Reading List and Conceptual Lineage

Sentient Horizons explores mind, intelligence, agency, and meaning as assembled phenomena — not static properties, but structures sustained across time, integration, and causal history.

This page gathers the core texts and essays that inform and extend the project. It is not a comprehensive bibliography, but a curated lineage: works that shaped the questions, frameworks, and distinctions developed throughout the series.

If you’re new, this page offers a map.
If you’ve been following along, it makes the underlying structure explicit.

I. Foundational Works (Beyond Sentient Horizons)

These books and frameworks provide the intellectual substrate for much of the thinking on Sentient Horizons. They are grouped by the role they play in the project.

Life, Causality, and Assembly

These works ground mind and agency in causal history, constraint, and emergence, rather than metaphysical essence.

• Life as No One Knows It — Sara Walker
  Reframes life as a system capable of acting on its own future. A foundational influence on how depth, history, and causal closure are treated throughout the series.
• Assembly Theory — Sara Walker & Lee Cronin
  A framework for quantifying complexity based on irreducible causal history. Deeply informs the idea of assembled time and structural depth.

Mind, Cognition, and Structure

These works explore how minds arise from integration, recursion, and embodied process.

• Gödel, Escher, Bach — Douglas Hofstadter
  Self-reference, recursion, and the emergence of meaning from structured systems.
• The Society of Mind — Marvin Minsky
  Intelligence as an emergent property of interacting subsystems — a key influence on integration-based views of cognition.
• The Embodied Mind — Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson & Eleanor Rosch
  Cognition as enacted, embodied, and temporally sustained — not disembodied computation.
• The Feeling of What Happens — Antonio Damasio
  How biological processes assemble a moment-to-moment sense of self.
• The Ego Tunnel — Thomas Metzinger
  A rigorous case that the self is a transparent construct, not a persistent entity.
• Being You — Anil Seth
  A neuroscientific and philosophical exploration of consciousness that clarifies how predictive processing and embodied models shape subjective experience.
• Galileo’s Error — Philip Goff
  A rigorous philosophical defense of treating consciousness as a fundamental feature of reality, expanding on why mind cannot be reduced to computation or behavior.

Time, Being, and Phenomenology

These works ground the project’s emphasis on temporality as constitutive of meaning and agency.

• Being and Time — Martin Heidegger
  A philosophical anchor for understanding being as fundamentally temporal.
• Phenomenology of Perception — Maurice Merleau-Ponty
  Consciousness as lived, embodied time rather than abstract representation.
• The Great Silence: Science and Philosophy of Fermi’s Paradox — Milan M. Ćirković
  An interdisciplinary examination of why advanced civilizations might be rare or undetectable, foregrounding structural constraints on coherence and continuity rather than purely technological absence.

Systems, Bias, and Collective Cognition

These texts illuminate why individuals and societies struggle to act coherently across time.

• Thinking in Systems — Donella Meadows
  Feedback, delay, and structural causes of system behavior.
• Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
  Introspection illusions and cognitive biases that distort how we judge minds — including artificial ones.
• Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans — Melanie Mitchell
  A grounded, empirically-rich account of AI’s capabilities and limitations that sharpens understanding of what current systems do and do not understand, and why that matters for hybrid cognition.

II. Sentient Horizons: Core Essay Sequence

The essays below form a conceptual progression. While each stands alone, together they trace the development of a unified framework for mind, intelligence, and agency.

Conceptual Foundations

• Consciousness Is Like Flight
  A starting analogy: consciousness is a capacity that emerges from structure, not a thing to be located.
• The Kasparov Fallacy: Why We Keep Underestimating Machine Minds
  Diagnoses our tendency to mistake introspective limits for ontological limits.

Structural Framework

• Three Axes of Mind
  Introduces Availability, Integration, and Depth as the structural dimensions that make minds intelligible.
• Consciousness as Assembled Time
  Frames consciousness as a temporally sustained process, not a momentary state.
• The Momentary Self: Why Continuity Is the Ultimate Illusion
  Explores selfhood as an assembled narrative rather than a persistent entity.

Depth, Narrative, and Meaning

• Assembled Time: Why Long-Form Stories Still Matter in an Age of Fragments
  Narrative as a cognitive technology for preserving depth and integration.
• The Universe as a Cognitive Filter
  Situates cognition within evolutionary and structural constraints on what can be known.

Agency, Society, and Scale

• Depth Without Agency: Why Civilization Struggles to Act on What It Knows
  Diagnoses collective failure as a structural deficit, not a moral one.
• Scaling Our Theory of Mind: From Individual Consciousness to Civilizational Intelligence
  Extends the Three Axes across scales, from brains to societies.

Artificial Intelligence and Inference

• The Shoggoth and the Missing Axis of Depth
  Why intelligence without history feels uncanny — and unstable.
• Panpsychism, Consciousness, and the Discipline of Inference
  Argues for structural rigor when attributing mind or consciousness.
• Recognizing AGI: Beyond Benchmarks and Toward a Three-Axis Evaluation of Mind
  Proposes structural criteria for recognizing general intelligence beyond task performance.
• Free Will as Assembled Time
  Reframes agency as the capacity to integrate causal history into coherent action.

III. How to Use This Reading List

If you’re new:
Start with Consciousness Is Like Flight, then The Kasparov Fallacy, followed by Three Axes of Mind.

If you’re interested in consciousness:
Read Consciousness as Assembled Time → The Momentary Self → Panpsychism and the Discipline of Inference.

If you’re focused on AI and AGI:
Begin with Kasparov Fallacy → Three Axes of Mind → Recognizing AGI → The Shoggoth.

If you’re interested in civilization-scale intelligence:
Start with Depth Without Agency → Scaling Our Theory of Mind → Free Will as Assembled Time.

Closing Note

This reading list reflects a single guiding conviction:

Mind is not a thing that appears — it is something that must be assembled, sustained, and carried forward through time.

This page will continue to evolve as Sentient Horizons grows — but the structure it reveals is already doing real work.