The record

Every correction, stated plainly.

This library publishes its own errors instead of quietly removing them. These are the corrections found so far by a manuscript's own verification pass — not a summary written to look good, the actual entries, in the actual back matter, where a reader can check them against the source.

All eight below come from one manuscript’s source-by-source verification pass — The Closed Manifold, not yet part of the twelve-volume shelf. The pass checked every citation a chapter leaned on, named the primary source, and rewrote the sentence when the source said something narrower, older, or different than the draft claimed.

Read that second row carefully before the list. Five corrections out of eight moved the book’s own draft toward what it wanted to argue — a stronger claim than the source actually supported. That is not a flattering pattern and it is stated here rather than folded into a vaguer number. Confirmation bias at the sentence level, measured rather than suspected.

1. Synesthetes and "standard-issue paint"

   Toward the thesis

   An earlier draft of Chapter One said synesthetes experience ordinary colours attached to unusual triggers. That is not what the literature reports, and the error ran in the book’s favour. Ramachandran and Hubbard describe a colour-blind synesthete who called what he experienced “Martian colours” — hues unavailable to him through his eyes at all, not ordinary colours with an odd trigger. The chapter now runs its own falsifier test on the corrected case and reports the result as open rather than confirmed.

   Chapter One · source: Ramachandran & Hubbard, “Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes,” Scientific American

2. Hinton’s practitioner cohort

   Toward the thesis

   An earlier draft said a documented body of Charles Howard Hinton’s practitioners trained for years and reported that the intended perceptual result never arrived. No such documented body exists. What exists is Hinton’s published method, his own claims about his progress, and the author’s inference from them — three different things the earlier draft had collapsed into one.

   Chapter Five · source: Hinton’s own published works, checked directly

3. Stott’s “visualisation”

   Toward the thesis

   An earlier draft attributed the word visualisation to Alicia Boole Stott’s own description of how she worked out four-dimensional geometry. That word belongs to the later scholarship characterising her method, not to any first-person account from Stott herself. What is actually documented is the procedure she used, not the word she'd have used for it.

   Chapter Five · source: Polo-Blanco, “Alicia Boole Stott, a geometer in higher dimension,” Historia Mathematica (2007)

4. Nagel’s missing “must”

   Toward the thesis

   An earlier draft quoted Nagel as concluding physicalism is false. His actual words are that it would be a mistake to conclude physicalism must be false — a claim about the limits of present concepts, not a verdict about the world. Dropping one word quietly converted an epistemic caution into a metaphysical conclusion Nagel never drew.

   Chapter Twenty-Three · source: Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” The Philosophical Review (1974)

5. Chalcedon’s four-to-four mapping

   Toward the thesis

   An earlier draft claimed every Christological heresy the early church fought was an attempt to turn the Incarnation into a message, a demonstration, an appearance, or a merger — a tidy four-shape taxonomy. Two heresies fit. Nestorianism does not fit at all: that dispute was about excessive separation, the opposite failure mode from a merger, and Chalcedon’s own formula rules out both directions at once. The four-shape mapping described one side of the fence, not the whole fence.

   Chapter Twenty-Six · source: the Chalcedonian definition (451) itself

6. Hume’s dismissal, rendered

   Neutral — precision only

   Hume’s own phrasing for the missing-shade-of-blue case is a double negative: “I believe there are few but will be of opinion that he can” [supply the colour]. The chapter’s rendering turns that construction around for readability. Checked directly against both the Treatise and the Enquiry to confirm the turn does not invert his actual claim. It does not — recorded here because the check was made, not because it found an error.

   Chapter Four · source: Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

7. De Valois’s decade

   Neutral — precision only

   An earlier draft placed Russell De Valois and colleagues’ discovery of spectrally opposed cells in the primate visual system in the 1960s alone. The publication record runs from 1958 through 1966 — a decade late by a decade, corrected to the actual span.

   Chapter Two · source: De Valois et al., publications 1958–1966

8. Interaction-free measurement’s ceiling

   Ran against the book

   An earlier draft said the success probability of interaction-free measurement cannot be pushed to one — implying a hard ceiling that made the physics example weaker than the book needed. The actual state of the art is the opposite: Kwiat and colleagues report the relevant probability “can in principle be arbitrarily small,” with 73% efficiency observed and 85% shown feasible — well past the 50% ceiling of the original 1993 proposal. The chapter now says the honest version: the rate approaches one without arriving, since arbitrarily small is not zero. This is the only one of the eight that made the book’s own case stronger than the earlier draft had allowed, which is exactly why it is the one most worth checking yourself.

   Chapter Fourteen · source: Kwiat et al., Physical Review Letters 83, no. 23 (1999)