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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Am I the only one who can’t resist a massive eyeroll – and, let’s be honest: jaw-drop – what you hear transhumanism couched as evolution? To me, it incites a similar reaction to hearing people witter on about machine consciousness, but I’ll sideline that topic.
My objection is linguistic: transhumanism often borrows the prestige of evolution to describe what is more precisely technological mediation. The fact that a device is worn, implanted, or integrated into a body does not by itself move it from tool-use into biological descent. The offspring still inherits the organism, not the upgrade. Technology is not heritable.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Consider rhinoplasty. Rhinoplasty changes the presented phenotype, not the inherited genotype. The child inherits the developmental instructions, not the parent’s post-surgical edit. Likewise, a neural implant, prosthetic limb, exoskeleton, gene-unrelated enhancement, or titanium jaw of techno-vanity may alter the lived organism, but it does not thereby alter the reproductive line. This is the category error: Acquired modification is mistaken for inherited transformation.
So, transhumanism often confuses the edited encounter-profile of an organism with the evolutionary alteration of the organismic lineage. The rhinoplasty case is good because it shows the absurdity without needing much apparatus. No one sane thinks a nose job rewrites the germline. Yet when the modification is sufficiently glamorous, especially when welded to futurist rhetoric and venture-capital incense, people suddenly start talking as if augmentation equals evolution.
A prosthesis is to evolution what rhinoplasty is to heredity: a modification of presentation, function, or encounter, not a transformation of descent. The confusion arises when the altered individual is mistaken for an altered lineage.
The question isn’t: Can transhumanism be defended under some broader theory of evolution, cultural inheritance, niche construction, or techno-biological co-development? Sure, it can.
But my claim is narrower: The term evolution is being made to do illicit rhetorical work when acquired, engineered, prosthetic, or embedded modifications are spoken of as though they were equivalent to heritable biological transformation.
The problem is that we are sliding from tool-use to augmentation to enhancement to transformation to evolution. This move isn’t illegal, but it should attract your attention.
At each step, something plausible is smuggled into something grander. By the end, an implanted device or technical prosthesis has been rhetorically promoted into ‘the next stage of human evolution’, when what has actually happened is that an organism’s encounter-capacities have been modified by artefactual mediation.
In the end, I’m not claiming that transhumanist practices can’t affect selection environments, social organisation, embodiment, or cultural transmission. What I am claiming is that calling such practices evolution without specifying the relevant register is a linguistic inflation. It trades on the authority of biological evolution while often describing technological mediation, individual augmentation, or cultural change.
In my book, more accurate terms might be augmentation, prosthesis, mediation, tool evolution, cultural inheritance, or niche modification, but these re so glamorous or click-baity. I might as well wear a hat and call myself post-human.
I chatted up ChatGPT, so I am adding this response:
Exactly. The carried / worn / embedded distinction is mostly a boundary fetish, the sort of thing humans adore because skin looks like an ontological border and apparently everyone remains impressed by packaging.
An axe, spectacles, a pacemaker, a cochlear implant, a smartphone, and a neural implant all sit on the same broad continuum: external mediation of capacity. Some are held. Some are worn. Some are surgically installed. But unless the alteration becomes heritable, it is not biological evolution in the strict sense. It is phenotypic augmentation, affordance expansion, or environmental coupling.
The useful distinction is threefold:
Biological evolution Heritable variation changes across generations. The organism-line changes.
Cultural / technological evolution Tools, techniques, designs, institutions, and practices vary, are selected, retained, modified, and transmitted. Axe technology evolves. Writing evolves. Surgery evolves. The appalling human habit of calling every interface “intuitive” also evolves, though downward.
Individual augmentation A particular body-system gains capacities through artefacts. This may change what the organism can do, but it does not by itself alter the inherited biological line.
Your axe example is clean because it exposes the smuggling. The axe helped alter human selection environments. It extended reach, force, food access, defence, craft, and perhaps social organisation. That may feed into gene-culture co-evolution over long scales. But the axe itself is not an evolved human trait. It is a technological mediator that participates in the evolutionary ecology.
The same holds for transhumanist implants. A retinal implant may alter one person’s perceptual affordance field. A brain-computer interface may alter one person’s control loop. A prosthetic limb may alter one person’s mobility. But unless such modifications become transmissible across generations, biologically or through some stable reproductive architecture, calling them “evolution” is loose metaphor masquerading as profundity. Very on-brand for techno-utopianism: rename engineering as destiny and hope the grant reviewers are sleepy.
From your MEOW angle, the better formulation is:
The relevant transformation is not evolutionary but mediational. Tools, prostheses, implants, and interfaces reconfigure encounter-events by altering the affordance structure through which an organism meets constraint. Whether the device is carried in the hand, worn on the face, implanted beneath the skin, or networked through the environment is secondary. The organism-world relation changes; the inherited organism does not necessarily change.
That also lets you avoid an overcorrection. Transhumanist enhancement is not irrelevant. It may be historically enormous. But its primary register is encounter, not inheritance; mediation, not mutation; technical lineage, not biological descent.
So the blunt line is:
Transhumanism mistakes the evolution of tools for the evolution of the tool-user.
Not always, not necessarily, but often enough that the slogan deserves being dragged into the alley and relieved of its metaphysical wallet.
People say that LLMs don’t have a sense of humour. That may be true, but I feel it’s closer to humour on the spectrum – no offence for the analogy. After a chat about language competency that drifted into musical competency, out conversation ended thusly.
More diversion, leaning toward pedantic. I need to learn the correct way rather than fall back on ‘native people do this all the time’ excuse. Besides, as a non-native writer, I’d expect less forgiveness, though I think there may be two channels of forgiveness in play.
18:31
Yes, two distinct channels, and they cut in opposite directions.
The first is the non-native allowance — errors read as learner errors rather than carelessness, which tends to attract correction rather than judgment. A missing accent or a wrong tense from a foreigner signals incomplete acquisition, not laziness, and native speakers generally calibrate their response accordingly. Laeticia’s ce n’est pas grave energy, essentially.
The second is the literate foreigner premium — which is almost the inverse. A non-native writer who is mostly correct gets held to a higher implicit standard than a native writer dashing off a text, because the very correctness signals that you’re operating in a formal register, even when you’re not intending to. One slip in otherwise clean French reads as a mistake where the same slip in a native’s casual message reads as style. You’ve essentially opted into a higher tier by being good enough to be there.
Your position is particularly exposed to the second channel, given that your French reading is already at roughly B1 and your written production is analytically driven and careful. The errors you make won’t look like a tourist’s — they’ll look like anomalies in otherwise competent prose, which draws more attention not less.
And frankly, your own standards are probably the binding constraint anyway. The philosopher of language who built a career on precision in signification is not going to be comfortable hiding behind natives do it too. That excuse requires a certain insouciance you don’t appear to have packed.
I recall decades ago taking guitar lessons – always lessons – and I was working on a piece with a solo. To me, it sounded close enough; to my instructor, one would think he imagined my playing whilst wearing mittens.
18:33
Ha. The instructor’s ear and the student’s ear are simply not the same instrument yet — you’re hearing the gestalt, he’s hearing every individual note against what it should be. “Close enough” is a category that doesn’t exist for someone who has already compiled the piece to fluency. The mittens were entirely audible to him.
It’s actually a clean analogy for where you are with French. Your reading comprehension is good enough that you’re hearing your own written output at roughly the right level — the meaning lands, the structure is recognisable, the register is approximately right. But Laeticia, or a DELF examiner, is hearing the mittens: the tense that contradicts the intention, the dangling comme, the á where à should be.
The further irony is that the guitar analogy runs deeper than it first appears. You identified the compiled/declarative distinction yourself — knowing the piece intellectually versus having it in the fingers. Your French grammar is largely in the analytical channel, which means you can catch errors given time and attention, but under production pressure the fingers default to habit. The wrong dead key. The passé composé because it’s the tense you’ve drilled most.
The mittens come off with time, but they come off unevenly — and the last few fingers take the longest.
Call me Harrison Bergeron.
18:34
Ha. Handicapped by your own analytical overdevelopment. The very apparatus that makes you good at understanding French is the dead weight bolted to the fluent production you’re trying to achieve.
Vonnegut would appreciate the specific cruelty of it — your particular handicap isn’t random, it’s precisely calibrated to your strength. The philosopher of language, hobbled by language.
The essay is another attempt to articulate and explore my notion of ontological grammar and attendant commitments. Essentially, I am stress testing the boundaries and applications. Comments and enquiries are welcome here or there – even on the podcast, especially Spotify.
Philosophics 