Books like Actual Minds, Possible Worlds — picked by fans

Few books have reminded me more powerfully that our circumstances and our inner life are not the same thing.

I first read Man's Search for Meaning years ago, and its impact has only deepened over time. Frankl's willingness to look directly at suffering without becoming defined by it challenged many of the assumptions I carried about happiness, success, and what it takes to live a meaningful life.

I return to this book because it continually reminds me that meaning is not something life hands us once everything finally goes our way. It is something we discover in how we meet what life places before us.

During difficult seasons of my own life, Frankl's perspective helped me remember that even when we cannot control our circumstances, we still have a relationship with how we respond to them. Few books have given me more courage, perspective, and hope.

This rocked my world.

As an analytical person, I loved Carse’s precise logic—that every human activity can be seen as either a finite game, played to win and end the game, or an infinite game, played to keep playing. Simple. Devastating.

What stopped me cold was seeing myself in it—when I was playing to dominate, demean others so they’d shrink, and I could feel bigger, transacting rather than connecting. Carse gave me a framework to see that honestly, and to choose differently—to play to connect, to stay in the game with everyone around me.

I have never seen life the same way since. The ideas contributed profoundly to my work on personal and shared responsibility, especially in consulting with teams and leaders.

Robert Putnam is a Harvard political scientist who studies social trust, which he calls “social capital,” because once we earn trust, we can spend it for a long time.

Putnam argues that Americans in the mid-twentieth century had much higher levels of social trust than we do today, and this made for a much more stable and decent politics. That greater social trust, he argues, was the product of people joining clubs, fraternities, and other associations in huge numbers. Whereas people used to bowl in bowling leagues, now they generally bowl alone.

In case you are wondering about what has happened to our politics, Putnam offers a compelling diagnosis and a prescription for a better way forward. 

Nicholas Carr shows us why Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram bring out the worst in us. Their algorithms are designed to generate envy, outrage, and fear rather than empathy, understanding, or affection.

Carr takes a deep dive into research in social psychology to make the case that we all become trolls while doomscrolling. We want to believe that learning more about other people makes us like them more, but Carr shows that what we learn about other people online makes us like them less.

We are all prone to oversharing and lying online, which undermines social trust. Moreover, it is now impossible to tell whether messages on social media were generated by human beings or bots, further undermining our trust in other people.

I love how Carr illustrates his arguments with examples from cutting-edge research. 

When I met Jerry Bruner in the summer of 1965, I had expected to become a clinical psychologist or perhaps a psychoanalyst. However, the chance to work as a research assistant for Bruner as he was developing a social studies curriculum for middle schools was transformative: I decided to become a cognitively oriented developmental psychologist with a focus on the arts.

Both the ideas that Bruner introduced me to and the way in which he interweaved the humanities and social sciences in his writings are never far from my literary consciousness. I am glad that my children had a chance to attend schools where Bruner’s ideas were taken seriously.

In the view of many—including me!—early childhood education in Reggio Emilia, a city in Northern Italy, constitutes the gold standard, combining the genius of American and European approaches. While the ideas were developed primarily in Reggio Emilia, the long-term collaboration between Reggio and Project Zero at Harvard University made the practices clear to the rest of the world.

Interestingly, both Jerome Bruner and I spent many years visiting these schools, trying to understand them, and writing about them for both educators and the general public.

A comprehensive account by a pioneer of the discipline.

This book provides an overview of the relatively new discipline (in 1975) of “cognitive science,” so much so that I wondered whether I should have switched over from philosophy (I did not). It displays the breadth and depth of the discipline, which convinced me that one could no more be an expert in cognitive science in general than an expert in physics in general, biology in general, or philosophy in general.

This book is certainly a must-read for anyone interested either in the discipline itself or even in a corner of it, such as human brain laterality. (Be sure to see “hemispheres” in the index of this book.)

Stanovich takes his title from the very last sentence in Richard Dawkin’s book The Selfish Gene, “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” In his book, Stanovich shows how human beings are able to rebel against those selfish replicators – our genes. It involves exercising, in Kahneman’s terminology, our ‘system two’ and exercising tenacity and self-discipline in bringing to bear logic and rationality in our decisions. This book is not an easy read, but it is a fascinating account of why human thinking is different and of what such differences might in principle enable us to do. 

Before Lakoff wrote about politics, he compiled this treasure trove of the metaphors humans recruit to grapple with moral concerns. For instance, early in the book I learned how to take a listener “in front” of a problem, “behind it” “inside it” as well as “outside it” so they might vicariously experience four points of view instead of one.

Engaging the body embeds regular intelligence with sensory wisdom.

Where Andy Clark leaves off, claiming that cognition is extended into the environment via the tools that we use, Kirchhoff and Kiverstein take up claiming that consciousness itself may also be extended into the environment under certain circumstances. Consider that moment when you and someone close to you are both trying to remember the name of some actor from a movie. You both feel like the name is on the tip of your tongues but can’t quite come to a realization. You manage to blurt out the first name but nothing else and then your partner blurts out the last name. As per Andy Clark, this is clearly a case of extended cognition between two people. But is it perhaps also a case of a momentary shared consciousness? 

Kirchhoff and Kiverstein first provide a scholarly analytical philosophical treatment of recent iterations of the extended cognition hypothesis primarily to draw the… show more.