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Interests

My approach to architectural and cultural thought can be summarized as follows, which then indicates the authors that have been influential on me:

Books influential on me academically:

 

The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler

"The means to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy."

Spengler has two great insights. The first is that the great cultures of the world--Western, Greco-Roman, ancient Egyptian, Chinese, etc.--each have a distinctive inner symbolic configuration. The second is that a culture is "organic" in nature, and undergoes a natural "lifecycle" from birth and youth, to maturity, to old age, and finally ossification. The two insights combined, along with his abundance of historical and cultural examples make his work endlessly illuminating to the student of culture.

Any understanding of mind and the possibilities of A.I. must include a systematic understanding of the minds great creation, culture, and no system for understanding culture is more profound than Spengler's.

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Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Post-modernism has offered us the "social construction of reality." Merleau-Ponty offers us an understanding of the means through which such construction might actually take place. Merleau-Ponty's great discovery is the "body-subject" as the giver of meaning through intentionality. Perception not only comes into the senses, it also goes out from the body, giving meaning to the environment. All of our experience originates with our perceptions, which in turn consists not only of the conscious and unconscious modes, but also of the pre-conscious, namely the structure of the body itself. The ceiling is high or low because I am short or tall. The chair is a chair because I can sit on it. The chair is made of wood because I have the category wood, which is made of chemicals, which are made of atoms because I have those categories in my mind.

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Understanding Media by Marshal McLuhan

McLuhan is associated with the phrase, "The medium is the message." By this he means that the importance of any medium (by which he means not only print and television, but just about any technology including the automobile) is not in its content, but in the medium itself. Thus trains will stop infrequently and lead to distinct town, while automobile can stop anywhere, leading to sprawl independent of what they carry.

McLuhan shows how each new medium rebalances the senses and thereby how we perceive. Just as exercising a muscle will cause it to grow and strengthen, so exercising (for example) the part of the visual cortex used in reading will cause it to grow, strengthen, dominate other functions, and change the way we experience everything.

Long ignored following the boom of the late 70s (when 'media ecology departments sprang up in universities like mushrooms and many PhD thesis were based on single paragraphs from McLuhan's book), McLuhan is again back in fashion as an avatar of the Internet age.Now if some people would actually read the books ...

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The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

"Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation."- Joseph Campbell

"No one in our century--not Freud, not Jung, not Thomas Mann, not Levi-Strauss--has sop brought a mythic sense of the world back into daily consciousness." - James Hillman speaking of Joseph Campbell

Campbell defines myth broadly to include art, literature, and religion, and is a master at "reading a myth." But far beyond mythology, Campbell is the most powerful interpreter of human culture, not through his own theories, but through enabling us to understand a culture's own presentation of itself.

The human story is told over thousands of years of very capable people seeking to understand the higher order of things and their place in that order. We have made remarkable advances with our sciences (of which Campbell is very aware and very appreciative) but we would be foolish to think that we have nothing to learn from other cultures. Indeed outside of the sciences we probably have a lot to learn. For example our youthful psychology pales before the two thousand plus years of Buddhist studies of the mind.

While Hero is Campbell's most important single book, all of his work is worth reading. His essay "Symbol Without Meaning" in Flight of the Wild Gander is an incredible insight into our contemporary condition, and his Masks of God provides powerful insight into the world's great culture systems. See the Joseph Campbell Foundation's web site, jcf.org, for a full listing of books.

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The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

This just might be the single most important book of the 21 st Century (although it was published in 1997.) In it Deutsch, a pioneer in quantum computing at Oxford University, presents a fundamentally new view of reality that takes seriously four fundamental ideas of science that are fully accepted, but whose implications are widely ignored. These are: quantum theory, evolution, computation, and the theory of knowledge. Taken together, these four theories not only present us with the multiverse (the idea in quantum theory that when a particle has to make a decision to take one of two paths, it in fact takes both, and the universe splits at that moment into two parallel universes. This happens ad infinitum.One of Deutsch's proofs of this is that harnessing its siblings in infinite parallel universes is the only workable explanation for the inordinate power of quantum computers.

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The Quest for a Quantum Computer by Julian R. Brown

Quantum computing will be the hot topic of the next decade or so, and this book provides the best introduction. But just as important, it brings us up to date on information theory, which has taken major leaps in the past twenty years. Ideas that I held about Maxwell's Demon, the relationship of energy and information, etc. have been updated, and Brown's book is a great source for getting caught up. In this sense it updates Singh's Great Ideas in Information Theory, Language and Cybernetics. It is also a great introduction to Deutsch's Fabric of Reality.

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Great Ideas in Information Theory, Language and Cybernetics by Jagjit Singh

It is now widely held that the fundamental substance of the universe is information. So how do we get up to speed on information theory? I would work through the following:

1. Written in 1966, Singh's Great Ideas in Information Theory, Language and Cybernetics is out of date, but still an excellent introduction to the field.
2. Next I would read chapter 2 of Brown's The Quest for a Quantum Computer for recent developments in information theory.
3. Then I would play around--perhaps re-read Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach. Robert Wright's Three Scientists and Their Gods , presenting a lively introduction to the ideas of Edward Fredkin, Edward O. Wilson, and Kenneth Boulding. Wheeler's Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam ; and B. Roy Frieden's Physics from Fisher Information (You can get the introduction on Amazon. The rest requires graduate math, so skip unless you can handle it. Also peruse the criticism of Frieden on the Web.). And of course Claude E. Shannon's 1948 paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication , which created the field of information theory.

 

The Ten Books Most Influential On Me Personally

The American Film Institute in Los Angeles, California, in mid-June 1998 commemorated the first 100 years of American movies by making a "definitive selection" of the 100 greatest American movies of all time. The American Association of publishers responded with 100 greatest novels in English. WNYC radio then asked listeners what books were most influential on them, and my mother, Griselda Lobell, decided to ask all of her friends to submit lists of the ten books since 1900 most influential on them. Note that this is not what one thinks are the most IMPORTANT books, but the books most influential on YOU. I asked for the same from about 150 colleagues at Pratt, and interestingly only one (Bill Katavolos) responded. My mother thinks that people are reluctant to reveal too much about themselves. I wonder if some of them have read ten books, or have been influenced by anything.

Here is my list of ten books most influential on me in the order I read them. I made this list in October, 1998, and I might make a few changes if I did it again today. Click on the links to see my comments on each.