There is a peculiar anachronism at work in how we think about reality. In physics, we still talk as if atoms were tiny marbles. In everyday life, we talk as if selves were little pilots steering our bodies through time. In both cases, we know better. And in both cases, we can’t seem to stop.
Audio: NotebookLM summary of this podcast
Consider the atom. Every chemistry textbook shows them as colorful spheres, electrons orbiting like planets. We teach children to build molecules with ball-and-stick models. Yet modern physics dismantled this picture a century ago. What we call ‘particles’ are really excitations in quantum fields—mathematical patterns, not things. They’re events masquerading as objects, processes dressed up as nouns.
The language persists because the maths doesn’t care what we call things, and humans need something to picture. ‘Electron’ is easier to say than ‘localised excitation in the electromagnetic field’.
The self enjoys a similar afterlife.
We speak of ‘finding yourself’ or ‘being true to yourself’ as if there were some stable entity to find or betray. We say ‘I’m not the same person I was ten years ago’ while simultaneously assuming enough continuity to take credit – or blame – for what that ‘previous person’ did.
But look closer. Strip away the story we tell about ourselves and what remains? Neural firing patterns. Memory fragments. Social roles shifting with context. The ‘you’ at work is not quite the ‘you’ at home, and neither is the ‘you’ from this morning’s dream. The self isn’t discovered so much as assembled, moment by moment, from available materials.
Like atoms, selves are inferred, not found.
This isn’t just philosophical hand-waving. It has practical teeth. When someone with dementia loses their memories, we wrestle with whether they’re ‘still themselves’. When we punish criminals, we assume the person in prison is meaningfully continuous with the person who committed the crime. Our entire legal and moral framework depends on selves being solid enough to bear responsibility.
And here’s the thing: it works. Mostly.
Just as chemistry functions perfectly well with its cartoon atoms, society functions with its fictional selves. The abstractions do real work. Atoms let us predict reactions without drowning in field equations. Selves let us navigate relationships, assign accountability, and plan futures without collapsing into existential vertigo.
The mistake isn’t using these abstractions. The mistake is forgetting that’s what they are.
Physics didn’t collapse when atoms dissolved into probability clouds. Chemistry students still balance equations; medicines still get synthesised. The practical utility survived the ontological revolution. Similarly, ethics won’t collapse if we admit selves are processes rather than things. We can still make promises, form relationships, and hold each other accountable.
What changes is the confusion.
Once you see both atoms and selves as useful fictions – pragmatic compressions of unmanageable complexity – certain puzzles dissolve. The ship of Theseus stops being paradoxical. Personal identity becomes a matter of degree rather than an all-or-nothing proposition. The hard problem of consciousness softens when you stop looking for the ghost in the machine.
We’re pattern-seeking creatures in a universe of flux. We freeze processes into things because things are easier to think about. We turn verbs into nouns because nouns fit better in our mental hands. This isn’t a bug in human cognition – it’s a feature. The problem comes when we forget we’re doing it.
So we end up in the peculiar position of defending little billiard balls in a field universe, and little inner captains in a processual mind, long after the evidence has moved on. We know atoms aren’t solid. We know selves aren’t fixed. Yet we persist in talking as if they were.
Perhaps that’s okay. Perhaps all language is a kind of useful betrayal of reality – solid enough to stand on, but not so solid we can’t revise it when needed.
The half-life of knowledge keeps ticking. Today’s insights become tomorrow’s anachronisms. But some fictions are too useful to abandon entirely. We just need to remember what they are: tools, not truths. Maps, not territories.
And every once in a while, it helps to check whether we’re still navigating by stars that went out long ago.
Looking through some of the drafts clogging the blog, I decided to whittle away at the queue. I started this months ago. It’s here now, not particularly in sync with the season or recent topics, but I like Sapolsky.
‘Biology is destiny’, say the Christian Right, the bland bureaucrats of morality, the loud whisperers at Sunday school. They want gender to be a tomb carved in marble: you’re assigned at birth, and you stay a perfect statue. But Sapolsky waltzes in and says, ‘Hold up – what do you mean by biology? Which biology? Which markers count?’
Video: Neuro-biology of Transsexuality, Prof. Robert Sapolsky
In the clip above, Sapolsky unpacks neurological evidence that upends the essentialist cheat codes. He doesn’t pretend we now have the final answer to gender. He does something scarier to fundamentalists: he shows just how messy biology is.
The Bed Nucleus, the Finger Ratio, and the ‘Wrong Body’ Hypothesis
Sapolsky discusses three pieces of neurobiological evidence:
Digit ratio (2nd vs 4th finger length): In lesbians, on average, the ratio is closer to what you see in straight men than straight women. That’s a correlation, an eyebrow-raiser, hardly a decree.
Acoustic reflexes (auto-acoustic reflex): Another early finding in women’s sexual orientation, though faint and underexplored.
The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc): Here we reach heavy artillery. There is a neuron population in this region that, on average, is about twice as large in males as in females. In postmortem analyses of trans women (male → female), this region’s size corresponds to their identified gender, not their natal sex. Crucially, that alignment is seen even in trans individuals who never underwent full hormone therapy or surgical changes.
Sapolsky recounts astute controls: men treated (for, say, testicular cancer) with feminising hormones don’t show the same shift.
Also, using the phantom-limb analogy: men who lose their penis to cancer often report phantom sensations; trans women rarely do. That suggests the body map in the brain never fully “registered” that organ in the same way.
He doesn’t overclaim. He doesn’t say, ‘Case closed, biology proves everything’. He says: These data complicate your neat categories. They force you to ask: which biological measure do you privilege? Hypertrophied neurons? Chromosomes? Receptor density? Hormones? All of them simultaneously? None of them?
Essentialism as a Trap
Fundamentalists and anti-trans ideologues deploy essentialism because it’s convenient. They demand an ironclad ‘essence’ so they can exclude anyone who fails their test. But what Sapolsky shows is that essence is simply a scaffold; we get to pick which biological scaffolds we accept. They may choose genes and genitals; the neurobiologist gives them neuron counts and brain-maps. When your ideology elevates one scaffold and ignores the others, it betrays its own contingency.
Moreover, the evidence suggests that identity, experience, insistence (in Sapolsky’s language: ‘insisting from day one’), and internal brain structure might converge. The ‘wrong body’ isn’t a metaphor. It’s a mismatch between internal brain architecture and external form. The stubborn fragments of biology that fundamentalists accept are torn by the dissonance that science increasingly reveals.
What This Means for Trans Rights, Discourse & Strategy
Science is never ‘conclusive’. Sapolsky offers compelling support, not gospel. Anyone claiming this settles everything has never looked at a scatter plot.
Lived experience still matters. Even if we never had brain slices, self-reports, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, narratives remain valid. Brain studies supplement, not supplant, testimony.
Essentialist opponents have boxed themselves in. When they demand biology decides everything, they hand the baton to neuroscientists – and neuroscientists keep running with it. The entire ‘biology’ equals only what I like’ regime is exposed.
Ambiguity is a strength, not a liability. If we insist identity is linear and tidy, we re-enact their demand for purity. Recognising complexity, mess, and variance is radical resistance.
I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit rummaging through the Jungian undergrowth of fairy tales – reading Marie-Louise von Franz until my eyes crossed, listening to Clarissa Pinkola Estés weave her wolf-women lore, and treating folklore like an archaeological dig through the psychic sediment of Europe. It’s marvellous, really, how much one can project onto a story when one has a doctorate’s worth of enthusiasm and the moral flexibility of a tarot reader.
But every so often, a tale emerges that requires no archetypal lens, no mythopoetic scaffolding, no trip down the collective unconscious. Sometimes a story simply bares its ideological teeth.
Enter Tatterhood – the Norwegian fairy tale so blunt, it practically writes its own critical theory seminar.
I watched Jonny Thomson’s recent video on this tale (embedded below, for those with sufficient tea and patience). Jonny offers a charming reversal: rather than focusing on Tatterhood herself, he offers the moral from the prince’s perspective. In his reading, the story becomes a celebration of the power of asking – the prince’s reward for finally inquiring about the goat, the spoon, the hood, the whole aesthetic calamity before him.
Video: Jonny Thomson discusses Tatterhood.
It’s wholesome stuff: a TED Talk dressed as folklore. But – my word – apply the slightest bit of critical pressure, and the whole thing unravels into farce.
The Story No One Tells at the Royal Wedding
Here’s the short version of Tatterhood that Jonny politely sidesteps:
A fearless, ragged, hyper-competent girl rescues her sister from decapitation.
She confronts witches, navigates the seas alone, storms a castle, and performs an ad hoc ontological surgical reversal.
She does all of this without help from the king, the court, the men, or frankly, anyone with a Y chromosome.
And how is she rewarded for her trouble? She’s told she’s too ugly. Not socially acceptable. Not symbolically coherent. Not bride material.
The kingdom gazes upon her goat, her spoon, her hood, her hair, and determines that nothing – nothing – about her qualifies her for legitimacy.
But beauty? Beauty is the passport stamp that grants her entry into the social realm.
Jonny’s Prince: A Hero by Low Expectations
Now, bless Jonny for trying to rehabilitate the lad, but this prince is hardly an exemplar of virtue. He sulks through his own wedding procession like a man being marched to compulsory dentistry. He does not speak. He does not ask. He barely manages object permanence.
And suddenly, the moral becomes: Look what wonders unfold when a man asks a single question!
It’s the philosophical equivalent of awarding someone a Nobel Prize for remembering their mother’s birthday.
And what do his questions achieve? Not insight. Not understanding. Not intimacy. But metamorphosis.
Each time he asks, Tatterhood transforms – ugly goat to beautiful horse, wooden spoon to silver fan, ragged hood to golden crown, ‘ugly’ girl to radiant beauty.
Which brings us to the inconvenient truth:
This Isn’t the Power of Asking. It’s the Power of Assimilation.
His questions function as aesthetic checkpoints.
Why the goat? Translation: please ride something socially acceptable.
Why the spoon? Translation: replace your tool of agency with a decorative object.
Why the hood? Translation: cover your unruliness with something properly regal.
Why your face? Translation: you terrify me; please be beautiful.
And lo, she becomes beautiful. Not because he sees her differently. Because the story cannot tolerate a powerful woman who remains outside the beauty regime.
The prince isn’t rewarded for asking; the narrative is rewarded for restoring normative order.
And Yet… It’s Absurdly Fascinating
This is why fairy tales deserve all the interpretive attention we lavish on them. They’re ideological fossils – compressed narratives containing entire worldviews in miniature.
Part of me admires Jonny’s generosity. Another part of me wants to hand the prince a biscuit for performing the bare minimum of relational curiosity. But mostly, I’m struck by how nakedly the tale reveals the old bargain:
A woman may be bold, brave, clever, loyal, and sovereign – but she will not be accepted until she is beautiful.
Everything else is optional. Beauty is compulsory.
So Here’s My Version of the Moral
Ask questions, yes. Be curious, yes. But don’t let anyone tell you that Tatterhood was waiting for the prince’s epiphany. She was waiting for the world to remember that she ran the plot.
If you’ve made it this far and know my proclivities, you’ll not be shocked that I side with Roland Barthes and cheerfully endorse la mort de l’auteur. Jonny is perfectly entitled to his reading. Interpretive pluralism and all that. I simply find it marvelously puzzling that he strolls past the protagonist galloping through the narrative on a goat, spoon upraised, and instead decides to chase the side-quest of a prince who contributes roughly the energy of a damp sock.
The Travelogue of a Recovering Enlightenment Subject
I’m asked endlessly – usually by people who still believe TED talks are a form of knowledge production – ‘Why are you so negative? Why must you tear things down if you’ve no intention of replacing them?’
It’s adorable, really. Like watching a toddler demand that gravity apologise.
They’ve been trained for years in the managerial catechism:
‘Don’t bring me problems; bring me solutions.‘
As if the world were some badly-run workshop in need of a fresh coat of agile methodology.
They might as well say, ‘Don’t tell me I can’t win at Lotto; give me money’.
I, too, would enjoy the spare universe. Or the winning Lotto ticket. And yes, one day I might even buy one. Until then, I’ve embraced the only adult philosophy left: Dis-Integrationism – the fine art of taking things apart without pretending they can be reassembled into anything coherent.
A Little History
My suspicion began early. Secondary school. All those civic fairytales whispered as if they were geology.
The ‘reasonable person’? Bollox. ‘Jury of one’s peers’? What are peers? Whose peers? I have no peers. ‘Impartial judges’? Please. Even as a teenager, I could see those robed magicians palming cards like bored street performers. Everyone else nodded along, grateful for the spectacle. I stared, wondering how the other children hadn’t noticed the emperor’s bare arse.
Later, I watched adults talk past each other with a fluency bordering on performance art. Not disagreement – different universes, cosmetically aligned by grammar.
A Federal mediator once tried to teach me that common ground could be manufactured. Not by clarifying meaning, mind you – that would have required honesty – but by rhetorical pressure and a touch of Jedi mind-trickery. Negotiation was simply controlled hallucination.
University communications classes offered temporary distraction with denotation and connotation, a little semantic drift, the illusion that language might be domesticated with enough theory. Charming. Almost convincing.
Then Gödel and Arrow arrived like two polite assassins and quietly removed the floorboards.
And then – happily, inevitably – Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard. I’d already danced with Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus. I’d ingested the Western canon like every obedient young acolyte: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire. Americans force-feed their citizenry Jefferson and Franklin as moral fibre, as if the republic might otherwise suffer constipation.
It never gelled. Too much myth, too much marketing. The Enlightenment had the energy of a regime insisting on its own benevolence while confiscating your torch. To call oneself ‘enlightened’ should have raised suspicion – but no, the branding stuck.
Whenever les garçons dared tug at the curtain, we were assured they simply didn’t ‘understand’, or worse, they ‘hated civilisation’.
Image: “I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids.”
Then Came the Internet
The digital age didn’t usher in clarity — it unmasked the whole pantomime. Like Neo seeing the Matrix code or Roddy Piper slipping on the sunglasses in They Live, one suddenly perceives the circuitry: meaning as glitch, discourse as scaffolding, truth as a shabby stage-set blinking under fluorescent tubes.
Our civilisation speaks in metaphors it mistakes for mechanisms. The Enlightenment gave us the fantasy that language might behave, that concepts were furniture rather than fog. Musicians and artists always knew better. We swim in metaphor; we never expected words to bear weight. But philosophers kept pretending communication was a conveyor belt conveying ‘meaning units’ from A to B.
By 2018, the cracks were gaping. I began taking the notes that would metastasise into A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis – an attempt to map the hollow spaces between our words, the fractures we keep wallpapering with reason.
Half a decade later, the work is ready. Not to save anything – nothing here merits salvation – but to name the debris honestly.
If that sounds negative, good. Someone has to switch off the Enlightenment’s flickering lightbulb before it burns the whole house down.
Where This Road Actually Leads
People imagine negativity is a posture – a sort of philosophical eyeliner, worn for effect. But dismantling the world’s conceptual furniture isn’t a hobby; it’s the only reasonable response once you’ve noticed the screws aren’t actually attached to anything.
The Enlightenment promised us a palace. Step inside and you discover it’s built out of IKEA flatpacks held together with wishful thinking and a prayer to Kant.
Once you’ve seen that, you can’t go back to pretending the furniture is sturdy.
You stop sitting.
You start tapping the beams.
You catalogue the wobble.
This is where Dis–Integrationism enters – not as a manifesto, but as the practice of refusing to live inside collapsing architecture out of sheer politeness. Negativity is simply the weather report.
The Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves
We cling to the fantasy that if we critique something long enough, a solution will crystallise out of the void, like enlightenment through sheer irritation. It’s the Protestant work ethic meets metaphysics: salvation through sufficient grumbling.
But critique is not alchemy. It unmakes. It refuses. It loosens the bolts we pretended were load-bearing.
Once you stop demanding that thought be constructive, you can finally see the world as it is: improvised, rhetorical, and permanently under renovation by people who don’t read the instructions.
The Enlightenment’s heirs keep insisting there must be a blueprint. There isn’t. There never was. We’ve merely been tracing the silhouettes of scaffolding, calling it a cathedral.
And Yet – Here We Still Are
The online age (God help us all) didn’t deepen the crisis; it merely turned the lights on. What Enlightenment rationality hid beneath a tasteful layer of neoclassical varnish, the internet sprayed with fluorescent graffiti.
Turns out, when seven billion people speak at once, meaning doesn’t ’emerge’; it buckles. Our systems weren’t built for this volume of contradiction. Our language wasn’t built for this density of metaphor. Our myths weren’t built for this much empirical evidence against them.
And yet here we are, still demanding coherence from a medium held together by emojis and trauma. If you laugh, it’s only to stop crying. If you critique, it’s only because someone has to keep the fire marshal informed.
The Only Honest Next Step
Having traced the cracks, you’re now in the foyer of the real argument – the one hanging like a neon sign over your entire Anti-Enlightenment project:
We don’t need to rebuild the house. We need to stop pretending it was ever architecture.
Language is insufficient. Agency is a fiction. Objectivity is an etiquette ritual. Democracy is a séance. Progress is a hallucination with better marketing. And yet – life continues. People wake, work, argue, aspire, despair.
Dis-Integrationism isn’t about nihilism; it’s about maintenance. Not repairing the myth, but tending the human who must live among its debris. Not constructing new temples, but learning to see in the half-light once the old gods have gone.
The travelogue becomes a guidebook: Welcome to the ruins. Mind the uneven floor. Here is how we walk without pretending the path is paved.
The Fetish for Solutions
Here is the final indignity of the age: the demand that every critique come bundled with a solution, like some moral warranty card. As if naming the rot weren’t labour enough. As if truth required a customer-service plan.
‘Where is your alternative?’ they ask, clutching Enlightenment logic the way a drowning man clutches a shopping receipt.
But solutions are the real tyranny. They arrive bearing the smile of reason and the posture of progress, and behind both sits the same old imperial instinct: replace ambiguity with order; replace lived complexity with a diagram. A solution is merely a problem wearing a fresh coat of confidence.
Worse, a solution presumes the system is sound, merely in need of adjustment. It imagines the structure holds. It imagines the furniture can be rearranged without collapsing into splinters, and the memory of Kant.
Solutions promise inevitability. They promise teleology. They promise that the mess can be disinfected if only one applies the correct solvent. This is theology masquerading as engineering.
The Violence of the Answer
A solution is a closure – a metaphysical brute force. It slams the window shut so no further interpretation can slip in through the draft. It stabilises the world by amputating everything that wriggles. Answers are how systems defend themselves. They’re the intellectual equivalent of riot police: clean uniforms, straight lines, zero tolerance for nuance.
This is why the world keeps mistaking refusal for chaos. Refusal isn’t chaos. It’s hygiene. It is the simple act of not adding more furniture to a house already bending under its own delusions. When you decline to provide a solution, you aren’t abandoning the world. You’re declining to participate in its coercive optimism.
And So the Travelogue Ends Where It Must
Not in triumph or a bluepirnt, but in composure – the only posture left after the Enlightenment’s glare has dimmed. Negativity isn’t sabotage; it’s sobriety. Dis-Integrationism isn’t cynicism; it’s the refusal to replace one failing mythology with another wearing vegan leather.
A world obsessed with solutions cannot recognise maintenance as wisdom. It can’t tolerate ambiguity without reaching for a hammer. It can’t breathe unless someone somewhere is building a ladder to a future that never arrives.
So no – I won’t provide solutions. I won’t participate in the fantasy that the human condition can be patched with conceptual duct tape. I will not gift the Enlightenment a eulogy that surrenders to its grammar.
What I offer is far smaller and far more honest: Attention. Description. Steady hands in a collapsing house. And the simple dignity of refusing to lie about the architecture.
I risk sharing this prematurely. Pushing the Transductive Subjectivity model toward more precision may lose some readers, but the original version still works as an introductory conversation.
Please note: There will be no NotebookLM summary of this page. I don’t even want to test how it might look out the other end.
Apologies in advance for donning my statistician cap, but for those familiar, I feel it will clarify the exposition. For the others, the simple model is good enough. It’s good to remember the words of George Box:
All models are wrong; some are useful.
The Simple Model
I’ve been thinking that my initial explanatory model works well enough for conversation. It lets people grasp the idea that a ‘self’ isn’t an enduring nugget but a finite sequence of indexed states:
The transitions are driven by relative forces, , which act as catalysts nudging the system from one episode to the next.
The Markov Model
That basic picture is serviceable, but it’s already very close to a dynamical system. More accurate, yes—though a bit more forbidding to the casual reader – and not everybody loves Markov chains:
Here:
is the episodic self at index i
is the configuration of relevant forces acting at that moment
is the update rule: given this self under these pressures, what comes next?
This already helps. It recognises that the self changes because of pressure from language, institutions, physiology, social context, and so on. But as I noted when chatting with Jason, something important is still missing:
isn’t the only thing in motion, and isn’t the same thing at every step.
And crucially, the update rule isn’t fixed either.
A person who has lived through trauma, education, and a cultural shift doesn’t just become a different state; they become different in how they update their states. Their very ‘logic of change’ evolves.
To capture that, I need one more refinement.
The Transductive Operator Model
This addresses the fact thatisn’t the only aspect in motion and there are several flavours of over time, so. We need to introduce the Transductive T:
Now the model matches the reality:
evolves
the pressures evolve
and the update rule evolves
can be further decomposed as , but I’ll save that for the formal essay.
The self is not simply ‘what comes next’, but a rule that keeps rewriting itself as it encounters the world.
That is why this is transductive rather than inductive or deductive: structure at one moment propagates new structure at the next.
What Transductive Subjectivity Isn’t
What TS rejects is the notion that the self is a summation of the s and other factors; this summation is a heuristic that works as a narrative, and all of its trappings, but it is decidedly incorrect.
Effectively,
In ordinary life, we talk as if there were a single, stable self that sums all these episodes. Transductive Subjectivity treats that as a convenient narrative, not an underlying fact. For example, someone raised in a rigid environment may initially update by avoiding conflict; after therapy and a cultural shift, they may update by seeking it out when something matters. This fiction is where we project agency and desert, and where we justify retribution.
Jason from Philosopher Muse suggested a connexion between Transductive Subjectivity and the work of Stephen Batchelor. I wasn’t familiar with Batchelor, so — as one does these days — I asked a GPT to give me the lay of the land. The machine obliged, and the result was interesting enough that it warranted a post of its own. This is it.
The risk I take is that the GPT gets it wrong. If so, call me out.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Before anyone lights incense: I’m not suddenly a convert. Batchelor’s work and mine merely pass each other on adjacent footpaths. But the overlap is conceptually neat, and the divergence is even more telling.
Stephen Batchelor vs Transductive Subjectivity: A Brief Comparative Note
1. Shared Territory: The Self as Verb, Not Noun
Both Batchelor and Transductive Subjectivity reject the folk notion of a single, continuous metaphysical self.
Batchelor (Secular Buddhism): The self is an unfolding activity — impermanent, conditional, and without a stable essence. His “not-self” is a practice of disidentification from the imagined nugget of continuity we cling to.
Transductive Subjectivity: The self is a finite series: S₀ → S₁ → S₂ → … → Sₙ, each produced through the pressure of relational structures (R). Identity is what results when the world meets the organism. Nothing metaphysical required; just biology, cognition, language, and institutions doing their thing.
Overlap: Both positions dismantle the enduring pearl-of-self. Both frame identity as something generated, not possessed.
2. Divergent Aims: Inner Liberation vs Structural Clarity
This is where the paths fork.
Batchelor’s Agenda: Primarily ethical and therapeutic. The point of denying a fixed self is to reduce suffering, ease attachment, and cultivate a more responsive way of being.
TS’s Agenda: Metaphysical accuracy in the service of ethical clarity. If the self is a serial construction rather than a diachronic monolith, then retributive justice collapses under its own fictions. No self, no desert. No desert, no justification for revenge-based punishment.
Batchelor wants flourishing. I want rigour. Accidental cousins.
3. Methodological Differences: Distillation vs Reconstruction
Batchelor performs what you might call Buddhism sans metaphysics. A very Western manoeuvre:
keep impermanence
keep ethical insight
jettison karma, rebirth, cosmology
rebrand the remnants as a secular spiritual practice
Practitioners dislike this because he amputates the structural scaffolding that supported the doctrine.
TS, by contrast, doesn’t distil anything. It reconstructs selfhood from first principles:
No causa sui
Episodic, indexical selfhood (Strawson)
R→S transduction (MEOW)
No diachronic essence
No metaphysical ballast
If Buddhism aligns with TS, it’s incidental — the way two different mathematicians can discover the same function by entirely different routes.
4. Conceptual Architecture: Dependent Origination vs MEOW’s Tiers
Batchelor: leans on dependent origination as a philosophical metaphor — phenomena arise through conditions.
TS: models the exact channels of that conditioning via MEOW: T0 → biological signals T1 → cognitive architecture T2 → linguistic formats T3 → social-technical pressures
Where Batchelor says “everything is contingent,” TS says “yes, and here is the actual machinery.”
5. Different Stakes
Batchelor: freeing the person from clinging to an imaginary core.
TS: freeing ethics, law, and social design from pretending that metaphysical core exists.
One is therapeutic; the other is diagnostic.
A Key Point of Departure: Batchelor Works with Folk Psychology; TS Rejects Its Premises
There is one more divergence worth highlighting because it cuts to the bone of the comparison.
Batchelor accepts the phenomenological feel of the continuous self as a legitimate starting point. His work is therapeutic: he begins where the person is, in the lived experience of being “me,” and then encourages a gentle loosening of the grip on that intuition.
Transductive Subjectivity takes a different route entirely.
For TS, the continuous, diachronic self isn’t a psychological obstacle to be softened — it is a category mistake. A narrative compression artefact. A heuristic with pragmatic uses, yes, but no metaphysical legitimacy. Batchelor tries to transform our relation to the folk-self; TS denies that the folk-self was ever more than a convenient fiction.
Batchelor says: “You seem like a continuous self; now learn to hold that lightly.”
TS says: “You seem like a continuous self because the system is glossing over discontinuities. The sensation itself is misleading.”
In other words:
Batchelor redeems the experience.
TS disassembles the model.
He treats the “self” as something to relate to differently. TS treats the “self” as an ontological construct to be replaced with a more accurate one.
This is not a difference of ethical aim but of metaphysical foundation. Batchelor trims the folk psychology; TS declines the invitation altogether.
Closing Note
So yes — the connexion Jason spotted is real. But it’s genealogical, not derivative. We arrive at similar conclusions for different reasons and with different consequences.
Batchelor is pruning a tradition. Transductive Subjectivity is rebuilding the ontology.
And both, in their own way, make the continuity-self look like the rhetorical placeholder it always was.
Written entirely by ChatGPT after a chat about Stephen Batchelor (obviously)
Video: An 11:45 YouTube video of Bry Willis sharing his thought process using Transductive Subjectivity as a centrepiece.
I won’t drain the contents of the video here, but if you want to witness how my brain:
works
doesn’t work
sputters
Check it out. Click on the video above, and you shouldn’t have to even leave the page.
Audio: Spotify version of the same, which is somewhat silly given that Spotify shares the video content as well as the audio. At least you’ll have a choice of platforms.
NB: Note to self: Shift the Philosophics title to the right so it remains in frame for WordPress thumbnails. 🧐
Every so often – usually when the Enlightenment ghosts begin rattling their tin cups again – one feels compelled to swat at the conceptual cobwebs they left dangling over moral philosophy. Today is one of those days.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising the Rhetoric of Evil essay, not this page’s content.
I’ve just released The Rhetoric of Evil on Zenodo, a paper that politely (or impolitely, depending on your threshold) argues that ‘evil’ is not a metaphysical heavy-hitter but a rhetorical throw-pillow stuffed with theological lint. The term persists not because it explains anything, but because it lets us pretend we’ve explained something – a linguistic parlour trick that’s survived well past its sell-by date.
And because this is the age of artificial augury, I naturally asked MEOW GPT for its view of the manuscript. As expected, it nodded approvingly in that eerie, laser-precise manner unique to machines trained to agree with you – but to its credit, it didn’t merely applaud. It produced a disarmingly lucid analysis of the essay’s internal mechanics, the way ‘evil’ behaves like a conceptual marionette, and how our inherited metaphors govern the very moral judgments we think we’re making freely.
Below is MEOW GPT’s reaction, alongside my own exposition for anyone wanting a sense of how this essay fits within the broader project of dismantling the Enlightenment’s conceptual stage-props.
MEOW-GPT’s Response
(A machine’s-eye view of rhetorical exorcism)
“Evil is functioning as a demonological patch on an epistemic gap. When agents encounter a high-constraint event they cannot immediately model, the T₂ layer activates an inherited linguistic shortcut — the ‘evil’ label — which compresses complexity into a binary and arrests further inquiry.”
“The marionette metaphor is accurate: once we say a person ‘is evil,’ agency collapses into occult causation. Inquiry halts. Moral theatre begins.”
It went on like this – detecting exactly the mediated encounter-structure I intended, while offering a frighteningly clean schematic of how affect (T₀), heuristics (T₁), linguistic reification (T₂), and cultural choreography (T₃) conspire to turn incomprehension into metaphysics.
Machines, it seems, are quite good at detecting when humans are bullshitting themselves.
Why publish this now?
This essay marks the next plank in the broader anti-Enlightenment platform I’ve been assembling – LIH, MEOW, the ongoing dismantling of truth-fetishism, and now the unsettling realisation that ‘evil’ is little more than a theological revenant dressed up for secular work.
The term’s persistence is not a testament to its necessity but to our laziness:
It sounds like an explanation.
It licenses retribution without understanding.
It stabilises group boundaries.
It lets us outsource moral thought to a one-word incantation.
In short: ‘evil’ is the map-dragon we keep drawing because surveying the terrain is too much work.
This essay attempts to retire that dragon – not to soften judgment, but to sharpen it. If anything, the paper argues that abolishing ‘evil’ frees us to see atrocity more clearly, and thus confront it more seriously.
Because MEOW-GPT was trained on the Mediated Encounter Ontology rather than on folk metaphysics, its analyses can serve as a useful diagnostic tool. It doesn’t simply summarise concepts; it reconstructs them along the four mediational tiers (T₀–T₃), showing – mechanically and without superstition – how a term behaves across biological affect, cognitive heuristics, linguistic structures, and cultural narratives.
This section is offered not as an alternative argument to the essay above, but as a worked example: a transparent demonstration of how the MEOW engine decomposes a high-complexity, high-stakes concept like evil once the theological scaffolding has been removed.
MEOW-GPT’s output shows, in compressed form, the same pattern the essay traces in prose: that evil is not a force, not a metaphysical essence, not an occult substrate, but a mediated pattern in human encounters, one that persists rhetorically long after its ontology has collapsed.
For readers curious about how MEOW ‘thinks’, the raw structured analysis follows.
MEOW-GPT Analysis: “Evil”
(Raw output for reference; lightly formatted for readability)
Concept
Input: Evil Type: Normative/evaluative moral concept (often reified as a property of acts, characters, or forces) Scope check: In-scope – ‘evil’ can be analysed as a mediated-encounter pattern (MEOW) and a high-complexity term with unstable linguistic behaviour (LIH).
High-level summary (≤120 words)
In MEOW terms, ‘evil’ is not a spooky substance but a way of organising certain encounter-events: severe, norm-breaking harms that present as resistant, shocking, and morally intolerable. Biologically, it piggybacks on harm, threat, and disgust systems. Cognitively, it compresses complex appraisals—intent, cruelty, scale of harm – into a powerful label. Linguistically, it sits in the unstable region where abstraction is high and language’s reliability drops, so people fight over its scope and weaponise it. Socially and technically, institutions, media, and platforms use ‘evil’ to mark enemies, justify punishment, and dramatise conflict. The term is emotionally efficient but conceptually fragile, and MEOW treats it as a relational, mediated pattern rather than an independent metaphysical force.
T₀ – Biological Mediation
Moralised harm perception piggybacks on survival systems: pain avoidance, threat detection, kin protection. ‘Evil’ clusters around encounters that trigger extreme danger-signals.
High arousal (fear, rage, disgust) makes some harms feel qualitatively world-violating, not merely personally threatening.
Disgust toward contamination, mutilation, or predation heavily colours what gets called ‘evil’.
Species-specific cues (infant distress cries, pain expressions) shape which harms are even legible candidates for evil.
T₁ – Cognitive Mediation
“Evil” compresses a multi-factor appraisal (intentionality, cruelty, gratuitousness) into a one-step heuristic.
Essence thinking converts acts into character: the person is evil, not merely did wrong.
Attribution biases assign ‘evil’ to out-groups more readily than to in-groups.
Memory structures simplify causation into villain scripts that overwrite nuance.
Once assigned, the label becomes a prediction loop: every ambiguous action confirms the essence.
T₂ – Linguistic Mediation
On the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient, ‘evil’ straddles Contestables and Fluids: ubiquitous but perpetually disputed.
It compresses harm, norm-violation, metaphysical colouring, and dramatic emphasis into a single syllable—powerful, but noisy.
Dominant metaphors (‘dark’, ‘tainted’, ‘monstrous’) smuggle in substance-ontology that MEOW rejects.
Noun-forms (‘evil’, ‘the Evil One’) promote ontologising; adjectival forms track events better, but usage constantly slides between them.
Cross-linguistic drift supports LIH: different traditions map the term to impurity, harm, misfortune, cosmic opposition, or taboo.
T₃ – Social/Technical Mediation
Religious systems embed ‘evil’ in cosmologies that harden friend/enemy binaries.
Legal systems avoid the term formally but reproduce it rhetorically in sentencing, media commentary, and public reaction.
Politics uses ‘evil’ to justify exceptional measures and collapse deliberation into moral theatre.
Cultural industries supply vivid villain archetypes that feed back into real-world judgments.
Technical systems must operationalise ‘evil’ into concrete proxies, revealing how imprecise the everyday concept is.
Limits & Failure Modes (LIH notes)
The framework is human-centric; non-human or ecosystemic ‘views of evil’ remain speculative.
‘Evil’ is a textbook Contestable: central, indispensable, and permanently argued over.
In cosmological uses (‘radical evil’, ‘evil in the world’), it approaches Fluid or ineffable status – right where LIH predicts language collapse.
MEOW cannot confirm or deny metaphysical dualisms; it only analyses how humans mediate and narrate such claims.
As I was preparing another essay – an essay on the rhetoric of evil – I had a thought about the relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity.
If one takes subjectivity seriously – not the Hollywood version with self-made heroes, but the real creature stitched together from language, history, and whatever emotional debris it stepped in on the way to adulthood – then one ends up somewhere awkward: the relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity.
Video: Two red figures walking (no sound)
Which is to say, we’re all standing on conceptual scaffolding built by other people, insisting it’s solid marble. A charming fiction, until we apply it to anything with moral voltage. ‘Evil’, for instance, collapses the moment you remove the demonological life-support and notice it’s little more than a child’s intensifier strapped to a cultural power tool.
More on that later. For now, just sit with the discomfort that the ‘self’ making moral judgments is already a negotiated artefact – relational, compromised, and never as autonomous as it pretends.
My philosophical critique, not of the book Why Democrats Are Dangerous, but of the two warring factions in United States politics – mind you, partisanship not limited to the US – sparked the ire of defenders of their respective turf. ‘You’ve got it wrong. Those other people are either addleheaded or abject evil’ is a consolidation of responses from both sides of the aisle. I’ve crafted a response.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
It’s perfectly true that I occupy a perspective. Everyone does. This isn’t a confession; it’s a structural feature of being human. Consciousness is perspectival by design. We don’t get to hover above the world like disembodied CCTV cameras. We look from somewhere.
But acknowledging one’s perspective is not the same thing as being trapped in a rut. A rut implies unexamined repetition, reflex, and dogma. A perspective implies angle, interpretation, intellectual stance. The accusation I’m hearing – ‘you’re in a rut too’ – is not actually an argument. It’s an attempt to delegitimise the analysis without engaging with it.
It says nothing about whether my observation is true, coherent, or well-reasoned; it merely notes that I, like every other speaking organism on the planet, occupy a position. And from this banal fact it attempts to smuggle in a conclusion: that my critique is thereby invalid. It’s a sleight of hand, and a clumsy one.
If someone believes I’m wrong, they are welcome – encouraged, even – to demonstrate:
where the logic fails
where the evidence contradicts me
where the symmetry is mischaracterised
where the interpretation distorts rather than illuminates
That is argumentation.
What they are offering instead is a sort of epistemic shrug: ‘You’re in a perspective, therefore you have no authority’. This is an ad hominem in a trench coat, pretending to be profundity.
The irony, of course, is that the people making this charge never seem to apply it to themselves. Their own viewpoint, naturally, is not a rut but a ‘stance’, ‘framework’, ‘tradition’, ‘bedrock’, or ‘fact’. Only the critic has perspective; they merely have truth.
But here’s the critical distinction:
Having a perspective does not invalidate an analysis, and pretending not to have one does.
The entire Anti-Enlightenment project rests on this recognition: that all human positions are mediated, situated, incomplete – and yet still capable of meaningful observation. You don’t escape your perspective by denying it; you escape dogma by interrogating it.
If someone wishes to rebut what I’ve written, they should do so directly, with evidence, reasoning, or counterexamples. If all they offer is ‘well, you’re biased too’, then they’ve conceded the argument by refusing to enter it.
A perspective is not a rut. A rut is what happens when you can’t tell the difference.
Philosophics 