Books like Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

01

The Hidden Life of Trees

Peter Wohlleben · Science

Peter Wohlleben spent decades as a forester in the Eifel mountains of Germany, and The Hidden Life of Trees is his account of what scientific research and sustained observation have revealed about trees as social organisms.

A kindred science read.

02

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

Suzanne Simard · Science

Suzanne Simard is the forest ecologist who discovered that trees communicate and share resources through underground mycorrhizal fungal networks — the research that gave rise to the concept of the "mother tree" and, at several removes, Peter Wohlleben's popular writing on the subject.

Both dig into mycorrhizal networks.

03

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Elizabeth Kolbert · Science

The Sixth Extinction is Elizabeth Kolbert's account of the mass extinction event currently underway — the sixth in Earth's history, and the first caused by a single species.

A kindred science read.

04

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson · Science

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's attempt to understand the scientific story of everything — from the Big Bang to the emergence of modern humans — by spending three years talking to scientists and reading science history.

A kindred science read.

05

How to Change Your Mind

Michael Pollan · Science

Michael Pollan came to psychedelics late in life, as a skeptic.

Both dig into consciousness.

06

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

William McDonough & Michael Braungart · Science

Cradle to Cradle is William McDonough and Michael Braungart's argument that the conventional approach to environmentalism — reducing, reusing, recycling, being "less bad" — is insufficient and in some ways misleading.

Both dig into ecology.

07

From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Daniel C. Dennett · Science

Daniel Dennett's 2017 book is his most comprehensive attempt to explain how minds — conscious, intentional, creative minds — could have evolved from mindless matter without any homunculus, soul, or top-down designer.

Both dig into consciousness.

08

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Douglas Hofstadter · Science

Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, published in 1979, asks how meaning can arise from formal rules — how a biological machine can think, feel, and experience self-awareness.

Both dig into consciousness.

09

How the Mind Works

Steven Pinker · Science

How the Mind Works is Steven Pinker's synthesis of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, built around a central thesis: the mind is a computational system — a neural computer — shaped by natural selection to solve the adaptive problems that faced our ancestors on the Pleistocene savanna.

Both dig into consciousness.

10

How to Create a Mind

Ray Kurzweil · Science

Ray Kurzweil's central claim in How to Create a Mind is that the neocortex — the part of the brain responsible for higher thought — operates on a single repeating algorithm called the pattern recognition theory of mind.

Both dig into consciousness.

11

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Max Tegmark · Science

Life 3.0 is Max Tegmark's accessible survey of the questions raised by the prospect of human-level and superhuman artificial intelligence: What are the plausible paths to AGI?

Both dig into consciousness.

12

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Peter Godfrey-Smith · Science

Peter Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher of science and a scuba diver who began spending time with octopuses off the coast of Sydney, and Other Minds is the result of that dual perspective.

Both dig into consciousness.