@wfryer@mastodon.cloud#book2read: Unabashed Faith: Resisting Anti-Spiritual Influences in the Modern World by C. Andrew Doyle
https://a.co/d/5QeXagv
via [PODCAST] Resisting Anti-Spiritual Influences in the Modern World w/ Bishop Andy Do…
@castarco@hachyderm.io
@shriramk@mastodon.social1/ Something a bit unusual and fun: I read a travel book *after* returning from #Italy25. This is a book first written in 1913; I had the 1923 edition. It was tough going to read before I left, because (as the title suggests), it's really a tour guide of a book. #BookReview ↵
@Rob_Oost@mastodon.social
@bobmueller@mastodon.world
@kexpmusicbot@mastodonapp.uk🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #DriveTime
Book of Love:
🎵 Boy
#BookofLove
https://evankenney.bandcamp.com/track/the-book-of-love
🎶 show playlist 👇
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2KW4FxNKVGpVTgIJYolnNY
🎶 KEXP playlist 👇
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6VNALrOa3gWbk794YuIrwg
@unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyznew book about medicine history, "droplets" theory etc
"Science writer Carl Zimmer’s latest book is a brilliant history of medicine that takes us from Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of the 19th century to present day. Along the way, it offers an anthropological study of medical culture — a culture capable of ignoring science when it wants to. ...
"If COVID-19 spread in droplets, then it was worthwhile to keep people two metres apart, to put up plexiglas barriers around checkout stands, and make supermarket aisles one-way. Sanitizing countertops could break the chain of infection.
"But if COVID-19 was airborne, all those measures were pointless."
Bit of an exaggeration in that part of the article. The 2m distance does put you outside the densest clouds of exhaled breath, and sanitising countertops helps against other diseases. But yeah. A lot of effort wrongly expended due to the prevailing myth.
#CovidIsAirborne #books #history
@ronaldsnijder@mastodon.social
@glauber@writing.exchange @wfryer@mastodon.cloud#book2read: How Civil Wars Start: And How To Stop Them (Amazon, 23 June 2025)
#politics
@EmilyMoranBarwick@mastodon.social
@stefan@gardenstate.socialThis book is so cool. 650 pages with amazing screen shots and descriptions of each game.
#books #videogames #jrpg
@Rob_Oost@mastodon.socialAtlas Shrugged (1957) by Ayn Rand. A strange book, many pages, set in an unnamed industrial age, with some science fiction elements. Deals with clashing political and economic lines of thoughts. Romances (dis)connect the main characters. All a bit shallow and incredible.
#book
@andrewspink@mastodon.greenGraafdier door Nikki Dekker is een interessante boek. Hier is mijn review:
#books
@Philantrop@mastodon.mailstation.de
@theDuesentrieb@social.linux.pizzaI'm so hyped for the fourth part of Adrian Tchaikovskys "Time" series, 'Children of Strife'. I'm currently on a re-listening of the audiobooks with the equally phenomenal speaker Mel Hudson.
As each book of the series was increasingly mind bending, I don't know what to expect from the next.
#books
@tgpo@social.linux.pizzaFinished #reading The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril #book for the 3rd time. I love the old #noir #detective
@AmazingMeagen@historians.socialTomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by G Zevin
Was captivated by the people, the changing narrative style and a new world for me, gaming.
New York Times "100 Best Books of the 21st Century"
#bookstodon
@laimis@mstdn.social @shriramk@mastodon.social1/ I know very little about the Balkans, and I discovered this excellent book, Modern Albania by Fred Abrahams, in an unusual way. I was at the Albania exhibit at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, and this happened to be placed with the exhibit. ↵
#BookReview
@pre@boing.worldI read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld
@sascha_wolfer@fediscience.orgUnter #BookAScientist #Linguistics
@Philantrop@mastodon.mailstation.deNine Dragons (Harry Bosch #14), by Michael Connelly
#Adventure #Book #Crime #Mystery
@ronaldsnijder@mastodon.socialAt @oapenbooks.bsky.social, we have updated our #Metadata feeds, to better integrate our #OpenAccess #books into #libraries
@andrewspink@mastodon.greenI've been reading Go as a river by Shelley Read for our #bookclub. Here is what I thought : https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/39e0afee-a00f-4e68-8b1e-922d…
@Philantrop@mastodon.mailstation.de @kexpmusicbot@mastodonapp.uk🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #DriveTime
Booker T. & the MG’s:
🎵 Red Beans and Rice
#BookerT #theMGs
https://sfbdhq.bandcamp.com/track/booker-t-the-mgs-red-beans-and-rice
https://open.spotify.com/track/19Ctz6FcKusc2P3Z4WaQgj
@Philantrop@mastodon.mailstation.de @Philantrop@mastodon.mailstation.de
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