Amazon.com: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection: Clifford A. Pickover: Books

Product Description

A Beginner's Guide to Immortality is a celebration of unusual lives and creative thinkers who punched through ordinary cultural norms while becoming successful in their own niches. In his latest and greatest work, world-renowned science writer Cliff Pickover studies such colofrul characters as Truman Capote, John Cage, Stephen Wolfram, Ray Kurzweil, and Wilhelm Rontgen, and their curious ideas. Through these individuals, we can better explore life's astonishing richness and glimpse the diversity of human imagination. Part memoir and part surrealistic perspective on culture, A Beginner's Guide to Immortality gives readers a glimpse of new ways of thinking and of other worlds as he reaches across cultures and peers beyond our ordinary reality. He illuminates some of the most mysterious phenomena affecting our species. What is creativity? What are the religious implications of mosquito evolution, simulated Matrix realities, the brain's own marijuana, and the mathematics of the apocalypse? Could we be a mere software simulation living in a matrix? Who is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Emanuel Swedenborg? Did church forefathers eat psychedelic snails? How can we safely expand our minds to become more successful and reason beyond the limits of our own intuition? How can we become immortal?

About the Author

Clifford A. Pickover received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is the author of thirty-six highly acclaimed books on science, mathematics, art, and religion. His web site, pickover.com, has received several million visits.

Product Details

Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Basic Books (December 26, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1560259841
ISBN-13: 978-1560259848
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #96,369 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
Last night, I dreamed I was eating the brain of Truman Capote. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
quantum immortality, intelligent designer, axial age, simulated reality, process physics

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Truman Capote, John Cage, Old Testament, Epic of Gilgamesh, Nick Bostrom, New Testament, Doomsday Argument, Harvard University, Middle Ages, New Scientist, Roger Corman, United States, William James, World War, Elisabeth K�bler-Ross, Ernst J�nger, Jack Kerouac, Jack Parsons, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Carl Sagan, Cold War, Fissure of Rolando, Jack Nicholson, John Nash

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 100 books:

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote on 6 pages
Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote on 4 pages
Gilgamesh: A New English Version by Stephen Mitchell on 4 pages
Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives Of Eccentric Scientists And Madmen by Clifford A. Pickover on 4 pages
The Epic of Gilgamesh: An English Verison with an Introduction (Penguin Classics) by Anonymous on 4 pages

See all 100 books this book cites

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	71% buy the item featured on this page: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection 4.9 out of 5 stars (8) $14.35
	11% buy Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves: Sushi, Psychedelics, Parallel Universes and the Quest for Transcendence 4.3 out of 5 stars (56) $11.53
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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews

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Average Customer Review

4.9 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Most Fascinating Books That I've Ever Read!, January 23, 2007

By	David J. Brown (Ben Lomond, California) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I really loved *A Beginner's Guide to Immortality*! Clifford Pickover summarized so many thought-provoking and mind-expanding ideas in this book that I thought my head might explode. I simply couldn't put this book down. Every page is bursting with so many creative ideas that I actually had to close my eyes every few minutes just to think about the implications of what he was saying. This book really expanded my perception of reality. Very highly recommended reading!

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Live forever?, December 21, 2006

By	Paul Moskowitz (Yorktown, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Live forever? Isn't that what immortality is all about? Well, yes and no. In this delightful new book by Clifford Pickover, the author explores many routes to immortality. This book continues the explorations that the author began in his previous "Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves." Throughout, he interweaves themes on the nature of reality, people of genius, and of course how to achieve immortality.

Early on, Pickover casts doubt on the thesis that you can achieve immortality by creating a work of literature. He lists a sampling of best-sellers from 1950. Most are not known today. Other more exotic routes to immortality may be through the quantum theory of many worlds. In one of these you may never die. Too bad it is not the one that you live in now. We may all have our thoughts replicated in the storage of a massive computer. Or better yet, there are enough stray electrical impulses in a cubic mile of lime Jell-O to mimic our thought processes so that we might find our eternity there. If this is too mechanistic for you, there remains the religious concept of an afterlife in heaven or perhaps in hell if you do not qualify for heaven.

On every page of this book, you can find a new idea explored. Are we at the beginning or the end of the human species? Can we actually be living in a simulation like that in the "Matrix" movie? Are people with additional fingers smarter? Where are the "missing links" in the record of evolution?

There is a mechanism that Pickover begins to explore at the end of the book. We are all linked to each other by the threads of our relationships. What is the Internet if not an instantiation of a giant network of relationships? I used to think that writing your name on a web page was like writing your name in sand at the beach. However, now I am not so sure. Nothing ever seems to go away on the web. Perhaps, we are now finding our way to immortality in the sum of our ever-increasing Google hits.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Gardens of Gilgamesh, January 28, 2007

By	Ray Erskins (La Porte, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In "Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves" Cliff Pickover revealed a side of his personality that was well-camouflaged in his first thirty some-odd books on mathematics, time travel, fractals, aliens, patterns, puzzles, God, etc. Indeed, writing so many books in such a short time may be the root cause of his now irrepressible eclecticism. This latest effort, "A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Aliens Brains, and Quantum Resurrection," has many similarities to SDE&E. Not only is it written with an exuberance that complements the author's multi-dimensional perspective, the prose remains clear and accessible even as Pickover explores the complex reaches of transcendental reality.

One of the highlights of "A Beginner's Guide to Immortality" is Chapter 3, "Gilgamesh, God, and the Language of Angels." Pickover confesses that the "Epic of Gilgamesh" is one of his deepest obsessions. And we get a feel for his zeal as he recounts the ancient Mesopotamian king's search for immortality. But there is also a lot of extraneous material in this chapter. It's a virtual Mind Salad of eclecticism. Pickover's brain is fizzing with ideas and impressions, perhaps as a result of his relentless work ethic and voracious reading habits, and they seem to inundate his consciousness as he writes. I find this stimulating. Others may differ, wishing instead for a simpler, more direct narrative line.

At his best, Pickover's mind is encyclopedic -- correction: it's Wikipedic! It's Google-alien! Who else would focus on "The Brain from Planet Arous" in a chapter about Truman Capote? But Pickover does, and it can be fascinating because you get a completely different mental picture once you exit Truman Capote's peculiar oeuvre and enter the zany universe of Fifties science-fiction flicks, of which Pickover is a connoisseur. He loves the movies themselves, but also their filmmakers and the whole idea that some P.T. Barnum showman could make some outrageous, low-budget, horror-show hokum with B-list actors and still turn a tidy profit.

But Pickover can also be deadly serious, and I find this quote from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, (which also appears in Chapter 3) to be quite haunting:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We lie on the placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of disassociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

After reading "A Beginner's Guide to Immortality" you may suspect that Cliff Pickover actually wants "the human mind to correlate all its contents." Which could be precisely what happens to the most intelligent human beings in the 21st Century anyway. If so, what he has to offer in this book should be of interest to the armchair existentialists. We all want to live forever. But then again, maybe not.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Cool
If I were any happier I'd die from the happiness and the happy feelings you get from the happy feelings of feeling happy. Read more

Published 14 months ago by Samuel M. Britton

4.0 out of 5 stars Immortality as in being remembered after your death....
I am enjoying this book thus far. Obviously, it's not a book on how to become immortal in the supernatural sense. Read more

Published 17 months ago by Bella Donna

5.0 out of 5 stars Out side the box
Amazing books, mind bending Pickover does a great job of placing many interesting facts, and sciences in short easy to read pages of abosolute goodness. Read more

Published 18 months ago by Jeremy Tuve

5.0 out of 5 stars My brain is glowing
Pickover knows just what to say to kickstart the parts of your brain you haven't even used yet. Reading this book is like taking a walking tour through the magical zone where your... Read more

Published on January 28, 2007 by E. E. Kuersten

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fun and Fascinating Read
I just finished Pickover's book and like the way he bridges all sorts of different ideas, interspersed with great quotes form notables. Read more

Published on January 2, 2007 by Robert Bulterman

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