Dan Dennett, the author of the piece that sparked this one, is an obvious intellectual ancestor to these ideas. I can't recommend his book "Intuition Pumps and

Dan Dennett, the author of the piece that sparked this one, is an obvious intellectual ancestor to these ideas. I can't recommend his book "Intuition Pumps and other Tools for Thinking" enough. In it, he lays out his entire model of the mind, and really, the whole universe. It's eminently approachable and provides a good introduction to the way of thinking lying behind this article.