Details on the Books

- UnimatrixZeroOne received Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes (1647)

The book is made up of six meditations, in which Descartes first discards all belief in things that are not absolutely certain, and then tries to establish what can be known for sure. He wrote the meditations as if he had meditated for six days: each meditation refers to the last one as "yesterday"

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- 7101334 / Galactic_Geo received Nine Tomorrows by Isaac Asimov (1956-1958)

Nine Tomorrows is a collection of nine short stories and two pieces of comic verse by American writer Isaac Asimov. The pieces were all originally published in magazines between 1956 and 1958, with the exception of the closing poem, "Rejection Slips", which was original to the collection. The book was first published in the United States in 1959 and in the UK in 1963. It includes two of Asimov's favorite stories, "The Last Question" and "The Ugly Little Boy".

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- [Piemaster] Nevadander received The Dramaturges of Yan by John Brunner (1982)

The far-flung fingers of Earth's civilisation touched many corners of the galaxy, and among them was the beautiful planet Yan. Here the colonists lived a peaceful, almost idyllic life, amid ancient and secret relics, co-existing with their strange and compatible neighbours. The arrival of Gregory Chart, the greatest dramatist ever, whose productions were played out in the skies, and whose actors were also the audience, could only disrupt and destroy once the Yanfolk were aroused from their dreaming indifference

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- CobraTV received The Conscious Mind In Search of a Fundamental Theory by David J. Chalmers (1996)

The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory is a 1996 book by David Chalmers,[1] an Australian philosopher specializing in the area of philosophy of mind. Chalmers presents the major arguments against materialist theories of consciousness, and then advances his own dualistic theory of consciousness based on "Shannon information partitions".

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- Tony Towers received From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett (2017)

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds is a 2017 book about the origin of human consciousness by philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author makes a case for a materialist theory of mind,[1] arguing that consciousness is no more mysterious than gravity.

Drawing on ideas from René Descartes and Charles Darwin, Dennett writes that:

    '... natural systems can create "competence without comprehension"—that is, situations in which sophisticated actions occur without the individual or machine involved understanding the reasons for the actions taken.'
and that:
    'a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection.