gamerdad As we dawdle into the final days of 2024 I have vowed as a kind of New Year’s resolution to read more books. That might not mean starting more books, mind, as much as finishing more books that I have already started. Either way, I started this one a couple weeks back and have been reading all about how a 1980s philosopher tries to explain modern computing architecture as he build up to what I presume is a thesis in the nature of the conscious mind and of by way how that relates to artificial intelligence and quantum mechanics.

Reading complex explanations of maths and algorithms and Turing Machines right before bed is a real challenge tho, I gotta say.

The nature of the conscious mind has been of particular interest to me because there is a narrative thread in my novel that ties directly back to this concept. In the story (spoiler alert) a forest is subject to alien mutation influences and begins to experience a kind of accelerated transmission of signals in its roots leading to a kind of primitive consciousness that communicates and interacts with the human characters. All that means is that I have been thinking a lot about what consciousness is, how to simplify it for a story, and what it says about the universe in which as i’m writing said story.

All of this is pretty heavy for bedtime.