• "Laws of Form" by George Spencer-Brown, a little book that describes how to bootstrap the Universe from nothing. Louis Kauffman [1] has a lot of papers/writeups on it, from knot theory to quantum physics. If you ever wanted to make a pancake truly from scratch, this is a place to start.
• "The Unconscious as Infinite Sets" by Ignacio Matte Blanco. Reformulates Freud in logico-mathematical terms and establishes a formal system (bi-logic) to describe unconsciousness phenomena: in case you ever wanted to apply category theory to study yourself.
• "The Protracted Game" by Scott Boorman. Interprets Maoist's revolutionary strategies during 1927 - 1949 period as a game of Go. Interesting both from historical, military, and game-theoretical perspective; raised an appreciation of Eastern wisdom and 'board games as a tool of thought' [2] for me.
• "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering" by W. J. King. Written in 1944, but the advice is still relevant, more so to the software engineering field. Should be at least skimmed at any part of your career.
• "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Alber Camus. Unequivocally answers the most important question there is — does life have meaning, and if not, should you kill yourself over it? I read it in my teens while wrestling with existential dread, and lived a somewhat happy and interesting life ever after.
You would definitely appreciate Intelligence and Spirit, which employs game theory, linear logic, and Hegel towards a theory of artificial general intelligence.
Retroactively, I would also add "A Thousand Plateaus" by Deleuze & Guattari to this list, except that I haven't yet read the actual thing, but only dipped my toes into related studies, like e.g. "The Allure of Machinic Life" by John Johnston that traces the history of cybernetics, A-Life and AI fields and adds a Deleuzian spin on top.
This is the only case in my life where I wanted to adopt author's philosophy and learn to see the world the way they do. The content is very interdisciplinary and heavily borrows from various fields (psychoanalysis, dynamic systems theory, biology, linguistics &c) and will surely appeal to a technically minded person.
these all sound interesting but the first result of laws of form on amazon shows an edition that claims the first ever proof of the riemann hypothesis, so now i am suspicious because that is obviously a falsehood. it's possible that someone has posthumously edited the original, but either way it shows that the book attracts cranks. any thoughts on this?
i see now that wikipedia states that spencer-brown claimed applications of his approach to big conjectures that never panned out, so now i am extra dubious. it makes sense now why people would go off and try that out.
It does attract eccentric people and spiritual seekers of all sorts ([1] gives a good historical overview), but also open-minded academics, like aforementioned Kauffman; Spencer-Brown's ideas were very popular in cybernetics at the time of Macy conferences, e.g. Varela's autopoiesis was heavily influenced by LoF. I also recall reading something about how Luhmann applied it to sociology.
There are some papers/presentations about applications of ideas based on these laws: circuit optimizations, query engines, various "iconic" algebras [2, 3]; I, like you, have a hard time buying all that (ditto author's claims about Reimann hypothesis), but still, it sounds pretty damn interesting and innovative, e.g. examples of multiplication/addition in 1st vol. of "Iconic Math" were eye-opening and intuitive for me, as a person with kinaesthetic learning style, in a sense that I deeper understood what "number" and "to calculate" mean; it also promotes the invention of various ad-hoc calculi and notations, of which I am a big fan of.
For me, the greatest thing about LoF is cross-fertilization: esoterical mumbo-jumbo benefits from formalization and mathematical approach, while technical disciplines find their root in the spiritual ground; that and the thought experiment of building the world from nothing. It bridges "above" and "below", and kinda reminds me of [4].
Minor correction: not at the time of Macy conferences, but rather at the dawn of the 60s and rise of second-order cybernetics; Macy conferences ended in 1960, while LoF was published in 1969.
• "The Unconscious as Infinite Sets" by Ignacio Matte Blanco. Reformulates Freud in logico-mathematical terms and establishes a formal system (bi-logic) to describe unconsciousness phenomena: in case you ever wanted to apply category theory to study yourself.
• "The Protracted Game" by Scott Boorman. Interprets Maoist's revolutionary strategies during 1927 - 1949 period as a game of Go. Interesting both from historical, military, and game-theoretical perspective; raised an appreciation of Eastern wisdom and 'board games as a tool of thought' [2] for me.
• "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering" by W. J. King. Written in 1944, but the advice is still relevant, more so to the software engineering field. Should be at least skimmed at any part of your career.
• "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Alber Camus. Unequivocally answers the most important question there is — does life have meaning, and if not, should you kill yourself over it? I read it in my teens while wrestling with existential dread, and lived a somewhat happy and interesting life ever after.
[1]: http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Form.html
[2]: There's also "Laws of the Game" by Eigen & Winkler that describes natural phenomena as glass-bead games with various rules.