I’ve been thinking through dozens of use cases to explain how some polemic positions are intractable via language. When they are resolved through power, at least one ontological cohort is left wanting. In a compromise, likely both sides feel they’ve lost.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of the video transcript for this topic.
I’ll post a separate announcement presently, but I want to share my new Legibility GPT to assess concepts for ontological and grammatical commensurability.
In conventional (read: orthodox Enlightenment thinking), communication and negotiation are supposed to bring groups together. This is only true for intra-ontological conflict; it’s never been true for inter-ontological issues. There are edge cases where differing ontologies might be satisfied with an inter-ontological agreement, but this is likely accidental and certainly differently motivated. Not all such disagreements can be mediated, and this is where power politics steps in โ not to ameliorate but to force the matter. This happens in politics, law, and many other power-oriented domains.
NotebookLM Infographic: No idea why this is formatted like this.
As the publication date of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH) draws nearer, I feel it’s a good time to promote it (obviously) and to introduce some of the problems it uncovers โ including common misperceptions I’ve already heard. Through this feedback, I now understand some of the underlying structural limitations that I hadn’t considered, but this only strengthens my position. As I state at the start of the book, the LIH isn’t a cast-in-stone artefact. Other discoveries will inevitably be made. For now, consider it a way to think about the deficiencies of language, around which remediation strategies can be developed.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.
Letโs clear the undergrowth first. The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is not concerned with everyday ambiguity, garden-variety polysemy, or the sort of misunderstandings that vanish the moment someone bothers to supply five seconds of context. That terrain is already well-mapped, thoroughly fenced, and frankly dull.
Take the classic sort of example wheeled out whenever someone wants to sound clever without doing much work:
‘I made a 30-foot basket’.
Video: a woman making a large basket
If youโre a basketweaver, you picture an absurdly large basket and quietly question the makerโs life choices. If youโre watching basketball, you hear ‘score’. If youโre anywhere near the context in which the sentence was uttered, the meaning is obvious. If it isnโt, the repair cost is trivial. Add context, move on, live your life.
Language did not fail here. It merely waited for its coat. This is not the sort of thing the LIH loses sleep over.
The Groucho Marx Defence, or: Syntax Is Not the Problem
Logicians and armchair philosophers love to reach for jokes like Groucho Marxโs immortal line:
‘I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. Why it was wearing my pyjamas, Iโll never know’.
Video: A man and elephant in pyjamas (no sound)
Yes, very funny. Yes, the sentence allows for a syntactic misreading. No, nobody actually believes the elephant was lounging about in striped silk. The humour works precisely because the โwrongโ parse is momentarily entertained and instantly rejected.
Again, language is not insufficient here. Itโs mischievous. Thereโs a difference.
If the LIH were worried about this sort of thing, its ambitions would be indistinguishable from an undergraduate logic textbook with better branding.
Banks, Rivers, and the Myth of Constant Confusion
Likewise, when someone in a city says, ‘I went to the bank’, no sane listener imagines them strolling along a riverbank, unless they are already knee-deep in pastoral fantasy or French tourism brochures. Context does the heavy lifting. It almost always does.
Video: Rare footage of me trying to withdraw funds at my bank (no sound)
This is not a crisis of meaning. This is language functioning exactly as advertised.
Where the Trouble Actually Starts: Contestables
The LIH begins where these tidy examples stop being helpful. It concerns itself with Contestables: terms like truth, freedom, justice, fairness, harm, equality. Words that look stable, behave politely in sentences, and then detonate the moment you ask two people what they actually mean by them. These are not ambiguous in the casual sense. They are structurally contested.
In political, moral, and cultural contexts, different groups use the same word to gesture at fundamentally incompatible conceptual frameworks, all while assuming a shared understanding that does not exist. The conversation proceeds as if there were common ground, when in fact there is only overlap in spelling.
Thatโs why attempts to ‘define’ these terms so often collapse into accusation:
Thatโs not what freedom means. Thatโs not real justice. Youโre redefining truth.
No, the definitions were never shared in the first place. The disagreement was smuggled in with the noun.
‘Just Ignore the Word’ Is Not a Rescue
A common response at this point is to suggest that we simply bypass the troublesome term and discuss the concrete features each party associates with it. Fine. Sensible. Often productive. But notice what this manoeuvre concedes. It does not save the term. It abandons it.
If meaningful discussion can only proceed once the word is set aside and replaced with a list of clarifications, constraints, examples, and exclusions, then the word has already failed at its primary job: conveying shared meaning. This is precisely the point the LIH is making.
The insufficiency is not that language is vague, or flexible, or context-sensitive. Itโs that beyond a certain level of conceptual complexity, language becomes a confidence trick. It gives us the feeling of agreement without the substance, the appearance of communication without the transaction.
At that point, words donโt merely underperform. They mislead.
I shared this post not too long ago. Today, I shared it in a different context, but I feel is interesting โ because I feel that many things are interesting, especially around language and communication.
Ocrampal shared a link to an article debating whether we are cold or have cold. Different cultures express this differently. It’s short. Read it on his site.
Audio: Exceptional NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I replied to the post:
Nicely observed. I’ve pondered this myself. Small linguistic tweak: between รชtre and avoir, avoir already behaves better metaphysically, but sentir seems the cleanest fit. Cold isnโt something one is or has so much as something one senses โ a relational encounter rather than an ontological state or possession.
Between having and being, having is the lesser sin โ but sensing/feeling feels truer. Cold belongs to the world; we merely sense it.
He replied in turn:
Agree except for: “Cold belongs to the world”. That is a metaphysical assumption that has consequences …
Finally (perhaps, penultimately), I responded:
Yes, it does. That statement was idiomatic, to express that ‘cold’ is environmental; we can’t be it or possess it. Coincidentally, I recently wrote about ‘cold’ in a different context:
A more verbose version of this response might have been:
This pushback is fair, but Iโm not trying to re-ontologise cold. โBelongs to the worldโ in that context is doing rhetorical, not metaphysical, work; it’s idiomatic.
The point isnโt that cold is a mind-independent substance waiting around like a rock. Itโs that whatever cold is, it doesnโt sit comfortably as an identity predicate (‘I amโฆcold’ โ ‘J’aiโฆfroid‘) or a possession (‘I haveโฆcold’ โ so, not ‘Je suisโฆfroid‘) โ neither to be confused with ‘I have a cold’, a different animal altogether.
‘Sensing’ (‘I feelโฆcold’ โ ‘Je me sensโฆfroid‘ โ we have to use the reflexive pronoun, me, here; in English, this syntax has been deprecated) keeps the relation explicit without smuggling in ownership or essence. It leaves cold as an encounter-property, not a thing I contain and not a thing I am.
If anything, that phrasing was meant to resist metaphysical inflation, not commit to it.
And this is exactly the problem I gestured at in the aliens piece. We mistake familiar grammatical scaffolding for shared metaphysics. We assume that if the sentence parses cleanly, the ontology must be sound.
Language doesnโt just describe experience. It quietly files it into categories and then acts surprised when those categories start making demands.
Cold, like aliens, exposes the trick. The moment you slow down, the grammar starts to wobble. And that wobble is doing far more philosophical work than most of our declarative sentences are willing to admit.
I am a philosopher of language. That is typically my primary perspective, so communication and limitations often fall into my sights. I believe that not all disagreements can be resolved through language communication. This illustrates one barrier in particular.
This essay is not an attempt to resolve disagreement, adjudicate truth, or reconcile competing worldviews. It is an attempt to explain why so many disagreements persist despite intelligence, good faith, and shared vocabulary โ and why escalating those disagreements often makes them worse rather than better.
What follows is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. I am less interested in who is right than in why arguments so often fail to converge, and why those failures are routinely misinterpreted as moral defects rather than structural mismatches. The claim is not that ‘anything goes’, nor that all perspectives are equally valid, but that many disputes operate across ontological fault lines that no amount of better reasoning, evidence, or civility can bridge on their own terms.
Recognising this does not require abandoning oneโs commitments. It requires abandoning the fantasy that every disagreement is corrigible and that persuasion is always the appropriate response to difference. If the essay succeeds, it will not produce consensus. It may, however, produce a little more clarity, a little less moral theatre, and a slightly more disciplined form of charity โ one grounded not in agreement, but in an honest appraisal of where disagreement actually lives.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.
On Ontological Incommensurability and the Case for Civilised Disagreement
Most disagreements that metastasise into moral theatre are not disagreements at all. They are collisions between incompatible ontologies, misdiagnosed as differences of opinion.
This assumption is not merely optimistic. It’s wrong.
We continue to behave as though all disputes take place on a shared stage called โreality,โ where facts sit patiently waiting to be interpreted, weighed, or refuted. From this perspective, disagreement is assumed to be corrigible. If only one side listened harder, reasoned better, or acquired the right evidence, convergence would follow. This assumption is not merely optimistic. It is wrong.
Many of our most entrenched conflicts persist precisely because the parties involved do not inhabit the same world in any substantive sense. They operate with different background assumptions about what exists, what counts as real, what can ground truth, and what sorts of things are even eligible for belief. Argument, in such cases, does not fail due to bad faith or insufficient charity. It fails because it presumes a shared ontology that does not exist.
Before proceeding, a clarification. I am using ontology here in a deliberately broad, working sense. Not merely as an inventory of what exists, but as the background framework that determines what can count as real, meaningful, or normatively binding in the first place. This inevitably overlaps with epistemology, ethics, and theories of agency. Not because these domains are identical, but because in lived discourse they travel together. The fault line I am describing is not disciplinary. It is structural.
Video: Two people in ontological bubbles. (no sound)
Opinion Is Not Ontology
A difference of opinion presupposes a common world. Two people may disagree about what justice requires, but only because they agree, tacitly, that justice is a thing of some kind. Two people may dispute whether God exists, but only because they share enough conceptual scaffolding for the sentence to function.
Ontological disagreement runs deeper. It concerns not what is the case, but what it even means for something to be the case at all. When these levels are conflated, discourse becomes theatrical. Arguments are repeated with increasing urgency, frustration is moralised, and disagreement is reinterpreted as stubbornness, ignorance, or vice. Civility erodes not because people are cruel, but because they are speaking from worlds that do not interlock.
Consider debates over abortion. Pro-life arguments typically presuppose that the fetus is already a moral person; pro-choice arguments often presuppose that moral personhood is inseparable from bodily autonomy. These positions are not primarily disagreements about policy, compassion, or even ‘the value of life’. They are disagreements about what kinds of entities exist and when they begin to matter. Shared language about rights or harm often masks this deeper ontological divergence, which is why such debates rarely converge despite decades of argument.
When Critique Presumes the Ontology It Opposes
This distinction helps explain a familiar but often confusing phenomenon: cases where two parties appear to agree on symptoms, vocabulary, and even outrage, yet remain fundamentally misaligned.
Consider critiques of institutional cruelty that condemn dehumanising practices while retaining the very assumptions that make those practices intelligible. For example, workplace critiques that oppose excessive surveillance, unfair metrics, or punitive performance targets often still presume the figure of the autonomous, responsible worker whose output reflects individual will. The system is blamed for misapplying norms, not for producing those norms as instruments of control. Such critiques are often insightful and well-intentioned. They identify real harm. They name real suffering. And yet they stall.
The reason is not timidity or bad analysis. It is ontological inheritance. These critiques operate inside the same metaphysical framework that generates the harm they diagnose. They presuppose moral realism, individual agency, and normative grounding as givens, then object to their misapplication. The result is an internal critique: coherent, compelling, and structurally limited.
This is not a misunderstanding. It’s a category error.
From a different ontological position, the problem is not that the norms are misapplied, but that the norms themselves function as delivery mechanisms of harm. What appears as reform from within appears as reenactment from without. This is not a misunderstanding. It is a category error.
Recognising this helps explain why superficial agreement so often feels productive while changing nothing. Shared language can create the appearance of convergence while leaving foundational divergence intact. The temperature drops. The mediator applauds. The underlying machinery hums on.
Igtheism and the Refusal to Pretend
This is why I describe myself, somewhat unfashionably, as an igtheist rather than an atheist.
Atheism still accepts the question ‘Does God exist?’ as well-formed. It grants the concept enough coherence to deny its instantiation. Agnosticism does much the same, merely pausing at the threshold. Both remain inside the game.
Igtheism steps back and asks a prior question: What, precisely, are we talking about? If no stable referent can be specified, the sentence does not become false. It becomes undefined. The system returns ‘does not compute’. This is not evasive. It is diagnostic.
I cannot make sense of strong metaphysical Realism
Try as I may, I cannot make sense of strong metaphysical Realism, let alone Theism. The idea that there exists a fully formed, mind-independent world ‘out there’, grounding truth prior to mediation, language, practice, or perspective, does not parse for me. Not as a contested claim. As a coherent one.
However, and this is the crucial point, once I accept Realism as a mechanism, Theism suddenly makes sense. If you already believe in a metaphysically exterior realm that guarantees truth and coherence, then placing God there is not a leap. It is an economy of scale.
Paraphrased bluntly: They believe there is a whole world ‘out there’. I donโt believe in any of it, so God might as well live out there, too.
From within that worldview, atheistic Realism is arguably the stranger position. The cathedral has been built; denying the altar looks parsimonious rather than principled.
I am not offering a competing metaphysical system here. Not idealism, not pragmatism, not a substitute ontology waiting in the wings. I am declining the assumption that reality must come pre-packaged as a mind-independent domain in order to be intelligible or actionable at all.
Of course, non-realist positions are not exempt from this problem; they, too, can smuggle in unexamined ontological commitments under the guise of pragmatism, coherence, or practice.
Pascalโs Wager and Ontological Blackmail
This is why igtheism tends to offend theists more than atheism ever could. When a theist says, ‘How can you not care? Your soul depends on it’, they are not making an argument. They are issuing an ontological demand. Pascalโs Wager is merely this demand formalised into decision theory.
How can you not care?
The wager only works if one has already granted the existence of souls, post-mortem identity, divine reward structures, and a cosmic enforcement mechanism that cares about belief states. Without those assumptions, there is no wager. There is only a shouted house rule addressed to someone who is not in the casino.
None of this is meant to trivialise the existential seriousness with which such claims are often held. It is simply to note that care does not precede ontology; it follows it. One cannot meaningfully care about entities one does not recognise as intelligible occupants of the world.
Why This Doesnโt End in Relativism
None of this implies that ‘all ontologies are equally true’, nor that disagreement is pointless. It implies something far less comforting and far more useful: many disagreements are non-resolvable by design. This does not deny that ontological frameworks can and do shift over time, sometimes under empirical pressure; it only denies that such shifts are guaranteed, universal, or achievable through argument alone.
Non-resolvability does not entail arbitrariness. Ontological frameworks can be evaluated for internal coherence, practical consequences, and the kinds of lives they make possible. What cannot be done is to adjudicate between them using criteria that belong exclusively to one side. Recognising this does not require abandoning oneโs worldview. It requires abandoning the fantasy that persuasion is always possible, or that failure to persuade is a moral defect.
Once we see that we are not standing on the same ground, something like charity becomes possible. Not the saccharine kind. The disciplined kind. I understand that this matters enormously to you. I do not share the ontology that makes it matter to me. This is not a truce forged through compromise. It is a ceasefire born of ontological honesty.
Civility Without Convergence
Our age is addicted to resolution. Every disagreement is treated as a problem to be solved, a synthesis waiting to happen, a bridge yet to be built. Sometimes there is no bridge. Sometimes the most responsible thing to do is to stop pretending there is one.
Sometimes there is no bridge. Sometimes the most responsible thing to do is to stop pretending there is one.
Civility does not require agreement. It does not even require mutual understanding in the strong sense. It requires only that we stop mistaking incompatible world-models for intellectual obstinacy. We are not all arguing about the same furniture. Some of us are questioning whether the room exists at all.
Once that is acknowledged, the volume drops. The moral theatre loses its urgency. And disagreement, while still real, becomes less corrosive. Not because we have reconciled our ontologies. But because we have finally noticed that they do not reconcile.
Naturally, it will make more sense alongside the book. But it may still provide a bit of entertainment โ and mild discomfort โ in the meantime.
tl;dr: Language is generally presumed to be stable. Words mean what you think they mean, right? A table is a table. A bird is a bird. Polysemy aside, these are solid, dependable units.
Then we arrive at freedom, justice, truth, and an entire panoply of unstable candidates. And letโs not even pretend qualia are behaving themselves.
So when someone says ‘truth’, ‘free speech’, or ‘IQ’, you may suddenly realise youโve been arguing with a cardboard cut-out wearing your own assumptions. That isnโt just interpersonal mischief. Itโs language doing exactly what it was designed to do: letting you glide over the hard problems while sounding perfectly reasonable.
Audio: Short NotebookLM summary of this page content*
Video: Legacy video explaining some features of the LIH.
If that sounds banal, youโve already fallen for the trap.
Give it a try โ or wait until youโve digested the book. Not literally, unless youโre short on fibre.
Cheers.
Written by Bry Willis
microglyphics
* As I’ve cited previously, the quality of NotebookLM varies โ usually in predictable directions. This one does well enough, but it doesn’t have enough context to get the story right (because it was only drawing from this page rather than from a fuller accounting of the LIH). Its trailing comment reveals that it doesn’t grasp that “new words” don’t solve the problem.
Earlier, it suggests that language is intentionally vague. This is not an assertion I make. You can read some of the earlier incarnations, or you can wait for it to be published.
Why shared language creates the illusion โ not the reality โ of shared experience
Human beings routinely assume that if another agent speaks our language, we have achieved genuine mutual understanding. Fluency is treated as a proxy for shared concepts, shared perceptual categories, and even shared consciousness. This assumption appears everywhere: in science fiction, in popular philosophy videos, and in everyday cross-cultural interactions. It is a comforting idea, but philosophically indefensible.
Video: Could You Explain Cold to an Alien? – Hank Green
Recent discussions about whether one could ‘explain cold to an alien’ reveal how deeply this assumption is embedded. Participants in such debates often begin from the tacit premise that language maps transparently onto experience, and that if two interlocutors use the same linguistic term, they must be referring to a comparable phenomenon.
A closer analysis shows that this premise fails at every level.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Shared Language Does Not Imply Shared Phenomenology
Even within the human species, thermal experience is markedly variable. Individuals from colder climates often tolerate temperatures that visitors from warmer regions find unbearable. Acclimation, cultural norms, metabolic adaptation, and learned behavioural patterns all shape what ‘cold’ feels like.
If the same linguistic term corresponds to such divergent experiences within a species, the gap across species becomes unbridgeable.
A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense
A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense, but by adjusting metabolic output. A thermometer measures cold without experiencing anything at all. Both respond to temperature; neither inhabits the human category ‘cold’.
Thus, the human concept is already species-specific, plastic, and contextually learned โ not a universal experiential module waiting to be translated.
Measurement, Behaviour, and Experience Are Distinct
Thermometers and reptiles react to temperature shifts, and yet neither possesses cold-qualia. This distinction illuminates the deeper philosophical point:
Measurement registers a variable.
Behaviour implements a functional response.
Experience is a mediated phenomenon arising from a particular biological and cognitive architecture.
Aliens might measure temperature as precisely as any scientific instrument. That alone tells us nothing about whether they experience anything analogous to human ‘cold’, nor whether the concept is even meaningful within their ecology.
The Problem of Conceptual Export: Why Explanation Fails
Attempts to ‘explain cold’ to hypothetical aliens often jump immediately to molecular description โ slower vibrational states, reduced kinetic energy, and so forth. This presumes that the aliens share:
our physical ontology,
our conceptual divisions,
our sense-making framework,
and our valuation of molecular explanation as intrinsically clarifying.
But these assumptions are ungrounded.
Aliens may organise their world around categories we cannot imagine. They may not recognise molecules as explanatory entities. They may not treat thermal variation as affectively laden or behaviourally salient. They may not even carve reality at scales where ‘temperature’ appears as a discrete variable.
When the conceptual scaffolding differs, explanation cannot transfer. The task is not translation but category creation, and there is no guarantee that the requisite categories exist on both sides.
The MEOW Framework: MEOWa vs MEOWb
The Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) clarifies this breakdown by distinguishing four layers of mediation:
T0: biological mediation
T1: cognitive mediation
T2: linguistic mediation
T3: social mediation
Humans run MEOWa, a world structured through mammalian physiology, predictive cognition, metaphor-saturated language, and social-affective narratives.
Aliens (in fiction or speculation) operate MEOWb, a formally parallel mediation stack but with entirely different constituents.
Two systems can speak the same language (T2 alignment) whilst:
perceiving different phenomena (T0 divergence),
interpreting them through incompatible conceptual schemas (T1 divergence),
and embedding them in distinct social-meaning structures (T3 divergence).
Linguistic compatibility does not grant ontological compatibility. MEOWa and MEOWb allow conversation but not comprehension.
Fiction as Illustration: Why Aliens Speaking English Misleads Us
In Sustenance, the aliens speak flawless Standard Southern English. Their linguistic proficiency invites human characters (and readers) to assume shared meaning. Yet beneath the surface:
Their sensory world differs;
their affective architecture differs;
their concepts do not map onto human categories;
and many human experiential terms lack any analogue within their mediation.
The result is not communication but a parallel monologue: the appearance of shared understanding masking profound ontological incommensurability.
The Philosophical Consequence: No Universal Consciousness Template
Underlying all these failures is a deeper speciesist assumption: that consciousness is a universal genus, and that discrete minds differ only in degree. The evidence points elsewhere.
If โcoldโ varies across humans, fails to apply to reptiles, and becomes meaningless for thermometers, then we have no grounds for projecting it into alien phenomenology. Nor should we assume that other species โ biological or artificial โ possess the same experiential categories, emotional valences, or conceptual ontologies that humans treat as foundational.
Consciousness is not a universal template awaiting instantiation in multiple substrates. It is alocal ecological achievement, shaped by the mediations of the organism.
Conclusion
When aliens speak English, we hear familiarity and assume understanding. But a shared phonological surface conceals divergent sensory systems, cognitive architectures, conceptual repertoires, and social worlds.
Linguistic familiarity promises comprehension, but delivers only the appearance of it. The deeper truth is simple: Knowing our words is not the same as knowing our world.
And neither aliens, reptiles, nor thermometers inhabit the experiential space we map with those words.
Afterword
Reflections like these are precisely why my Anti-Enlightenment project exists. Much contemporary philosophical commentary remains quietly speciesist and stubbornly anthropomorphic, mistaking human perceptual idiosyncrasies for universal structures of mind. Itโs an oddly provincial stance for a culture that prides itself on rational self-awareness.
To be clear, I have nothing against Alex OโConnor. Heโs engaging, articulate, and serves as a gateway for many encountering these topics for the first time. But there is a difference between introducing philosophy and examining oneโs own conceptual vantage point. What frustrates me is not the earnestness, but the unexamined presumption that the human experiential frame is the measure of all frames.
Having encountered these thought experiments decades ago, Iโm not interested in posturing as a weary elder shaking his stick at the next generation. My disappointment lies elsewhere: in the persistent inability of otherwise intelligent thinkers to notice how narrow their perspective really is. They speak confidently from inside the human mediation stack without recognising it as a location โ not a vantage point outside the world, but one local ecology among many possible ones.
Until this recognition becomes basic philosophical hygiene, weโll continue to confuse linguistic familiarity for shared ontology and to mistake the limits of our own embodiment for the limits of consciousness itself.
Iโve decided it might be worthwhile to share some of my thoughts earlier in their larval stages, if only to demonstrate that none of my essays arrive fully formed from the head of Zeus. Far from it. Most of my ideas ricochet around my skull for weeks, months, years โ occasionally decades โ before deciding to cooperate. Even the ones that appear spontaneous usually have a long archaeological tail if I bother to dig.
I also hold, rather unfashionably but quite firmly, that all knowledge is a derivative remix. No one escapes this, least of all me. My own work is stitched from whatever intellectual scrap I‘ve encountered along the way. This is why I’ve never been persuaded by the sanctity of ‘originality’ or the mythology of intellectual property. Ideas don’t respect fences. They migrate, hybridise, and reappear wearing different hats. Claiming exclusive rights over them feels more like territorial anxiety โ Territorial Pissing โ than epistemic necessity โ though that, admittedly, is a polemic for another day.
The point is simply this: I’m documenting this particular idea not because it arrived perfect, but because I can see the threads that led to it. And because the genealogy is often more revealing than the polished conclusion.
What follows is one of those threads.
A recent exchange with Thomas on Mastodon forced me to articulate a phrase that arrived mostly as an intuition but seems to have legs: the relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity. Put briefly, subjectivity (S) is always perspectival, always bound to a particular point of view, but never free from the pressures of its relative environment (R). No subject springs forth pristine; it is continually formed and re-formed by the linguistic, social, institutional, and affective structures in which it is embedded.
As a minimal sketch:
โR โ S โโด Sโ โ Sโ
as the subject metabolises the influence of R and becomes something other than its prior configuration.
This is neither the usual bogeyman of ‘relativism’ nor the heroic Cartesian subject polishing its autonomy in splendid isolation. It is a subject that is contingent without being dissolved, formed without being mechanistic, and embedded without being determined. In a way, this is an echo of the causa sui argument, that no S can be self-caused.
If one wanted an analogue, the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) provides it. In the same way that encounter-events are mediated through biological, cognitive, linguistic, and institutional tiers, subjectivity itself can be seen as a kind of slow-form encounter โ one whose centre drifts as the mediating structures press upon it. The subject is not the neutral observer of these tiers; it is the ongoing outcome of their interaction. In this sense, the ‘relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity‘ is simply what a MEOW-adjacent ontology would predict once applied to the subject rather than the event.
Whether this deserves a full essay depends on whether I can demonstrate that the idea is genuinely new rather than a recycled fragment of BergerโLuckmann, Rosen, or post-Kantian anthropology. But at first glance, the conceptual terrain appears fertile โ at least fertile enough to justify a longer wander.
It seems my latest rant about AI-authorship accusations stirred something in me, that I need to apologise for being a professional writer โ or is that a writing professional? Blame the Enlightenment, blame writing and communication courses, whatevs. I certainly do. But since some people are still waving the pitchforks, insisting that anything too coherent must be artificially tainted, I should address the obvious point everyone keeps missing:
The writing structures people attribute to AI arenโt AI inventions. Theyโre human inventions. Old ones. Codified ones. And we made the machines copy them. Sure, they have a certain cadence. It’s the cadence you’d have if you also followed the patterns you should have been taught in school or opened a book or two on the topic. I may have read one or two over the years.
Wait for itโฆ The orthodoxy is ours. I hate to be the one to break it to you.
Video: AI Robot Assistant (no audio)
Professional Writing Has Its Own House Rules (And Theyโre Older Than AI Neural Nets)
๐ I wrote earlier how even talking about AI is censored in Reddit. ๐คท
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic and the last one.
Long before AI arrived to ruin civilisation and steal everyoneโs quiz-night jobs, weโd already built an entire culture around โproper writingโ. The sort of writing that would make a communications lecturer beam with pride. The Sith may come in twos; good writing comes in threes.
Tell them what youโre going to say.
Say it.
Repeat what you told them.
But wait, there’s more:
Use linear flow, not intellectual jazz.
One idea per paragraph, please.
Support it with sources.
Conclude like a responsible adult.
These arenโt merely classroom antics. Theyโre the architectural grammar of academic, corporate, scientific, and policy writing. No poetic flourishes. No existential detours. No whimsical cadence. The aim is clarity, predictability, and minimal risk of misinterpretation. Itโs the textual equivalent of wearing sensible shoes to a board meeting. So when someone reads a structured piece of prose and yelps, โIt sounds like AI!โ, what theyโre really saying is:
It sounds like someone who was properly trained to write in a professional context.
Je m’accuse. AI Didnโt Invent Structure. We Forced It To Learn Ours. Full stop. The problem is that it did whilst most of us didn’t.
If AI tends toward this style โ linear, tidy, methodical, lamentably sane โ thatโs because we fed it millions of examples of โproper writingโ. It behaves professionally because we trained it on professional behaviour โ surprisingly tautological. Quelle surprise, eh?
Just as you donโt blame a mimeograph for producing a perfectly dull office memo, you donโt blame AI for sounding like every competent academic whoโs been beaten with the stick of โclarity and cohesionโ. Itโs imitation through ingestion. Itโs mimicry through mass exposure.
And Now for the Twist: My Fiction Has None of These Constraints
My fiction roams freely. It spirals, loops, dissolves, contradicts, broods, and wanders through margins where structured writing fears to tread. It chases affect, not clarity. Rhythm, not rubrics. Experience, not exegesis.
No one wants to read an essay that sounds like Dr Seuss, but equally, no one wants a novel that reads like the bylaws of a pension committee.
Different aims, different freedoms: Academic and professional writing must behave itself. Fiction absolutely should not.
This isnโt a value judgement. One isnโt โtruerโ or โbetterโ than the other โ only different tools for different jobs. One informs; the other evokes. One communicates; the other murmurs and unsettles.
Not to come off like Dr Phil (or Dr Suess), but the accusation itself reveals the real anxiety. When someone accuses a writer of sounding โAI-like,โ what they usually mean is:
โYour writing follows the conventions we taught you to follow โ but now those conventions feel suspect because a machine can mimic themโ.
And thatโs not a critique of the writing. Itโs a critique of the culture around writing โ a panic that the mechanical parts of our craft are now automated and thus somehow โimpureโ.
But structure is not impurity. Professional clarity is not soullessness. Repetition, sequencing, scaffolding โ these arenโt telltale signs of AI; theyโre the residue of centuries of human pedagogy.
AI mirrors the system. It didnโt create the system. And if the systemโs beginning to look uncanny in the mirror, thatโs a problem of the system, not the reflection.
In Short: The Craft Is Still the Craft, Whether Human or Machine
Professional writing has rules because it needs them. Fiction abandons them because it can. AI imitates whichever domain you place in front of it.
The accusation that structured writing โsounds artificialโ is merely a confusion between form and origin. The form is ours. The origin is irrelevant.
If clarity is now considered suspicious, I fear for the state of discourse. But then again, Iโve feared for that for some time.
And apparently, Iโve still got more to say on the matter.
โThe Enlightenment didnโt free us from superstition; it mechanised it.โ We built reason into a machine, called it capitalism, and let it think for us.
What followed was a case study in how not to communicate.
LinkedIn, that self-parody of professional virtue signalling, is essentially a digital networking sรฉance: a place where narcissism wears a tie. So I expected a reaction โ just not one quite so unintentionally revealing.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
But Firstโฆ
Before I get too engaged, I want to share one of my favourite interactions: After I informed a commenter that I was a trained economist who taught undergraduate economics for the better part of a decade and had read many seminal economic books and journals firsthand, he replied, ‘No wonder you don’t know anything about economics’.
It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s quip:
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
โ Oscar Wilde
I think he may have taken this point too far.
The Post
I posted this:
Capitalism doesnโt kill with guns or gulags. It kills with forms, policy, and plausible deniability. The machine is efficient precisely because no one feels responsible. When an insurance executive cuts ‘unprofitable’ coverage, itโs not an atrocity โ itโs ‘cost optimisation’.
Four assertions that, if anything, were restrained. And yet, of roughly 6,600 impressions, 150 people commented โ and only ten actually clicked through to read the article itself. Two, perhaps, reached the source post.
So, fewer than one-tenth of one per cent engaged with the argument. The rest engaged with their projections.
The Anatomy of Reaction
From this data set, one can discern a familiar pattern โ social mediaโs endemic form of discourse dementia. People no longer respond to content, but to keywords. They hear ‘capitalism’ and proceed to recite preloaded scripts from whichever Cold War memory palace they inhabit.
Their replies fall neatly into categories.
1. The Purists and Apologists
These are the theologians of the market. They defend a sacred true capitalism โ pure, fair, competitive โ untainted by corruption or collusion. Every failure is blamed on heresy: ‘Thatโs not capitalism, thatโs bureaucracy’.
This is theology masquerading as economics. The purity argument is its own circular proof: if capitalism fails, it was never real capitalism to begin with.
I eventually replied with a meme that captured the absurdity perfectly:
ยซ Yeah, bruh! Cancer is not the problem. The problem is stage 4 cancer. What we need is stage 2 cancer. ยป
Image: Mentioned Meme
Thatโs the logic of ‘real capitalism’. A belief that malignancy can be cured by downgrading it.
2. The Cold Warriors and Whatabouters
When all else fails, shout Stalin. ‘Move to Cuba’, they say, as if the modern world were still divided between the Berlin Wall and McDonaldโs.
These people argue from the long-term memory of the twentieth century because their short-term memory has been erased by ideology. The result is political dementia โ functioning recall of ghosts, total blindness to the present.
3. The Moral Traditionalists
‘Capitalism created the highest living standards in history’, they proclaim, ignoring that the same sentence could be said of feudalism by a duke.
They confuse correlation for causation: prosperity under capitalism equals prosperity because of capitalism. Itโs a comforting fable that erases the costs โ colonialism, exploitation, environmental collapseโfolded into that narrative of progress.
4. The Diagnosticians and Dismissers
When all argument fails, the fallback is pathology: ‘Youโre confused,’ ‘Youโre a cancer’, ‘Take this nonsense to Bluesky‘.
Ad hominem is the last refuge of the intellectually cornered. It converts disagreement into diagnosis. Itโs a defence mechanism masquerading as discourse.
5. The Bureaucracy Confusionists
This group misread ‘forms and policy’ as an attack on government, not markets. For them, only the state can be bureaucratic. They cannot conceive of corporate violence without a uniform.
Thatโs precisely the blindness the post was about โ the quiet procedural cruelty embedded in systems so efficient no one feels responsible.
6. The Realists and Partial Allies
A handful of commenters admitted the system was broken โ just not fatally. ‘Capitalism has gone astray’, they said. ‘Itโs not capitalism; itโs profiteering’.
This is capitalismโs soft apologetics: acknowledging illness while refusing to name the disease. These are the reformists still rearranging chairs on the Titanic.
7. The Human-Nature Essentialists
‘The problem isnโt capitalism โ itโs people’.
Ah yes, anthropology as absolution. The rhetorical sleight of hand that converts design flaws into human nature. Itโs a comforting determinism: greed is eternal, therefore systems are blameless.
This, too, proves the thesis. Capitalismโs most effective mechanism is the internalisation of guilt. You blame yourself, not the structure.
8. The Paranoids and Projectionists
For these, critique equals conspiracy. ‘The Marxists are oppressing your freedom’. ‘Bank accounts frozen in Canada’. ‘Social credit scores!’
They live in a world where any question of fairness is a plot to install a totalitarian state. Their fear is algorithmic; it needs no source.
9. The Systemic Observers
A few โ precious few โ saw the argument clearly. They understood that capitalismโs violence is procedural, not personal. That its atrocities come with signatures, not bullets. That the โcost optimisationโ logic of insurance or healthcare is not an aberration โ itโs the system functioning as designed.
These voices are proof that rational discourse isnโt extinct โ merely endangered.
Discourse Dementia
What this episode reveals is not a failure of capitalism so much as a failure of cognition. The audience no longer hears arguments; it hears triggers. People donโt read โ hey recognise.
The reflexive replies, the off-topic tangents, the moral panic โ all of it is capitalism in miniature: fast, efficient, transactional, and devoid of empathy.
Social media has become the bureaucratic form of thought itself โ automated, unaccountable, and self-reinforcing. Nobody reads because reading doesnโt scale. Nobody engages because attention is a commodity.
Capitalism doesnโt just kill with forms. It kills with feeds.
Coda: The Light That Blinds
The Enlightenment promised clarity โ the clean line between reason and superstition, order and chaos, subject and object. Yet, from that same light emerged the bureaucrat, the executive, and the algorithm: three perfect children of reason, each killing with increasing efficiency and decreasing intent.
Capitalism is merely the administrative arm of this lineage โ the economic expression of the Enlightenmentโs original sin: mistaking quantification for understanding. When discourse itself becomes procedural, when conversation turns into cost-benefit analysis, thought ceases to be an act of care and becomes an act of compliance.
The tragedy isnโt that weโve lost meaning. Itโs that weโve automated it. The machine hums on, self-justifying, self-optimising, self-absolving.
Your post is a confession that anti-capitalism kills with guns and gulags. Give me capitalism over socialism any day.
Well, you should move to Cuba or any other socialist paradiseโฆ end of issue.
How can you be taken seriously when you conflate an entire economic system with health insurance? And for someone to say that overt murder, a la Stalin, is โdecencyโ? That speaks for itself.
That is not capitalism. That is bureaucracy.
Healthcare isn’t free and everyone has the same right to make or not to make money.
Sounds more like socialism. Do it our way or we will freeze your bank account, take your job, and make sure you get nothing till you comply (proof was during covid)
Capitalism has made us the desired destination for those living in socialistic societies
BEURACRACY. The word your looking for is BEURACRACY not capitalism. There is no form of government more beurocratic than communism, except socialism. If you wonder why that is, communism doesn’t have to hide it’s authoritarianism like socialism does.
Socialism/Communism killed over 100 million the last century the old fashioned way;: bullets, starvation, torture, etc. Capitalism lifted 1 billion people out of poverty
Pathetic – misleading statement. Yes there are many problems, and mistakes that should be corrected. But as a physician, can guarantee before this medical system starting to ignore viruses, far more people were killed yearly under socialist or communist medical systems than capitalism. Wake up – care was not denied because many procedures and higher levels of care were unreachable to most!!!
How is the Government any different? You get what they say you get without the option of voting with your feet/checkbook. Iโll take my chances in the free market EVERY TIME.
This post is fiction from the start. Capitalism does NOT kill. Communism/Socialism does though.
Are you implying the ponderous inactivity of the socialist apparat is not worse than what we encounter with capitalistic motivated organizations? Learn the facts.
Capitalism works well enough–better than any other alternatives. It degrades when government sticks its nose into private transactions to provide cover for lethargy and inefficiency. Responsibility moves from the person with whom one deals to a great nothingness of indifference. [truncated for brevity]
Private insurance has its faults but so does government insurance they are different but just as challenging
Any business that deals directly with Human tragedy (Casualty, Medical, Health, et al) should be held to both a different and higher standard in โcost optimizationโ than other businesses. To say that someoneโs chemo should be spreadsheeted in the same columns as someoneโs second home 80 feet from the beach is proof that capitalism is dead and scorched earth profiteering is now the new normal.
The argument should not be about capitalism vs. communism, but rather about human beings. Are humans creative/gifted enough to take care of themselves and produce surplus for the helpless few, or helpless sheep, majority to be fed and controlled by elites? But for your edification Bry, as you are critic of capitalism, try communism for a season, to balance your critique.
Bry WILLIS how long have you been this confused about basic economics and government policy?
Most people stop using the “I know you are, but what am I” basis for their arguments by the age of seven or eight. But it appears to still be your basis for discourse.
I wish you better luck seeing and understanding things for what they actually are vice how you wish they were.
The rules come from a socialist regime. The Marxists are oppressing your freedom. Not rhe FREE market and free enrerprises. What are you talking about….
That is is not capitalism. that is CRONY capitalism when feather merchants spread so much hoo-ha that nobody can get anything done.
Bry WILLIS look up social credit. Bank accounts under this government in Canada, have already been frozen, for dare disagreeing with them
This man feels our health insurance system represents capitalism? We better have a more in depth talk about how American health insurance works.
This has nothing to do with โcapitalismโ. If you choose to use the English language to communicate, understand the intended meanings of the words. We use contract law in our country regarding insurance coverage. It has little to do with capitalism. In fact, Obamacare stripped any semblance of capitalism from the process and replaced it with pricing manipulation, regulations, subsidies and other such โadjustmentsโ to what used to be a capitalistic system. Blame the regulations, and lack of government enforcement, not โcapitalismโ. No winder NYC elected Momdani.
Ask those in China, N. Korea, and Russia how socialism/communism works for them.
Next you will have Gen AI and Agentic AI declining claims so that management can just point to the AI and no one has to feel bad for cutting off life saving care.
Youโre a cancer. Capitalism created the best living standards the world ever seen. The socialist show up and corrupt it with all these social programs that donโt work and thatโs where weโre at. Youโre killing the future. Youโre an idealist that never had to live in the real work and built anything and youโll be the one whoโs bitching when youโre on relief.
The only system that placed people in gulags was socialism all under the banner of democracy.
This is pure nonsense. Take stuff like this on Bluesky
As Iโve said 4,000 times before, Capitalism requires robust competition in the market and zero collusion, price fixing, and market manipulation in order for it to function in its truest form and most beneficial economic impact to society as a whole (instead of 2%) and to be truly considered superior to other forms. None of those conditions exists in todayโs capitalism (as practiced) and it has devolved into scorched earth profiteering which has a totally different definition and is practiced in a different way. Todayโs profiteering by Corporations, which includes actions and behaviors that are counter-productive to capitalism, and that they hide under the guise of capitalism, acts as a malignant cancer on true capitalism and its inevitable result is, over time, a greater demand by society for socialist response as a counter measure. If Capitalism were working as it should, (and itโs not) that demand by society for socialist action would be highly diminished instead of enhanced.
Capitalism is not the “marriage of business and government” — that’s called oligarchy or, as the WEF calls it, “stakeholder capitalism”, also known as aristocracy. This is the current operating model of Canada, for example, wherein regulation and subsidy and tax”relief” is used to protect monopolies they are favorable to the sitting government.
Before we go any further, please share your definition of capitalism.
Such bureaucracy is worse with socialism, with even less individual freedom because the almighty centralized state maintains tight control over everything.
Another socialist complaining about tainted money. Bry, the money “taint” yours to spend. It belongs to those who earned it.
More like government bureaucracy
Notes and References
1.The Procedural Violence of Systems. David Graeberโs The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018) remain essential on the bureaucratic face of modern capitalism โ where compliance replaces conscience and inefficiency becomes profitable.
2.Markets as Mythology. Karl Polanyiโs The Great Transformation (1944) describes how โself-regulatingโ markets were never natural phenomena but products of state violence and enclosure. What contemporary defenders call โreal capitalismโ is, in Polanyiโs terms, a historical fiction maintained through continuous coercion.
3.The Logic of the Machine. Bernard Stieglerโs Technics and Time (1994โ2001) and Automatic Society (2015) provide the philosophical frame for capitalismโs algorithmic mutation: automation not just of production, but of attention and thought.
4.Bureaucracy and Death. Max Weberโs early insight into rationalisationโthe conversion of moral action into procedural necessityโreaches its necropolitical extreme in Achille Mbembeโs Necropolitics (2003), where the administration of life and death becomes a managerial function.
5.Language, Responsibility, and the Loss of Agency. Hannah Arendtโs Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) diagnosed โthe banality of evilโ as precisely the condition described in the post: atrocity performed through paperwork, not passion. The executive who denies coverage is merely performing policy.
6.Attention as Commodity. Guy Debordโs Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Byung-Chul Hanโs In the Swarm (2017) both chart the transformation of discourse into spectacle, and thought into metrics โ the perfect capitalist apotheosis: outrage without substance, visibility without understanding.
7.On Reflex and Recognition. Friedrich Nietzscheโs Genealogy of Morals (1887) prefigures this pathology in his account of herd morality and ressentiment โ a collective psychology where reaction replaces reflection.
Further Reading / Contextual Essays
The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose A dismantling of the Enlightenmentโs faith in progress. Maintenance, not innovation, becomes the moral task once teleology collapses. This essay lays the groundwork for understanding capitalism as an entropy accelerator disguised as improvement.
Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self Explores how neoliberal ideology weaponises Enlightenment individualism. The myth of โself-madeโ success functions as capitalismโs moral camouflage โ the narrative counterpart to plausible deniability.
The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment The core text of the Anti-Enlightenment corpus. A philosophical excavation of modernityโs central delusion: that illumination equals truth. Traces the lineage from Cartesian clarity to algorithmic opacity.
Objectivity Is Illusion (The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis) An inquiry into the failure of language as a medium for truth claims. Introduces the EffectivenessโComplexity Gradient, showing how every human system โ political, linguistic, economic โ eventually collapses under the weight of its own abstractions.
The Discipline of Dis-Integration A philosophy of maintenance over progress. Argues that dis-assembly โ not construction โ is the proper epistemic gesture in an age of exhaustion.
Propensity(Ridley Park, 2024) The fictional mirror to these essays. A speculative novel examining the behavioural mechanics of optimisation, obedience, and systemic cruelty โ a narrative form of โcost-optimisation ethics.โ
I maintain this blog for two primary reasons: as an archive, and as a forum for engagement.
Philosophy isnโt a mass-market pursuit. Most people are content simply to make it through the day without undue turbulence, and I can hardly blame them. Thinking deeply is not an act of leisure; itโs a luxury product, one that Capitalism would rather you didnโt afford. Even when Iโve been employed, Iโve noticed how wage labour chokes the capacity for art and thought. Warhol may have monetised the tension, but most of us merely survive it.
Video: Sprouting seed. (No audio)
Thatโs why I value engagement โ not the digital pantomime of ‘likes’ or ‘shares’, but genuine dialogue. The majority will scroll past without seeing. A few will skim. Fewer still will respond. Those who do โ whether to agree, dissent, or reframe โ remind me why this space exists at all.
To Jason, Julien, Jim, Lance, Nick, and especially Homo Hortus, who has been conversing beneath the recent Freedom post: your engagement matters. You help me think differently, sometimes introducing writers or ideas I hadnโt encountered. We may share only fragments of perspective, but difference is the point. It widens the aperture of thought โ provided I can avoid tumbling into the Dunning-Kruger pit.
And now, a note of quiet satisfaction. A Romanian scholar recently cited my earlier essay, the Metanarrative Problem, in a piece titled Despre cum metanaraศiunile construiesc paradigma ศi influenศeazฤ rฤspunsurile emoศionale โ translation: On How Grand Narratives Shape Paradigms and Condition Our Emotional Responses. That someone, somewhere, found my reflections useful enough to reference tells me this exercise in public thinking is doing what it should: planting seeds in unpredictable soil.
Philosophics 