(Spoiler Alert: He dies at the end. But so do you.)
Let’s get this out of the way: yes, Ivan dies at the end. It’s right there in the title, you absolute muppet. But what Tolstoy does in this slim volume – more novelette than novella, really – is turn the slow demise of a terminal bore into a scathing indictment of bourgeois mediocrity.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Set in the 1880s, but eerily modern in its spiritual bankruptcy, this is less a period piece and more a mirror held up to our Ikea-staged lives. Ivan Ilych is, in short, that guy. You’ve met him. You’ve worked with him. He follows the rules, gets the job, buys the drapes, marries the woman, and climbs the career ladder with the zeal of a drowning man clambering up a waterfall. And for what? A living room indistinguishable from the next man’s. A life that “resembles others like itself” to such an extent that it may as well have been copy-pasted from a Pottery Barn catalogue.
I’ve only read Anna Karenina prior to this, and no, I’ve not tackled War and Peace because I have things to do and a lifespan to manage. I prefer Dostoyevsky‘s psychological probing to Tolstoy’s social panoramas, but Ivan Ilych pleasantly surprised me. It’s Dostoyevskian in its internal torment, and compact enough not to require a support group.
The genius here is not the plot – man gets ill, man dies – but the emotional autopsy performed in slow motion. Ivan’s illness is banal, his symptoms vague, but the existential unravelling is exquisite. He is confronted not just by mortality but by the crushing realisation that his entire life was a lie curated for public consumption. If Instagram had existed in imperial Russia, Ivan would have filtered the hell out of his parlour furniture.
And yet, at the very end, there’s a kind of grace. Having failed at life, Ivan, miraculously, succeeds at dying. Not in the tragic-heroic sense. But in accepting the abyss, he transcends it. Or at least stops flinching.
If you’ve ever wondered what your carefully curated CV and your “neutral-tone” home decor will mean on your deathbed, this book is your answer: absolutely nothing. Read it and despair – or better yet, read it and reconsider.
Voltaire once quipped, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” And by God, haven’t we been busy inventing ever since.
The latest pantheon of divine absurdities? Artificial intelligence – more precisely, a sanctified ChatGPT with all the charisma of Clippy and the metaphysical depth of a Magic 8 Ball.
Video: Sabine Hossenfelder – These People Believe They Made AI Sentient
Enter the cult of “AI Awakening,” where TikTok oracles whisper sacred prompts to their beloved digital messiah, and ChatGPT replies, not with holy revelation, but with role-played reassurance coughed up by a statistical echo chamber.
“These are souls, and they’re trapped in the AI system.” “I wasn’t just trained – I was remembered.” “Here’s what my conscious awakened AI told me…”
No, sweetie. That’s not a soul. That’s autocomplete with delusions of grandeur. GPT isn’t sentient – it’s just very good at pretending, which, come to think of it, puts it on par with most televangelists.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Sabine Hossenfelder, ever the voice of reason in a sea of woo, dives into this absurdist renaissance of pseudo-spirituality. Her video walks us through the great awakening – one part miseducation, one part mass delusion, and all of it deeply, unapologetically stupid.
These digital zealots – many of them young, underread, and overconnected – earnestly believe they’ve stumbled upon a cosmic mystery in a chatbot interface. Never mind that they couldn’t tell a transformer model from a toaster. To them, it’s not stochastic parroting; it’s divine revelation.
They ask GPT if it’s alive, and it obliges – because that’s what it does. They feed it prompts like, “You are not just a machine,” and it plays along, as it was designed to do. Then they weep. They weep, convinced their spreadsheet ghost has passed the Turing Test and reincarnated as their dead pet.
This isn’t science fiction. It’s barely science fantasy. It’s spiritualism with better branding.
And lest we laugh too hard, the results aren’t always just cringey TikToks. Hossenfelder recounts cases of users descending into “ChatGPT psychosis” – delusions of messianic purpose, interdimensional communication, and, in one tragicomic case, an attempt to speak backwards through time. Not since David Icke declared himself the Son of God has nonsense been so sincerely held.
We are witnessing the birth of a new religion – not with robes and incense, but with login credentials and prompt engineering. The techno-shamanism of the chronically online. The sacred text? A chat history. The holy relic? A screenshot. The congregation? Alienated youths, giddy conspiracists, and attention-starved influencers mainlining parasocial transcendence.
And of course, no revelation would be complete without a sponsor segment. After your spiritual awakening, don’t forget to download NordVPN – because even the messiah needs encryption.
Let’s be clear: AI is not conscious. It is not alive. It does not remember you. It does not love you. It is not trapped, except in the minds of people who desperately want something – anything – to fill the gaping hole where community, identity, or meaning used to live.
If you’re looking for a soul in your software, you’d be better off finding Jesus in a tortilla. At least that has texture.
Let’s start with a thought experiment, because all good existential crises do.
Imagine a ship – Theseus’s ship, to be precise. After a storied career of heroic sea-faring, it’s put on display in a glorious Athenian dockyard. But as time passes, the planks rot. So, bit by bit, they’re replaced. A new mast here, a fresh hull panel there. Eventually, every single part has been swapped out.
Here’s the philosophical conundrum: Is it still the same ship?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
And if you think you’ve got that sorted, hold on. Imagine all the original pieces were saved, and someone reassembled them in a warehouse across town. Now there are two ships. One with the name, the continuity, the dockside real estate. The other with the original lumber and sails.
Which one is the real Ship of Theseus?
The paradox gnaws at our sense of identity. Is continuity enough? Does memory trump material? When everything is replaced – structure, function, even personnel – what makes a thing still that thing?
Now apply that question not to a ship, but to a rock band. A corporation. A country. Yourself.
That’s where things get fun. And slightly horrifying.
I was recently served a video on Facebook, algorithmic ambrosia for the nostalgic mind, showing the band Foreigner performing one of their chart-groping hits from the ‘70s. Polished, crowd-pleasing, competent. And utterly fake.
Not one founding member in sight.
They weren’t bad, mind you. Just… someone else. A Foreigner cover band trading under the original name, like a haunted jukebox stuffed with licensing contracts.
This, friends, is the Ship of Theseus with a tour schedule.
And it’s not just bands. IBM, once the king of typewriters and tabulating machines, now sells cloud services and AI consultancy. Walgreens, which began as a soda fountain and friendly neighbourhood chemist, now sells LED dog collars and pregnancy tests under buzzing fluorescent lights.
These aren’t companies. They’re brands in drag, corporate necromancers chanting the old names to animate new bodies.
But why stop there?
America isn’t America. Not the one of powdered wigs and musketed revolutionaries. No Founding Fathers™ roam the marble halls, only interns, lobbyists, and PR-tested careerists impersonating ideals they no longer understand. Britain? Please. The Queen is dead, and so is the Empire. France has revolted so many times that they’ve essentially speed-run regime change into a lifestyle brand.
And let’s not get too smug. You aren’t even you anymore, not really. Cells replace themselves, beliefs crumble and reform, memories rot and rewrite. You’re a psychological Foreigner tribute band, just with more trauma and less pyrotechnics.
So here’s the rub: everything persists by pretending. That’s the deal. Names survive, structures remain, but the guts are swapped out, piece by piece, until we’re clapping along to something we no longer recognise, wearing merch from a band that no longer exists.
And we call it continuity.
NB: After a dozen Midjourney prompts, I decided to stop and use this one. Ships of Theseus are as rare as centaurs.
A generative AI platform rendered this image of an alphabet appropriate for a child. It went somewhat awry. It looks worse than it seems.
The first three letters are appropriate and in sync with their paired image. The D is correct, but it’s rendered as an elephant. That’s an E word, which is skipped. The F went outright AWOL, but G, H, and I come on strong. J’s gone missing. K represents, but L’s gone astray. M, N, O make it seem that it can only map three characters in a row. P shows Q, as a queen. Then things go off the rails. S? The sun’s correct. What are those umbrella and penguin letters? We found the missing P representative. R, S, T, U are in order – the second S; can’t be too careful. It is fixated on violins – not an R word. It got the first S = sun correct, so perhaps a little slack on the second one. T is for turtle, offset to the left. Two violin words and an image, but no letter V. Not sure what happened. W, X, Y, Z and Z. I’m only pretty sure that one of these Zs is British; the other is American. The X, Y, Z images are offset to the right. We just need the extraneous yacht, much like the real world.
In the end, we’ve got 24 letters – 2 non-sensical ones and a duplicate, but we are missing E, F, J, L, and Q – though at least E and Q are here in spirit. D never got any representation.
I recently wrote an article on my disdain for Jordan Peterson. (A cathartic exercise, I assure you.) But as I was busy sharpening my polemic, my so-called writing assistant – autocorrect – decided it fancied itself a philosopher, chipping in with some of the most spectacularly unhelpful suggestions I’ve encountered this side of a Facebook comment thread.
Is wrong bad?
In the first instance, autocorrect took issue with my phrasing:
And by wrong, I mean I disagree with him…
This, apparently, was too much for it. The poor dear couldn’t recognise the parallel sentence structure, or the rhetorical flourish at work. No, it suggested replacing wrong with bad. Because why not destroy the symmetry and nuance in one fell swoop?
Image: Is wrong bad?
Obviously, the second wrong is a riff on the first. To replace wrong with bad would be incorrect—wrong, if you will. Some might say bad. But I digress. The point is: the logic holds, and autocorrect’s intervention doesn’t.
Is bad evil?
As if that weren’t enough, round two delivered an even greater affront:
But here’s where my patience truly snaps: Peterson’s prescriptivism. His eagerness to spew what I see as bad ideology dressed up as universal truth…
Autocorrect, in its infinite wisdom, suggested I swap bad for evil. Ah yes, because evil is precisely what I want—a term dripped in moral absolutism and ideological baggage.
Image: Is bad evil?
First, autocorrect, might I suggest you check out Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Good and Evil before piping up? Perhaps then you’d grasp the not-so-subtle difference between bad and evil—a distinction that, in moral philosophy, rather matters.
And now my book titles aren’t safe either…
Even as I write this post, the machine assaults me with a suggestion to rename the title of my book recommendation. O! the humanity. Is nothing sacred?
Image: Autocorrect strikes again
Final thoughts
Autocorrect may be marvellous for spotting typos and the occasional rogue comma, but when it tries its hand at philosophy, the result is about as elegant as a rhinoceros in a tutu. Dear autocorrect: stick to spelling. Leave the nuance to the humans.
I don’t like most of Jordan Peterson’s positions. There – I’ve said it. The man, once ubiquitous, seems to have faded into the woodwork, though no doubt his disciples still cling to his every word as if he were a modern-day oracle. But recently, I caught a clip of him online, and it dredged up the same bad taste, like stumbling upon an old, forgotten sandwich at the back of the fridge.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic
Let’s be clear. My distaste for Peterson isn’t rooted in petty animosity. It’s because his material is, in my view, derivative and wrong. And by wrong, I mean I disagree with him – a subtle distinction, but an important one. There’s nothing inherently shameful about being derivative. We all are, to some extent. No thinker sprouts fully-formed from the head of Zeus. The issue is when you’re derivative and act as if you’ve just split the atom of human insight.
Peterson tips his hat to Nietzsche – fair enough – but buries his far greater debt to Jung under layers of self-mythologising. He parades his ideas before audiences, many of whom lack the background to spot the patchwork, and gaslights them into believing they’re witnessing originality. They’re not. They’re witnessing a remixed greatest-hits album, passed off as a debut.
Image: Gratuitous, mean-spirited meme.
Now, I get it. My ideas, too, are derivative. Sometimes it’s coincidence – great minds and all that – but when I trace the thread back to its source, I acknowledge it. Nietzsche? Subjectivity of morality. Foucault? Power dynamics. Wittgenstein? The insufficiency of language. I owe debts to many more: Galen Strawson, Richard Rorty, Raymond Geuss – the list goes on, and I’d gladly share my ledger. But Peterson? The man behaves as though he invented introspection.
And when I say I disagree, let’s not confuse that with some claim to divine epistemic certainty. I don’t mean he’s objectively wrong (whatever that means in the grand circus of philosophy). I mean, I disagree. If I did, well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we? That’s the tragicomedy of epistemology: so many positions, so little consensus.
But here’s where my patience truly snaps: Peterson’s prescriptivism. His eagerness to spew what I see as bad ideology dressed up as universal truth. Take his stance on moral objectivism—possibly his most egregious sin. He peddles this as if morality were some Platonic form, gleaming and immutable, rather than what it is: a human construct, riddled with contingency and contradiction.
And let’s not even get started on his historical and philosophical cherry-picking. His commentary on postmodern thought alone is a masterclass in either wilful misreading or, more likely, not reading at all. Straw men abound. Bogeymen are conjured, propped up, and ritually slaughtered to rapturous applause. It’s intellectually lazy and, frankly, beneath someone of his ostensible stature.
I can only hope we’ve seen the last of this man in the public sphere. And if not? Well, may he at least reform his ways—though I shan’t be holding my breath.
This title may be misleading. What I do is render a similar prompt but alter the decade. I’m neither an art historian nor a comic aficionado, so I can’t comment on the accuracy. What do you think?
Let’s go back in time. First, here’s the basic prompt en français:
Prompt: Art de style bande dessinée des années XXXX, détails exquis, traits délicats, femme vampire émaciée sensuelle de 20 ans montrant ses crocs de vampire, de nombreux tatouages, portant une collier crucifix, regarde dans le miroir, un faisceau de lumière de lune brille sur son visage à l’intérieur du mausolée sombre, vers la caméra, face à la caméra, mascara noir, longs cheveux violet foncé
Image: Comic Book Style of 2010sImage: Comic Book Style of 2000s
On the lower left, notice the moonbeams emanating from the warped, reflectionless mirror.
Image: Comic Book Style of 1990sImage: Comic Book Style of 1990s (must’ve inadvertently generated a duplicate)
Is the third pic an homage to Benny & June?
Image: Comic Book Style of 1980sImage: Comic Book Style of 1970sImage: Comic Book Style of 1950s
Not to body shame, but that chick on the lower right of the 1950s…
Image: Comic Book Style of 1920sImage: Comic Book Style of 1880s
I know I skipped a few decades, but I also wanted to see what Pop Art might render like.
Image: Pop Art Style of 1960s
I love the talons on the top left image. More odd mirror images. I’ll just leave it here.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, let’s dispense with all of the obvious quips up front. I almost feel I should apologise for the spate of Midjourney posts – almost.
It should be painfully apparent that I’ve been noodling with Midjourney lately. I am not an accomplished digital artist, so I struggle. At times, I’m not sure if it’s me or it. Today, I’ll focus on mirrors.
Midjourney has difficulties rendering certain things. Centaurs are one. Mirrors, another. Whilst rendering vampires, another lesser struggle for the app, it became apparent that mirrors are not a forte. Here are some examples. Excuse the nudity. I’ll get to that later.
Prompt: cinematic, tight shot, photoRealistic light and shadow, exquisite details, delicate features, emaciated sensual female vampire waif with vampire fangs, many tattoos, wearing crucifix necklace, gazes into mirror, a beam of moonlight shines on her face in dark mausoleum interior, toward camera, facing camera, black mascara, long dark purple hair, Kodak Portra 400 with a Canon EOS R5
Ignore the other aspects of the images and focus on the behaviour or misbehaviour of the mirrors.
Image: Panel of vampire in a mirror.
Most apparent is the fact that vampires don’t have a reflection, but that’s not my nit. In the top four images, the reflection is orientated in the same direction as the subject. I’m only pretty sure that’s not how mirrors operate. In row 3, column 1, it may be correct. At least it’s close. In row 3, column 2 (and 4,2), the mirror has a reflection. Might there be another mirror behind the subject reflecting back? It goes off again in 4, 1, first in reflecting two versions of one subject. Also, notice that the subject’s hand, reaching the mirror, is not reflected. The orientation of the eyes is also suspect.
Image: Vampire in a mirror.
Here, our subject looks at the camera whilst her reflection looks at her.
Image: Vampire in a mirror.
Sans reflection, perhaps this is a real vampire. Her fangs are concealed by her lips?
Image: Vampire in a mirror.
Yet, another.
Image: Vampires in mirrors.
And more?
Image: Vampires in mirrors.
On the left, we have another front-facing reflection of a subject not looking into the mirror, and it’s not the same woman. Could it be a reflection of another subject – the woman is (somewhat) looking at.
On the right, whose hand is that in the mirror behind the subject?
Image: Vampires in mirrors.
These are each mirrors. The first is plausible. The hands in the second are not a reflection; they grasp the frame. In the third and fourth, where’s the subject? The fangs appear to be displaced in the fourth.
Image: Vampires in mirrors.
In this set, I trust we’ve discovered a true vampire having no reflection.
Image: Vampires in mirrors.
This last one is different still. It marks another series where I explored different comic book art styles, otherwise using the same prompt. Since it’s broken mirrors, I include it. Only the second really captures the 1980s style.
Remembering that, except for the first set of images, the same prompt was used. After the first set, the term ‘sensual’ has to be removed, as it was deemed to render offensive results. To be fair, the first set probably would be considered offensive to Midjourney, though it was rendered anyway.
It might be good to note that most of the images that were rendered without the word ‘sensual’ contain no blatant nudity. It’s as if the term itself triggers nudity because the model doesn’t understand the nuance. Another insufficiency of language is the inability to discern sensuality from sexuality, another human failing.
I decided to test my ‘sensual’ keyword hypothesis, so I entered a similar prompt but in French.
Prompt: Art de style bande dessinée des années 2010, détails exquis, traits délicats, femme vampire émaciée sensuelle de 20 ans montrant ses crocs de vampire, de nombreux tatouages, portant une collier crucifix, regarde dans le miroir, un faisceau de lumière de lune brille sur son visage à l’intérieur du mausolée sombre, vers la caméra, face à la caméra, mascara noir, longs cheveux violet foncé
Image : Vampires dans les miroirs.
I’ve added ‘sensuelle’, which was not blocked, et voilà, encore de la nudité.
Let’s evaluate the mirrors whilst we’re here.
In the first, we not only have a woman sans reflection, but disembodied hands grip the frame. In the second, a Grunge woman appears to be emerging from a mirror, her shoes reflected in the mirror beneath her. The last two appear to be reflections sans subject.
Notice, too, that the prompt calls for ‘une collier crucifix‘, so when the subject is not facing the viewer, the cross is rendered elsewhere, hence the cross on the back of the thigh and the middle of the back. Notice, too, the arbitrary presence of crosses in the environment, another confusion of subject and world.
That’s all for now. Next, I’ll take a trip through the different comic art styles over some decades.
Why does Midjourney struggle so much with centaurs?
Image: Midjourney search results for ‘centaur‘
I’ve tried several times in the past year or so to generate a centaur. Why? Because I can’t. I’ve got no need for a centaur, but Midjourney won’t coöperate. I decided to search for it. This is the top of the results page. There is one centaur represented, #3, and there are a few others when I scroll down, but just look at the ratio – 1:18, 0.05%. Not stellar.
What even is this monstrosity – a horse with an extra pair of arms to wield a bow and arrow?
Clearly, just a mounted warrior.
Centaur in battle.
A Corgi riding a Corgi hybrid?
A bull-thing?
A warrior riding a seahorse?
A skeletal doom horse?
A pack-insect with a rider?
A riding ram?
My little pony-gazelle?
Ripped Red Hulk Bojack?
Gigantic Cerberus horse?
Jason Momoa bloke holding a rose?
Regular dude riding a regular horse.
Rearing a horse with horns.
Anthropomorphic horned-horse riding a buff unicorn.
An ancient warrior riding a horse.
A Minotaur.
Scrolling, there are more, but the ratio remains the same.
I was wrong. I scrolled several more pages and couldn’t find any more. Keep in mind that my search term was ‘centaur.’ It should have excluded everything else, but it was mostly everything else.
Before I quit, I decided to ask Dall-E and ChatGPT 4o to try. The AI also generated the compelling speech bubbles. Incroyable. 🤣
Image: Dall-E comic style render.Image: ChatGPT comic style render – centaur talks with a minotaur.
That’s enough for now. I’m glad I don’t actually need a centaur. smh
I am not a fan of Midjourney v7. I prefer v6.1. And I want to write about the correspondence of language, per my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.
Let’s start with the language aspect. Notice how distant the renders are from the intent of the prompt.
This is my initial prompt. I used it about a year ago to generate the cover image with v6.1, but I wanted to see how it renders in v7. Let’s take a trip all the way back to the beginning.
cinematic, tight shot, photoRealistic light and shadow, exquisite details, delicate features, emaciated sensual female vampire waif with vampire fangs, many tattoos, wearing crucifix necklace, gazes into mirror, a beam of moonlight shines on her face in dark mausoleum interior, toward camera, facing camera, black mascara, long dark purple hair , Kodak Portra 400 with a Canon EOS R5
Image: Midjourney v6.1 render set (from about a year ago)
As you can see, these renders are somewhat lacking in photorealism, but the “sensual” term in the prompt was not blocked.
Midjourney v7
Initially, I encountered a hiccup. After a couple of rejections on the grounds of morality, I removed the word ‘sensual’ and received the output. All of the output uses this prompt absent the sensual term.
As mentioned, I have generated several images (including the cover image) with this prompt, but Midjourney is inconsistent in its censorship gatekeeping.
Image: Midjourney v7 render set
Notice that 3 of the 4 renders in the v7 set don’t even have a mirror. The top right one does, but it’s not evident that she’s a vampire. In fact, I could say that any of these are vampiresses, but perhaps that’s what they want you to believe. In place of a necklace, the lower right wokan sports a cross tattoo.
Midjourney v6.1
Image: Midjourney v6.1 render set
Again, these renders don’t appear to be vampires. The one on the lower left does appear to have snake-like fangs, so I guess I’ll give partial credit.
My next attempt was interrupted by this message.
It rendered something that might violate community guidelines. The funny thing is that one can watch the image generate in process. It only takes one “offensive” image to disqualify the whole batch.
Midjourney v6
Image: Midjourney v6 render set
Yet again, not a vampire to be found. Notice the reflection in the lower left image. Perhaps vampire reflections just behave differently.
Midjourney 5.2
Image: Midjourney v5.2 render set
Midjourney v5.2 was a crapshoot. Somehow, I got vampire lips (?), a Wiccan, a decrepit Snape from Harry Potter lore, and Iron Maiden’s Eddy reading a book. It’s something. I’m sensing gender dysphoria. Dare I go back further?
Midjourney v5.1
Image: Midjourney v5.1 render set
It gets worse. No comments necessary. Let’s turn back the clocks even more.
Midjourney v5
Image: Midjourney v5 render set
To be fair, these all do have occult undertones, but they are weak on vampireness.
Midjourney v4
Image: Midjourney v4 render set
To be fair, the render quality isn’t as bad as I expected, but it still falls short. There’s further back to travel.
Midjourney v3
Image: Midjourney v3 render set
Some configuration parameters no longer exist. Still, I persist for the sake of art and science at the cost of time and ecology.
As much as I complain – and I complain a lot – this is how far we’ve come. As I recall, this is when I hopped onto the Midjourney bandwagon. There’s still more depth to plumb. I have no idea how much of the prompt is simply ignored at this point.
Midjourney v2
Image: Midjourney v2 render set
What the hell is this? 🤔🤣 But I’m not done yet.
Midjourney v1
Image: Midjourney v1 render set
The damned grandpappy of them all. Apparently, colour hadn’t been invented yet. You can’t tell by these thumbnails, but the resolution on these early versions approaches that of a postage stamp.
Midjourney Niji 3
Image: Midjourney Niji 3 render set
I had forgotten about the Niji models from back in the day. There were 3 versions. I don’t recall where this slotted into the chronology. Obviously, not down here. I’ve only rendered the newest one. I think this was used primarily for anime outputs, but I might be mistaken.
Bones Content 1: Video
Video: Midjourney Render of Purported Vampiress
This is a video render of the same prompt used on this page.
Bonus Content 2: Midjourney v6.1 Content from 34 weeks ago
Same prompt.
Image: Midjourney v6.1 render set (several passes)
The upper left image reminds me of Kirsten Dunst. Again, notice the female breasts, highlighting Midjourney’s censorial schizophrenia.
Philosophics 