I've been thinking on that, actually. So far all I've come up with is the fact that learning to exercise your creativity and think more abstractly can help very much with finding new ways of approaching problems and looking at your universe, thereby helping to shed new light on certain subjects. The obvious flaw is, of course, that you can learn to be creative without art; there are legions of scientists who show it to be so.

If I happen to come up with something that I think is particularly relevant or interesting I will definitely show it to the community, though.

Hah, the relative lack of discussion on art was exactly why it seemed to me as if the physics was more useful here. But who knows, I may be able to start up some discussion once I've gotten into the swing of things.

Thank you for the updated recommendation. I will probably look into reading Sweet Dreams. Would I benefit from reading Consciousness Explained first, or would I do well with just the one?

Gödel, Escher, Bach is definitely a good recommendation, at least it appears to be from my cursory research on it.

As to what sort of recommendations I am looking for, I've noticed that LW appears to have a few favorite philosophers (Dennett among them) and a few favorite topics (AI, bias, utilitarian perspective, etc.) which I might benefit from understanding better, nice as the articles are. Some recommendations of good books on some of LW's favorite topics would be a wonderful place to start.

Thanks much for your help.

Hi, everyone, you can call me Gigi. I'm a Mechanical Engineering student with a variety of interests ranking among everything from physics to art (unfortunately, I know more about the latter than the former). I've been reading LW frequently and for long sessions for a couple of weeks now.

I was attracted to LW primarily because of the apparent intelligence and friendliness of the community, and the fact that many of the articles illuminated and structured my previous thoughts about the world (I will not bother to name any here, many are in the Sequences).

While the rationalist viewpoint is fairly new to me (aside from various encounters where I could not identify ideas as "rationalist"), I am looking forward to expanding my intellectual horizons by reading, and hopefully eventually contributing something meaningful back to the community.

If anyone has recommendations for reading outside LW that may be interesting or relevant to me, I welcome them. I've got an entire summer ahead of me to rearrange my thinking and improve my understanding.