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Here are three Chapters from the book that may assist you to judge whether the book might be relevant to your goals:
The first is Chapter One, the introduction to the book. This short, 6-page overview will give you a feel for what is involved in using recursive self-improvement to enhance your thinking and cognition. It is designed to evoke in the reader two critically-important realizations: that the methods detailed by the book are plausible, and that currently almost no one uses them systematically, despite their enormous potential.
The second is Chapter Four of the book, titled “Stumbling onto the path of recursive self-improvement.” It recounts my experiences as a teenager at school when I began to recursively escalate my ability to solve problems and challenges. These included physics and maths problems, as well as techniques for memorising facts and rules, and eventually social and other challenges.
My ‘accidental’ development of this capacity for recursive self-improvement rapidly enhanced my performance at school. Metacognition on steroids. Soon, despite investing far less effort in school work, I moved from ranking in the middle of my class to being the top student in the school, and then was ranked fourth in my State of Queensland in the year 12 public exams.
I was soon applying these tools to all aspects of life, not just school work. Although I had climbed only the first steps in a long ladder of recursive self-improvement, it produced a mind set and methods that would propel me continually up the ladder over the course of my life.
What I stumbled upon at school was not particularly complex or challenging to implement. If you know a bright teenager or a precocious pre-teen, give them a copy of Chapter four and hope that it resonates with them. The younger they start the further they are likely to get, and the more they will be able to contribute positively to human survival and thrival.
The third is an extract from Chapter Twenty-Two of the book, titled “The meaning and purpose of life and suffering”. This Chapter applies higher cognition to some key philosophical issues that are raised by the human condition.
First, the Chapter addresses the fundamental existential question that faces each of us: How should we live our life? What should we do?
The Chapter demonstrates that there is a rational way to answer this question. This is the case even though there are a huge number of hypotheses that can explain why our universe exists, but that cannot be ruled out because of inconsistency with any known evidence. Some of these hypotheses would have major consequences for how we might choose to live our lives if they were true. For example, they may promise us an enjoyable afterlife if we behave in particular ways.
This huge number of hypotheses that cannot be ruled out include hypotheses that postulate the existence of various kinds of gods or other creators such as the programmers of simulations, as well as other explanations that do not involve higher-level agency.
The Chapter then goes on to demonstrate how science can be established on a rational basis even though key methods currently used by science cannot establish ‘the truth’ about reality. These ineffective methods include the use of induction as well as experiments that claim to identify causal relationships (Hume’s elephants in the room).
Humans are continually faced with radical uncertainty about the nature of our universe and beyond. However, the Chapter demonstrates that despite this, we can develop a rational basis for designing our scientific methodologies and for choosing how we should live our lives (some are dubbing these approaches as “Stewart’s Wagers” because of surface similarities to “Pascal’s Wager”).