Source: /dump/overall.md

The author’s own working source graph — a compiled set of influences, references, notes, and connections that informed the book.

Summary

This document is the author’s synthesis of their research process: a spine-of-the-theory overview that names intellectual influences, maps them to the book’s three acts, identifies the “closest academic neighbours,” and gives practical guidance on which thinkers and search terms are most important. It is structurally different from the chapter files: it is meta-level, documenting the construction process rather than the content.

What it added to the wiki

This source materially extended or created the following wiki pages:

• concepts/volo-ergo-sum.md — added Damasio’s four-book lineage, homeostasis/interoception as biological substrate, allostasis, SDT as specification of healthy wanting
• concepts/thingification.md — added layered realism taxonomy, psychological essentialism, fungibility and rival/nonrival as ontological tools
• concepts/the-mmm-loop.md — added Marr’s levels, active inference, Ashby’s law of requisite variety, chaos theory/Lorenz, Becker (time/human capital), Williamson (transaction costs), cybernetics
• concepts/layered-realism.md — created; the formal five-layer ontological taxonomy
• themes/want-and-will.md — added homeostasis as substrate, social baseline theory, love as shared homeostasis, SDT on controlling relationships as regulatory capture
• themes/wisdom-traditions.md — added named tradition specifics: Stoic control principle, Buddhist appropriation/upādāna, Gita’s autonomous action, Daoist ten thousand things
• themes/cost-of-distinction.md — added Goodhart’s Law as the universal failure mode of measurement-as-target
• themes/intellectual-lineage.md — created; full map of thinkers, texts, and research programs per act
• themes/meaning-coherence-purpose-significance.md — created; three-dimensional meaning research and its convergence with Act 1

Key claims from this source

• The book’s closest academic neighbours: embodied cognition, philosophy of action, social ontology, meaning-in-life research, cybernetics, behavioral economics.
• The three acts form one argument, not three adjacent curiosities: wanting forces distinction; distinction forces recursive measurement, modelling, and action.
• Love runs through all three acts: as shared homeostasis (Act 1), non-reifying perception (Act 2), and cooperative recursion (Act 3).
• Meaning is the synthesis: owned desire, workable models, and visible consequence.

Ingested: 2026-04-16