I think this book is fine. The writing is simplistic and the concepts are complex. It's dense and seems to have blown the minds of the people it's supposed to be for. But it's not for a wide audience, and I will bravely admit that it was not me. DNF at 20%

There is no way to describe The Romance of Reality other than mind-blowing. Azarian takes you from cosmos to consciousness and back again, and gives a plausible explanation to the meaning of everything, (as far as I can discern). The language is accessible and I think he does a really good job describing things as best he can, bearing in mind some things are not really supposed to totally comprehensible to the human mind. Whilst Azarian is really trying to communicate these concepts to a wide audience and does' not presuppose knowledge (which I'm all for!), I think the writing style at times is a little too casual for my liking

Overall, I'd highly recommend this book to everyone. It's pretty tough going, and some bits you'll get more than others, but if you want to begin to understand the nature of things, this is a really good place to start and much more accessible than other books out there. I will definitely be giving this another read!

This is an interesting and informative book. It's not written for a lay audience, though to me it didn't seem to be too difficult to be understood by a lay audience. I stopped reading around the 36% mark because it seemed to be getting increasingly technical and no longer held my interest.

I also felt like it made logical leaps that undermined the main thesis of the book. If thermodynamics inevitably results in adaptive systems, and life is an adaptive system, it doesn't necessarily follow that life is inevitable.

Nor does the book really seek to explain why abiogenesis happened only once on Earth as far as we know. There's maybe a paragraph on it during the first third of the book, and it wasn't all that persuasive. Something along the lines of "once life developed it was no longer imperative for life to develop." Okay, but that doesn't really explain why, if life developed along the mid-Atlantic ridge for instance, the pressure for life to develop elsewhere on Earth suddenly stopped. But I'm not a scientist, so what do I know?

Overall, I found the first quarter of the book to be really valuable. After that, the law of diminishing returns kicked in. I think the book does a good job of explaining how life might have first begun. But the arguments about inevitability fall short IMO.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

This book presents a metaphysics based on the relatively new (but increasingly mainstream) sciences of complexity, chaos, and information. It boldly explores some of the major questions that consume both philosophers and scientists, such as: how life came to be, what life’s purpose is (to the degree it has one,) what consciousness is and does, and how are we to explain the fact that we live in a universe finely-tuned to generate and support life? (Particularly, if one doesn’t like explanations that are audacious and unprovable like “god did it” or “there are infinite parallel universes.”)

The book starts out in territory that is fairly uncontroversial among physicists, arguing that life comes about (and does so with striking speed – i.e. fast abiogenesis) by a process through which nature moves the ordered / useful energy that Earth has in abundance into disordered / useless energy (e.g. waste heat,) a process that runs on rules not unlike Darwinian evolution (molecules have an informational existence that allow something like hereditability [passing down of “blueprints”] and mutation [distortion in copies, some of which will make the molecule or organism more efficient at using energy.]

The book then ventures into territory that is quite controversial, arguing that life has a purpose (beyond the tedious one of moving low entropy energy into a high entropy state,) and that purpose is to be an observer – i.e. to be the first stage in a self-aware world. I should point out a couple things. First, when I say this part is controversial, I mean that it couldn’t be called the consensus view, but that’s not to say that these ideas don’t have a following among some high-level intellects. Second, I think we need people to consider ideas that might seem a bit “out there” because there is a danger of not progressing because we’re trapped in morass of assumptions. Science has quite a few self-appointed guardians who mock as pseudo-science any idea that strays from scientific consensus or from a rigidly reductionist / materialist / Copernican worldview. The author doesn’t abandon a scientific point of view, even though it might seem he does to some because he abandons the nihilistic view that’s taken as a given by many in the scientific community (i.e. that life is a happy accident without purpose, significance, or influence on the universe – and that life consists of automata, playing out programs -- devoid of any kind of free will.)

I don’t know how much of Azarian’s metaphysics will prove true, but this book was superbly thought-provoking and opened up to me whole new vistas of possibility about the big questions of philosophy and science. I’d highly recommend it for readers interested in the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

This book’s cover is pretty great. It nearly singlehandedly got me to start the book, and it looks like a lot of effort went into it – unlike anything else about it.

<i>The Romance of Reality</i> by Bobby Azarian opens with a collection of fourteen (14!) glowing review snippets all gushing full of praise for this book. This feels like overcompensating. Not even the best writer in the world needs <i>that</i> many positive reviews inside the actual book (if it’s truly that good, it will speak for itself!) and the staggering number of over-the-top praise in this one feels like a clumsy attempt to preventively make up for what is possibly the worst written book I’ve read this year.

Look. This book manages to be bad in such a myriad of different ways as to be pretty impressive; when I got to the end and read the acknowledgements I nearly couldn’t believe that this had been professionally edited.

The writing is simplistic and rough and just honestly lousy. The over reliance on italics for emphasis makes me think of a very eager undergraduate writing their first-ever term paper rather than the holder of a doctoral degree – if you’re not able to construct a sentence in a way that emphasises the concepts and words that you believe should immediately catch the reader’s attention, then your book doesn’t have an “engaging, accessible prose” as the blurb insists it does. Rather, a lot of the explanatory passages read as pretty patronising; I’ve seen high school textbooks that have more faith in the ability of the reader to follow basic scientific concepts and definitions. <i>The Romance of Reality</i> spends a lot of time and unnecessary words to recap what was just explained in the chapters (or even paragraphs) immediately prior, as if the author were well aware that most readers will be dozing off every dozen pages and picking the book back up days later if they remember it exists.

At the same time, so many of the sentences are such a meaningless word salad that feels like a parody of itself. For example: <i>“It is important to keep in mind that the global mind, should we bring it about by coordinating our activity in the correct way, is not the end goal of evolutionary process; it is merely a step on the ladder of open-ended complexity growth. The major evolutionary transitions of biology are just a subset of a larger chain of cosmic metasystem transitions, which are far-from-equilibrium phase transitions that continuously create new levels of hierarchical control.</i>” (Yes, that is three transitions in one sentence and a random semicolon when a conjunction would do – see what I mean about professional editing?). And the same paragraph continues: <i>“Darwinian dynamics are at work above the level of biological evolution, propelling cultural and technological evolution forward, making a self-replicating biosphere as inevitable as was the origin of life, given enough time and enough evolutionary cycles. When intelligent life terraforms a new planet, that is the biosphere replicating, and because the planet will have different properties than the planet of origin, there will be replication with variation.” I feel like I’m reading Rob Hubbard by way of a Grimes song. I honestly didn’t think a book could be too dumbed down and too pretentious to follow, but Azarian managed it without even trying.

If the writing is mediocre, the content is worse. I admit I went in not knowing what to expect – I saw the pretty cover and very quickly skimmed the blurb, saw a Sagan quote, and expected a book that would be at least something resembling pop science. Instead this is just complete pseudoscientific drivel that doesn’t even seem to understand the point it attempts to make. There doesn’t seem to be a real thesis or a solid conclusion, or a reflection of what the more concrete, every day implications this “riveting vision of life” may be.
If I hadn’t read the author’s bio before writing this review I really wouldn’t believe that Bobby Azarian has an academic background, even putting aside the clumsy writing. There are constant references to scientists “quietly challenging” mainstream tenets of science from physics to neuroscience, but all the citations are from either very obscure work with little peer review, or out-of-context quotes from much more famous scientists whom I seriously doubt are even aware this book exists. Admittedly, if the prose had been less of a word salad it may have been easier to wade through the conceptual mess and understand what points the author attempts to make, but the combination of out-there ideas and messy writing makes for a thoroughly surreal combination of nonsense.