(Part 2) Top products from r/PhilosophyofScience

I'm quite enjoying it! And, full disclosure, I'm a bit of an ADD type... I don't stay focused on one thing for too long. I like to get to the point of something in as few steps as possible. The book really plays in to that! It's a collection of about 150 1-4 page little essays from prominent thinkers. They all were simply asked "What is your favorite deep, beautiful, elegant theory?"

It comes from edge.org.

Edge puts out a new one every year (at least I think that's the frequency...).

Last year's was a great read as well! Same format as this year's, just a different question.

And since you said no textbooks, I wasn't sure how much technical stuff you'd be up for, but as a physics major, there isn't really anything you'd couldn't deal with. It's a fairly technical domain. Amazon seems to have quite a few titles, including something very cheap from the very short introduction series. I haven't seen any of them, but that sounds interesting. I haven't read anything lately on the subject. Honestly, the impression I got was that there really wasn't going to be much to find, but if you are interested, I wish you luck.

The social branch of network science studies this kind of thing and would have some good uses for the data set, I'm sure.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=social+contact+network&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=

http://barabasilab.com/pubs-socialnets.php

http://barabasilab.com/pubs-humandynamics.php

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/pubs.html

With respect to looking for happiness, you might look for studies on sentiment analysis and the spreading of emotion in social networks. I know people have looked at how positive and negative emotion traverses the graph of twitter followers and retweets.

There's a small lifetime's worth of reading in those links. If you want a fairly comprehensive introduction that balances well between theory and examples, check out Mark Newman's book.

I enjoyed Consciousness: Reflections of a Romantic Reductionist (http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Confessions-Reductionist-Christof-Koch/dp/0262017490/ref=la_B001IZVC1C_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343766764&sr=1-1) by Christof Koch. It was a thoughtful and pretty quick book, it was interesting, personal, and scientific all at the same time.

Daniel Dennett's entire book on free will is a discussion of what free will is, why it can exist in a materialistic and natural world, and the implications of defining free-will out of existence - which has been done on one side by theologians who claim free-will must be supernatural, and on the other by naive neuroscientists who claim free will is an illusion.

I sometimes find it helpful to draw a mental line between the actual research on the one hand, and the researchers interpretations of their results on the other. One can often find many possible interpretations of a given experiment.

>What Im wondering about is if humans having little or no control over our actions is the standpoint scientists are generally taking now that a lot of new research exists to support it.

I can't comment as to whether the majority of neuroscientists would endorse this view, but I can see another interpretation that jibes well with the research I've read: we do have control over a number of factors and situations (e.g. ducking when somebody throws something at you shows control), but control amounts to a mishmash of both conscious and unconscious factors. Where others see research showing that we don't have control, I see research showing that conscious awareness has a more limited scope than was previously believed. I would not call conscious awareness an "illusion" as such, because clearly we have awareness, but I think we do have illusions about the scope of that awareness and we underestimate the importance and power of unconscious processes.

>I could add that the paper Im writing is on the emergence of Descartes dualistic theory and how it is proven or disproven in todays scientific and religious world.

You might check out Antonio Damasio's book Descartes' Error.

I think you should take a read of this book. I read it and it gives a great picture on topics close to what you brought up here. Antonio Damasio did a great job, although it can get a bit heavy on the technical stuff near the end.

Here's a twofer ya. The reason one should believe in theories is that theories have explanatory power. Most of the philosophical razors you have heard of are an attempt to get at good explanations.

A great book about explanatory power is The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch, and his 'hard to vary' razor is keener than Occam's.

I once read (and I've been annoyed several times by not being able to remember where I read this and who said it) that the most annoying thing in philosophy was anyone who attempted to do pre-Kantian metaphysics after Kant. I like that a lot, and to that extent, I think everyone had better be at least a little bit Kantian.

I think empiricism is a dreadfully mixed bag. As an arch-Darwinian, I have a hard time believing we have access to much anything beyond empirical data, but at the same time, I'm less than satisfied with Humean, Millian, or van Fraassenian accounts of what it is that we might know about the world given that restriction. I do like Tim Maudlin's views on that front, though I haven't worked through the issues in a detailed-enough way to really have clear thoughts on the subject.

This would be perfect for you: van Fraassen's Quantum Mechanics: An Empiricist View.

The User Illusion, or
The first idea would be good places to start.

A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science by John Losee looks good, but it might be too concise for a semester-long colloquium.

Personally, I would go with the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Science. Check out the table of contents in the preview; it's an absolute feast.

The gist is that you can’t just present facts, you have to manipulate a bit, which is why most people don’t bother unless you really benefit (politicians, clergy, salesmen). This is a decent read:

https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X

I suggest you read this book of Christof Koch

http://www.amazon.com/Biophysics-Computation-Information-Computational-Neuroscience/dp/0195181999/

Here's a scholarly review of the book and I notice that Amazon UK has it a little cheaper.

Just thought I'd point every one to Richard Lewontin's Biology as Ideology, which touches on the abuses of naive scientism in the realms of both the judicial system and public policy.