth Spelke. See also his book A Natural History of Human Morality.

7. Martin A. Nowak with Roger Highfield (2011). Super Cooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. Free Press. Martin Nowak, Professor of Mathematics and Biology at Harvard is one of the most productive contemporary scholars. His group “Evolutionary dynamics” holds some ambitious goals: curing the world of cancer, infectious diseases, selfishness and inclusive fitness theory! This book, Super Cooperators is easily digested, and provides a nice overview of his research path and key findings in the area of cooperation. The book starts with a quote from Bertrand Russell: “The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation” and Nowak frequently points out that “cooperation is the fabric of the universe”.

8. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (2011). A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Two household names in economics and behavioural economics. In this insightful book they approach the topic of cooperation.

9. Richard D. Alexander (1987). The Biology of Moral Systems. Aldine de Gruyter. This is a classic that has been cited more than 3000 times (Google Scholar). The book aims to show that evolved human nature and morality are compatible.

10. Leonard D. Katz (2000). Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. A fascinating edited volume that includes articles from the key scholars in that area. The beauty of this book is that it consists of principal papers and a large number of commentary discussions on the principal paper.

11. James Q. Wilson (1993). The Moral Sense. Free Press. An important book on morality.

12. C. Daniel Batson (2011). Altruism in Humans. Oxford University Press. Martha Nussbaum argues that the “book is simply one of the most important books of our time for anyone who wants to ponder the problems and prospects of our species”.

13. David P. Barash (2008). Natural Selections: Selfish Altruists, Honest Liars, and Other Realities of Evolution. Bellevue Literary Press. Witty, funny, and according to Dawkins “tonic for the mind”.

14. Robert Trivers (2011). The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. Basic Books. The powerhouse of Trivers approaches a still poorly understood topic applying an evolutionary approach.

15. David Livingstone Smith (2004). Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind. St. Martin’s Griffin. Another accessible contribution to understand a fascinating subject.

16. Robin Dunbar (1996). Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Harvard University Press. Dunbar’s most cited work with more than 3000 citations providing an insightful perspective on the purpose of language.

17. Michael Tomasello (2010). Origins of Human Communication. MIT Press Tomasello has conducted substantial theoretical empirical work in this area. A volume based on the Jean Nicod Lectures which received the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology.

September 29

Back to the Roots Night Part III: Biological Thinking

In his book Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist, Robert Trivers emphasizes that Ernst Mayr “was the greatest U.S. evolutionist I ever met, certainly Mr. Animal Species and possessing a very broad and deep knowledge of almost all of biology. He had also perhaps the strongest phenotype of any organism I have ever met. He lived to be a hundred and published more books after age ninety than most scientists do in a lifetime”. The Web of Stories has a wonderful interview with Ernst Mayr. We will look at three important contributions by Ernst Mayr that are also very important from a methodological point of view:

1. Ernst Mayr (2004). What Makes Biology Unique. Cambridge University Press. 2. Ernst Mayr (1997). This is Biology: The Science of the Living World. The Belknap Press. 3. Ernst Mayr (1982). The Growth of Biology Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. The Belknap Press.

4. John Maynard Smith (1986). The Problem of Biology. Oxford University. This small but powerful book is by the eminent biologist John Maynard Smith who was a theoretical evolutionary biologist and geneticist.

5. Evelyn Fox Keller (2002). Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines. Harvard University Press. A good overview covering a lot of aspects.

We will look at two books of Peter Kropotkin, the Prince of Evolution, a brilliant scholar and polymath with an interesting biography. From the back cover of his Memoirs of a Revolutionist: “Having renounced his title, Kropotkin pursued his work as a scientist and won international acclaim as a geographer as well as a radical. Memoirs is also a study of the early anarchist movement in Western Europe, in which Kropotkin played a part after his escape from a Russian prison – thereby earning a second imprisonment, this time in France”.

6. Peter Kropotkin (2014). Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Dialectics. 7. Peter Kropotkin (1995). Evolution and Environment. Black Rose Books.

8. Nikolaas Tinbergen (1989). The Study of Instinct. Clarendon Press.

Tinbergen’s influential book on animal behaviour has also influenced artificial intelligence (combination of if-then rules to account for behaviour). He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch. The brother of Jan Tinbergen who won the first Nobel Prize in Economics together with Ragnar Frisch.

9. Daniel C. Dennett (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life. Simon & Schuster. Dennett is one of the most prolific philosophers and cognitive scientists of the last few last decades. A fascinating book that is widely cited (more than 7000 citations on Google Scholar).

10. Thomas Nagel (2012). Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Concept of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press. Our struggle with understanding mind-related features such as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value is a major problem for science. A short and challenging book by another great philosopher.

11. Henry Plotkin (1993). Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge. Harvard University Press. “However odd or difficult the idea that knowledge, human knowledge, what you and I know of the world, is closely connected to a very fundamental feature of all living things might seem at first, I will show that it none the less is important because it tells us significant things about why we ever came to know anything, and how we do so”.

12. Erwin Schrödinger (1944). What is Life? Cambridge University Press.

This short book is a classic that has influenced a generation of leading scholars such as J. B. S. Haldane or Francis Crick.

13. Steven Rose (1997). Lifelines: Life Beyond the Gene. Oxford University Press. Richard Lewontin: “Anyone interested in knowing the truth about the relation between genes, cells, environment and chance processes in living systems ought to read this book”.

14. Gregory Chaitin (2012). Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical. Vintage Books.

The creative mathematician Chaitin attempts to “lay bare the deep inner mathematical structure of biology” suggesting a new field which he calls metabiology.

15. Robert E. Ulanowicz (2009). A Third Window: Natural Life beyond Newton and Darwin. Templeton Press. Stuart Kaufmann: “Ulanowicz has written a deeply important, controversial, and potentially transformative book”.

Two books by Peter Corning, a scholar who is able to synthesize or include a lot of knowledge:

16. Peter Corning (2003). Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind. Cambridge University Press. 17. Peter A. Corning (2005). Holistic Darwinism. Synergy, Cybernetics, and the Bioeconomics of Evolution. University of Chicago Press.

18. W. Brian Arthur (2009). The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. Free Press.

Arthur, is one of the most creative minds in economics and a member of the Founders Society of the Santa Fe Institute. In this important book he applies biological thinking to understand the nature of technology.

October 27 Forward to the Future Night Part I: Artificial Intelligence

1. Pamela McCorduck (2004). Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. A K Peters.

A well-written overview. According to Herb Simon the most reliable source on the first couple of decades of AI.

2. Herbert A. Simon (1996). The Science of the Artificial. MIT Press. A book with an impressive clarity and precision (cited more than 21,000 times (Google Scholar)) from one of the founders of artificial intelligence and Nobelist in economics.

We take a look at two books from one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, namely Marvin Minsky. Truly a treat! A wonderful thinker. Isaac Asimov once said: “The only people I ever met whose intellects surpasses my

28 own were Carl Sagan and Marvin Minsky”. Here you can find a celebration of Marvin Minsky who died last year: PART 1, PART 2, PART 3, PART 4. Here also is an interview with him on Web of Stories.

3. Marvin Minsky (1986). The Society of Mind. Simon & Schuster. 4. Marvin Minsky (2006). The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. Simon & Schuster. All his lectures are available on MIT OpenCourseWare: Video Lectures in 2011 (at the age of 84). A must watch (take the time for it)!

5. Norbert Wiener (1950). The Human Use of Human Being: Cybernetics and Society. Da Capo Press. Wiener, the founder of the science of cybernetics discusses the implications of cybernetics.

6. Patrick Henry Winston (1992). Artificial Intelligence. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. Minsky was his doctoral advisor. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997 and has developed the key textbook on AI. The Lectures are available on MIT OpenCourseWare. (Fall 2010) Minsky’s short remark in Lecture 2 (Falling in Love) on AI textbooks (see link under 4, around 1:13:30 into the lecture): “If you want to keep up with AI you should read Patrick’s textbook even though people are starting to use this new one which doesn’t have any AI in it [smile] By who is it by [image]” …[students: Russell and Norvig]. Minsky: “Russell and Norvig9. It is probably pretty good technically but I leafed through it and didn’t have any... Never mind, it is probably better than I think because I am jealous”.

9 https://research.google.com/pubs/author205.html

7. Kevin Warwick (2012). Artificial Intelligence: The Basics. Routledge. A good overview of the basics.

8. Rosalind W. Picard (2000). Affective Computing. MIT Press. Covers the quest to give computers the ability to recognize, understand, and express emotions.

9. David Vernon (2014). Artificial Cognitive Systems: A Primer. MIT Press. A look at a new emerging field.

10. Keith L. Downing (2015). Intelligence Emerging: Adaptivity and Search in Evolving Neural Systems. MIT Press. A systematic exploration of how intelligence emerges.

11. José Hernández-Orallo (2016). The Measure of All Minds: Evaluating Natural and Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge University Press. A wide-ranging discussion on intelligence with the goal of providing insights into understanding what intelligence is and how it can be recreated.

12. Ray Kurzweil (1999). The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Penguin Press.

A prophetic blueprint for the future by the restless thinking machine of a Kurzweil?10

13. James Kennedy, Russell C. Eberhart and Yuhui Shi (2001). Swarm Intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. A good overview that goes beyond what we would expect from just looking at the title.

14. Ethem Alpaydin (2016). Machine Learning. MIT Press. An approachable overview of machine learning.

15. Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville (2016). Deep Learning. MIT Press. Geoffrey Hinton: “This is the definitive textbook on deep learning. Written by major contributors to the field, it is clear, comprehensive, and authoritative. If you want to know where deep learning came from, what it is good for, and where it is going, read this book”. (back cover).

16. Dario Floreano and Claudio Mattiussi (2008). Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence: Theories, Methods, and Technologies. MIT Press. Rodney Brooks (back cover): “Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence brings together all the things I’ve been interested in for the last twenty-five years, and surprises me by providing a coherent intellectual framework for them all. This book is a treasure trove of history from Darwin to Gibson and Walter, an unambiguous tutorial on how to build a plethora of computational models, and a healthy exploration of the philosophies that have driven wide-ranging research agendas”.

17. Nick Bostrom (2014). Superintelligence: Path, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press. Elon Musk: “Worth reading…. We need to be super careful with AI” (back cover).

18. Kevin Kelly (2016). The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future. Viking. Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired has the great intuition of making sense of technology.

19. Sherry Turkle (2005). The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. MIT Press. Computers are part of our social and psychological lives. A book by Turkle, a leading figure on human- technology interaction.

10 Kurzweil Interviews Minsky: Is Singularity Near?

20. Neil Gershenfeld (1999). When Things Start to Think. Henry Holt and Company. Gershenfeld, a creative creator and tinkerer: “I will have succeeded if a shoe computer comes to be seen as a great idea and not just a joke, if it becomes natural to recognize that people and things have relative rights that are now routinely infringed, if computers disappear and the world becomes our interface”.

Forward to the Future Night Part II: Big Data and Networks

1. Alex Pentland (2014). Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread – The Lessons from A New Science. The Penguin Press.

“If the Big Data revolution has a presiding visionary, it is MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland” (book cover). From his preface: “I don’t teach traditional classes; instead, I bring in visitors with new ideas and get people to interact with others who are on the same journey. When I was academic head of the Media Lab I pushed to get rid of traditional grading; instead, we have tried to grow a community of peers where respect and collaboration on real-world projects is the currency of success and further opportunity. We live in social networks, not in the classroom or laboratory”.

2. Dirk Helbing (2015). Thinking Ahead: Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society. Springer.

A book by Helbing, professor of computational social science at the ETH Zurich, and a principal investigator of FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator Crisis Relief System (see his presentation), described as an attempt to create a crystal ball, the machine that would predict the future. The project almost received €1 billion funding from the European Commission (lost in the final round).

3. Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel (2013). Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture. Riverhead Books. A good overview of what you can do with Google Books data.

4. Nathan Eagle and Kate Greene (2014). Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World. MIT Press.

A book in the spirit of nudging, which provides good insights on the tools available to engineer a better world.

5. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier (2013). Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think. John Murray. One of the first books on the implications of Big Data. Already more than 2000 citations on Google Scholar.

6. César A. Hidalgo (2015). Why Information Grows. Basic Books.

César A. Hidalgo, an economist and director of Macro Connections (MIT Media Lab) looks at an important question.

7. Albert-László Barabási (2003). Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. A Plume Book.

An easy read providing the intuition on networks. It is written by Barabási, one of the pioneers in the field of networks (his Science paper in 1999 on the emergence of scaling in random networks has been cited more than 26,000 times (Google Scholar)).

8. Antony M. Townsend (2013). Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for A New Utopia. W. W. Norton & Company. The move towards a new kind of city.

9. Melanie Mitchell (2009). Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford University Press. An excellent overview in the spirit of the Santa Fe Institute.

10. John H. Miller and Scott E. Page (2007). Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Science. Princeton University Press. Two economists also attached to the Santa Fe Institute provide a clear discussion on complex adaptive systems.

11. Thomas C. Schelling (2006). Micro Motives and Macro Behavior. W. W. Norton. A classic by Nobelist Schelling (cited more than 6500 times (Google Scholar)). A good foundation for Agent-Based Computational Modelling.

12. Joshua M. Epstein (2006). Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling. Princeton University Press. A creative overview on what can be done with ABM.

Two books on Behavioural Computational Social Science:

13. Riccardo Boero (2015). Behavioral Computational Social Science. Wiley 14. Scott de Marchi (2005). Computational and Mathematical Modeling in the Social Sciences. Cambridge University Press.

Three textbooks by leadings scholars on networks:

15. Albert-László Barabási (2016). Network Science. Cambridge University Press. 16. Matthew O. Jackson (2008). Social and Economic Networks. Princeton University Press. 17. Mark E. J. Newman (2010). Networks: An Introduction. Oxford University Press.

December 15 The Holy Grail Night: Mind and Consciousness

December, Christmas is coming. Time to get into a holy spirit.

Marvin Minsky: “[C]onsciousness is a suitcase-like word that we use to refer to many different mental activities, which don’t have a single cause or origin – and, surely, this is why people have found it so hard to “understand what consciousness is.” The trouble was that they tried to pack into a single box all the products of many processes that go in different parts of our brains – and this produced a problem that will remain unsolvable until we find ways to chop it up”.

See also the work by Minsky and Nagel (former reading group sessions).

1. Ray Kurzweil (2012). How to Create a Mind: the Secret of Human Thought Revealed. Penguin. Let’s take a look what the visionary Kurzweil has created.

2. Francis Crick (1995). Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Scribner. Cricks, from co-discovering the structure of the DNA molecule to the attempt to advance the scientific study of human consciousness. In the Preface he points out: “This book is about the mystery of consciousness – how to explain it in scientific terms. I do not suggest a crisp solution to the problem. I wish I could, but at the present time this seems far too difficult. Of course some philosophers are under the delusion they have already solved the mystery, but to me their explanations do not have the ring of scientific truth”. Christof Koch (see previous link)11: “Francis Crick was a close personal friend and mentor to me for the past sixteen years. He was the living incarnation of what it is to be a scholar: brilliant, rational, dispassionate, and always willing to revise his own opinions and views in light of the actions of a universe that never ceased to astonish him. He was editing a manuscript on his death bed, a scientist until the bitter end”.

Two books by Koch:

3. Christof Koch (2004). The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Roberts & Company Publishers 4. Christof Koch (2012). Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. MIT Press.

5. Daniel C. Dennett (1991). Consciousness Explained. Back Bay Books. His most cited work (cited more than 11,000 times (Google Scholar))

6. Antonio Damasio (2012). Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. The key expert on the brain in his quest to understand consciousness (see also his TED talk about it).

11 Crick dedicated his book to Koch: “FOR CHRISTOF KOCH, without whose energy and enthusiasm this book would never have been written”.

7. Michael S. A. Graziano (2013). Consciousness and the Social Brain. Oxford University Press. “The current scientific study of consciousness reminds me in many ways of the scientific blind alley in understanding biological evolution…Then Darwin discovered the trick”. In this book he attempts to provide a new theory.

8. David Gelernter (2016). The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness. Liverlight Publishing. Gelernter’s artistic flair comes alive in this well written book – The New York Times called him a rock star of the computing world.

9. David J. Chalmers (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press. Seen by many as a key contribution to the literature (cited more than 7400 times (Google Scholar)).

10. Stanislas Dehaene (2014). Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. Viking. Nobelist Eric Kandel: “Stanislas Dehaene’s remarkable book is the best modern treatment of consciousness I have read to date”.

11. Todd E. Feinberg and Jon M. Mallatt (2016). The Ancient Origins of Consciousness: How the Brain Created Experience. Christof Koch: “A very level-headed, deeply informed, and magisterial approach to the neurobiological basis of consciousness that considers the evolutionary history, the neuroanatomy, and the behaviour of extant animals”.

12. Steven Pinker (2009). How the Mind Works. W. W. Norton. Another classic book by Pinker and also highly cited (more than 7400 times (Google Scholar)).

13. Gregory Bateson (2002). Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unit. Hampton Press. A beautiful book that requires time and thinking to digest.12

14. Evan Thompson (2007). Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Science of Mind. More on the explanatory gap. A book that does not provide a new theory or model of consciousness but rather tries to provide richer phenomenological accounts of the structure of experience.

12 Mary Catherine Bateson in With A Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson on Bateson (and Mead): “Margaret was swift and sure of her intent as she moved through the day, almost as if she were following an agenda in which every activity was labelled, seemingly untiring but never wasting energy, ending phone conversations abruptly and rarely turning for additional farewells once a new trajectory was set. Gregory’s day was filled with postponements and moments of sinking into quiescence, briefly aimless before all that length could be mustered for some next activity” (p. 15). “Gregory was basically indifferent to wet spots on his knees, to stains and spills, from children or animals, and indeed to the stings or scratches he got from handling wild creatures. His tenderness, whether to children or to animals, always contained an element of the naturalist’s care, tolerant and admiring of living grace” (p. 34). “Living creatures, messy and beautiful, were united by similarities of form and able to respond in some degree to other living beings, and it was to living creatures that Gregory responded with love and admiration. Indeed, the quality of his affection for an octopus or a bat was similar to his wry tenderness and tolerance for me or for my brother, John, or my sister, Nora” (p. 69). Both of them lived profoundly unconventional lives but worried deeply about the nature of order, both in social life and in nature. Margaret cared about how she was perceived, while Gregory was generally content to be seen as flouting convention” (p. 101).