The whole thing was rigged

“Mass Has Meaning” belongs near the foundation of this inquiry. The archived July 29, 2024 post develops the claim that material interactions shape perception, experience, symbolism, and existential significance. Its subject is not simply the symbolism of heavy objects; it is the continuity between material existence and meaningful participation in a world. (The post, 29 July 2024)

Taken together, that argument, the Rig, and the trickster address three connected questions: How does something come to matter? How can the conditions under which it matters be arranged? What happens when the arranger discovers that those arrangements also constitute the arranger?

The cosmic joke belongs to the third question. It changes the conceptual structure of the Big Rig rather than merely adding humor to its presentation.

1. Materiality, meaning, and the different senses of “mattering”

“Mass has meaning” and “matter comes to matter” work through a productive ambiguity. Matter names physical reality, but to matter means to make a consequential difference. The philosophical task is to explain their relationship without treating them as either completely separate or automatically identical.

Several distinctions help. Physical efficacy concerns what something does in an interaction. Functional significance concerns what that interaction contributes to an organized activity. Experiential meaning concerns how something is encountered and understood. Normative significance concerns what deserves attention, protection, or care. These distinctions need not divide reality into separate substances. They distinguish questions asked about the same situation.

Consider a hypothetical handwritten note left beside a door. Its physical properties make it visible and durable. Its position makes it likely to be encountered at departure. Its wording connects it to a remembered intention. Its significance depends on whether that intention concerns an errand, a promise, or somebody’s welfare. Describing the paper’s composition does not exhaust the note’s significance, but its significance is not independent of every material circumstance.

This is already a small rig: matter organized so that a relationship becomes consequential at a particular moment.

There is a remarkably exact scholarly connection in Karen Barad’s 2003 article, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Barad’s subsequent Meeting the Universe Halfway develops agential realism, in which the boundaries and capacities of participants emerge through specific material practices. Their term intra-action contrasts with an interaction understood as occurring only between independently constituted entities. This is a conceptual connection to the earlier Nicky argument, not a claim about its historical inspiration.

Applied to the Rig, that distinction raises a stronger question than whether an environment helps an already finished individual. It asks how the environment participates in producing the individual’s operative capacities. A practice can develop forms of perception, coordination, and judgment that do not precede participation in it.

The rig would therefore be simultaneously an arrangement for a practitioner and an arrangement through which a practitioner develops.

A different connection comes from Artemy Kolchinsky and David Wolpert’s 2018 theory of semantic information. They distinguish statistical correlations from information that makes a causal difference to a system’s continued existence. Their method considers interventions that scramble system–environment correlations and asks what happens to the system’s ability to maintain itself. This supplies a formal, physically grounded account of one kind of significance. It does not purport to capture every dimension of literary meaning, affection, or ethical worth.

The resulting connection is precise: a relationship can be materially real, informationally structured, and functionally significant without its significance being reducible to the quantity of material involved. “Mass Has Meaning” opens that problem; the Rig asks how such consequential relationships can be deliberately cultivated.

2. The Rig as organized sense-making, not merely equipment

The distinctive emphasis in the Rig formulation is the recursive connection between needs, available configurations, actual configurations, and consequential feedback. It is not adequately represented by an inventory of tools.

David Kirsh’s “The Intelligent Use of Space” provides a particularly close antecedent. His research examines how people arrange environments to simplify choice, perception, and computation. Importantly, he explicitly describes experts as jigging their environments. He distinguishes physical arrangements that constrain possible movement from informational arrangements that guide attention or make a problem easier to perceive. The same material arrangement can perform both functions.

This distinction connects the Rig directly to “Mass Has Meaning.” A physical arrangement can act as a constraint, a signal, or both. Its significance is not something added afterward by a detached mind. Significance participates in how the arrangement works.

Edwin Hutchins’s “How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds” changes the unit of analysis in a complementary way. Remembering can be studied across people, instruments, representations, and coordinated activity rather than attributed exclusively to an isolated individual. The relevant cognitive organization extends through the working arrangement.

Enaction adds a further dimension. In Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo’s account of participatory sense-making, social interaction is not merely the exchange of meanings already formed inside separate individuals. The interaction process can acquire its own dynamics and participate in transforming what becomes meaningful to those involved, while their individual autonomy remains important.

These perspectives should remain distinguishable. Kirsh explains how environmental organization changes cognitive demands. Hutchins examines the organization of cognition across a system. Participatory sense-making examines how interaction can transform significance itself. Together, they suggest that a rig can redistribute work, stabilize coordination, and generate new capacities for interpretation.

The original evidence boundaries remain important. Context-cued habit, changes in sensorimotor representation, and the experience of flow are different phenomena. Wood and Neal’s habit account concerns learned context–response relations. Iriki and colleagues’ rake experiments concern changes in neuronal receptive fields in trained macaques. The flow literature distinguishes enabling conditions from the experience of absorption. A rig can support these processes without collapsing them into one neurological mechanism.

A significant tension follows. A rig that supports fluent performance reduces the need to reconsider every action. A rig that supports discovery must also permit established ways of acting to be interrupted. Consequently, the objective cannot simply be maximum automaticity, minimum friction, or uninterrupted flow. Different phases of a practice require different relationships between stability and reconsideration.

This is where the trickster becomes relevant to the functioning of the rig, not only to its philosophy.

3. 間, constraints, and the efficacy of what is not filled

The Big Rig’s emphasis on 間, ma, introduces spatial and temporal intervals as constitutive features of an arrangement. The concept concerns more than empty visual space: it can concern pauses, timing, and the meaningful intervals through which an encounter takes shape.

For the Rig, the important consequence is that arrangement cannot be equated with adding more components or connections. Sometimes an arrangement becomes more capable because a connection is delayed, an interruption is prevented, an interval remains available, or a boundary is maintained.

The classical comparison is chapter 11 of the Dao De Jing: the usefulness of a wheel, vessel, or room depends on the relationship between its material structure and the openings it preserves. The argument is not that material existence is irrelevant. It concerns the complementary roles of what is present and what its organization leaves available.

A contemporary theoretical connection appears in Miguel García-Valdecasas and Terrence Deacon’s work on biological teleology. They distinguish energetic processes from the constraints that channel those processes. Constraints do not supply energy, but their organization affects what energy does. Their account of self-maintenance emphasizes processes that regenerate the constraints necessary for their own continuation. Purpose-like organization is investigated through these dependencies rather than assumed to require an external designer.

This gives the “between” a technically useful interpretation. What matters may be a pattern of permitted and prevented transitions rather than an additional substance situated between objects.

A hypothetical communication channel illustrates the distinction. Its usefulness depends not only on the existence of senders, receivers, and messages, but also on timing, permissions, interruption rules, and conditions under which a message is withheld. Those constraints help constitute the channel’s function.

Alan Rayner’s natural-inclusion argument contributes another perspective: identity should be considered in relation to neighbourhood and the spatial conditions that make distinction possible, rather than imagined as wholly self-contained. That philosophical proposal is relevant to the Rig’s treatment of boundaries as relations, although it should not be treated as interchangeable with either ma or Deacon’s account of constraints.

The synthesis is that the between is neither necessarily an inert void nor a mysterious additional force. It can be examined through timing, accessibility, separation, mediation, and constrained possibility. Nicky’s description of it as energetic gives the philosophical orientation; particular implementations still need to identify what moves, what is transformed, and what regulates that movement.

4. Hypergraphs, operator hierarchies, and organization through time

The hypergraph perspective becomes substantive when the relationship among several participants cannot be adequately recovered by examining each pair separately.

A simple mathematical example shows the issue. Let A and B be independent, equally likely binary variables, and define C = A ⊕ B, where ⊕ means exclusive OR. Every pair is statistically independent, but the triple obeys a strict constraint: knowing two values determines the third. Pairwise statistics alone miss the organizing relationship.

That does not mean ordinary graphs can never encode higher-order organization; an incidence or factor graph can represent a relation as an additional node. The important requirement is to preserve the higher-order constraint rather than silently replace it with a collection of pairwise connections.

For a rig, this matters whenever an outcome depends jointly on a practitioner, a tool, a task, a timing condition, and an authorization. The significant unit may be the coordinated relationship, not any individual component.

The operator hierarchy adds a different question: when does organization constitute a new kind of organized whole? In Jagers op Akkerhuis and colleagues’ Operator Theory, a restricted class of transitions combines structural and functional closure, termed dual closure, to produce a branching hierarchy of increasingly complex organization. This is not simply a hierarchy of managers, software functions, or nested diagrams.

An important qualification comes from Jagers op Akkerhuis’s own treatment of artifacts. His 2022 account distinguishes operators from many artifacts organized by other systems, using the idea of allo-organization. Consequently, nesting agents and tools does not by itself establish a new evolutionary operator. The interesting research question is what kind of organization the arrangement possesses, how it is maintained, and how dependent it remains on an external organizer.

The distinction between these frameworks is useful. A hypergraph represents participation and higher-order relations. Operator Theory proposes criteria for particular organizational transitions. A chronoholonic account examines how wholes and parts maintain or change their organization through time. They can inform one another without becoming synonyms.

This temporal dimension is explicit in the Rig v0.3 development record: state is reconstructed from transition events, and changes within an existing configuration space are distinguished from changes to the configuration space itself. Its twin is assessed against a declared vocabulary, observations, and epoch. These are reported properties of that particular implemented-and-tested model, not evidence that every rig must use event sourcing or that a complete model of reality has been achieved. (The Rig, generalized — people and machines, written in logic (v0.3))

The deeper implication is that a snapshot cannot disclose the full organization of a rig. An identical-looking configuration might have been reached through learning, coercion, accident, adaptation, or restoration. Those histories can affect what happens next. The coral image is therefore conceptually useful as an image of accumulated organization, not merely visual complexity.

5. Cultural knowledge, apprenticeship, and the production of associations

The cheese ontology example addresses a different transition: a domain becomes more intelligible when distinctions and relations become available for thought. But making a domain intelligible is not yet the same as becoming competent within its practices.

That distinction is central to the cultural-ruliad ambition. A taxonomy can identify categories. A procedure can specify an intended sequence. Neither automatically supplies the ability to notice which difference matters in a changing situation.

Tim Ingold’s formulation, “From the transmission of representations to the education of attention,” identifies precisely this alternative emphasis: learning cannot be understood only as moving explicit representations from one head into another. The educational question also concerns the development of attention within a practice.

Applied to the Rig, apprenticeship would involve learning both an arrangement and how to revise it. A transferable rig must therefore carry more than its successful configuration. It needs indications of what practitioners attend to, how they detect exceptions, and when established procedures should be abandoned.

There is also unusually relevant empirical research for the trading-floor example. Daniel Beunza and David Stark’s 2004 ethnography, “Tools of the Trade,” describes arbitrage as an art of association: constructing comparability across assets. They examine how the trading room’s social, spatial, and technical organization shapes the recognition of opportunities and the production of novel associations. Calculation is distributed across people and instruments working with different principles of valuation. This supports the broader trading-room connection, without verifying the separate EEG anecdote.

This provides a particularly strong connection to omnisociation. The issue is not simply combining more information. It is arranging encounters among different ways of making distinctions so that a consequential comparison becomes possible.

The same question can be posed of a film-production system, a consultancy, or a community publication: what arrangement permits different specialties to inform one another without erasing the distinctions that make each specialty useful? A hundred contributors are not a coherent production system merely because they share an objective. Their relations must make disagreement, translation, sequencing, and revision workable.

6. The trickster as a problem in boundaries and interpretation

The trickster should not be reduced to a cheerful agent of chaos. In the relevant comparative literature, trickster figures combine ingenuity with appetite, boundary-crossing with vulnerability, and cultural invention with damaging consequences. Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World emphasizes precisely this ambiguity: the maker of devices can also become their victim.

“Archetype” can be used here in a limited analytical sense: a recurring configuration of narrative functions. That usage does not require treating a universal inherited psychic structure as an established empirical fact. Nor does comparison make culturally distinct figures interchangeable.

For this inquiry, the most useful trickster function is the exposure of a mismatch between an arrangement and the assumptions by which it is understood. A boundary may work under one description and fail under another. A device may produce an unintended outcome. A literal rule may conflict with the material circumstances of its application.

Loki offers two exceptionally precise cases.

The net and its maker

In Gylfaginning, Loki makes a net while considering how he might be captured. He burns it when the gods approach, but Kvasir infers its function from the pattern remaining in the ashes. The gods reconstruct the device and use it in the pursuit that ends in Loki’s capture.

This narrative concentrates several of the Big Rig’s concerns.

First, anticipation produces an artifact: imagining a possible relation of capture gives that relation material form. Second, destruction does not eliminate every relevant trace. Third, another interpreter recognizes significance in the remaining pattern. Fourth, the original maker becomes subject to a reconstructed version of the arrangement.

The maker’s knowledge does not provide a position outside the consequences of making. Indeed, the knowledge contributes to those consequences.

This is also a precise connection to “Mass Has Meaning.” The ashes matter not just because they exist but because their arrangement affords an inference that changes subsequent action. The material trace, the interpreter’s competence, the imagined function, and the reconstructed device belong to one sequence of consequential relations.

Nothing requires the myth to be an anticipatory scientific theory. Its value here is that it presents an unusually clear structure for examining reflexive agency: the capacity to model and arrange possibilities can generate possibilities that constrain the modeller.

The head and the neck

In Skáldskaparmál, Loki wagers his head and subsequently attempts to evade the consequences by insisting that the wager did not include his neck. The episode turns on the discrepancy between a verbally isolated object and the conditions of acting upon an embodied whole.

Read alongside the Rig’s contract requirements, the problem is not merely dishonesty. It is the relation between specification and execution. Naming an object of an agreement does not guarantee that it can be physically or operationally separated from what the agreement leaves unnamed.

A contemporary hypothetical equivalent would be permission to modify one component when that modification necessarily changes the conditions under which another component operates. A correct-looking permission statement can still describe an action inadequately.

Loki’s maneuver therefore exposes a general problem for formalization: the chosen distinctions may be coherent in the language of the contract while failing to capture the dependencies of the situation.

The trickster does not prove that distinctions are meaningless. The trick depends on distinctions having enough force to be exploited. Its analytical contribution is to make their scope and consequences questionable.

7. Why “the whole thing was rigged” is a philosophical joke

The wordplay joins three senses of arrangement: a working apparatus, a prearranged outcome, and the setup through which a joke acquires its later meaning.

The joke’s conceptual force is retrospective. What initially appeared to be the neutral background of action is recognized as participating in how action became possible and intelligible. The perceiver discovers not only an arrangement but also their own involvement in it.

That recognition need not imply an external rigger. The practitioner arrives with a body, a history of learning, available categories, inherited practices, and material dependencies. Deliberate rigging begins within those conditions rather than before them.

The strongest version of the cosmic joke is therefore not “nothing can be changed.” It is that the capacity to recognize and change an arrangement is itself something the arrangement has helped make possible. Participation and revision coexist.

Bateson’s account of play supplies a useful connection through metacommunication: communication about how communication is to be understood. An action interpreted within a play frame is not equivalent to the same apparent action interpreted as hostility. Frederick Steier’s later application of this framework emphasizes the jointly sustained understanding of what participants are doing.

The trickster makes this distinction unstable or visible. The question changes from “What action occurred?” to “Under which frame did that action acquire its meaning?”

For the Rig, this separates adjustment within a frame from revision of the frame. Moving a tool is one kind of change. Discovering that the defined task was wrong is another. Improving a measure differs from questioning whether the measure captures what matters.

The cosmic joke can thus be understood as a moment of higher-order recognition: the investigator notices that their method of investigation was not neutral background. It was part of the setup.

There is a connection to Wolfram’s ruliad, understood within his proposed framework as the entangled limit of possible computations. His account places observers within the computational structures they experience rather than outside them. That offers a formal-metaphysical parallel to the embedded observer of the Big Rig, while remaining a distinct theoretical proposal rather than an empirical validation of the entire synthesis.

The corresponding discipline for omnology is significant. Seeking connections across domains need not imply access to a perspective outside every domain. Breadth of inquiry and totality of viewpoint are different ambitions.

8. Haraway’s “witty agent”: the direct connection between mattering and trickster

Donna Haraway provides an especially close connection between the material and comic dimensions of this inquiry. In “Situated Knowledges” and related work, she rejects both the passive world awaiting human description and the world treated as merely a product of human interpretation. She invokes the trickster to characterize a world capable of resisting, surprising, and exceeding the arrangements through which it is known. Jasmin Trächtler’s detailed study calls attention to this frequently neglected aspect of Haraway’s account: the world as a “witty agent.”

This is more specific than the observation that knowledge is incomplete. It concerns the status assigned to what is being known. The object is not simply whatever remains after the observer has finished defining it.

For the Big Rig, the resulting methodological question is whether feedback is allowed to challenge the categories that made it recognizable as feedback in the first place. A system can appear responsive while permitting only answers that fit its predefined vocabulary.

A rigorous rig would therefore need two kinds of responsiveness. It would respond to observed differences within its current model, and it would preserve ways of discovering that the current model has excluded relevant differences.

This is where the trickster becomes useful to scholarship rather than decorative within it. An anomaly is not automatically profound, but neither should it be dismissed merely because it arrives in an inconvenient form. The question is what the anomaly reveals about the organization of observation.

The same point connects to the limited completeness of a digital twin. A twin can be complete relative to a specified observation scheme while remaining inadequate for a newly discovered question. Its declared boundary is not a defect to conceal. It is part of what makes the model interpretable.

9. Animism, mutuality, and the question of whose life the rig sustains

Nurit Bird-David’s “‘Animism’ Revisited” approaches animism through relational epistemology: knowing is examined through relations with an environment rather than reduced to an erroneous attribution of human properties to inert objects. Nicky’s broader claim about the inescapability of a human relational lens is a philosophical extension; it should remain distinguishable from the specific ethnographic argument.

Three issues can therefore be connected without being conflated: the situated character of human knowing, the recognition of nonhuman participation, and claims about another being’s inner experience. Granting that an arrangement answers back does not by itself settle its consciousness, personhood, or authority.

Mutuality introduces another distinction: a rig’s descriptive organization is not the same as its ethical adequacy.

A hypothetical system could function effectively for its operator while transferring its burdens to somebody unable to refuse them. Recursive feedback, high performance, and persistence would not establish that the arrangement was good. The mutualist commitment adds an evaluative question that an inventory of capabilities cannot answer.

Margulis’s endosymbiotic work provides an important biological precedent for investigating complex organization through association. It does not establish that every association is mutually beneficial or that biological persistence supplies a sufficient moral standard.

The Big Rig’s four stances consequently address different problems. Constructivism asks how workable worlds and distinctions are formed. Connectionism directs attention to organized relations. Animism challenges the reduction of participants to passive resources. Mutualism asks how an arrangement sustains those involved.

Their combination is strongest when their tensions remain visible. An arrangement can be generative without being equitable, responsive without being trustworthy, and stable without being desirable.

“Mattering” also has an ethical implication here: what becomes salient within a rig is not necessarily everything that deserves consideration. An arrangement can systematically fail to notice consequences that remain real. Improving the rig therefore includes revising whose experiences count as evidence, which costs remain outside its measures, and who can challenge its definition of success.

10. The resulting research program

The combined framework suggests a research program organized around relations, not merely artifacts.

One inquiry would test configuration directly. Hold the components of a practice approximately constant while changing their spatial arrangement, timing, accessibility, or coordination rules. Measure which capabilities change. That would distinguish claims about possessing tools from claims about their relational organization.

A second would examine transitions between fluency and reconsideration. A rig might be excellent for familiar execution but poor at detecting a changed situation. Conversely, an arrangement that continually provokes novelty might undermine reliable practice. The question is how practitioners recognize the need to change modes and what supports that transition.

A third would study transmission. Copying an expert’s visible setup may reproduce its appearance without reproducing the attention and judgment through which it functions. Comparing artifact transfer, procedural instruction, and guided participation would help identify what a rig must transmit to become usable by another practitioner.

A fourth would examine reflexive limits. When does feedback revise a parameter, a procedure, a category, an objective, or the distribution of authority? Those are different forms of rerigging. A system that permits the first while blocking the others may be adaptive in a narrow sense and rigid in a more consequential one.

The trickster belongs particularly to this last inquiry. Its scholarly role is to provoke questions about the distinction between the rules an arrangement states, the dependencies through which it operates, and the consequences its participants encounter. Its ethical role cannot be assumed: exposing a boundary and exploiting a vulnerability are not automatically the same achievement.

The synthesis is therefore larger than a theory of optimized environments. “Mass Has Meaning” concerns the material conditions of significance. The Rig concerns the organization and revision of those conditions in practice. The Big Rig concerns the wider relational setting in which practitioners, arrangements, and meanings develop together. The trickster exposes the incompleteness of treating any participant—including the arranger—as external to that process.

The cosmic joke does not cancel agency. It makes agency recursive: the capacity to act on a world includes the capacity to recognize how that world has already participated in making the actor.

A research synthesis I commissioned from ChatGPT on 30 September 2026, reading my Mass Has Meaning post against the Rig notes and the Big Rig study. The house verified every source before publication.

Sources

Every source below was checked on 30 September 2026 against a primary page: the publisher's or the author's own page, a repository record, or the text itself. Each claim the essay attributes was found in its source. Where a publisher page refused automated access (Barad, De Jaegher and Di Paolo, García-Valdecasas and Deacon, Jagers op Akkerhuis 2022, Bird-David), the bibliographic record and quoted excerpts were used instead. The link to the 29 July 2024 post is by its LinkedIn share id and was not machine-checked.

1. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, Signs 28(3), 801–831 (2003); Meeting the Universe Halfway (Duke University Press, 2007).
2. Artemy Kolchinsky and David H. Wolpert, “Semantic information, autonomous agency and non-equilibrium statistical physics”, Interface Focus 8(6), 20180041 (2018).
3. David Kirsh, “The Intelligent Use of Space”, Artificial Intelligence 73(1–2), 31–68 (1995). The paper opens with “Experts jig their environment.”
4. Edwin Hutchins, “How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds”, Cognitive Science 19(3), 265–288 (1995).
5. Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo, “Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(4), 485–507 (2007).
6. Wendy Wood and David T. Neal, “A New Look at Habits and the Habit–Goal Interface”, Psychological Review 114(4), 843–863 (2007).
7. Atsushi Iriki, Michio Tanaka and Yoshiaki Iwamura, “Coding of Modified Body Schema during Tool Use by Macaque Postcentral Neurones”, NeuroReport 7(14), 2325–2330 (1996).
8. Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The Concept of Flow,” in Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2002), 89–105; reprinted 2014.
9. Dao De Jing, chapter 11.
10. Miguel García-Valdecasas and Terrence W. Deacon, “Origins of Biological Teleology: How Constraints Represent Ends”, Synthese 204, article 75 (2024).
11. Alan D. Rayner, “Space Cannot Be Cut: Why Self-Identity Naturally Includes Neighbourhood,” Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 45(2), 161–184 (2011).
12. The exclusive-or example is standard probability, not a citation: with A and B independent uniform bits, each pair among A, B and C = A ⊕ B is independent, while the triple has only four of eight outcomes.
13. Gerard Jagers op Akkerhuis, Hendrik Pieter Spijkerboer and Hans-Peter Koelewijn, “Introducing the Operator Theory”, in Evolution and Transitions in Complexity (Springer, 2016), 23–60.
14. Gerard Jagers op Akkerhuis, “The Operator Theory: A Yardstick for Complexity from Quarks to Memons”, in Efficiency in Complex Systems (Springer, 2022). The chapter treats artifacts as rapidly evolving systems that are not operators, products of allo-organization.
15. The Rig, generalized — people and machines, written in logic (v0.3), this library, 26 September 2026.
16. Tim Ingold, “From the Transmission of Representations to the Education of Attention,” in The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography, ed. Harvey Whitehouse (Berg, 2001), 113–153.
17. Daniel Beunza and David Stark, “Tools of the Trade: The Socio-Technology of Arbitrage in a Wall Street Trading Room”, Industrial and Corporate Change 13(2), 369–400 (2004).
18. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
19. Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda, Gylfaginning, chapter 50. It is Kvasir who reads the net in the ashes.
20. Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda, Skáldskaparmál, chapter 35: the wager with the dwarf Brokkr; Loki keeps his head and has his lips sewn.
21. Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” Psychiatric Research Reports 2, 39–51 (1955), reprinted in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). Jane Jorgenson and Frederick Steier, “Frames, Framing, and Designed Conversational Processes”, The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 49(3), 388–405 (2013).
22. Stephen Wolfram, “The Concept of the Ruliad” (2021) and “Observer Theory” (2023).
23. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14(3), 575–599 (1988). Jasmin Trächtler, “The world as witty agent—Donna Haraway on the object of knowledge”, Frontiers in Psychology 15, 1389575 (2024).
24. Nurit Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology”, Current Anthropology 40(S1), S67–S91 (1999).
25. Lynn Sagan (Lynn Margulis), “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells”, Journal of Theoretical Biology 14(3), 225–274 (1967). Its mitochondria and plastid claims are now textbook; its basal-body claim is not accepted.