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  • Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulations (1981) originates the concept, citing a scene from a later Borges's story.

  • The hyperreal convergence of Dr. Tsun's and Dr. Albert's paths predates that story by a decade.

  • Literature has a life beyond what the reader gets on the page. 

  • Borges personally espoused this idea 

  • Ts'ui Pen's novel is a virtual realization of it.

Borges' The Garden compelled the world to reconsider, deconstruct, and redefine notions of truth.

  • Foucault's "death of man" (1966)

  • Fragmented, centerless identity

  • Annihilation of individuality

  • Return of One and the Many

  • Dr. Tsun's identity fused with Ts'ui Pen, Stephen Albert, and even Richard Madden.

  • Borges' identity fused with Ts'ui Pen's.

  • Postmodern literary theory.

  • Deauthorization of the text, centrality of the reader

  • Barth (1968, 1977): "​birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author."

  • Ts'ui Pen's theory of time is owed to Albert's work on his manuscript.

  • The Garden depends on readers interacting with its paradoxes, allusions, and labyrinthine structure.

Macfarlane (2006) came up a way to write logically formulated relative truth statements to accommodate branching futures, citing Borges' The Garden...

Garden of forking paths is a standard model for Simmons, Nelson & Simonsohn's (2011) Multiple Comparisons and p-hacking: 

Testing data without making hypotheses first (or creating hypotheses after obtaining a significant result).

It confuses spurious results with research-given evidence.

  • Social, linguistic and epistemological construction of science, math and knowledge:

  • Politically motivated decisions, linguistic limitations, cultural biases, and artificiality of lab environments.

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Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1979) acknowledged the postmodern era in literature and philosophy.

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Borges is widely regarded as a forerunner.

The Garden preceded and foreshadowed the developments in 

quantum physics that were about to take the world by storm.

A format of branching narratives.

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Ted Nelson coined the term as part of his Project Xanadu in the 1960s.

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Tsui Pen's novel is accepted as the modern origin of literary hypertexts.

Tsui Pen's model of time & universe and Dr. Stephen Albert's acceptance of the simultaneously probable possibilities in his and Tsun's convergence at his house anticipate Physicist Dirac's formulation of Quantum Superposition in 1958.

Hugh Everett's doctoral dissertation (1957) was republished in 1973 by Bryce DeWitt as the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics introduced the work with the paragraph from The Garden of Forking Paths containing Stephen Albert's description of Tsui Pen's labyrinth of time.

World wide web, smart media, digital libraries, and countless modern media productions are all hypertext formats.

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  • Conventions of a detective story.

  • Metaphysical and philosophical content

  • Postmodern literary devices

  • Borges story is a forerunner

This is an overview of the story's legacy.

The upright tree of the hypertext front links to resources on the internet that elaborate on each of these aspects in greater detail.
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