Preamble This text is not a review or an explainer. It attempts to construct a formal model of Shane Carruth’s 2004 film Primer, treating the work as an axiomatic system to be reverse-engineered. The film's notorious difficulty constitutes its primary aesthetic and philosophical statement: it models the
7. A Static, Closed and Singular Universe To accept the logical premises of New Foundations (NF) is to affirm the existence of the Universal Set ($V$) and reject the hierarchy of types as an ontological reality. This commitment forces us to abandon the comfortable metaphysics of the "Iterative Conception.
1. The Library and the Censor To practice the philosophy of mathematics today is to accept an incomplete reality. The dominant paradigm, the "Iterative Conception of Set" codified in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF), models the mathematical universe as an ever-expanding hierarchy. It bootstraps from the void of the