100 books like The Robot's Rebellion

Based on scientific arguments, this book shows how strongly incorrect drives are stuck in our brains, causing us to think that we are making a logical decision, while this is not the case.

The best example I tell everybody: Look at your attic that you want to clean out. You empty your cupboards, and almost always, a large part goes back into the cupboard because it is a waste. But if you are offered the same stuff for free, you usually don't want it.

The message of this example: Your brain finds it difficult to get rid of something you have, and it is a non-rational reaction that occurs in our fixed brain.

As with any other academic discipline, philosophy has its own language. This is not jargon (or it shouldn’t be!). It is a technical terminology. To look at something very closely, as any academic discipline does, is to record distinctions that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Immediately two names are needed where only one was needed before. This book will talk you through the most important of these distinctions. The book also looks at the methodology of philosophy, the most important of which, of course, is logic. 

In this book, David-Hillel Ruben introduces the ways in which various philosophers have tried to explain the concept of explanation, before ending with his own account of explanation. Explaining is one of the most important actions a human being can engage in. Diagnoses, for example, are explanations of why you have the symptoms you have, or perhaps they are explanations of why that bridge collapsed or why those people bombed that mosque. In trying to explain something we make our first attempts at trying to understand the phenomenon under investigation. But what actually is an explanation? What do we do when we try to explain something. This is not an easy read, but it is an excellent book. 

This book grabs your attention right from the start. Four people are on a train, and one of them believes in witches. That’s crazy, right? (The witches part, not the train part.) But can you prove that he is wrong? One character trusts science, and only science. Another is a relativist, who believes that each person’s opinion is “true for them.” And then there is the annoying young philosopher, who is just as irritating as she is logical. This is a great book about truth, knowledge, fallibility, and tolerance. Timothy Williamson is one of the best philosophers alive today, and yet this book is accessible and engaging for anyone who wants to think about fundamental questions. The characters are compelling, and the writing is witty and fun.

When I was a musician encountering theory in cognitive science for the first time, this book really moved me. I was searching for conceptual lenses on cognition in instrumental practice and this book is aimed at grounding the study of cognition in the body. I can still see myself sitting at a huge ugly desk under a tiny window thoroughly absorbed in this thrilling page-turner in the philosophy of mind. The book moved me so profoundly that I cried when I approached the last page, and gently closed the back cover. It is a precious book. It changed my world. 

On the last page of The Continuity of Mind, I playfully hinted at a sequel (probably written by someone else) that would continue the paradigm’s push not just away from a “computer metaphor for the mind” but even beyond a brain-based approach to cognition. A couple of years later, Tony Chemero published Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, which (to me) felt like that sequel. 

In Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, Chemero draws on philosophy, then on cognitive psychology, then on dynamical systems theory, then on ecological psychology, and finally back to philosophy to tell the story of a progressive interdisciplinary approach to understanding sensorimotor processing and human experience as belonging to the natural order – rather than being some unique phenomenon that has no overlap with the rest of the natural world. After setting the stage with a treatment of the philosophical background and defining what the theoretical stakes… show more.

Professor Elizabeth Loftus essentially launched the modern field of eyewitness studies with her experiments on the dynamics of human memory in the eyewitness context, and this book discusses her most important experiments, major studies which reinvigorated this important field.

She demonstrated that memory can be reconfigured in the presence of post-event information, to the degree that a given eyewitness memory may bear no resemblance to the actual events supposedly being remembered.

This is among the most important books in forensic cognitive science, the psychological basis of law enforcement, and the criminal justice system.

Loftus began the studies which culminated in my own book. Her work focused on eyewitness memory, but has implications far beyond that realm in more modern research.

The dynamics she identified operate in realms as disparate as officer-involved shootings, training for the detection of terrorist bombs, and even beliefs in paranormal phenomena and "sightings" of such… show more.

Where Andy Clark leaves off, claiming that cognition is extended into the environment via the tools that we use, Kirchhoff and Kiverstein take up claiming that consciousness itself may also be extended into the environment under certain circumstances. Consider that moment when you and someone close to you are both trying to remember the name of some actor from a movie. You both feel like the name is on the tip of your tongues but can’t quite come to a realization. You manage to blurt out the first name but nothing else and then your partner blurts out the last name. As per Andy Clark, this is clearly a case of extended cognition between two people. But is it perhaps also a case of a momentary shared consciousness? 

Kirchhoff and Kiverstein first provide a scholarly analytical philosophical treatment of recent iterations of the extended cognition hypothesis primarily to draw the… show more.

This book provides the reader with a foundation as to how we think through our bodily experience in the world. It argues that we think through the body and through experience and that bodily engagement with the world (organism-environment interaction) is used to develop more abstract modes of thought.

I find this key to understanding design generally.

We know from the work of Bartlett and Loftus that memory is malleable, changing in the directions of gist, brevity, and personal belief. 

This book provides a more modern academic view of these phenomena, demonstrating why eyewitness memory, and other aspects of memory such as those involved in combat situations and officer-involved shootings, may be entirely inaccurate without any ill will or prevarication on the part of the given witness.

Not an easy read, but an important one for those who wish to have a full understanding of memory in the criminal justice system.