Recommended reading list 1 (work in progress)
And I hope to see you at the Terasem Colloquium next Thursday, July 20!
Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:
Mark your calendar and don’t miss the Terasem Space Day Colloquium! The Colloquium will be held on Thursday, July 20, via Zoom, from 10am ET to 1pm ET.
July 20 is the anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon. This Terasem Colloquium will explore long-term perspectives on human space expansion, and the intersections of human space expansion with highly imaginative, far-out concepts in science, philosophy, and politics (and science fiction of course).
We’ll hear from stellar scientists, authors, polymaths, transhumanist philosophers, and activists. All talks will last half an hour including Q/A. This is the current agenda:
10am minus 5 min: very short introduction by me.
10am ET - 10:30am ET: Christopher E. Mason
10:30am ET - 11am ET: Stellar Magnet
11am ET - 11:30am ET: Clément Vidal
11:30am ET - noon ET: Todd A. Drashner & Trond Nilsen
noon ET - 12:30pm ET: Max More
12:30pm ET - 1pm ET: Tom W. Bell
Zoom access coordinates: CLICK HERE to attend the Colloquium.
By the way, I encourage you to join Terasem, which is a small but growing organization, with a great potential to do good.
I’ve been reluctant to introduce a formal notion of Turing Church membership. To me, if you want to be a member of Turing Church, then you are a member of Turing Church, and there’s nothing more to say. Also, I’m one of those who can do without shared rituals etc.
But many need shared rituals and formalized belonging. If this is your case, and you find my ideas interesting, and you don’t feel at home in traditional religions, then I think Terasem is for you and you should consider joining. To me, Turing Church is very closely related to Terasem.
This Linktree page is the closest thing to a central Terasem website at this moment.
Every month on the 10th I participate in a monthly Terasem gathering online (Zoom, 10am ET) with other “joiners.” I would love seeing you there! Feel free to write to me if you want to join Terasem and participate, and I’ll introduce you.
Recently reviewed books
I’ve been asked to write a recommended reading list, and here is a very preliminary one. I’ll continue to develop it and eventually publish it as a featured page on this website.
I’m a voracious reader and there are a lot of good books that I like, so my recommended reading list would fill a book, or many books. But I’ll force myself to keep it short and think carefully about what to include and what to leave out. I don’t have the time to do this now, but the list below is a first step.
In most posts I recommend one or two good books to read. Subscribe to Turing Church to receive book recommendations by email. See also my Amazon reviews.
My books “Tales of the Turing Church: Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology” (2020) and “Futurist spaceflight meditations” (2021) are full of reading recommendations.
Here’s my very preliminary list of highly recommended books. What these books have in common is: 1) they are great books; 2) they are mostly about science and metaphysics; 3) they’ll be prominently featured in the new book I’m writing.
“The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics” (2023), by Heinrich Päs. Also listen to my podcast with Päs.
“The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity” (2022), by Bobby Azarian. Also listen to my podcast with Azarian.
“Believing in Dawkins: The New Spiritual Atheism” (2020), by Eric Steinhart. Also listen to my podcast with Steinhart.
“Foundations of Quantum Mechanics” (2021), by Emily Adlam. Also listen to my podcast with Adlam.
“The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are In a Video Game” (2019) and “The Simulated Multiverse: An MIT Computer Scientist Explores Parallel Universes, The Simulation Hypothesis, Quantum Computing and the Mandela Effect” (2021), by Rizwan Virk. Also listen to my podcast with Virk.
“The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution” (1987, 2021) and “The Cosma Hypothesis: Implications of the Overview Effect” (2018), by Frank White. See my review in “Futurist spaceflight meditations.” Also listen to my podcast with White.
Everything by Howard Bloom. Also listen to my podcast with Bloom.
Everything by and about Robert Pirsig.
“Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions” (2022), by Sabine Hossenfelder.
“The Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World” (2022), by Tim Palmer. See also “Deterministic metaphysics is not always boring.”
“Code Name God” (2018), by Mani Bhaumik. See my review in “Tales of the Turing Church.”
“The Labyrinth of Time: Introducing the Universe” (2007), by Michael Lockwood.
“The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds” (2021), by Christopher Mason.
“The Beginning and the End: The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective” (2014), by Clément Vidal.
“Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False” (2012), by Thomas Nagel.
“The Demon in the Machine” (2019), by Paul Davies.
“Humanity in a Creative Universe” (2016), by Stuart Kauffman. See my review in “Tales of the Turing Church.”
I’ll write new lists of recommended books, including of course science fiction books.