Reciprocality

Welcome to Reciprocality.

This project began as a piece of practical, real-world psychology in the software industry. It ended up unfolding into a broader model of why many people, in many societies, seem to carry a consistently distorted view of what is happening around them.

Special Introduction to the ADHD, CFIDS (ME), and Acquired Autism aspects of the project

Not everyone is caught in that confusion. As the picture emerged, an alternative way of relating observable phenomena became describable. Variants of it appear in the working habits of creative software engineers, “star” diagnosticians in medicine, great physicists and mathematicians, people labeled as ADHD, practitioners of quality thinking in industry, and in the records of artists and mystics.

The claim is ambitious but simple in spirit. The alternative picture is rational without being reductionistic. It is grounded in specific mechanisms and is intended to be experimentally testable. If the experiments fail, the model can be discarded. If they work, we learn something important about attention, cognition, culture, and the way explanations get blocked.

By watching creative software engineers, I learned how to teach a state of mind that many students assumed they could not access. Then the similarity between creative engineers and children diagnosed as ADHD led to a further idea: certain features of modern culture may push many people into a stable, early-formed cognitive posture that dampens part of awareness.

Once a whole community settles into that posture, a second effect can appear: a logical blind spot that makes it difficult for anyone to clearly see, name, or discuss what is happening. The two effects protect each other, and the combination produces predictable trouble in institutions, language, schooling, and workplaces.

I tested the blind-spot idea by applying it to longstanding puzzles in physics. The mathematics may remain familiar, but the underlying assumptions can shift. Because the project is centrally about awareness, I then applied the resulting physical picture to consciousness and arrived at a different type of answer than the standard reductionist options. The model aims to describe how physical processes, including consciousness, fit together from our point of view.

Then the investigation widened. Records from several mystical and religious traditions appear to contain direct discussion of similar logical and physical concepts. If that is true, a practical implication follows: when direct communication is blocked by culture and language, people try to build environments and practices that allow the picture to become speakable over time. Some parts of a solution are “payload,” some are “transport,” and some are side effects. Without the big picture, they are easy to confuse.

One aim here is to treat spiritual experience as a class of phenomena that can be discussed with intellectual honesty: not as superstition, and not as a cheap reduction. A useful analogy is engineering. An atom bomb sounds impossible until one understands fission and mass-energy equivalence. With the right physical theory, one can see why certain materials can do the job and others cannot. The point is not the bomb; it is the difference between a vague intuition and a precise mechanism.

This page introduces the main strands of the project. Each section below is a short orientation only. Modern, updated pages will be created for each section with supporting references, clarifications, and current language.

— Alan G. Carter

Mirrors, Translations, Downloads

This material may be quoted or reformatted with attribution. Older mirror, translation, download, and mailing-list information has been removed from this edition.

Joining the Project

This began as a collaborative project and benefited from discussion and critique. Legacy subscription forms and archived group links have been removed. A modern discussion and contact page will be provided separately.

0: The Programmers’ Stone

Artificial Discipline: Software Engineering

This section is included to set the scene. It is not “the project” so much as what motivated it.

I wanted to get better at teaching software engineering. I discovered that the real lever was not another technique or framework. It was attention and stance. If the student’s mind was in the right mode, the details tended to sort themselves out. In that mode, design becomes possible, not just coding.

Over many years I tried many approaches and kept what worked. The original material was written for working programmers, so it speaks bluntly about personal responsibility, awareness, and the limits of proceduralism. That made it commercially awkward. People often would not argue against it directly. They would change the subject, or hide behind compliance language. The refusal itself became a clue.

At the same time, industry moved toward a “software factory” mindset. Unskilled staff were encouraged to act as if they were automatons executing standards documents as if they were complete behavioral programs. That approach collapses as soon as the program to be written is not exactly like something written before. Real engineering is adaptation under novelty. The factory model treats novelty as a defect.

I suspected I had stumbled onto something psychologically important. So I stopped teaching and started investigating what that “state of mind” actually is, why it is blocked, and what social forces maintain the block.

1: M0

Artificial Discipline: Neurochemistry

M0 is proposed as an unrecognized public-health style phenomenon: a self-reinforcing pattern in which boring, repetitive social conditions lead people to seek and prefer more repetition, and to become physiologically averse to novelty.

The core claim is that this preference is not merely a habit. It is underwritten by neurochemistry in a way that reduces access to a layer of cognition that depends on precisely tuned feedback processes. People do not notice the loss because they cannot perceive what they can no longer perceive, and because the altered state can come with an artificial sense of well-being. Repetition starts to feel like “what being good looks like.”

In this frame, “ritual” is not a moral failing. It is a stabilization strategy. The trouble begins when an entire culture treats stabilization as the highest virtue and treats novelty as threat. In that environment, people who retain strong novelty-handling cognition (including many engineers and many children labeled as ADHD) are not merely misunderstood. They can become targets.

Another difficulty is that a society structured around ritual and withdrawal avoidance produces a cultural distortion that makes the subject hard to discuss. People feel fear, shame, or hostility, but cannot name why. That makes the topic socially radioactive. And yet it is precisely the kind of thing that can be examined if we describe mechanisms carefully and design tests.

Additional Materials
An Introduction to M0 A succinct introduction to the M0 concept by Joss Earl.
An Example Of how the M0 effect sneaks up on people in the workplace.
The Howtos Some useful techniques for people free of dopamine self-addiction.

2: The Ghost Not

Artificial Discipline: Logical Philosophy

If a society is saturated with novelty-avoidance and ritual fixation, a characteristic distortion appears in language and reasoning. The “Ghost Not” is offered as a precise description of that distortion.

The idea begins with natural immunes who sense that something is wrong but cannot express it in the available language. Under pressure, they learn to perceive conventionally: to see what the group says is there rather than what their senses and cognition report. The striking claim is that simply building this “perceptual apparatus,” even if it is used rarely, introduces a definable logical error at the base of thought.

That error functions like an “inner not” that propagates through reasoning. The conclusion may feel consistent, but it is subtly detached from objective reality. The distortion is elegant because it is general. It does not need thousands of special cases. It is a single root move that produces a family of predictable mistakes.

The Ghost Not is presented as the jewel of the system because it is (a) specific enough to formalize, (b) psychologically plausible under social pressure, and (c) capable of generating testable predictions about reasoning patterns in ritual-heavy cultures.

Here are the full additional materials, links and references.

Additional Materials
Comments on Multi-Dimensional Critical Thinking Discussion of a remarkable paper by Prof. N. N. Nepejvoda that parallels much of the M0 thinking. Translated from the Russian by the author.
Motivational Inversion Some discussion of the idea that the Ghost Not converts selfishness into anti altruism, altruism into anti selfishness, rationalism into anti spirituality and spirituality into anti rationalism.

3: Reciprocal Cosmology

Artificial Discipline: Fundamental Physics

If the Ghost Not is real, it should leave fingerprints where human reasoning is pushed to its limits. Fundamental physics is one such domain, because it depends on clean inference under abstraction and on the disciplined handling of observer assumptions.

The project reports that, by treating the Ghost Not as a diagnostic tool, an alternative set of underlying assumptions can be assembled that leaves much of the mathematics intact while changing interpretation. The resulting picture is claimed to integrate disparate problems: questions around gravitation and inertia, redshift and scaling, the philosophical discomforts of quantum mechanics, and the fractal character of nature.

Even if the proposed cosmology turns out to be wrong, the act of generating a coherent alternative using the Ghost Not as a tool would still support the psychological claim that a systematic distortion exists. It would show that the distortion can be isolated, inverted, and used to open novel conceptual paths.

4: Consciousness

Artificial Discipline: Consciousness Studies (but it’s getting tricky…)

On this view, the revised physical picture has consequences for consciousness. The claim is not simply that “consciousness is mysterious,” but that the standard debate is constrained by assumptions that may be artifacts of the distortion described earlier.

If the universe is structured in a way that makes feedback, constraint, and informational organization central, then the question of consciousness changes shape. The aim here is to re-frame consciousness as a natural phenomenon that fits inside physics without reducing it to a trivial epiphenomenon.

5: Hypertime

Artificial Discipline: Fundamental Semiotics (trickier still…)

The earlier work gained traction by dropping unhelpful language and letting the ideas stand on their own terms. This section attempts a similar move for the concepts developed in cosmology and consciousness.

The project suggests that when people see clearly “around” the M0 effect, they tend to report a similar structure of reality, regardless of whether they approach it through engineering, art, or mysticism. That convergence may explain the recurring “ADHD/hacker/mystic” character type: a person whose cognition is comfortable with novelty, feedback, and deep structure, and who therefore finds certain claims obvious that others cannot parse because they lack the relevant cognitive “hardware features” in operation.

Additional Materials
An Expression of the Paradigm by Zach Gold.
A Quotation from Bennett that parallels Zach.

6: History

Artificial Discipline: Applied Theology (trickiest…)

This section is different in tone. It argues that the paradigm outlined above is not merely a modern invention. Whether the model is ultimately correct or not, it resembles the universe that multiple historical mystical traditions believed they inhabited.

The project claims this can be shown by providing a concrete interpretation of early source material (for example, the Gospel of Thomas) under the proposed framework. A key motif is that complex structures can be understood as self-creating through constraints that echo their own future state. The paper also notes that one can attempt thermodynamic explanations for some of these motifs, but that those explanations sometimes become strained. That tension is framed as the difference between purely “body” language and purely “spirit” language.

7: Magic

Artificial Discipline: None (Specialization is for insects!)

Once cognition and the surrounding paradigm are clarified, it becomes possible to speak more carefully about subjective phenomena that many effective and creative people report, but that are rarely discussed in public without embarrassment or distortion.

This applies to technologists as much as artists. Artists often have a vocabulary for such experience, but technologists encounter it as well, typically without a shared language. The first step is not to assert that every experience is “true,” but to ask what kind of reality we think the experience would have to occur in, and what would count as evidence either way.

About The Author

Alan G. Carter

British writer and software engineer. This project originated in the late 1990s from his work teaching software engineering and studying patterns of cognition, learning, and problem-solving in technical environments.

Born 11 July 1960 in Nottingham, England. At the time the original work was written he was based in Ibiza, Spain.

This modern edition presents the material for archival and discussion purposes.

Books List
Reciprocality Book List