/lit/ - Literature

What are some books about people with extremely low IQs (we're talking retard-tier low) trying to get by in life? I think the hardships which clinical idiots face are perfect material for a tragedy, it must be really grim to hear people yelling at you every day and being visibly annoyed by your stupidity and still being unable to comprehend what exactly they want from you. I've already read Flowers for Algernon and I remember Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep having some retard with a heart of gold, what are some other books?

>>23020674
You got a problem with that?

I read textbooks for fun but never remember any of their contents

stokoe's high life

I've read blood meridian and i loved it. Any other old western novel that you would recc me? pic not related

A Coffin for Demitrios by Eric Ambler (9/10) - exceptional mystery novel, economically written, makes you share the MC's inexorable compulsion to keep pulling the thread of an increasingly murkey and perilous conspiracy
Empire by Gore Vidal (6.5/10) - don't care much for drawing-room social maneuvering, pampered heirs and heiresses bickering over inheritance, and other society novel crap, and there's enough of that in here to make parts of it a slog. The detail Vidal puts into coloring the world on the cusp of the twentieth century makes you feel like you're actually there, though, which mostly makes up for it
Blindsight by Peter Watts (9/10) - for me sci-fi is mostly a vehicle for exposing you to cool ideas and concepts and this book is so dense with them that I actually had to start taking notes. Competently constructed and engaging narrative.
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (5/10) - The sci-fi whoah-dude-think-about-it parts of this one were satisfactory, but unlike Blindsight the narrative behind it was punishingly hard to care about. I also fucking hated every character besides the based hardboiled cop dude. I am only reading the sequel because I was promised that it's way better. Also the translator should never work again because the dialogue sounds like he copy-pasted from Google
Claudius the God by Robert Graves (9/10) - historical novels walk a fine line between making characters seem like space-aliens with no recognizable human feelings or motivations, and modern people transported into exotic times past with their worldviews intact. Graves walks this tightrope masterfully and shows you Imperial Rome through the eyes of a man who feels truly contemporary.

>>20917330
For example, you're experiencing qualia both within and as your consciousness; you're thinking about thoughts, right? Now, you're trying to explain to me, as best you can, using symbols which do are not comprised of the same "substance" to direct my attention towards memories that can be used to construct a perspective similar to yours, without the direct apprehension of your conscious frame of reference?

What you are doing RIGHT NOW is logically equivalent to what a man with sight does when he describes the color of bright scarlet to a blind man as alike "the blare of a trumpet".

You're an idiot, I'm a professor, and you can fuck off with your undergrad tamale' tech idiocy.

I get filtered by every book I read

Books to help me clean up and organize my life?

I'm tired of being sloppy and unorganized. My house growing up was chaotic and no one really taught me these life skills. For instance, I just throw my mail into a big pile, accumlate crap until it becomes an incoherent mess. I just noticed messes that would bother other people don't really bother me.

Why is reading associated with intelligence? Why is it that other mediums of learning are generally considered inferior? Is this idea outdated or do you agree?

>>20189193
What do you use to hold a door open?

>>20140115
>If I had to relive my life I would be even more stubborn and uncompromising than I have been.

>The reader may be disposed to suspect that this is merely a mathematician’s fancy, and that no such case would be likely ever to occur. But he may be assured that such occurrences are far from being rare. In order to satisfy him that this state of things does occur, I will mention an incontestable instance of it; — incontestable, at least, by any fair mind competent to deal with the problem.

>>20036843
That's a mediocre analogy. But he probably wasn't 300 IQ like me. Let me freak you the fuck out.

Consider an infinite line. We then mark a point along that infinite line, and denote it point A. Now, let's make a rule that says every point along the infinite line that's 1 inch from point A is colored blue, and that any point along the line that's 1 inch from a blue point must also be colored blue.

Well, the consequence is that the entire infinite line is colored blue, right? That's how most people think consciousness works. That there's a sort of infinite line stretching backwards into the past, and forwards into the future, and that consciousness is a kind of infinite extension of both into themselves as a discontinuous sequence or spectrum. Like your professors analogy seems to hint at. There's a sort of deterministic pattern linking the past to the present, and propelling the present into the future.

Not so.

Let's consider another infinite line with a point A. Except this time the rule is that the every point infinitesimally close to point A must be painted blue, and that every point infinitesimally close to a blue point must be painted blue.

Well, what happens? An infinite amount of the line is thereby painted blue, and an infinite amount of the line on either side of the infinite blue line is still unpainted. You end up with the blue line portion being a smaller infinity than the two infinities that it interposes. Consciousness is, essentially, the blue portion on this line. It's continuous. The past is known to our facilities of conscious experience only via recollection of memories of the past that persist into the present as a consequence of the infinitesimally short nature of the present as experienced consciously. As such, the future is known to our experiential faculties only in so far as we are capable of deriving sense from the intimations derived from actuality regarding future events that inhere within both our recollections of the past, and our immediate experiences of those recollections in present memory.

There is some determinate distance away from the present as interpreted by my memories of the past as the present moment that constitutes an effectively infinite distance into the past with respect to my conscious experience of that moment — I have an immediate consciousness of a state of consciousness past by one unit of time, and if that past state involved an immediate consciousness of the preceding state by one unit, I then have an immediate consciousness of a state past by two units, etc. It appears that there exists a unit of distance between the present and the past that is more than any finite number of units as a consequence of the fact that I have no immediate consciousness of it.

There are no discrete units, my friend. The universe is one giant photon that appears to be moving at a fixed rate in time, and with fixed physical laws, only due to our conscious experience of it as such.