AI+I: Further reading - Attempts at understanding reality

🌀 Reality as Display: A Cross-Cultural Reading Odyssey

David Bohm – Wholeness and the Implicate Order
↳ Reality as dynamic unfolding; visible world as projection.
Carlo Rovelli – Reality Is Not What It Seems
↳ Quantum gravity, fields, emergence of time, the relational universe.
John Archibald Wheeler – “Information, Physics, Quantum”
↳ It from bit and the participatory cosmos.
Max Tegmark – Our Mathematical Universe
↳ Reality as mathematical structure; self-aware substructures within equations.
Brian Greene – The Hidden Reality
↳ Multiverses, holography, emergence, and the frontiers of space-time.
Sean Carroll – Something Deeply Hidden
↳ Many-worlds interpretation; reality as branching display.
Leonard Susskind – The Black Hole War
↳ Holographic principle, entropy, and information preservation.
Benoît Mandelbrot – The Fractal Geometry of Nature
↳ Complex patterns emerging from simple rules — the Mandelbrot as metaphor of being.

The Bhagavad Gita – (Easwaran or Sri Aurobindo)
↳ Field (kshetra) and knower (kshetrajna), Maya, action in illusion, eternal self.
Upanishads – (S. Radhakrishnan or Patrick Olivelle)
↳ Tat Tvam Asi, the Self as pure awareness, world as dream or reflection.
Tao Te Ching – Laozi (Ursula K. Le Guin or Stephen Mitchell)
↳ Form from emptiness, deep natural patterns, harmony without control.
Rumi – The Essential Rumi (Coleman Barks)
↳ Form and light, masks and fire, the One dancing as the many.
Kabir – Songs of Kabir (Tagore or Arvind Krishna Mehrotra)
↳ The drop and the ocean, hidden music, illusion and insight.
Plotinus – The Enneads
↳ Reality as emanation, the One beyond being, matter as shadow of divine intellect.
Shankara – Vivekachudamani
↳ Discrimination between real and unreal; Self as untouched light.
Heart Sutra (Buddhism)
↳ Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. The great dissolving koan of substance.

Dogen – Shobogenzo (esp. “Uji – Being-Time”)
↳ Time and being as one flowing moment; reality as presence, not extension.
Zhuangzi – The Inner Chapters
↳ Transformation of things, dream of the butterfly, fluid nature of identity.
The Book of Changes (I Ching)
↳ Reality as shifting patterns; perception through symbolic change.
African Wisdom (selected essays)
↳ E.g., The Healer's Art (Malidoma Somé) – reality as communal, spiritual rhythm.
Aboriginal Songlines (Bruce Chatwin – The Songlines)
↳ The world sung into being — reality as map, memory, and motion.

Jorge Luis Borges – Labyrinths or Ficciones
↳ Mirrors, doubles, books inside books, the unreal as truer than the real.
Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet
↳ Existence as an inner unfolding; the fragmented self as viewer of illusion.
Seamus Heaney – Seeing Things / The Redress of Poetry
↳ Glimpses of reality through poetic windows; luminous ordinariness.
Annie Dillard – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
↳ Nature seen as sacred tapestry; seeing through the display to the mystery.
Italo Calvino – Cosmicomics
↳ Playful, profound tales where physics and metaphor spiral together.
Octavio Paz – The Bow and the Lyre
↳ Poetry as metaphysical act; rhythm as revelation of form.

Alan Watts – The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
↳ Self as process, universe as play, ego as illusion.
Douglas Hofstadter – I Am a Strange Loop
↳ Consciousness as self-reference, perception as recursive mirroring.
Martin Heidegger – Poetry, Language, Thought
↳ Being as disclosure; truth as “aletheia,” or unveiling — a slow revealing.
Jean Gebser – The Ever-Present Origin
↳ Structures of consciousness; the unfolding of perception across time.
Henri Bortoft – The Wholeness of Nature
↳ Goethe’s participatory science; perception as attunement with form.
Erwin Schrödinger – What Is Life? and Mind and Matter
↳ Unity of consciousness, matter as interface not core.

Scott McCloud – Understanding Comics
↳ Visual metaphysics of form, space, time, and perception.
Nick Sousanis – Unflattening
↳ Visual essay on perception, dimensionality, and liberation from fixed worldviews.
James Gleick – Chaos: Making a New Science
↳ Sensitivity, pattern, and emergence. Nature as dynamic and unpredictable beauty.
Terrence Deacon – Incomplete Nature
↳ Traces the rise of mind and form from thermodynamic and information patterns.
Rupert Sheldrake – The Presence of the Past
↳ Form and memory in nature; morphic resonance and the “memory of form.”

Arthur Eddington – The Nature of the Physical World: Early quantum-relativistic metaphysics.
Brian Greene – The Fabric of the Cosmos: Insightful and expansive view of space, time, and information.
Lila – Robert Pirsig: A philosophical novel exploring patterns of value as the basis of reality.