After Best Reads of 2024, I decided I’d experiment with more regular sharing of what I’m reading. Below is a list - with links and a brief description - of what I’ve been reading this year so far. Among these Blindsight was my favorite because it provoked the most thought. I’ve written a brief review of it and why I found it interesting below as well.

What I’ve Been Reading

• Blindsight — A thought provoking “first contact” science fiction story that explores ideas around intelligence and consciousness. I’ve written more about it a bit below. It was my favorite book of this crop.
• Iranian Architecture — A good coffee table book full of pictures of Iranian architecture. Makes me want to read history and go look at some architecture physically (alas, not any time soon in Iran, though).
• World Builders — Bruno Macaes’ latest tome on geopolitics, positing that it is really a struggle about who constructs the “operating system” of the world. I liked the ideas and think that there is much to apply from MEV to them. We typically don’t think of global institutions as something like software or operating systems, but much is revealed when we do. e.g. perhaps you were surprised to learn the E.U. could arbitrarily freeze Russian funds at the start of the Ukraine war. But that is a lever the system administrator has always had. A diligent security researcher would have noted that if the E.U’s financial system was a crypto project being audited!
• Abundance — An argument for a new kind of politics focused on abundance from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. A lot of it resonated with me. I don’t think they break any new ground, but it is well packaged. It’s written with the left in mind; and I expect it’ll do pretty well. The right version of this book is The Conservative Futurist.
• Believe — Ross Douthat’s argument for why we should all be religious believers. The overlap with Light of the Mind, Light of the World resonated most.
• The Technological Republic — Alex Karp’s tome arguing for the central role technology has had in establishing the West’s power, and calling software engineers back to arms to join forces with the state and defend the nation. My sense is there are more Straussian messages in this book if one spends time on it, but I wasn’t motivated to dig myself.
• American Caesars: Looks at the rise to power, time in power, and personal lives of American presidents from FDR to George W. Bush. Pretty interesting, it made me want to dig into a few presidents and events more.
• The Trouble with Physics: On the rise of String Theory and why it’s not a good theory or good science. Very interesting because the book is nearly 2 decades old and must have been quite contrarian at the time. But, even the originators of String Theory concede its ideas now and admit that “String Theory has failed.”
• Quantum: Gives the history of the discovery of quantum physics step by step, and digs into the debate about what that meant for the nature of reality as it unfolded among Einstein, Bohr and others.
• Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Tells a story about the history of science and faith, and gives some arguments for how to reconcile these two using contemporary quantum physics thought. I enjoyed the history of science, and particularly the introduction to John Wheeler's ideas, like the notion that consciousness is fundamental to the universe because the universe needs observers to collapse wave functions. Or his time-bending delayed-choice experiment.
• Space Oddities: A book about a bunch of anomalies that challenge our understanding of physics. I love this kind of thing, and I learned of some new oddities, but the book actually didn’t cover my favorite mysteries in physics.
• Einstein and the Quantum Revolutions: A nice little book giving surface level explanations of first quantum physics itself, and second Bell’s Theorem opening the door to experimental tests of quantum entanglement, thereby paving the way for quantum computing and cryptography. Don’t read it for depth, though.
• Nationalism: A World History: Self-explanatory, haven’t finished this yet.
• Freedom from Fear: A self described “incomplete history” of liberalism. Also haven’t finished this yet. Interesting angle to describe liberalism but I doubt that it will stick with me (compared to, say, Fukuyama’s drier tripartite description).

On Blindsight

"Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters."

"Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels."

Blindsight is a hard sci-fi story centered on first contact between humans and aliens. The central idea is that consciousness is a disadvantage.

Without revealing too much, the basic argument is that our conscious mind is a bottleneck rather than the mastermind behind our actions. Our unconscious brain can handle - indeed, does handle - more than we imagine. You’ve experienced this in your reflexes or gut intuition; or perhaps the oft-idolized “flow state” where our self-awareness recedes and our unconscious brain takes over. In this view, consciousness is less an enabler than a parasite - a drain on computational resources and a limiter of our true capabilities.

Beyond being an interesting idea, the book takes on striking new meaning given the advances in raw, computational intelligence. Written in 2006, the protagonists encounters at some point an alien intelligence that, when contacted in English, replies in English. After a good deal of probing conversations they conclude that it is a “Chinese room” - an uncanny intelligence that communicates like us without genuine understanding. At the time it must have seemed quite radical to think that something could convincingly replicate our speech using raw statistics and pattern matching. But in 2025 this is a fact of life with LLMs!

If you scale this up to an entire species, what would that look like? How would an intelligence without consciousness operate? What are the evolutionary dynamics between intelligences with different levels of consciousness? Is one end of the “Hyper-conscious to not-conscious” tradeoff spectrum the natural predator and the other prey? The book explores these questions, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly.

Blindsight has left me pondering about these lines of inquiry. It is hard to not read this book without thinking about AI. Consciousness being a maladaptive trait gives new color to what we’re summoning into the world. And it makes me think what future augmentations of our biological wiring with AI might bring. So, if you measure a book by the thoughts it provokes then Blindsight was very fruitful for me.

However, the ideas compensate for a story and writing that I otherwise found lacking. At various points the book was difficult to get through. The writing was dense. The descriptions of environments made little sense. Details of the story didn’t always either. I started the book last year and got 15% of the way through before putting it down and not returning to it for a year, when I actually got really engaged on the second try.

After finishing the book I realized some of these issues were as much a feature than a bug. The way the story is told itself is part of the story. A close second reading confirmed this, and knowing the arc of the story provided a key that unlocked depth in early passages that lost my interest otherwise. The author was clever and thoughtful about the story, but so much so that he almost lost me on my first pass through the book.

Still, the core idea of the book and a few chapters were good enough that it balances the book out and I feel good about recommending Blindsight if you’re in the mood for hard sci-fi. Now I am on to the next in the series, Echopraxia.