Books or essays that answer each others' questions
- type: intertwingled list
- status: never exhaustive, currently maybe about 10% of what I could write out based on what I know in my head etc
- The basic idea is that some books might inspire you to ask questions that other books answer. Moreoever, some points relate pairwise in this way, where one might talk on the level of theory and another on practice, or one might answer the "why?" level and another the "how?" level.
- For now I'm mostly going to loosely connect a few sources, and flesh out the details more as time goes on:
- DD: The Evolution of Culture by David Deutsch says a bunch of stuff about cultural evolution, which also connect potently with The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich
- DD: The Evolution of Culture talks more about the implications on a meaning level
- The Secret of Our Success talks more about the implications on a biological level
- both talk about the role of rationality and how it relates to memes, in different ways
- and both talk about ways in which the culture itself can "know" things the individuals don't, and the implications that has for things like rationality, creativity, etc
- The Beginning of Infinity talks about how people have basically been traumatized into being uncreative
- if that raises the question "why is it so hard, yet apparently somewhat possible, to unlearn said traumas?" then go read Unlocking the Emotional Brain, which answers that question in detail
- and this is itself an answer to a question that might arise from reading Behavior: The Control of Perception of "why doesn't this reorganization happen automatically?"
- Behavior: The Control of Perception relates to Unlocking the Emotional Brain in relation to learning, unlearning, & the role of conscious awareness therein
- video of me talking about this youtu.be/AigDi5PEEc8
- Sources of Power talks about expert decision-making in terms that imply that it's governed by the same underlying rapid situational-assessment neurology as traumatic responses, that Unlocking the Emotional Brain describes.
- Already Free by Bruce Tift
- relates what he calls
- the "developmental view" (untangling trauma, à la Unlocking the Emotional Brain)
- the "fruitional view" (awakening, for which he's coming from a Vajrayana perspective similar to Spectrum of Ecstasy)
- and also talks about effective relationships and navigating differentiation & integration, similar to eg After the Honeymoon or The Passionate Marriage
- Sarah twitter thread relating Already Free to Core Transformation (which is both a technique and a book about the technique)
- The Master and his Emissary answers on a really deep level questions (that I don't know where they're raised) like:
- why do insights end up getting all goodharted & stale?
- why is it so hard to put certain common experiences into words?
- The Master and his Emissary relates to Spectrum of Ecstasy in that nondual awareness seems to be characteristic of the right hemisphere
- So you could say that The Master and his Emissary answers these questions one might have reading Spectrum of Ecstasy
- "In what sense, concretely, is the nondual view "always already there"?"
- it's your right hemisphere's perspective
- and it's important to note that just because you (when you're in LH mode) are not consciously aware of how your right hemisphere is perceiving and operating, it's still entirely involved in every moment of operating
- "What's going on neurologically when someone shifts from a dualistic to non-dualistic view?"
- this isn't answered very precisely, but it's clearly something about a shift in the relationship between the hemispheres
- The Way of Effortless Mindfulness by Loch Kelly is also very related to this topic.
- If, reading The Master and his Emissary, you have the question "what sort of thing might I do that would shift my experience into a more right hemisphere mode?" then The Way of Effortless Mindfulness has dozens of exercises for this.
- This is all part of Adyashanti's school, btw, which is part of Mahamudra which is a close cousin of Dzogchen. See pages about these on HowToHuman (troubleshooting guide for the human condition)
- Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse seems to me and others to be pointing at two stances of the world that map onto McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model as described in The Master and his Emissary
- Anyway, this is something I keep feeling into, and now I have a place to list stuff!
3 linked references
April 11th, 2024
- > Both show how you can’t understand psychological differences among individuals just by looking at their genes, or at their immediate environment — you have to see what’s been happening in the hundreds and thousands of years of their ancestor’s cultural history. They also both point to the importance of “cognitive tools” gained through culture, argue that we’re smart because we connect up with others, and think that mimesis is at the very base of our cognition.
Henrich makes a big point that the social sciences, thus far, have proceeded on the assumption that humans “are just a really smart, though somewhat less hairy, chimpanzee”. But cultural evolution has made us a fundamentally new kind of animal — and that the scholarly road ahead is wide open for exploring this. I sorta can’t imagine a more Egan-y thing to say. I think that one of the reasons Egan’s ideas didn’t spread is that they were ahead of their time; this was the paradigm Egan’s ideas make sense in.
December 20th, 2021
- the PCT books and Unlocking the Emotional Brain have some interesting cross-connections, which I talk about in the convo I had with Eva de Hullu
- meanwhile, some stuff that Book/Controlling People talks about dovetails interestingly with David Deutsch and The Secret of Our Success...
- if one asks the question, from PCT, why don't people reorganize better already? why do we get worse at reorganizing as we age, given that that seems non-adaptive?
- DD: The Evolution of Culture by David Deutsch says a bunch of stuff about cultural evolution, which also connect potently with The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich
- which explains why this is
- and if one asks the Deutsch-inspired question of how this happens neurologically, or even something like what is necessary to achieve this, neurologically?, Unlocking the Emotional Brain and PCT both have some answers
- Controlling People in particular talks a lot more about the reorganization system, and so if you want people to not try to outsmart culture then it would naturally be necessary to keep people from consciously inspecting certain things!!!