There are many references in the Reciprocality papers to other works. After reading Reciprocality I found I wanted to read several of these, partly because I wanted to see for myself what they were about, and partly because they sound interesting. The current set of books recommended here is taken from the "Additional Material" sections of the papers. I've added one or two which are relevant, and if you can think of other relevant books, let me know and I'll add them.
The lists are linked to amazon.com, so for purchase info click on the book title.
Comments on books in italics are by Alan Carter; comments in bold are by Martin Hargreaves.
Adams, Scott The Dilbert Future
Boxtree ISBN 0-7522-1118-8
Very funny and perceptive. A lot of nonsense is talked about Adams. Some say that he has failed to champion the cause of cubicle dwellers. As far as I know, he has never claimed to be the cubicle dwellers' champion - just a very funny cartoonist. Others say that he is a terrible, cynical person. This is because he documents workplace stupidity with staggering accuracy. All of the pomposity, dishonesty, bullying and ritualism is there. The end section of this book, about affirmations etc. should make your hair stand on end.
Brookes, Frederick P. The Mythical Man-Month
Addison Wesley ISBN 0-201-00650-2
Generally recognised as the most sensible guide to running practical, effective software projects, Brookes' every observation seems to have been thrown out by the ISO9001 ritual fixing zombies. This is why commercial software production is stagnant.
DeMarco, Tom & Lister, Timothy Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
Dorset House ISBN 0-932633-05-6
Common sense observations regarding making effective software projects. The best bits are the railing against open-plan offices. In Reciprocality, open-plan can be seen as desirable because ritual fixers love to regard one anothers' ritualised movements all day, and the endlessly ringing phones don't cause a problem, because no-one thinks anyway. Also look out for the comments on "jelled teams" and "professionalism" which is exposed as a euphemism for smirking pomposity.
Degrace, Peter & Stahl, Leslie Hulet The Olduvai Imperative
Prentice Hall ISBN 0-13-220104-6
The authors set out to write a book about CASE tools, and discovered the vast spaces waiting to be explored when we ask what we are really doing when we make software. I don't think the "Greeks vs. Romans" split they propose works too well, but they do introduce the idea that there are two distinct approaches.
Feynman, Richard P. Feynman Lectures on Computation
Addison Wesley ISBN 0-20148991-0
All good, but particularly the sections on Charles Bennett and the energy value of information. This book was stuck in legal wrangles for 10 years, but now we can get Feynman's words on this remarkable result, so essential in Reciprocality.
Gamma, Erich et. al. Design Patterns: Elements of reusable Object-Oriented Software
Addison Wesley ISBN 0-201-63361-2
The book on design patterns. Emphasises the compositional aspects of software design - the bit M0 victims can't do. Very handy on sites where the M0 reductionist misinterpretation of ISO9001 has got entirely out of hand. You just reference the pattern (by name) in the Architectural Design Document, and talk about details in the Detailed Design Document. This produces a useful document that doesn't prevent good composition by requiring the design to fit into an imbecilic, mandatory document structure created by people who can't understand what composition is, but are determined to stop it!
Goldratt, Eliyahu M & Cox, Jeff The Goal
Gow ISBN 0-566-07418-4
Fairy stories about how our heros manage to think around M0 and solve problems, instead of being driven off site with their stuff in binliners, which is what would really happen.
Goldratt, Eliyahu M. It's Not Luck
Gower ISBN 0-566-07637-3
More fairy stories.
Hohmann, Luke Journey of the Software Professional
Prentice Hall ISBN 0-13-236613-4
As far as anyone could go towards the Programmers' Stone while retaining M0 paradigm and language. The closest thing to the Programmers' Stone in print. The Journey of the title is of course, Hermetic.
Penguin ISBN 0-14-023269-9
How the "clearly very stupid" people changed the world. Starring little Bill Gates as the young Darth Vader. (Fact: In 1978 I bought a Microsoft product called EDAS for TRS-80 Model I. It was so crap I used it to write it's replacement and threw it away. The musicassette tape it came on was too small to hold anything useful.)
Naur, Peter Computing: A Human Activity
ACM Press ISBN 0-201-58069-1
Wise words from the dawn of time. How could it possibly be anything other than a human activity, but people have forgotten this.
Schwartz, Howard S. Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay
New York University Press ISBN 0-8147-7938-7
Describes M0 in commercial settings in a Freudian model. The model is largely correct of course - M0 rather than infantile memories is where the motivational and delusional structure comes from.
Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline
Random House ISBN 0-7126-5687-1
M0 free business thinking. Introduces "Sengian Patterns", which I reckon M0 victims will not be able to spot in real world situations.
Spencer-Brown, George Laws of Form
E. P Dutton ISBN 0-525-47544-3
The mathematical parts of "2: The Ghost Not" come from this. A cult classic amongst hackers nearly 30 years ago, also referenced in Robert Anton Wilson's "Universe Next Door" books.
Weinberg, Gerald M. The Psychology of Computer Programming
Van Nostrand Reinhold ISBN 0-442-20764-6
This ancient text still hasn't been bettered. No-one dare look for some reason.
White, Michael Isaac Newton - The Last Sorcerer
Fourth Estate ISBN 1-85702-416-8
White doesn't seem to understand that alchemy is a transformation of the operator - mapping - but his journalism is excellent so you can draw your own conclusions from his data.
Yourdon, Edward Decline and Fall of the American Programmer
Prentice Hall ISBN 0-13203670-3
I've not yet seen the second edition. The offshore problem didn't happen, because programming isn't the kind of context-free proceduralism people think can be done well in open plan offices. Sets out the dreary predictability of the standard management stupidity rituals in M0 shops.
Lucis Publishing Co. ISBN 0-85330-116-6
As far as I can see, this is where the mystical types start to get worth reading. Blavatsky (and the loathesome Crowley) are below this line, Steiner and Gurdjieff are above it. She describes a telepathy that works by convergence to objective reality, and deep structure perception.
Feynman, Richard P. What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Unwin ISBN 0-04-440341-0
The simple country boy exposes M0 in NASA.
Friedenberg, Edgar Z. Laing
Fontana
Laing started as a psychiatrist, and became a philosopher when he attempted to understand why his patients had been surrounded by the webs of mystification an coercion their relatives had created. M0 provides a reason, and Friedenberg's critique of Laing remorselessly describes the damage M0 has done.
Richard Feynman: A Life in Science
Viking ISBN 0-670-87245-8
Insightful biography of an M0 free person, and what he achieved.
Gurdjieff, G. All and Everything or Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson
Routledge & Kegan Paul ISBN 0-7100-1479-1
Very hard to read due to a construction that forces the reader to stay awake. Once you have them in mind, clearly contains the ideas contained in Reciprocality.
Laing, R. D. The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise
Penguin, ISBN: 0140134867
Laing's description of humanity in the grip of M0.
Ouspensky, P. D. In Search of the Miraculous
Routledge & Kegan Paul ISBN 0-7100-4635-X
I think the system of hydrogens is about multi-fractals. If anyone cracks the mystery, do let me know! Much on M0 and freeing one's self from it.
W. H. Allen
Reciprocality as ancient teaching. There's little doubt these people all thought Reciprocality describes the universe, the place of consciousness, and the current state of humanity.
Penguin
Laing recognised the deep logical structure in the linguistic games he saw people playing, and set it down. At the root of it all is the logical blindspot documented in "2: The Ghost Not".
Time's Arrows and Quantum Measurement - L S Schulman.
Paperback - 364 pages (31 July, 1997) Cambridge University Press;
ISBN: 0521567750
Provides an interesting complement to "Hypertime" and "Reciprocal Cosmology". Future states affect past states by deselecting microstates that would produce "grotesque" macrostates in the future. This comes very close to asserting the same things as Reciprocality.
Bell, J. S. Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics
Cambridge University Press ISBN 0-521-36869-3
It's worth bearing the picture in "3: Reciprocal Cosmology" in mind and savouring this book slowly. Bell's philosophical rigour and sense, his willingness to recognise the unsolved problems, are quite wonderful.
Davies, Paul (ed) The New Physics
Cambridge University Press ISBN 0-521-43831-4
Excellent general discussion of issues in QM and chaos in particular. Rich yet very readable.
Deutsch, David The Fabric of Reality
Penguin ISBN 0-713-99061-9
Deutsch's view relates the themes of quantum physics, epistemology, theory of computation and evolution in a quite Reciprocality friendly way. He's deeply wedded to multiple universes, but in such a way that we can swap them out and install the creative arrow of time instead. In particular, his challenge on p217, "To those who still cling to a single-universe world-view, I issue this challenge: explain how Shor's algorithm works" is answered in Reciprocality as an event that must be possible on both arrows at once - the same place probability amplitudes come from.
Feynman, Richard P. The Character of Physical Law
Penguin ISBN 0-14-017505-9
Vintage Feynman. See as he stumbles around, unhappy about what entropy is at cosmological scales!
Feynman, Richard P. The Feynman Lectures on Physics Volume 1
Addison Wesley ISBN 0-201-02116-1
See how Feynman first shows us a universe of dynamic movement, then gets into special cases like simple harmonic motion. Newton does this the same way, yet physics is always taught with dynamic motion last, after the wrong impression - that there can be a static frame of reference - has been established.
Feynman, Richard P. The Feynman Lectures on Physics Volume 3
Addison Wesley ISBN 0-201-02118-1
Feynman on QM. These are the mysteries - don't worry about them, just make progress...
Kantor, Frederick W. Information Mechanics
Wiley ISBN 0-471-02968-8
A hard book in places. Sections 1 and 3 took me years to read. Section 2 is more accessible. I borrowed the Photon Particle Representations (and took some liberties with them) for the model of massive particles in "3: Reciprocal Cosmology".
Leff, Harvey S. & Rex, Andrew F. (eds) Maxwell's Demon: Entropy Information Computing
Adam Hilger ISBN 0-7503-0057-4
Much on Bennett. I found the paper by Myron Tribus and L. Costa de Beauregard an inspiration. At a level where they demonstrate the equivalence of thermodynamic and information theoretical entropy, they observe that inductive reasoning is still not understood. This point convinced me that what I think of as a day to day occurence - and taught my students to also - needs a whole new chunk of physics to explain. Penrose was right - we will need new physics to build a synthetic consciousness. (Interestingly, the authors' point doesn't apply to linear consciousness, since that cannot do inductive reasoning. We could build linear consciousness out of kit to hand today.)
Mandelbrot, Benoit B. The Fractal Geometry of Nature
Freeman ISBN 0-7167-1186-9
If you've never seen this book, it's a real treat. For some reason, the geometry of nature is very fractal. I accidentally put the great man on his arse once. It was so embarrassing :-(
Newton, Isaac Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
University of California (English Translation), ISBN: 0520088166
Just Another Alchemy Hacker :-)
Rae, Alastair Quantum Mechanics
Institue of Physics Publishing ISBN 0-7503-0217-8
Standard text, so accessable for physics types.
Thorne, Kip S. Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy
Papermac ISBN 0-333-63969-3
Predeterminism (but not necessarily determinism) in GR, how Penrose thought round the Ghost Not and applied global methods to black hole entropy, how Einstein turned up at his local physics group with another theory of Relativity every Wednesday for a month before they stopped iterating.
Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained
Penguin ISBN 0-14-012867-0
Actually, it isn't explained at all, but Dennett povides a superb introduction to the fascinating field of Consciousness Studies.
Bennett, John G. Gurdjieff: Making A New World
Turnstone Press ISBN 0-85500-067-8
A student of Gurdjieff's for 30 years, this work is interesting because with Reciprocality in mind, it is easy to see where Bennett is making it up to fill in the blanks.
McDermott, Robert A. (ed) The Essential Steiner
Floris Books ISBN 0-86315-225-2
Reciprocality again. He wrote for a gas-bag audience, and it shows.
Ouspensky, P. D. The Strange life of Ivan Ossokin
Ouspensky's erotic science fiction novel. Honestly! Contains a "block universe" model of time.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre The Phenomenon of Man
Collins, ISBN: 006090495X
Evolving structure will co-adunate and reach an Omega Point.
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