Hacker News Books

Check out the Unfolding of Language if you're interest in the Language Instinct. Also Elephant in the Room made me think of the Master and his Emissary, very interesting book, check that one out too.

> Why not both? Left neocortex hemisphere handles discrete, right handles continuous. Iain McGilchrist makes a convincing argument for that in his book The Master and His Emissary.

I haven't read the book, but this sounds totally absurd. What kind of evidence is there for this?

Challenging myself. Reading books that are hard and maybe not relevant to my current job but super interesting and provoke ideas. Most recent example is The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist.

Also:

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

If you want to read a book that has the potential of radically changing your perspective of things, give this a shot.

Currently reading The Master and His Emissary and can't help but feel this is a related problem. In short, more and more of life is being packaged into lifeless utilitarian abstractions, and less and less are we connected to spontaneous, intuitive, and humanistic facets of life.

Thankyou dang. This is not personal at all. I wish this person well, I'm sure he's a nice guy!

I wanted to point out a phenomena, that I happen to be passionate about. I have thought alot about this. It was not meant to be a random twitter comment. But I am very serious about this, and hope that people notice this pathology. This guy is clearly lost in his "left-brain" [1]: full of details, trees with no forrest. It's all about plans, manipulation, linearity, verbiage, control. No wider context, no magic. Probably he has an impressive mastery of details, but basically clueless, as I said. Very likely he is a positive energetic person, full of charisma, nice to be around. Yet too often we put these charismats in charge! So that's my Dr. House run-down that I was reluctant to give. In summary, good with spreadsheets, hopeless at finding a direction.

[1] See "The Master and His Emissary" by Iain Mcgilchrist. Awesome book.

The idea that analogy underpins all thought is also argued by Ian McGilchrist in his book Master and His Emissary, which I'd highly recommend to people interested in the sort of epic philosophical undertaking GEB was: http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/The_Master_and_his_Emissary_b...

See Ian McGilchrist’s 2009 book The Master and His Emissary:

> McGilchrist digests study after study, replacing the popular and superficial notion of the hemispheres as respectively logical and creative in nature with the idea that they pay attention in fundamentally different ways, the left being detail-oriented, the right being whole-oriented.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary

This might even be rooted in human psychology. "The Master and His Emissary" and other books about neuroscience argue that we have brain functions specialized for focus and other brain functions specialized for context. Activating focus reduces contextual thinking.

Currently reading "The Master and his Emissary" basically says that right and left brain ensemble back and forth

Iain McGilchrist discusses at length the two-sided brain in his book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World [1]

Fun fact: He wrote the book over a period of 20 years.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0300245920

It's not like I have it written down, but...

* Plato's Republic. It's not meant to be read alone, I think. Read it with a like minded group of folks a book at a time. Our discussions of this work still inform how I think of all the ways people form groups together, in more or less ideal forms.
* The Master And His Emissary. This book opened up the ancient worldview to me, and also gave me a strong rap on the head that "figuring things out" might not be the best way to navigate through life.

The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. http://iainmcgilchrist.com/the-master-and-his-emissary/

Are you by chance reading "The Master and His Emissary"?

It's not about the brain, it's about the body. Right brain innate connection to ones own body and to the world. We know that there are nouns because the body senses objects. We know there are verbs because the body can make movements. We know there are adjectives because the objects differs. It's a very left brain dominated view that would even contemplate that a language system would evolve free of interaction with the world, only through dna construct some language organ.

And language is probably a product of singing. Checkout "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World". Singing is used to share feelings in larger groups then ordinary grooming permit. Language is a systematization of singing. That is why music evokes feeling response more readily then words in ordinary speech, speech evolved later.

Except that is not true.
We know from texts that if anything old "geniuses" were not autistic, but they were on the bipolar spectrum, or more generally on the affect spectrum ( mood disturbance ). Winston Churchill for example is famously bipolar. Many texts refer to feeling an overbearing sudden sadness, as in bipolar depression spectrum.

Autism and schizophrenia are so horrible because they are not on the affect spectrum. So in a historic view autism is indeed a new and a modern madness.

I would recommend the book "The Master and His Emissary" by Iain McGilchrist.

In no particular order:

    Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (Keith Johnstone)
    The Master and His Emissary (Iain McGilchrist et al.)
    Emissary’s guide to worlding (Ian Cheng)

Black Swan by NNT already recommended elsewhere in the thread.

I want to go off-topic and recommend a non-book, Learning to Fly by Missing the Ground[0] (Venkatesh Rao).

And further off the topic, the discussions in The Midnight Gospel were the closest to qualifying as mind-bending experience recently.

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/11/20/learning-to-fly-by-mis...

I am currently reading "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" by Iain McGilchrist. It provides a good overview of current insight into the roles of the separate hemispheres of the brain (way beyond the usual hippy stuff). One of the distinctions made is that the left hemisphere creates "abstraction" and the right hemisphere works by using "examples". A good course in (pure) mathematics will emphasize both: understand the theorem but also consider these examples that demonstrate the theorem. Now it strikes me that this article by Gowers paints a deeper picture of this left/right brain divide in mathematics, and the tension between them that McGilchrist describes in his book. How remarkable.

I think this book, "The Master and his Emissary"
https://www.amazon.com/The-Master-and-His-Emissary-audiobook...
would argue that the right hemisphere of our brain acknowledges multiple perspectives and contextualizes them, and that our culture suffers from a severe left hemisphere bias.

Brain lateralization probably isn't what you think it is since pop culture gets almost everything about it wrong and it has become a career-ender for academic study so that no one synthesizes the research into coherent theses. Sadly, the topic has gotten such a bad reputation that I have to take a brief moment to defend the validity of bringing it up.

Why not both? Left neocortex hemisphere handles discrete, right handles continuous. Iain McGilchrist makes a convincing argument for that in his book The Master and His Emissary.

Also, the main difference between 'hardware' and 'wetware' arises as a consequence of a very simple cybernetic principle, to quote Wikipedia:

"Also in 1960, [Manfred Clynes] discovered a biologic law, "Unidirectional Rate Sensitivity," the subject, in 1967, of a two-day symposium held by the New York Academy of Science. This law, related to biologic communication channels of control and information, is basically the consequence of the fact, realized by Clynes, that molecules can only arrive in positive numbers, unlike engineering electric signals, which can be positive or negative. This fact imposes radical limitations on the methods of control that biology can use. It cannot, for example, simply cancel a signal by sending a signal of opposite polarity, since there is no simple opposite polarity. To cancel, a second channel involving other, different molecules (chemicals) is required. This law explains, among other things, why the sensations of hot and cold need to operate through two separate sensing channels in the body, why we do not actively sense the disappearance of a smell, and why we continue to feel shocked after a near-miss accident."

See also here:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/19/NYT3.jpg

Also, fun fact about the Macy conferences that a friend of mine pointed out to me recently:

According to Hayles, neither the term nor the word “reflexivity” exists anywhere in the Macy foundation transcripts, which means no one introduced it to cybernetics from 1946-1953.

Yes I referred to the correct hemisphere.

The right hemisphere is visuospatial. Also, the right hemisphere 'sees' time/process.

The left hemisphere puts together contextless symbolic model. So I see where your question comes from: the left hemisphere can do the contextless proofs. In this case (and in many cases) the more complex solution "works" and the left brain can "prove" it works.

But a 'simplicity' proof seems better suited to the right hemisphere (I am no expert here, mind you) .... So in my anecdote the "simpler" solution is the one that I would guess the right brain "sees" as simpler: i.e., it is visually much smaller, also much easier to manipulate (over time), etc.

The book is "The Master and His Emissary".

In "The Master and His Emissary", a (usually described as deeply flawed but fascinating) book by Iain McGilchrist about brain organization, the author had an alternative interpretation to address the essential timing problem of JJ's notion, where events around the Iliad are several thousand years too late for the process he describes.

The fascination with JJ's idea is not about his theory, it is about the problem he tried to solve, and that we still have not solved. He offered one idea, and supported it as well as he could with what he had, but discarding his idea takes you no closer to a solution.

Note that the events of the Iliad are around the beginning of the Iron Age, near the time of what historians call The Catastrophe, of c. 1190 BC when all the coastal cities around the Mediterranean (except in Egypt) were sacked, and written records dry up for four centuries. The Iliad was written down sometime after the end of this period, coincidentally around the time coins were first minted. Civilization had already existed for 2000+ years, and had money all along, just no actual currency. The Great Pyramids were already ancient, but still much more impressive-looking than today, because their white facing had not yet been stripped off to build mosques of. But I Digress.

I read this book "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" and based on that I would say your left hemisphere were active when right one was suppressed for some time. I can't recommend this book highly enough - it's very comprehensive and it give you an opportunity to look at the world from a different perspective

I read this book "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" and based on that I would say your left hemisphere were active when right one was suppressed for some time. I can't recommend this book highly enough - it's very comprehensive and it give you an opportunity to look at the world from a different perspective

It is generally better to live your life irrational and do decisions irrational, because this usually indicates decisions based on values, humanism and real human empathy. Rationality in it self is autistic and schizophrenic, a closed system that is doomed by Gödel to always try, but never achieving completeness and consistency. A never ending lie that we can know it all rationally.

I actually think that humans work the other way around. At our core is a giant GPU parallel computing system that deals in emotions and our culture. Slapped on to the system is a slow weak single core trying desperately to control everything. I can recommend the book "The Master and His Emissary" by Iain McGilchrist.

Notice especially in the Schizophrenic Paranoia in the link in the GP. Most people are dumb, but there are the evil "Persuaders" who are out to get you. And you are the enlightened one who has figured out the "truth". Classic delusion.

Fascinating subject. Much more is address in Iain Mc Gilchrist's book

"The Master and his Emissary : the divided brain and the making of the western world"

http://iainmcgilchrist.com/

ps: put short, the book explains how pop psychology belief that left is maths and right is arts (you get the idea), was wrong, and yet.. there is a physiologically noticable difference as well as observable differences in how each hemispheres processes reality. In short, each hemisphere attends to the world with a different kind of attention, left is narrow and focused for what we commonly see as intellectual acvitivites, left deals with a map of the world. Right hemispheres takes the world as one whole, it's broad attention required to survive in our environment, but it's also necessary for empathy, etc. The book then tries to show how the over relianceo n our left hemisphere in today's world has roots in the last few centuries, and that perhaps it is not in our best interest. BOTH hemispheres are always needed, but we are increasingly acting in the world from the left hemisphere (hence the book title "the master and his emissary").