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From 70544.1227@compuserve.com Wed Aug 10 04:11:34 1994
Date: 23 Jul 94 21:52:03 EDT
From: Reilly Jones <70544.1227@compuserve.com>
Reply to: extropians@extropy.org
To: Extropians@extropy.org
Subject: Resource List (Books I)

  I have quite a list of books of Extropian interest.  Some are highly
recommended, some are very current and relevant but of less urgency for
absorbing, most are for specialized research or of historical interest.

Highly recommended ---

* Nicolo Machiavelli  "The Prince"  (1513) - Hasn't been improved on yet, this
is how things work.
* Goethe, Johann  "Faust" (1832) - Great literature, deep, creative.
* Nietzsche, Friedrich  "The Will to Power"  (1901) - Extraordinarily
influential ideas.  The Ubermensch: Caesar with the soul of Christ.
* Unamuno, Miguel  "The Tragic Sense of Life"  (1913) - Deepest insights on the
physical immortality of the self.
* Koestler, Arthur  "Janus: A Summing Up" (1978) - First rate intellect
discussing creativity and the forerunners of "extropy."
* Bloom, Allan  "The Closing of the American Mind"  (1987) - How the entropic
death-worshippers took over.
* Holland, John & Holyoak, Keith & Nisbett, Richard & Thagard, Paul  "Induction:
Processes of Inference, Learning and Discovery" (1986) - Current research on the
foggiest, but most important source of knowledge.
* Edelman, Gerald  "Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind"
(1992) - How we know, why our minds work the way they do, and what the physical
bases are of thoughts and emotions.  Theory of Neuronal Group Selection.
Predictive theories are being borne out by research.
* Kauffman, Stuart  "The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in
Evolution"  (1993)  Don't miss this one, it asks great questions and points in
extropic directions.  A tour de force of the science of living systems.
* Searle, John  "The Rediscovery of the Mind"  (1993) - Essential for
understanding the uniqueness of our subjective self.

Current and relevant ---

* Barkow, L. & Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J.  "The Adapted Mind"  (1992) - Reasoning
about social exchange.
* Bohm, D. & Hiley, B.J.  "The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation
of Quantum Theory"  (1993) - Avoid neo-Gnostic physics by learning the truth.
* Boyd, R. and Richerson, P. J.  "Culture and the Evolutionary Process"  (1985)
- How human social behavior and evolution may interact, quantitative memetic
evolution.  Very important work.
* Brown, James Robert  "Smoke and Mirrors: How Science Reflects Reality"  (1993)
- Realist epistemology.
* Cavalli-Sforza, L. and Feldman, M.  "Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A
Quantitative Approach"  (1981) - Early quantitative memetic evolution.
* De Sousa, R.  "The Rationality of Emotion"  (1987) - Philosophical account of
extraordinarily complex, multilevel nature of emotions.
* Fiske, John  "Introduction to Communication Studies"  (1990) - A suitable
phrase to define communication might be 'Social interaction through messages'.
* Foot, Phillipa  "Virtues and Vices" - Current moral philosophy.
* Gazzaniga, Michael  "The Social Brain: Discovering the Networks of the Mind"
(1985) - Good introduction to the 'nurture' part of our brain.
* Gelernter, David  "Mirror Worlds"  (1993) - How to get an overview of complex
society through your computer.
* Gelernter, David  "The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human
Thought"  (1994) - Cognition vs. high focus (analytical), medium focus (emotion)
& low focus (associative creativity), excellent work.
* Gottlieb, Gilbert  "Individual Development and Evolution"  (1992) - Overview
of the basic biological problems from developmental genetics.
* Himmelfarb, Gertrude  "On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture
and Society" (1994) - Let's clean up the mess left by the entropic
death-worshippers.
* Holton, Gerald  "Science and Anti-Science"  (1993) - Science, along with
rationality, is under siege.
* Hull, D.  "Science as a Process"  (1988) - Evolutionary epistemology.
* Johnson, Paul  "The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830"  (1991) -
Good book on a critical transitional period in history.
* King, Florence  "With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy"  (1992)
- For fun.
* Laffont, J.J.  "The Economics of Uncertainty and Information"  (1989) - From
"Ideas Futures" in Extropy #8.
* Lasche, Christopher  "The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics"
(1991) - What's wrong with progress?
* Lerner, Eric  "The Big Bang Never Happened"  (1991) - Plasma cosmology of
Hannes Alfven and eternal universe of Gerald Hawkins.  Escape from
neo-Gnosticism.
* Lieberman, Myron  "Privatization and Educational Choice"  (1989) - Get
government out of education.
* Meyer, Herbert  "Hard Thinking" - Argues that science be adopted to the art of
the political process.
* Nakamura, Katsuhiro  "Quantum Chaos: A New Paradigm of Nonlinear Dynamics"
(1993) - Let's fix the obviously wrong Schrodinger-Feynman equations by making
them discrete.
* Novak, Michael  "The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism"  (1993) -
The moral background to capitalism; trust and consistency.
* Nozick, Robert  "The Nature of Rationality"  (1993) - Good lists of
problem-solving techniques, surveys the current field of decision-theory.
* Pejovich, Svetozar  "The Economics of Property Rights: Towards a Theory of
Comparative Systems"  (1990) - Do we still have property rights?
* Prigogine, Ilya and Nicolis, G.  "Exploring Complexity: An Introduction"
(1989) - Survey of complexity from the master.
* Revel, Jean-Francois  "The Flight From Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age
of Information"  (1991) - How our political culture is set, to the detriment of
both the truth and democracy.
* Revel, Jean-Francois  "Democracy against Itself: The Future of the Democratic
Impulse"  (1993) - Transitional states of government.
* Rosenberg, Nathan and Birdzell, L.E.  "How the West Grew Rich: The Economic
Transformation of the Industrial World"  (1986) - Where next?
* Ryn, Claes  "Will, Imagination, and Reason"  (1986) - Willpower on the
rational frontier.
* Schroeder, Manfred  "Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite
Paradise"  (1992) - The myriad manifestations of self-similarity, very thorough
coverage of complexity, heavy on formulas and do-it-yourself computer modelling,
it's good.
* Slobodkin, L. Basil  "Simplicity, Complexity and Games of Intellect" - The
age-old relationship between simplicity and complexity in human thought.
* Sober, Elliott (Knowles, D. ed.)  "Explanation and its Limits"  (1990) - Let's
razor Ockham's razor.
* Sober, Elliott (Nitecki, M. ed.)  "Evolutionary Ethics" (1994) - Evolutionary
altruism, psychological egoism, and morality: disentangling the phenotypes.
* Sober, Elliott  "Philosophy of Biology"  (1993) - Good discussion of the units
of selection controversy (Dawkins doesn't fare well), and supervening
selectional systems.
* Solzhenitsyn, Alexander  "August 1914"  (1972) - A masterpiece, deep
understanding of military and human motivations.
* Torrey, E. Fuller  "Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on
American Thought and Culture"  (1992) - The death-worshippers at it again.
* Wilson, D. & Dugatkin, L.  "Evolutionary Ecology"  (1991) - "Nepotism vs.
tit-for-tat or, why should you be nice to your rotten brother?" 5: 291-299 - A
fine advance on the more primitive Axelrod book on cooperation.
* Wilson, James Q.  "American Government: Institutions and Policies"  (1988) -
Just how big and complex is government anyway?  Organizational analysis of just
how the tentacles reach every facet of our lives.

Less current, more specialized or current pop books ---

* Alexander, R.D.  "The Biology of Moral Systems"  (1987) - Great title.
* Banfield, Edward  "The Unheavenly City"  (1968) - Time preference is crucial
to the growth or stagnation of cities, and the deterrence of crime.
* Berger & Luckmann  "The Social Construction of Reality"  (1967) - Knowledge is
socially constructed, facts reflect purposes.
* Bork, Robert  "The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law"
(1989) - Exposes entropic death-worshippers as they hijack law.
* Clark, Alan  "Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict 1941-1945"  (1965) -
Battle of Titans.
* Drucker, Peter  "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" - From the master.
* Ellul, Jacques  "Technological Society" - French POV.
* Feynman, Richard  "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter"  (1985) -
Presents quantum electrodynamics with clarity, accuracy, and completeness.
* Flanagan, Owen  "The Science of the Mind"  (1991) - A nice survey of the
thoughts and work of modern psychologists.
* Friedman, Milton & Friedman, Rose  "Tyranny of the Status Quo" - Politicians,
private interests, and bureaucrats can be defeated.
* Fuller, Buckminster  "The Critical Path" - Futurist history.
* Gazzaniga, M. & LeDoux  "The Integrated Mind"  (1978) - Older work, updated in
'85.
* Geertz, Clifford  "The Interpretation of Culture"  (1973) - Defined culture as
a system of meanings in terms of which people interpreted their experiences and
guided their actions.  These 'networks of significance' serve to locate
individual experience in some kind of framework, as well as to explain it.
* Giddens, Anthony  "The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of
Structuration"  (1980?) - It is the structural properties of social system that
provides the means by which people act and which, at the same time, are the
outcome of these actions.
* Gilder, George  "Wealth and Poverty"  (1981) - Makes the definitive case for
the morality of capitalism, and how to increase wealth and curtail poverty.
* Gilder, George  "The Spirit of Enterprise"  (1984) - A celebration of the
American entrepreneurial spirit.
* Gilder, George  "Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and
Technology"  (1990) - I hate the overuse of "quantum" but Gilder makes good
points.
* Gray, John  "Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy"  (1989) -
Methodology of death-worshippers.
* Hayek, Friedrich  "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism"  (1988) - The
death-worshippers are irrational.
* Hazlitt, Henry  "Man vs. the Welfare State"  (1983) - It's a battle, and the
good guys don't fare so well.
* Kelly, Kevin  "Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization"
(1994) - Frantic pop journalism, mentions "extropy", covers many fields of
interest, mentions familiar names.
* Koestler, Arthur  "Bricks to Babel"  (1981) - Collected writings.
* Kurzweil, Raymond  "The Age of Intelligent Machines"  (1990)
* Lakatos, I.  "The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical
Papers, vol. 1"  (1978) - Falsification and the methodology of scientific
research programmes.
* Levy, David  "Political Order: Philosophical Anthropology, Modernity, and the
Challenge of Ideology"  (1988)
* Lewis, C.S.  "The Abolition of Man"  (1976) - Apres les scientists.
* MacIntyre, Alasdair  "After Virtue"  (1986?) - Moral entropy.
* Mayr, Ernst  "The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and
Inheritance" (1982) - Neo-Darwinian theory outlined in whole.
* Nagel, Ernest  "Teleology Revisited and Other Essays"  (1978) - Purpose is the
foundation of all.
* Nisbet, Robert  "History of the Idea of Progress"  (1980) - Progress is what
we want.
* Nisbett & Ross  "Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social
Judgment"  (1980) - Induction is difficult, a view of consensual reality.
* Nozick, Robert  "Anarchy, State and Utopia"  (1974) - Nozick has recanted
somewhat.  Harvard has gone PC.
* O'Brien, Conor Cruise  "God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism"
(1988) - Good survey of the most powerful social forces.
* Parsons, Talcott  "The System of Modern Societies"  (1971) -
Stucturalist-Functionalist.
* Popper, Karl  "Objective Knowledge"  (1972) - Evolutionary epistemology.
* Putnam, Hilary  "Mind, Language, and Reality"  (1975) - Philosophy and our
mental life.
* Rosenberg, Nathan  "Technology and American Economic Growth"  (1972) - From
Julian Simon article in Extropy #11.
* Rothbard, Murrray  "Man, Economy and State" - Libertarian, free markets.
* Rothschild, Michael  "Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism"  (1990) -
Pop economics, good springboard to the lecture circuit.
* Scalia, Antonin & Epstein, Richard  "Two Views on Judical Activism"  (1985) -
Scalia is the intellectual leader of the Supreme Court.
* Schoek, Helmut  "Envy"  (1969) - From Julian Simon article in Extropy #11.
* Schultz, Harry  "On Remaking the World: Cut Nations Down to Size" - A great
idea whose time may eventually come.
* Shaw, Peter  "The War Against the Intellect: Episodes in the Decline of
Discourse"  (1989) - The war on rationality.
* Smithson, Charles and Maurice, Charles  "The Doomsday Myth: 10,000 Years of
Economic Crisis"  (1984) - The entropic death-worshippers have been at it for a
very long time.
* Toulmin, S.  "Human Understanding"  (1972) - Evolutionary epistemology.
* van den Haag, Ernest  "Capitalism: Sources of Hostility"  (1979) - The losers
and the herd mentality.
* Wilson, Edward O.  "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis"  (1975) - The start of
much controversy, definitely not PC.
* Zey, Michael G.  "Seizing the Future: How the Coming Revolution in Science,
Technology, and Industry Will Expand the Frontiers of Human Potential and
Reshape the Planet"  (1994) - Pop, frantic.
* Jouvenal, Bertrand de  "The Ethics of Redistribution" - Redistribution in the
democracies inexorably results in the atrophy of personal responsibility and the
hypertrophy of bureaucracy and the centralized state.
* Jouvenal, Bertrand de  "On Power: The Natural History of its Growth" - Account
of the factors that have helped and continue to help expand the power of the
state and of the ways in which state power in inevitably abused.
*Lovejoy, A.O. "The Great Chain of Being: a Study of The History of an Idea" -
Memetic evolution.
* Mises, Ludwig von  "Bureaucracy" - Why government bureaucracies can never
deliver on promises.
* Mises, Ludwig von  "Human Action: A Treatise on Economics" - Decisions shape
the future.
* Quine, W.V.  "Set Theory and Its Logic" - Axiom of Choice.
* Simon, Julian  "Population Matters"  (1990) - From Extropy Journal review.

Part II has the books of historical interest.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reilly Jones               |        Philosophy of Technology:
70544.1227@compuserve.com  |  The rational, moral and political relations
                           |  between 'How we create' and 'Why we create'