Creative Zeitgeist

by Andrew Watchorn

Over the past three years, I’ve been working with universities, helping them incorporate technology from the company I work for into their engineering curriculum. My territory includes 18 research-based institutions from the Midwest to the East Coast. Needless to say, I spend a lot of time driving, and NPR begins to repeat itself after an hour and a half. I needed something else to fill the time.

Enter my mother. Mom is a neat character in the sense that she was not encouraged to go to college by her parents, but each of her brothers has a PhD in something (physics, education, philosophy). Mom has the same set of genes and there is clearly an interest in acquiring information. She is a techie–got her degree in computer science as I was growing up–and signed up for audible.com. When I am back home, about once every six weeks or so, she downloads and burns a book on CD from her account. I usually have it “read” within a few weeks.

Needless to say, over three years, I’ve now experienced a lot of good nonfiction books. My take on books is influenced by an English class I took at University of Michigan, “Chaos in Society.” The TA’s take on modern literature was deeply rooted in the post-modern idea of constellation-making. The stars are arguably a random arrangement of celestial bodies, but we create connections between them to make recognizable things. This is the same attitude I take when reading nonfiction. You take the ideas presented and look for connections between them.

The sum total of this reading adds up to me having read a large set of books that other people thought I would find interesting and have tried my best to distill a useful idea or two from each. I begin a lot of my conversations with, “there is a great book that talks a little bit about that…”

So, what does being well-read mean these days? A few years ago, I talking to a good friend from MIT. I had just read Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and a “for Dummies” introduction to biochemistry. We got into a discussion about the small amount of information that allows one to be up-to-date in biochemistry–he was working on things that were just permutations of the ideas from the Dummies book. Compared to that, GEB (which makes connections between artificial intelligence, cognition, math, art, and biochemistry) was a VERY dense read. I realized I would have had to chase down a million references to fully understand each topic brought up in the book at a fundamental level.

I made the statement that “you can’t be at the forefront of everything.” My friend was skeptical for a moment, “Really?” he said. Then we both thought about it for a second and he said, “That is demonstrable. There will always be someone who is able to put 100% of their time into their field. If you’re putting 100% of your time into one thing, you’re not putting it into another.” I walked away from that discussion with a sense that I still wanted to read as much as I could, even understanding that I can’t be an expert in everything–or anything, really.

I get into lots of conversations where I share what I consider a central theory of a book or several books with someone and they say “Send me the name of that book!” What I’d like to do with this post is start a list of the books that come up the most often. I also love to follow other people’s karma, so, hopefully I’ll get some suggestions that I can have Mom download.

My list starts with Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. The basic premise of the book is that self-referential statements are found in mathematics, art, music, dialogue, computer science, etc. An example of a self-referential statement is “This sentence is false.” Such a statement loops in on itself, creating a paradox. Hofstadter explores how self-referential statements and loops can give us an understanding of the way consciousness arises from the collection of biochemical processes that makes up a human being.

GEB, which won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, is a tough read, but, absolutely worth it. It’s full of wordplay, intellectual puns, and ideas that will make you think differently about how you think for some time to come. For those with less time, I Am a Strange Loop is a follow-up to GEB. Published more than 20 years later, the book clarifies some of the headier concepts in GEB.

I’ll update a complete list of my favorite books and expand on it as we go along.

Happy reading and thinking.