Socio-political philosophical musings
I agree with Paul directionally, but I think he could have gone further – and perhaps he has since – so I compare his view to my own in a Substack article. I’m not sure whether he’d disagree with the extensions. Check it out.
Somebody somewhere made mention of The Social Construction of Reality, so I asked ChatGPT if I should engage with it directly, which is to say, to read it. Already believing that what we perceive and experience is a subjective construction, albeit shaped by relative forces, I thought it might be a lot of choir preaching.
ChatGPT admitted that this was partially true, but that the benefit would be to get a sociological rather than strictly philosophical account. Having read the introduction and started the first chapter, I already feel this to be true. The authors make it clear that Sociology is just a special philosophy that doesn’t aim quite so deep and has a specific and obvious focus on societies. Fair enough.
So far, I’m glad I picked it up. It’s relatively short, which was a deciding factor, and it’s giving me a break from the 1066 material I’ve otherwise been consuming as of late.
I don’t have more to add, save to say, so far so good. I look forward to the rest. I’ve got more to do today, including editing a video for YouTube, which is me rather than AI for a change – a process that reminds me why I use AI in the first place: so much time investment.
NB: I am actually listening to an Audible version of this book. Whilst searching for an apt cover image for this post, I found the associated image, and it is as apt as one might find.
I read an IAI article titled Memory is not stored in the brain: Time, not space, contains memory. Of course, I had to read it. It sounds implausible even on the surface.
Anyone familiar enough with my writing knows that I don’t support objectification – nounification – except as a scale-dependent heuristic shortcut. Victoria pulls memory out of the object of the brain and relocates it to time or, more specifically, to Bergson’s durée. But this move doesn’t make sense either. Plus, it adds an unnecessary or at least unearned metaphysical inflation. Whilst time may be containerised, durée can’t be by its very phenomenal nature.
In any case, after an extended chat with a GPT, I asked for a rendition to share. I’ll amend this in various ways, but for now, I wanted to capture the essence for review. I’ll describe the relata in more detail presently.
The feedback loop indicates that recollection may itself revise the system. Each re-presentation can alter subsequent weighting, interpretation and recollection, so memory is not a static archive but a recursively reconstructive process.
I borrow some of this nomenclature from Iain McGilchrist, which I’ll also explain in future.
This is the fifth of a deeper look into ten philosophical positions. This one is on convergence realism within the category of epistemology. A full article is available on Substack, with supporting information on a recent post here on Philosophics Blog.
Below is a ~5-minute short podcast.
Language works, but not uniformly.
Its effectiveness declines as the conceptual complexity, abstraction, contestability, contextual dependence, and institutional burden of what it is asked to communicate increase. We routinely mistake grammatical fluency for semantic precision and social agreement for shared reference.
I describe this through an Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient:
Invariants are comparatively stable terms with constrained error ranges.
Contestables remain usable but acquire their force within normative or institutional frameworks.
Fluids drift across contexts and disciplines, preserving family resemblance without reliable closure.
Ineffables mark domains where propositional language collapses into metaphor, gesture, paradox, or silence.
These are not ontological species. They are diagnostic regions along a gradient. The important feature is not the label but the rate at which apparent linguistic effectiveness decays as conceptual load increases.
This is the fourth of a deeper look into ten philosophical positions. This one is on convergence realism within the category of epistemology. A full article is available on Substack, with supporting information on a recent post here on Philosophics Blog.
Below is a ~5-minute short podcast.
I don’t regard the self as a persistent entity travelling through time while accumulating experiences like stamps in a metaphysical passport.
The first-person “I” is an indexical compression. It marks the presently organised locus of perspective, salience, memory-access, and action. It is indispensable, but indispensability does not establish an inner owner to which the index refers.
The diachronic self is a broader compression: a narrative, biological, documentary, interpersonal, and institutional device for tracking selected continuities across time. Memory contributes to this, but memory is lossy, reconstructive, and uneven. The person remembered is not transported intact into the act of remembering.
In this Substack essay, I explore the flawed nature of human comprehension, arguing that our understanding is often just a calculation of probability rather than an objective grasp of truth. By examining linguistic errors like misheard lyrics and his own struggles with French phonemes, Willis demonstrates that humans frequently hallucinate or misinterpret data based on what seems most plausible. He compares these mental lapses to the ‘hallucinations’ of Large Language Models, suggesting that the mistakes made by AI are fundamentally similar to our own. The author contends that we apply a double standard by granting humans the status of ‘understanding’ while dismissing machines for the exact same predictive behaviours. Ultimately, the text challenges the metaphysical assumptions of human exceptionalism, asserting that what we call ‘understanding’ is merely an external attribution rather than a unique internal state.
Essentially, I am not advocating the view that LLMs have consciousness and understanding; rather, I am arguing that the human versions of these are inflated with metaphysics.
This is the third of a deeper look into ten philosophical positions. This one is on convergence realism within the category of epistemology. A full article is available on Substack, with supporting information on a recent post here on Philosophics Blog.
Below is a ~5-minute short podcast.
This is the second of a deeper look into ten philosophical positions. This one is on mediated encounter realism (ontology) within the category of metaphysics and ontology. A full article is available on Substack, with supporting information on a recent post here on Philosophics Blog.
Below is a ~5-minute short podcast.
This is the first of a deeper look into my position of diagnostic anti-foundationalism within the category of philosophical method for metaphilosophy. A full article is available on Substack, with supporting information on a recent post here on Philosophics Blog.
Below is a ~5-minute short podcast.
The question is reasonable, although belief may already be doing more work than I would permit it under cross-examination. My writing is generally diagnostic rather than doctrinal. I am more interested in identifying the architectural assumptions beneath a dispute than in selecting a furnished room within it. Where philosophy offers a contest between established positions, I often suspect that the arena itself has been badly designed.
Still, repeated diagnoses eventually disclose a pattern. Certain commitments recur: suspicion of substance, resistance to metaphysical inflation, distrust of linguistic confidence, rejection of moral realism, scepticism toward persistent personal identity, and an insistence that mediation does not entail fabrication.
What follows is therefore neither a creed nor a completed system. It is a provisional map of where I presently stand.
The labels are intended as coordinates, not allegiances. Where no established term quite fits, I have used my own. This is partly unavoidable and partly evidence for the very linguistic difficulty I spend so much time diagnosing.
This content, including video and podcast summary, are of a longer Substack article on my philosophical positions with descriptions.
