We will list a few inspirations for Alice and Bob. The authors who inspired us are wiser than we are, and the reader would obtain a better philosophical foundation by reading the books mentioned below than by reading Alice and Bob’s dialogues. Our intention is that Alice and Bob’s dialogues can serve as an illustration or introduction to these kinds of ideas. Then, we recommend that you try these books for yourself. The inspirations include:
Martin Buber, I and Thou
Susan Campbell, Getting Real
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching
David Wallin, Attachment in Psychotherapy
For the dialogue format: Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hofstadter) and This Book Needs No Title (Raymond Smullyan)
For the names of the characters: Alice, Bob, Eve, and others are traditional names for characters in mathematical papers on cryptography.
At least as important as any of these, conversations with friends helped to formulate these ideas. We appreciate all of the discussions we had about these ideas.
Another important experience was the feeling of being embedded and of getting out of the embedding. Are we free of all embeddings? Sadly, we cannot yet claim to be level infinity wizards. We’re working on it.