Book Review: Rescher's Free Will

Rescher's Free Will: A Philosophical Reappraisal [0] argues for a compatibilist view on the question of free will.  He very carefully presents his argument to reconcile the internal subjective experience of deliberate free decision and action within the current objective scientific view that the universe is deterministic.  The pages span various arguments for and limitations to free will that asserts that humans are ration beings that make "choices".  But despite the quantity, depth and breadth of the arguments presented, he demurs that the book "does not lay claim to the status of a categorical proof." [1]  He alludes to the ramifications at the end with regards to ethics and how we should understand ourselves.

The sort of free will envisioned by Rescher is very limited in comparison to the oft imagined "can try anything at any time" sort of freedom. He limits this freedom to choose otherwise only "if something-or-other and [sic; had?] been different." [2]  He rejects that agents have the possibility to choose differently if it were possible to somehow re-play the choice made as showing that the agent is not rational.  However, the determinism must not by-pass the agent either, the agent's internal deliberation and resulting decision are necessarily in the stream of causality, but these have a different quality than natural phenomena.  In contrast, a hard line materialist view can be summarized as "an illusion.  The experience we have of deliberating before some important decision is a mere bit of electrical chatter that our brains generate, the effect of which is to obscure from us the fact that our decision was cast before we were even aware of it." [3]  Thus, although Rescher does not postulate some supernatural decider such as a mind, the subjective experience of deciding is nonetheless elevated above other natural phenomena.

Overall, Rescher argues ardently on the question and common objections to the compatibilist position from both advocates of determinism and free will.  These are technical in nature and for someone leaning in the general direction, I suspect, quite convincing.  Even if one leans away, there is much here worth mulling over.  Overall, it seems that there is a dichotomy between subjective experience and objective reality.  Perhaps it can be thought of as akin to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle where position and momentum of a particle cannot be known to a high degree of precision at the same time.  One can address the question from the perspective of materialistic science or by analyzing the subjective experience, but doing so from both at the same time leads to unresolvable paradoxes.

Suppose you and I are playing billiards.  The playing table, suitably situated in the pub down the road such that relativistic and quantum level effects are negligible, is deterministically defined through Newtonian mechanics.  As each player takes a turn, the shot one will take, while affected by the situation on the table, is not predetermined by that situation, but rather determined by the player's deliberation.  One can discuss the forces, momenta and positions of the balls and predict the result of the shot taken, or one can discuss the motivations and strategy of what shot should be taken, but not at the same time.  The key feature is that different rules apply depending whether you are analyzing the movement of the balls or deliberation of the thoughts.  But you cannot find a single set of rules to analyze both at the same time.  Well, it's a thought.

[0] Rescher, Nicholas. Free Will: A Philosophical Reappraisal. United Kingdom, Transaction Publishers, 2009.  Note: this version did seem to have a higher quantity of typographical errors than other books I have read.

[1] Rescher, p. 162

[2] ibid, p. 50.

[3] Crawford, Matthew B.. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Book review: Graziano's Rethinking Consciousness

Michael Graziano's Rethinking Consciousness, A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience [0] is a popular science book where he elaborates in a non-technical way about his attention schema theory and concludes the book discussing implications for artificial intelligence and uploading minds.  During the journey, he explains his materialistic view of what consciousness is.  His definition is that consciousness  is the ability to have a subjective experience.  He explains that through neuroscience, consciousness, or one's subjective experience, arises from the attention schema which constructs a rough simple model of the world which determines what stimuli one's attention should focus on.  This interplay between stimuli, the underlying neural network, and the attention schema creates the feeling that one has a mind or subjective experience.  Consciousness is not an illusion nor is it something non-physical such as a soul or essence, but rather, it emerges from the ingredients similarly to temperature and pressure emerge from the average speed of atoms in a gas in a container.

This first part of explaining the foundation necessary for the attention schema theory and how that theory actually works is somewhat confusing and left me with a feeling that somehow it was all begging the question...the conclusion was somehow assumed in the premises of the argument and it ended up in a big circle.  But the next part speculating on the application to artificial (and given enough technical progress, biological) intelligence is worth the slog.  He posits that there are 4 essential elements to a being that can have consciousness or a subjective experience: (1) be able to pay attention to something; (2) an attention schema that can shift the attention between different things; (3) a wide range of content (memories, data, etc.); and (4) the ability to search the content to find relevant facts on which the attention schema can make decisions to direct the attention.  Following this explanation is a survey of the state of technology (in 2019) to be able to instantiate the necessary pieces to construct an artificial intelligence per this blueprint.  In the discussion, emotional states and body awareness are mentioned as two possible additional necessary elements to arrive at consciousness as we know it.  Graziano speculates these could be added virtually for artificial intelligences, but need more consideration in the biological scenario.

This deconstruction of the necessary elements of consciousness, Graziano suggests, could provide a means to test for it.  Certainly, a computer program that was written to be an artificial intelligence could be examined to see if it in fact fulfilled the requirements.  Biological wetware is harder to examine, but morphological differences between brains would show whether the structures where we currently believe the processes take place are present.  As scanning resolution increases (cue the alien abduction visual), scanning and probing could allow verification that these essential elements are present.  Based on morphology, he asserts that only the higher mammals have consciousness.  One of the consequences of what Graziano proposes is that consciousness is algorithmic.  So, on the question of Searle's Chinese Room paradox, it seems Graziano would argue that the room (not the person within), is conscious. [1]  Thus any Universal Turing Machine can become conscious given the right algorithm and enough data.

The last portion of the book focuses on the possibility of uploading one's mind, whether the Matrix is possible, and the ethical challenges with duplicate "selfs", if such are ever constructed.  While interesting, given how far technology has to go, it remains firmly in the realm of science fiction.

My motivation for reading this book came from discussions on the topic of free will.  Graziano offers no opinion overtly.  The materialistic approach of the explanation suggests he might fall into the determinist camp although he does offer that consciousness is not necessary for decision making [2] and usually, it is argued that consciousness is necessary for free will.  And so, I will end it here and I have Rescher's Free Will [3] on my night stand, borrowed through interlibrary loans from the University of Idaho.  I am in the middle of chapter 1 and already have a lot of reactions to put into words.  (stated that way as a preview of what's to come!)

[0] Graziano, Michael S A. Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience. United States, W. W. Norton, 2019.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

[2] Graziano, p.6

[3] Rescher, Nicholas. Free Will: A Philosophical Reappraisal. United Kingdom, Transaction Publishers, 2009.

Book Review: Free Will by Sam Harris

 Sam Harris' Free Will [0] is a thin volume (one of the jacket blurb mentions 13,000 words) that is easily digested in an afternoon.  He sets out to show that two assumptions are false: "(1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present."  Both of these are approached from a neuroscience perspective.  Neuroscience has made progress in mapping conscious and unconscious mental states and processes to physical brain states and changes. [1] Some of this comes from analysis of people with brain injuries. [2]

Examining through introspection, it seems that the thoughts that occur are self-generated.  The way thoughts appear to ourselves is highly suggestive that we have free will.  However, since much of what happens in the brain is not accessible to introspection and we know that some of the heuristics used by the brain can be easily manipulated [3], the introspective conclusion is suspect at best.  For example, having sat on the beach observing carefully for ideas for next year's sandcastle building competition, one would also notice the movement of the sun over the course of the day and conclude that the sun moves around the earth.  But of course this is an illusion.  Physiologically, Harris argues, the conscious thoughts and decisions come from the unconscious which has been ultimately influenced by externalities and therefore no thought or decision can truly be created ex nihilo.

The question that arises here is whether the existence of prior influences are sufficient that thoughts and decisions are pre-determined or is there room for a person to have bechaved differently in a given situation. A die thrown with a certain velocity and spin onto a specific surface will stop with the same number on top under Newtonian mechanics.  That we may not be able to predict it because we do not know the specific values of the velocity or spin does not negate the fact that repeating the throw exactly will not alter the result.  The sources and effects of the pre-determining influences on our thoughts are vast and diverse so as to make it currently impossible to determine.  (Although, one might consider "psychohistory" envisioned in Asimov's Foundation series as a basis for a methodology. [4])

The definitive experiment would be to run time forward and backward over some point in time to see if indeed one behaved differently.  Again, under Newtonian mechanics as well as Einstein's relativistic mechanics, outcomes are pre-determined and therefore would never vary although they may be difficult to compute.  Quantum behaviour, such as where an electron will hit a screen after passing through a double slit, is not pre-determined although there are regions where the probability is zero.  For the regions with non-zero probability, there is no calculation made or process used that can narrow the result a given trial any further than the computed probability density.  For many, this has given hope that if the physiological mechanics occur at scales sufficiently small that quantum effects can result in different outcomes for the same set of inputs, then a physiological basis for free will is established.  Unfortunately this may be a pyrrhic victory in that one does not consciously think and decide upon a course of action, it is merely chosen for us through the arbitrary collapse of a wave function somewhere amongst the myriad of neurons in one's brain.

Another argument that gets raised is the emergent complex behaviour of simple systems such as, for example, cellular automata [5]: the "self" that thinks thoughts and decides decisions is something arising out of the complexity of the neural network in the brain and is distinct from the underlying substructure.  But this emergent behaviour is not something that exists of itself and is merely pareidolia no more autonomous than the patterns of dots occurring in the cellular automata simulation.  Of course there is a difference between simple cellular automata and a human brain in that the brain does exhibit the ability to learn and change behaviour based on this learning.  But learning should not be mistaken for free will, it is an improvement in the ability to predict outcomes and thus is another input into the calculation of what is next thought or decided.

Harris dismisses the compatibilist view as simply a post hoc justification of what has occurred which does not substantiate that an alternate history could have happened.  When it is asserted that someone or something, other than the self, has free will, this is based on observation that it behaves in ways that are self-generated, goal-seeking, and non-uniform in response the same stimuli.  However, rule-basead "artificial intelligences" such as computer opponents in various games also display these traits as do most animals.  Assertions about free will are about interior states not amenable observation and where self-reporting is suspect as explained above.  As a result, when discussing the past, at best one can provide an enumeration of roads not taken, and when discussing the future, it devolves into an analysis of constraints on free action.  Far from making the case for free will, it is not even wrong.

Thus Harris succeeds in his argument for determinism and concludes with some discussion on the implication that people are not the authors of their actions.  Since much of morality considers the intent to cause harm a prime consideration as to the morality of an act, does determinism make morality irrelevant.  Harris argues that it does not make morality irrelevant but rather it suggests that punishment does very little (except in a Pavlovian sense) to deter unwanted behaviour.  Determining desired and undesired behaviours (i.e. what is moral vs. immoral) does not change whether people have free will.  However, how justice is meted out must change once you accept that people do not have free will.  While containment of dangerous persons and deterrence through the threat of punishment is necessary for the greater good, rehabilitation should be the focus rather than incarceration as punishment.

The persistence of the illusion of free will is not difficult to explain.  Human beings tend to give themselves credit for good things and blame bad things on externalities.  When someone achieves a goal or completes a project or provides for their family or community, these good things are attributed as achievements of the self, including that they are self-generated, innovative, or even brilliant solutions to problems that others have failed to solve.  The credit is then given to the conscious self because of the physiological reaction of good feeling that follows.  Bad things that happen are blamed on externalities because if one admits the harm done, if often results in a physiological reaction of bad feeling.  Whether good achievements are self-generated or are the results of externalities does not diminish their good.  The key here about bad things is that humans do have a capacity to learn which can lead to a change in behaviour in a future similar situation.  This learning comes from the sum influences on the individual and is not a function of some illusory free will to learn.

References:

(0) Harris, Sam. Free Will. India, Free Press, 2012.

(1) https://www.thebigq.org/2020/11/26/what-are-some-of-the-key-developments-in-cognitive-neuroscience-%E2%96%B6/

(2) Ananthaswamy, Anil. The Man Who Wasn't There: Tales from the Edge of the Self. United States, Dutton, 2016.

(3) Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Spain, Cambridge University Press, 1982.

(4) Asimov, Isaac. Foundation. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2004.

(5) https://lifeinbeaverton.blogspot.com/2019/01/python-version-of-game-of-life-cellular.html

Book Review: Time Travel, a history

Time Travel, by James Gleick is subtitled " A history".  In it, Gleick traces the origins of the idea of "time travel", which did appear in a way as part of some stories from time to time (such as a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), but that Wells' Time Machine made it explicit.  Paired with this is that physics, in the early 20th Century now also started investigating the nature of time as "the fourth dimension" of spacetime and that physicists were working on the mathematics to try to see if time travel a la Wells was allowed by Nature.  Gleick takes his cues from literature (mostly science fiction) and physics, launching into detailed discussions of the philosophical ramifications of the ideas.
Clearly from the fact that the chapters usually end in questions, time is something that humanity experiences constantly but it has a slipperiness that evades a good definition.  If somehow one could get outside of time to examine it from a different perspective one could make some sense of what it is.  But even this thought, if someone tries to clarify it, is found to be either so vague as to be meaningless or full of unresolvable paradoxes.  Every consideration regarding backward travel in time ends up into a discussion of determinism vs. free will.  Forward time travel at an increased rate is perfectly acceptable and there is a technical solution: park a space ship close to a black hole for a couple of days and when you head back to civilization, you will find centuries have passed.  So far, it seems that it is a one-way ticket though.
I have a hesitation in recommending this book.  If one has not thought deeply about the subject of time and time travel, there are many naïve thoughts that Gleick destroys, but one gets frustrated because I did not get the sense that something was suggested as backfill.  Further, since I am listening to it as an eAudiobook borrowed from the library, the convolutions created in some of the argumentation that I covered become unclear.  Some of the subtleties are not brought out in the contrast as well as I would have liked.  Nonetheless, there are many rewarding aspects and the book has been deeply researched.  The variety of references and sources, from Wells to Spock, philosophers to physicists, is astounding and surprising in some cases.  If you have thought philosophically about time and time travel and enjoy science fiction, then you will relish this book.  For the average person, it is ahead of its time.

Book Review: What is real?

What is real? by Adam Becker is on the topic of quantum physics.  Becker is trying to answer the title question which has been debated very much in quantum physics due to the prevalence of the Copenhagen interpretation which was championed by Bohr.  In that interpretation, it was considered taboo to think that the solutions to the quantum wave equation represented actual particles, photons and objects since the world was divided between objects that obey the quantum laws and measuring devices which do not.  Becker is clearly infuriated by the Copenhagen interpretation, attacking it on numerous fronts including thinly veiled ad hominem arguments on the proponents of the theory.
In its place, he provides the outlines of several different theories including the many worlds interpretation, the pilot wave theory and the spontaneous collapse theory.  He admits that there are still problems to be resolved but stresses that not all is solved by the Copenhagen interpretation either.
Becker's answer is that there must be real objects that are described by the mathematics.  This is Scientific Realism.  I also agree that there must be something there even though we can only observe it in effects rather than directly.  Boltzmann created statistical mechanics to describe the motions of atoms as the basis for deriving thermodynamic properties of substances, but no one doubts that the atoms that are being described don't exist.  There is still some science to be done, but eventually, we will have a similar understanding even if the Schrodinger wave equation is only considered a similar statistic tool to predict behavior macroscopic properties or results rather than being able to actually be applied to individual objects like Newton's laws of motion.
The approach is heavily biographical.  A lot of details about people's lives are included.  Becker also makes the point that the way things turned out at times was heavily dependent on the people and circumstances and that in fact the orthodoxy of Bohr's position could have crumbled much earlier if things had happened just a little differently.  There is a quite a bit of discussion regarding logical positivism as well as Popper's theory of falsifiability.  This is very much a book that considers the topic from a philosophical point of view highlighting the metaphysical and epistemological questions that are raised from the counterintuitive results of the mathematics and experiments that have verified the predictions of the theory.  It is very clear, unless humans still don't understand quantum physics well enough, it is non-local at least some of the time which has huge consequences with regard to normal people's understanding of causality.  But, similar to when Einstein shows that two observers can differ on whether two events are simultaneous, non-locality must be limited such that it doesn't play a large role for macroscopic objects at non-relativistic speeds of the everyday world.
I borrowed the downloadable audit book from the local library and halfway through came to the realization that I had in fact read it some time ago as a physical book.  Not too disappointed, I enjoyed it again.

Book Review: Code Warriors

Code Warriors by Stephen Budiansky is about the history of the NSA and covers aspects of code usage and code breaking.  I listened to the audiobook version over about 2 weeks.  The book focuses on, firstly, a lot of details about codes and ciphers and covers the WW II era in quite a lot of detail including recounting the famous deciphering of messages encrypted by the German Enigma code machines.  It discusses how through some mathematics, you can create systems that are practically unbreakable through brute force methods on conventional computers or even computers that might have 10 or 1000-fold improvements over current technology.  There is a lot of discussion in the later part of the book regarding bugs and other methods that have been employed and documented in the 50's, 60's and 70's to be able to get information without having to resort to breaking the code (clear text intercepts, either prior to encryption by the sender or after decryption at the destination).
The book was fascinating because of the shear amount of detail as well as the reconstruction of some well known events in history, for example the Cuban missile crisis, with a commentary of how the state of the art encryption and code breaking played a part to inform the decision makers of salient details that were not known publicly.  However, I found that in some places the progress in the narrative became excruciatingly slow simply because of the long descriptions of the fine details of the innards of various coding and decoding machines.
The author uses the technique of trying to make history interesting through narrating events through the eyes of whomever seems to have had the most interesting character that was involved in the incident.  And I think it gets overused since it started to feel like the book was a biography at a few points rather than about encryption and code breaking.
The opening describes Edward Snowden's flight with lots of information to Russia from the NSA.  At the very end, there is a little bit of a loop back to this incident.  The author tries to describe why the NSA was doing some of the things it was doing and also does elaborate how these activities are anathema to democracy.  However, we don't really get to a clear picture of the philosophical conflict between privacy and security that the revelations of the sweeping NSA surveillance programs that were brought to light by Snowden.  At best, it is framed as privacy vs. bureaucracy with a caveat that the political leaders should have the personal moral integrity not to use the spy agencies for personal or political advantage wherein Nixon and his enemies list is provided as a case study.
As such, it is difficult for me to strongly recommend the book unless you happen to have a great interest in both 20th century history and the theories that underpin codes and ciphers.  If only one of the two topics interest you, it'd tell you to read it, but be prepared to skim over some parts that might be out of scope for you.

Book Review: Sapiens

Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, is a book about the history of mankind.  It was written in 2014 and has generally aged well so far.  In fact, one aspect is that one of the points Harari makes, that being that 2014 was during a golden age for liberal values, was inadvertently underscored by events around the world, particularly the 2016 US presidential election results.  One of Harari's conclusions is that humans now are on the verge of evolving to the next level whether through biology, cyborgs or AI (see my review of Superintelligence by Bostrom) and that as a result the end is near for Homo Sapiens as a species.
However, it has been a spectacular existence in that in only 10 millennia, we have gone from tentative farmers with the first agricultural settlements to filling the Earth and becoming the clearly dominant species on the planet.  Harari does a cooks tour of history, philosophy, economics and theology during his exposition of the breadth of human history.  Although he admits that developments are not assured (we could still blow up the planet) and it might take some time (even a couple of centuries), but nonetheless, on the geological time scale, the whole of civilization since the start of writing things down has really only happened in the blink of an eye.
I highly recommend the book.  Although there will be some sections which may for any given reader feel pedantic, overall, this was a tour de force, weaving together many threads from different disciplines that I found compelling overall.

Book review: Superintelligence

Superintelligence is written by Nick Bostrom.  This is about construction of a general artificial intelligence and the reality that this is likely going to be an existential threat to humanity when it happens.  Bostrom seems to be convinced that this will happen although the timeframe may well be 100 years as constructing a general artificial intelligence is still quite a difficult task.  Personally, I have been trying to construct an argument using Gödel's incompleteness theorems to argue that a general artificial intelligence is really not constructable.  Nonetheless, Bostrom describes a number of different paths that are currently being pursued that will get us to the same place.
The book is a tour de force of ideas and vocabulary.  I've not learned so many new words since reading George Will's columns.  If I had actually bought myself a copy rather than borrow it from the local library, I would have ended up circling some sentence every 2 or 3 pages with the note that it would be a good undergraduate thesis topic.
There are just a couple of spots where it feels like the subject matter has been massaged to appear more academic than it is (for example the analogy with horses), but overall, this shows that there is a significant amount of thinking that has gone into many of these topics and Bostrom does a superb job of summarizing the thinking and the issues.
Surprisingly, for a four year old book on the subject of AI, it doesn't really seem out of date.  I am sure that it will start to appear aged in another 5 or 10 years, but I don't think that the real problems (the control problem, perverse instantiation, etc.) will be any different then than now.
I would highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in the field of computer science and especially to anyone who thinks that the current automated assistants (e.g. Alexa, Siri, "hey google", etc.) are the first step to Nirvana.

Book Review: Lexicon

After reading Jennifer Government, I ended up playing on nationstates.org for a little while.  It is an interesting contraption to play around with but not being terribly social, I got bored and let my nation "Oregano-stan" die.  Anyway, I noted that the site was advertising Barry's book Lexicon and so I got it out of the library and decided to read it.  I do think that Barry's writing style is not far off from Neal Stephenson and William Gibson although his plots are less intricate and his writing is less about the technology and more about political philosophy.
I enjoyed the book although figuring out that certain parts of the story are happening years apart was annoying to figure out.  The mechanic of mind control through specific words is an interesting one although I feel that it means that the mind must be linear and hackable to an extent that just does not seem right.  The grain of truth is that there is a way to influence people through presentation of ideas whether you call it dialogue, advertising or propaganda, but there it is.
I would recommend the book, especially if you enjoy science fiction.  Just a minor quibble is that the opening scene takes place in PDX Airport and well, the descriptions are just all wrong.

Book Review: Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick

So I have read The collected stories of Philip K. Dick. Vol. 1 : the King of the Elves [1947-1952] which includes Paycheck which had been made into a similarly titled Hollywood movie.  I very much enjoyed the collection which did have some mixture between Star Trek-like stories about spaceships, stories about fascism and stories regarding the exploration of effects of technology other than space travel.
Clearly Dick had been concerned regarding the rise of fascism during World War II as a number of the stories reflected elements of history much like the novel Man in the High Castle.  At this time, the totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union was starting to rise to power but I don't think that the level of deprivation of human rights was yet completely evident.  I expect that later volumes will play on the totalitarian themes more strongly.
If you consider the predictions about technology that Dick made, comparing it to what has happened in the roughly 60 years since the writing adds a layer of interest to reading this book.  For some things, technology ended up going in very different and unforeseeable directions.  The spaceship stuff is still very much science fiction.  But some of the musings on robots are very relevant given that we are just on the cusp of self-driving cars and other similar AI enhanced systems.
Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who generally enjoys science fiction.

Book Review: The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick was written back at the end of the 1950's and is set in an alternate world in 1962.  Since the last book review that I wrote, I had tried and failed to read through a couple of books, one being Jon Green's Turtles all the way down and the other being a history of quantum physics which seemed to be advertised as a biography of Wheeler and Bohr but seemed to be very much about Feynman up to the point that I had read and given up.
Anyway, so I was reminded about Dick's book, which had recently been made into a TV series, I believe, from something I had read on quantum physics even though there is nothing about quantum physics in The Man in the High Castle.  The only thing that is even close is if you were to think that Dick had tried to used the multiple worlds interpretation in his work although I don't think that was developed until much later.  In the alternate world, the Allies have lost World War II and Germany and Japan have divided the globe in half.  The story occurs in Japanese occupied California where there is intrigue afoot.  This alternate reality focuses on the horrors committed by Germans and extends them to logical consequences of the supremacist views and this would make riveting television in today's extremely polarized USA.
One of the items that is an important symbol in the book is the I Ching.  This oracle features prominently and is given god-like powers.  Although at the time, AI would have not been something that Dick would likely have known about, it does appear as if the I Ching functions partly in the way that the current AI technology (for example Machine Learning) works.
I enjoyed the book and plan to read some more of Dick's work since he is credited with writing science fiction in a "non-pulp" way.  Comparing this book with some of Asimov's or Clark's writings, Dick has a distinctly literary feel to his writing.  There is much focus on the emotionality of the characters; there is character development; there is literary allusion.  While Dick is characterized (and rightly so) as a science fiction writer, this book does not feel Sci-Fi because his prognostications about the future from a 1960 perspective are irrelevant to the modern reader.  The edition I read was unapologetic about the reader not knowing German.  I don't speak, but I have had enough exposure I can figure some things out.  But I feel like I missed the point (or possibly some inside joke) because of a lack of understanding.  Additionally, a good understanding of World War II is necessary to put the events of the book into context.  Millennials will probably struggle to get the WWII context.  But I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading something a bit challenging.

Book Review: The Hate U Give

The Hate U Give is a novel by Angie Thomas.  It is a Young Adult genre novel and I found myself not being able to relate to it very much due to the fact that nothing in my own life has resembled what the book describes.  I struggled to read it until the end because of this.  I do realize after getting through the whole thing that I have grown up and lived with many advantages that I have taken for granted.
I ended up borrowing it from the library and reading it on the basis of someone on Youtube raving about the novel which is all I know about it when I started reading the first page.  The novel tackles a very heavy subject: racism; and it does a fairly good job.  There are many viewpoints expressed in the various characters so it does not fall into portraying this as a simple problem with a simple solution.  It traces the roots of poverty in the ghetto and shows how the culture tends to hammer down on anyone that rises up.  It is an effective story and most people who read this book will be moved.  It shows that choices make differences.  There is an element of the tragedy of the commons aspect to this.  The rage that has been stoked through centuries of injustice rages within the community comes out to disrupt the lives of everyone from time to time and as a result, this pushes those who would provide stability away.
The conclusion of the novel is that the black community has to come together and heal itself.  With regards to the vitriol about the act and the perpetrator, it is acknowledged and the plot demonstrates how anger can color decisions and actions and that in the end, there is no good that comes from allowing the anger to take over.  But anger is necessary to spur people to action.  The tome is an educative one for others to understand some of the nuanced realities of attitudes that are taken about the racism question.  There is not a lot of time spent on exploring whether the white policeman was really a racist and in the end it is left as an open question.  The resolution does not matter because there are some racist cops out there and to build the future, the black community has to find a way to deal with that fact, engage in getting reform and move on.  This novel is one step in that direction as it will likely become one of the standard high school reading texts, it is that good.  It explains in a human way, beyond the headlines, damage is sustained to families and the community if police are allowed to stop people on the street on the basis that they were walking while black.

Book Review: Knots by Gunnhild Oyehaug

First, I have to apologize since I can't figure out how to get the special character so as to spell the author's last name correctly.  The book is called Knots and originally I had thought of knots in rope, however, there are some different kinds of knots involved in a few of the stories including knots in rope as well as wood.
I was surprised at just how much passion is invoked in the stories.  At times rawly sexual, the characters are variously mad, glad and sad with thoughts, concerns and action revolving around family, lovers, would-be lovers, old lovers and those never loved.  There are 23 short stories in this thin tome.  A few stories are related.  The draw is the simple authentic language, the vivid emotion with all of the turbulent internal dialogue such that the setting, the plot, everything but the characters fades in relation to the burning emotions and intense focus that the characters express as we learn a little about the dark cold winters in Bergen, Norway.
I've enjoyed the read and recommend it to anyone who is looking for something a bit different.  It certainly will not please those who are looking for a trashy romance novel or pulp sci-fi story.  There are some flaws such that one does have to allow for sparsely decorated sets and characters who are only defined by their love (or not) of their spouse.
Would that Ms. Oyehaug have one of her novels translated into English, that might be a tasty read, or, should some of these ambiguities that can be left alone in a short story not be addressed in the novel, dry and chewy, potentially repetitive in flavor across the entirety of the story.  But I would look forward to taking a bite to see how the dish has turned out.
Knots by Gunnhild Oyehaug is available from the Library.

Book Review: The Cold Between

The Cold Between written by Elizabeth Bonesteel is a sci-fi novel.  I picked this up at the Beaverton City branch of the Washington County Library.  It has been recently released and is apparently the first novel by Bonesteel.  The cover was a bit deceiving as it was subtitled "A Central Corps Novel" which led me to believe that this was one of a series of books.  Although searching now I find that the library does have a second novel by Ms. Bonesteel listed in the catalog.
I would give the book 3 out of 5.  Certainly the story was interesting, although it seemed to take about 50 pages for it to develop any kind of a hook to it.  Once it got going, it was nicely paced action steadily to the end.  The universe that the story is set in seems well thought out and relatively rich in detail.  The characters are relatively believable.  Although here, we have a lot of inner thoughts bandied about in a way that I certainly did not really enjoy.  There was a flavor of trashy romance novel in the first part of the book which does eventually subdue towards the end.
Speculative technical science fiction this is not.  It uses technology at the level of what you would see in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  But, while TNG often did episodes around philosophical questions, there is not really any of that done here.  There is a wormhole, and it leads somewhere, but the location of the end point in time and/or space is never revealed despite the hints that it's not where you would expect.
I am doubtful I will read any further work by Ms. Bonesteel.  However, if you like a mix of nerdy and romantic, this book will likely please.

Book Review: Norse Mythology

Neil Gaiman has recently released a new book entitled Norse Mythology.  This book, per the introduction, is a labor of love on Gaiman's part and he is trying to share his love of story as well as demonstrate how many stories are really very old, they are just retold in slight variations with new names for the characters.  However, I fear this ends up being his "Silmarillion": bookish, pedantic and missing the crafting required to have made it a whole rather than a collection of parts.

Between Muspell and Niflheim was a void, an empty place of nothingness, without form.  The rivers of the mist world flowed into the void, which was called Ginnungagap, the "yawning gap".

Gaiman has tried to piece together a set of myths into a whole story.  In my opinion, this does not work terribly well.  There are a bunch of episodes, almost like a sitcom that nearly resets at the end of each episode.  A few events have consequences later in the book, but relatively little.  I kept having flashbacks to a rendition of "You're a good man, Charlie Brown" as one parallel to this book.
More fascinating are the characters of Thor, Loki and Odin.  Thor is powerful, but yet makes bad choices and falls victim to his hubris (actually reminds me a lot of a certain current politician).  Loki causes trouble simply because he is bored.  He lies so well to people he does so just to see if he can get away with it.  Odin is wise and thoughtful but somehow never seems to lead action:  Thor and/or Loki are always taking care of the business at hand.  We also have a lot of giants of different types that are involved in the stories and as a result few humans.  But in many ways the gods (the Vanir and Aesir) and the giants are of recognizable human archetypes.  If one thinks of these as stories told to children, then adults who would exhibit the behaviors in the story could appear to be giants, so in a way it fits.
I found it to be disjointed, fairly pedantic (I mean at a few points, family history was being explained to the extent I thought I was reading Deuteronomy), and a struggle to keep my interest.  The end where Ragnarok was explained, (and this is the point: it was explained rather than it being a story told) it seemed a list of unrelated events.  Your mileage may vary and perhaps if you have already been submersed into this ethos, his re-telling might be splendid.  Gaiman has made a brave try, but unfortunately, I have to give it a C.

Book Review: Jennifer Government by Max Barry

This is an older book, written in 2003, which I borrowed from the Washington County Public Library system. (Aloha branch to be specific).  I started it on the plane and finished it that evening in the hotel room.  It has a compelling promise, in that the government has been slashed back to nearly nothing due to the abolition of taxes.  A free-market paradise of a world, everything has a price and the world has broken down, largely, to tribal affiliations and rivalries all fighting for supremacy in rational unrestrained markets.  At one point, the characters want to obtain fake guns as part of a stunt, but find it easier to get real ones and just don't load them.
The story clearly shows how economic theories are largely irreconcilable with human emotions such as love and compassion.  There are passages which have some exposition on "capitalizm", as it is called in the book, as well as critiques of it from a socialist viewpoint and both are merely sound bites which ring hollow in the lives of the characters in the novel.
Love, hate, paranoia, altruism, ambition, service to others have no markets.  But these are the human impulses with which the characters wrestle against a backdrop of might makes right financial dealings.  Science does not appear, each character deals with the reality presented to them through a filter of marketing, highly polished ad copy which allows propaganda to masquerade as truth.  Every impulse can be acted on, if you have enough money and any scheme to make money can be tried, even if it kills your customers or destroys the world.  Most of the citizens portrayed have no moral compass left and the ends are what matter, regardless of the means.
I enjoyed the book immensely.  While the philosophical questions are interesting, the plot is character driven and, trying not to give too much away, it is a love story with jealousy, betrayal and infatuation where the main characters each have an arc that despite how much money any one of them might have, they all want to just be happy.  And the happiness never comes from the things they have around them, it is the people.