The Romance of Reality

How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity

By: Bobby Azarian

Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith

Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's summary

Why do we exist? For centuries, this question was the sole province of religion and philosophy. But now science is ready to take a seat at the table.

According to the prevailing scientific paradigm, the universe tends toward randomness; it functions according to laws without purpose, and the emergence of life is an accident devoid of meaning.

But this bleak interpretation of nature is currently being challenged by cutting-edge findings at the intersection of physics, biology, neuroscience, and information theory—generally referred to as “complexity science”. Thanks to a new understanding of evolution, as well as recent advances in our understanding of the phenomenon known as emergence, a new cosmic narrative is taking shape: Nature’s simplest “parts” come together to form ever-greater “wholes” in a process that has no end in sight.

In The Romance of Reality, cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian explains the science behind this new view of reality and explores what it means for all of us. In engaging, accessible prose, Azarian outlines the fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics at the heart of the old assumptions about the universe’s evolution, and shows us the evidence that suggests that the universe is a “self-organizing” system, one that is moving toward increasing complexity and awareness.

Cosmologist and science communicator Carl Sagan once said of humanity that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself”. The Romance of Reality shows that this poetic statement in fact rests on a scientific foundation and gives us a new way to know the cosmos, along with a riveting vision of life that imbues existence with meaning—nothing supernatural required.

©2022 BenBella Books (P)2022 BenBella Books

this is what schools should be teaching

I particularly like the way the book ropes in all of the disciplines all of the state of the art theories breaks them down into a nuts and bolts how does this fit into the puzzle or not leaving you with a very clear picture of the most modern state in which we find ourselves and science

A Speculative Science/Spirituality

Azarian does a good job summarizing and explaining the current thinking of many contemporary scientists who embrace a new scientific spirituality based on a model of a computational universe. However, many of these theories are inherently not falsifiable and therefore are speculative and destined to remain so.

Excellent book on the understanding of the human experience and function of the universe.

Cant recommend enough. If possible, I would recommend listening to Visionary by Graham Hancock, and The immortality Key by Brian Muraresku before embarking into this. These books give a solid understanding of the roots of human consciousness leading to where we are today without too much esoteric speech.

Reality Redefined with New Epistemic Findings!

Excellent book! For a sequel or prequel, but definitely a must, read/listen to The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution by futurist and evolutionary cyberneticist Alex M. Vikoulov where you'll find many confirmations as well as additional insights and fresh perspectives.

The great awakening revealed

Finally an intelligent person who was able to articulate all of the discoveries of silence and combine them into a single theory of everything This book we'll change your life and Mr. Arzarian is a prophet of the universe!

A Monumental Work! (If you are fortunate to grasp it).

After reading close to 300 books over the past decade on various domains in Science, I would say this book was a watershed moment for me in terms of perspective. It needs a familiarity with concepts in evolution, neuroscience, Bayesian model and quantum theory else you only see the tip of the iceberg. I found nuggets of wisdom in almost every other page and for someone like me that reads a lot of books on these topics, that’s a big statement.

What a debut. I hope Bobby Azarian writes more books.

The single best complexity science book yet

Wow! I’ve had a 30+yr fascination with complexity science since reading Gleick’s Chaos in 1987 and this was the greatest so far.

For me personally I’m not sure I could have fully appreciated this book without some understanding of complexity science (I’ve probably read 22 books on the subject over 30yrs) but that’s me. For smarter folks this could be a perfect place to start and I would discourage no one to start here.

The book was still a mighty but extremely rewarding challenge.

For anyone who has read complexity science books like Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex System, Butterfly Economics: A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior or many others you find that elements of complexity science or complex adaptive systems are well explained but a unifying truly scientific theory that ties it all together is missing.

For me Romance of Reality did just that and did it beautifully.

All that said this was not an easy read/listen, requiring me to playback sections many times over and over again. At times I was extremely frustrated trying to grasp a concept that seemed unrelated or too difficult to comprehend.

The audio version was excellent. While there is certain material, especially scientific, that doesn’t lend itself to audio, Romance of Reality actually did.

Muscle through this listen and you’ll walk away with a (maybe not *the*) unifying theory of the big (universe, galaxies, civilizations) and small (molecular, atomic) that explains how and why we got here.

I hope others read this and review it.

Simply mind-blowing.

I don't know for another work like this. It's very dense and draws on a lot of works.

2/3rds great

The first two parts were great. the third part got to be very subjective. however I agree with the basic premise of the book, just slightly different supports.

Brilliant book, except for the author’s examination of free will.

Explaining all of life and natural phenomena through the lens of energy gradients, self organization, and the emergence of complexity is a profound feat and beautiful novel frame.

Where the author goes wrong is in his “debunking” of the illusion of free will. The explanation given is that there are top down causal processes that moves an organism in a direction of choice or goals. What the author fails to realize is that those top down processes are also controlled at the atomic level by emergent complexity.

While our subjective experience is surely one of free will and it can be harnessed to move people towards better lives, there are also many damaging aspects to this view such as resultant judgements of self and others, energy wasted on regret, and our appallingly terrible criminal justice system.

Better to live with the paradox of subjective free will and it’s objective absence than to claim free will exists with literally no evidence and a thin argument. Paradoxes exist everywhere. Let’s embrace the genius of the “and” rather than arguing on either/or.