Les Années Vécues

Jul 1, 2026Jul 1, 2026Posted in philosophyTagged ai, book, books, fiction, language, LLMs, philosophy, plotting, process, short story, workflow, writingLeave a comment

4–6 minutes

I’ve been working for days on a new short story that investigates time. I’ve already published The Box in English, but this new piece looks at a different aspect of time, one I suspect may work better in French because the grammar gives me more useful pressure points than English.

The working title is Les Années Vécues, which translates literally as The Years Lived. For now, that’s only a working title. Oddly enough, the purpose of this post is not really to describe the story, though I may do some of that. It is more about the tools, the process, and the strange route by which the idea arrived.

The story began as a conversation between me, Claude, and ChatGPT about human innovation and creativity. A colleague had recommended How Language Began. I bought it and read the first few chapters. For the record, it’s interesting.

Early on, the author discusses genetics and evolution, citing human inventions along the way, particularly those associated with Homo erectus. Because I tend to question narratives of progress, and especially grand claims around Innovation and Creativity, I fell into some LLM-assisted chit-chat. From there, the conversation drifted into time travel in fiction. We discussed tropes from Back to the Future to Outlander. Somewhere in that mess, I noticed a missing perspective I felt I could capitalise on.

For the record, again, I have not been especially successful at writing short stories. They tend to grow beyond my intent, usually into novelettes or novellas. My first novel, written as Ridley Park, began as a short story. That story is now ostensibly chapter five of Hemo Sapiens. It can stand on its own, but it plays better in context. It is still my favourite chapter, if I had to choose one. So I’ll see where this new one goes, if anywhere. Nowhere is always an option. The blank page remains admirably non-committal.

After hours of brainstorming with the LLMs, arbitrarily switching from French to English and back again, I had a plot outline with beats and flavour, tropes and intentions, subversions and misdirects. I had captured dialogue exchanges, worked through worldbuilding constraints, and fleshed out several plot points. Then I asked ChatGPT to build me a tracking document to serve as a punch list.

I’ve done this a few times before, but with the advancement of the tools, the output was surprisingly robust, arguably overkill, which isn’t always a vice.

The spreadsheet contains 9 tabs:

Lists
Dashboard
Punchlist
Beat Map
Continuity Rules
Motifs & Plants
Evidence Ledger
Open Questions
Sources

Lists

The Lists tab is mostly internal to the spreadsheet. It controls status values, priorities, categories, and related dropdowns. I would not have made it this elaborate manually, but I’m not offended by competence when it arrives uninvited.

I wouldn’t have been so elaborate, but it’s nice nonetheless.

The Dashboard

The Dashboard is also a bit of overkill, but useful overkill. In its inaugural state, it gives a quick view of task status, priorities, and next actions. Its intent should be clear from the screenshot.

Punchlist

The Punchlist is essentially an actionable to-do list with status markers. I think I can safely share this without giving too much away. It lets me manage the story as a set of unresolved craft problems rather than as a vague cloud of ‘I should really get back to that’.

Beat map

The Beat Map contains representative story beats, with notes that capture narrative purpose, confidence level, and risk-management annotations. This is where structure can be managed without cluttering the prose draft itself.

Continuity Rules

The Continuity Rules tab captures worldbuilding constraints and adjacent considerations. It is probably oversharing at this stage, but I’ll take the risk. These rules matter because speculative fiction can collapse quickly when the premise starts leaking.

Motifs & Plants

The Motifs & Plants tab tracks recurring touchpoints, images, phrases, and planted details. Some of these may be premature, but having them outside the draft helps me avoid forcing them into the prose too early.

Evidence Ledger

The Evidence Ledger tracks what counts as evidence inside the story world, who can interpret it, and how it may be misread. This is another continuity check, but also a thematic one.

Open Questions

The Open Questions tab is exactly what it sounds like: unresolved choices, structural uncertainties, and decisions I do not yet want to freeze into place. Sometimes the most useful document is the one that refuses to pretend everything has been solved.

Sources

The Sources tab lists the chat history and documents from which the rest of the content was derived.

The Rest

This is only a partial listing, and I am not finished ideating. I have not yet begun the prose.

I do not always plot my stories. More often than not, I take something closer to a stream-of-consciousness approach. But for one thing, my consciousness does not stream in French. So there’s that.

What impressed me most was the organisational layer the LLM produced. The spreadsheet is now hosted on Google Drive as a Sheet, accessible to both me and the LLMs, so it can be updated as the discussions and decisions continue.

I’m looking forward to wrapping up the ideation phase and beginning, and ideally completing, the prose. That last part remains the traditional nuisance.

Klara and Identity

Jun 29, 2026Jun 29, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcast, videoTagged androids, asterism, book, eliminativism, essentialism, identity, mediated encounter ontology, perception, philosophy, positional objectivity, psychology, relationships, selfhoodLeave a comment

I’ve just finished reading Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun, and I was scripting a video review, but I wanted to focus on one aspect in particular.

I’ve published a full piece on Substack, but here are summaries and artefacts from YouTube and Spotify.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The_Asterism_of_the_Self Download

Deconstructing Consciousness without Panpsychism

Jun 29, 2026Jun 29, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged Alex O'Connor, awareness, books, consciousness, Cosmic Skeptic, deflationary metaphysics, dis-integration, emergence, Hard Problem of Consciousness, idealism, ignostic closure, kind-terms, materialism, MEOW, ontology, panpsychism, phenomenal experience, philosophy, philosophy of mind, poetry, qualia, reductionism, science, substance metaphysicsLeave a comment

3–4 minutes

I am decidedly not a proponent of panpsychism. Most philosophers – and, let us be honest, most people – cannot deconstruct without immediately reconstructing; the rubble has barely settled before they are pouring fresh foundations. I decline that reflex, and I call the declining Dis–Integration – the term chosen partly to keep my distance from Derrida, whose own coinage is abused by more people than have even read him.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Alex Connor begins well. He Dis–Integrates the folk package of consciousness, and he does it cleanly. Respect. Set aside that ‘consciousness’ carries literally dozens of definitions across disciplines and subdisciplines. Just grant him the ordinary picture and watch him strip it. Memory, sensory richness, identity, deliberation, narrative selfhood – he shows that none of these is intrinsic to consciousness as ordinarily imagined. As he says, close your eyes and subtract sight; still conscious. Subtract hearing, subtract touch, subtract memory until no instant is ever laid down. What remains, he says, is bare awareness. So far, so good. Descartes would have been proud.

But then Alex makes the same mistake as René, mistaking the dust for an ontological primitive. That a folk bundle can be decomposed entails precisely nothing about the fundamentality of whatever is left at the bottom of the barrel. It may show only that ‘consciousness’ was never a stable kind-term – that we have been pointing at an assortment and calling it a thing.

Dismantling_Panpsychism Download

This subtraction is only Dennett’s intuition pump, not the engine, which arrives at the end, when Alex argues that you can’t assemble a substance from parts that lack it – that the familiar emergence analogies, temperature from molecules, an image from pixels, all smuggle in the very phenomenality they pretend to derive, because temperature ’emerges’ only for someone who already feels heat. No good analogy survives, he concludes; therefore, consciousness cannot be built; therefore, it must already be down there in the atoms. Nope.

Leave that standing and the subtraction argument was never load-bearing at the start. The stripping was only ever ostensive, a way of pointing at minimal consciousness, but the fundamentality claim never rested on it.

The subtraction works only by thinning ‘consciousness’ to bare awareness – by evacuating redness, the unified first-person feel, the entire rich remainder, on purpose and as a matter of method. The anti-emergence argument works only by treating ‘consciousness’ as a robust substance whose assembly from non-conscious parts is incoherent – and every ounce of that incoherence is borrowed from exactly the rich phenomenal features the subtraction he’d just tossed overboard. ‘First-person unified experience’. ‘The redness of red’. Those were his words, and they are doing the work in the argument that needs consciousness to be thick, moments after he has insisted it is thin. Oops.

So the noun equivocates inside his own case. Damn dirty objects. It’s a decomposable bundle when he needs minimality; an indecomposable substance when he needs non-emergence. He can’t eat his cake and have it, too. There’s no single referent for the emergence to succeed or fail at. Some bundled features plainly emerge – that’s what bundling is. The bare what-it-is-like-ness is the contested remainder. And ‘it’s all one substance that can’t be built’ is simply the reification I diagnosed earlier.

This is why I decline the question. It’s not ‘consciousness is emergent‘ set against his ‘consciousness is fundamental‘ – that trade keeps the bad noun on the pitch. The framing of substance-versus-emergence is what fails. So, I’m not adjudicating the dispute. I’m just declining its terms after showing that its terms weren’t ever coherent to begin with.

Culture Shock: Who’s the Boss, and Who’s Asking?

Jun 27, 2026Jun 27, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcast, videoTagged art, asking, books, culture, demanding, English, food, French, language, ordering, patrons, philosophy, photography, psychology, restaurants, travelLeave a comment

3–4 minutes

Although I am not a linguist, I am a philosopher of language, so occasionally I cross into that territory through sheer love of the thing. I chat with a French interlocutor a couple of times a week, and today we discussed the French infinitive demander – a false friend (faux ami) in English, though a closer one than most.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic. Please excuse the poor French pronunciation of the podcasters.

Demander means to ask, not to demand, though an English speaker might notice that demanding is simply an elevated asking. Which raises the question: is there an elevated version of demander in French? It turns out there is – a whole ladder of them.

In English: to ask → to demand → to order → to command → to enjoin.
In French: demander → exiger → ordonner → commander → enjoindre.

(Enjoin, for those who’ve only met it in legal documents, is the formal instrument of judicial compulsion – to enjoin someone is to prohibit or require by court order. It earns its place at the top of the ladder.)

I won’t get into the full nuances of each term. I’ll leave that to a linguist. But the false friend problem is worth pursuing, because it’s more interesting than a simple mismatch.

The trouble isn’t just that demander ≠ ‘demand’ etymologically. It’s that the English word ‘demand’ smuggles in a force condition that French distributes across different verbs depending on the source of that force. Exiger implies force from authority, entitlement, or insistence. Ordonner implies force from hierarchy – a command structure in which compliance is not optional. Demander, however formally framed, remains a request. English ‘demand’ collapses all of this into one word and leaves the source of force unspecified.

Linguistic_Power_Dynamics Download

This becomes vivid with examples. A judge doesn’t demander; the authority relationship forecloses the mere-request reading entirely. Exiger captures the illocutionary force; this demand is backed by institutional power, and non-compliance has consequences. But a judicial order in English sits closer to ordonner than exiger; the court doesn’t merely insist, it commands with legal effect. And a military general? Ordonner again – unilateral, hierarchical, non-negotiable.

This brings us to restaurants, where things get strange. In English, customers order. The same verb a general uses. What gives?

Polysemy is the easy answer, but the cultural one is more interesting. The French model is closer to hospitality in the older sense – the restaurateur is the host, the diner is a guest, and the dynamic carries an implicit asymmetry in which the host has authority over the experience. One eats what is offered, at the pace the kitchen sets; complaining loudly is a breach of the guest’s role rather than an exercise of consumer rights. Commander fits this – one places a request within a framework that the host controls.

The American model inverts this. The customer is sovereign, the staff are in service to the customer’s preferences, and the transactional frame licenses a kind of authority that would read as rudeness in France. ‘Order’ in the American restaurant sense carries just enough of the command register to be revealing; you’re not asking, you’re directing.

This makes the English verb choice quietly ideological in a way the French isn’t. Commander is neutral about the power dynamic. English ‘order’ encodes the American consumer-as-patron assumption right into the lexicon.

And the word, patron, is almost too good to leave alone. In French, le patron is the boss, the owner, the one with authority. In American English, the patron is the customer. The semantic inversion is almost too neat to be coincidental. It maps the entire cultural difference onto a single word: in France, the restaurateur is the patron; in America, the diner is. When the two meet – a tête-à-tête between rival patrons – culture shock is the predictable result.

There Is No Spoon

Jun 23, 2026Jul 4, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged anti-realism, Architecture of Encounter, Baudrillard, consciousness, critical theory, existentialism, film philosophy, film theory, language, language insufficiency, meaning, mediated encounter ontology, metaphysics, no spoons, ontological grammar, ontology, perception, phenomenology, philosophy, philosophy of language, postmodernism, reality, relational ontology, simulation, subjectivity, The MatrixLeave a comment

Responding to a post, I found myself returning to that iconic, routinely misrepresented scene from The Matrix: the one with the spoon. The scene has been dragged through so many motivational seminars, self-help swamp rituals, pseudo-Buddhist wall decals, and entrepreneurial cocaine-affirmation threads that it now arrives pre-misunderstood.

Video: Bonus Content

Even Baudrillard distanced his work from the version of simulation the Wachowskis made cinematic. This is not a criticism, exactly. Film has two hours to smuggle metaphysics through leather coats, sunglasses, and slow-motion firearms. One makes allowances. Philosophy, alas, has fewer trench coats and more footnotes.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Read the full story on Substack.

Capital Letters, Trade Marks, and Other Warnings Against Semantic Mischief

Jun 22, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcast, videoTagged communication, epistemology, language, meaning, ontology, orthography, philosophy, semantics, semiotics, trademark, truth, typologyLeave a comment

I have an orthographic habit, perhaps merely a private convention, though I rather suspect all conventions begin this way before someone gives them a Latin name and a committee. I use typography to signal when a word is doing more than pedestrian language ordinarily admits.

Read the rest of the story on Substack. (It’s free there, too!)

Meantime, here is a video and podcast summary and some pics.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Chess with Heidegger

Jun 20, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcast, videoTagged chess., critique, Heidegger, language, philosophy, substack, videoLeave a comment

On Heidegger, and the rook that was always, secretly, a bishop

Imagine, if you will, that you are playing chess with a grandmaster. Your opponent fingers his rook, slides it diagonally across the board, captures your queen and lifts the piece away. Nonplussed, you question the tactic. He defends it with vehemence.

Full story on Substack. Video and podcast summaries below.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

On the limitations of NotebookLM.

For most of my posts, I also share a summary processed by Google’s NotebookLM. Most of these summaries are decent enough – some are even excellent inasmuch as they shed a new light on the idea. Other times, they miss the point, are well off the mark, or inject concepts or translations, not only unintended, but markedly opposed to the point being made.

My recent Chess with Heidegger post is illustrative. Both the podcast and the video make errors – and I don’t mean the visual ones that occur as well.

As a page footer, I mention that I use LLMs as part of my workflow. This may be anywhere from 0–99%. The podcast asserted that I used an LLM as a significant part of this project. This is incorrect. Specifically, I didn’t feed Heidegger’s text into an LLM and ask it to digest and regurgitate it, parsing out some unlocked wisdom. Obviously, I used various LLMs for supporting content.

The video misrepresented my point about Wittgenstein, directionally off. He expressly does not support the specificity of language. My reference to him rolling over in his grave was triggered by the notion that language is determined by use – and language games.

Was Hobbes Right in Leviathan?

Jun 19, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged anarchy, book, critique, democracy, enlightenment, Leviathan, monarchy, philosophy, political philosophy, politics, social contract, society, Thomas HobbesLeave a comment

This is a NotebookLM podcast audio summary of a Substack essay on a key idea of Thomas Hobbes expressed in Leviathan.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

We all remember Hobbes. Not Calvin’s pet tiger, regrettably, but the Leviathan one: the cheerful fellow who looked at human beings and concluded that, left to themselves, they would make life ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. A line so good it almost excuses the anthropology. Almost.

Read the full essay on Substack.

The_Leviathan_Paradox Download

What can we say about trust and guilt?

Jun 18, 2026Jun 19, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged epistemology, ethics, images, language, law, legal theory, linguistics, metaethics, philosophy, philosophy of language, substack, wittgensteinLeave a comment

Not as much as we might think.

I shared a post on Substack. It starts like this:

As I continue to read Heidegger’s On the Essence of Truth, I feel compelled to share my musings. Avert your eyes if this doesn’t work for you, but don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Read the rest of the article there, or listen to the podcast.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Below are some related NotebookLM images for the target topic.

Can anyone know what philosophy is?

Jun 17, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged book, epistemology, language, philosophy, psychology, semantics, semioticsLeave a comment

Reading Heidegger’s What Is Philosophy? set me going. Heidegger answers the question not by definition but by retrieval: he takes philosophia back into its Greek setting, as though the older word might disclose what philosophy is. The lecture is the occasion rather than the target. It offers a clean specimen of a manoeuvre that runs far wider. A word’s origin can show where a practice has been, but it can’t settle what the practice is. At least this is what I was thinking as he was making his case.