11.4 Bibliography

References from all seedpods, grouped by keyword.

Note: currently the same reference may appear multiple times. A future update will merge references from different seedpods into a single entry.

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Anderson, Philip W. More Is Different. Science, 177(4047), 1972.
Science 177, pp. 393-394, the opening argument and the two-column table of sciences. Four pages, no sections, and the whole claim lives in one distinction: Anderson grants the reductionist hypothesis and denies the constructionist one. You may have the fundamental laws and still be unable to walk back up. 2.5
Arnold, Vladimir I. Small Denominators and Problems of Stability of Motion in Classical and Celestial Mechanics. Russian Mathematical Surveys, 18(6):85–191, 1963.
Introduction, sections 1 and 4, and chapter I, section 3, on small denominators, with the Newton-method argument in section 4. Arnold’s result is the general one the passage needs: quasiperiodic motions whose frequency ratios satisfy a Diophantine condition survive small perturbation, while those close to resonance are the ones destroyed. He does not single out the golden ratio; that claim is carried by Greene. 7.6
Baldwin, James Mark A New Factor in Evolution. American Naturalist, 1896.
American Naturalist 30, pp. 441-451: section I, Ontogeny: Organic Selection, for the mechanism, and section II, Phylogeny: Physical Heredity, pp. 448-450, where Baldwin argues that determinate variation is accounted for without the inheritance of acquired characters. Organic selection keeps a lineage alive long enough for selection to move the congenital starting point toward what the individual had to learn. 10.3
Barlow, Horace B. Possible Principles Underlying the Transformations of Sensory Messages. In Sensory Communication, ed. Walter A. Rosenblith, MIT Press, 1961, pp. 217–234.
The original statement of the efficient coding hypothesis: sensory systems recode their input to strip redundancy given the statistics of the natural environment. Note that Barlow’s later Redundancy Reduction Revisited (Network 12(3):241–253, 2001) partly retracts this, arguing he had over-emphasized compression and that the brain exploits redundancy rather than discarding it, so the 2001 paper cannot be cited for the compression claim made here. 7.3
Bauby, Jean-Dominique The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Knopf, 1997.
The untitled opening chapter and The Wheelchair, where the diagnosis is finally delivered and named, together with The Vegetable, where Bauby learns what the ward calls him. The whole memoir is an interior for which the exterior offered no evidence whatever. 5.6
Bekenstein, Jacob Black Holes and Entropy. Physical Review D, 7(8):2333–2346, 1973.
The original argument that a black hole’s entropy, and so its information content, is proportional to horizon area rather than volume. This is the result the holographic principle generalizes; the principle itself was formulated later, by ’t Hooft (1993) and Susskind (1995), both cited in The Soap Bubble as Recognition, Not Metaphor. 8.1
Benford, Frank The Law of Anomalous Numbers. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1938.
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 78, pp. 551-556, where Table I on p. 553 tabulates twenty heterogeneous datasets and averages 30.6 percent for leading digit 1 against 4.7 percent for 9, and the section headed The Law of Anomalous Numbers on p. 556 states the logarithmic law. Benford’s point is that the fit is best where the data are most miscellaneous, which is what makes the hierarchy look structural rather than an artifact of any one domain. 3.4
Bergson, Henri Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. Zone Books, 1988. Originally Matière et mémoire, 1896. Check
Ch. I, Of the Selection of Images for Conscious Presentation: What Our Body Means and Does. The brain appears there as an organ of action that selects from a wider field of images only what is practically useful, which is the argument Broad and then Huxley recast as the reducing valve. 10.11
The common source. Whitehead translates Bergson’s durée into occasions; Teilhard translates it into cosmic direction. 3.9
Bohr, Niels The Quantum Postulate and the Recent Development of Atomic Theory. Nature, 1928.
Section 1, Quantum Postulate and Causality, where space-time coordination and the claim of causality are called complementary but exclusive features of the description, and Section 5, Wave Mechanics and Quantum Postulate, where wave and particle become complementary pictures that only together generalize the classical account. Mutually exclusive in use, jointly exhaustive in content, is Bohr’s own formulation. 6.4
Brolin, Hans Invariant Sets Under Iteration of Rational Functions. Arkiv för Matematik, 6:103–144, 1965.
Establishes that harmonic measure on a Julia set coincides with the equilibrium measure of the iteration, which is what makes the measure fall out of the geometry rather than being imposed on it. 9.2
Burkert, Walter Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism. Trans. Edwin L. Minar Jr. Harvard University Press, 1972.
Ch. V on Pythagorean musical theory. The identification of consonance with simple integer ratios is genuinely Pythagorean; it is now understood as stability under iteration. Pythagoras himself left no writings, so the tradition must be cited through its later reporters. 3.5
Ch. V, §1 on speculation, experimentation and fiction. The ratio doctrine is genuinely Pythagorean, but Pythagoras left no writings, and the monochord and smithy stories are later legend, the smithy version physically false as told. Burkert is the standard source on what the evidence will and will not support. 3.3
Butterfield, Herbert The Whig Interpretation of History. Bell, 1931.
The Preface, where the whig interpretation is named and defined as the habit of emphasising principles of progress in the past and producing a story that is the ratification if not the glorification of the present, and Ch. 1, Introduction, where the abridgement of the past by reference to the present is worked out. The famous definition is in the Preface, not, as commonly reported, in Ch. 2. 2.2
Campbell, Joseph The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books, 1949.
Prologue, The Monomyth, section 3, The Hero and the God, where the separation-initiation-return formula is named the nuclear unit of the monomyth, and Part I, chapters I through III, which unfold it. The formula is what makes the hero’s journey canonical rather than one story among many. 6.3
Chalmers, David Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3):200–219, 1995.
Section 2, The Easy Problems and the Hard Problem, pp. 200 to 203, and Section 3, Functional Explanation, where the hard problem is put at its sharpest: explain the performance of every function and the question why there is experience at all remains untouched. That is precisely the boundary the passage suggests may prove contingent. 5.8
Chalmers, David The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press, 1996.
For the hard problem, Ch. 1’s section on the two mind-body problems and the whole of Ch. 3, Can Consciousness be Reductively Explained. For the panpsychist leaning that puts Chalmers alongside Goff here, Ch. 8, Consciousness and Information, and its section asking whether experience is ubiquitous, where the double-aspect principle and the thermostat appear. He arrives near panpsychism by the failure of reduction, not by taste for it. 2.4
Chapter 3, section 1, where the zombie is introduced and its logical possibility argued, and chapter 4, section 1, the argument against materialism that turns that possibility into a conclusion. The inference the passage is testing is Chalmers’ own: if the zombie is conceivable, feeling does not follow from function. 5.9
Cohen, Leonard “Anthem.” The Future, Columbia Records, 1992.
Anthem, track 5 on The Future, in the refrain. Cohen sings ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything’ — the doubling is his, and the line as quoted here compresses it. 7.5
Collier, Jacob Interview. Source unconfirmed.
On melody as dialogue and harmony as plot. UNVERIFIED: this exact formulation could not be located in any indexed Collier interview. Citable Collier-on-harmony sources that do exist: WIRED, Musician Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty (2018); NPR TED Radio Hour, The Language of Harmony (2022). Either confirm the source or recast the line in the author’s own voice. 7.5
Darwin, Charles On the Origin of Species. John Murray, 1859.
Ch. IV, Natural Selection, with Chs. I and II supplying the premise of undirected variation. Darwin gives the mechanism and only the mechanism; the demonstration that it cumulates is Fisher, Haldane and Wright, which is the division of labor the passage describes. 2.6
Deacon, Terrence Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. W.W. Norton, 2011.
The chapters titled Constraint, Homeodynamics, Morphodynamics and Teleodynamics, which build the hierarchy of emergent dynamics, and then Information and Significance, where reference to what is absent is finally earned. Cited by chapter title rather than number, since editions disagree on whether the opening chapter, Absence, is numbered zero or one. 10.5
Deida, David Blue Truth: A Spiritual Guide to Life & Death and Love & Sex. Sounds True, 2004.
Unverified attribution. The line, light is what love looks like and love is what light feels like, cannot be located in Blue Truth, which runs as short chapters across Part One, Life and Death, and Part Two, Love and Sex; no chapter, published excerpt, or quotation record carries the sentence, and no other Deida source does either. The wording needs to be checked against the print text, or the citation reassigned, before a locator can be given. 3.8
Dennett, Daniel Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown, 1991.
Ch. 5, Multiple Drafts Versus the Cartesian Theater, with Ch. 6 on the revisability of experienced time; the self as a centre of narrative gravity is Ch. 13, The Reality of Selves. Continuity is an achievement of the telling, not a property of the stream being told about. 10.12
Chapter 10, Show and Tell, where the zimbo is introduced as a zombie with higher-order reflective states and the zombie is argued out of existence: a system with that much self-monitoring is not a creature we can coherently say the lights are off in. Chapter 12, Qualia Disqualified, removes what would have to be left over. Cited by chapter rather than section, since the section heading is attested only secondhand. 5.9
Dennett, Daniel Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. W. W. Norton, 2013.
Part I, the introduction, which is the only place the intuition pump is defined rather than used: a thought experiment with knobs, whose settings can be turned to see whether the intuition survives. For the narrower job of catching a rhetorical substitution as it happens, the closer tools are Part II, number 10, the surely operator, and number 12, on deepities. 2.3
DeWitt, Bryce Quantum Mechanics and Reality. Physics Today, 1970.
The sections titled The EWG metatheorem and A splitting universe, within pp. 30 to 35, where DeWitt defends the picture of a universe continually splitting into an enormous number of equally real, mutually unobservable worlds, and shows why no observer can ever feel the split. 9.5
Dickens, Ky The Telepathy Tapes. Podcast, Season 1, 2024.
Season 1, Episode 1, where Dickens lays out the premise, and Episode 10, In Their Words, assembled entirely from the nonspeakers’ own statements. The reach of the podcast is the claim being made, and the reach came from the interiors it let speak. 5.6
Douady, Adrien and Hubbard, John H. Étude dynamique des polynômes complexes. Publications Mathématiques d’Orsay 84-02 and 85-04, 1984–85.
The Orsay notes: external rays, the Green’s function on the complement of the Mandelbrot set, and the potential theory from which harmonic measure on the boundary is defined. (Douady and Hubbard’s better-known 1985 paper, On the Dynamics of Polynomial-like Mappings, proves the Straightening Theorem and does not treat harmonic measure at all.) 9.2
External rays and the potential theory that defines harmonic measure on the boundary of the Mandelbrot set. 9.3
Edelman, Gerald Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. Basic Books, 1987.
Part I, Somatic Selection, Ch. 3, Neuronal Group Selection, with the compact statement of the theory in Ch. 1, A Summary and Historical Introduction. Ch. 3 supplies the mechanism the passage needs: a primary repertoire of neuronal groups is generated, then selected among by experience, so that what reaches coherent representation has been competed for rather than computed. 10.2
Einstein, Albert Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper (On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies). Annalen der Physik, 322(10):891–921, 1905.
Kinematical Part, Sections 1 and 2, on the definition of simultaneity and the relativity of lengths and times, and Section 4, where the retardation of a moving clock is derived and its behaviour as velocity approaches c can be read straight off. The photon’s vanishing proper time is the limit of that Section 4 result. 4.4
Elhage, Nelson et al. Toy Models of Superposition. Transformer Circuits Thread, Anthropic, 2022.
The section Definitions and Motivation: Features, Directions, and Superposition, particularly the subsections Features as Directions and The Superposition Hypothesis, where the Johnson-Lindenstrauss bound gives an n-dimensional space exponentially many almost-orthogonal directions, and then the section Demonstrating Superposition, where the toy models show a trained network actually doing it. 9.7
Epperson, Michael Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Fordham University Press, 2004.
Sustained reading of QM through Whitehead’s occasions; the standard modern text. 3.9
Euler, Leonhard Tentamen novae theoriae musicae. 1739.
Caput IX, De genere diatonico-chromatico, pp. 132-150 of the 1739 edition, with the lattice at p. 147. Two cautions: Euler never calls it a Tonnetz, that name being Oettingen’s and Riemann’s a century and a half later, and his figure is a bounded twelve-note speculum musicum. The unlimited extension is a later reading, and Euler’s own comes in the 1774 paper on the speculum musicum. 7.5
Everett, Hugh, III ‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics. Reviews of Modern Physics, 29(3):454–462, 1957.
Reviews of Modern Physics 29, pp. 458-460, the treatment of the observation process, where the observer state branches and the accompanying footnote insists that every branch is equally actual, none more real than the rest; the closing discussion runs to p. 462. The branching and its symmetry are Everett’s. The evolutionary reading, each branch running its own experiment, is an extension of him, not a claim he makes. 4.5
Section 5, Observation, where the observer state is said to branch with each measurement and the trajectory of the memory configuration becomes not a linear sequence but a branching tree with all outcomes existing simultaneously. The Note added in proof attached to that passage answers the objection that only one branch can be real: on the theory there is no transition from possible to actual, and no branch can register the splitting. 3.5
Section 5, Observation, pp. 459-461, through Eq. 26. Everett has the observer branch into a superposition of outcome-records and then derives the square-amplitude measure as the only additive measure available on those branches. That derivation is what sharpens the question: every branch is real, so the weighting cannot be a fact about which one happened. 9.2
The section headed Observation, where the observer state branches and all branches are said to exist simultaneously in the superposition, together with the footnote insisting that every element is actual and none more real than the rest. The relative-state formalism is set up earlier; the ontological claim, that nothing is discarded, is made here. 9.5
Section 4, Concept of Relative State, for the formalism, read with the branching-tree passage in section 5 and the closing discussion in section 6. The relative-state construction never posits worlds; it yields a superposition whose elements each carry a definite observer and a definite outcome, and the tree is what that superposition looks like when it is traced through a sequence of measurements. 9.4
Farey, John On a Curious Property of Vulgar Fractions. Philosophical Magazine, 1816.
pp. 385-386, the whole letter. Farey observes that each fraction in the ordered array is the mediant of its neighbours, and offers no proof. The mediant relation is what carries over to the bulb ordering; nothing in the letter anticipates that use. 3.5
The 1816 letter entire, Philosophical Magazine 47, pp. 385-386; two pages, no sections. What Farey supplies is the ordering itself, all reduced fractions between 0 and 1 arranged by increasing denominator and value, so that simplicity and position coincide; the musical consequence is ours, not his. 3.4
pp. 385-386, the whole letter, which asserts the mediant property and proves nothing. The gap property this passage leans on, that neighbours a/b and c/d differ by exactly 1/bd so a simple ratio sits isolated in its own moat, was proved by Cauchy and is set out at Hardy and Wright, Ch. III, Theorems 28 to 30. Farey is the eponym, not the support. 3.3
Feynman, Richard The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics. Nobel Lecture, 1965.
The lecture carries no sections; the relevant stretch is the Princeton narrative about a third of the way in, the telephone call in which Wheeler says all electrons have the same charge and mass because they are all the same electron. It sits between the absorber-theory account and Feynman’s adoption of the positron as an electron running backward in time, which is the half of the proposal he kept. 4.4
The opening pages, where Feynman recounts Wheeler’s 1940 telephone call: “Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass. Because they are all the same electron!” Wheeler never published the idea; Feynman’s lecture is the only source for it. 3.6
Feynman, Richard The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 2. Addison-Wesley, 1964.
Vol. II, Ch. 1, Electromagnetism, and within it section 1-5, What are the fields?, following the statement of the laws in 1-4. Feynman’s question there is exactly the one this seedpod ends on: whether the field is a calculational convenience laid over action at a distance, or the physically real thing in which the interaction actually lives. 3.1
Friston, Karl The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2010.
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, pp. 127-138, especially the section Neural Darwinism and value learning, where Friston himself recasts Edelman’s neuronal group selection in free-energy terms, and Box 2, Hierarchical message passing in the brain, for the predictive coding machinery. The two theories the passage yokes together are yoked together in this paper as well: selection and prediction-error minimization are the same optimization seen from different ends. 10.2
Gleick, James Chaos: Making a New Science. Viking, 1987.
The chapters The Butterfly Effect and Strange Attractors, with Universality standing behind them. The first shows simple deterministic rules producing behavior indistinguishable from noise; the second shows the structure hidden inside that noise. The surprising relationship the passage names is the pairing of the two. 2.6
Gödel, Kurt On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I. Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik, 38:173–198, 1931.
Section 2, the arithmetization of the system P: the assignment of numbers to symbols, formulas and proof sequences, the chain of primitive recursive definitions numbered 1 to 45 erected on it, and Theorem VI, which uses them to construct the self-encoding sentence. The number is enormous and the operations that reach it are entirely routine, which is the whole of the passage’s point. 6.5
Theorem VI of §2, the first incompleteness theorem, proved for the formal system P constructed in that same section. Theorem XI, in §4, is the second theorem, on the unprovability of consistency, and is not the result Penrose’s argument turns on. 6.6
Section 1 sketches the self-referential construction informally; Section 2 proves it as Theorem VI. The sentence produced there is true and unprovable within the system, so truth and provability come apart exactly where the passage says they do. 6.4
Goff, Philip Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. Pantheon, 2019.
Ch. 4, How to Solve the Problem of Consciousness, is where the panpsychist alternative is actually built, resting on Ch. 3’s demonstration that physical science cannot deliver a reductive explanation. The Galileo diagnosis lives in Ch. 1; what this passage needs is Ch. 4’s argument that grounding experience in simpler experience costs less than conjuring it out of the non-experiential. 2.4
Ch. 4, How to Solve the Problem of Consciousness, which runs the Russell and Eddington argument that physics delivers only structure, never intrinsic nature, and infers panpsychism from the gap. The preceding chapters clear away dualism and materialism; the positive analytic case, the one this passage is pointing at, is made here. 2.2
Ch. 4, How to Solve the Problem of Consciousness, which runs the Russell and Eddington argument that physics delivers only structure and never intrinsic nature, and that consciousness is the intrinsic nature the equations leave blank. That is the rigorous form of the claim that experience is not an anomaly in a dark universe. 4.4
Ch. 4, How to Solve the Problem of Consciousness, where Goff builds the panpsychist case and then concedes the combination problem inside it. He treats the step from micro-experience to unified macro-experience as unsolved rather than merely unfinished, which is why he can be cited against his own position. 10.11
Goff, Philip Galileo’s Error. Pantheon, 2019.
The clearest recent reconstruction of panpsychism in analytic idiom. 3.9
Goff, Philip and Seager, William and Allen-Hermanson, Sean Panpsychism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2022.
Section 3.1, the anti-emergence argument, is the section that bears on the choice this passage frames: the emergence of experience from wholly non-experiential matter is unintelligible in a way that panpsychism is not. Section 1 supplies the long history alluded to, and 2.1 the working definition. 2.4
Goffman, Erving The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books, 1959.
The Introduction and chapter 1, Performances, opening with belief in the part one is playing, and the Conclusion, where the self is described as a performed character rather than an inner possession. The reflexive turn the passage wants is Goffman’s point that the performer is also in the audience. 6.3
Greene, John M. A Method for Determining a Stochastic Transition. Journal of Mathematical Physics, 20(6):1183–1201, 1979.
The source of the specific claim that the golden ratio is the most stable: Greene’s residue criterion shows the last invariant torus to break is the one with golden-ratio winding number. Arnold supplies the general Diophantine condition (badly approximable frequencies survive); that phi is the extreme case rests on Hurwitz’s theorem and is Greene’s and Percival’s result, not Arnold’s. 7.6
Hameroff, Stuart and Penrose, Roger Orchestrated Reduction of Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules: A Model for Consciousness. Mathematics and Computers in Simulation, 40(3–4):453–480, 1996.
§5, wave function self-collapse in microtubules, with §5.1 on the collapse criterion and conscious thought and §5.2 on shielding coherence from the environment; §6 assembles the whole Orch OR model as a numbered list of ingredients, and §3 supplies the microtubule background. The speculative load sits in §5.2: everything depends on coherence surviving a warm, wet brain. 6.6
Hawking, Stephen Particle Creation by Black Holes. Communications in Mathematical Physics, 1975.
Sections 1 and 2 of the paper, Communications in Mathematical Physics 43, 199 to 220. The identification of surface gravity with temperature and horizon area with entropy, and the proposal of a generalized second law, close section 1 at roughly pp. 203 to 205; section 2 derives that the emission is exactly that of a body at temperature kappa over two pi, at roughly pp. 211 to 213. This establishes black hole thermodynamics; the holographic reading of it came two decades later. 8.1
Hering, Ewald Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne. Carl Gerold’s Sohn, 1878. The mature statement is the posthumous Grundzüge der Lehre vom Lichtsinn (Springer, 1920), trans. Leo M. Hurvich and Dorothea Jameson as Outlines of a Theory of the Light Sense, Harvard University Press, 1964.
Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne, sixth communication, Grundzüge einer Theorie des Farbensinnes: §38 arranges the primaries as mutually exclusive Gegenfarben, and §42 states the three antagonistic visual substances, black-white, blue-yellow, red-green. Two corrections are owed. The Hurvich and Jameson translation, Outlines of a Theory of the Light Sense, renders Hering’s 1920 Grundzüge der Lehre vom Lichtsinn and not this 1878 book, so the reference as it stands fuses two separate works; and Hering placed opponency in hypothetical visual substances, the retinal circuitry being a twentieth-century discovery. 7.4
Hofstadter, Douglas Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Basic Books, 1979.
Ch. IX, Mumon and Godel, where Godel numbering is introduced and the theorem given its first pass, and Ch. XIV, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of TNT and Related Systems, where G is actually built. Ch. XIII, BlooP and FlooP and GlooP, supplies the intuition for primitive recursion, the routine machinery by which a number comes to talk about itself. 6.5
The dialogue Ant Fugue, which follows Ch. X, Levels of Description, and Computer Systems, and precedes Ch. XI, Brains and Thoughts. Aunt Hillary belongs to the dialogue and not to the chapter: it is the Anteater’s conversation, not the exposition, that gives the colony its moods, its opinions, and a level of description the ants themselves know nothing about. 2.5
Ch. XIV carries the proof of Gödel’s theorem inside TNT. The turn against Penrose is Ch. XV, Jumping out of the System, whose sections on Lucas dismantle the claim that Gödel shows the mind to be non-mechanical, the very argument Penrose later revived; Ch. XX, Strange Loops, Or Tangled Hierarchies, then draws the self-reference and mind conclusion. Note the rebuttal lives in Ch. XV, not in the strange-loop chapter where one might look for it. 6.6
Ch. V, Recursive Structures and Processes, the INT and Gplot sections, where self-similar graphs are built out of continued fractions and Gplot’s bands are indexed by rationals; the strange loop belongs to the Introduction and to Ch. XX, Strange Loops, Or Tangled Hierarchies. A correction is needed: the word Farey never appears in GEB, nor does Stern-Brocot. The book contains that mathematics under other names, so the sentence should credit the continued-fraction graphs of Ch. V rather than the named sequence. 10.10
’t Hooft, Gerard Dimensional Reduction in Quantum Gravity. Salamfestschrift, 1993.
The unnumbered passage around Eq. 3, where the count comes out at one Boolean degree of freedom per unit of Planck area, and the paragraphs after it that give the hologram analogy: everything happening inside a closed surface is representable by degrees of freedom on the surface itself. The preprint carries no headings, so the equation is the anchor. 8.2
Hume, David A Treatise of Human Nature. John Noon (Books I–II, 1739); Thomas Longman (Book III, 1740).
Book I, Part IV, Section VI: ‘Of Personal Identity,’ where Hume introspects and finds only a bundle of perceptions streaming past, no owner behind them. 8.7
Hurvich, Leo and Jameson, Dorothea An Opponent-Process Theory of Color Vision. Psychological Review, 64(6):384–404, 1957.
The quantitative account of the opponent scheme, derived by hue cancellation: three paired channels, red-green, yellow-blue, and black-white, recoding the cone responses. Note this is psychophysics, inferring the code from what observers can and cannot see; it establishes the scheme, not its anatomical location. 7.2
Huxley, Aldous The Doors of Perception. Chatto & Windus, 1954.
Roughly pp. 22 to 24, the Mind at Large sequence: from Huxley’s endorsement of C. D. Broad on Bergson, that brain and senses are eliminative rather than productive, to the claim that Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system, with mescaline working by impairing the valve. 10.11
Ibn al-’Arabi al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Revelations). c. 1238. Translated and anthologized in William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, SUNY Press, 1989.
The Futuhat is where the barzakh is developed as a cosmological principle: the isthmus that joins and separates two states while never being reducible to either side. Chittick anthologizes the relevant chapters, above all those on imagination as the intermediate world in which the invisible takes visible form. The barzakh does not occur in the Fusus al-Hikam, where this reference formerly pointed; the Fusus, Ch. 9 on Joseph, carries the imaginal intermediary but not the term or its cosmology. 8.1
ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 7498-1: Information technology — Open Systems Interconnection — Basic Reference Model. 1994.
Clause 6.1 enumerates the seven layers and clause 7 describes each in turn, from 7.1 application down to 7.7 physical. The structural claim the passage borrows is not in either: it is in clause 5, concepts of a layered architecture, and above all 5.2, principles of layering, where a layer is defined by the service it offers upward and the service it consumes from below. 8.6
James, William Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (Ingersoll Lecture). Houghton, Mifflin, 1898.
Caveat: the reducing valve position is not argued in the Gifford Lectures. James defends the brain’s transmissive rather than productive function in Human Immortality, the 1898 Ingersoll Lecture, which Varieties mentions only in a Postscript footnote and for an unrelated point about a plurality of selves. What Varieties does supply is Lectures XVI and XVII on Mysticism, where normal waking consciousness is parted from other forms by the filmiest of screens, and Lecture XX, Conclusions, where the subliminal is the door through which the more enters; cite Human Immortality if the filter thesis is what is wanted. 10.11
James, William The Principles of Psychology, Chapter 6: “The Mind-Stuff Theory.” Henry Holt and Company, 1890.
Ch. VI, The Mind-Stuff Theory, in the section headed Self-Compounding of Mental Facts Is Inadmissible. That is where the dozen words and the twelve men appear, and where James insists each feeling stays shut in its own skin, so that stacking twelve yields twelve and never a thirteenth. 10.11
Johnson, William B. and Lindenstrauss, Joram Extensions of Lipschitz Mappings into a Hilbert Space. Contemporary Mathematics 26, 1984.
Contemporary Mathematics 26, pp. 189-206, section 1, The Extension Theorems, where Lemma 1 is stated on p. 190 and proved on p. 191: for each tolerance there is a constant K such that n points embed into roughly K log n dimensions with distortion bounded by that tolerance. Inverted, the lemma says a d-dimensional space holds exponentially many nearly orthogonal directions, and the tolerance is a free parameter you simply choose, which is the arbitrariness this seedpod proposes to replace. 9.8
Joule, James Prescott On the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1850.
The result sits in the two numbered propositions on the closing page, p. 82, fixing 772 foot-pounds against one pound of water raised one degree Fahrenheit. The opening pages review Rumford and the mechanical doctrine; what closed the case was the water-friction series and the number it yielded. 2.2
Kahneman, Daniel Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Part I, chapter 1 for the two systems, and chapter 7, the machine for jumping to conclusions, for WYSIATI. Chapter 7 is the load-bearing one here: System 1 does not wait for sufficient data, it assembles the most coherent available story from whatever fragments it has, which is why a smile arrives already interpreted. 6.3
Kant, Immanuel Critique of Pure Reason. 1781.
Transcendental Aesthetic, sections 4 to 7, on time as the form of inner sense (A30-41 / B46-58), and the Phenomena and Noumena chapter of the Analytic of Principles (A235-260 / B294-315), where the limit is drawn. We never reach the object as it is, only as it appears to a mind already structured by space, time, and the categories. 4.1
Kastrup, Bernardo The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality. Iff Books, 2019.
Part II, Ch. 5, An ontological solution to the mind-body problem, pp. 57 to 92. The dissociation argument is set out there: universal consciousness is the ground state and individual subjects are alters, on the analogy of dissociative identity disorder, so what needs explaining is separation, not combination. 10.11
Katie, Byron and Mitchell, Stephen Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life. Harmony Books, 2002.
Chapter 1, A Few Basic Principles, where inquiry is defined as putting a believed thought up against the four questions, and chapter 2, The Great Undoing, which sets out the four questions and the turnarounds in full. The leverage is precisely at the level the passage identifies: the method treats ‘she’s jealous’ as a proposition to be examined, not a perception to be trusted. 6.3
Kauffman, Stuart At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Oxford University Press, 1995.
Ch. 4 gives the phrase order for free and the random-network result behind it, but the claim made here, that self-sustaining organization arrives before selection can act, is the autocatalytic-set argument of Chs. 2 and 3, The Origins of Life and We the Expected. Life is expected, not lucky. 3.7
Chapter 3, We the Expected, for the autocatalytic set that appears once chemical diversity crosses a threshold, and chapter 4, Order for Free, for the phrase and the generic self-organization behind it. Kauffman’s own argument in chapter 4 rests on network and ensemble dynamics more than on energy flow, so the thermodynamic gloss in this passage runs slightly ahead of him. 10.5
Kauffman, Stuart The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Part II, The Crystallization of Life, Ch. 7, The Origins of Life: A New View, and within it the section on autocatalytic sets of catalytic polymers. The argument there is a threshold argument: once a soup of polymers is diverse enough, the probability that the set catalyzes its own formation approaches one and the reaction network closes on itself. Nothing outside the chemistry does the organizing. 2.6
Kearns, Mike Could Daniel Dennett Be a Zombie? Unpublished manuscript, n.d. PhilArchive (KEACDD).
The quoted lines open the paper, p. 1. Kearns concludes the reverse of his own joke: the last page argues that Dennett cannot be a zombie, because zombies have no world and Dennett has one. The irony is his; the verdict is not. 5.5
Kirkpatrick, Scott and Gelatt, C.D. and Vecchi, M.P. Optimization by Simulated Annealing. Science, 220(4598), 1983.
The section headed Statistical Mechanics, Science 220, pp. 671-673, which carries both halves of the analogy: melting and slow cooling on the metallurgical side, the Metropolis rule accepting an uphill move with temperature-dependent probability on the algorithmic side. Kirkpatrick’s own formulation is that annealing differs from iterative improvement in that the procedure need not get stuck. 2.6
Koestler, Arthur The Act of Creation. Hutchinson, 1964.
Book One, Part One, The Jester, Ch. I, The Logic of Laughter, where bisociation is coined and defined, and Ch. IV, From Humour to Discovery, which carries the structure from the joke to the theorem. The triptych of Jester, Sage and Artist is the architecture of Book One: one act seen three times. 2.5
Koestler, Arthur The Ghost in the Machine. Hutchinson, 1967.
Part One, Order, Ch. III, The Holon, pp. 45-58, and its sections Enter Janus and Social Holons; Appendix I restates the properties formally. Janus is the whole point: every node faces downward as a whole and upward as a part, and neither face is the real one. 2.5
Ch. XIV, The Ghost in the Machine, pp. 197 to 224, which answers Ryle by name at p. 202 in the section titled The Swing of the Pendulum: deny the ghost outright and you risk conjuring a nastier one. The interiority at every level is carried later in the same chapter, in The Flatworm’s Ego and The Open-Ended Hierarchy; the holon apparatus itself is Ch. III and Appendix I. 8.8
Book One, Ch. III, The Holon, and within it the section Enter Janus, where the word is coined for an entity that faces both ways at once, whole toward what it contains and part toward what contains it. The layering into a holarchy is set out in Ch. VII, The Helmsman, in the section A Holarchy of Holons. 8.5
Part One, Ch. III, The Holon, where the word is coined and the sections Enter Janus and The Basic Polarity establish the two-faced character of every holon, a whole facing down and a part facing up. Ch. VII carries the section A Holarchy of Holons, and Appendix I puts the Janus Effect first among the general properties of open hierarchical systems. 8.6
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Ch. XII, The Resolution of Revolutions. Not the chapter on anomaly or on crisis but the one on how the thing actually ends. Kuhn quotes Planck here, and Darwin, and argues that conversion is not what settles a revolution. Attrition is. 6.1
Chapters IX through XI. Chapter X gives revolutions as changes of world view; chapter XI, on the invisibility of revolutions, is the sharper support for the passage, since it shows textbooks retroactively rewriting the narrative so that the new story looks like the one science was telling all along. 6.3
Ch. XI, The Invisibility of Revolutions, where textbooks rewrite the past as cumulative and scientists inherit a discipline with its ruptures edited out; Ch. V, The Priority of Paradigms, supplies the mechanism, since a paradigm directs research without ever being articulated as a rule. The framework goes unseen from inside because it is what one sees with. 2.2
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Chapters 1 through 3, where ARGUMENT IS WAR is introduced and then shown to be systematic rather than decorative, and chapter 9, where TIME IS A MOVING OBJECT is developed. The argument of those opening chapters is exactly the one the passage needs: metaphor is not how we dress up concepts but how the concepts are built. 6.3
Laureys, Steven et al. Unresponsive wakefulness syndrome: a new name for the vegetative state or apallic syndrome. BMC Medicine, 8:68, 2010.
The proposal to retire “vegetative state” for “unresponsive wakefulness syndrome”, on the grounds that the old name asserts an absent interior that the evidence does not establish. The name follows the missing channel. 5.6
Lavoisier, Antoine Elements of Chemistry. Trans. Robert Kerr. William Creech, 1790. Originally Traité élémentaire de chimie, Cuchet, 1789.
Part I, Ch. I, Of the Combinations of Caloric, and the Formation of Elastic Aeriform Fluids, where the three states of matter are derived from caloric, together with the Table of Simple Substances at the head of Part II, p. 175 of the Kerr translation, which lists caloric and light among the elements. Caloric was not a stray hypothesis here but load-bearing structure: Lavoisier enrolled it as an element of the new chemistry. 2.2
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Monadology. 1714.
Sections 1 to 7 for monads as simple indivisible substances and for the windowlessness stated at 7; sections 14 to 17 for perception and appetition, which is what makes a monad a unit of experience rather than a mere point; sections 56 to 62 for each monad as a perpetual living mirror of the universe, representing the whole from its own irreducible point of view. 8.3
Maldacena, Juan The Large N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories and Supergravity. Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, 2(2):231–252, 1998.
The AdS/CFT correspondence, §§1–2: type IIB string theory on AdS5×S5 is dual to N=4 super-Yang-Mills on the boundary. Note the analogy to Leibniz is looser than it looks: AdS/CFT is a boundary-encodes-bulk claim, not a part-contains-whole claim, so it supports the encoding half of the monad picture but not the mirroring half. 8.3
Mandelbrot, Benoit The Fractal Geometry of Nature. W.H. Freeman, 1982. 8.6
Ch. 19, Cantor and Fatou Dusts; Self-Squared Dragons, the chapter on iterating z squared plus c, where the set makes its first book appearance as the mu-map together with its plates. The structure is carried entirely by the bifurcation boundary; the interior is the region where nothing further happens. 8.1
Ch. 19, Cantor and Fatou Dusts; Self-Squared Dragons, where the set now bearing Mandelbrot’s name is first presented and plotted. Caveat: the Farey and Stern-Brocot ordering of the bulbs is not in Mandelbrot and is not his result; this reference establishes the object, not the arithmetic of its bulbs, which belongs to the later Douady and Hubbard combinatorics. 3.5
Ch. 19, Cantor and Fatou Dusts; Self-Squared Dragons, the one chapter of the book that treats quadratic iteration in the complex plane. Mandelbrot works there under the name mu-map; the set is not yet called by his own name in this text. 3.6
Ch. 19, Cantor and Fatou Dusts; Self-Squared Dragons, this time for the boundary between bounded and escaping orbits and the plates that display it. The chapter carries the mathematics but not the anecdote: the expectation of a smooth boundary and the suspicion of a computer bug come from Mandelbrot’s later reminiscences and are nowhere in this book. 3.3
Marder, Michael Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press, 2013.
Chapter 5, The Wisdom of Plants, on non-conscious intentionality and vegetal life as a thinking before thinking, with chapter 1, The Soul of the Plant, for the rehabilitation of the vegetal soul against the metaphysical tradition. Chapter 5 is what licenses intention without deliberation, and so intention in degrees. 10.5
Mathieu, W. Allaudin Harmonic Experience: Tonal Harmony from Its Natural Origins to Its Modern Expression. Inner Traditions, 1997.
The lattice is built in Part One, Chs. 6, 10 and 16, the last pushing it past twelve notes without bound. The purchase of travel at the price of purity is Ch. 19, Leaping from Paradise. The composers’ plotted paths are Part Four, Chs. 35-44, where Bach is worked through on the lattice; Beethoven and Coltrane are named in this sentence but not confirmed in Mathieu, so verify before print. 7.5
Maturana, Humberto and Varela, Francisco Autopoiesis and Cognition. Reidel, 1980.
The second essay in the volume, Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living, Ch. I, On Machines, Living and Otherwise, sections 1 and 2, where the autopoietic machine is defined. The operative distinction is organization against structure: what makes a cell living is the closed circle of its own production, not the molecules currently occupying the roles. 2.6
The 1972 monograph reprinted in this volume, Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living, Ch. I, On Machines, Living and Otherwise, where machines in general are defined in section 1 and living machines are characterized as autopoietic in section 2. The definition is organizational rather than behavioral: not a list of what living things do, but the single closure condition a network of processes must satisfy to produce the components that constitute it. 2.7
The essay Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living, Ch. I, On Machines, Living and Otherwise, where the autopoietic machine is defined as a network of processes that continuously regenerates the network that produced it, and Ch. II, Dispensability of Teleonomy. The two chapters give the passage precisely its two halves: living organization differs in kind because of a recursive self-producing process, and no vital substance or purpose is required to say so. 2.2
Maturana, Humberto and Varela, Francisco The Tree of Knowledge. Shambhala, 1987.
Ch. 2, The Organization of Living Things, which restates autopoiesis without the 1972 formalism, read with Ch. 1, Knowing How We Know, and Ch. 7, The Nervous System and Cognition. The cognitive implication is already in the opening aphorism that all doing is knowing and all knowing is doing; living and cognizing are one operation described twice. 2.7
Ch. 1, Knowing How We Know, for the thesis that all doing is knowing and all knowing is doing, cognition as the bringing forth of a world rather than a picture of one. The mechanism the passage leans on, structural coupling, the reciprocal perturbation of organism and medium, is defined in Ch. 5, The Natural Drift of Living Beings, in the section on structural determination and coupling; Ch. 2 gives the unicellular case, where what a molecule is depends on how the cell takes it. 8.9
Maxwell, James Clerk A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Clarendon Press, 1873.
The foundational text of classical electromagnetism. Vol. II, Part IV, Ch. XX, Electromagnetic Theory of Light, articles 781 to 789, where the speed of an electromagnetic disturbance is computed and turns out to be the speed of light. Maxwell’s article numbers survive every edition; his page numbers do not. Note that the unification was first published not here but in A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, Philosophical Transactions 155:459-512, 1865; the Treatise is its systematic exposition. 3.1
Mollon, John D. ‘Tho’ she kneel’d in that place where they grew…’ The Uses and Origins of Primate Colour Vision. Journal of Experimental Biology, 146(1):21–38, 1989.
Trichromacy and its evolution, from p. 25, and within it the subsection on the co-evolution of fruit and of primate trichromacy, where the long-wavelength subsystem is tied to finding yellow and orange fruit against dappled foliage and the tree is credited with an interest in being seen. Mollon offers it as a hypothesis, which is the weight the passage gives it. 7.4
Nagel, Thomas Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Chapter 3, Consciousness, where the historical account of conscious life is sorted into causal, teleological and intentional forms and the coherence of natural teleological laws is defended, and chapter 4, Cognition, where Nagel says plainly that he is drawn to a fourth alternative, natural teleology. The bias toward mind is proposed as law, not as intention, which is the distinction the passage depends on. 10.5
Nagel, Thomas What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Philosophical Review, 1974.
The criterion, that an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be it, falls on p. 436; the bat and its sonar on pp. 438-440. The passage leans on pp. 442-445, where every move toward objectivity is shown to move away from the point of view that constitutes the experience. 2.4
Newcomb, Simon Note on the Frequency of Use of the Different Digits in Natural Numbers. American Journal of Mathematics, 1881.
pp. 39-40, the whole note. Newcomb infers the logarithmic first-digit law from the wear on the early pages of logarithm tables, and states the probabilities outright. The observation was complete in 1881 and simply went unread for fifty-seven years. 3.4
Olshausen, Bruno A. and Field, David J. Emergence of Simple-Cell Receptive Field Properties by Learning a Sparse Code for Natural Images. Nature, 381:607–609, 1996.
The result this passage actually turns on: oriented, localized, bandpass edge filters fall out of nothing but a sparse-coding objective applied to natural image patches, which is why a trained network’s first layer converges on what the retina already found. 7.3
Parfit, Derek Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press, 1984.
Part III: Personal Identity, the teleportation and brain-splitting thought experiments that dissolve the sharp line between self and not-self. 8.7
Penrose, Roger Pentaplexity: A Class of Non-Periodic Tilings of the Plane. Eureka, 39:16–22, 1978; reprinted in The Mathematical Intelligencer, 2:32–37, 1979.
Where the kite-and-dart tiling is developed in full, including the inflation/deflation self-similarity and the golden-ratio limit of the tile-count ratio. This, not the 1974 Bulletin note, is the paper that carries the golden-ratio claim. 9.9
Penrose, Roger Shadows of the Mind. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Part I, Ch. 2, The Gödelian case. §2.5 states the Gödel-Turing conclusion G; the extended defence runs across §2.6, which answers objections Q1 through Q9, and §2.10, which answers Q10 through Q20. The twenty replies are split across two sections, not gathered into one. 6.6
Penrose, Roger The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Ch. 4, Truth, Proof, and Insight, presents Gödel’s theorem and introduces the appeal to mathematical insight. The non-algorithmic thesis itself is not settled there: it is argued in Ch. 10, Where Lies the Physics of Mind, under the heading on the non-algorithmic nature of mathematical insight. Ch. 4 supplies the premise, Ch. 10 the conclusion. 6.6
Penrose, Roger The Role of Aesthetics in Pure and Applied Mathematical Research. Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, 10(2):266–271, 1974.
Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications 10, pp. 266-271, the lecture in which the aperiodic pentagonal tiling first reached print. Two corrections are due here. Pentaplexity is a different paper, Eureka 39 of 1978, reprinted in the Mathematical Intelligencer in 1979, and it is there rather than in the 1974 Bulletin piece that the golden ratio and the inflation self-similarity of the tiling are worked out. If the golden-ratio claim is what the sentence needs, Pentaplexity is the citation. 9.9
Peskin, Michael and Schroeder, Daniel An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory. Westview Press, 1995.
Ch. 2, The Klein-Gordon Field. Section 2.1, The Necessity of the Field Viewpoint, argues that the field and not the particle must be fundamental; section 2.3, The Klein-Gordon Field as Harmonic Oscillators, is where quantization turns the field’s modes into a ladder of excitations, and those excitations are what we had been calling particles. 9.1
Planck Collaboration Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 641:A6, 2020.
Section 3, Constraints on base LCDM, together with Tables 1 and 2, which report the primordial scalar amplitude and a last-scattering redshift of about 1090. The paper gives the amplitude and the redshift, not the round figures of one part in 100,000 and 380,000 years, which are the conventional derivations from them; Planck 2018 results I states the anisotropy amplitude directly. 9.10
Planck, Max Scientific Autobiography. Philosophical Library, 1949.
Pp. 33-34 of Gaynor’s 1949 translation; the essay is continuous prose with no divisions, so the pages are the only anchor. Planck is not theorising here. He had watched it happen to himself. 6.1
Prigogine, Ilya and Stengers, Isabelle Order Out of Chaos. Bantam, 1984.
Book Two, The Science of Complexity: the chapter on the three stages of thermodynamics, where the far-from-equilibrium regime is reached and the dissipative structure named, and the chapter on order through fluctuations, which supplies the mechanism. Cited by title rather than number, as the numbering shifts between printings. Order here is not a state the system settles into but a shape it can only hold while something flows through it. 4.2
Book Two, The Science of Complexity, Ch. V, The Three Stages of Thermodynamics, especially the sections on the far-from-equilibrium regime and the threshold of chemical instability, carried forward in Ch. VI, Order Through Fluctuations. Past a critical distance from equilibrium, fluctuations stop being noise and become the seed of a new macroscopic order. That is the Nobel work, and it is the reason order arises because of randomness rather than in spite of it. 2.6
Book Two, The Science of Complexity, Ch. V, The Three Stages of Thermodynamics, sections 3 and 4 on far-from-equilibrium conditions and the threshold of chemical instability, extended in Ch. VI, Order Through Fluctuations. Order here is not imposed but sustained: past the instability threshold a fluctuation is amplified rather than damped, and the resulting structure exists only while the energy flow does. 2.7
Rahula, Walpola What the Buddha Taught. 1959.
The clearest modern exposition of anatta and dependent origination. Chapter VI on the doctrine of no-self is the most direct treatment. 8.7
Rovelli, Carlo Reality Is Not What It Seems. Riverhead, 2017.
Ch. 4, Quanta, and its subsection Quanta 3: Reality is relational, where a system’s properties are said to exist only in relation to another system. Reality is reduced to interaction; the electron has a spin for whatever it has just touched, and for nothing else. 4.1
Rovelli, Carlo Relational Quantum Mechanics. International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 1996.
§II, quantum mechanics as a theory about information, and within it §II.A on the third person problem and §II.C, the main discussion, where two observers give incompatible but equally correct accounts of the same events and Rovelli concludes that every quantum description is relative to a particular observer. §IV turns that conclusion on the notion of state itself: there is no absolute state, only a state relative to whatever the system has interacted with. 4.1
Rovelli, Carlo The Order of Time. Riverhead, 2018.
Ch. 5, Quanta of Time, and its subsection Relations, is where this book makes the relational argument the passage actually needs; Ch. 6, The World Is Made of Events, Not Things, then draws the ontological corollary. Worth flagging that the book’s headline thesis is the dissolution of time, not the relativity of quantum states, so it is doing supporting rather than load-bearing work here. 4.1
Rukeyser, Muriel The Speed of Darkness. Random House, 1968.
The title poem, section IX, in the closing ‘say it’ passage. The line is a claim about particularity and relation, not a slogan about physics: what is irreducible in a thing is the telling of it. 6.3
Ryle, Gilbert The Concept of Mind. Hutchinson’s University Library, 1949.
Chapter I, Descartes’ Myth, sections 2 and 3, where the absurdity of the official doctrine is exposed by the visitor who has seen the colleges and asks to be shown the University, and the error is then named the category-mistake. The example is why the concept is recognized on sight. 2.3
Ch. I, Descartes’ Myth, sections 2 and 3. Section 2 names the category mistake and gives the visitor who is shown the colleges and then asks to be shown the University; section 3 traces how Descartes walked into it. The error is not a false belief about minds but a misfiled one. 5.6
Ch. I, Descartes’ Myth, and its three sections: the official doctrine, its absurdity, and the origin of the category-mistake. The phrase is coined there, with deliberate abusiveness, and the charge is not that the mind is immaterial but that it has been sorted into the wrong logical type altogether. 8.8
Sagan, Carl Cosmos. Random House, 1980.
Chapter 1, The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean, in the passage that runs from star stuff to the cosmos knowing itself. Sagan states the conclusion beautifully and leaves the metaphysics unargued, which is exactly the division of labor the passage assigns him. 4.6
Schnabel, Julian (dir.) The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Film, 2007.
The film entire. It stands here as the fact of the adaptation, the memoir passing back out into the world through a second channel. 5.6
Schnakers, Caroline and Vanhaudenhuyse, Audrey and Giacino, Joseph and Ventura, Manfredi and Boly, Melanie and Majerus, Steve and Moonen, Gustave and Laureys, Steven Diagnostic Accuracy of the Vegetative and Minimally Conscious State: Clinical Consensus versus Standardized Neurobehavioural Assessment. BMC Neurology, 9:35, 2009.
Laureys’s group, on the misdiagnosis rate: roughly four in ten patients labelled vegetative are in fact minimally conscious when assessed with a standardized scale rather than clinical impression. This is the finding that makes the chapter’s argument, that we read absence of output as absence of interior. 5.6
Schrödinger, Erwin What is Life? Cambridge University Press, 1944.
Ch. 6, Order, Disorder and Entropy, in particular the sections It Feeds on Negative Entropy and Organization Maintained by Extracting Order from the Environment, with the Note to Ch. 6 where Schrodinger concedes that free energy is the physicist’s term. The thermodynamic point is subtractive: the organism does not resist decay so much as continuously export it, staying far from equilibrium by drawing order in. 2.7
Searle, John Minds, Brains, and Programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1980.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, the statement of the thought experiment on pp. 417-418, before the numbered replies, together with Searle’s answer to the Systems Reply, where he has the man internalize the entire room. The inference the passage quotes, that the man does not understand and therefore neither does the system, is licensed only by that second move. 5.5
Sharma, Abhishek and Czégel, Dániel and Lachmann, Michael and Kempes, Christopher P. and Walker, Sara I. and Cronin, Leroy Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution. Nature, 622(7982):321–328, 2023.
The sections Assembly theory and Assembly index and copy number, with the formalism in The assembly equation. Assembly index is defined as the shortest number of steps that builds an object from basic parts; a high index found at high copy number is where the paper locates the signature of selection, since chance cannot reach such objects in quantity. 8.5
Shechtman, Dan et al. Metallic Phase with Long-Range Orientational Order and No Translational Symmetry. Physical Review Letters, 1984.
pp. 1951-1953: electron-diffraction spots as sharp as a crystal’s, of icosahedral symmetry, indexable to no Bravais lattice. Note the limit of what this establishes, which is long-range orientational order without translational periodicity, and nothing about golden-ratio self-similarity. That half of the sentence rests on the Penrose tiling work. 9.9
Simpson, George Gaylord The Baldwin Effect. Evolution, 1953.
pp. 110-117. Simpson names the effect and grants that it is consistent with the modern synthesis precisely because it requires no Lamarckian inheritance. His reservations are about how often it operates and whether it could be shown, not about whether it coheres. 10.3
Sperry, Roger Hemisphere Deconnection and Unity in Conscious Awareness. American Psychologist 23(10), 1968.
American Psychologist 23:10, pp. 723 to 733; the conclusion drawn in the closing discussion, that each disconnected hemisphere sustains its own separate sphere of conscious awareness. The lateralized visual and tactile results reported earlier in the paper are what force it, and they are what make unity look like a fact about wiring. 10.11
Stapp, Henry Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer. Springer, 2007.
The Zeno-effect argument for mental causation. 3.9
Stern, Moritz and Brocot, Achille Stern, Über eine zahlentheoretische Funktion, Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik, 55:193–220, 1858; Brocot, Calcul des rouages par approximation, Revue Chronométrique, 3:186–194, 1861.
The mediant construction that generates every positive rational exactly once, in lowest terms, ordered by increasing denominator. Stern and Brocot never collaborated: Stern arrived at it in number theory, Brocot independently while computing clockwork gear ratios. The tree is what makes “simpler ratio” a precise notion, and so what links bulb position to consonance. 3.5
Susskind, Leonard The World as a Hologram. Journal of Mathematical Physics, 1995.
Section 1, Counting Degrees of Freedom, Journal of Mathematical Physics 36, pp. 6377 to 6382, where the Bekenstein bound and the black-hole horizon are used to show that the degrees of freedom of a region are bounded by the area enclosing it, one bit per Planck area on the screen. The later sections on parton growth and light-front strings are a separate argument and are not what is being built on here. 8.4
Section 1, Counting Degrees of Freedom, pp. 6377-6379, which reasons from the Bekenstein bound to a two-dimensional lattice at the boundary and closes with the explicit statement of the holographic principle. The string-theoretic implementation in the later sections is a separate argument and not the one wanted here. 8.2
Svaetichin, Gunnar Spectral Response Curves from Single Cones. Acta Physiologica Scandinavica, 39(Suppl. 134):17–46, 1956.
The physiological half of the claim: intracellular recordings in fish retina showing opponent (S-potential) responses, the first direct evidence that the opponent recoding happens in the retina itself rather than downstream in the brain. 7.2
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre The Phenomenon of Man. Trans. Bernard Wall. Harper & Brothers, 1959. Originally Le phénomène humain, Seuil, 1955.
Book Four, Survival, Ch. II, Beyond the Collective: The Hyper-Personal, section 1 on the convergence of the person and the Omega Point and section 3 on its attributes. That is where the single attractor is named and given its properties, which is the claim Many Worlds is being set against. 4.5
Book Four, chapter II, section 1, on the convergence of the person and the Omega Point, reached through Book One, chapter II, The Within of Things, and Book Three, chapter I, The Birth of Thought. The arc from matter through life to thought is not a sequence of accidents for Teilhard but a single movement of the universe toward self-possession. 4.6
Book One, chapter II, The Within of Things, especially sections 1 and 3 on existence and on spiritual energy. Teilhard’s claim is that the within is coextensive with the without, present wherever matter is, which is the whole of what this passage borrows. 10.9
Book Four, Survival, Ch. II, Beyond the Collective: The Hyper-Personal, sections 1 and 3, where Omega is introduced as the point of convergence and its attributes set out. The prior claim that complexity and consciousness rise together is Book One, Ch. II, The Within of Things. 3.7
Book One, Ch. II, The Within of Things, where consciousness is said to rise with organized complexity at every scale, and Book Four, Ch. II, Beyond the Collective: The Hyper-Personal, where that rise converges on Omega. The claim that the process points toward self-awareness rests on the first law and terminates in the second. 10.8
Book Three, Thought, Ch. III, The Modern Earth, section 1, The Discovery of Evolution, subsections B and C, pp. 220 to 221 in the Wall translation: man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself, and the consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself. The Omega naming belongs to Book Four; the claim that the telos of the process is self-awareness lives here. 10.7
Book Four, Survival, Ch. II, Beyond the Collective: the Hyper-Personal, section 1, The Convergence of the Person and the Omega Point, and section 3, The Attributes of the Omega Point. Section 3 is what makes Omega an attractor rather than a mere terminus: autonomous, actual, irreversible, transcendent, already present and drawing, not simply the place the process happens to stop. 10.6
Book Four, chapter II, Beyond the Collective: the Hyper-Personal, sections 1 and 3, on the convergence of the person and the Omega Point and on Omega’s attributes, resting on Book One, chapter II, The Within of Things, for the correlation of complexity with consciousness. The vector is the whole claim: complexity rises, interiority rises with it, and Omega is where the curve is going. 10.5
Thompson, Evan Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Harvard University Press, 2007.
Ch. 4, The Structure of Behavior, where behavior is treated as the expression of an organism’s form rather than a detachable output, with Ch. 6, Life and Mind: The Philosophy of the Organism, supplying the continuity claim underneath. The living surface is legible only as the trace of the process that throws it off. 5.1
Part II, Life in Mind, Ch. 5, Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living, and Ch. 6, Life and Mind: The Philosophy of the Organism, with Ch. 3, Autonomy and Emergence, for the enactive framing. Ch. 6 is where the deep continuity thesis is argued: the organizational principles that constitute a living system are the same ones that constitute a cognizing one, which is precisely the bridge this seedpod needs. 2.7
Ch. 1, in the section headed The Enactive Approach, sets out the five ideas: autonomous agents bringing forth their own cognitive domains, a world enacted rather than pre-given and represented. Ch. 6, Life and Mind: The Philosophy of the Organism, supplies sense-making, which is what licenses the bacterium’s gradient being significant rather than merely present. 8.9
Ch. 5, Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living, on the membrane as a boundary the metabolic network produces and which in turn makes that network possible, extended into sense-making in Ch. 6, Life and Mind. The boundary is not what contains the system; it is where the system becomes a self with a world outside it. 8.1
Tononi, Giulio An Information Integration Theory of Consciousness. BMC Neuroscience 5:42, 2004.
Presentation of the hypothesis, the subsections Consciousness as information integration and Measuring the capacity to integrate information: the Phi of a complex. The first states that consciousness corresponds to the capacity to integrate information; the second defines Phi as the effective information carried across a subset’s weakest informational link, which is the non-decomposability the passage is after. 10.11
Turing, Alan Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, 1950.
Section 1, where the question whether machines can think is set aside as unanswerable and replaced by the imitation game, and the opening of section 6, p. 442, where Turing calls the original question too meaningless to deserve discussion. The reframing is precisely a retreat from process to output. 5.1
Section 1, The Imitation Game, pp. 433-434, for the substitution of conversation for direct access, and section 6, item 4, The Argument from Consciousness, pp. 445-447, for the limits. Turing concedes there that consciousness remains a mystery rather than claiming his test dissolves it, which is the honesty the passage credits him with. 5.5
Van Raamsdonk, Mark Building up Spacetime with Quantum Entanglement. General Relativity and Gravitation, 2010.
The section headed A disentangling experiment, General Relativity and Gravitation 42, roughly pp. 2325 to 2327 with figures 2 to 4. Using Ryu and Takayanagi, as the entanglement entropy between two boundary regions is driven to zero the minimal surface separating them shrinks while the geodesic distance between them diverges, and the geometry pinches off. The tearing is quantitative, not metaphorical. 8.4
Varela, Francisco and Thompson, Evan and Rosch, Eleanor The Embodied Mind. MIT Press, 1991.
Part IV, Steps to a Middle Way, Ch. 8, Enaction: Embodied Cognition, especially the section Self-Organization Revisited, together with Ch. 7’s Representation Revisited, where operational closure is introduced as the successor to representation. A system with operational closure is one whose processes produce those processes; cognition on this account is not extraction of a pregiven world but the enactment of a domain by an autonomous network. 2.7
Vyse, Stuart The Telepathy Tapes: A Dangerous Cornucopia of Pseudoscience. Skeptical Inquirer, 49(3), May/June 2025.
Skeptical Inquirer 49.3, the sections headed The Experts and The Evidence. The first impeaches Powell, Tarrant and Sheldrake as long-standing advocates of the paranormal; the second notes that not one supporting study runs a basic authorship test, which is the disputed-methods charge and is separable from the telepathy claims themselves. 5.6
Wheeler, John A. Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links. Proceedings III International Symposium on Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, 1989.
Section 2, “it from bit”: every physical quantity derives its meaning from binary yes/no answers, so the universe is at bottom information-processing. Cited here for that reading of iteration, not for the one-electron universe, which this paper does not discuss. 3.6
Whitehead, Alfred North Adventures of Ideas. Macmillan, 1933.
Ch. XI, Objects and Subjects, where Whitehead holds that the universe consists entirely of elements disclosed in the experiences of subjects, and Ch. XVIII, Nature Alive, the most quoted statement of the same claim. The accessible route into the argument, without the categoreal apparatus. 2.4
Whitehead, Alfred North Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Macmillan, 1929; corrected ed., Free Press, 1978. Check
Part I, Ch. I, section III, where the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is named as the error of mistaking an abstraction for the concrete thing, and Part I, Ch. II, section I, where actual entities are introduced as the final real things of which the world is made. Whitehead’s own footnote at the first passage points back to Science and the Modern World, Ch. III. 4.1
Part I, Ch. II, section I, where the final real things are actual entities, described as drops of experience, and Part III, Ch. I, The Theory of Feelings, where the machinery is supplied and every prehension is shown to carry a subjective form. The claim that experience goes all the way down is stated in the first and earned in the second. 2.4
Part III, Ch. II, section I, on simple physical feelings, where the past occasion is conformally re-enacted in the present one. This is prehension as physical memory: each moment does not recall its predecessor but literally feels it. Part II, Ch. III, sections II and V, supply the self as a route of occasions rather than a thing that has them. The theory of extension is Part IV and has no bearing here. 8.7
Part I, Category of the Ultimate, where Whitehead defines creativity as the universal of universals, the principle by which the many become one and are increased by one. The creative advance is not a property of special occasions; it is what every occasion does. 10.1
The act and its expression is Whitehead’s concrescence and objectification: Part II, Ch. X, Process, section I, on the two kinds of fluency, and Part III, Ch. I, section I, on genetic versus morphological analysis. The process can be divided one way and the trace another, which is exactly the asymmetry the chapter turns on. The deepest-error gloss belongs to Part I, Ch. I, section III. 5.1
Eternal objects are defined in Part I, Ch. II, under Category of Explanation vii, as pure potentials for the specific determination of fact. Part III, Ch. II, sections I and II, is where an occasion selects among them, and Ch. I, section VI, describes the world as a transmitting medium, which is the closest Whitehead comes to the role the vacuum plays here. 4.2
See especially Part III on prehension, where Whitehead develops the claim that each occasion reaches out and takes in what surrounds it, and that the field is the medium through which this reaching occurs. 3.1
Part I, Ch. II, sections II and IV, where creativity is the Category of the Ultimate and becoming is a creative advance into novelty. The self-determination half of the claim is elsewhere: Part III, Ch. I, section III, where the occasion is causa sui, its own final cause. Novelty is not noise admitted from outside; it is what an occasion does in settling itself. 2.6
Part II, Ch. III, The Order of Nature, section II, where a society is defined by a common characteristic inherited genetically across its members, and section V, on enduring objects and structured societies. A society is not a thing that has a history; it is a pattern that keeps re-electing itself. 2.5
Part II, Ch. III, The Order of Nature, section II, where a society is defined by its defining characteristic and genetic inheritance, and sections V through XI, which carry the definition through enduring objects, structured societies, life, and living persons. A society is not a thing that persists but a pattern of occasions each inheriting the defining characteristic from its predecessors, which is why it is the metaphysical twin of autopoietic closure rather than a mere analogy to it. 2.7
Part I, Ch. III, §II supplies the definitions, social order, defining characteristic, personal order, enduring object. The cosmological work is Part II, Ch. III, The Order of Nature, whose §II restates the society and whose §V introduces the structured society, a whole that harbours subordinate societies and furnishes their environment. That is the category a city falls under, and why its responses are not the sum of its inhabitants’. 10.4
Part II, Ch. X, Process, sections I to III, and in particular section III on the three stages of microscopic concrescence, with Part III, Ch. I, section II on the succession of phases within a feeling. For the weight space as pure possibility, Part I, Ch. II, section II, category of existence five, eternal objects as pure potentials for the specific determination of fact. The field is the potential; the forward pass is the ingression. 5.3
Part I, Ch. II, section IV, on the perishing of occasions and their objective immortality, and Part III, Ch. II, The Primary Feelings, section I, where the past occasion enters the new one as the initial datum of a simple physical feeling. The past is not recalled but re-enacted: it is present as the very content out of which the new occasion is composed, which is the structure the attention mechanism reproduces in miniature. 5.4
Part I, chapter I, Speculative Philosophy, section III, where overstatement is called the chief error in philosophy and one form of it is named the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely under some abstract aspect. Whitehead’s own footnote there sends the reader to Science and the Modern World, chapter III, which is where the fallacy is coined and expounded at length. 2.3
Part II, Ch. VII, The Subjectivist Principle, section I, and its reformed subjectivist principle: apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, bare nothingness. This is where the dualism dissolves rather than where prehension is worked out. The machine has no outside that is not also somebody’s inside. 8.8
Part II, Ch. VII, The Subjectivist Principle, sections I, III and V. Section V states the reformed subjectivist principle, that process is the becoming of experience, and section III insists that the primitive form of physical feeling is emotional. Together they are what licenses treating experience as the interior of events at any scale rather than a late product of complex biology. 5.5
Contrast is the eighth Category of Existence, defined in Part I, Ch. II, section II. But the doctrine this passage needs is Part II, Ch. IV, sections I to III, where depth of experience is defined as incompatibility resolved into contrast. Flat experience lacks tension; rich experience holds differences together without collapsing them into one another. 6.4
Part II, Ch. VII, The Subjectivist Principle, section V, where the reformed subjectivist principle is stated: process is the becoming of experience, and apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing. Experience is not a late arrival in an otherwise dark universe; on this account it is the form actuality takes at any scale. 2.2
Part II, Ch. VII, The Subjectivist Principle, Section V, the reformed subjectivist principle: apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness. Prehension enters as one of the four fundamental notions at Part I, Ch. II, Section I, and is developed systematically in Part III, The Theory of Prehensions; together these are the claim that experience is a feature of actuality as such and not a biological specialty. 4.4
Part III, Ch. I, The Theory of Feelings, section I, on the distinction between genetic and morphological analysis. An occasion’s concrescence can be divided genetically but not extensively, which is exactly why the interiority meant here is not the air inside the bubble. Part IV, Ch. I, on coordinate division, supplies the other half of the contrast. 8.1
Part I, Ch. II, section II, the Category of the Ultimate, and section IV, where becoming is said to be a creative advance into novelty. The advance is not a trajectory the cosmos travels and one might watch from outside; it is what each occasion does in the act of becoming itself, which is why it can be described from inside a single moment. 4.5
Part II, Ch. X, Process, sections I to III, on the two kinds of fluency: the macroscopic transition from occasion to occasion and the microscopic concrescence within one; with Part III, Ch. II, section I, on the conformal re-enaction by which an occasion takes up its predecessor. This is Whitehead’s iteration, and it is the same shape as the one described here: grasp the completed world, issue a new one, repeat. 3.6
Part II, chapter VII, The Subjectivist Principle, sections I and II, for the reformed subjectivist principle that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, and Part II, chapter X, Process, for concrescence and objective immortality. Together they give the passage what it claims: an occasion inherits its past, becomes, and perishes into the datum of what comes next, and this holds of every occasion, not only the ones with nervous systems. 4.6
Part I, chapter II, The Categoreal Scheme, sections I and II, where prehension is named as one of the four ultimate notions alongside actual entity, nexus and the ontological principle, and Part III, The Theory of Prehensions, chapter I. Prehension is the technical term for an occasion taking account of another; it is definitional, not a late addition, which is why it applies from the beginning. 10.9
Part II, Ch. II, The Extensive Continuum, sections I and II, where the continuum is real potentiality atomized by actual occasions and time is epochal rather than smooth. That is the text that licenses the field analogy. Ch. III, sections II and IV, defines society and works out the electromagnetic society that this cosmic epoch runs on. 9.1
Part II, Ch. III, The Order of Nature, section I, where the lure of feeling and causa sui are introduced, and Part V, Ch. II, God and the World, where the lure becomes cosmological. The lure belongs to the primordial nature of God, not the consequent nature: the primordial nature is the eternal urge of desire drawing each occasion toward the fullest realization open to it, while the consequent nature is God’s reception of what the world has already become. 3.7
Part I, Ch. II, Section II, where the creative advance is defined as creativity applied to the disjunctive universe, and Part V, Ch. II, Section IV, on the consequent nature of God, where that advance is read cosmologically as the retention of immediacy across the whole. The scale-invariance the passage wants is in the first; the directionality it pairs with Teilhard is in the second. 10.8
Part V, Ch. II, God and the World, sections II and III, on the primordial nature as conceptual pole and ground of relevant possibility, together with Part III, Ch. III, section I, where God’s valuation supplies each occasion its initial subjective aim. The lure is not cosmic weather but a per-occasion delivery, which is what makes it a mechanism rather than a mood; the term lure of feeling itself enters at Part II, Ch. III, section I. 10.6
Unanchored, and I cannot fix a locator honestly. This entry sits at the foot of the chapter with no citation attached to any sentence, so there is no claim to locate it against. Were it meant to underwrite the chapter’s picture of interiorities meeting through layered apparatus, the division would be Part III, The Theory of Prehensions, Ch. I on the theory of feelings and Ch. III on the transmission of feelings, where the completed occasion becomes datum for the next; but that is a reconstruction of intent, not a reading of the text. 8.6
Part I, Ch. II, Section II, the Category of the Ultimate, p. 21 of the corrected edition, where the many become one and are increased by one is stated as the ultimate metaphysical principle. Concrescence is defined there as the production of novel togetherness: unification is the primitive act, not a derived one. 10.11
Whitehead’s technical usage. The zoological/anatomical usage predates this by roughly a century. 3.9
Part I, Category of Existence: societies of actual occasions distinguished from structured societies without a dominant occasion. 5.10
Whitehead, Alfred North Science and the Modern World. Macmillan, 1925.
Ch. III, The Century of Genius, where simple location and the substance-quality pair are dismantled and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is named for the first time; scientific materialism is christened earlier, in Ch. I. The critique arrives here without the categoreal machinery of Process and Reality, which is why it is the chapter to send a reader to first. 4.1
Wittgenstein, Ludwig Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Blackwell, 1953.
§47 contains the direct analysis of the simple parts of a chair, “It makes no sense at all to speak absolutely of the ‘simple parts of a chair.’” §66–67 develop the concept of family resemblance, showing that categories like “game” have no single defining feature. 4.1
See especially §293, the beetle-in-a-box passage. 5.5
Wolfram, Stephen A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, 2002.
Ch. 2, The Crucial Experiment, sections 1 and 2, where rule 30 forces the new intuition, and Ch. 12, section 6, Computational Irreducibility. The first shows that iteration alone manufactures the complexity; the second shows why there is no shortcut around the iteration, which is what makes the complexity a fact rather than a puzzle. 3.6