Background and Further Reading

This book draws on a larger body of work, most of it published free on my blog, and on a handful of older sources from outside it. Here are the ones that matter most, so you can check what I have built on.

The framework

• The Reality Equation: the canonical statement, with the three lines R = A / E, S = ln R, and the lens.
• The Reality Equation, Second Edition: the full treatment, in book form.
• Surprise Has an Imaginary Part: why dividing by a complex Expectation leaves an angle in surprise, and why you feel only the real part.
• You Only Feel the Real Part: the lesson the previous essay borrows from.
• You Do Not Choose the Future. You Choose History.: freedom on the left side of the equation.

The past, the future, and love

• The Immutable Past: the axiom underneath everything, with the full paper.
• What Is Love: he and she as nodes; love as the structure; the one place it is felt.
• The Standing Wave: why ideals do not travel, and why every mark is judged by correspondence.
• The Monad Is Complete: why the past satisfies what philosophy tried to name.
• What Is History: the record and the past are two different objects.
• What Is Grief: abundance without access; the two jobs inside grief.

Ideas

• What I Got Wrong: the public ledger of retractions, including ideas as beings.
• The Flatlander's Mistake: nothing arrives; you turn.
• Creation Ends Where It Began: why exactly four cardinal ideas, and in what order.
• Four Letters and One Degree: the four bearings, and why the counterfeit sits nearest the real thing.
• A Compass Cannot Choose: the four testimonies, and who supplies the irreversible event.
• What Is Willpower: a record, not a reserve.
• Love, The Cosmic Dance on the blog: the running index of essays written in this book's world.

From outside

• Edward H. Adelson, the checker shadow illusion (MIT, 1995).
• Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, volume 3 (1867), on unconscious inference.
• Anil Seth, Being You (2021); Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty (2016), on predictive processing and controlled hallucination.
• Phillippa Lally and colleagues, How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world, European Journal of Social Psychology (2010).
• Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884); Carl Sagan, Cosmos, episode 10, The Edge of Forever (1980).
• Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), on the cosmic game of hide-and-seek.
• The Mandukya Upanishad, on waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and the Fourth.
• Paul Benacerraf, What Numbers Could Not Be, Philosophical Review (1965): the strongest objection to naming the four bearings.