Lineage / shoulders-of-giants map

This page collects people, traditions, and canonical works that are invoked in the cited sources as intellectual lineage for the framework used in this project.

It is intentionally incomplete and will grow as additional sources are processed.

Keystone lineage (frequently used as framing)

Aristotle — offered as an early non-dualist framing: the psyche as an organizing principle of living matter rather than a separable substance. talk: The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis

Leibniz — invoked as a proto-computationalist: discourse can, in principle, be formalized and evaluated mechanically. talk: The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis

La Mettrie — used to dissolve the “gears and cogs” straw man: humans can be abstract machines (causal organizations), not literal clockwork. talk: The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis

Wittgenstein — used as a pointer to a methodological problem: natural language is too ambiguous for reliable truth-tracking; we need precision closer to a modeling/programming language. talk: The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis

Norbert Wiener (cybernetics) — invoked as the control-centric bridge: minds can be described as feedback systems. talk: The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis

John von Neumann (computer architecture) — invoked as the substrate for building arbitrary causal structures at scale. talk: The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis

Alan Turing — invoked via the Turing test as a pragmatic test for intelligence; used to contrast performance-tests with consciousness-as-organization. talk: The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis

Minsky / McCarthy (founding AI) — invoked as the start of AI as an explicitly philosophical project: build minds to understand minds. talk: The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis

Computation, information, and formal limits

Kurt Gödel — invoked in the context of undecidability/limits of formal systems. talk: The Ghost in the Machine

Alan Turing / Alonzo Church — invoked as a boundary condition for what is computable/constructive in realizable systems (Church–Turing). talk: The Ghost in the Machine

Claude Shannon — invoked as the canonical notion of information (and contrasted with “meaningful information”). talk: The Ghost in the Machine

Philosophy of mind (computational functionalism lineage)

Daniel Dennett — invoked as a major functionalist philosopher of mind (including discussion of “zombies” and why purely behavioral framings can still miss internal organization). talk: Self Models of Loving Grace

Development / adult growth (agency and self-model)

Robert Kegan — invoked for an adult-development lens: growth as making formerly automatic processes explicit (subject → object). talk: Computational Meta-Psychology

Candidates to add (needs anchors)

As we process sources, add entries here the first time they are noticed, then later move them into the sections above once they have timecoded anchors and a short explanation of the role they play.