https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151144

Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

• ⭐️"Permutation City" by Greg Egan: Explores the consequences of consciousness being just a pattern. Would it continue if the pattern is paused? Seems yes, since we survive being unconscious. So we move in space and time, but still consciousness feels continuous.
• The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi.
• Diaspora: First Chapter: https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html
• Quarantine by Greg Egan: https://www.gregegan.net/
• Axiomatic by Greg Egan
• "Understand" by Ted Chiang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understand_(story)
• Schild's Ladder
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur
• The Culture series by Ian M Banks.
• Neuropath by Scott Bakker.
• "The Mind's I" by Hofstadter and Dennett
• "Laws of Form" by George Spencer-Brown, a little book that describes how to bootstrap the Universe from nothing. Louis Kauffman [1] has a lot of papers/writeups on it, from knot theory to quantum physics. If you ever wanted to make a pancake truly from scratch, this is a place to start.
• "The Unconscious as Infinite Sets" by Ignacio Matte Blanco. Reformulates Freud in logico-mathematical terms and establishes a formal system (bi-logic) to describe unconsciousness phenomena: in case you ever wanted to apply category theory to study yourself.
• "The Protracted Game" by Scott Boorman. Interprets Maoist's revolutionary strategies during 1927 - 1949 period as a game of Go. Interesting both from historical, military, and game-theoretical perspective; raised an appreciation of Eastern wisdom and 'board games as a tool of thought' [2] for me.
• ⭐"The Unwritten Laws of Engineering" by W. J. King. Written in 1944, but the advice is still relevant, more so to the software engineering field. Should be at least skimmed at any part of your career.
• ⭐"The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus. Unequivocally answers the most important question there is — does life have meaning, and if not, should you kill yourself over it? I read it in my teens while wrestling with existential dread, and lived a somewhat happy and interesting life ever after.
• "Laws of the Game" by Eigen & Winkler that describes natural phenomena as glass-bead games with various rules.