John Miedema

50 Books that Changed Me, Pt. 3, Undergrad

Every extension of mind breaks a rule. Undergrad years are a good time for innovative thinking and rule breaking.

Psychology 020 text. I took a year off before going to university, but I knew I wanted to study psychology so I read an introductory text, learning the scope of the field and how to think about psychological phenomena in a scientific manner. I tried to apply my high school physics to craft an ‘atomic’ psychology. I later learned that a turn of the century psychologist, Titchener, had tried something like this using introspection as an observation tool. For my honour’s year thesis, I asked people to report their experience when introspecting and correlated it with their beliefs about reality. People who hold conservative beliefs don’t ’see’ much; those with transcendent beliefs see much more. Interesting, eh?

The Tao of Physics. Fritjof Capra explored the parallels between eastern mysticism and western physics. Critics, including my philosophy of science professor, said that Capra wrongly connected ‘real’ concepts in physics with metaphorical ones, e.g., energy. Well, I disagree. I see the energy described in physics as the same kind of physical energy at work in my mind and body. At the most basic level of reality, it all comes down to energy.

Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance. I read Robert Pirsig’s autobiographical book in my twenties, and again in my thirties. The author’s pursuit of Quality drives outside him outside academia, the ‘Church of Reason’, and breaks him. Several years later, patched up, the ghosts of the past threaten him again.

The Personal Nature of Notions of Consciousness. Imants Baruss is a psychology professor at King’s College, a small campus of the University of Western Ontario. Baruss’ course on consciousness shaped my interest in psychology, leading to two independent studies and my honour’s thesis. It is hard to shortlist a number of other worthy books I found as a result. Barr’s A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, Dretske’s Explaining Behaviour, Jung’s …, Lyon’s The Disappearance of Introspection, Marr’s Vision, Paivio’s Mental Representations, Pylyshyn’s Computation and Cognition. All cut deep in trying to explain mind.

Transcendence of the Ego by Jean-Paul Sartre. Most of my undergrad courses were essay courses, and I could not write an essay without adding some kind of original spin, until I read this book. It took me two weeks just to decipher and summarize this book. I thought I met my match until I later read Being and Time by Martin Heidegger. I read 200 pages, pen in hand, finally taking a rest, never going back, though I read other more accessible treatments of it. This book defined slow reading to me. I consider it meta-philosophy. You don’t agree or disagree with it. It just is. Very Buddhist.

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