---
date: '2025-12-17'
description: inspired by [David Cole's](http://davidcole.me/canon/), [Brendan Schlagel's](https://www.brendanschlagel.com/canon/#words-language), and [Marcelo Chaman Mallqui](https://www.marcelochaman.ca/s/heuristics)
id: personal canon
layout: technical-tractatus
modified: 2026-10-14 14:58:03 GMT-04:00
tags:
  - pattern
  - sapling
  - technical
title: personal canon
created: '2025-12-17'
published: '2025-12-17'
pageLayout: technical-tractatus
slug: personal-canon
permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/personal-canon.md
generator:
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full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt
---
## language, logic, and epistemic calibration

- _1.0_ [[thoughts/Wittgenstein|Ludwig Wittgenstein]]
  - _1.01_ [[library/Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus|Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus]] ([PDF](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/5740-pdf.pdf)) treats a proposition as a picture of a possible fact. Its saying/showing distinction marks what a factual proposition can state and what its logical form can only display.
  - _1.02_ [[library/Philosophical Investigations|Philosophical Investigations]] ([PDF](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54889e73e4b0a2c1f9891289/t/564b61a4e4b04eca59c4d232/1447780772744/Ludwig.Wittgenstein.-.Philosophical.Investigations.pdf)) follows words into language-games: giving orders, reporting, joking, praying. Use, training, rule-following, and correction give each practice its shape.
- _1.1_ A.J. Ayer & Bertrand Russell.
  - _1.11_ [[library/Language, Truth & Logic|Language, Truth and Logic]] by A. J. Ayer asks whether a proposition is analytic or open to empirical verification. The test is severe enough to make the status of ethical and metaphysical claims itself contentious.
  - _1.12_ [On Denoting (1905)](https://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/br-on-denoting.html) and [Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types (1908)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Mathematical_Logic_as_Based_on_the_Theory_of_Types_-_Bertrand_Russell_%281908%29.pdf) by Bertrand Russell ask how an expression works in a proposition when its grammatical form misleads us about its logical role.
- _1.2_ Frank Ramsey
  - _1.21_ _Truth and Probability_ (1926) connects degrees of belief to the odds a person would accept.
  - _1.22_ _General Propositions and Causality_ (1929) calls belief “a map of neighbouring space by which we steer.” [[posts/2025|The 2025 notes]] extend that image: much of the map is water, and old beliefs leave marks after a revision.
- _1.3_ [The Cluster Structure of Thingspace](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) by Eliezer Yudkowsky treats categories as clusters of correlated properties, a reason to examine a category’s predictive use instead of searching for its essence.
- _1.4_ [On Bounded Distrust](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-bounded-distrust) by Zvi Mowshowitz asks what signal can still be extracted from a source whose distortions are known. Distrust has to be calibrated to the claim and context.

## existentialism, phenomenology, and the absurd

- _2.0_ [[thoughts/Camus|Albert Camus]]
  - _2.01_ [[library/The Myth of Sisyphus|The Myth of Sisyphus]] asks whether life is worth living once the demand for meaning meets an indifferent world. Its answer is revolt without an appeal to philosophical suicide.
  - _2.02_ [[library/The Rebel|The Rebel]] asks how refusal of injustice can remain committed to human limits, rather than license murder in the name of a promised future.
  - _2.03_ [[library/The First Man|The First Man]], the unfinished novel about childhood in colonial Algeria, returns the argument to poverty, family, and the search for an origin.
- _2.1_ Gilles Deleuze
  - _2.10_ [[library/Nietzsche and Philosophy|Nietzsche and Philosophy]] by [[thoughts/Giles Deleuze|Gilles Deleuze]] reads critique through the origin and value of values. This is the route into [[thoughts/aesthetic value|aesthetic value]] in the existing [[thoughts/Philosophy and Nietzsche|Nietzsche notes]].
  - _2.11_ [[library/A Thousand Plateaus|A Thousand Plateaus]] ([PDF](https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf)) by Deleuze and Félix Guattari develops rhizomes, assemblages, and multiplicities as ways to describe relations that do not grow from one root.
- _2.2_ [[library/Being and Time|Being and Time]] ([PDF](https://libraryofagartha.com/Philosophy/Martin%20Heidegger/Being%20and%20Time%20%28Martin%20Heidegger_Berserker%20Books%29.pdf)) by Martin Heidegger starts from [[thoughts/being|Dasein]], already situated in a world of uses and concerns. _Readiness-to-hand_ and _presence-at-hand_ name two ways a thing becomes intelligible in that situation.
- _2.3_ _The Sickness unto Death_ by Søren Kierkegaard and [[library/The Need For Roots|The Need for Roots]] by Simone Weil hold a question open: what gives a self form when possibility multiplies? [[posts/hyperabundance|Hyperabundance]] makes that question practical, because chosen commitments need time and attention to become real.

## writing, agency, taste, and tools for thought

- _3.0_ A notebook and an essay do different work in a [[thoughts/writing|writing]] life.
  - _3.01_ [[library/On Keeping a Notebook|On Keeping a Notebook]] by Joan Didion keeps contact with earlier selves. Its entries record how an event felt to the writer, even when they would make poor evidence for a factual diary.
  - _3.02_ [The Age of the Essay](https://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html) and [Writes and Write-Nots](https://paulgraham.com/writes.html) by Paul Graham treat an essay as an attempt (_essayer_): write a claim down, follow its consequences, and find out where thought is incomplete.
- _3.1_ Henrik Karlsson’s three essays make a sequence from private thought to public discovery to practical [[thoughts/Agency|agency]].
  - _3.11_ [Writing to Think](https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/writing-to-think) pins a vague claim to the page so that contradictions and counterexamples become visible. The friction is part of the method.
  - _3.12_ [A Blog Post Is a Very Long and Complex Search Query](https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query) treats specific public writing as a way to find people who can answer, challenge, or extend an unusual interest.
  - _3.13_ [Agentic Fragments](https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/agentic-fragments) uses a reknitted sweater to show agency as seeing more degrees of freedom in an object, then acting on them. The public excerpt ends before the paid essay’s other fragments.
- _3.2_ [Impact, Agency, and Taste](https://www.benkuhn.net/impact/) by Ben Kuhn separates choosing consequential work from carrying it through. [Audience of One](https://jasmine.substack.com/p/audience-of-one) by Jasmine Sun belongs beside it as a prompt to examine whose judgment shapes [[thoughts/taste|taste]] and where the [[thoughts/Overton Window|Overton Window]] enters the room.
- _3.3_ The tools-for-thought track asks how a computer can extend a person’s working memory and agency.
  - _3.31_ [[library/As We May Think|As We May Think]] by Vannevar Bush imagines the memex and its associative trails; [[library/The Dream Machine|The Dream Machine]] by M. Mitchell Waldrop follows J. C. R. Licklider’s later vision of human-computer symbiosis.
  - _3.32_ [Magic Ink](https://worrydream.com/MagicInk/) by Bret Victor, [Timeful Texts](https://numinous.productions/ttft/) by [Andy Matuschak](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z51q8prEJzs5Jqa5WPThYoV?stackedNotes=z7EQ2nVGus5B1rS9CqT18g6) and Michael Nielsen, and [Tufte CSS](https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/) give the page room for context, interaction, memory, and sidenotes.
  - _3.33_ [File Over App](https://stephango.com/file-over-app) by Steph Ango puts durable files under the owner’s control. Together these works explain the interest in [[thoughts/personal computing|personal computing]] and [[thoughts/malleable software|malleable software]].
- _3.4_ [Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/) by Scott Alexander belongs here because its demand for propositional proof interrupts an encounter. [[posts/2025|The 2025 notes]] use it to ask whether insisting on verification can turn a subject into an object.

## computing, information, and interpretability

- _4.0_ [[library/Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs|Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs]] ([PDF](https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf)) by Abelson and Sussman teaches procedures, data, and interpreters by constructing them, then changing the abstraction boundary.
  - _4.01_ [[library/The Art of Doing Science and Engineering|The Art of Doing Science and Engineering]] by Richard Hamming makes sustained attention to important problems part of the craft.
  - _4.02_ [How To Ask Questions The Smart Way](http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html) by Eric S. Raymond asks for prior investigation and a precise account of the failure. Reading source code is often how a question becomes precise.
- _4.1_ _A Mathematical Theory of Communication_ (1948) by Claude Shannon measures information against uncertainty in a distribution. _On Exactitude in Science_ by Jorge Luis Borges supplies the counterimage of a map as large as its empire. [[thoughts/Information Theory|Information theory]], [[thoughts/Entropy|entropy]], and [[thoughts/Compression|compression]] matter because a useful representation leaves something out.

## cinema, sound, and craft

- _5.0_ [[cinematheque.base|Cinema]] is a [[thoughts/Sets|set]] of recurring questions about time, belonging, and what another person can teach us.
  - _5.01_ [[movies/Past Lives|Past Lives]] (Celine Song) and [[movies/Paris Texas|Paris, Texas]] (Wim Wenders) return to lives that might have been and relationships altered by absence.
  - _5.02_ [[movies/Good Will Hunting|Good Will Hunting]] (Gus Van Sant) and [[movies/Dead Poets Society|Dead Poets Society]] (Peter Weir) put education, intimacy, and lived experience beside book knowledge.
  - _5.03_ [[movies/La Haine|La Haine]] (Mathieu Kassovitz) and [[movies/The Defiant Ones|The Defiant Ones]] (Stanley Kramer) put people in a social conflict they cannot think their way out of alone.
  - _5.04_ [[movies/tenet|Tenet]] (Christopher Nolan) makes time itself the puzzle, then asks what an action means when cause and effect no longer arrive in their usual order.
- _5.1_ [[library/Ma Gastronomie|Ma Gastronomie]] by Fernand Point and Marco Pierre White’s craft aphorisms keep cooking close to feeling, timing, and repeated practice. The practical version is a [3-quart Made In stainless clad saucier](https://madeincookware.com/products/saucier/3-quart), Sunday _uovo_ pasta, _velouté_, and [[thoughts/atelier-with-friends/index|atelier with friends]].
- _5.2_ [[mixed|mixed]] soundtracks and songs.
  - _5.21_ [Four Tet](https://www.fourtet.net/) (_There Is Love in You_, _Rounds_, [The Lot Radio set](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvO0PrMBH9I\&ab_channel=TheLotRadio)) supplies the folktronica thread.
  - _5.22_ Miles Davis Quintet (_Kind of Blue_, _Working with the Miles Davis Quintet_) and Floating Points with Pharoah Sanders (_Promises_) carry the jazz thread across different ensemble sizes and textures.
  - _5.23_ Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3