SOURCES · PRECEDENTS · CONTRASTS

The intellectual landscape

These works do not “prove” Unreality. They provide precedent, contrast, language, empirical pressure and neighboring attempts to explain appearance, process, identity and participation.

Idealism and the conditions of appearance

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Idealism
  Kant’s transcendental idealism treats space, time and causality as forms through which objects appear, while retaining empirical realism. Unreality radicalizes the observer-first direction and rejects an unknowable view-from-nowhere as explanatory foundation.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Consciousness
  A map of the explanatory problem the framework takes as foundational rather than derivative.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Hard Problem of Consciousness
  Background on why structural and functional accounts do not straightforwardly entail first-person experience.

Process, event and becoming

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Process Philosophy
  Process traditions challenge the substance-first picture and treat becoming as ontologically primary. Unreality’s “objects are slow stories” belongs in this family while deriving process through actualization and record.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Process Theism
  Whitehead’s formulation that “the many become one, and are increased by one” resonates with qualification, actualization and the accumulation of history.

Time and memory

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Henri Bergson
  Bergson connects duration with memory—the past prolonging itself into the present. Unreality describes that prolongation through record and reconstructed identity.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Temporal Consciousness
  Competing accounts of how succession, duration and the experienced present become available.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Memory
  Distinctions among recollective, propositional and habit memory, useful for separating identity from a single archive of images.
• William James, The Principles of Psychology
  The chapters on the stream of thought emphasize change, continuity, selection and the personal form of consciousness.

Relativity and spacetime curvature

• Markus Pössel, “Gravity: from weightlessness to curvature,” Einstein Online
  An overview from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics of free fall, geodesics, tidal effects and spacetime curvature in general relativity. Chapter 37 uses it to distinguish the established geometry from Unreality’s ontological interpretation.

Personal identity

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Personal Identity
  Psychological-continuity, bodily and reductionist accounts; a rigorous context for the claim that identity is reconstructed continuity.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Locke on Personal Identity
  The historical memory criterion and the circularity and transitivity problems later continuity accounts inherit.

Choice and determinism

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Free Will
  The major families of accounts connecting alternatives, sourcehood, reasons and moral responsibility.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Causal Determinism
  The thesis that laws and antecedent conditions necessitate every event—the direct rival to live structured possibility.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Incompatibilist Theories
  Why indeterminism alone is insufficient and why agent-causation remains a separate question.

Participation and quantum record

• John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum”
  Wheeler’s “it from bit” and participatory universe provide a physics-adjacent precedent for treating registered information as fundamental. Unreality makes a broader metaphysical argument and does not claim quantum theory proves observer-created reality.
• A. V. Nesteruk, “A Participatory Universe of J. A. Wheeler”
  A philosophical examination of human subjectivity and participation in Wheeler’s cosmological picture.

Relational and structural realism

• Structural Realism — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  A major realist attempt to place relational structure, rather than intrinsic substance alone, at the center of scientific knowledge.
• Scientific Realism — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  Background for the ontology’s starting point: why successful scientific description gives strong reason to affirm a mind-independent, resistant world.

Canonical authored work

• Matt Dell, The Constraints of Coherence: Ontological Necessity as the Foundation of Knowable Reality (2025–2026).
  The living work from which this site’s ontology, argument structure, Information Cosmology and technical vocabulary are derived.
• Matt Dell, Quantum Relativity and You (2024).
  The large developmental manuscript exploring potential, observation, rendering, emergent spacetime, quantum theory, free will and personal consequence.
• Matt Dell, Reality — The Book (2024).
  The broader exploratory corpus from which many cosmological problems and conceptual experiments emerged.
• Matt Dell, Quantum Thoughts (2014).
  The early seed: interaction as the basis of time, actualization through record, and entanglement understood relationally.

These manuscripts are the source of the ontology. The external works below are precedents, contrasts and points of convergence; they are not being presented as its authors.

Relationship, not derivation

Unreality is closest to idealism in its foundation, process philosophy in its world of events, psychological-continuity theories in its account of identity, incompatibilism in its account of open agency, and participatory cosmology in its treatment of registration. It differs from each by treating perspective, qualification, record and global coherence as one derivational stack.

A source appears here because it sharpens, supports, anticipates or challenges one part of the framework. Agreement with one source does not import that source’s full system.