Braitenberg’s Vehicles, which shows, step-by-step, how more and more complex behaviors can evolve in little robot “vehicles,” starting from the simplest possible. Braitenberg then goes on to show how this illustrates how complex brains might have evolved, and illustrates his arguments with examples from neuroscience.
Robert L. Forward’s Indistinguishable from Magic, which gives an overview of how various science-fiction dreams relate to modern-day science. He has a fairly lengthy section on our burgeoning antimatter industry, for example.
I’d suggest Sagan’s Dragons of Eden, but I actually don’t remember it that well. I remember reading it over and over as a kid, and being fascinated by its discussions of split-brain patients, animal intelligence, AI, and so on.
(And one of these days I intend to read Godel, Escher, Bach and Guns, Germs, and Steel)
The Demon Haunted World by Sagan
(Sagan destroys pseudoscience)
The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
(Exploring the horrors of scientific racism)
Also, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Nrretranders. A fascinating (though much debated) thesis on everything from information theory to entropy to discussions on consciousness.
How could I have forgotten The Mind’s I? Quite simply, the most amazing book on the question of consciousness I’ve ever read. Short on answers, but very, very long on mind-blowing questions.
Wanted to pop in to say Gödel, Escher, Bach. I got a lot more out of it the second time around.
Stephen Jay Gould’s Full House is worth picking up, too, as long as you approach it as a work of general philosophy rather than as literal evolutionary theory.
:clears throat:
The Names of Things: Life, Language, and Beginnings in the Egyptian Desert, by Susan Brind Morrow, is essential reading. It’s sort of a travelogue for word-nerds, and it as poetic as it is information-dense.
If you’re interested in psychology, try Timothy Leary’s Infopsychology. I’ve read pretty much every major theorist in the field and his theories make the most sense to me.
Anything and everything by Carl Sagan. It’s all good. I read his books whenever I need a reminder of reality.
One non-fiction book I read that I thought was very good was Keith Richburg’s Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. Richburg was a journalist who covered lots of African conflicts and human-interest stories in Africa in the early '90s. He was in Somalia during the events of “Black Hawk Down”, South Africa as Apartheid was dying, Rwanda during the Hutu-Tutsi genocide, etc. Great book, genuinely terrifying and moving.