Book Reviews
Contemporary books on consciousness, mind, and the question of self, read alongside the traditions this library keeps. What science and philosophy are finding, the contemplatives have been saying for a long time.
I Am a Strange Loop
A brilliant, maddening, deeply personal investigation into how a self can arise from the tangled feedback of a brain modelling itself.
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The Ego Tunnel
A vipassana meditator with a neuroscience lab makes the scientific case that the self is a virtual model so seamless you cannot see its edges.
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Waking Up
A neuroscientist trained in Dzogchen and Advaita makes the case for spiritual experience outside the framework of religion.
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The Idea of the World
A rigorous, peer-reviewed philosophical case that consciousness is fundamental and the physical world is its appearance, echoing Advaita through analytic philosophy.
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The Experience of God
A cross-traditional argument for God as infinite being, consciousness, and bliss, structured around the Vedantic triad Sat-Chit-Ananda.
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Waking, Dreaming, Being
A philosopher-scientist takes the claims of Vedanta and Buddhism about pure awareness as genuine philosophical positions, not cultural artifacts.
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The Case Against Reality
A cognitive scientist argues that perception is an adaptive interface, not a window onto reality, and that consciousness, not matter, is fundamental.
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Galileo's Error
The argument that Galileo's foundational move of stripping qualities from the physical world created the hard problem of consciousness, and panpsychism may resolve it.
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The Matter with Things
A 1,500-page argument that the left hemisphere's fragmentary model of reality is a cognitive distortion, and that consciousness, not matter, is primary.
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Being You
The best mainstream science book on consciousness in a decade, arguing that all perception, including the self, is a controlled hallucination.
Read the review →Looking for the books that pair with the library itself? See the reading list.