The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins

A bit "dumbed down" from some of his earlier work, I guess in a bid to try and win a wider audience.  He draws on various magical and miraculous stories from various texts and explains why teh simple explanation is much more plausible, and in fact all the more 'magical' in the sense of wondrous.

All peoples around the world have origin myths, to account for where they came from. Many tribal origin myths talk only about that one particular tribe – as though other tribes don’t count! In the same way, many tribes have a rule that they mustn’t kill people – but ‘people’ turns out to mean only others of your own tribe. Killing members of other tribes is just fine!Read more at location 302 •
You were once a baby. Now you are not. When you are a lot older you’ll look quite different again. Yet every day of your life, when you wake up, you are the same person as when you went to bed the previous night. A baby changes into a toddler, then into a child, then into an adolescent; then a young adult, then a middle-aged adult, then an old person. And the change happens so gradually that there never is a day when you can say, ‘This person has suddenly stopped being a baby and become a toddler.’ And later on there never comes a day when you can say, ‘This person has stopped being a child and become an adolescent.’ There’s never a day when you can say, ‘Yesterday this man was middle-aged: today he is old.’Read more at location 385 •
So, the question of who was the first person, and when they lived, doesn’t have a precise answer. It’s kind of fuzzy, like the answer to the question: When did you stop being a baby and become a toddler? At some point, probably less than a million years ago but more than a hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors were sufficiently different from us that a modern person wouldn’t have been able to breed with them if they had met.Read more at location 408 •
Next time you see an animal – any animal – or any plant, look at it and say to yourself: what I am looking at is an elaborate machine for passing on the genes that made it. I’m looking at a survival machine for genes. Next time you look in the mirror, just think: that is what you are too.Read more at location 812 •
armed with science, we can at least ask sensible, meaningful questions about it and recognize credible answers when we find them. We don’t have to invent wildly implausible stories: we have the joy and excitement of real scientific investigation and discovery to keep our imaginations in line. And in the end that is more exciting than fantasy.Read more at location 2229 •
Bad things happen because things happen. Whether they are bad or good from our point of view doesn’t influence how likely it is that they will happen. Some people find it hard to accept this. They’d prefer to think that sinners get their come-uppance, that virtue is rewarded. Unfortunately the universe doesn’t care what people prefer.Read more at location 2562 •
There are things that not even the best scientists of today can explain. But that doesn’t mean we should block off all investigation by resorting to phoney ‘explanations’ invoking magic or the supernatural, which don’t actually explain at all.Read more at location 2909 •
The eminent science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke summed the point up as Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Mistakes were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Similar to some of the material in the Psychopath Test I read in November in a strange way, this book looks at our in-built tendency to judge others by different standards than those we use on ourselves.
How our memory is not what it seems at all, how it reconstructs the past so it fits with our view of the world and of ourselves.
How the well meaning social services teams construct abuse that never happened.  How judges and prosecutors cannot accept that innocent men were imprisoned (or given the death penalty)

Perhaps my favourite quote is the last in this blog from a Chinese philosopher more than 2500 years ago - we really haven't come that far since then!

“There is probably no such thing as a conscious hypocrite.” It seems unlikely that Newt Gingrich said to himself, “My, what a hypocrite I am. There I was, all riled up about Bill Clinton’s sexual affair, while I was having an extramarital affair of my own right here in town.” Similarly, the prominent evangelist Ted Haggard seemed oblivious to the hypocrisy of publicly fulminating against homosexuality while enjoying his own sexual relationship with a male prostitute.Read more at location 174

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What they do show is that if a person voluntarily goes through a difficult or a painful experience in order to attain some goal or object, that goal or object becomes more attractive.Read more at location 374

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So powerful is the need for consonance that when people are forced to look at disconfirming evidence, they will find a way to criticize, distort, or dismiss it so that they can maintain or even strengthen their existing belief. This mental contortion is called the “confirmation bias.”Read more at location 384

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see.” Self-justification, therefore, is not only about protecting high self-esteem; it’s also about protecting low self-esteem if that is how a person sees himself.Read more at location 612

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people will bend over backward to reduce dissonance in a way that is favorable to them and their team. The specific ways vary, but our efforts at self-justification are all designed to serve our need to feel good about what we have done, what we believe, and who we are.Read more at location 726

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Just as we can identify hypocrisy in everyone but ourselves, just as it’s obvious that others can be influenced by money but not ourselves, so we can see prejudices in everyone else but ourselves. Thanks to our ego-preserving blind spots, we cannot possibly have a prejudice, which is an irrational or mean-spirited feeling about all members of another group. Because we are not irrational or mean spirited, any negative feelings we have about another group are justified; our dislikes are rational and well founded. It’s theirs we need to suppress.Read more at location 998

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Once people have a prejudice, just as once they have a political ideology, they do not easily drop it, even if the evidence indisputably contradicts a core justification for it. Rather, they come up with another justification to preserve their belief or course of action.Read more at location 1073

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reviewing the huge research literature on prejudice, found that whenever people are emotionally depleted—when they are sleepy, frustrated, angry, anxious, drunk, or stressed—they become more willing to express their real prejudices toward another group.Read more at location 1101

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Fortunately, we can also better understand the conditions under which prejudices diminish: when the economic competition subsides, when the truce is signed, when the profession is integrated, when they become more familiar and comfortable, when we are in a position to realize that they aren’t so different from us.Read more at location 1142

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We need a few trusted naysayers in our lives, critics who are willing to puncture our protective bubble of self-justifications and yank us back to reality if we veer too far off. This is especially important for people in positions of power.Read more at location 1152

memory researchers love to quote Nietzsche: “ ‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—memory yields.”Read more at location 1230

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Because memory is reconstructive, it is subject to confabulation—confusing an event that happened to someone else with one that happened to you, or coming to believe that you remember something that never happened at all.Read more at location 1260

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Conway and Ross called this self-serving memory distortion “getting what you want by revising what you had.”Read more at location 1387

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If we are to be careful about what we wish for because it might come true, we must also be careful which memories we select to justify our lives, because then we will have to live by them.Read more at location 1588

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Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows just the opposite. The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them but that they cannot forget them: The memories keep intruding.Read more at location 1879

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McNally. “The basic principle is: if the abuse was traumatic at the time it occurred, it is unlikely to be forgotten. If it was forgotten, then it was unlikely to have been traumatic. And even if it was forgotten, there is no evidence that it was blocked, repressed, sealed behind a mental barrier, inaccessible.”Read more at location 1884

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Their experience and training did not improve their performance. Their experience and training simply increased their belief that it did.Read more at location 2439

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Many judges, jurors, and police officers prefer certainties to science. Law professor D. Michael Risinger and attorney Jeffrey L. Loop have lamented “the general failure of the law to reflect virtually any of the insights of modern research on the characteristics of human perception, cognition, memory, inference or decision under uncertainty, either in the structure of the rules of evidence themselves, or the ways in which judges are trained or instructed to administer them.”Read more at location 2559

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Successful partners extend to each other the same self-forgiving ways of thinking we extend to ourselves: They forgive each other’s missteps as being due to the situation, but give each other credit for the thoughtful and loving things they do.Read more at location 2821

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Social psychologist June Tangney has found that being criticized for who you are rather than for what you did evokes a deep sense of shame and helplessness; it makes a person want to hide, disappear.Read more at location 2848

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In his groundbreaking study of more than 700 couples, whom he followed over a period of years, psychologist John Gottman found that contempt—criticism laced with sarcasm, name calling, and mockery—is one of the strongest signs that a relationship is in free fall.Read more at location 2856

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in the way each side tells the same story. Perpetrators, whether individuals or nations, write versions of history in which their behavior was justified and provoked by the other side; their behavior was sensible and meaningful; if they made mistakes or went too far, at least everything turned out for the best in the long run; and it’s all in the past now anyway. Victims tend to write accounts of the same history in which they describe the perpetrator’s actions as arbitrary and meaningless, or else intentionally malicious and brutal; in which their own retaliation was impeccably appropriate and morally justified; and in which nothing turned out for the best. In fact, everything turned out for the worst, and we are still irritated about it.Read more at location 3248

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The implications of these studies are ominous: Combine perpetrators who have high self-esteem and victims who are helpless, and you have a recipe for the escalation of brutality. This brutality is not confined to brutes—sadists or psychopaths. It can be, and usually is, committed by ordinary individuals,Read more at location 3314

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The moral of our story is easy to say, and difficult to execute. When you screw up, try saying this: “I made a mistake. I need to understand what went wrong. I don’t want to make the same mistake again.” Dweck’s research is heartening because it suggests that at all ages, people can learn to see mistakes not as terrible personal failings to be denied or justified, but as inevitable aspects of life that help us grow, and grow up.Read more at location 3855

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As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (“Old Master”) observed more than twenty-five-hundred years ago: A great nation is like a great man: When he makes a mistake, he realizes it. Having realized it, he admits it. Having admitted it, he corrects it. He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.Read more at location 3882

Born Liars why we can't live without deceit by Ian Leslie

A book investigating why we are programmed to deceive, most of all to deceive ourselves.  Touches on topics from several other books I have read, explaining that what we perceive as reality is actually constructed by our minds some time after the event (so as to best fit with our mental view of the world).

Interesting chapters on child development and at what point they are able to deceive and detect deception.

Looks at how the evolutionary explosion in teh size of our brain can be traced back to having to manage living in larger social groups with an 'arms race' of deception and detection.


Based on the size of our brains, he said, we should be able to cope with a social group – people we would happily meet for a drink, say – of about a hundred and fifty people. Sure enough, when he combed through the anthropological and sociological literature, he found that a hundred and fifty worked as a rough average of the size of many human social groups, from hunter-gatherer societies to modern army units and company departments.Read more at location 215 •
Two-year-olds start to sense that their parents have feelings, and that they can affect those feelings by what they do. They then proceed to test this fascinating insight to destruction.Read more at location 368 •
Great liars tend to be great readers of human behaviour. Think of Iago, a ‘people person’ if ever there was one, subtly drawing out Othello’s rage, or reflect that Bill Clinton is famous for being both a convincing liar and a politician of exceptional empathy.Read more at location 438 •
What’s clear is that, faced with a group of people and asked to identify the liar, you’d be better off picking the most charismatic and fluent person in the room rather than, as we’re inclined to, the shifty-looking mumbler in the corner. Lying requires high cognitive, emotional and social abilities. The best liars tend to be charming, empathetic, and capable of thinking several moves aheadRead more at location 927 •
When you are talking to someone, there are at least two things more prominent in your mind than in theirs – your thoughts, and their face. As a result you tend to judge others on what you see, and ourselves by what you feel.Read more at location 1111 •
This description of memory tallies with the experimental evidence of Elizabeth Loftus, and with the findings of modern neuroscience. Remembering is an act of creative reconstruction rather than simple replaying. Every time a memory is recalled it is re-formed, and in the process it becomes mingled with the stories of others and shaped by our own anxieties, desires and imaginings. As the neurologist Antonio Damasio puts it, the brain carries ‘no hard copies’.Read more at location 1731 •
that our feeling of free will is nothing but a trick of perspective – a deception practised by the brain. A conscious ‘decision’ is merely a story we tell ourselves to explain what has happened to us, or what our bodies have already executed. This is a deeply contentious position, although many neuroscientists agree with him. There is certainly a huge amount of experimental evidence that our unconscious brain guides and determines many of the everyday decisions we think of as conscious ones.Read more at location 1869 •
Anthony Greenwald compressed this even further when he coined the word beneffectance to describe the normal human tendency to interpret reality so as to present ourselves as both beneficial and effective. Whenever either of these propositions are thrown into question, we are good at inventing stories that resolve the inconsistency between our actions and our self-image. Most of the time we’re not aware of doing so.Read more at location 2283 •

scientist Harold McGee has pointed out that the pungent smell of certain cheeses, like Vieux Boulogne, is the smell of decay – something we are hard-wired to find disgusting (and thus to avoid for our own good). That some people, in certain countries – especially France, of course – find such smells appetising is testament to the extent that our senses are in thrall to the beliefs we inherit from the culture in which we live.Read more at location 3071 •
Other studies have shown that green pills are better at reducing anxiety, and white pills are best for soothing ulcers. Patients who take four sugar pills a day clear their gastric ulcers faster than those who take two sugar pills a day. Large pills work better than medium-sized pills, and very small pills work best of all. Placebos that patients believe to be expensive work better than those they think cost less. Fake surgery involving impressivelooking, excitingly-named machines works extremely well indeed.Read more at location 3211 •
The anthropologist Robin Fox put it to me like this: ‘The brain’s business is not to give us an accurate or objective view of the world, but to give us a useful view – one we can act on.’ Its primary job is to help the packet of tissue, bone and muscle in which it’s encased to survive and thrive; reporting reality is an important but secondary consideration. So is telling the truth to others.Read more at location 3570 •

The Ego Trick by Julian Baggini

A book exploring what constitutes the single 'I' that appears to be going on inside our heads.  As well as dipping into cognitive neuroscience and the philosophy of self, the book looks ate various human case studies of individuals that give us insights into the system from those suffering from dementia, with various brain defects and damage, through to those with depression or undergoing gender reassignment.

In the end the book explains that what appears to us to be a singular self, is in fact just a trick, played on us by our brains as a complicated bundle of mental processes go about their daily function (normally with very little input or control from us).

To underestimate the extent to which the medium of our existence – the particular body each of us is given – shapes the person we become would be folly. But to think the person just is the medium is equally misguided. more at location 252
Unable to write or take notes, he had to think and remember what he wanted to say, and then dictate it to others. As a result, his memory improved considerably. But ‘The pleasures of mental agility are much over-stated, inevitably – as it now appears to me – by those not exclusively dependent upon them.Read more at location 303
The unity of the self is not to be explained in terms of a single, unified brain region, which acts as the master controller.Read more at location 385
Commissurotomy therefore seems to show that selves can be divided – at least temporarily – or that they needn’t have just one centre of consciousness after all.Read more at location 504
The unity and permanence we feel over time largely depends on our ability to construct an autobiographical narrative that links our experiences over time. But individual experiences and sense of self at any particular time can vary enormously. What is more, the autobiographical self is very good at self-revision. In effect, we are constantly rewriting our histories to keep our inner autobiographies coherent.Read more at location 566
To put it another way, the self is a construction of the mind, one flexible enough to withstand constant renovation, partial demolition and reconstruction, but one that can be brought down if the foundations are undermined.Read more at location 574
Many philosophers have argued that we are constituted by a psychologically continuous web of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and memories. Dementia says, well, okay, let’s pick that web apart, piece by piece and see if anything of you remains.Read more at location 630
We all ignore and do not commit to memory facts and events that conflict with the way we see ourselves and the world. We remember selectively, usually without conscious effort or desire to do so. And yet because we believe memory records facts, objectively, we fail to see that all this means that we are constructing ourselves and the world.Read more at location 694
They started from the correct idea that thoughts, feelings and sensations were not physical things. The category mistake was to conclude that they must therefore be a different kind of thing, a non-physical thing. But there is another, more plausible alternative: they are not things at all. Rather, thinking and feeling are what brains and bodies do. Mind should not be thought of a substance, but as a kind of activity.Read more at location 903
It’s a bit like a picture made up of hundreds of black and white dots. It could be that 90 per cent of the dots are identical, but the 10 per cent that differ create a totally different image.Read more at location 1177
‘The point of philosophy,’ wrote Bertrand Russell, ‘is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.’1Read more at location 1647
The Ego Trick should be seen in this way. There is no single thing which comprises the self, but we need to function as though there were. As it happens, the mind, thanks to the brain and body, has all sorts of tricks up its sleeve that enable us to do this. Because it succeeds, selves really do exist. We only go wrong if we’re too impressed by this unity and assume that it means that underlying it is a single thing. But the self is not a substance or thing, it is a function of what a certain collection of stuff does.Read more at location 1709
The unity we experience, which allows us legitimately to talk of ‘I’, is a result of the Ego Trick – the remarkable way in which a complicated bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, creates a singular self, without there being a singular thing underlying it.Read more at location 1757
Hobbes’s famous example of the ship of Theseus.21 This vessel is taken into dry dock for repairs. The masts are broken, so these are replaced. The hull is rotting, so that too is rebuilt with new timber. Then it’s noticed the deck is looking a bit worn, so that too is replaced. And so on, until no parts of the ship are the same as when it came in. So is it the same ship? And what if someone took all the old bits and put them back together? Would that have a stronger claim to being the original ship of Theseus?Read more at location 1899
Everyone is familiar, I think, with the realisation that our competence to use a word accurately often exceeds our ability to define it precisely. Wittgenstein’s insight is that this is not paradoxical, but a reflection of the true nature of meaning itself.Read more at location 1953

The Greatest Show on Earth - Evidence for evolution

One of Richard Dawkin's better books that outlines the reasons why he sees evolution powered by natural selection as the only plausible explanation for the wonderful breadth of beauty in the natural world around us.

He gives lucid  arguments against the common creationist explanations though not in such reactionary terms as some of his other works.

I hope it becomes a school textbook - it would inspire a wonder in understanding the natural world.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

A fascinating study into why human societies develop religion. Lewis Wolpert gives an explanation that belief was a by-product of the brain's development for using tools.

In essence, our brains are pre-programmed to have a tendency to accept religious and mystical beliefs because as our brains developed, they created causal beliefs of why the things around them were the way they were and did what they did. The better the organism was at this trick - the better it (and its offspring) survived.

Quite accessible as a read and he avoids technical jargon. Also not too dogmatic in the explanations.

The God Delusion

Well this is one of those books that tends to polarise its audience into love it or hate it (probably depending on your personal position in the arguments)
I unashamedly admit I come out firmly on Richard Dawkins' side and this is a great book for pulling out bits of argument to support your point. ON the other hand this is one of his more extreeme works and some have described it a s a bit of a rant.

Breaking the Spell - Relidgion as a natural phenomenon

Daniel Dennett studies the roots of religion and belief and why it evolved within society.

Why are such ideas so common across societies and so powerful within them? He doesn't contest religious beliefs but rather argues that we need to understand why the phenomenon is so deeply rooted.

On Intelligence

From the man who invented the PalmPilot, a book about how the brain works from the perspective of pattern recognition and heirarchical feedback loops.

As in several other books I have enjoyed on the same subject it captures the idea that brain functions such as what we call 'intelligence' are not coded to specific operations in the brain but are more akin to meta descriptions of such operations. I like the analogy that a water molecule isn't wet - but a collection of them do exhibit this property.

The Blank Slate

A seminal work on the Nature vs Nurture debate, that actually comes out to say it is around 50:50 but with much more nature than most would be prepared to admit.

Numerous examples from various studies to illustrate his points that challenge 'modern' thinking that we are all equal - we are not. On the other hand that doesn't mean we don't all have something to bring to society.

The Mind Made Flesh

A collection of Nicholas Humphrey's essays on the evolution of the mind touches on a wide range of apparently unrelated themes but his style serves to make each of them entertaining and enlightening.

A good book to read on a long journey.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An eternal Golden Braid

A book I read many years ago but that started me off on my journey of discovery about consciousness and philosophy. First published in 1979 but still as fresh and relevant today.

Douglas Hofstadter attempts to explore how consciouness can arise in inanimate matter (our brains). Written in the style of Lewis Carol there are actually three books entwined within each other.

Godel: who wrote on the theorem of incompleteness of any logically consistent mathematical system and explored such paradoxes as the liars paraodx - "This statement is false"
Escher: who drew wonderfull self-referential etchings
Bach: who investigated canons and fugues (tunes that are played against themsleves such as three blind mice)

Throughout the book he explores strange loops - where successive jumps up (or down) heirarchical levels eventually bring you back to what appears to be where you started.

If all this doesn't make your head hurt but rather piques your interest then I strongly urge you to read the book, after all it could be the start of a wonderful journey down a rabbit hole from which you might (or might not) reappear.

Note: I own an earlier edition of this book