The main idea of this wonderfully-multidisciplinary and intellectually-stimulating book on consciousness can be summarized as:

Consciousness in humans is analogous to how a user interacts with the software on a computing device: a simple, unified user interface hiding an overwhelming amount of details in the underlying implementation (bits and bytes) in order to allow the user to focus on the goal at hand, such as text editing, form filling, and listening to recorded music. Consciousness is “a lie”, albeit a useful one. It enables the individual who possesses it to achieve actions needed for survival and thriving in the complex world: decision making, planning, and interaction with other individuals.

This book is written in clear, engaging English, covering a wide-range of seemingly-remote but in fact deeply-connected topics. This gives the reader a sense of panoramic intellectual beauty centered at the philosophical question of consciousness: one that spans physics, mathematics, computer science, neurophysiology, psychology, and sociology.

The author starts by discussing the question of Maxwell’s Demon and the 2nd law of thermodynamics. He uses this discussion as a launch point for the claim that information by itself is not useful or valuable. Instead, the selective discarding of information, referred to as “exformation“, is the hallmark of intelligence. Exformation is the hard work done to extract the a small amount of most relevant insight from a pile of raw information. This deeply resonates with modern intellectual workers, who are familiar with, e.g., the fact that the most valuable part of a scientific paper is not always what’s explicitly written down, but includes the failed explorations, debates, and discussions along the way of the research that crystallized in the final choice of methods and the results. In fact, the most valuable bit about the paper might be in the selection of the very topic to attack in the first place, which may be the result of years of painstaking deliberation and trial-and-error (i.e., discarded information), little of which is directly visible in the final output.

Exformation is the true intellectual value – a claim that the author connects convincingly to the field of computational complexity (Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and Turing’s halting problem) and the theory of computational depth (Kolmogorov).

This principle of exformation is embodied in the human brain through the fact that the information bandwidth from the senses (1M bps) far exceeds the estimated bandwidth of high-level, conscious cognition (10-20 bps). Evidence for the latter is abundant, including the famous 7±2 capacity of working memory (Miller 1956) and the known facts regarding typical speaking rate seen in humans (200 words/minute, or approximately 3 words/second). Based on this observation of exformation, the author formulates the human mind has consisting of two-levels: the high-bandwidth, low-level “Me” that is non-conscious, and the low-bandwidth, high-level “I” that is conscious. “I” is based on the input information from “Me”, but only a highly-processed version of it. This processing is best seen from a few astonishing and revealing results by Benjamin Libet’s famous perceptual and motoric studies, ones that show that 1) the conscious awareness of self-initiated simple actions such as flexing of a finger lags behind the onset of the EEG correlate (the readiness potential) by ~300 ms; and 2) the conscious awareness of simple sensory stimuli (e.g., tactile stimulation of the skin) also lags the stimulus onset by about the same long latency, despite the fact that the sensation is antedated (moved backward in time) to roughly correspond to the actual stimulus. Such a long latency is the time it takes to perform this exformation process.

The author’s philosophical musing of the relation between “Me” (the grounded self) and “I” (the illusory self) resonates with thoughts such as the “flow state” and those who pursue high levels of artistic and athletic achievement. In those ideal states, one often feels that “I” retreats to the background, if not disappearing altogether (the Buddhist ideal of “no self”), hence giving “Me” an unhindered chance to perform at its impressive high bandwidth. Think of saying such as “dance like no one is watching”, where “no one” includes the “I”. Yet the reader is reminded that in the modern world, “Me” cannot function without an “I”, because it is “I” that navigates social relations, sets the goals, directs “Me” to overcome difficulties and challenges against its animal nature (e.g., initial fear and laziness).

Despite all these intriguing points throughout this chapters, this book is not the final word on the hard problem of consciousness. The formulation of the user illusion itself hints at its biggest weak point. The user-illusion analogy pre-supposes that there is an entity (i.e., the user) as the starting point. In the analogy, the user (human operator of a computing device) exists before the device and the software are made and presented to the user. But in the human brain, there is no such pre-existing entity. So where does this entity that corresponds to the user in the analogy, one that “experiences” the result of the computer’s exformation process, come from? This entity must be bootstrapped into existence by the neurophysiological substrates of consciousness, as if the computer bootstraps a user! Thus following the user-illusion analogy leads to this nonsensical conclusion.

The reader can hardly blame the author for this gaping hole, because it is rooted in the deepest unanswered metaphysical question about the nature of subjective experiences and the self, one that rings throughout the history of philosophy in the form of Cartesian dualism, theological thoughts, and panpsychism. The materialistic and monistic view in this User Illusion book provides experimental data points that a final solution to this problem must fit.

Before ending this note, let me write down a few thoughts about the question of consciousness in modern AI models (e.g., large language models or LLMs). The User Illusion book does not provide much useful insight to the question of whether an LLM is or can be conscious. The exformation process may truly be a foundation for consciousness in humans. But there is no reason to believe that any kind of consciousness or self-awareness must be built on exformation. LLMs are fortuitously similar to the low bandwidth of human language production, but that is just a trivial consequence of their textual input and output modality. This analogy breaks down as soon as we move from LLMs to large multi-modal models such as those with image and video output. There are few key questions surrounding LLM consciousness, such as the nature of symbolic reference (meaning) and self-reference. Questions like those received a deeper treatment in D. Hofstadter’s books (e.g., GEB and I Am a Strange Loop) than in this book. But none of this is to take away the quality and depth of The User Illusion. For example, this book reminded me of two interesting and under-explored questions regarding LLMs: 1) the computational depth of LLMs and how it relates to their mathematical formulation and 2) pre-training followed by auto-regressive sampling as a form of exformation. In this regard this book can serve as a useful source of inspiration and guide.

Previously, I posted my reading notes for J.E. Gardiner’s “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven”. This book is another biography of J.S. Bach. I consider it more authoritative and comprehensive than the Gardiner book. It may be the “standard Bach biography” in today’s English-speaking world. Christoph Wolff, the German-born author of the book, used to be the chair of Harvard University’s Department of Music before he retired emeritus. Having published numerous other books and articles on Bach and other classical composers, Wolff is probably the most knowledgeable living person on Bach’s life and musical trajectory. 

Unlike Gardiner’s vocal background, Wolff’s musical training is in the area of keyboard instruments. Therefore this book has a better coverage of Bach’s keyboard works than Gardiner’s book, and may be a little less detailed or personal regarding the vocal works. But it is still a well-rounded account of all Bach’s extant works, including keyboard, vocal (cantatas, passions, masses), and other instruments, so much so that the book can be used as a reference for all the major works in the BWV and BWV Anhang catalogs.

For me, this book is a thoroughly fun read because it helps me mentally place all the familiar pieces of music composed by Bach into appropriate historical perspectives. Below is a quick list of some of the facts that I found new and/or most interesting to me in this book.

– Bach’s success resulted from an enormous gift multiplied by extraordinary hard work. Bach was born into a family of musicians. He was never a formal student or apprentice of any particular musician. Instead he picked up keyboard skills from his father, his older brothers, and cousins early in life. Likewise, he never systematically learned composing from any particular teacher. Instead his composing knowledge was mostly self-taught. Nevertheless, he actively sought out contact with well-known composers and organists in order to learn from them during his youth. Those people included Bohm, Reincken, and Buxtehude. His hard work is manifested to the fullest in his years as the Thomascantor in Leipzig. There he composed 2-3 full annual cycles of cantatas, averaging about one cantata every week. Each cantata lasts for 20-30 minutes and contains 10 or so movements. The effort involved in bringing each cantata to life included initial composing all the way up to rehearsal with fellow musicians and final performance on Sundays and sacred holidays. Bach did all this on top of his routine responsibilities as the cantor of the Thomas school, which includes responsibilities like monitoring the students and teaching Latin and music classes.

– Bach was a lifelong learner, constantly updating his knowledge by learning from the work of other composers. He didn’t travel as widely as some of his contemporaries such as Handel and Telemann. He got hold of latest music trends through his robust professional network that he built over the years. For instance, he wrote several keyboard arrangements based on the string concertos written by Vivaldi, a contemporary composer who he held in high regard.

– In addition to maintaining a life-long self-education, Bach was also a highly active teacher of music. His students included his own children (with W.F. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, and J.C. Bach among the most well-known), his formal students at St. Thomas School, and many private students who sought composing and keyboard instructions from him after he established his fame and stature.

– Bach was a multi-instrumentalist, perhaps proficient at all common instruments including keyboard, violin, cello, woodwinds, and brass. But his foremost identity as a music performer was a keyboard virtuoso. Among the keyboard instruments, the pipe organ was his absolute instrument of choice. His skills at organ performance, including improvisation, was considered peerless throughout Europe at his time.

– Most of Bach’s organ works were completed in his early years, before he settled in Leipzig. The Muhlhausen, Weimar, and Cothen years saw his most productive composing activities for the organ. Later in Leipzig, his focus shifted towards vocal music. There he spent most of the time on the cantata cycles and his leadership of Collegium Musicum, which performed at coffee houses where no organ was available.

– In addition to being a great improviser of music, Bach also benefited from the great habit of going back to his early works and revising them in order to achieve perfection. Examples include his multiple revisions of his St. Matthew Passion (which he considered his greatest work) or his revision of the organ chorale preludes such as BWV 668 (dictation at deathbed).

– Bach’s works come down to us today via a very diverse set of routes. The first route includes the works were published during his lifetime. Examples include the two books of WTC, the four books of Clavier-Ubung (Book 1: Keyboard Partitas; Book 2: Italian Concerto and French Overture, Book 3: Various chorales for the organ along with St. Anne Prelude and Fugue;  Book 4: Goldberg Variations), as well as the Musical Offering. The second route includes unpublished compositions he passed to his children as estate at his death. The third route is the most haphazard and relies on copies kept by his students and colleagues. Despite there being more than 1000+ numbered works in the BWV and BWV Anhang catalogs, we know that a significant portion of his compositions have not been passed down to us today. Among these unfortunately lost works are many cantatas Bach composed in Leipzig and many organ improvisations he did in the “Castle of Heaven” (Himmelsburg) in Weimar.

– The incomplete last part of the Art of Fugue (BWV 1080), despite anecdotes, wasn’t really the piece that Bach worked the last in his life. It is possible that the last part was completed but somehow failed to be transmitted to us. 

– Despite never having composed or performed specifically for the fortepiano (predecessors of modern piano) during his lifetime, Bach had substantial contact with the inventor of the new instrument, namely G. Silbermann. Bach praised the prototypes that Silbermann showed him in many respects, but also criticized it in other aspects. This resulted in Silbermann’s delaying of the market release of his fortepiano for several years. This is a reflection of Bach’s widely recognized authority as an expert of musical instruments, which paralleled his fame as a composer and music performer. 

There are too many fun and intriguing points to list here. So I’ll stop. This book contains all the facts about J.S. Bach a sane musician would or should know, which helps them ground their performance or appreciation of all Bach’s work in their historical background and thus (hopefully) make the music sound more authentic and learned. If you want to get further into the weeds, I guess you’d have to check out Wolff’s other books.

Written in a fluid and readable style by a journalist and professional writer, this book can be used as an introduction to ontology, a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of existence. The organization of the book is a medley of monologues setting the stage for ontological discussions, interviews with living philosophers and scientists who either proposed noteworthy theories in this field or are considered experts in the related topics, and occasional personal stories and travelogues which the author use to illustrate and explore the emotional dimension of ontology. In one of the chapters, the author even advanced his own theory (Holt Selector Theory?) Ontology intersects with theology (“does God exists?”), philosophy of mind (“what is the nature of consciousness?”), and theoretical physics (e.g., cosmology and quantum mechanics), which the author also dives into together with various expert interviewees with impressive sophistication and depth.

Below is a table I made to keep track of the various theories and ideas about why the world exists that are covered in this book.

#YouAreWhatYouRead #BooksForJuniors

Not all superheros wear capes. Some of them wear business suits (occasionally lab coats) and chase the root causes of mysterious outbreaks of diseases. They generally don’t save people’s lives on the spot (although that does happen once in a while), but the insight their investigations generate always saves people from future suffering and deaths. This is the kind of book that can hook young minds and convince them to pursue a career in healthcare or medical sciences.

D and I were reading this book together. We sometimes got into debate about whose turn it was to read. It was the first time something like this had happened. The author has the uncanny ability to turn the dry processes of epidemiological investigation into captivating Sherlockian story lines. I learned about this book through an unlikely route: it is recommended by the famous programming book “Programming Pearls” by Jon Bentley despite having nothing to do with computers. The reason for the recommendation is that the way the public health professionals solve medical mysteries in this book is deep down analogous to debugging complex computer bugs. Epidemiological investigation and computer debugging are both based on the mindset that the problems in the world, no matter how puzzling and messy-looking at first, are fundamentally understandable and hence fixable through rational thinking – a central tenet of the Enlightenment that has helped us conquer and tame numerous diseases and continues to be the most valuable tool we have in fighting morbidities and improving lives.

Radical Candor is an 2017 book written by Kim Scott, who worked and continues to work at Google. Therefore I feel an extra affinity with this book since it can be viewed as one of the business books “of Google origin”, unlike other popular management books I have read. The key point of Radical Candor can be summarized as follows in my own words. Successful teamwork (management being a part of it) relies on giving each other frequent and timely guidance (feedback), both positive (praises) and negative (criticism). The latter part – giving negative feedback (“challenge directly”), is crucial for avoiding errors and helping each other stay on track, but it often feels unnatural or uncomfortable given most people’s upbringing (“if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything”). Therefore consciousness effort must be spent in encouraging criticism and in making it a habit. The foundation of a culture of constructive negative feedback is the genuine care between colleagues (“caring personally”).

My experience in reading Radical Candor stands out among my experience reading other management books in that this book often makes me feel on the edge of my seat. The stories and points in the book are so relevant to my own work (perhaps owing to the Google origin of the book) that I can easily see the stories happen in my own team or my own org. As a result, I feel truly encouraged or even urged to put the book’s teaching into my everyday work, which I have in fact already started doing and will continue to do in the coming days and weeks.

The author of this book, John Eliot Gardiner, is a (the?) leading interpreter of Bach’s vocal music among living conductors. The corpus of Bach’s religious choral works, along with Bach’s organ repertoire, perhaps supersedes his more familiar secular works (e.g., keyboard suites and etudes like WTC 1 and 2, and various solo and concerto pieces for strings) in importance in the eyes of Bach himself and his family (e.g., CPE Bach who helped write his obituary). Reading this book helps me understand why this is the case. It fill in a gap in my knowledge of Bach’s life and musical achievements.

You might be slightly disappointed if your goal is to read up on Bach’s most familiar keyboard pieces such as the WTC, the suites, the partitas, and Goldberg Variations. Gardiner doesn’t talk much about these aspects of Bach’s achievements, because those are not his specialty. But this is made up for by the deep and detailed discussion of almost all the major cantatas, Passions, and masses, which guides the reader into the cultural and historical backdrop against which these works were created, how they stemmed from Bach’s Lutheran faith (the core of his identity and a source of his musical inspirations), and how they formed a colossal systematic whole that revolved around the 18th century religious life in Germany on the verge of Enlightenment. Therefore, anybody who aspires to play and hear Bach’s music better should benefit from the erudition and careful research Gardiner offers in this book, no matter which instrument they happen to approach Bach’s music from, be it the organ, piano, violin, or cello, etc. Being a chorus person himself, Gardiner is also ahead of the herd in his English prose among music critics. This makes this book also a good read for improving English writing, especially for those who want to improve their writing about music.

This is a big book, with 550+ pages of main text. Another factor that contributes to the long time it takes to get through the book is the frequent temptation to check out recordings of the cantatas that the book is talking about. YouTube has many of them, the best of which are by the Netherlands Bach Society and the author himself conducting the Monteverdi Choir.

The title of this book, Rigor Mortis, is a play on the Latin term ​for the stiffness of muscles that befalls a person’s body shortly after death. It is used by the author to refer to the “death of scientific rigor” in biomedical research. This book was published in 2017, not long after I left academia to pursue a career in the tech industry. Having got a modicum of first hand experience of this topic, I have wanted to read this book for a long time and finally got to read it recently.​

This book did not disappoint me in its comprehensive account of the variety of manifestations of the “death of rigor”. In addition to familiar pitfalls such as small sample size, the batch effect (uncontrolled confound), p-hacking, HARKing, and confusing exploratory and confirmatory research, the book also covers issues less familiar to me, including unverified cell lines, poor animal models of human diseases, and lack of standards in handling perishable tissue samples. Instead of stopping at the surface level, the book delves deep into the root causes of theses symptoms, namely a hyper-competitive job market filled with researchers under the pressure to cut corners despite the best of their intentions.​

​To me, biomedical systems are unique in their complexity, which renders them some of the hardest topics to study. This can be seen as nature’s price for the noble and miraculous potentials of biomedical research, namely conquering diseases and bestowing life and health. Other STEM fields, such as engineering and physical sciences, often face simpler and more controllable phenomena, and hence are relatively less susceptible to the problem of reproducibility and lack of statistical power. However, I can’t help but feel in the back of my mind the alarm this book sounds for a few non-biomedical fields of study related to my work, such as large machine-learning models and human-computer interfaces, which can easily slip into some of the same pitfalls as biomedical research has if researchers do not pay sufficient attention to sharing code and data and using proper research methodology. ​

​Apart from the complexity of the underlying system of interest, biomedical research also differs from most other STEM fields in having a long feedback loop between basic research and practical application. In tech, a new piece of software, be it a new recommendation algorithm or a new UI design, can be quickly put to test on live traffic, providing tech companies with a short feedback loop for deciding whether the new idea works or not. But basic biomedical research projects, the results of which are mostly filed away in journals, often are years away from actual tests through clinical studies, if at all. Some of the most interesting parts of this book are stories of the biotech / pharmaceutical industry suffering from the poor reproducibility of published results and (rightfully) complaining about them followed by efforts to fix them. This points to the importance of quick feedback loop for the success of most human endeavors, which is a philosophical point with wide and deep implications.​

​The author of this book is a professional journalist, not an academician. This gives the book a refreshing outsider’s perspective, along with the nicely flowing prose that is a pleasure to read.

Professor Eric D. Young of Johns Hopkins University, my Master’s thesis advisor, passed away in early February. It is with profound sadness that I am writing this article in his remembrance.

Eric was my first teacher and advisor after I arrived in the United States for my post-graduate study in 2005. I owe him a tremendous amount for my education and my later professional development. I still vividly remember meeting him the first time at his office in the Traylor Building on the JHU medical campus the day after I arrived in Baltimore. The “Models of the Neuron” course he taught was the most memorable classes among the ones I took during my two years at JHU. It combined deep mechanistic understanding of how neurons work with mathematical modeling. It was an epitome of JHU Biomedical Engineering’s philosophy of making discoveries and advances at the intersection of biomedicine and engineering.

Eric was a nurturing and stimulating research advisor. He gave me and others of his lab ample latitude in exploring research directions before committing to one. He encouraged me to develop my own research program instead of relying on him or others to hand out ideas, which was both a thought-provoking and somewhat shocking suggestion to me at that time. Of course, in retrospect, it is an art to balance this emphasis on personal research freedom and the research group’s commitments and priorities, one that Eric excelled at. During my project focusing on the effect of acoustic trauma on the encoding of sound intensity in the auditory brainstem, Eric not only guided me through the formulation of the research questions and the design of the experiments, but also provided me with hands-on tutoring despite his other responsibilities. The overnight neuronal recording sessions, during many of which we was personally there to observe and help, were examples of hardworking and devotion for the sake of scientific progress.

During my time at Eric’s lab, he led weekly journal club meetings, an opportunity for students, postdocs, and professors of his lab and collaborating labs to present latest papers relevant to the lab’s research. It gave me and others a great opportunity not only in developing presentation skills, honing skills in critical evaluation of papers, but also in forming a habit of staying abreast of the latest breakthroughs and trends in the field, as well as keeping engaged in communication with colleagues. Eric’s incisive and oftentimes humorous questions and comments, some which continued into the daily lab lunches that felt like a family, still resonate in my memory to this day.

Eric was a role model for a thoughtful and caring mentor and advisor, one who continued to learn and grow together with his students and colleagues despite already having achieved widely-recognized contributions in his area of science (the neurophysiology of the auditory system). It was obvious that he did all of that with joy and love. His memory will continue to guide and inspire me in my future career. I am sure many of his former students and colleagues feel the same way.

May his soul rest in peace.

​As a long-time fan of the popular science animation channel “Kurzgesagt” on YouTube, I expected its original creator, Philipp Dettmer, to be a wonderful visual storyteller. What I didn’t expect, until I read this book, was that he is also a skillful writer and science communicator in general.​

​The human immune system, the focus of this book, is astonishingly complex, with its myriad of cell types, molecular mechanisms, and interactions among them. It’s no small feat to break the immune system down, as this book does, into digestible and well-paced short chapters, accompanied by playful illustrations that every Kurzgesagt fan will immediately recognize and love.  (But there are no birbs in this book, mind you!) The writing is made more accessible through its ample use of analogies and reminders.

It is indeed an irony that such a system critical to the daily survival of every human receives so little attention in popular science literature compared to other topics such as astronomy and neuroscience. This book, along with several equally wonderful videos about the immune system you can find on Kurzgesagt’s YouTube channel, have changed this forever.​

​As someone who majored in biomedical engineering, of which the curriculum barely covered any immunology at all, I had no trouble following this book. I’d imagine it also would be a fine read for high schoolers and motivated middle schoolers. Some of my most memorable reading experience as a teenager was reading in bed while being sick and taken care of by adults. It would have been a most fitting and cozy experience if I were reading this book at that time!

“A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci (1552-1610)” by R. Po-Chia Hsia

​​If hard sci-fi is the closest thing we have to forward time travel, then scholarly history books are the closest thing we have to backward time machines. The quality of such a time machine is determined by the scholarship and impartialness of the historian. In fact, before backward time travel becomes a reality, the study of history is history itself. Four hundred years later, there is no way for us to remember and learn from this remarkable first in-depth encounter between the East and the West, except through the work of historians like the author of this book.

​Prof. ​Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia of PSU is an expert in the history of Catholic Renewal and the Reformation. This expertise, coupled with his inborn Chinese cultural background, makes him uniquely prepared to write about Ricci’s life story. Some commentators point out that this is the first book on Ricci that uses all available original sources, half of which is found in the Jesuit archives today and half of which is found in Chinese texts (many of which are written by Ricci himself).​

​From this book, we learn the strengths of Ricci, his lifelong devotion to the Christian faith, his tenacity in the face of hardship and uncertainty, his extraordinary ability to learn a difficult and confusing foreign language before there were textbooks or established pedagogy, his ingenious synthesis of Confucianism and Christianity, which laid the foundation for the early spread of the Christian faith among the Chinese, his interpersonal charisma and communication skills, which led to his eventual success in reaching the top echelon of the Ming China society. We also learn of his weaknesses, the most obvious of which were his inability or unwillingness to understand Buddhism and lack of effort to connect with people outside the literati class, as well as occasional display of vindictiveness. From this book, we also appreciate the contrast between the two cultures circa 1600, one multipolar and one unipolar, one outgoing and one largely inward-looking. But the underlying humanity shared between them still shows vividly throughout the book, as seen in the many friendships that Ricci forged with Chinese scholars and mandarins.

​​I am especially interested in exploring history books beyond the “official history” approved and promoted in Chinese mainland grade schools where I grew up. This book is another step of mine along this journey. Next on the list is the history of the Boxer Rebellion. If you have similar interests and would like to discuss or share ideas, please comment or message me.