The Flicker Men (Ted Kosmatka)

A complex, mind-blowing novel about what quantum mechanics is really telling us about the nature of reality. How can observing events change what events happen? Whose observations matter? Will being observed by a bacterium collapse the indeterminate waveform?  How about a cricket, or a garter snake, or a hamster? How about a cat, a monkey, an ape? Is it only humans? Only SOME humans? What if there are humans who qualify as observers, from the point of view of an indeterminate probability waveform, and some who don't? Then the novel goes on from there - how many universes are there? Where do new universes come from? Where does our universe fit into this fractal system? I loved how the ideas built on each other, but confess that as the novel pushed toward its gripping conclusion I started skipping some of the physical ideas and just going for the external plot, and then got lost completely at the very end. Were there different realities the narrator experienced? How was his timeline bent, and was it broken? I guess I'm not quite smart enough, or knowledgeable enough, to stay aboard through the author's train of thought right to the end.

Aurora (Kim Stanley Robinson)

This is a massive, richly detailed, comprehensive science fiction story with an almost anti-SF theme. It begins on a generation ship that's almost reached its target planet, Aurora, which has enough similarities to Earth that it seems a likely place for humans to create a viable colony.. The ship is fascinating, a character in its own right, and the people living aboard are a complex set of people with a wide range of motivations and perspectives. Robinson does a great job representing the ethnic diversity of humanity in this miniature world. Of course, people face a spiraling series of cascading technological challenges before the story finally ends. The final scenes are as warm and uplifting as one could want, but the overall message is far from encouraging. This book does not flinch from the really hard challenges of life in space, and does not gloss them over with an ad astra! (to the stars!) optimism. There is also a deep and thoughtful consideration of questions relating to artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness.

Living With a Wild God (Barbara Ehrenreich)

The author as a mature woman, veteran of marriages and illnesses and careers, looks back at a quest she began at age 14 to understand the real nature of the universe. Raised as a staunch atheist, she wondered what the purpose of life and the universe could have beyond reproduction and death. Was there some ineffable, inexpressible Other that gave the world its real nature? For most of her life, Ehrenreich has been subject to what can only be called mystical experiences, in which language and human labels are leached away, leaving only pure sensations and a strong sense of Presence. This book is her attempt to describe her experiences as accurately as she can and to determine what they might mean. My professional background and my scientific inclinations lead me to something like this: brain circuitry developed for the purpose of recognizing and predicting the behavior of the intelligent social creatures we lived with (other people) sometimes overshoots, leading to pariedolia and, in the case of temporal-lobe epilepsy, a strong sense of oneness with the divine. Ehrenreich dismisses these explanations too glibly, I believe, lumping them in the category of "mental illness." I will grant her that no evidence disproves the existence of Others that are invisible to any rational scientific investigation and can't even be approached in a rational linguistic frame, but I don't accept that she has provided any actual evidence in favor of its existence either. No matter--the book is a fascinating look at the really big questions, and will provoke anyone to think deeply about them.

Echopraxia (Peter Watts)

I admired Watts's earlier Blindsight for its intelligence, its mind-blowing ideas, and its frequent reference to ideas that are square in the center of my own professional areas of interest. Echopraxia is more of the same, and even more so. It takes place in the same universe as the earlier book, focusing on what's going on back home while Humanity's heroes are engaging in a deeply mysterious first Contact. The main character, a biologist of the old school who eschews most forms of direct brain augmentation, gets caught up in an increasingly challenging set of circumstances as he fights to save himself and humanity from vampires, scientific mystics, military zombies, and alien slime mold. It's not clear whether or not he is successful. I admire the brilliance of his thinking and world-building. I love that I know about little bits of psychological research he tosses out. I was impressed with how he gave one character a unique voice, a sense of rapid delivery and impatience, simply by leaving out commas. Still, I can't say that I loved either book, and I'm afraid that it's because I'm not smart enough to read Peter Watts. I had the constant feeling that I didn't quite know what's actually happening, and kept going in the belief that it would become clear eventually, but it never did. If you loved Blindsight and you're smart enough to follow down the rabbit hole, you will probably love this one as well.

Blindsight (Peter Watts)

This is a deeply complex, challenging book that touches on topics that are important to me professionally: the blindsight of the title, for one thing, and also saccadic blindness, Cotard syndrome, and the nature and value of consciousness itself. It wraps this up in a first-contact novel like none other. The story starts when millions of tiny sensors drop into our atmosphere all over the world and immediately burn up, presumably after sending information to some alien ship. Humanity throws together several waves of manned and unmanned probes to try to reach the aliens and learn about them, hoping to open a dialogue at best, to defend ourselves at words. The story follows a ship containing a linguist with four different identities, a marine with neural connections to armies of mechanized grunts, a biologist whose normal senses have been replaced with a whole array of sensors, and a synthesist whose job is to translate what experts learn into terms ordinary folks can understand, under the command of a vampire. Seriously. It all makes sense. The aliens are more completely alien than anything I've ever seen before, and they apparently think of us the same way. The story doesn't have a happy ending, not only because of what aliens may do to us, but because of what we are doing to ourselves. I read this long ago and remember thinking that I need to read it again so I can get more out of it the second time, because it is so dense. Now seemed like the right time, as I want to read his next book, set in the same universe: Echopraxia.

Our Own Minds (Radu Bogdan)

I'm reminded once again that I'm a psychologist, not a philosopher. I'm fascinated by the workings of the mind. but I want to approach them empirically and don't have the patience for the fine-grained logical analysis philosophers do. So while I enjoyed the basic ideas put forward in Bogdan's work on the development of consciousness, I found myself skipping over some of the painstaking argument and semantic distinctions here. Here's that basic idea. Children are born with an external orientation (to the environment and especially other people). Their minds work furiously to figure out how what others are doing and why, and what this has to do with the events and objects in the world. They very quickly start internalizing some of this, in the sense of developing their own relationships with the world, including the world of other people, but they're still looking at their own minds and relationships more or less from the outside, and don't start to develop a truly internal view of themselves until after around age four. That's when they start to be able to perceive their own internal thoughts and motivations directly. This fits with what I've always thought of as the nature of our self-awareness. As social creatures, we have to try to understand and predict what others will do. Because humans are flexible in our responses to the environment, with very few specific behaviors controlled directly by biology, we needed to develop internal models of other people, figuring out their motivations and goals and preferences. This mental machinery, created to help us think of others, is then available for us to use to understand ourselves, and that's where we get our ability to think of our own motivations and goals and preferences. Makes sense to me.