In the third week at the Academy, I reread that PDF.
It kept forcing its way into my head. Like an alcoholic who can’t walk past a bar: you know you’ll go in, you know you’ll regret it, you know tomorrow will be worse — and you open the door anyway. Only my bar is three hundred and twenty pages with no cover, and the hangover is a complete revision of all baseline assumptions about the nature of reality. Which, if you think about it, is considerably worse than a headache: for a headache there’s ibuprofen, and for a revision of baseline assumptions there’s nothing except new assumptions, which will, in turn, also need revising.
Infinite recursion. As I said: I’m a physicist. I see recursion.