Marco Fiorentini
Back home

Selected shelf

Reading / Influences

A selective shelf of works that changed how I think about will, mind, living systems, capital, and computation. It is not a complete bibliography or a statement of endorsement.

Will, meaning, and mind

How will, interiority, symbols, self-reference, and distributed processes become a world and a mind.

  1. The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1 — English edition
    English edition

    The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1

    Arthur Schopenhauer

    Begins from the claim that the world appears as representation while its inner reality is ceaseless will.

  2. The Phenomenon of Man — English edition
    English edition

    The Phenomenon of Man

    Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

    Connects evolution, increasing complexity, and the emergence of reflective consciousness.

  3. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid — English edition
    English edition

    Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

    Douglas R. Hofstadter

    Uses formal systems, recursion, and self-reference to investigate how meaning and minds emerge.

  4. The Society of Mind — English edition
    English edition

    The Society of Mind

    Marvin Minsky

    Models intelligence as the organization of many limited, interacting processes rather than one central faculty.

Cognition and world models

How attention, reference frames, and networks construct a usable world.

  1. The Master and His Emissary — English edition
    English edition

    The Master and His Emissary

    Iain McGilchrist

    Examines how distinct modes of attention disclose and organize different versions of the world.

  2. Networks of the Brain — English edition
    English edition

    Networks of the Brain

    Olaf Sporns

    Treats cognition as an outcome of structural and functional connectivity across brain networks.

Life, systems, and causality

How living networks, feedback, intervention, and counterfactuals make structure and change legible.

  1. Thinking in Systems — English edition
    English edition

    Thinking in Systems

    Donella H. Meadows

    Makes stocks, flows, feedback loops, delays, and leverage points available as a practical language of systems.

  2. The Book of Why — English edition
    English edition

    The Book of Why

    Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie

    Separates association, intervention, and counterfactual reasoning into explicit levels of causal inquiry.

Computation and control

How data infrastructure and planetary computation reorganize state, sovereignty, and agency.

  1. Designing Data-Intensive Applications — English edition
    English edition

    Designing Data-Intensive Applications

    Martin Kleppmann

    Clarifies the trade-offs among state, consistency, replication, partitioning, and distributed computation.

  2. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty — English edition
    English edition

    The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

    Benjamin H. Bratton

    Reads planetary computation as layered infrastructure that reorganizes sovereignty, territory, and agency.

Capital and institutions

How value, discipline, labor, and accumulation become durable social structures.

  1. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 — English edition
    English edition

    Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1

    Karl Marx

    Treats capital not as a stock of things but as a social relation reproduced through labor, value, and accumulation.

  2. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism — English edition
    English edition

    The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

    Max Weber

    Examines how religious discipline became an institutional ethic for work, calculation, and capitalist conduct.

Science Fiction / Imagined civilizations

Fiction as a space to explore machine judgment, civilizational design, and the conditions of freedom.

  1. I, Robot — English edition
    English edition

    I, Robot

    Isaac Asimov

    Explores the gap between giving machines rules and entrusting them with judgment: what those rules mean when they meet human intentions and unforeseen situations.

  2. Foundation — Series selection: Foundation · English edition
    Series selection: Foundation · English edition

    Foundation series

    Isaac Asimov

    Sets the ambition to predict and shape civilization against individuals who unsettle its assumptions. A way to examine the reach of social models and what escapes them.

  3. The Player of Games — Series selection: The Player of Games · English edition
    Series selection: The Player of Games · English edition

    Culture series

    Iain M. Banks

    Asks what freedom and agency mean when machine intelligence sustains society. It also tests the authority of a civilization that intervenes in others in the name of a better life.

Cover sources: Open Library and publisher catalogues.