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“Second-Mover Advantage Doctrine”
William Cook (2025) Abstract The Second-Mover Advantage Doctrine unites economics, military science, cyber strategy, and moral philosophy into a single theory of reflective defense. It argues that the first to create autonomous intelligence bears the cost of revelation, while the second—learning in secrecy—perfects imitation into dominance. To counter this asymmetry, the paper proposes the Guardian…
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The Temporal Regulator: A Speculative Model of Consciousness, Time, and Cosmic Equilibrium
A Speculative Philosophy of Cosmology William Cook (2025) The Mental Root Kit Manuscripts Series — Vol. 1 ⸻ Abstract This speculative philosophical paper proposes a time-first ontology in which time precedes geometry, awareness arises as the universe’s self-regulating principle, and gravity represents the field’s drive toward temporal coherence. It suggests that the universe functions as…
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The Double Standard of Contagion: When Morality Becomes Self-Exemption
By W. Cook — Mental Root Kit Series Every generation sees its beliefs as the pinnacle of reason and its causes as self-evidently just. But there’s a quiet hypocrisy hidden in how we speak of ideas that spread: when we approve of them, we call it progress — when we disapprove, we call it contagion….
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The Industrialization of Instant Gratification
By W. Cook — Mental Root Kit Series I. The Age of Manufactured Impulse We no longer live in an age of discovery, but of design — an age where instant gratification has been industrialized. Every system, from entertainment to politics, is engineered to mass-produce emotional reward. The algorithm is the new assembly line: instead…
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The Yoke That Isn’t: When Jesus Ended Religion
by Wm. Cook Prologue: The Root Illusion The oldest lie in the world is not that God doesn’t exist, but that He is somewhere else. From that single illusion grows every priesthood, every ritual, every wall between sacred and ordinary. Jesus came to destroy the distance—and humanity built a religion to preserve it. 1. The…
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Blind Evolution?
By William Cook — Mental Root Kit ⸻ The Story We’ve Been Told For more than a century, the story of evolution has been told in stark terms: life is the product of blind chance. Mutations — random copying errors, chemical accidents, radiation events — throw dice at the cellular level. Natural selection, like an…