Comparisons

References

Every external work the framework leans on, with a one-line note on how it is used — and whether faithfully.

Only verifiable works are listed. Where the corpus gestures at a source this archive could not confirm to a specific, citable work, the entry says so explicitly rather than manufacture a citation. Identifiers (arXiv id, ISBN, year) are given where they are real and stable.

The primary scientific sources are now mirrored in-repo: arXiv PDFs under refs/papers/ and plain-text sources under refs/texts/. Filenames and exact identifiers are given per entry so claims can be checked against the actual text rather than a remembered gloss.

Formal & mathematical layer

• Spencer-Brown, George. Laws of Form. London: Allen & Unwin, 1969. (Later eds. Bohmeier; widely reprinted.) — The mark / state / crossing / re-entry calculus. Used faithfully as a vocabulary and stance (pt1 · 011); overstated when treated as a proven foundation for cosmology. See distinction page.
• Kauffman, Louis H. "Laws of Form and the Logic of Non-Duality," and related papers on re-entry and eigenforms (1987 onward). — Background for the re-entry / self-reference reading; not cited by the posters but the lineage they inherit.
• Varela, Francisco J. "A Calculus for Self-Reference," International Journal of General Systems 2 (1975): 5–24. — The extension of Laws of Form toward autonomy; orienting context for the distinction-as-operation claim.
• Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems (trans. 1995; orig. Soziale Systeme, 1984). ISBN 978-0804726252. — The canonical downstream use of distinction (system/environment) as a primitive; shows the move the corpus makes has a real tradition.
• Hennix, Catherine Christer. Writings on intuitionistic logic, topos theory and "epistemic" structures (collected fragmentarily; e.g. materials around The Yellow Book and her Moderna Museet work, 1976). — Invoked for the move "beyond a rigid binary cut" (pt1 · 013). Used as an orienting reference, not a specific theorem; her corpus is hard to verify and should be treated cautiously.

Cosmology & learning

• Alexander, Stephon; Cunningham, William J.; Lanier, Jaron; Smolin, Lee; Stanojevic, Stefan; Toomey, Michael W.; Wecker, Dave. "The Autodidactic Universe." arXiv:2104.03902v2 [hep-th], 3 Sep 2021. In-repo: refs/papers/arxiv-2104.03902.pdf. — A load-bearing source: graph variety (an explicit protocol), precedence (§4.2), the "no supervision" reading of autodidaxis, and consequencer-style stored consequence. Used faithfully on the technical core; the paper's own "this correspondence is not an equivalence" caveat is honoured by the corpus. The "universe goes to school" gloss and the splice to suffering are the corpus's, not the paper's. See autodidactic page.
• Smolin, Lee. The Life of the Cosmos. Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0195126648. — The cosmological-natural- selection background to Smolin's contribution to 2104.03902; not directly cited by the posters but the relevant precedent for "the universe selects its laws." Used here only as context, not claimed as a corpus source.
• Tamon, Christino, and collaborators. Four mirrored continuous-time-quantum-walk papers, all in-repo under refs/papers/:
  • Chan, Godsil, Tamon, Xie, "Of Shadows and Gaps in Spatial Search," arXiv:2204.04355v2 [quant-ph], 30 Aug 2022 (arxiv-2204.04355.pdf).
  • Bernard, Tamon, Vinet, Xie, "Quantum state transfer in graphs with tails," arXiv:2211.14704v1 [quant-ph], 27 Nov 2022 (arxiv-2211.14704.pdf).
  • Xie & Tamon, "No Infinite Tail Beats Optimal Spatial Search," arXiv:2301.07251v2 [quant-ph], 20 Jan 2023 (arxiv-2301.07251.pdf).
  • Levine, Mesapam, Mustico, Tamon, Tucker, Zhan, "Uniform Mixing in Chiral Quantum Walks," arXiv:2605.04414v2 [math.CO], 18 May 2026 (arxiv-2605.04414.pdf).
  These supply the spatial-search, state-transfer, graphs-with-tails and chiral-walk imagery of the firmament panels (pt1 · 001–008). Motivating, not foundational: per the project owner the quantum-walk lineage is an exploratory seed for the distinction/lawful-unfolding intuition, not a load-bearing input. The corpus's "Tamon's random-walk papers" label is now resolved to these specific works; the mapping of any one theorem to a panel remains loose and should be read as illustration, not derivation.

Painful intelligence & agency

• Hyvärinen, Aapo. Painful Intelligence: What AI Can Tell Us About Human Suffering. arXiv:2205.15409v2 [cs.LG], Second Edition, 5 Sep 2024 (a book, not a short paper). In-repo: refs/papers/arxiv-2205.15409.pdf. — A load-bearing source. Frustration is defined as "the failure of an agent… to achieve a goal or a reward it wanted or expected"; the book states "the amount of frustration is expressed by a simple equation," and that frustration is "fundamentally an error signal that the system uses for learning." Used faithfully as the affective underside spliced onto the law-learning cosmos (pt2 · 006–008, 030); the cosmological extension of suffering is the corpus's, not the book's.
• Bennett, Michael Timothy. How to Build a Conscious Machine. Doctoral thesis, the Australian National University, completed 13 May 2025 (preprint under review; 13 chapters based on 13 prior papers). In-repo: refs/papers/ConsciousMachines.pdf. — A load-bearing source: w-maxing (choosing the weakest constraints on possible worlds, shown to maximise generalisation), the abstraction-layer "stack" and delegation of adaptation down it (the corpus's "Law of the Stack"), the cosmic ought, and causal-identities (tapestries of valence). The earlier "Conscious Machines thesis" label is now confirmed to this exact title and used faithfully; the theological reading of idolatry-as-overconstraint is the corpus's extension.

Theology & philosophy of religion

• Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Macmillan, 1929 (corrected ed., Free Press, 1978). ISBN 978-0029345702. — The unnamed structural kin for creatio continua and self-as-process. The corpus reproduces the structure without the panexperientialism. See process page.
• Hartshorne, Charles. The Divine Relativity. Yale University Press, 1948. ISBN 978-0300028805. — The dipolar / persuasive God behind "providence without micromanagement."
• Griffin, David Ray. God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy. Westminster, 1976 (reissue 2004, ISBN 978-0664229061). — The closest theodicy analogue to "can God be just if nature is uncaring?" See theodicy page.
• Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. Macmillan, 1966 (reissue 2010, ISBN 978-0230252790). — The soul-making tradition behind "wounds / pain become curriculum."
• Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Mystical Theology (in The Complete Works, Paulist Press, 1987, ISBN 978-0809128389). — The via negativa structure behind "the framework kneels." See apophatic page.
• Anonymous (14th c. English). The Cloud of Unknowing. Quoted on the apophatic page from the standard public-domain text (Evelyn Underhill ed., 1912): "of God himself can no man think… by love he may be gotten and holden; but by thought never" (ch. 6); the "cloud of forgetting" / "cloud of unknowing" between seeker and God (chs. 3, 6). Used faithfully for the apophatic comparison. Data caveat: the in-repo file refs/texts/cloud-of-unknowing.txt is mislabeled — it actually contains Constance Lindsay Skinner's novel "Good-Morning, Rosamond!" (Project Gutenberg eBook #57254), not the Cloud. The quotations here are therefore from the external standard edition, not that file; the file should be replaced or removed.
• Nāgārjuna. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (e.g. Jay L. Garfield, trans., The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Oxford University Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0195093360). — Madhyamaka emptiness and the self-emptying of emptiness; the structural parallel for "correspondence, not collapse."

Unverified or programme-level references

The corpus also leans on a "Blowtorch Theory" of active cosmogenesis (attributed to a researcher named Gough) and on tropical / min-plus algebra. Tropical algebra is a standard mathematical field (semiring with a⊕b = min(a,b), a⊗b = a+b; see Maclagan & Sturmfels, Introduction to Tropical Geometry, AMS, 2015, ISBN 978-0821851982) and is used straightforwardly as the algebra of least-cost path selection. "Blowtorch Theory" could not be tied here to a specific verifiable publication and is, per the corpus's own framing, used as metaphor and "not endorsed as settled cosmology"; it is listed only to record that the framework treats it as decorative, not load-bearing.

Back to the comparisons index or the poster browser.