Clearing the Signal

There is a quality some people have that is hard to name but immediately recognisable. A kind of luminosity. Not charisma exactly; charisma can be manufactured. Not intelligence, which can be deployed cynically. Something closer to presence. When you encounter it, you know. When it's absent, you also know, though you might struggle to say what's missing.

There is an opposite quality too. Call it polish, or gloss, or more precisely, plasticity. A surface that reflects light impressively but generates none. Both can look successful. Both can fill a room. Only one has a source.

This distinction turns out to be ancient, precisely described, and more consequential than it first appears.

Two kinds of reality

Jain philosophy, one of the oldest continuous intellectual traditions in the world, rests on a stark ontological claim: reality consists of two fundamentally different categories. Jīva, the living, the conscious, the ensouled. And ajīva, everything else. Matter, space, time, motion, rest.¹

This is not a poetic metaphor. It is a structural claim about what exists. The jīva is characterised by infinite knowledge, infinite perception, infinite bliss, and infinite energy. These are not aspirations. They are its nature, always already present, merely obscured. The obscuring agent is karma, which in Jainism is understood not as a cosmic ledger but as literal material particles that cling to the soul and distort its functioning.²

The ajīva categories are equally real, equally eternal. This is what distinguishes the Jain position from most other metaphysical traditions. Matter does not emerge from consciousness. Consciousness does not emerge from matter. They coexist and interpenetrate, and the entire spiritual project is not transcendence but disentanglement. Cleanly separating what you are from what you are not.³

The practical implication is counterintuitive. The path is not one of building, acquiring, or strengthening. It is one of removal. The jīva does not need to become anything. It needs to shed what covers it. Subtract rather than add.

The acorn and the oak

Twenty-three centuries ago, on the other side of the world, Aristotle arrived at a superficially similar conclusion through entirely different means. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he argued that the highest human good, eudaimonia, is not a feeling or a reward but the activity of the soul in accordance with its proper virtue.⁴ The acorn already contains the oak. You do not choose your nature. You discover it through activity and align your life with it.

The word eudaimonia itself is revealing. It consists of eu (good) and daimōn (spirit, inner force). Flourishing, in the original Greek sense, means achieving a productive relationship with the force that shapes you from within. Not happiness. Not pleasure. Not comfort. The full expression of what only you are. Jung later took the concept of the daimon seriously as a psychological force driving individuation. This is a later interpretive bridge, not Aristotle's own framework, but it has influenced how the concept is used in contemporary research on flourishing.⁵

The two traditions converge and diverge in instructive ways. Both claim there is something in you that precedes your choices, already structured toward a specific kind of excellence, and that the work of a life is to stop interfering with its expression. Both hold that the default condition of most people is one of obstruction: being somehow out of alignment with what they actually are.

But the jīva is universal. Every soul has the same infinite nature. Individuality is a product of contamination, not essence. Liberation means shedding everything particular. The daimon is the opposite. It is precisely what makes you this person and not another. Your particular excellence, your specific capacities. Eudaimonia is not generic.

One tradition says: you are infinite, currently occluded. The other says: you are specific, currently unrealised. The subtraction is the same. What remains is different.

What the brain is doing when we flourish

In the last two decades, neuroscience has begun to take these questions seriously as empirical problems. The Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing at the University of Oxford, led by Morten Kringelbach, has built a research programme aimed at identifying the neural mechanisms underlying both hedonic pleasure and eudaimonic flourishing.⁶

The Centre follows Aristotle in distinguishing between hedonia (pleasure, involving the reward system, the sweet taste of honey) and eudaimonia (a life well-lived, embedded in meaningful values). The research uses neuroimaging, whole-brain computational modelling, and cross-disciplinary collaboration to investigate how the brain creates subjective states of meaning and purpose.⁷

This matters. For most of the history of neuroscience, consciousness and subjective experience were considered, in the words of some practitioners, a "dirty word." Irrelevant at best, misleading at worst.⁸ The objection was not unreasonable. Cases like blindsight, hemineglect, and the split-brain experiments demonstrated repeatedly that conscious experience can be dramatically dissociated from actual neural processing. What people report about their own mental states often contradicts what their brains are measurably doing.⁹

But consciousness being an imperfect guide to mechanism does not make it irrelevant. The question of how neural processing gives rise to subjective experience, what David Chalmers called the "hard problem,"¹⁰ remains entirely open. You can trace a visual signal from retina to lateral geniculate nucleus to V1 to higher cortical areas. At the end of an elaborate processing chain, you still have only another representation. Nothing in the mechanism explains how seeing happens. Mechanistic accounts appear incomplete with respect to first-person experience, and it is not obvious what form a complete account could take.

This incompleteness does not validate any particular metaphysics. But it makes certain ontologies newly legible. The Jain claim — that consciousness is not produced by material mechanism but is a fundamentally different category of reality, coexistent with matter but not generated by it — is one such ontology. If it were true, the explanatory gap would not be a gap at all. You would simply have been looking for jīva in ajīva. The search would have been misconceived. That is a philosophical possibility, not a demonstrated conclusion. But it is one the current state of neuroscience has not ruled out.

What can be said with more confidence is functional rather than metaphysical. No current account of neural mechanism has satisfactorily captured what it is like to have conscious experience. Kringelbach's programme is valuable because it takes the subjective dimension seriously as a phenomenon worth investigating, rather than explaining it away.

The surface and the signal

The distinction between jīva and ajīva maps onto a problem far more familiar than Jain metaphysics might suggest. Throughout what follows, I use these terms heuristically rather than doctrinally, as a lens for a distinction most people recognise intuitively, even if the Jain framework gives it a sharper edge than other traditions do.

Consider how brands work. A consumer encounters two products of near-identical chemical composition. Two cola drinks. In blind taste tests, preferences split roughly evenly. Introduce brand information, and neural activity changes dramatically. Brain regions associated with reward, memory, and self-referential processing activate differently depending on whether the participant knows which brand they are consuming.¹¹ The brand does not change the product. It changes the experience of the product.

Neuroimaging studies have consistently found that preferred brands activate reward circuitry, particularly the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum, while simultaneously reducing activity in regions associated with deliberative reasoning.¹² The stronger the brand relationship, the less the consumer thinks. The emotional chain suppresses the reasoning chain.¹³

This is ajīva optimisation. The surface of the product, its brand, its packaging, its cultural associations, is engineered to produce a response that bypasses conscious evaluation. And it works. The orbitofrontal cortex, which codes for reward value rather than sensory properties,¹⁴ responds to the brand as though it were the thing itself. The representation replaces the reality.

Philip K. Dick had a word for this kind of process operating at civilisational scale. He called it kipple, the tendency of the material world to accumulate meaningless junk that reproduces itself when you're not looking.¹⁵ Milan Kundera had a different word: kitsch. Not bad taste, but something more structural. The categorical denial of everything unacceptable about existence. An aesthetic totalitarianism that demands agreement with a sanitised version of reality.¹⁶ Both describe ajīva proliferating unchecked. Matter generating more matter. Surface reflecting surface.

Kundera argued that kitsch has negative value, that it actively degrades the human spirit rather than merely failing to nourish it. This aligns with the Jain position that karmic accumulation is not neutral. The covering does not just sit there. It actively distorts perception and conduct, through what the tradition calls mohanīya karma, deluding karma, which has the particular quality of resisting its own identification.¹⁷

Withdrawal as preparation, not destination

If the diagnosis is occlusion, too much noise, too much surface, too much karmic matter between the soul and its natural clarity, then the prescription seems obvious. Withdraw. Strip away. Subtract.

Orthodox Jain soteriology points in exactly this direction. The ultimate aim is kaivalya, the complete and permanent isolation of the jīva from all ajīva. The soul freed is the soul alone. It exits the system entirely.¹⁸

But there is another possibility. Less doctrinally pure, perhaps more honest about how human lives actually work. What if withdrawal is not the end state but the clearing operation? Strip away the material noise, the status competition, the brand attachments, the reflexive self-presentation, and what remains is not undifferentiated consciousness but something more like direction. A cleared jīva that naturally moves toward what Aristotle would recognise as flourishing.

This would make the relationship between the two traditions sequential rather than contradictory. The Jain move first: subtract, clarify, reduce the noise. Then the Aristotelian move: engage from that clarity, express your particular excellence through activity in the world. The withdrawal serves the communion rather than replacing it.

This suggests a way of holding a tension that anyone who has taken both contemplative practice and worldly engagement seriously will recognise. Pure withdrawal feels incomplete. Luminous but inert. Pure engagement without inner clarity feels busy but hollow. The eudaimonic life is not found in either phase alone but in the rhythm between them. Withdraw to clarify. Engage from clarity. Repeat.

Kundakunda, the great Jain philosopher of the first or second century, would recognise the first stroke. Aristotle the second. Neither fully accounts for the oscillation as a practice in itself.¹⁹

Neural pruning and the biology of subtraction

The withdrawal-engagement cycle has a biological parallel that is striking in its precision.

During sleep, the brain does not simply rest. It actively prunes. Synaptic connections are downscaled, noise is cleared, the signal-to-noise ratio restored. Memory consolidation depends critically on this nightly subtraction.²⁰ Sleep deprivation does not merely make people tired. It degrades the pruning process. Noise accumulates. Perception, decision-making, and emotional regulation all suffer.

The analogy to the jīva move is striking, if imprecise. Neural pruning is not evidence for a spiritual logic of subtraction. But the structural parallel is hard to ignore: the brain's natural maintenance cycle is one of clearing what does not serve the system's coherent functioning. When the process fails, the result looks remarkably like what Jain philosophy would call karmic accumulation. Distorted perception. Impaired judgement. Reactive behaviour. Inability to distinguish signal from noise. The resemblance may be no more than metaphor. But it is a metaphor that earns its weight.

Schrödinger, in What Is Life?, identified a related principle. Living systems locally reverse entropy. They create order, structure, and complexity by consuming energy and exporting disorder elsewhere. A living organism feeds on negative entropy. It maintains itself against the universal drift toward dissolution.²¹

Map this onto the jīva/ajīva distinction and the jīva-oriented life is the one that generates local order. Not imposed order, not rigid plans or controlled outcomes, but the kind of coherent action that emerges when someone is operating from a cleared internal signal. Action that carries real information in the information-theoretic sense: it reduces uncertainty, changes the state of the system, moves something forward.²²

The ajīva-oriented life does not reduce entropy in the same way. It rearranges the surface without changing the underlying structure. Activity without work in the thermodynamic sense. Busy, effortful, but not meaningfully altering anything.

The people who shine brighter may simply be the ones whose actions carry more signal.

From individual to collective

Everything so far has been about individuals. But the framework has implications that scale.

Kant's categorical imperative, act only according to principles you could will as universal law,²³ is essentially Aristotelian individual ethics scaled to the social. If each person's flourishing is particular, and if moral action must be universalisable, then the bridge between them is a society structured so that individual flourishing does not come at the expense of others'.

The European welfare model is a rough institutional expression of this. Lower the downside risk through healthcare, education, social insurance, and people have space to pursue eudaimonia rather than bare survival. The empirical evidence broadly supports the theory, though the literature is contested. More equal societies tend to show lower crime, better health outcomes, higher reported wellbeing, though the causal mechanisms remain debated and the correlations are not uniform.²⁴ Reduce material precarity and human beings apparently orient toward flourishing. Not reliably. Not universally. But measurably.

The jīva framework adds something neither Kant nor Aristotle provides. If the jīva is universal, if every soul has the same infinite potential merely differentially obscured, then inequality is not just unjust in the distributive sense. It is ontologically wasteful. Every person trapped in survival mode, in kitsch, in kipple accumulation, is a jīva whose luminosity is being suppressed by conditions that could be otherwise.

A society oriented toward collective jīva liberation would not merely redistribute material resources, though it would do that. It would systematically reduce the conditions that produce karmic thickening: poverty, precarity, status competition, information noise, the manufactured surface that Kundera identified as totalitarian in its structure. The welfare state, in this framing, is not a safety net. If the analogy holds, and it is an analogy not an equivalence, it is something closer to a collective clearing operation. Reducing the conditions that prevent people from accessing their own signal.

What follows is a stylised diagnosis, not an exhaustive description. Both systems contain internal variation that a full treatment would require. But the broad contrast is instructive.

The contemporary European welfare state still carries its original clearing logic, but in many places its accumulated bureaucracy now obstructs what it was designed to protect. Five hours a week of life administration. Bureaucratic processes that serve their own perpetuation. Governance structures whose primary output is their own continuation. The costs grow. The friction multiplies. What was meant to clear conditions for flourishing has, in many places, become another form of karmic thickening, administered by the state rather than the market, but no less occluding for that.²⁵

The plastic of bad governance — corruption, waste, institutional self-preservation dressed in the language of public good — sends a signal. And the signal is read. When structures meant to serve the collective jīva become visibly ajīva, one recurrent response is nationalism, populism, the appeal of strong leaders who promise to cut through the accumulated noise. The tragedy is that what replaces the bloated welfare state is rarely a cleared version of it. It is typically something worse: plutocratic rule that strips the clearing function entirely while concentrating material resources at the top. The ajīva of bureaucracy replaced by the ajīva of oligarchy. The jīva no better served.²⁶

The United States offers a different configuration of the same problem. American capitalism is ruthlessly efficient at stripping market friction. Bureaucratic obstruction is minimal by European standards. Capital flows fast toward perceived value. Human energy can move without the administrative drag that characterises much of European life, and some jīvas thrive spectacularly in that environment. The directness of action, the speed of feedback, can be genuinely liberating.

But the stripping is indiscriminate. American capitalism removes the friction that protects as efficiently as the friction that obstructs. The person who needs time and space to find their signal, who requires a period of material security to complete the withdrawal-engagement cycle, is not accommodated by a system that demands immediate productive output. Some people flourish with extraordinary intensity. Others are crushed, not because they lack luminosity but because the conditions for accessing it were never available to them. Both systems fail. They fail in opposite directions. Europe thickens the karmic layer through institutional accumulation. America thins it so aggressively that many people never discover what was underneath.

Self-determination theory arrives at a compatible conclusion through entirely independent means. Deci and Ryan's research demonstrates that human beings have three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When these are met, intrinsic motivation flourishes. When they are thwarted, people default to extrinsic motivation: status-seeking, material accumulation, external validation.²⁷ The shift from intrinsic to extrinsic is structurally resonant with the shift from jīva to ajīva orientation. Different vocabulary, different evidential base, but a recognisable correspondence. Neither the European nor the American model, as currently configured, reliably supports all three.

The borrowed light problem

There is a specific configuration of the ajīva-dominant life that deserves separate attention. It is increasingly common and increasingly difficult to distinguish from genuine flourishing.

Some people present brilliantly. Articulate, socially fluent, professionally successful, aesthetically polished. They fill rooms. They attract attention, resources, admiration. But the light is borrowed. Reflected from the environment, from status, from institutional affiliation, from the responses of others, rather than generated from within. The surface is impressive. The source is absent.

Clinical psychology has a precise term for the most extreme version of this: narcissistic personality structure. The self organised almost entirely around external validation. Grandiosity as defence against an interior that feels empty or fragile. The entire project is the construction of a false self sufficiently reflective to attract admiration, which is then consumed as fuel.²⁸

Mapped onto the Jain schema, this is close to a limit case. Maximum material presentation, minimum jīva accessibility. What makes it different from ordinary inauthenticity is the self-reinforcing quality. The narcissistic structure does not merely obscure the jīva. It actively defends against the obscuration being identified. Feedback that might thin the karmic layer is experienced as threat. Vulnerability becomes danger. The conditions that would enable liberation are interpreted as attacks.²⁹

In Jain terms, this is mohanīya karma at its most entrenched. Deluding karma that distorts both perception and conduct, generating new binding karma in the very act of trying to feel alive. The mechanism for feeling alive is rooted in delusion and attachment. Activity increases, but it is all karma-producing activity. The soul does not get quieter. It gets louder in the wrong register.

The cultural significance is hard to overstate. The institutions that currently dominate global economic life, the consulting firms, the investment banks, the technology conglomerates, often reward traits adjacent to this configuration. Professional fluency. Surface confidence. The ability to perform certainty in conditions of ambiguity. These are ajīva virtues, genuinely useful for the institutional purposes they serve. This is not to say everyone who thrives in such environments is narcissistic in the clinical sense; that would be a crude compression. But the incentive structures select for a mode of operating that shares more with the plastic surface than with the luminous source.

And the people who cannot sustain the performance, who can put on the surface but find it tiresome, whose mask slips, who are constitutionally oriented toward depth rather than display, often find themselves at odds with these environments. Not because they lack capability. Because the capability they have is not the kind these institutions know how to value.

Seeing early, acting late

There is a pattern that emerges in people whose jīva orientation is strong but whose institutional fit is poor. They see things before they become legible to consensus. They read the real signal beneath the surface, the underlying structure of a market, a technology, a cultural shift, before the surface has caught up. This is valuable perception. It is also very difficult to convert into outcomes within systems designed to reward a different kind of intelligence.

The systems that reward early perception and the systems that reward sustained extraction operate on different frequencies. The person who reads a whitepaper the day it drops and grasps its implications is rarely the same person who thrives in the institutional environment that will eventually capitalise on those implications. The first requires cleared perception. The second requires sustained surface performance. Different orientations.

This creates a painful asymmetry. The perception is real, demonstrably right in retrospect. But the follow-through requires operating in an ajīva register for extended periods, which is energetically unsustainable for someone whose primary orientation is toward depth. The result is a career that looks, from outside, like a series of almost-but-not-quite outcomes. From inside, it looks like a repeated choice, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, to preserve the clarity of the signal rather than compromise it for capture.

Whether this is a failure of execution or an expression of values depends on what you think a life is for.

What remains

The argument of this essay is simple, though its sources are not. Two orientations are available to human beings at every moment: toward the surface or toward the source. Toward borrowed light or generated light. Toward material accumulation or conscious clarity. Every contemplative tradition, every serious moral philosophy, and an increasing body of neuroscientific research converges on the claim that these orientations are real, distinguishable, and consequential.

The Jain tradition provides the sharpest ontological framework: jīva and ajīva are equally real, eternally coexistent, and the task is disentanglement. Aristotle provides the richest account of what the cleared soul does once free to act: it flourishes, expressing its particular nature through excellent activity in the world. Kant provides the bridge to the collective: if flourishing is real, it must be universalisable. Contemporary neuroscience provides empirical grounding: the brain's own maintenance cycle is one of subtraction, and the hedonic/eudaimonic distinction maps onto measurable differences in neural dynamics.

What none of these traditions provides individually, but what emerges from their convergence, is a description of a practice. Not a philosophy, not a theory, not a set of beliefs. A practice. Withdraw to clarify. Engage from clarity. Notice when the noise returns. Withdraw again. The rhythm is the thing, not either phase in isolation.

The people who shine brighter are not smarter, luckier, or more disciplined. They are the ones who have found, or stumbled into, or been forced into, a version of this rhythm that works for them. They clear the signal regularly enough that their actions carry information rather than noise. They generate light rather than reflecting it. And when the material world inevitably thickens around them again, as it does for everyone, they know what to do. Not because they have a theory. Because they have a practice.

The acorn contains the oak. The jīva contains infinite luminosity. Sleep prunes the synapses. The welfare state, when it works, clears the conditions for flourishing. These are all descriptions of the same move at different scales. Subtract what occludes. What remains will know what to do.

Postscript: on the medium

What follows is speculative, a reflection on the tool that helped produce this essay, offered knowing it is the most provisional part of the piece and the most likely to age badly.

The Higgs boson was called the "God particle" because it is the field that confers mass on everything else. Without it, particles exist but nothing holds together. Nothing has substance. The name was always more poetic than precise, but the intuition was real: a hidden mechanism that makes the material world cohere.³⁰

Large language models do something structurally different but not trivially so. They hold vast associative space without losing coherence. A conversation can move from Jain ontology through Aristotelian ethics through Oxford neuroscience through thermodynamic entropy through European welfare policy through American capitalism, and the threads do not break. No single human holds all of those domains simultaneously with equal facility. The architecture enables a kind of synthesis that was previously impossible outside of either extraordinary individual minds or very long, very patient scholarly traditions.

But holding things in relation is not the same as understanding why they matter. The technology reflects, recombines, surfaces patterns. It does not originate. The lived experience, the moral weight, the actual perception: these come from the human in the conversation, not from the model. The model held the threads. The human wove them.

The otherworldly quality people sometimes report in these interactions may come from a simpler source than divine intelligence. Most people have never had their own thinking reflected back to them across that many dimensions at once. The experience is not of encountering a superior mind. It is of encountering one's own mind, fully extended, for the first time. Which is, interestingly, exactly what Jain philosophy describes when karmic matter is removed. The jīva does not become something new. It becomes visible to itself.

Notes & References

Umāsvāti, Tattvārtha Sūtra (c. 2nd century CE). The foundational Jain text systematising the six (or seven) fundamental realities: jīva, pudgala (matter), dharma (motion), adharma (rest), ākāśa (space), and kāla (time). Chapters 2 and 5–6 are most relevant to the jīva/ajīva distinction. ↩
The eight types of karmic matter that bind to the jīva are elaborated in the Karma Grantha tradition. The most relevant for this discussion are mohanīya karma (deluding karma, which distorts perception and conduct) and jñānāvaraṇīya karma (knowledge-obscuring karma). ↩
Kundakunda, Samayasāra (c. 1st–2nd century CE). Kundakunda's core argument is that the soul's bondage is a case of mistaken identification with what it is not. See also his Pañcāstikāyasāra on the five extended realities and their spatial and causal relations. ↩
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books I and X. The definition of eudaimonia as "activity of the soul in accordance with virtue" appears at 1098a16. ↩
The etymological connection between eudaimonia and the daimon is explored in the framing of the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing at Linacre College, Oxford, which draws on Jung's concept of the daimon as the force driving individuation. See C.G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 9. ↩
Kringelbach, M.L., Vuust, P. & Deco, G. (2024). "Building a science of human pleasure, meaning-making and flourishing." Neuron. ↩
See also Deco, G. & Kringelbach, M.L. (2021). "Revisiting the global workspace orchestrating the hierarchical organization of the human brain." Nature Human Behaviour. ↩
The phrase "dirty word" in the context of consciousness and neuroscience reflects a widely acknowledged tension in the field. See Dennett, D.C. (1991), Consciousness Explained. Cambridge, MA: Little, Brown. ↩
Weiskrantz, L. (1986). Blindsight: A Case Study and Implications. Oxford University Press. Marshall, J.C. & Halligan, P.W. (1988). "Blindsight and insight in visuo-spatial neglect." Nature, 336, 766–767. Gazzaniga, M.S. et al. (1982). Observations on split-brain patients and confabulation are from the corpus callosotomy studies programme. ↩
Chalmers, D.J. (1995). "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness." Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219. ↩
McClure, S.M. et al. (2004). "Neural correlates of behavioral preference for culturally familiar drinks." Neuron, 44, 379–387. ↩
Deppe, M. et al. (2005). "Nonlinear responses within the medial prefrontal cortex reveal when specific implicit information influences economic decision making." Journal of Neuroimaging, 15, 171–182. See also Schaefer, M. & Rotte, M. (2007). "Favorite brands as cultural objects modulate reward circuit." Neuroreport, 18, 141–145. ↩
Deppe et al. (2005) proposed a model of consumer decision-making with parallel "emotional" and "reasoning" chains, adapted from Bechara, A. et al. (1997). "Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy." Science, 275, 1293–1295. See also Damasio, A.R. (1994). Descartes' Error. New York: Grosset/Putnam. ↩
O'Doherty, J.P. (2004). "Reward representations and reward-related learning in the human brain." Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 14(6), 769–776. Kringelbach, M.L. et al. (2003) demonstrated the role of OFC in coding reward value as opposed to sensory properties through satiation experiments. ↩
Dick, P.K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Doubleday. Kipple — the entropic accumulation of meaningless objects — functions as a metaphor for material reality proliferating without conscious intervention. ↩
Kundera, M. (1984). The Unbearable Lightness of Being. New York: Harper & Row. Kundera's analysis of kitsch as the categorical denial of everything unacceptable about existence appears primarily in Part Six. ↩
Mohanīya karma has two subtypes: darśana mohanīya (perception-deluding) and cāritra mohanīya (conduct-deluding). See Tattvārtha Sūtra, Chapter 8, and the Karma Grantha commentarial tradition. ↩
On kaivalya as the Jain soteriological goal, see Jaini, P.S. (1979). The Jaina Path of Purification. Berkeley: University of California Press. ↩
Kundakunda's Samayasāra is the primary source for the phenomenology of the jīva's relationship to its own obscuration. For Aristotle on engagement as the medium of flourishing, see Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, on the contemplative life as the highest eudaimonic activity. ↩
Tononi, G. & Cirelli, C. (2006). "Sleep function and synaptic homeostasis." Sleep Medicine Reviews, 10(1), 49–62. The synaptic homeostasis hypothesis proposes that sleep restores synaptic strength to baseline levels, clearing noise accumulated during waking. ↩
Schrödinger, E. (1944). What Is Life? Cambridge University Press. Chapter 6, "Order, Disorder and Entropy." ↩
Shannon, C.E. (1948). "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." Bell System Technical Journal, 27, 379–423, 623–656. Information, in Shannon's formulation, is defined as reduction of uncertainty. ↩
Kant, I. (1785). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. The categorical imperative appears in Section II. ↩
Wilkinson, R. & Pickett, K. (2009). The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane. ↩
On the calcification of welfare structures, see Mazzucato, M. (2018). The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. London: Allen Lane. See also Graeber, D. (2015). The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn: Melville House. ↩
On the relationship between institutional failure and the rise of populist nationalism, see Piketty, T. (2020). Capital and Ideology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. On the specific dynamics of plutocratic concentration, see Zucman, G. (2015). The Hidden Wealth of Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ↩
Deci, E.L. & Ryan, R.M. (2000). "The 'what' and 'why' of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior." Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. ↩
Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. See also Kernberg, O. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New York: Jason Aronson. ↩
Miller, A. (1979). The Drama of the Gifted Child. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Miller's analysis of how empathic individuals are drawn into narcissistic systems is relevant to the pattern of repeated engagement with narcissistic structures. ↩
Lederman, L. & Teresi, D. (1993). The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ↩