Socio-political philosophical musings
Ok. I admit this is an expansive claim, but I write about the limitations on generative artificial intelligence relative to writers. I wrote this after encountering several Reddit responses by writers who totally misunderstand how AI works. They won’t read this, but you might want to.
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
— Oscar Wilde
Identity is an illusion—but a necessary one. It’s a shortcut. A heuristic, evolved not for truth but for coherence. We reduce ourselves and others to fixed traits to preserve continuity—psychological, social, narrative.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic. (Spotify)
But what if continuity is a lie?
In the latest post on RidleyPark.blog, we meet Sarah—a woman who survives by splintering. She has three names, three selves, three economies of interaction. Each persona—Sarah, Stacey, and Pink—fulfils a role. Each protects her in a system that punishes complexity.
And yet, this isn’t fiction. It’s reality intensified.
Cognitive science suggests that we don’t possess a self—we perform one. Our so-called identity is assembled post-hoc from memory, context, and social cues. It’s recursive. It’s inferred.
We are not indivisible atoms of identity. We are bundled routines, personae adapted to setting and audience.
This is not pathology. It’s strategy.
In Needle’s Edge, Sarah doesn’t use aliases to deceive. She uses them to survive contradictions:
Each persona comes with scripts, limitations, and permissions. Sarah isn’t being dishonest. She’s practicing domain-specific identity. This is no different from how professionals code-switch at work, or how people self-edit on social media.
It’s just more raw. More urgent. Less optional.
In character development, we often demand “depth,” by which we mean contradiction. We want to see a character laugh and break. Love and lie. But Sarah shows us that contradiction isn’t depth—it’s baseline reality. Any singular identity would be a narrative failure.
Characters like Sarah expose the poverty of reduction. They resist archetype. They remind us that fiction succeeds when it reflects the multiple, the shifting, the incompatible—which is to say, the real.
For a concrete, narrative reflection of these ideas, this post on RidleyPark.blog explores how one woman carries three selves to survive three worlds—and what it costs her.
I don’t like most of Jordan Peterson’s positions. There – I’ve said it. The man, once ubiquitous, seems to have faded into the woodwork, though no doubt his disciples still cling to his every word as if he were a modern-day oracle. But recently, I caught a clip of him online, and it dredged up the same bad taste, like stumbling upon an old, forgotten sandwich at the back of the fridge.
Let’s be clear. My distaste for Peterson isn’t rooted in petty animosity. It’s because his material is, in my view, derivative and wrong. And by wrong, I mean I disagree with him – a subtle distinction, but an important one. There’s nothing inherently shameful about being derivative. We all are, to some extent. No thinker sprouts fully-formed from the head of Zeus. The issue is when you’re derivative and act as if you’ve just split the atom of human insight.
Peterson tips his hat to Nietzsche – fair enough – but buries his far greater debt to Jung under layers of self-mythologising. He parades his ideas before audiences, many of whom lack the background to spot the patchwork, and gaslights them into believing they’re witnessing originality. They’re not. They’re witnessing a remixed greatest-hits album, passed off as a debut.
Now, I get it. My ideas, too, are derivative. Sometimes it’s coincidence – great minds and all that – but when I trace the thread back to its source, I acknowledge it. Nietzsche? Subjectivity of morality. Foucault? Power dynamics. Wittgenstein? The insufficiency of language. I owe debts to many more: Galen Strawson, Richard Rorty, Raymond Geuss – the list goes on, and I’d gladly share my ledger. But Peterson? The man behaves as though he invented introspection.
And when I say I disagree, let’s not confuse that with some claim to divine epistemic certainty. I don’t mean he’s objectively wrong (whatever that means in the grand circus of philosophy). I mean, I disagree. If I did, well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we? That’s the tragicomedy of epistemology: so many positions, so little consensus.
But here’s where my patience truly snaps: Peterson’s prescriptivism. His eagerness to spew what I see as bad ideology dressed up as universal truth. Take his stance on moral objectivism—possibly his most egregious sin. He peddles this as if morality were some Platonic form, gleaming and immutable, rather than what it is: a human construct, riddled with contingency and contradiction.
And let’s not even get started on his historical and philosophical cherry-picking. His commentary on postmodern thought alone is a masterclass in either wilful misreading or, more likely, not reading at all. Straw men abound. Bogeymen are conjured, propped up, and ritually slaughtered to rapturous applause. It’s intellectually lazy and, frankly, beneath someone of his ostensible stature.
I can only hope we’ve seen the last of this man in the public sphere. And if not? Well, may he at least reform his ways—though I shan’t be holding my breath.
Few philosophical thought experiments have managed to torment empiricists quite like Molyneux’s problem. First posed by William Molyneux to John Locke in 1688 (published in Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding), the question is deceptively simple:
If a person born blind, who has learned to distinguish a cube from a sphere by touch, were suddenly granted sight, could they, without touching the objects, correctly identify which is the cube and which is the sphere by sight alone?
I was inspired to write this article in reaction to Jonny Thmpson’s post on Philosophy Minis, shared below for context.
Locke, ever the champion of sensory experience as the foundation of knowledge, gave a confident empiricist’s answer: no. For Locke, ideas are the products of sensory impressions, and each sense provides its own stream of ideas, which must be combined and associated through experience. The newly sighted person, he argued, would have no prior visual idea of what a cube or sphere looks like, only tactile ones; they would need to learn anew how vision maps onto the world.
This puzzle has persisted through centuries precisely because it forces us to confront the assumptions at the heart of empiricism: that all knowledge derives from sensory experience and that our senses, while distinct, can somehow cohere into a unified understanding of the world.
Before we dismantle the cube further, let’s sweep some conceptual debris out of the way. Empiricism is the view that knowledge comes primarily (or exclusively) through sensory experience. It stands opposed to rationalism, which argues for the role of innate ideas or reason independent of sense experience.
Epistemology, the grandiloquent term for the study of knowledge, concerns itself with questions like: What is knowledge? How is it acquired? Can we know anything with certainty?
And then there is the spectre of a priori knowledge – that which is known independent of experience. A mathematical truth (e.g., 2 + 2 = 4) is often cited as a classic a priori case. Molyneux’s problem challenges empiricists because it demands an account of how ideas from one sensory modality (touch) might map onto another (vision) without prior experience of the mapping—an a priori leap, if you will.
While Molyneux and Locke framed this as an epistemological riddle, we can unmask it as something more insidious: a failure of language correspondence. The question presumes that the labels “cube” and “sphere” – tied in the blind person’s mind to tactile experiences – would, or should, carry over intact to the new visual experiences. But this presumption smuggles in a linguistic sleight of hand.
The word “cube” for the blind person means a specific configuration of tactile sensations: edges, vertices, flat planes. The word “sphere” means smoothness, unbroken curvature, no edges. These are concepts anchored entirely in touch. When vision enters the fray, we expect these words to transcend modalities – to leap from the tactile to the visual, as if their meanings were universal tokens rather than context-bound markers. The question is not merely: can the person see the cube? but rather: can the person’s tactile language map onto the visual world without translation or recalibration?
What Molyneux’s problem thus exposes is the assumption that linguistic labels transparently correspond to external reality, regardless of sensory apparatus. This is the mirage at the heart of Locke’s empiricism, the idea that once a word tags an object through experience, that tag is universally valid across sensory experiences. The cube and sphere aren’t just objects of knowledge; they are signs, semiotic constructs whose meaning depends on the sensory, social, and linguistic contexts in which they arise.
Molyneux’s cube reveals the cracks in the correspondence theory of language: the naïve belief that words have stable meanings that latch onto stable objects or properties in the world. In fact, the meaning of “cube” or “sphere” is as much a product of sensory context as it is of external form. The newly sighted person isn’t merely lacking visual knowledge; they are confronted with a translation problem – a semantic chasm between tactile signification and visual signification.
If, as my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis asserts, language is inadequate to fully capture and transmit experience across contexts, then Molyneux’s problem is not an oddity but an inevitability. It exposes that our conceptual frameworks are not universal keys to reality but rickety bridges between islands of sense and meaning. The cube problem is less about empiricism’s limits in epistemology and more about its blind faith in linguistic coherence.
In short, Molyneux’s cube is not simply an empirical puzzle; it is a monument to language’s failure to correspond cleanly with the world, a reminder that what we call knowledge is often just well-worn habit dressed up in linguistic finery.
Molyneux’s problem, reframed through the lens of language insufficiency, reveals that our greatest epistemic challenges are also our greatest linguistic ones. Before we can speak of knowing a cube or sphere by sight, we must reckon with the unspoken question: do our words mean what we think they mean across the changing stage of experience?
That, dear reader, is the cube that haunts empiricism still.
I’m a nihilist. Possibly always have been. But let’s get one thing straight: nihilism is not despair. That’s a slander cooked up by the Meaning Merchants – the sentimentalists and functionalists who can’t get through breakfast without hallucinating some grand purpose to butter their toast. They fear the void, so they fill it. With God. With country. With yoga.
Humans are obsessed with function. Seeing it. Creating it. Projecting it onto everything, like graffiti on the cosmos. Everything must mean something. Even nonsense gets rebranded as metaphor. Why do men have nipples? Why does a fork exist if you’re just going to eat soup? Doesn’t matter – it must do something. When we can’t find this function, we invent it.
But function isn’t discovered – it’s manufactured. A collaboration between our pattern-seeking brains and our desperate need for relevance, where function becomes fiction, where language and anthropomorphism go to copulate. A neat little fiction. An ontological fantasy. We ask, “What is the function of the human in this grand ballet of entropy and expansion?” Answer: there isn’t one. None. Nada. Cosmic indifference doesn’t write job descriptions.
And yet we prance around in lab coats and uniforms – doctors, arsonists, firemen, philosophers – playing roles in a drama no one is watching. We build professions and identities the way children host tea parties for dolls. Elaborate rituals of pretend, choreographed displays of purpose. Satisfying? Sometimes. Meaningful? Don’t kid yourself.
We’ve constructed these meaning-machines – society, culture, progress – not because they’re real, but because they help us forget that they’re not. It’s theatre. Absurdist, and often bad. But it gives us something to do between birth and decomposition.
Sisyphus had his rock. We have careers.
But let’s not confuse labour for meaning, or imagination for truth. The boulder never reaches the top, and that’s not failure. That’s the show.
So roll the stone. Build the company. Write the blog. Pour tea for Barbie. Just don’t lie to yourself about what it all means.
Because it doesn’t mean anything.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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, 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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
| Aspect | Lawson’s Position |
|---|---|
| Role of Models | Tools/metaphors for intervention, not truth |
| Truth | Not required for usefulness |
| Refinement | Models are improved for practical effectiveness |
| Reality | Fundamentally open, never fully captured by models |
| Implication | Focus on utility and adaptability, not final truth |
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.
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.
The ergonomic cage of compatibilist comfort
“You are not playing the piano. You are the piano, playing itself — then applauding.”
Compatibilists — those philosophical locksmiths determined to keep the myth of free will intact — love to say that constraint doesn’t contradict freedom. That a system can still be “free” so long as it is coherent, self-reflective, and capable of recursive evaluation.
In this view, freedom doesn’t require being uncaused — it only requires being causally integrated. You don’t need to be sovereign. You just need to be responsive.
“The pianist may not have built the piano — but she still plays it.”
It sounds lovely.
It’s also false.
This analogy fails for a simple reason: there is no pianist. No ghost in the gears. No homunculus seated behind the cortex, pulling levers and composing virtue. There is only the piano — complex, self-modulating, exquisitely tuned — but self-playing nonetheless.
The illusion of choice is merely the instrument responding to its state: to its internal wiring, environmental inputs, and the accumulated sediment of prior events. What feels like deliberation is often delay. What feels like freedom is often latency.
Ah, but what about reflection? Don’t we revise ourselves over time?
We do. But that revision is itself conditioned. You didn’t choose the capacity to reflect. You didn’t choose your threshold for introspection. If you resist a bias, it’s because you were predisposed — by some cocktail of education, temperament, or trauma — to resist it.
A thermostat that updates its own algorithm is still a thermostat.
It doesn’t become “free” by being self-correcting. It becomes better adapted. Likewise, human introspection is just adaptive determinism wearing a philosophical hat.
Compatibilists smuggle in a quieter, defanged version of freedom: not the ability to do otherwise, but the ability to behave “like yourself.”
But this is freedom in retrospect, not in action.
If all freedom means is “acting in accordance with one’s programming,” then Roombas have free will.
If we stretch the term that far, it breaks — not loudly, but with the sad elasticity of a word losing its shape.
So no — you’re not playing the piano.
You are the piano — reverberating, perhaps beautifully, to stimuli you didn’t summon and cannot evade.
What if you are not who you were — but simply what you’ve become?
Philosophics 