Return Self
Return Self
Essays on Recursive Thinking
About the Book
Return Self is a book for those who build, break, and rebuild systems — and begin to realize the system is building them back.
Blending software architecture, organizational theory, cybernetics, recursive epistemology, and structural poetics, this book offers essays that loop, concepts that contradict, and fragments that reflect more than they explain.
Read it once, and you’ll see systems differently.
Read it twice, and you may see yourself.
About the Author
Table of Contents
- Prologue
- Meta-Architecture and Toolmaking as Strategy
- What is Meta-Architecture?
- Recursive Feedback Without Chaos
- Versioning and Accumulation: Time as State
- Causality as Structure
- Reflection as Practice
- Toolmaking as Strategy
- Don’t Fear the Loop
- Reflection as Practice
- Temporal Abstractions
- Modeling Belief
- Belief in Organizations
- Modeling Organizations
- Constraint and Form
- Constraint as Generative Pressure
- Constraints as Memory of Failure
- Language as Interface
- Naming is Modeling
- Interface as Negotiation
- Epistemic Gravity
- Inertia and Attractors
- Operational Surfaces
- Inference Without Guarantees
- Mutation and Irreversibility
- Mutation as Cost
- Irreversibility as Structure
- Designing with Commitment
- Finality Without Panic
- Divergence and Drift
- Fractured Mirrors
- Multi-Tenant Madness
- Designing for Divergence
- Platform Identity
- Collapse from Within
- Loop Collapse
- Belief Entrenchment
- Invisible Drift
- Designing for Recovery
- What Emerges, Survives
- Pattern Without Plan
- Systems That Teach
- Cultivating Surprise
- The Loop Beyond Intention
- Recursive Mirrors
- Conway’s Shadow
- Design as Repetition of Thought
- Mirrors Within Mirrors
- Practicing Self-Reflection
- Epilogue
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