(with a look further back to 2024, and even touching back to 2023)
2025 was my year of societal reading.
To the past - and beyond!
Deep breath to set the scene! Starting in 2023 with Philipp Goff’s Galileo’s Error , a book about the philosophical theory of consciousness called panpsychism, where everything, down to the smallest subatomic atom, consists of consciousness (plus other properties like mass, spin, etc), so that we no longer have to worry about how consciousness comes about in humans because it’s already there, I set off on a literal journey to see what I could understand of the modern world of Consciousness as an area of study. Goff’s book was something of a wild outlier as a starting point, with his selection of theory to explore where consciousness might come from feeling pretty esoteric, but it contains a certain coherence on the theoretical level when you actually read the book. (Galileo’s error from the title was that of completely disregarding (because unexplainable) anything to do with consciousness in his modelling of the world.)
This journey continued into 2024 with two books taking very different lines on the same overall topic: Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality, which builds on the premise that our senses and consciousness are optimised for survival and thriving, rather than for granting us a true representation of reality (though it doesn’t really treat the question as to how we feel conscious at all); and Anil Seth’s Being You which takes as its starting point the notion of the mind as a “prediction machine” which creates “expectation models” for a stable reality as it expects to find it, so that - along the same lines as Hoffman’s survival mechanism - we can operate efficiently and safely in most scenarios that we encounter in life, by forming and filtering out the chaos that our senses provide. I also re-read a book by Daniel Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, which develops the basic materialist message that consciousness “falls out of” the evolution-driven collaboration between cells under the motto of “competence without comprehension,” where there is no soul or emergent feature, let alone a consciousness as a fundamental feature of the universe. Instead, we are vast communities of cells that have evolved to cooperate by developing signal pathways that result in electrochemical stimuli being generated that we now interpret as representing consciousness.
The conscious transition
My interest in consciousness continued - but also abated - into 2025 with David Chalmers' intriguing book Reality+ (subtitled “Virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy”) that treats the consciousness question from the perspective of the simulation conundrum. This thought-experiment (though also actually a theory) studies the idea that we can’t really prove that we’re not living in a simulation, or even in a simulation that itself is being simulated, or indeed in recursive levels of simulations above our own, until, eventually, some “reality” happens, which, as in The Case against Reality, even more clearly doesn’t need to look like what we perceive. Again, it raises the question of what our minds process, with the twist of asking what it is that our minds are given to process from the various stimuli they receive - we might simply be “brains in vats” being fed electrical signals to trick ourselves into thinking that we are corporeal, or we might even be algorithms swimming in a universe of bits.
I’ve always had a thing for Sci-Fi, and 2024 ended with me finding a stash of my Dad’s collection of Isaac Asimov books over Christmas and blasting through Prelude to Foundation and Foundation itself. I had not recognised how simplistic the language was when I read them as a teenager. This time around, they felt rather clunky and dated, almost perfunctory somehow, and I didn’t get swept up into the story as I had hoped.
Another sci-fi throwback that I finally got around to reading in 2025 was Dune by Frank Herbert: I had spotted a colleague at orchestra reading the second book and asked if I could borrow this first. It was good, gripping at times, but also rather tiresome with extremists at all turns reflecting our fascist-authoritarian-colonialist adjacent times, made more grating by a kind of “noble savage” sentiment that I couldn’t get into. I didn’t feel the need to continue with a second volume.
I finally finished the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel, which in The Mirror and the Light still amazed with its language and ever so human depictions of politics and power plays, threaded through with cunning and idiocy, love and duty, obedience, piety and bravery. I also tried a book that I’d read of somewhere in the Guardian as a modern classic - but hated (though I could see why others could love it): Glister by John Burnside.
We reach 2025
In 2025 I also finished another trilogy by finally getting around to reading Necessity, which completes Jo Walton’s amazingly well constructed The Just City trilogy about the goddess Athena setting up an experimental community based on Plato’s strictures of how philosopher kings would optimally govern a city (spoiler: imperfectly). I’ll admit that Necessity didn’t flow well into the story at first, so I had broken off from it - but it seems I was in a better frame of mind for it at the second attempt, and it read well. As it happens, in her thanks at the end of this book, Walton mentions the author Ada Palmer, who herself started a “societal sci-fi” series with Too Like the Lightning, which I happened to find in our company’s open library. It is baroque and affective, but rather too “florid” for my tastes.
Along with the novels, I read a sequence of non-fiction books tending towards society and technology, listed here:
- Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder (this a re-read)
- The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism by George Monbiot
- Black Gold: A Global History of Coffee by Antony Wild (gifted to me by my uncle in Ireland)
- Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth by Kohei Saito (original Japanese title: Capitalism in the Anthropocene)
- Work: A History of How We Spend our Time by James Suzman (also a re-read)
- Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (not Wolf!)
- Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders by Lewis Baston
- The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman (about AI)
Beyond all of that, I re-read After Rain, a short story collection by William Trevor that, like Foundation I also preferred the first time around, and - with (reading to) my daughter - the first Percy Jackson book, among other successes and the worthy but dull failure of the Last Bear (which we didn’t finish).
What I gave up in 2025
There is one book that I couldn’t bring myself to finish in 2025
- Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, which, whilst no doubt being the first major book of its kind, focussing on the human need to transgress norms of society, class and wedlock, to me just wallows in keeping the protagonist, his dreams and loves, down, which I don’t feel the need to subject myself to.
Two others that I might (like Necessity above) take up again after a refreshing pause:
- Smellosophy by Anne-Sophie Barwich: though this investigation into how studying the sense of smell from a neuroscientific and consciousness perspective should be key to understanding both, it seems that the book is too early for its own good and there’s nothing really astounding to say, beyond “we’re working on it”
- Aristotle Detective by Margaret Doody, which is a bit silly, should be fun, but somehow didn’t grab me.
What I started to read in 2025
In an interesting circle back to my reading into consciousness, I just started reading a book I got as a Christmas present called simply AI Ethics by Mark Coecklebergh, which, as a primer on the subject (admittedly from 2020, so lacking the latest transformers, LLMs or ChatGPT), does a great job of highlighting the key themes surrounding AI’s place(s) in human societies, whils also considering an AI’s potential mode(s) of being. One point amongst many that stood out to me with its reference back to all the consciousness stuff I’d been reading, is that, since we don’t really understand our own consciousness, we’re not really in a position to state whether or not AIs can become conscious in some non-human way. Naturally, it also starts to raise the questions of where AI acts, what it affects or even effects in the world.
Continuing with the societal enquiries, I am also still reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, on inequality societies throughout history and how inequality has been generated, maintained, justified and fought against over time. For time off, I’m also reading Umberto Eco’s Baudolino, which is another very Eco book.
What did I learn?
Asking about the point of reading is an almost equally deep sub-question to the main one about the point of life - should it be useful? pleasurable? What did I learn, really, from all of that? What, from all those ideas, all that erudition, sank into to my consciousness whilst they were taking up that much of my time?
George Monbiot opened up a fresh framework to see our societies through a different lens with The Invisible Doctrine. In it, he describes how insidiously neoliberalism (which he actually classifies as an ideology, something that I had in my naivete previously only attributed to non-religions like communism) became the political air that we breath, to the extent that we hardly notice the blankly rational ideals of endless growth and deregulation behind neoliberalism. He also points out the apparent weakness of our societies and politics in the face of the oligarchs, autocrats, rapacious capitalists and populists that circle the neoliberal ideology. With its clear-eyed exposition of the dangers both to society and to the environment that the neoliberal ideology represents, the book provided the basic groundwork for most of the rest of my reading in 2025.
The books that I felt had the most impact on me, though, were Black Coffee, Doppelganger and Borderlines. These most effectively made personal - in an individual yet generally human way - the dangers of ideologies of all stripes, and the callous disregard for those who don’t hold great power or wealth; how, fundamentally, grand historical sweeps can make those doing the sweeping become inured to the notion of massive suffering and killing, their perspectives based mainly on maps, huge numbers and “great protagonists” with barely a thought for the human or ecological aspects of conquest, slavery, land grabs and social media conspiracy fabulism (with a dash of family thrown in). These three books highlighted (for me) the human aspect of it all, and, in a way, brought it all back to the question of consciousness, and the ethics that arise from that. Consciousness is such an amazing aspect of the universe that we should (I feel) hold it precious. Nihilists would counter that a universe’s “consciousness” - if it were to exist at all - couldn’t possibly depend on that of a single human (except, in too many cases, their own, of course), and they could mention that the human population is still increasing, which the universe should be “happy” about. But wantonly destroying, or deadening consciousnesses by depriving so many people of their potential, or preying on addictions for financial gain, for example, can be viewed as a crime against potential in a cold, uncaring universe that, to circle back to the kind of ridiculous but not logically inconsistent or disproven idea of panpsychism, could have consciousness as a goal of the universe, for it to be able to “feel” itself.
That runs close to the almost mystical themes that panpsychism raises, but these “images” or “simulations” or signals of pain or joy or satisfaction that we receive and interpret in our brains are our reality (if not the universe’s), and should be held to higher standards than mere numbers.
The 2025 books that didn’t rise to the same levels remain valuable, and will be part of my re-reading pattern for 2025, especially Slow Down, for its attempt to describe potential other paths for society, along with, hopefully, some lessons and ideas from Capital and Ideology to come, too.
The message that capitalism is at base predicated on limitless exploitation of resources (human and natural) to the point of collapse is common across Slow Down, The Invisible Doctrine and Black Gold - so this must factor in my own thinking and behaviour in the future.
I have - from listening to Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast (and reading his newsletter) also subscribed to Ed Ongweso Jr.’s newsletter (on Substack, boo!), The Tech Bubble, both of which hold the whole tech, AI and Venture Capital worlds in a pugnaciously sceptical, sociological, view.
I still need to formalise what I’ll actually do about it all. I’m a pretty comfortably well off (recent) home-owner, with at least the goal of picking up the pace and investment on our energy upgrades in 2026, to reduce our family’s carbon footprint. It’s not a revolution, and it’s worth remembering that things aren’t all that bad here in Germany - which is another thing I should work on. Maintaining positive and respectful interactions with as much of what society has to offer as possible is, ultimately, the answer proposed by all sceptics of neoliberalism: we’re humans, doing things for the good of people. And, if places like the USA, people like Putin, Xi, Erdogan et al, would switch the ‘G’ in MxGA from “Great” to “Good”, we’d all be in a much better place.
