Reddit reviews Contact
We found 15 Reddit comments about Contact. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
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Reddit reviews ContactWe found 15 Reddit comments about Contact. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Read all of his books.
The Demon Haunted World
Cosmos
Varieties of the Scientific Experience
Pale Blue Dot
The Dragons of Eden
Billions and Billions
His novel:
Contact
Contact by Carl Sagan. (Amazon link)
Or even the book Contact!
Or Contact could happen. That would be sweet.
Some of the (non-technical) books I've recently read:
Though, a lot of these quotes are from journals of mine. But many of the above books are great spring boards to other readings (especially the "Infinite in All Directions" book).
I usually prefer to get people interested in reading philosophy obliquely, through pop. philosophy or fiction with philosophical themes. So much depends on what you are interested in...
Fiction:
A good overview like Sophie's World
Military Ethics / Social Responsibility Starship Troopers
Science and Faith Contact
Somewhat easy philosophy
Ethics: The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill
Mind: Consciousness Explained
War: Just and Unjust Wars
Yes. I strongly encourage reading it. The film is good, but it had a few shortcomings that weren't in the book.
# | Book | Links
---|----|----
1 | Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson | (Powells) (Amazon)
2 | Contact by Carl Sagan | (Powells) (Amazon)
3 | Bellwether by Connie Willis | (Powells) (Amazon)
4 | 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson | (Powells) (Amazon)
5 | The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin | (Powells) (Amazon)
6 | The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang | (Free)
7 | The Practice Effect by David Brin | (Powells) (Amazon)
8 | A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan | (Powells) (Amazon)
9 | The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell | (Powells) (Amazon)
10 | As She Climbed Across The Table by Jonathan Lethem | (Powells) (Amazon)
This is a thingy I would like to read.
Contact by Carl Sagan http://www.amazon.com/dp/0671004107/ref=cm_sw_r_udp_awd_LAl7tb06FZF2P
Contact
I'm also about to do a road trip with two other scientists! Here are some awesome books that either I've read, or I plan on reading on my trip:
Contact - Carl Sagan. This book is absolutely my favorite science-y fiction, ever.
Cat's Cradle or Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, if you haven't read them already.
Anything by Ray Bradbury - specifically Fahrenheit 451, also if you haven't read it already.
If you're into full-on science fiction, I can totally recommend the Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card and the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.
Upvoted for a really great response.
I would second crillbilly's recommendation of reading Dawkins', specifically The God Delusion. He deals with pretty much every question you've asked here. Complexity and mystery don't necessarily equal a God. If that were true, you could throw anything into those "gaps" in our knowledge. I believe that's where the infamous "spaghetti monster" came from. I could tell you he existed, and if you never find him, that just means you haven't looked in the right place.
There will always be things we won't know, and one can always hold those "unknowables" hostage as proof that there's just one more layer we've yet to peel away in our search for God. But my philosophy on that is: belief is what you want it to be. Its importance is only what you ascribe to it. You don't need it to live a happy life, only if you've talked yourself into believing that you do.
tl;dr - Read Contact by Carl Sagan. Striking a balance between faith and science is pretty much all he did, and he did it well.
I highly recommend anything Carl Sagan has written. The book Contact is a good start since it's fiction. It's basically Sagan's love note to science. I also enjoy many of his non-fictions since he has a way of explaining things so that even an ignoramus like myself can understand.
My favorite is The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, but the first one I read was The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal view of the Search for God. I really attribute this book with making me want to learn more about science. It's the first non-fiction book I ever enjoyed.
Oh yeah, and watch any interview you can find with Richard Feynman. He has such a great way of looking at everything!
Wow, that short story was awesome. It's great that there's still so much Greg Egan I haven't encountered.
You're right that this idea feels like a deus ex machina. When I first read "Permutation City" I walked around for a few days in a euphoric haze, imagining simulations running without their substrates. But then reality hit. I was running huge microprocessor simulations in those days, and I remembered that you can't simulate their instructions out of order. There are dependencies that have to be respected[1]. And Egan had glossed past that in a single page, so slickly that I never noticed. This feels similar. It's dangerous to introduce too much fiction into one's worldview.
[1] Though it's possible you can sidestep dependency constraints, using something like maximum entropy to simulate a set of particles at far enough time steps without simulating the intervening steps, simply by estimating the probabilities of different kinds of interactions. It might work better if you have a goal in mind to train for using reinforcement learning. Then you could leave the fundamental laws of the simulated universe open and part of the weights to train, and select the simulation that gives you what you want. But all this is probably like Borges's library[2], or at least way beyond our computational capacity. Or maybe you need to imagine your goal to such depth that.. what's the point of finding a simulation that yields it? The world has never been easy, so better to assume it never will be until one is proven wrong.
[2] When I first read Carl Sagan's "Contact", the final chapter left me in a similar euphoric haze for a few days. Inside the infinite digits of pi in all bases you could find all possible patterns, all truths. Then I discovered the insight of Borges's library for myself.
I wonder if this is what sparked Contact..