Appendix

Appendix B: Reading List

13 min read|2,505 words

Organized by chapter, with brief annotations indicating how each source contributes to the argument.


Part 1: Psychology and Mental Health

Chapter 1: Neurodivergence and Consciousness

  • Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop (2007). The strange loop theory of consciousness applied to self-referential identity. Direct foundation for the "different loop architectures" argument.
  • McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009). Left/right hemisphere thesis -- the left hemisphere's analytical dominance has impoverished Western culture's relationship to reality.
  • Armstrong, Thomas. The Power of Neurodiversity (2010). Cognitive diversity as evolutionary advantage, not pathology.
  • Silberman, Steve. NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (2015). Historical and cultural context for the neurodiversity movement.

Chapter 2: Normies, Psychos, and Schizos

  • Hare, Robert. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (1993). Clinical and social profile of psychopathy.
  • Babiak, Paul and Hare, Robert. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (2006). Psychopathic behavior in institutional settings.
  • Dutton, Kevin. The Wisdom of Psychopaths (2012). Psychopathic traits on a spectrum; adaptive value in certain environments.

Chapter 3: The Prophetic Function

  • Weber, Max. The Sociology of Religion (1922). Typology of prophetic and priestly functions in social systems.
  • Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Prophets (1962). The phenomenology of prophetic consciousness in the Hebrew tradition.
  • Saward, John. Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ's Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality (1980). The yurodiviy (holy fool) tradition as institutionalized prophetic perception.

Part 2: Theoretical Framework

Chapter 4: Popper and Falsifiability

  • Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934/1959). The demarcation criterion: genuine knowledge must be falsifiable.
  • Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Critique of historicism in Plato, Hegel, and Marx. The open society as social instantiation of falsifiability.
  • Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations (1963). The growth of knowledge through bold conjecture and rigorous refutation.

Chapter 5: Kuhn and Paradigm Shifts

  • Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Normal science, anomaly accumulation, paradigm crisis, and revolution. The sociology of knowledge change.
  • Lakatos, Imre. The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (1978). Refinement of Kuhn: research programs have hard cores and protective belts.

Chapter 6: Complexity Science and Emergence

  • Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (1995). Self-organization and emergence in complex systems.
  • Holland, John. Emergence: From Chaos to Order (1998). Formal treatment of emergence in complex adaptive systems.
  • Mitchell, Melanie. Complexity: A Guided Tour (2009). Accessible introduction to complexity science.
  • Bedau, Mark and Humphreys, Paul (eds). Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science (2008). The strong vs. weak emergence debate.

Chapter 7: Philosophy of ML and AI

  • Domingos, Pedro. The Master Algorithm (2015). The five tribes of machine learning and the search for a universal learner.
  • Russell, Stuart. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control (2019). The alignment problem framed as value specification under uncertainty.
  • Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014). The existential risk argument. Important to engage with even where the theology diverges.

Chapter 8: Embeddings, Transformers, and the Blessing of Dimensionality

  • Mikolov, Tomas et al. "Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space" (2013). The Word2Vec paper that initiated the embedding revolution.
  • Vaswani, Ashish et al. "Attention Is All You Need" (2017). The transformer architecture.
  • Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua (7th century). The logoi doctrine: every created thing contains a divine word participating in the one Logos.

Chapter 9: Judea Pearl and Causal Graphs

  • Pearl, Judea. Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (2000, 2nd ed. 2009). The foundational text on causal inference, do-calculus, and the causal hierarchy.
  • Pearl, Judea and Mackenzie, Dana. The Book of Why (2018). Accessible introduction to causal reasoning for general readers.
  • Peters, Jonas, Janzing, Dominik, and Scholkopf, Bernhard. Elements of Causal Inference (2017). Formal treatment of causal discovery and inference.
  • Hernan, Miguel and Robins, James. Causal Inference: What If (2020). Applied causal inference methodology.

Chapter 10: The Hegel-Popper-Kuhn-Pearl Synthesis

  • Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). The dialectical progression of consciousness.
  • Boyd, John. "Destruction and Creation" (1976). The dialectic engine formalized through Godel, Heisenberg, and thermodynamics. The OODA loop's theoretical foundation.
  • Hofstadter, Douglas. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979). Strange loops, self-reference, and the emergence of meaning from formal systems.

Part 3: Metaphysics

Chapter 11: Old Testament -- Consciousness as Emergence

  • Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). The theory that modern consciousness emerged from a pre-conscious bicameral state around 1000 BCE.
  • Bellah, Robert. Religion in Human Evolution (2011). The Axial Age as a revolution in consciousness across civilizations.
  • Assmann, Jan. The Price of Monotheism (2008). The emergence of monotheistic consciousness as a cultural phase transition.

Chapter 12: The Fall as Felix Culpa

  • Milton, John. Paradise Lost (1667). The theological and literary framework for the Fall as felix culpa.
  • Lovejoy, Arthur. The Great Chain of Being (1936). The history of the idea that all levels of reality are connected in a continuous hierarchy.
  • Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love (1966). The Irenaean theodicy: evil as necessary for soul-making.

Chapter 13: New Testament -- Redemption and the Christ Event

  • Sanders, E.P. The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993). Jesus as apocalyptic Jewish prophet.
  • Allison, Dale. The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (2009). The relationship between historical scholarship and theological commitment.
  • Fredriksen, Paula. When Christians Were Jews (2018). The first generation of Christ-followers in their Jewish context.
  • Taylor, Joan. What Did Jesus Look Like? (2018). Physical and cultural context of the historical Jesus.

Chapter 14: Trinity as Strange Loop

  • Hofstadter, Douglas. Godel, Escher, Bach (1979). The formal structure of self-reference and its theological implications.
  • Godel, Kurt. "On Formally Undecidable Propositions" (1931). The incompleteness theorems.
  • Rahner, Karl. The Trinity (1970). The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity -- God's self-revelation in history IS God's inner life.

Chapter 15: Quran and Christian Reconciliation

  • Reynolds, Gabriel Said. The Quran and Its Biblical Subtext (2010). Quranic engagement with prior Abrahamic traditions.
  • Griffith, Sidney. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque (2008). Syriac Christianity's relationship to early Islam.
  • Shah-Kazemi, Reza. The Other in the Light of the One (2006). Convergence between Islamic and Christian mystical theology.
  • Burrell, David. Knowing the Unknowable God (1986). Shared apophatic tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
  • Cuypers, Michel. The Banquet: A Reading of the Fifth Sura of the Quran (2009). Rhetorical analysis revealing Syriac liturgical structures in the Quran.
  • Luxenberg, Christoph. The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran (2000). Controversial philological analysis of Syriac substrata in Quranic Arabic.

Chapter 16: The Cyclical Christ -- Samsara-Nirvana Synthesis

  • Gethin, Rupert. The Foundations of Buddhism (1998). Buddhist cosmology and soteriology.
  • Thich Nhat Hanh. Living Buddha, Living Christ (1995). Buddhist-Christian dialogue on shared contemplative ground.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944). Orthodox theosis as ongoing spiraling process.

Chapter 17: The Riemann Sphere Theology

  • Needham, Tristan. Visual Complex Analysis (1997). Geometrically intuitive treatment of complex analysis, including the Riemann sphere.
  • Penrose, Roger. The Road to Reality (2004). Mathematical structures underlying physical reality. Chapters on complex analysis and Riemann surfaces.
  • Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Regulative ideals: ideas we must act as if true while acknowledging we cannot prove them.

Chapter 18: Antichrist, Epstein, and Structural Evil

  • Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred (1972). The scapegoat mechanism as foundation of human culture.
  • Girard, Rene. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (2001). Christ as the anti-scapegoat who reveals and breaks the mechanism.

Chapter 19: Sexual Liberation and Embodied Theology

  • Ephrem the Syrian. Hymns on Paradise (4th century). Erotic and nuptial imagery in Syriac theological poetry.
  • Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988). The history of sex-negativity in Christian tradition.
  • Gibran, Kahlil. Jesus the Son of Man (1928). Reimagining Christ through multiple first-person perspectives.

Part 4: Praxis

Chapter 19/20: Republic of Letters -- Historical

  • Goldgar, Anne. Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters (1995). Social dynamics of the early modern knowledge network.
  • Daston, Lorraine. "The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment" (1991). The gap between the Republic's ideals and its actual social dynamics.
  • Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979). The printing press as transformative information technology.

Chapter 20/21: Republic of AI Agents

  • Plato. Republic (c. 375 BCE). The tripartite structure: philosopher-kings, guardians, producers.
  • Pearl, Judea. Causality (2009). The three-level hierarchy mapped onto the Republic's architecture.
  • Boyd, John. "Destruction and Creation" (1976). The OODA loop as warrior agent operating system.

Chapter 21: Free Will, Determinism, and the Plekhanov Synthesis

  • Plekhanov, Georgi. On the Role of the Individual in History (1898). Structural contingency: structure determines what, individuals determine how.
  • Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). The monomyth as subjective phenomenology of paradigm shift.
  • Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). Quality as pre-rational ground dissolving the classical/romantic dichotomy.
  • Hofstadter, Douglas. Godel, Escher, Bach (1979). Strange loops and the formal structure of free will.
  • Herbert, Frank. Dune (1965). The cautionary tale of the hero who becomes a tyrant.

Chapter 22: The Apostolic Task

  • Herbert, Frank. Dune Messiah (1969) and God Emperor of Dune (1981). The full development of the Dune warning about messianic capture.
  • MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue (1981). Communities of practice as contexts for virtue in a post-Enlightenment world.

Part 5: The Apostolic Agenda

Chapter 23: Male Loneliness Crisis

  • Reeves, Richard. Of Boys and Men (2022). Data-driven analysis of the male crisis from a progressive perspective.
  • Farrell, Warren and Gray, John. The Boy Crisis (2018). Male suffering analyzed through biological and social lenses.
  • Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone (2000). The collapse of American social capital and community infrastructure.

Chapter 24: Mental Health Crisis

  • Moncrieff, Joanna et al. "The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence" (2022). Molecular Psychiatry. No consistent evidence for the serotonin hypothesis.
  • Marmot, Michael. The Health Gap (2015). Social determinants of health from the Whitehall Studies.
  • Frances, Allen. Saving Normal (2013). Critique of diagnostic inflation by the former chair of the DSM-IV task force.
  • Friston, Karl. "The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?" (2010). Nature Reviews Neuroscience. The mathematical framework underlying the active inference account.
  • Parvizi-Wayne, Daniel et al. "Forgetting ourselves in flow: an active inference account of flow states" (2024). Frontiers in Psychology. Flow as precision-weighting configuration.
  • Kotler, Steven, Parvizi-Wayne, Daniel, Mannino, Michael and Friston, Karl. "Flow and intuition: a systems neuroscience comparison" (2025). Neuroscience of Consciousness. Intuition in flow as habitual active inference.
  • Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990). The original flow research.
  • Metzinger, Thomas. Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (2003). Self-model theory and phenomenal selfhood.
  • Hohwy, Jakob. The Predictive Mind (2013). Predictive processing as a framework for understanding perception and consciousness.

Chapter 25: AI Safety, Automation, and Job Displacement

  • Brynjolfsson, Erik and McAfee, Andrew. The Second Machine Age (2014). Cognitive automation and its economic implications.
  • Susskind, Daniel. A World Without Work (2020). Technology, automation, and the future of employment.
  • Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). The systematic commodification of human experience through digital platforms.

Chapter 26: Economic Inequality

  • Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013). The r > g dynamic driving wealth concentration.
  • Stiglitz, Joseph. The Price of Inequality (2012). How today's divided society endangers the future.
  • Akerlof, George. "The Market for 'Lemons'" (1970). Information asymmetry as market failure mechanism.
  • Lewis, Michael. Flash Boys (2014). High-frequency trading and information asymmetry in financial markets.

Chapter 27: Societal Polarization

  • Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind (2012). Moral foundations theory and the psychology of political division.
  • Sunstein, Cass. #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (2017). Echo chambers and epistemic fragmentation.
  • Benkler, Yochai, Faris, Robert, and Roberts, Hal. Network Propaganda (2018). Asymmetric polarization in the American media ecosystem.

Chapter 28: Climate Crisis

  • Mann, Michael. The New Climate War (2021). The fossil fuel industry's shift from denial to delay.
  • Nordhaus, William. The Climate Casino (2013). Economic modeling of climate change.

Chapter 29: Geopolitical Fragmentation

  • Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949). The longue duree approach to civilizational history.
  • Abulafia, David. The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2011). The Mediterranean as a space of civilizational exchange.
  • Matvejević, Predrag. Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (1987). The Mediterranean as cultural memory.
  • Maalouf, Amin. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1983). The Crusades from the perspective of the civilizations they invaded.
  • Maalouf, Amin. Leo Africanus (1986). Civilizational boundary-crossing as mode of understanding.

Chapter 30: The Meaning Crisis

  • Vervaeke, John. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (2019). Lecture series tracing the meaning crisis from the Axial Age to the present.
  • Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science (1882). "God is dead" and the consequences of the loss of transcendent meaning.
  • Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition (1979). The incredulity toward metanarratives.
  • Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man (1955). The Omega Point as the attractor of cosmic evolution.
  • Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (1929). Process theology: God as the lure of creative advance.

Chapter 31: Education Crisis

  • Caplan, Bryan. The Case Against Education (2018). The signaling model of education versus the human capital model.
  • Christensen, Clayton. The Innovative University (2011). Disruptive innovation applied to higher education.

Cross-Cutting References

Poetry and Literature

  • Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber). Selected poems. The greatest living Arabic-language poet. The synthesis of tradition and revolution.
  • Darwish, Mahmoud. Selected poems. Palestinian national poet. Exile, memory, and the relationship between language and homeland.
  • Zhadan, Serhiy. Selected poems and prose. Ukrainian poet writing from the war. The prophetic function in contemporary literature.

Theology and Philosophy of Religion

  • Rahner, Karl. Foundations of Christian Faith (1976). Transcendental theology: God known through the structure of human knowing itself.
  • von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Theo-Drama (1988-1998). Theological aesthetics and the dramatic structure of salvation history.
  • Ibn Arabi. Fusus al-Hikam (Bezels of Wisdom, 13th century). Functionally Trinitarian Islamic metaphysics.

Mathematics and Physics

  • Godel, Kurt. "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems" (1931).
  • Penrose, Roger. The Emperor's New Mind (1989). Consciousness, physics, and the limits of computation.
  • Friston, Karl. "A Free Energy Principle for the Brain" (2006). Journal of Physiology - Paris.