The Abstractionist’s Papers · List of Figures
Every figure in the book, by chapter. Tap a figure to go to the place where it appears.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. A Natural Theory of Mind
Chapter 2. How the Mind Works
Chapter 3. The Realities We Build
Chapter 4. The Natural Reality Framework
Chapter 5. General Selection and Emergence
Chapter 6. A Natural Theory of Light
Chapter 8. Causal Spaces
Chapter 9. Causal Dynamics
Chapter 11. Space and Time
Introduction
A still image the mind sees as moving.
The 2017 letter where the work began.
The 2018 story that first drew Red Spaces.
The 2024 story that brought back the yellow triangle.
Where the reader stands, from the mind out to the Blue Space.
Chapter 1. A Natural Theory of Mind
One mind inside the Blue Space, with light as its boundary.
Many minds side by side, each with its own boundary.
Each mind’s Red Space at right angles to the shared Blue Space.
Sensing, as happening outside induces meaning inside.
Moving, as meaning inside induces happening outside.
Chapter 2. How the Mind Works
What we interpret and expect steers our logic.
The body we feel and the body that acts.
Going around in circles, then rising out of them.
Chapter 3. The Realities We Build
The layers of a mind, with paradoxes between them.
Two people passing meaning and happening back and forth.
Two minds turning in step, like gears.
Reacting to an event versus choosing a response.
Chapter 4. The Natural Reality Framework
The mind’s map ends where light stops reaching.
A mind that takes itself for the universe.
The same mind modeled inside the Blue Space, and the paradox gone.
A single process and its boundary.
Other processes beside it.
Processes in parallel, at right angles to the minds.
How the Blue Space shapes a mind’s model of it.
A cause, a rule and an effect.
Ordinary change that stays on its plane.
Change that leaves its plane, an Incoherence.
Natural Spaces emerging one above another.
Physical, biological and cognitive layers.
Chapter 5. General Selection and Emergence
The loop of interaction, variety, selection and accumulation.
The same loop, lifted out of space and time.
The Natural Reality Axis, set beside complex numbers.
Natural Spaces stacked along the Causation Axis.
Chapter 6. A Natural Theory of Light
An effect in one process inducing a cause in the next.
Electrons in a wire, each inducing the next.
Chapter 8. Causal Spaces
A rule that applies inside its boundary and nowhere else.
A cause passing through a rule to become an effect.
Two causal spaces that never touch.
One space inducing a cause in another.
One cause reaching many spaces.
A single cause with a different effect in each space.
Two spaces taken for one, and the paradox that follows.
Sugar’s pleasure and harm, covered and uncovered.
Light as wave and particle, covered and uncovered.
The Liar, covered and uncovered.
The chicken and the egg, covered and uncovered.
Chapter 9. Causal Dynamics
Each effect becoming the next cause under one rule.
Part of the effect returning to join the next cause.
Chapter 11. Space and Time
Space and time held in the mind, the Causation Axis above.