Category: podcast

The Disorder of Saying No

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A Polite Rebuttal to a Diagnosis I Didn’t Ask For

A dear friend — and I do mean dear, though this may be the last time they risk diagnosing me over brunch — recently suggested, with all the benevolent concern of a well-meaning inquisitor, that I might be showing signs of Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

You know the tone: “I say this with love… but have you considered that your refusal to play nicely with institutions might be clinical?”

Let’s set aside the tea and biscuits for a moment and take a scalpel to this charming little pathology. Because if ODD is a diagnosis, then I propose we start diagnosing systems — not people.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

When the Empire Diagnoses Its Rebels

Oppositional Defiant Disorder, for those blissfully unscarred by its jargon, refers to a “persistent pattern” of defiance, argumentativeness, rule-breaking, and — the pièce de résistance — resentment of authority. In other words, it is a medical label for being insufficiently obedient.

What a marvel: not only has resistance been de-politicised, it has been medicalised. The refusal to comply is not treated as an ethical stance or a contextual response, but as a defect of the self. The child (or adult) is not resisting something; they are resisting everything, and this — according to the canon — makes them sick.

One wonders: sick according to whom?

Derrida’s Diagnosis: The Binary Fetish

Jacques Derrida, of course, would waste no time in eviscerating the logic at play. ODD depends on a structural binary: compliant/defiant, healthy/disordered, rule-follower/troublemaker. But, as Derrida reminds us, binaries are not descriptive — they are hierarchies in disguise. One term is always elevated; the other is marked, marginal, suspect.

Here, “compliance” is rendered invisible — the assumed baseline, the white space on the page. Defiance is the ink that stains it. But this only works because “normal” has already been declared. The system names itself sane.

Derrida would deconstruct this self-justifying loop and note that disorder exists only in relation to an order that never justifies itself. Why must the subject submit? That’s not up for discussion. The child who asks that question is already halfway to a diagnosis.

Foucault’s Turn: Disciplinary Power and the Clinic as Court

Enter Foucault, who would regard ODD as yet another exquisite specimen in the taxonomy of control. For him, modern power is not exercised through visible violence but through the subtler mechanisms of surveillance, normalisation, and the production of docile bodies.

ODD is a textbook case of biopower — the system’s ability to define and regulate life itself through classification, diagnosis, and intervention. It is not enough for the child to behave; they must believe. They must internalise authority to the marrow. To question it, or worse, to resent it, is to reveal one’s pathology.

This is not discipline; this is soulcraft. And ODD is not a disorder — it is a symptom of a civilisation that cannot tolerate unmediated subjectivity. See Discipline & Punish.

Ivan Illich: The Compulsory Institutions of Care

Illich would call the whole charade what it is: a coercive dependency masquerading as therapeutic care. In Deschooling Society, he warns of systems — especially schools — that render people passive recipients of norms. ODD, in this light, is not a syndrome. It is the final gasp of autonomy before it is sedated.

What the diagnosis reveals is not a child in crisis, but an institution that cannot imagine education without obedience. Illich would applaud the so-called defiant child for doing the one thing schools rarely reward: thinking.

R.D. Laing: Sanity as a Political Position

Laing, too, would recognise the ruse. His anti-psychiatry position held that “madness” is often the only sane response to a fundamentally broken world. ODD is not insanity — it is sanity on fire. It is the refusal to adapt to structures that demand submission as a prerequisite for inclusion.

To quote Laing: “They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.”

ODD is what happens when a child refuses to play the game.

bell hooks: Refusal as Liberation

bell hooks, writing in Teaching to Transgress, framed the classroom as a potential site of radical transformation — if it rejects domination. The child who refuses to be disciplined is often the one who sees most clearly that the system has confused education with indoctrination.

Resistance, hooks argues, is not a flaw. It is a form of knowledge. ODD becomes, in this frame, a radical pedagogy. The defiant student is not failing — they are teaching.

Deleuze & Guattari: Desire Against the Machine

And then, should you wish to watch the diagnostic edifice melt entirely, we summon Deleuze and Guattari. For them, the psyche is not a plumbing system with blockages, but a set of desiring-machines short-circuiting the factory floor of capitalism and conformity.

ODD, to them, would be schizoanalysis in action — a body refusing to be plugged into the circuits of docility. The tantrum, the refusal, the eye-roll: these are not symptoms. They are breakdowns in the control grid.

The child isn’t disordered — the system is. The child simply noticed.

Freire: The Educated Oppressed

Lastly, Paulo Freire would ask: What kind of pedagogy demands the death of resistance? In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he warns of an education model that treats students as empty vessels. ODD, reframed, is the moment a subject insists on being more than a receptacle.

In refusing the “banking model” of knowledge, the so-called defiant child is already halfway to freedom. Freire would call this not a disorder but a moment of awakening.

Conclusion: Diagnostic Colonialism

So yes, dear friend — I am oppositional. I challenge authority, especially when it mistakes its position for truth. I argue, question, resist. I am not unwell for doing so. I am, if anything, allergic to the idea that obedience is a virtue in itself.

Let us be clear: ODD is not a mirror held up to the subject. It is a spotlight shining from the system, desperately trying to blind anyone who dares to squint.

Now, shall we talk about your compliance disorder?

Full Disclosure: I used ChatGPT for insights beyond Derrida and Foucault, two of my mainstays.

Semantic Drift: When Language Outruns the Science

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Science has a language problem. Not a lack of it – if anything, a surfeit. But words, unlike test tubes, do not stay sterile. They evolve, mutate, and metastasise. They get borrowed, bent, misused, and misremembered. And when the public discourse gets hold of them, particularly on platforms like TikTok, it’s the language that gets top billing. The science? Second lead, if it’s lucky.

Semantic drift is at the centre of this: the gradual shift in meaning of a word or phrase over time. It’s how “literally” came to mean “figuratively,” how “organic” went from “carbon-based” to “morally superior,” and how “theory” in science means robust explanatory framework but in the public square means vague guess with no homework.

In short, semantic drift lets rhetoric masquerade as reason. Once a word acquires enough connotation, you can deploy it like a spell. No need to define your terms when the vibe will do.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

When “Vitamin” No Longer Means Vitamin

Take the word vitamin. It sounds objective. Authoritative. Something codified in the genetic commandments of all living things. (reference)

But it isn’t.

A vitamin is simply a substance that an organism needs but cannot synthesise internally, and must obtain through its diet. That’s it. It’s a functional definition, not a chemical one.

So:

  • Vitamin C is a vitamin for humans, but not for dogs, cats, or goats. They make their own. We lost the gene. Tough luck.
  • Vitamin D, meanwhile, isn’t a vitamin at all. It’s a hormone, synthesised when sunlight hits your skin. Its vitamin status is a historical relic – named before we knew better, and now marketed too profitably to correct.

But in the land of TikTok and supplement shelves, these nuances evaporate. “Vitamin” has drifted from scientific designation to halo term – a linguistic fig leaf draped over everything from snake oil to ultraviolet-induced steroidogenesis.

The Rhetorical Sleight of Hand

This linguistic slippage is precisely what allows the rhetorical shenanigans to thrive.

In one video, a bloke claims a burger left out for 151 days neither moulds nor decays, and therefore, “nature won’t touch it.” From there, he leaps (with Olympic disregard for coherence) into talk of sugar spikes, mood swings, and “metabolic chaos.” You can almost hear the conspiratorial music rising.

The science here is, let’s be generous, circumstantial. But the language? Oh, the language is airtight.

Words like “processed,” “chemical,” and “natural” are deployed like moral verdicts, not descriptive categories. The implication isn’t argued – it’s assumed, because the semantics have been doing quiet groundwork for years. “Natural” = good. “Chemical” = bad. “Vitamin” = necessary. “Addiction” = no agency.

By the time the viewer blinks, they’re nodding along to a story told by words in costume, not facts in context.

The Linguistic Metabolism of Misunderstanding

This is why semantic drift isn’t just an academic curiosity – it’s a vector. A vector by which misinformation spreads, not through outright falsehood, but through weaponised ambiguity.

A term like “sugar crash” sounds scientific. It even maps onto a real physiological process: postprandial hypoglycaemia. But when yoked to vague claims about mood, willpower, and “chemical hijacking,” it becomes a meme with lab coat cosplay. And the science, if mentioned at all, is there merely to decorate the argument, not drive it.

That’s the crux of my forthcoming book, The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: that our inherited languages, designed for trade, prayer, and gossip, are woefully ill-equipped for modern scientific clarity. They lag behind our knowledge, and worse, they often distort it.

Words arrive first. Definitions come limping after.

In Closing: You Are What You Consume (Linguistically)

The real problem isn’t that TikTokers get the science wrong. The problem is that they get the words right – right enough to slip past your critical filters. Rhetoric wears the lab coat. Logic gets left in the locker room.

If vitamin C is a vitamin only for some species, and vitamin D isn’t a vitamin at all, then what else are we mislabelling in the great nutritional theatre? What other linguistic zombies are still wandering the scientific lexicon?

Language may be the best tool we have, but don’t mistake it for a mirror. It’s a carnival funhouse – distorting, framing, and reflecting what we expect to see. And until we fix that, science will keep playing second fiddle to the words pretending to explain it.

The Indexing Abyss: A Cautionary Tale in Eight Chapters

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There, I said it.

I’m almost finished with A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, the book I’ve been labouring over for what feels like the gestation period of a particularly reluctant elephant. To be clear: the manuscript is done. Written. Edited. Blessed. But there remains one final circle of publishing hell—the index.

Now, if you’re wondering how motivated I am to return to indexing, consider this: I’m writing this blog post instead. If that doesn’t scream avoidance with an airhorn, nothing will.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

I began indexing over a month ago. I made it through two chapters of eight, then promptly wandered off to write a couple of novellas. As you do. One started as a short story—famous last words—and evolved into a novella. The muse struck again. Another “short story” appeared, and like an unattended sourdough starter, it fermented into a 15,000-word novelette. Apparently, I write short stories the way Americans pour wine: unintentionally generous.

Apparently, I write short stories the way Americans pour wine: unintentionally generous.

With several unpublished manuscripts loitering on my hard drive like unemployed theatre majors, I figured it was time to release one into the wild. So I did. I published the novelette to Kindle, and just today, the paperback proof landed in my postbox like a smug little trophy.

And then, because I’m an unrepentant completionist (or a masochist—jury’s out), I thought: why not release the novella too? I’ve been told novellas and novelettes are unpopular due to “perceived value.” Apparently, people would rather buy a pound of gristle than 200 grams of sirloin. And yet, in the same breath, they claim no one has time for long books anymore. Perhaps these are different tribes of illiterates. I suppose we’ll find out.

Let’s talk logistics. Writing a book is only the beginning—and frankly, it’s the easy part. Fingers to keyboard, ideas to page. Done. I use Word, like most tragically conventional authors. Planning? Minimal. These were short stories, remember? That was the plan.

Next comes layout. Enter Adobe InDesign—because once you’ve seen what Word does to complex layouts, you never go back. Export to PDF, pray to the typographic gods, and move on.

Then there’s the cover. I lean on Illustrator and Photoshop. Photoshop is familiar, like a worn-in shoe; Illustrator is the smug cousin who turns up late but saves the day with scalable vectors. This time, I used Illustrator for the cover—lesson learnt from past pixelation traumas. Hardback to paperback conversion? A breeze when your artwork isn’t made of crayon scribbles and hope.

Covers, in case you’ve never assembled one, are ridiculous. Front. Back. Spine. Optional dust jacket if you’re feeling fancy (I wasn’t). You need titles, subtitles, your name in a legible font, and let’s not forget the barcode, which you will place correctly on the first attempt exactly never.

Unlike my first novel, where I enlisted someone with a proper design eye to handle the cover text, this time I went full minimalist. Think Scandinavian furniture catalogue meets existential despair. Classy.

Think Scandinavian furniture catalogue meets existential despair.

Once the cover and interior are done, it’s time to wrestle with the publishing platforms. Everything is automated these days—provided you follow their arcane formatting commandments, avoid forbidden fonts, and offer up your soul. Submitting each book takes about an hour, not including the time lost choosing a price that balances “undervalued labour” and “won’t scare away cheapskates.”

Want a Kindle version? That’s another workflow entirely, full of tortured formatting, broken line breaks, and wondering why your chapter headings are now in Wingdings. Audiobooks? That’s a whole other circus, with its own animals and ringmasters. Honestly, it’s no wonder authors hire publishers. Or develop drinking problems.

But I’m stubborn. Which brings us full circle.

I’ve now got two books heading for daylight, a few more waiting in the wings, and one bloody non-fiction beast that won’t see release until I finish the damn index. No pseudonym this time. No hiding. Just me, owning my sins and hoping the final product lands somewhere between “insightful” and “mercifully short.”

So yes, life may well be a journey. But indexing is the bit where the satnav breaks, the road floods, and the boot falls off the car. Give me the destination any day. The journey can fuck right off.

Sustenance: A Book About Aliens, Language, and Everything You’re Getting Wrong

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Violet aliens on a farm

So, I wrote a book and published it under Ridley Park, the pseudonym I use for fiction.

It has aliens. But don’t get excited—they’re not here to save us, probe us, or blow up the White House. They’re not even here for us.

Which is, frankly, the point.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The book’s called Sustenance, and while it’s technically speculative fiction, it’s more about us than them. Or rather, it’s about how we can’t stop making everything about us—even when it shouldn’t be. Especially when it shouldn’t be.

Let’s talk themes. And yes, we’re using that word like academics do: as a smokescreen for saying uncomfortable things abstractly.

Language: The Original Scam

Language is the ultimate colonial tool. We call it communication, but it’s mostly projection. You speak. You hope. You assume. You superimpose meaning on other people like a cling film of your own ego.

Sustenance leans into this—not by showing a breakdown of communication, but by showing what happens when communication was never mutual in the first place. When the very idea of “meaning” has no purchase. It’s not about mishearing—it’s about misbeing.

Culture: A Meme You Were Born Into

Culture is the software you didn’t choose to install, and probably can’t uninstall. Most people treat it like a universal law—until they meet someone running a different OS. Cue confusion, arrogance, or violence.

The book explores what happens when cultural norms aren’t shared, and worse, aren’t even legible. Imagine trying to enforce property rights on beings who don’t understand “ownership.” It’s like trying to baptise a toaster.

Sex/Gender: You Keep Using Those Words…

One of the quiet joys of writing non-human characters is discarding human assumptions about sex and gender—and watching readers squirm.

What if sex wasn’t about power, pleasure, or identity? What if it was just a biological procedure, like cell division or pruning roses? Would you still be interested? Would you still moralise about it?

We love to believe our sex/gender constructs are inevitable. They’re not. They’re habits—often bad ones.

Consent: Your Framework Is Showing

Consent, as we use it, assumes mutual understanding, shared stakes, and equivalent agency. Remove any one of those and what’s left?

Sustenance doesn’t try to solve this—it just shows what happens when those assumptions fall apart. Spoiler: it’s not pretty, but it is honest.

Projection: The Mirror That Lies

Humans are deeply committed to anthropocentrism. If it walks like us, or flinches like us, it must be us. This is why we get so disoriented when faced with the truly alien: it won’t dance to our tune, and we’re left staring at ourselves in the funhouse mirror.

This isn’t a book about aliens.

It’s a book about the ways we refuse to see what’s not us.

Memory: The Autobiography of Your Justifications

Memory is not a record. It’s a defence attorney with a narrative license. We rewrite the past to make ourselves look consistent, or innocent, or right.

In Sustenance, memory acts less as a tether to truth and more as a sculpting tool—a way to carve guilt into something manageable. Something you can live with. Until you can’t.

In Summary: It’s Not About Them. It’s About You.

If that sounds bleak, good. It’s meant to.

But it’s also a warning: don’t get too comfortable in your own categories. They’re only universal until you meet someone who doesn’t share them.

Like I said, it’s not really about the aliens.

It’s about us.

If you enjoy fiction that’s more unsettling than escapist, more question than answer, you might be interested in Sustenance. It’s live on Kindle now for the cost of a regrettable coffee:

📘 Sustenance on Amazon US
Also available in the UK, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL, JP, BR, CA, MX, AU, and IN—because alienation is a universal language.

On Ishiguro, Cioran, and Whatever I Think I’m Doing

Posted in fiction, identity, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Sora-generated image of Emil Cioran and Kazuo Ishiguro reading a generic book together

Having just finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, I’ve now cracked open my first taste of Cioran—History and Utopia. You might reasonably ask why. Why these two? And what, if anything, do they have in common? Better yet—what do the three of us have in common?

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Recently, I finished writing a novella titled Propensity (currently gathering metaphorical dust on the release runway). Out of curiosity—or narcissism—I fed it to AI and asked whose style it resembled. Among the usual suspects were two names I hadn’t yet read: Ishiguro and Cioran. I’d read the others and understood the links. These two, though, were unknown quantities. So I gave them a go.

Ishiguro is perhaps best known for The Remains of the Day, which, like Never Let Me Go, got the Hollywood treatment. I chose the latter, arbitrarily. I even asked ChatGPT to compare both books with their cinematic counterparts. The AI was less than charitable, describing Hollywood’s adaptations as bastardised and bowdlerised—flattened into tidy narratives for American palates too dim to digest ambiguity. On this, we agree.

What struck me about Never Let Me Go was its richly textured mundanity. That’s apparently where AI saw the resemblance to Propensity. I’m not here to write a book report—partly because I detest spoilers, and partly because summaries miss the point. It took about seven chapters before anything ‘happened’, and then it kept happening. What had at first seemed like a neurotic, wandering narrative from the maddeningly passive Kathy H. suddenly hooked me. The reveals began to unfold. It’s a book that resists retelling. It demands firsthand experience. A vibe. A tone. A slow, aching dread.

Which brings me neatly to Cioran.

History and Utopia is a collection of essays penned in French (not his mother tongue, but you’d never guess it) while Cioran was holed up in postwar Paris. I opted for the English translation—unapologetically—and was instantly drawn in. His prose? Electric. His wit? Acidic. If Ishiguro was a comparison of style, then Cioran was one of spirit. Snark, pessimism, fatalistic shrugs toward civilisation—finally, someone speaking my language.

Unlike the cardboard cut-outs of Cold War polemics we get from most Western writers of the era, Cioran’s take is layered, uncomfortably self-aware, and written by someone who actually fled political chaos. There’s no naïve idealism here, no facile hero-villain binaries. Just a deeply weary intellect peering into the abyss and refusing to blink. It’s not just what he says, but the tone—the curled-lip sneer at utopian pretensions and historical self-delusions. If I earned even a drop of that comparison, I’ll take it.

Both Ishiguro and Cioran delivered what I didn’t know I needed: the reminder that some writers aren’t there to tell you a story. They’re there to infect you with an atmosphere. An idea. A quiet existential panic you can’t shake.

I’ve gotten what I came for from these two, though I suspect I’ll be returning, especially to Cioran. Philosophically, he’s my kind of bastard. I doubt this’ll be my last post on his work.

“Trust the Science,” They Said. “It’s Reproducible,” They Lied.

Posted in modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, science, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

—On Epistemology, Pop Psychology, and the Cult of Empirical Pretence

Science, we’re told, is the beacon in the fog – a gleaming lighthouse of reason guiding us through the turbulent seas of superstition and ignorance. But peer a bit closer, and the lens is cracked, the bulb flickers, and the so-called lighthouse keeper is just some bloke on TikTok shouting about gut flora and intermittent fasting.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

We are creatures of pattern. We impose order. We mistake correlation for causation, narrative for truth, confidence for knowledge. What we have, in polite academic parlance, is an epistemology problem. What we call science is often less Newton and more Nostradamus—albeit wearing a lab coat and wielding a p-hacked dataset.

Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit—the rotting mango of modern inquiry: nutritional science, which is to actual science what alchemy is to chemistry, or vibes are to calculus. We study food the way 13th-century monks studied demons: through superstition, confirmation bias, and deeply committed guesswork. Eat fat, don’t eat fat. Eat eggs, don’t eat eggs. Eat only between the hours of 10:00 and 14:00 under a waxing moon while humming in Lydian mode. It’s a cargo cult with chia seeds.

But why stop there? Let’s put the whole scientific-industrial complex on the slab.

Psychology: The Empirical Astrological Society

Psychology likes to think it’s scientific. Peer-reviewed journals, statistical models, the odd brain scan tossed in for gravitas. But at heart, much of it is pop divination, sugar-dusted for mass consumption. The replication crisis didn’t merely reveal cracks – it bulldozed entire fields. The Stanford Prison Experiment? A theatrical farce. Power poses? Empty gestural theatre. Half of what you read in Psychology Today could be replaced with horoscopes and no one would notice.

Medical Science: Bloodletting, But With Better Branding

Now onto medicine, that other sacred cow. We tend to imagine it as precise, data-driven, evidence-based. In practice? It’s a Byzantine fusion of guesswork, insurance forms, and pharmaceutical lobbying. As Crémieux rightly implies, medicine’s predictive power is deeply compromised by overfitting, statistical fog, and a staggering dependence on non-replicable clinical studies, many funded by those who stand to profit from the result.

And don’t get me started on epidemiology, that modern priesthood that speaks in incantations of “relative risk” and “confidence intervals” while changing the commandments every fortnight. If nutrition is theology, epidemiology is exegesis.

The Reproducibility Farce

Let us not forget the gleaming ideal: reproducibility, that cornerstone of Enlightenment confidence. The trouble is, in field after field—from economics to cancer biology—reproducibility is more aspiration than reality. What we actually get is a cacophony of studies no one bothers to repeat, published to pad CVs, p-hacked into publishable shape, and then cited into canonical status. It’s knowledge by momentum. We don’t understand the world. We just retweet it.

What, Then, Is To Be Done?

Should we become mystics? Take up tarot and goat sacrifice? Not necessarily. But we should strip science of its papal robes. We should stop mistaking publication for truth, consensus for accuracy, and method for epistemic sanctity. The scientific method is not the problem. The pretence that it’s constantly being followed is.

Perhaps knowledge doesn’t have a half-life because of progress, but because it was never alive to begin with. We are not disproving truth; we are watching fictions expire.

Closing Jab

Next time someone says “trust the science,” ask them: which bit? The part that told us margarine was manna? The part that thought ulcers were psychosomatic? The part that still can’t explain consciousness, but is confident about your breakfast?

Science is a toolkit. But too often, it’s treated like scripture. And we? We’re just trying to lose weight while clinging to whatever gospel lets us eat more cheese.

Unwilling Steelman, Part V

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A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning. This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.

You Cannot Originate Yourself

The causa sui argument, and the final collapse of moral responsibility

“If you cannot cause yourself, you cannot cause your choices.
And if you cannot cause your choices, you cannot own them.”

Audio: NotenookLM podcast on this topic.

Everything until now has pointed to erosion:

  • Your choices are state-dependent.
  • Your identity is cumulative, not authored.
  • Your evaluations are judged by compromised observers.

But here, finally, we strike at the bedrock.

It isn’t merely that you are manipulated.
It isn’t merely that you are misperceived.
It’s that you never could have been free, even in theory.

Because you did not make yourself.

The Causa Sui Problem

To be ultimately morally responsible, you must be the origin of who you are.

  • You must have chosen your disposition.
  • You must have selected your values.
  • You must have designed your will.

But you didn’t.

You emerged:

  • With a particular genetic cocktail.
  • Into a particular historical moment.
  • Through particular developmental experiences.
  • With particular neurological quirks and vulnerabilities.

And at no point did you step outside yourself to say:

“I would like to be this kind of agent, with this kind of character.”

You were thrown — as Heidegger might say — into a situation not of your choosing, with equipment you didn’t request, subject to pressures you couldn’t anticipate.

And everything you think of as “yours” — your courage, your laziness, your generosity, your rage — is the unfolding of that original unchosen situation.

No Escape via Reflexivity

Some will protest:

“But I can reflect! I can change myself!”

But this, too, is a mirage.

Because:

  • The desire to reflect is conditioned.
  • The capacity to reflect is conditioned.
  • The courage to act on reflection is conditioned.

You didn’t author your ability to self-correct.
You simply inherited it — like a river inheriting a particular gradient.

Even your rebellion is written in your blueprint.

Freedom by Degrees Is Not Freedom

The compatibilist fallback — that freedom is just “acting according to oneself” — collapses under causa sui.

Because the self that acts was never authored. It was configured by prior causes.

If you cannot be the cause of yourself,
then you cannot be the cause of your actions in any ultimate sense.

Thus:

  • No ultimate credit for your virtues.
  • No ultimate blame for your vices.
  • Only causal flow, chemical procession, narrative stitching after the fact.

The criminal and the saint are both unlucky configurations of biology and circumstance.

TL;DR: No Self, No Sovereignty

  • To be responsible, you must be causa sui — the cause of yourself.
  • You are not.
  • Therefore, you are not ultimately responsible for your actions.
  • Therefore, free will — as traditionally imagined — does not exist.

There is choice.
But there is no chooser behind the choice.
Only the momentum of prior conditions, impersonating agency.

Series Summary: Unwilling Steelmen

A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy

What remains, if not free will?
Something perhaps stranger — and possibly, more humane:

A universe of actors who deserve understanding, but not blame.
Compassion, but not judgment.
Help, but not hagiography.

Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Broken

Posted in consciousness, intelligence, language, maths, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, scienceTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Rather than recreate a recent post on my business site, LinkedIn.

(Warning: contains traces of logic, satire, and uncomfortable truths. But you knew that.)

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on the linked topic.

It’s just refusing to cosplay as your idealised fantasy of “human” cognition.

While pundits at the Wall Street Journal lament that AI thinks with “bags of heuristics” instead of “true models,” they somehow forget that humans themselves are kludged-together Rube Goldberg disasters, lurching from cognitive bias to logical fallacy with astonishing grace.

In my latest piece, I take a flamethrower to the myth of human intellectual purity, sketch a real roadmap for modular AI evolution, and suggest (only partly in jest) that the machines are becoming more like us every day — messy, contradictory, and disturbingly effective.

Let’s rethink what “thinking” actually means. Before the machines do it for us.

Unwilling Steelman, Part IV

Posted in free will, identity, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, realityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning. This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on the topic.

“It’s not just that you’re a hallucination of yourself.
It’s that everyone else is hallucinating you, too — through their own fog.”

The Feedback Loop of False Selves

You are being judged — by others who are also compromised

If you are a chemically modulated, state-dependent, narrativising automaton, then so is everyone who evaluates you. The moral courtroom — society, the law, the dinner table — is just a gathering of biased systems confidently misreading each other.

We are taught to believe in things like:

  • “Good character”
  • “Knowing someone”
  • “Getting a read on people”

But these are myths of stability, rituals of judgment, and cognitive vanity projects. There is no fixed you — and there is no fixed them to do the judging.

Judging the Snapshot, Not the Self

Let’s say you act irritable. Or generous. Or quiet.
An observer sees this and says:

“That’s who you are.”

But which version of you are they observing?

  • The you on two hours of sleep?
  • The you on SSRIs?
  • The you grieving, healing, adjusting, masking?

They don’t know. They don’t ask.
They just flatten the moment into character.

One gesture becomes identity.
One expression becomes essence.

This isn’t judgment.
It’s snapshot essentialism — moral conclusion by convenience.

The Observer Is No Less Biased

Here’s the darker truth: they’re compromised, too.

  • If they’re stressed, you’re rude.
  • If they’re lonely, you’re charming.
  • If they’re hungry, you’re annoying.

What they’re perceiving is not you — it’s their current chemistry’s reaction to your presentation, filtered through their history, memory, mood, and assumptions.

It’s not a moral lens.
It’s a funhouse mirror, polished with certainty.

Mutual Delusion in a Moral Marketplace

The tragedy is recursive:

  • You act based on internal constraints.
  • They judge based on theirs.
  • Then you interpret their reaction… and adjust accordingly.
  • And they, in turn, react to your adjustment…

And on it goes — chemical systems calibrating against each other, mistaking interaction for insight, familiarity for truth, coherence for character.

Identity isn’t formed.
It’s inferred, then reinforced.
By people who have no access to your internal states and no awareness of their own.

The Myth of the Moral Evaluator

This has massive implications:

  • Justice assumes objectivity.
  • Culture assumes shared moral standards.
  • Relationships assume “knowing” someone.

But all of these are built on the fantasy that moral evaluation is accurate, stable, and earned.

It is not.

It is probabilistic, state-sensitive, and mutually confabulatory.

You are being judged by the weather inside someone else’s skull.

TL;DR: Everyone’s Lying to Themselves About You

  • You behave according to contingent states.
  • Others judge you based on their own contingent states.
  • Both of you invent reasons to justify your interpretations.
  • Neither of you has access to the full picture.
  • The result is a hall of mirrors with no ground floor.

So no — you’re not “being seen.”
You’re being misread, reinterpreted, and categorised
— by people who are also misreading themselves.

📅 Coming Tomorrow

You Cannot Originate Yourself

The causa sui argument, and the final collapse of moral responsibility.

The Emperor’s New Models: Box, Lawson, and the Death of Truth

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We live in an age intoxicated by models: climate models, economic models, epidemiological models, cosmological models—each one an exquisite confection of assumptions draped in a lab coat and paraded as gospel. Yet if you trace the bloodline of model-building back through the annals of intellectual history, you encounter two figures who coldly remind us of the scam: George Box and Hilary Lawson.

Box: The Gentle Assassin of Certainty

George Box, the celebrated statistician, is often credited with the aphorism: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” However, Box himself never uttered this precise phrase. What he did say, in his 1976 paper Science and Statistics, was:

“Since all models are wrong, the scientist must be alert to what is importantly wrong.”

George Box

The “some are useful” flourish was added later by a public desperate to sweeten the bitter pill. Nevertheless, Box deserves credit for the lethal insight: no model, however elegant, perfectly captures reality. They are provisional guesses, finger-paintings smeared across the rough surface of the unknown.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Lawson: The Arsonist Who Burned the Map

Hilary Lawson, contemporary philosopher and author of Closure: A Story of Everything, drags Box’s modest scepticism into full-blown philosophical insurrection. In a recent lecture, Lawson declared:

“You don’t need truth to have a usable model.”

Hilary Lawson

Where Box warns us the emperor’s clothes don’t fit, Lawson points out that the emperor himself is a paper doll. Either way, we dress our ignorance in equations and hope no one notices the draft.

Lawson’s view is grim but clarifying: models are not mere approximations of some Platonic truth. They are closures—temporary, pragmatic structures we erect to intervene effectively in a world we will never fully comprehend. Reality, in Lawson’s framing, is an “openness”: endlessly unfolding, resistant to total capture.

The Case of the Celestial Spheres

Take Aristotle’s model of celestial spheres. Ludicrous? Yes. Obsolete? Absolutely. Yet for centuries, it allowed navigators to chart courses, astrologers to cast horoscopes, and priests to intimidate peasants—all without the slightest whiff of heliocentrism. A model does not need to be right; it merely needs to be operational.

Our modern theories—Big Bang cosmology, dark matter, and quantum gravity—may well be tomorrow’s celestial spheres: charming relics of ignorance that nonetheless built bridges, cured diseases, and sold mobile phones.

Summary Table: Lawson’s View on Models and Truth

AspectLawson’s Position
Role of ModelsTools/metaphors for intervention, not truth
TruthNot required for usefulness
RefinementModels are improved for practical effectiveness
RealityFundamentally open, never fully captured by models
ImplicationFocus on utility and adaptability, not final truth

Conclusion

Box taught us to distrust the fit of our models; Lawson reminds us there is no true body underneath them. If truth is a ghost, then our models are ghost stories—and some ghost stories, it turns out, are very good at getting us through the night.

We are left not with certainty, but with craftsmanship: the endless, imperfect art of refining our closures, knowing full well they are lies that work. Better lies. Usable lies. And perhaps, in a world without final answers, that is the most honest position of all.