Blindsight, by Peter Watts, helped a lot with my depression (though I am very much an outlier here, and nobody should expect the same result) and was sort of my “rabbithole” moment for thinking about brains and consciousness and “What makes me, ‘me’?” and so on, which continues to pay dividends insofar as a hugely useful tactic for dealing with depression is realizing that “you” are, at best, just one brain-part of a whole system of brain-parts, some of which are malfunctioning, and that e.g. you shouldn’t necessarily trust the brain-part which is saying “You are awful and need to die.”
(It also helped my depression because there’s just a certain element of “horrifying beauty” in Blindsight, but again I don’t expect other people to agree.)
Blindsight, by Peter Watts, helped a lot with my depression (though I am very much an outlier here, and nobody should expect the same result) and was sort of my “rabbithole” moment for thinking about brains and consciousness and “What makes me, ‘me’?” and so on, which continues to pay dividends insofar as a hugely useful tactic for dealing with depression is realizing that “you” are, at best, just one brain-part of a whole system of brain-parts, some of which are malfunctioning, and that e.g. you shouldn’t necessarily trust the brain-part which is saying “You are awful and need to die.”
(It also helped my depression because there’s just a certain element of “horrifying beauty” in Blindsight, but again I don’t expect other people to agree.)