BenBella Books The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic

Just as the other 5 star reviews noted, this is a brilliant book on all counts. Written superbly with amazing insights and clarity. I wish this was in German so i could give it to my fellow uni friends (physics).

This is not an easy book to read. It seems to assume a substantial background in evolutionary theory, thermodynamics, complexity theory, cosmology, quantum mechanics, cognition and much more. If you read it once and understand 25% - 33% of it, that would seem like great progress. It is definitely worth the effort, but you need to expect that there will be sentences and entire topics that are simply overwhelming. It's too bad this vary intelligent author didn't have an editor willing to force him to write more clearly, to stop dropping so many names and quotations, and the summarize - in simple English - what each chapter will discsss and, at the end, what it has accomplished.

Great read

“It is a thrilling time to be alive.”I’m not one to normally utter such words. In fact, I didn’t say those words just now… I quoted them from the first page. But as I read further into The Romance of Reality I found myself agreeing and actually thinking those exact words. Any book that can convince a self-proclaimed “realist” (read: pessimist) that it’s a thrilling time to be alive has to have done something right.So why it is a thrilling time to be alive?Bobby Azarian ties together a lot of concepts and presents them coherently as something new and clear, something exciting and thought-provoking, something actually worthy of being called a new paradigm. Basically, I felt thrilled to be reading about the way in which so many scientific concepts are (and so much disparate research is) beginning to tie together in “a theory of everything” that is simple enough for me to comprehend.The book is very well-researched. Azarian has clearly done his homework (the book acts as a compendium on complexity science, cybernetics, information theory, universal darwinism, the free energy principle, evolution, adaptation, and emergence) and synthesizes the ideas in a clear and presentable manner. Reading this book was like getting up to date on a lot of research that slowly starts to coalesce: starting a chain reaction that culminates in a new way to see cosmological evolution, life, and purpose.

This book should be required reading for all those interested in a deep understanding of the nature of reality. Bobby Azarian masterfully weaves together dozens of important concepts and their historical origins into a brilliant picture of what is going on in our universe. With this work, we can truly see how close we are to “waking up” as a universe, and perhaps understanding the nature of our reality.A philosophical theory of everything (PTOE), to me, is a theory which doesn’t quite have a fully mechanistic explanation that can be run on a computer, and/or used to predict all of our various perceptions. I would argue that a PTOE is a necessary stepping stone towards a true TOE. In this way, it’s paramount for those interested in understanding the nature of reality to see examples of how PTOEs are crafted, such that they can make their own and ideally turn it into a full blown TOE.I know of no other work that brings together these particular concepts into a cohesive story in a way that is graspable by even the lay person. I would certainly recommend it to anyone trying to get a good high level understanding of many scientific concepts which currently do a great job at describing different facets of our world, as well as how they might be connected together to create a true TOE.I have plenty of gripes/disagreements with certain views that Bobby seems to have, and even sometimes with the way those views are delivered, but that's what PTOEs are all about. Strong convictions, loosely held. It's meant to be provocative. Hopefully, this provocation drives YOU to actually do something about it... To fix what bothers you, to make your very own PTOE, or perhaps even a true TOE.