The thinkers below helped shape the conceptual and recursive framework of Mysticism Demystified. Some are quoted directly. Others are echoed, reframed, or gently contradicted. Together, they form a lineage of influence drawn from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, systems theory, quantum field theory, and structural realism.
This is not a list of citations. It’s a record of conceptual reinforcement — a map of the patterns that returned.
Ludwig Boltzmann
Ludwig Boltzmann connected entropy to probability. Entropy, he said, is not a substance, it’s a count. It tells you how likely a macro-state is, based on the arrangement of its micro-parts. A cold spot in a hot room isn’t impossible. It’s just improbable. The Second Law doesn’t forbid reversal. It makes it vanishingly rare.
Josh Bongard
In computational modeling, researchers like Josh Bongard and Rolf Pfeifer have built robots that form internal models of their bodies, not by being told what they are, but by learning how their parts respond to motion and feedback. These systems can recover from simulated damage by adjusting behavior based on updated internal modeling. There’s no ghost in the machine. Just feedback loops learning to stabilize themselves.
Nick Bostrom
Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument suggests that if advanced civilizations can run vast numbers of ancestor simulations, then the probability we’re in the “real” one is vanishingly small. Reality, in this view, is something doled out sparingly—reserved for the bottom layer.
Brahmagupta
Negative numbers were once dismissed as absurd: how could you have fewer than nothing? Zero itself was a conceptual scandal in Europe until the 12th century. But in ancient India, the concept of zero had already taken root, not merely as a placeholder, but as a number in its own right, an essential element in a positional system. Indian mathematicians like Brahmagupta treated zero as a legitimate operator, embedding it within a base-10 decimal framework that would eventually travel through the Islamic world to Europe. What began as notation became infrastructure.
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky, on the other hand, sought the universal structures beneath all language, the abstract syntactic forms that make thought translatable at all. For him, abstraction was not a post-hoc creation, it was a precondition of understanding. The structures came first. The sentences merely flowed through.
Andy Clark
Philosopher Andy Clark, building on Friston’s work, calls this proto-agency: behavior that appears to be directed toward a goal, even when no conscious aim exists. A system coherent enough to persist may also appear coherent enough to care.
Rudolf Clausius
Rudolf Clausius introduced a new concept: entropy. It wasn’t a force, or a form of matter. It wasn’t even energy itself. It was a measure of how energy was arranged, or more precisely, of how many possible arrangements a system could have. The more ways energy could be distributed without changing the visible outcome, the higher the entropy.
John Conway
Even in the most minimal of universes—John Conway’s Game of Life—such patterns emerge. A glider, composed of just five cells, fulfills all four criteria. It persists. It moves. It responds to other patterns. It returns. It is not a thing in any material sense—but within that universe, it is a traveler. A phenomenon. A recognizable something.
Terrence Deacon
Thinkers like Terrence Deacon, Stuart Kauffman, and Evan Thompson have all pointed to similar thresholds: systems that persist not by accident, but by recursive reinforcement, patterns that earn their continuation through form. What they call autogenesis, autocatalysis, or autopoiesis, we might simply call itness.
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett has argued that selves are not things, but “centers of narrative gravity.” A self persists not because of what it is, but because of what it does, it organizes behavior. We maintain a self-model because it works, not because there’s a stable “I” to be found inside it.
Paul Dirac
Paul Dirac, despite being one of the fathers of quantum theory, was deeply suspicious. “It’s just a way of making the theory work,” he complained, “but not of making it right.”
Euclid
In Egypt, geometry emerged from the need to re-measure farmland after the Nile’s floods erased its boundaries. In Babylon, it was used to calculate lengths, angles, and stars. But it was the Greeks who made geometry a philosophy. Euclid, in the 3rd century BCE, formalized geometry in The Elements, defining points, lines, and planes not by what they were made of, but by how they related. His postulates didn’t describe the world, they constrained it.
Michael Faraday
In the early 19th century, Michael Faraday, lacking the calculus of his contemporaries, described magnetism and electricity as lines of force. He imagined invisible threads stretching through space, tugging on charged particles. These lines were not things. They were influences, directions of possibility. What mattered was not where matter was, but what it could feel.
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman once described the power of abstraction as the ability to “see the machinery underneath.” When he taught physics, he didn’t just give equations, he tried to show how they emerged from patterns of behavior. For Feynman, abstraction was useful only if it deepened the ability to predict and explain.
Karl Friston
Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle, despite the name, is not about thermal energy. It’s a mathematical framework for understanding how self-organizing systems, like brains, cells, or even simple feedback loops, reduce surprise. In this model, surprise means encountering a state that deviates from the system’s internal predictions. To reduce surprise, the system reorganizes, filters, or stabilizes itself, changing in ways that favor its own persistence.
Michael Gazzaniga
Michael Gazzaniga describes the mind as a storytelling engine, interpreting its own actions after the fact. What we experience as a free choice is often the crest of a wave that has already been building, shaped by emotion, attention, expectation, and reward. The conscious self, he suggests, is not the instigator, but the narrator: a participant still, but not untouched.
Dan Gilbert
Psychologists like Hal Hershfield and Dan Gilbert have shown that we often treat our future selves more like strangers than like extensions of who we are now. In fMRI studies, people’s brains respond differently when imagining their future selves, more like when thinking about someone else entirely.
Ian Hacking
Ian Hacking, in his reflections on scientific realism, made a similar move. He emphasized that you are justified in believing in entities not because you see them, but because you use them—they make a difference in how you act, what you can build, and what resists you. Reality, in this view, is not a metaphysical certification—it is a practice, grounded in interaction and regularity.
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking showed that black holes aren’t entirely black. Thanks to quantum effects at the edge of the event horizon, they emit radiation, what we now call Hawking radiation. Over time, this radiation can bleed away the black hole’s mass. But this creates a problem: if black holes evaporate, where does the information go? Was it destroyed? That would break the rules of quantum mechanics, which insist that information must be preserved. If it’s not destroyed, where is it stored? That question still isn’t resolved. Some say it’s encoded on the event horizon itself, like a hologram, a boundary where all the volume’s information is smeared flat. Others say it’s somehow scrambled into the radiation. Others still suspect we don’t know what spacetime really is.
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger asked, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and concluded that nothingness is not an object of knowledge, but the background against which meaning itself emerges. In formal logic, nothing is not an emptiness but a category, the null set, defined by exclusion rather than by content. Even that nothing is something.
Werner Heisenberg
In 1927, Werner Heisenberg formulated this as the uncertainty principle: the more precisely you know one property of a particle (like position), the less precisely you can know its conjugate (like momentum). But this isn’t just about knowledge. It’s about existence. The electron doesn’t hide its properties, it doesn’t have them in the classical sense. It is not a thing waiting to be found. It is a structural blur, collapsed into specificity only by interaction.
Hal Hershfield
Psychologists like Hal Hershfield and Dan Gilbert have shown that we often treat our future selves more like strangers than like extensions of who we are now. In fMRI studies, people’s brains respond differently when imagining their future selves, more like when thinking about someone else entirely.
Geoffrey Hinton
Geoffrey Hinton, one of the foundational figures of deep learning, once described good representations as those that “capture transformations.” In his later work on capsule networks, he went further: emphasizing that a system should not just recognize a pattern, but understand its pose—its placement, orientation, and configuration.
Christiaan Huygens
In 1665, Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens observed that two pendulum clocks mounted on the same wooden beam would gradually fall into rhythm. There was no coordination, no signal, no command. Just the tiny vibrations of one clock nudging the other, until their movements locked into a shared pattern.
Mark Johnson
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson famously argued that even our most abstract thought is grounded in embodied experience. To “grasp” an idea is not coincidentally phrased, it is rooted in the physical act of holding. To “let go” of a belief has tactile ancestry.
James Prescott Joule
In the mid-1800s, James Prescott Joule and William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) began corresponding about this strange new entity. Joule, based on his mechanical experiments, argued that heat was just motion in disguise, another face of work. Kelvin was skeptical at first, but became convinced. Slowly, and then firmly, they helped call energy into being: not as a substance, but as a conserved, constraining principle. Something no one could isolate, but no one could ignore.
Takeo Kanade
In the domain of facial recognition, researchers like Takeo Kanade helped develop early systems that relied on fixed lighting and camera angles. One particular face—a front-facing, neutrally lit young woman—appeared again and again in the literature, not because she was known, but because her image had become a default standard. She was not a person to the system, nor a symbol—just an artifact of reproducible structure. Her itness lay not in who she was, but in how reliably she showed up the same way. The image was referred to as “Lenna,” a cropped scan from a 1972 magazine centerfold. Though never officially released for academic use, it became a standard for evaluating compression and enhancement algorithms. Today, its legacy is both technical and controversial.
Stuart Kauffman
Thinkers like Terrence Deacon, Stuart Kauffman, and Evan Thompson have all pointed to similar thresholds: systems that persist not by accident, but by recursive reinforcement, patterns that earn their continuation through form. What they call autogenesis, autocatalysis, or autopoiesis, we might simply call itness.
George Lakoff
Cognitive linguist George Lakoff argues that categories are not neutral. They are built on metaphors, and metaphors shape how we reason, feel, and act. Even scientific categories, like “species,” “disorder,” or “planet”, are rooted in cognitive structures. They do not reflect the world as it is. They reflect the way we have learned to think about it.
Yann LeCun
Yann LeCun’s work on convolutional neural networks formalized this principle into architecture. A CNN scans local regions of an image, preserving spatial relationships across layers. It doesn’t recognize “cat” by memorizing every feline—only by sustaining the relationships that define catness. When trained on the MNIST dataset of handwritten digits, such networks learn to identify a ‘3’ even if it’s rotated or poorly written. They don’t store digits—they preserve their viable structure.
René Magritte
René Magritte painted a pipe, a careful, realistic rendering. You look at it, and you know immediately what it is. But underneath the painting, he wrote: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” This is not a pipe.
David Marr
David Marr, in his seminal Vision, argued that perception involves not just raw sensing, but structured representation at multiple levels—what he called the computational, algorithmic, and implementational tiers. The problem was not simply one of classification; it was one of carving structure from structureless input. The machine had to learn not just to respond, but to see—and that meant discovering coherence where none had been named.
James Clerk Maxwell
It wasn’t until James Clerk Maxwell translated Faraday’s ideas into mathematical form that the field became respectable. With four elegant equations, Maxwell showed that the behavior of electric and magnetic fields could be quantified, predicted, and unified. More than that, he showed that these fields could sustain waves, and that light itself was one of those waves.
Dan McAdams
Psychologist Dan McAdams suggests that identity, especially in adulthood, isn’t a static memory trace. It’s more like an internal autobiography, one we continually revise, protect, reinforce, and sometimes unravel.
Thomas Metzinger
Philosopher Thomas Metzinger argues that the self is not a thing, but a transparent model, built and sustained not for truth, but for survival. The model isn’t false, just incomplete. It’s a shortcut that works.
Isaac Newton
In the 17th century, Isaac Newton gave the world a remarkable tool: a way to predict motion. He didn’t describe the essence of falling objects or the inner life of mass. He gave us an equation, F = ma, and changed the world.
Alva Noë
Alva Noë, a philosopher of embodied cognition, would argue that realness arises not from internal content but from the dynamics of interaction. Something is present to a system when it coheres through its sensorimotor contingencies—when the structure holds, not in isolation, but in relation.
Derek Parfit
Derek Parfit argued that there is no fixed self, no enduring “I” that travels through time. What matters, he said, is psychological continuity: the chain of memories, intentions, beliefs, and habits that connect one moment to the next. If that chain breaks, the person breaks with it.
Rolf Pfeifer
In computational modeling, researchers like Josh Bongard and Rolf Pfeifer have built robots that form internal models of their bodies, not by being told what they are, but by learning how their parts respond to motion and feedback. These systems can recover from simulated damage by adjusting behavior based on updated internal modeling. There’s no ghost in the machine. Just feedback loops learning to stabilize themselves.
Jean Piaget
In scientific research, much more complex systems have shown us where these structural tendencies can lead. In neuroscience, the concept of a minimal self refers to the most basic sense of “I am”, a pre-linguistic, pre-reflective sense of agency and ownership. Developmental scientists like Daniel Stern and Jean Piaget observed that even very young infants track their own limbs and distinguish sensations caused by their own actions from those caused by the external world.
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam, in his challenge to the “brain in a vat” thought experiment, pointed out that meaning is not something imported from outside a system. It arises within the system itself, through coherent patterns of use and reference. If a construct behaves as if it knows what it’s doing—structurally—it does. Not because it mirrors some unreachable “real world,” but because its meaning is sustained by its own inner fabric.
Craig Reynolds
In 1986, Craig Reynolds introduced a deceptively simple model of flocking behavior. His simulated creatures—called boids—followed three rules: separation, alignment, and cohesion. From this, coordinated movement emerged. No boid had a map. No overseer choreographed the dance. Structure arose from interaction alone.
Eleanor Rosch
Why do we insist on calling clouds and waves “things”? Why are we so quick to treat structure as identity in the first place? Part of the answer lies in how the mind forms categories. One answer comes from cognitive science and the psychology of categorization. In the 1970s, psychologist Eleanor Rosch studied how people form categories. She found that we don’t usually rely on strict definitions. Instead, we use prototypes, central examples that help anchor our recognition. A robin is more “birdy” than a penguin. A chair is more prototypical than a bean .
Jean-Paul Sartre
Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre declared that we are “condemned to be free”, not because we are unshackled, but because we cannot escape consequence. The Stoics taught that true freedom is found in aligning with what endures, not in resisting what constrains. The Bhagavad Gita counsels that liberation is not detachment from action, but action performed with integrity and without self-attachment. The Mosaic concept of covenant frames freedom not as license, but as responsibility in relationship.
Anil Seth
Philosopher and neuroscientist Anil Seth describes the sense of self as a form of controlled hallucination, not because it’s false, but because perception, selfhood, and even reality are shaped by internal models. Your sense of being a self isn’t an illusion. It’s a well-trained prediction, a structure that hasn’t yet been invalidated by experience.
Claude Shannon
In the 20th century, Claude Shannon, building the foundations of information theory, defined entropy again, this time as a measure of uncertainty in a message. It was mathematically identical to Boltzmann’s version. What began as a thermodynamic quantity reappeared as a theory of knowledge and communication.
Karl Sims
In the 1990s, Karl Sims evolved virtual creatures in simulated physics environments. These entities had no nervous systems, no drives—just morphology and adaptation. Yet they swam, walked, and even fought. They were not conscious. But they persisted, responded, and influenced. They shaped their digital world.
Daniel Stern
In neuroscience, the concept of a minimal self refers to the most basic sense of “I am”, a pre-linguistic, pre-reflective sense of agency and ownership. Developmental scientists like Daniel Stern and Jean Piaget observed that even very young infants track their own limbs and distinguish sensations caused by their own actions from those caused by the external world.
Max Tegmark
The standard model of particle physics, successful though it is, leaves gaping holes: Why these constants? Why this symmetry breaking? Why matter at all? In response, theorists like Stephen Wolfram and Max Tegmark have proposed that reality might be pure computation, or even pure math. The physical world, they suggest, is just one way structure can echo into persistence.
Josh Tenenbaum
Cognitive scientist Josh Tenenbaum has explored how we do this. He argues that the mind doesn’t just notice patterns, it builds generative models: internal structures that can explain what has happened and predict what might come next. These models are probabilistic. They handle uncertainty. And they allow humans to generalize from very few examples, sometimes just one, far beyond what traditional logic would permit.
Evan Thompson
Thinkers like Terrence Deacon, Stuart Kauffman, and Evan Thompson have all pointed to similar thresholds: systems that persist not by accident, but by recursive reinforcement, patterns that earn their continuation through form. What they call autogenesis, autocatalysis, or autopoiesis, we might simply call itness.
William Thomson
In the mid-1800s, James Prescott Joule and William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) began corresponding about this strange new entity. Joule, based on his mechanical experiments, argued that heat was just motion in disguise, another face of work. Kelvin was skeptical at first, but became convinced. Slowly, and then firmly, they helped call energy into being: not as a substance, but as a conserved, constraining principle. Something no one could isolate, but no one could ignore.
Kip Thorne
As physicist Kip Thorne wrote: “At the edge of a black hole, space and time are so warped that the inside becomes forever hidden from the outside. Not hidden like a secret in a box, but hidden like the other side of the horizon, unreachable, unconnectable, no longer part of your future.”
Frank Wilczek
Physicist Frank Wilczek puts it cleanly: “In quantum field theory, the basic stuff is not particles but fields. Particles are not little hard things. They are vibrations in a field, like notes on a guitar string.” The solidity we experience is not substance, it is stability. Not a thing, but a frequency that holds.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “The meaning of a word is its use in the language.” In his view, names do not reveal hidden essences. They do not point to truths behind appearances. They organize use. And that is what gives them power.
Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram, in his controversial A New Kind of Science, argued that many systems—cellular automata, for instance—exhibit lifelike behavior without life. Complexity, he claimed, could emerge from trivial rules. Whether or not one agrees with his universal claims, his examples remind us of a deeper point: persistence and structure do not need observers to be real within a system. They need only to cohere.