I’ve shared another article on Substack about how the AI-authorship debate is bollox.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
The LLM-versus-human debate has been raging for several years now, and there seem to be two principal camps: human exceptionalists and agnostics. I suppose there may also be a small, misanthropic faction, but its members are either remarkably quiet or indistinguishable from everyone else online. If you are out there, do raise your voice.
If you want to witter on about other negative aspects of AI, have at it, but the authorship debate is weak tea.
A toy model of why purification is the wrong verb – offered for dissent.
Addendum: Please note that I have added an endnote to this post to explain the maths a bit better.
Preamble
I continue to press on colonialism, but this time I look at possibilities and probabilities of extricating colonial influences. I suggest that this is easier said than done. I am no expert in colonialism, post-colonialism, or decolonialism, but I have an interest in philosophical claims and maths, so here I am. Here, I attack a particular model using the metaphor of reconstituting from an alloy. This may be the wrong practical argument, but I address it all the same.
Decolonising decolonisation
There is a picture of decolonisation so intuitive that it barely announces itself as a picture. Something foreign was introduced. The task is to get it out. Sift the flour, strain the tea, remove the intruder, and what remains is ours again. The picture is tidy, it is emotionally satisfying, and it licenses a rule: identify the imports by provenance, discard them, keep the rest.
Let me say at the outset what this essay is not, because the register invites misreading. It is not a defence of the Enlightenment’s colonial rationale, which I regard as indefensible. It is not a claim that nothing should be dismantled. I hold no brief for borders, nations, or the machinery that enforces them, and I am not about to acquire one in the space of fifteen hundred words. The argument is narrower and, I think, more awkward: the subtraction rule cannot be applied, not because it is politically inconvenient but because it is arithmetically malformed. If you want to dismantle something, you need a rule that can actually be run. Provenance is not one.
Wrong metaphor, slightly better metaphor
The usual image is a solution – salt in water. Evaporate the water, and you get your salt back. The image quietly promises that separation is a matter of energy and patience.
Alloys are less accommodating. Steel is not iron with carbon loitering nearby; the hardness belongs to the compound, not to either constituent. Better still, steel’s properties depend on its thermal path as much as its composition. Identical carbon content, quenched rather than annealed, gives you a different material. The map from ingredients to properties is many-to-one and runs in one direction only. You cannot read the recipe off the blade.
That is the metaphor I want, and I want it because it makes a specific claim rather than a mood: the question which properties are the coloniser’s? is not hard to answer. It is malformed. The properties in dispute are compound properties. They have no constituent-level owner to be returned to.
So I built a small arithmetic model to see whether that claim survives being made precise, or whether it evaporates like most metaphors do when you make them count.
Not evidence. Let me be blunt about this, since it is the first objection and it is correct. The model demonstrates nothing about actual history. The numbers are invented. There is no dataset, no measurement, no claim about any real polity.
Its use is different and, I’d argue, more honest than a model pretending to measure. It converts a rhetorical position into a set of rules, so that anyone who wants to disagree has to say which rule they reject rather than merely disliking the conclusion. That is a better argument than either of us shouting about purity. It also has the pleasant property of being able to embarrass its author, since a model can fail to produce the result you wanted, which is more than can be said for an essay.
The rules
Take a polity’s stock of practices – institutions, techniques, concepts, forms of life, whatever you like. Sort every element into three registers:
E : endogenous-tagged. Arose from the inherited repertoire.
X : exogenous-tagged. Imposed or imported from outside.
J : joint. Generated by combining the two, and therefore tagged to neither.
Two rules govern the dynamics.
Recombination. Each period, new practice is generated by combining two elements drawn at random from the existing stock. The offspring is E only if both parents are E. It is X only if both are X. Otherwise – mixed parentage, or a parent that is itself already joint – it is J.
Injection. During the colonial window, a fixed quantity is added to X each period from outside. This is the imposition proper: it does not arise from the stock, it is put there.
Then run two timelines. B receives the injection. A does not – except that A receives a fraction of it anyway, because no polity in the relevant centuries was sitting outside the world colonialism was busy making. Meiji Japan was not a control group. It was adapting to a treated world. In the causal-inference idiom this is an interference violation; I have simply written it in as a leakage parameter rather than confessing it in a footnote.
Finally, a property index sits on top of composition: P = E + 0.6·X + 1.8·J. The large coefficient on J is the whole point of the alloy metaphor. The compound has properties neither constituent had.
Sample output
Forty periods, injection running from period 5 to 25, recombination at 10% of stock per period:
period
E
X
J
J-share
5
161
0
0
0.0%
10
254
20
9
3.2%
15
384
41
56
11.7%
20
552
63
184
23.0%
25
755
86
472
35.9%
30
977
89
1048
49.6%
40
1398
91
3994
72.8%
Three things fall out, and the first is not a parameter trick.
One: the joint register is absorbing, so it eats everything. Any element with a J parent produces J. J therefore never shrinks and its share rises monotonically toward unity. This is a theorem about the rules, not an artefact of my invented numbers – any contact at all, given recombination and sufficient time, drives the untaggable share to dominance. By period 40, roughly three-quarters of the stock belongs to no one’s provenance.
Watch the X column, which is where the model earned its keep. X stalls at 91 while the total stock climbs past five thousand. The provenance-visible residue shrinks to 1.7% – not because the imposition faded, but because it was metabolised. What persists of the imposition is precisely the part that has stopped being taggable. I find this the most interesting output, since it says something the metaphor alone did not: coloniality outlives colonialism because it stops being legible as colonial.
Two: subtraction barely moves anything. Strip out every X-tagged element – perfect execution of the purificatory programme, no enforcement problems, no disputes about the list. The property index falls from 8,642 to 8,587. Six-tenths of one per cent. The property lives in J, which the provenance rule cannot see, let alone reach. The purist gets to burn the 1.7% that remains legible and call it a restoration.
Three: the control timeline identifies nothing. Over two hundred stochastic runs, the uncolonised timeline A returns a mean of 8,336 with a standard deviation of 1,249 – a 5th-to-95th percentile band running from 6,276 to 10,173. Colonised timeline B returns 8,571. That is 0.19 standard deviations from A’s mean: sitting comfortably inside the distribution, indistinguishable from an ordinary draw. The decolonising intervention shifts things by about 0.04 sd. Even if you grant a counterfactual – which the previous essay in this sequence argued you cannot, there being no determinate nearest world and no transworld-identical bearer – the counterfactual’s own variance swallows the effect whole.
The rule that survives
If provenance cannot be run, something else has to be. The model points at the alternative rather than merely clearing the ground.
A genetic rule asks: where did this come from? It is an origin test. It requires a counterfactual to answer, has no truth-value when the counterfactual is undefined, and – as the X column shows – targets a shrinking sliver of legible residue whilst the compound does the actual work. Applied in practice, an inoperable rule gets applied by proxy, which means provenance is assigned by whoever holds the pen. The purity test cannot be corrected, because it has already assumed its own criterion.
A functional rule asks: is this presently load-bearing in the reproduction of the asymmetry? It is answerable from what is in front of you, revisable when the answer changes, and indifferent to pedigree. Railways and germ theory arrived with the apparatus and do not sustain it. A racialised labour hierarchy sustains it, whatever its vintage. The question is not what a thing’s parents were but what it is currently holding up.
This is not a concession wrung out of anyone. The better decolonial work got here first and by a different route – Mignolo’s delinking is explicitly not restoration, and Táíwò’s objection to purity-by-provenance is that it insults the appropriative agency it claims to restore. Fanon, whose practice was cheerfully larcenous with Hegel, Marx and Sartre, would have had little patience for a rule that condemned an idea by its passport. The purificatory picture I am attacking is the popular one, not the serious one, and I would rather say so than enjoy an easy win.
What I want dissent on
Three specific places, since general disagreement is no use to anyone.
The absorbing rule. Is it right that mixed parentage yields an untaggable offspring? A critic might say that provenance is heritable – that a practice built from a colonial institution and a local one remains colonial in the relevant sense, and my rule assumes away the answer. I think that reply reintroduces the genetic test by the back door, but it is the strongest objection and I would like it pressed properly.
The coefficient on J. Nothing forces the compound to have emergent properties, and if the property index were merely additive the whole result collapses. Is emergence the right assumption, or have I built the conclusion into the arithmetic?
Whether the generalisation holds. I take this to be one instance of a wider pattern: there is no un-enframed baseline against which to audit a technology, no pre-wage self whose unalienated labour the wage-form displaced, no pre-Norman England to compare the settlement against. Every member of the family runs the same undefined counterfactual, and every purificatory programme in the set is malformed the same way. That is either an elegant result or an overreach dressed as one, and I am genuinely unsure which.
Endnote: On the constants
Several readers have asked where the coefficients in the property index came from. The answer is that I chose them, and since a toy model’s only real virtue is that its assumptions are visible, it is worth saying exactly what they do, what other values would mean, and – the more useful question – which results depend on them. The short version: almost none do.
What the index is
The index sits on top of the composition and reads:
P = E + κX·X + κJ·J
where each coefficient is a weight declaring how much a unit of stock in that register contributes to whatever the index tracks. The reader may fill in ‘functional capacity’, ‘productive capability’, or simply ‘the thing about the arrangement anyone would care about’; the argument does not depend on the interpretation. What matters is that the index is a stipulated relation between composition and property, not a measurement of one.
The coefficient on E is fixed at 1 by normalisation. It sets the unit and carries no claim. The other two do carry claims.
κX : how imported practice performs in situ. An imported practice was selected somewhere else, under other conditions. κX asks whether that provenance costs it anything, or gains it anything, once it is running here.
κJ : whether the compound exceeds its parts. This is the emergence parameter, and it is what makes the model an alloy rather than a mixture. Steel is harder than iron or carbon; if the joint register merely inherited the average of its parents, the metaphor would be idle.
What different ranges mean
κX
reading
< 0
imports subtract: a harm model, coherent but a different argument from this one
0 – 1
mismatch: practices adapted elsewhere underperform in a setting that did not select them
= 1
neutral; provenance carries no functional consequence
> 1
selection: things get imported because they work, so imports outperform the average
κJ
reading
< 1
degradation: hybrids are incoherent, syncretism costs something
= 1
mixture, no emergence; the alloy metaphor abandoned
> 1
alloy proper; the compound has properties neither constituent had
On restricting the ranges
I was asked whether κX ≤ 1 and κJ > 1 can be justified as constraints. My answers differ.
κJ > 1 is defensible, but only as interpretation. It is what the alloy metaphor asserts, so imposing it is less an empirical claim than a declaration of which model one is running. There is suggestive support in accounts of recombinant innovation – new capability arising from combination rather than from either parent – but suggestive is the correct word, and a critic who holds that hybrids typically underperform is making a coherent rival claim, not an error. The honest form of the constraint is therefore the inequality itself, κJ > κE, stated as the model’s premise rather than as a finding. And, as below, nothing turns on it.
κX ≤ 1 I would not impose, and I no longer use it. There is an argument for it: a practice selected in another environment has no particular reason to fit this one, so friction should be expected on average. But there is an equally good argument against, since the practices that travel are often the ones that travel because they work, which biases the other way. Neither argument is decisive, and the tie-break is not epistemic but rhetorical. This essay’s conclusion is that removing the exogenous register barely changes anything. Setting κJ low makes that conclusion cheaper to reach. Conservative practice runs the other way: choose the value that makes your own result harder to obtain, and report what happens across the range. The original draft used κX = 0.6, which quietly asserted that imported practice underperforms – an unargued substantive claim with an unfortunate resonance, and a thumb on my own scale. I have replaced it with 1.0.
What the constants actually carry
Very little, which is the point of saying so.
Across κX from 0.2 to 5.0 and κJ from 0.5 to 3.0, the effect of stripping every exogenous-tagged element at period 40 ranges from 0.14% to 11.8%, and stays under 3% everywhere except the corner where imports are stipulated to be worth five times native practice. At the neutral setting (κX = 1, κJ = 1 – no penalty on imports and no emergence at all, the metaphor entirely surrendered) the effect is 1.66%. Granting the purist’s own premise instead, that mixture degrades (κJ = 0.5), it is 2.61%. The identification result is similarly indifferent: the colonised timeline sits between 0.16 and 0.41 standard deviations from the uncolonised distribution’s mean across every pairing tested. There is no setting of these constants at which subtraction works or the control group identifies anything.
What does carry the argument is the absorbing rule – the stipulation that mixed parentage yields untaggable offspring – and, downstream of it, elapsed time. Holding the coefficients neutral, the effect of stripping X depends almost entirely on when you strip:
strip at
X-share
ΔP
t=8
5.3%
5.3%
t=15
8.6%
8.6%
t=25
6.6%
6.6%
t=40
1.7%
1.7%
t=60
0.3%
0.3%
The curve rises while the injection continues and X accumulates faster than recombination metabolises it, peaks near the close of the colonial window, and decays thereafter toward nothing. This is the model’s substantive claim, and it needs no invented constant to make it: purificatory subtraction has a window, and the window closes on its own. Attempted immediately it is partially coherent. Attempted at generational distance it addresses a fraction of a per cent, not because the imposition faded but because it stopped being taggable.
Why they cannot simply be estimated
One might reasonably ask why I do not calibrate the coefficients against something rather than stipulating them. The reason is not laziness, and it is not incidental to the argument. To estimate κX and κJ empirically, one would have to measure the separate contributions of endogenous, exogenous, and joint practice to some outcome – which requires precisely the provenance attribution the essay argues is inoperable, assessed against precisely the counterfactual baseline it argues is undefined. The model cannot be calibrated for the same reason the programme it examines cannot be run.
I would rather state that plainly than have it discovered. It also means the appropriate dissent is not about the numbers. Anyone wishing to defeat the argument should attack the absorbing rule, where the whole weight rests; quarrelling with the constants defeats nothing, as the grid above concedes in advance.
I shared another Substack post, but I want to expand it a bit here. On the Substack version, I conspicuously didn’t name certain obvious names, but here, I shall. I also left out a reference to Plato’s Republic.
The current American regime is built on meritocracy, and – this is the part everyone misses – it would not deny the charge. It rather likes the word. It uses the reinterpreted version, the laundered one my other essay was about, in which merit means precisely whatever the sovereign has decided it should mean this morning. Accuse them of meritocracy, and they will thank you for noticing.
Take the man at the centre of it. Whether Donald Trump is meritorious is not, in the end, a question about Donald Trump. It is a question about which ontological grammar you happen to be speaking, because the grammar constitutes the object before a single fact is admitted into evidence. This is the whole Language Insufficiency point in miniature: the frame quietly does the work the facts are later congratulated for.
To Cohort A, he is a charismatic and self-made businessman. The six bankruptcies are not failures but proof of a shrewd operator who knows how to play the game and walk away intact – power-mind, killer instinct, the art of the deal. That he has a decades-long habit of not paying his contractors, and an even longer one of not paying his tax, does not indict him; it endears him. It makes him the everyman who beat the system the rest of us merely resent. A working-class hero, if you can manage it, descending on a golden escalator.
To Cohort B – and I’ll confess my membership, since honesty is cheaper than the pretence of the view from nowhere – he is a less likeable Forrest Gump: a man forever arriving at the centre of history without ever quite grasping how he got there, weaponising a charisma that works only on the already-mesmerised, and rebuilding the world with himself at the origin. He has a certain gravity. It attracts sycophants and rewards them, which is the only merit test his court reliably administers.
Same man. Two grammars. The ‘merit’ resides in neither the man nor the record; it is assigned by the frame and then invoiced to the evidence. Which is exactly the thesis of the parent essay, now wearing a name tag.
The downward stroke, said plainly
The parent essay left the reverse operation as a coy ‘phrase in current circulation’. I’ll say it here without the euphemism: DEI hire. The move is to take career civil servants – people with decades of demonstrable domain competence, whatever their private politics – and broad-brush them as diversity appointments, which is to say, unqualified by definition, arrived by an unauthorised route. The vacancies then fill with those who have pledged fealty and displayed the one indispensable qualification: a flexible integrity. The competent are marked down for being the wrong sort; the pliant are marked up for being biddable. ‘Incompetent’ has been quietly reissued to mean not ours, and ‘qualified’ to mean loyal. Same machine, thrown into reverse – now with a name engraved on the lever.
The cream, and the dimension it rose along
Which brings me, as these things do, to Plato. The Substack piece used his ship of state – the crew who master the mutiny rather than the sea. Here I want the other half of the same complaint: the comfortable conviction that the meritorious rise to the top like cream.
They do rise. That was never in dispute. What the metaphor conceals is the dimension along which they rose. These people are genuinely competent – at working the system, at the acquisition and retention of position – which is a wholly different skill from governing, and precisely the one we so conveniently assume we were measuring. Cream rises; so does scum; the trope declines to specify which, and physics is no help at all.
This is the standing problem of republicanism – and no, before anyone lunges for the comment box, I do not mean the Republican Party, which has its own well-stocked catalogue of failures, as do the Democrats, who would be unwise to feel smug reading this. Nor is any of it uniquely American. If you are somewhere else entirely, enjoying the spectacle from a safe distance, do put the popcorn down. The mechanism by which a society mistakes competence-at-ascending for competence-at-ruling is not a national defect. It is a design flaw in selection itself, and your country installed it too.
I will not, on this occasion, start in on the failings of democracy as a system. Been there; done that. There are only so many sacred cows a man can tip before lunch.
The question, once more
‘Meritocracy’ survives all of this the way it survives everything – by never once being asked the only question that matters: merit at what, judged by whom, to whose benefit? Put it to the present court, and the answer is almost embarrassingly legible. Which is, of course, exactly why the question is never put.
My initial thought was to rid the English language of administrators and dominatrices. Of course, I instantly considered French, and I write about that as well.
Here, I want to discuss the rift in Feminism:
One faction feels that we should eliminate sexist terms in the Modern world. This is where I was coming from.
Another faction claims this is a way of not being absorbed into an already male-dominated, dare I say, patriarchal culture.
Hence the title of this post.
If we were to swap or consolidate administrator and the less common administratrix into administrater in an act of rebellious conformity, women will be subsumed. As Simone de Beauvoir notes, the dominant lens is the male lens. Womanisother. As I say, this is why we have male and female versions of many, if not most, competitive sports, and certainly the professional ones. Thi sis also an instinct underlying trans-athletes competing in a contrasport – and it’s almost always about CIS-males performing in CIS-female events. I’m not aware of the contrary – and I don’t feel like looking it up. Opponents imagine fit males dressing as females in order to win some ribbons and medals, but I don’t really care to engage further in this conversational framing. I have no interest in sports, not even the World Cup being performed in my backyard.
The point is that females and other so-called minorities can be marginalised and lost to language. We preserve this identity through mechanics such as Best Actress to ensure representation.
Of course, I can also run off the reservation and down any number of rabbit holes: why don’t we have best black actor and/or actress? Why not left-handed? Height ranges? Weight ranges? Income ranges? Religious orientation? We quickly run into an intersectional challenge. I might imagine something like:
And I am proud to announce the winner of best left-handed, Asian Buddhist actress with a speech impediment
It’s easy to see where this goes off the rails – another Sorites problem hiding in plain sight.
I could go on. I won’t, but I wanted to make a point about my point. Check out the base post on Substack.
I love language, and I study it. I also use LLMs. I am not anti-AI, but neither am I prescriptively pro-AI. I just happen to find them useful.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I also, however, find them to have quirks. I won’t regurgitate the supposed over-representation of delve — or em dashes, or lists of three, and so on. These are each, at once, true and hardly egregious – especially given that we were all schooled on the same English that now sits in their training data.
What I want to focus on is the cadence. I watched this video, and the historical information is interesting – in fact, much of the material on the channel is. A few shorts were recommended to me, I discovered more, I subscribed, as one does. But listen to the talk track.
Video: The Most Mispronounced Words in English and the History Behind Them – Airlearn Language Show
Whilst I may be mistaken, it sounds like an LLM-produced script. Perhaps the joke is on me, and the presenter herself is an AI avatar. It also sounds as though a de-LLM process was applied afterwards to obfuscate the patterns – whether by a human or by another model running some humaniser GPT.
Of course, there are other explanations. Perhaps the writer simply happens to write this way, and the LLMs merely encroach on it. Without a writing history, one can’t know for certain. And – I know this is true of me – exposure, dare I say overexposure, shapes how one writes.
I run almost everything I write through AI and ask for suggestions – and you needn’t even ask; it volunteers anyway. When the output looks better, I adopt it: a word, a phrasing, a more concise rendering, a supporting sentence or a setup. After a while, my writing has been nudged in that direction. I already used delve; now I am merely conscious of it. I used to use em dashes – look at my pre–2020 posts – and switched to en dashes purely to avoid the witch-hunt. In each case, the LLM Age has done something to my style.
So, back to the video. If you are familiar with long-form LLM output, you will notice how she supports her ideas and how she builds her asides – with a very particular pattern. I am not judging: as I say, I use these tools extensively. I only want to point out an observation.
BONUS: I don’t pronounce Wednesday as /wenz.day/. I pronounce it closer to /wedñz-day/, the tilde is rather on the /d/ or the space the /d/ occupies, but I placed the mark on the /n/ instead because there is no tilde-d glyph, and I wanted to represent a nasality the more typical pronunciation doesn’t have – but that I add.
From here on, I asked Claude to analyse my post (above) along with the video script. Pay special attention to its own cadence, which comports with the video.
Here, then, is the observation.
Watch how a point is made to land. The move is nearly always the same: state the naïve reading, snatch it away, and hand back the corrected version as a tidy little binary. It’s not random. There’s a reason.It wasn’t design. It accumulated.English spelling isn’t bad design. It’s no design at all. The shape does the work an argument would otherwise have to do. Negate, reverse, reveal – and the reveal feels like insight precisely because something was first taken away. It is the cheapest available route to the sensation of having been told something.
Notice, too, the reassurance travelling alongside it. There’s a reason. There’s always a reason. The promise of an explanation, delivered before the explanation arrives, so that you settle in and stop wondering whether one is coming. And where genuine argument would be laborious, the list stands in for it: Old English, Norse, Norman, French, Latin, scholarship, Dutch typesetters, the great vowel shift. Abundance, read as authority. Say enough true things in a row and the row itself begins to feel like a proof.
Then the asides. Almost every one is the same manoeuvre – the proper noun that renames itself the instant it appears. Woden, the chief god of the Anglo-Saxon pantheon.Latin, the prestige language of learning.A Quechua word from the Andes.Frigg being Odin’s wife. Nothing is permitted to sit unglossed for even a clause. This is what maximal legibility looks like once it hardens into reflex: a horror of the unexplained referent, a compulsion to footnote in real time. The second variety is the personality wink – and English being English, it kept both – character applied topically, like a balm.
And, so that you are never left to feel anything unsupervised, your reactions are narrated back to you in advance: if that feels insane to you, good, because it is. The response, pre-issued, so you may be spared the labour of having it. The whole is held together by a governing metaphor with a landing – fossil, photograph, museum – reactivated at the close (every mispronounced word is a crime scene) and finished with a note of absolution: you haven’t been mispronouncing English because you’re careless. It is very nearly a form one could fill in.
None of which proves a human didn’t write it.
And that is the part worth sitting with. Suppose no model ever touched this script. Suppose the writer arrived at the cadence honestly, by the same route I did – by reading enough of the stuff that the rhythm simply seeped in. Then the pattern is no longer evidence of authorship at all. It is evidence of a house style, and the house is one we have all quietly moved into. The tell no longer tells you a machine was here. It tells you the machine’s prosody has become the water.
I find that rather more unsettling than a mere ghost-writer would be. A ghost-writer you can dismiss. A cadence you have caught, like an accent, off the sheer ambient volume of the thing – that you carry home. And the video is, with some poetry, about exactly this: silent letters as fossils, sounds that mouths stopped making but that spellings preserved, layer upon historical layer that nobody ever cleaned up. The irony is that the script is laying down a fresh one as it speaks. Somewhere in the prose of the next decade there will be a stratum you can date almost to the year – ah, yes, written just after the models arrived – and it will be made of precisely these moves.
I switched to en dashes to dodge the witch-hunt. But the dash was never the point. You can strip every em dash from a sentence and leave the skeleton wholly intact, because the skeleton was never punctuation. It was the not-this-but-that, the aside that footnotes itself, the pile that mistakes its own length for weight. A humaniser can launder the vocabulary. It cannot, so far, launder the architecture. Which is how one reads a script scrubbed clean of every obvious tell and still hears, quite distinctly, the thing it was scrubbed to hide.
I am not judging. I write this way too, now – rather more than I would like. I only wanted to point it out. While I can still tell that I’m doing it.
This is less a confession than an earmark. I came across a conversation with Michael Puett on Chinese philosophy, selfhood, ritual, and the modern Western compulsion to find oneself, and the whole thing caught on an old hook.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Synthèse audio de ce sujet en français dans le podcast NotebookLM.
I am already familiar with some high-level accounts of Asian philosophies, especially Buddhism and the doctrine of anattā (Pali) or anātman (Sanskrit): non-self. That idea has never seemed especially alien to me. If anything, it names with admirable economy a suspicion I already held: that the stable, discoverable, authentic Self is less a hidden metaphysical jewel than a bundle of habits wearing a name badge.
Puett’s point, as I take it, is not merely that the Western self is overblown. That would be too easy, and therefore popular. The sharper claim is that the search for one’s True Self may become dangerous precisely because it mistakes the current arrangement of ruts, reflexes, wounds, preferences, and defensive routines for an essence. ‘This is just who I am’, says the person, embracing not a soul but a sediment. The bad habit acquires a halo. Therapy-speak finds a throne. Another little sovereign subject is crowned in the bathroom mirror.
Against this, Puett presents Chinese philosophy as a tradition of cultivation: not self-discovery, but self-transformation. The point is not to excavate an authentic interior but to train perception, conduct, relation, and response. Ritual, in this frame, is not dead ceremony or social programming. It is a technology of de-naturalisation. It interrupts the little automatisms by which we become legible to ourselves and intolerable to everyone else.
This matters to me because I have long been suspicious of Western narratives and metanarratives, especially those that mistake local grammar for cosmic architecture. The year and a half I lived around Tokyo was instrumental here. I did not leave Japan with a doctrine, thankfully. Nothing so vulgar. But it loosened something. I had already begun to distrust the sovereign Western subject, the metaphysical executive behind the eyes, the heroic interiority forever pretending to be origin rather than residue. What I lacked was a broader vocabulary. A better frame.
As often happens, I later encountered thinkers who had already articulated versions of what I had been circling, usually with more patience, precision, and elegance. Such is the scholar’s reward: to discover that one’s private revelation has an older bibliography.
What struck me in Puett’s discussion was the movement from identity to practice. Religion, selfhood, reading, even attention itself: these need not be treated as badges to defend, but as disciplines to inhabit. This is a useful corrective to the modern anxiety of proof. The self must prove itself. The worker must prove worth. The believer must prove identity. The thinker must prove originality. Modern life becomes a Calvinist treadmill with better branding and worse lighting.
The alternative is not passivity. Nor is it the wet little slogan that everything is socially constructed, therefore nothing matters, therefore let us all dissolve into discourse and invoices. The alternative is practice: deliberate, repeated, embodied interruption. Ritual as a way of making habits visible. Reading as a ritual of humility. Attention as a cultivated stance. Relation as something made, not merely felt.
This is where Chinese philosophy may become especially useful for my own work. It offers neither the Western fantasy of the fixed self nor the lazy inversion of pure flux. It gives us formation, pattern, training, relation, and transformation. Not the Self as essence. Not the self as fiction. The self as practised arrangement. That, at least, is worth returning to.
I am busy, always busy, because apparently exhaustion has been mistaken for virtue by a civilisation that should know better by now. But I want to earmark this thread for further consideration: Chinese philosophy, ritual, anti-authenticity, non-self, practice over identity, and the possibility that what we call ‘who I am’ is often only what has not yet been interrupted.
As Independence Day is upon the United States of America, I considered some counterfactuals. What if Europe fails to reach the Americas until a century or more late, and we watch the delay from the vantage of the peoples already here, going about the business of history without a Columbus to interrupt them? Then came the question everyone eventually asks about their own good ideas, in the tone of a man checking whether the milk has turned: has this been done before? Of course, it had been. Spoilers follow – sort of.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
The inversions
The oldest respectable relative is Robert Silverberg’s The Gate of Worlds (1967). A nastier Black Death carries off three-quarters of Europe rather than a third; the continent never recovers, the Ottomans move in, London becomes New Istanbul, and by the twentieth century the great powers are the Aztecs, the Incas, the Russians and the Japanese. Our guide is a young Englishman named Dan Beauchamp, who sails to an industrial, motorcar-driving Mexico to seek his fortune. Note the pronoun. The world has been turned upside down, and we are shown it by a European looking up.
Christopher Evans’s Aztec Century (1993), which took that year’s BSFA Award, runs the same reversal with more brass. Cortés changes sides, a New World plague scythes through Europe instead of the reverse, and the Aztec Empire swells into a technological superpower that eventually occupies Britain. The narrator is Princess Catherine, daughter of a defeated British monarch, Princess Diana watching London burn from the losing side. Again, the conquered European tells us what the conquest was like.
Laurent Binet’s Civilizations(2019) is the cleverest of the lot, and the most decorated – it won the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, and Sam Taylor’s English translation took the Sidewise Award for alternate history. A stray band of Vikings gifts the Americas iron, horses and, crucially, immunity; so when Columbus turns up in 1492, he is captured and demoted to court jester, and the Inca emperor Atahualpa later sails east to conquer a Europe conveniently fractured by Luther, the Inquisition and its own dynastic squabbles. Binet is far too intelligent not to know what he is doing. The whole thing is a Civilization-the-video-game daydream executed with Académie française tailoring, and it is genuinely delicious. It is also, structurally, another inversion: swap the conqueror, keep the conquest.
The remix and the intervention
Two cousins change the machinery rather than the direction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) empties Europe almost entirely – the plague takes ninety-nine per cent – and then spends six hundred sprawling, reincarnation-threaded pages letting China, Islam, India and the Indigenous Americas run world history without the Europeans in the room at all. It is less a mirror than a vast tapestry, and its ambition is precisely that Europe should not be the pivot. Whether it manages that, or merely relocates the pivot, is a question the book is honest enough to leave open.
Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996) cheats, and admits it: time-travellers reach back to soften the catastrophe of contact. It is a book about first contact, disease and conquest, but the engine is intervention from a guilty future, which makes it a novel about us editing them, the colonial gaze wearing a lab coat.
The one that isn’t a mirror
And then there is B. L. Blanchard’s The Peacekeeper (2022) – also, tellingly, a Sidewise Award winner – which does the rarer thing and quietly refuses the whole game. There is no inversion here, because there is no conquest to invert. North America was simply never colonised. The Great Lakes are an independent Anishinaabe nation; Chicago is Shikaakwa; there are no borders on the map because the book declines to draw any. It happens to be a murder mystery, and a slightly wobbly one – I called the culprit early, as apparently did everyone – but the mystery is scaffolding. The real work is a society organised around restorative justice, redistribution and something the glossary calls the Good Life, where crime is repaired rather than punished, and the question ‘what is success?’ gets a genuinely different answer. That difference is the whole point, and it is worth spelling out.
The tell
Watch what the inversion novels are obliged to do to their winners. Silverberg’s Aztecs drive coal-fired automobiles. Evans’s Aztecs somehow have flying warships and space weapons, to the audible irritation of every reviewer who has ever met a history book. In each case, the counter-empire only counts as having won once it has industrialised, once it has, in other words, become Europe in a headdress. The measuring stick never leaves the room. It just changes hands. Would not recommend. All of these are still viewed through Modernist lenses. They can’t seem to help themselves.
This is the trap, and it is a grammatical one: you can swap every noun in the sentence and leave the syntax of conquest perfectly intact. Who dominates whom is a variable. That domination is the axis of the story remains fixed – invisibly, load-bearingly fixed. So the shelf keeps producing books that promise to dethrone Europe and instead install a differently-costumed emperor on the same throne, using the same yardstick to prove he deserves it. Europe gets decentred by being made the absent centre. Everything still orbits the hole where it used to be.
Blanchard’s book is the one that escapes, and it escapes not by putting someone else on the throne but by asking whether the throne needed to exist. That is a far harder imaginative act, which is exactly why the shelf holds so many mirrors and so few windows. Inverting a hierarchy is a parlour trick – satisfying, symmetrical, teachable in an afternoon. Imagining a world whose values diverged, so that its people would not measure their flourishing in territory and tonnage at all, requires you to invent the ruler before you can invent the thing it measures. Most writers, sensibly, decline the extra labour.
Six books, then, and a warning label. Read Binet for the wit, Blanchard for the nerve, Silverberg for the ancestry, and the rest for the pleasure of watching very clever people not quite escape the room. Then, if you’re feeling brave, go and undiscover America properly, which means resisting the temptation to let it become us, wearing better feathers.
On Heidegger, and the rook that was always, secretly, a bishop
Imagine, if you will, that you are playing chess with a grandmaster. Your opponent fingers his rook, slides it diagonally across the board, captures your queen and lifts the piece away. Nonplussed, you question the tactic. He defends it with vehemence.
For most of my posts, I also share a summary processed by Google’s NotebookLM. Most of these summaries are decent enough – some are even excellent inasmuch as they shed a new light on the idea. Other times, they miss the point, are well off the mark, or inject concepts or translations, not only unintended, but markedly opposed to the point being made.
My recent Chess with Heidegger post is illustrative. Both the podcast and the video make errors – and I don’t mean the visual ones that occur as well.
As a page footer, I mention that I use LLMs as part of my workflow. This may be anywhere from 0–99%. The podcast asserted that I used an LLM as a significant part of this project. This is incorrect. Specifically, I didn’t feed Heidegger’s text into an LLM and ask it to digest and regurgitate it, parsing out some unlocked wisdom. Obviously, I used various LLMs for supporting content.
The video misrepresented my point about Wittgenstein, directionally off. He expressly does not support the specificity of language. My reference to him rolling over in his grave was triggered by the notion that language is determined by use – and language games.
This is a NotebookLM podcast audio summary of a Substack essay on a key idea of Thomas Hobbes expressed in Leviathan.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
We all remember Hobbes. Not Calvin’s pet tiger, regrettably, but the Leviathan one: the cheerful fellow who looked at human beings and concluded that, left to themselves, they would make life ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. A line so good it almost excuses the anthropology. Almost.
Am I the only one who can’t resist a massive eyeroll – and, let’s be honest: jaw-drop – what you hear transhumanism couched as evolution? To me, it incites a similar reaction to hearing people witter on about machine consciousness, but I’ll sideline that topic.
My objection is linguistic: transhumanism often borrows the prestige of evolution to describe what is more precisely technological mediation. The fact that a device is worn, implanted, or integrated into a body does not by itself move it from tool-use into biological descent. The offspring still inherits the organism, not the upgrade. Technology is not heritable.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Consider rhinoplasty. Rhinoplasty changes the presented phenotype, not the inherited genotype. The child inherits the developmental instructions, not the parent’s post-surgical edit. Likewise, a neural implant, prosthetic limb, exoskeleton, gene-unrelated enhancement, or titanium jaw of techno-vanity may alter the lived organism, but it does not thereby alter the reproductive line. This is the category error: Acquired modification is mistaken for inherited transformation.
So, transhumanism often confuses the edited encounter-profile of an organism with the evolutionary alteration of the organismic lineage. The rhinoplasty case is good because it shows the absurdity without needing much apparatus. No one sane thinks a nose job rewrites the germline. Yet when the modification is sufficiently glamorous, especially when welded to futurist rhetoric and venture-capital incense, people suddenly start talking as if augmentation equals evolution.
A prosthesis is to evolution what rhinoplasty is to heredity: a modification of presentation, function, or encounter, not a transformation of descent. The confusion arises when the altered individual is mistaken for an altered lineage.
The question isn’t: Can transhumanism be defended under some broader theory of evolution, cultural inheritance, niche construction, or techno-biological co-development? Sure, it can.
But my claim is narrower: The term evolution is being made to do illicit rhetorical work when acquired, engineered, prosthetic, or embedded modifications are spoken of as though they were equivalent to heritable biological transformation.
The problem is that we are sliding from tool-use to augmentation to enhancement to transformation to evolution. This move isn’t illegal, but it should attract your attention.
At each step, something plausible is smuggled into something grander. By the end, an implanted device or technical prosthesis has been rhetorically promoted into ‘the next stage of human evolution’, when what has actually happened is that an organism’s encounter-capacities have been modified by artefactual mediation.
In the end, I’m not claiming that transhumanist practices can’t affect selection environments, social organisation, embodiment, or cultural transmission. What I am claiming is that calling such practices evolution without specifying the relevant register is a linguistic inflation. It trades on the authority of biological evolution while often describing technological mediation, individual augmentation, or cultural change.
In my book, more accurate terms might be augmentation, prosthesis, mediation, tool evolution, cultural inheritance, or niche modification, but these re so glamorous or click-baity. I might as well wear a hat and call myself post-human.
I chatted up ChatGPT, so I am adding this response:
Exactly. The carried / worn / embedded distinction is mostly a boundary fetish, the sort of thing humans adore because skin looks like an ontological border and apparently everyone remains impressed by packaging.
An axe, spectacles, a pacemaker, a cochlear implant, a smartphone, and a neural implant all sit on the same broad continuum: external mediation of capacity. Some are held. Some are worn. Some are surgically installed. But unless the alteration becomes heritable, it is not biological evolution in the strict sense. It is phenotypic augmentation, affordance expansion, or environmental coupling.
The useful distinction is threefold:
Biological evolution Heritable variation changes across generations. The organism-line changes.
Cultural / technological evolution Tools, techniques, designs, institutions, and practices vary, are selected, retained, modified, and transmitted. Axe technology evolves. Writing evolves. Surgery evolves. The appalling human habit of calling every interface “intuitive” also evolves, though downward.
Individual augmentation A particular body-system gains capacities through artefacts. This may change what the organism can do, but it does not by itself alter the inherited biological line.
Your axe example is clean because it exposes the smuggling. The axe helped alter human selection environments. It extended reach, force, food access, defence, craft, and perhaps social organisation. That may feed into gene-culture co-evolution over long scales. But the axe itself is not an evolved human trait. It is a technological mediator that participates in the evolutionary ecology.
The same holds for transhumanist implants. A retinal implant may alter one person’s perceptual affordance field. A brain-computer interface may alter one person’s control loop. A prosthetic limb may alter one person’s mobility. But unless such modifications become transmissible across generations, biologically or through some stable reproductive architecture, calling them “evolution” is loose metaphor masquerading as profundity. Very on-brand for techno-utopianism: rename engineering as destiny and hope the grant reviewers are sleepy.
From your MEOW angle, the better formulation is:
The relevant transformation is not evolutionary but mediational. Tools, prostheses, implants, and interfaces reconfigure encounter-events by altering the affordance structure through which an organism meets constraint. Whether the device is carried in the hand, worn on the face, implanted beneath the skin, or networked through the environment is secondary. The organism-world relation changes; the inherited organism does not necessarily change.
That also lets you avoid an overcorrection. Transhumanist enhancement is not irrelevant. It may be historically enormous. But its primary register is encounter, not inheritance; mediation, not mutation; technical lineage, not biological descent.
So the blunt line is:
Transhumanism mistakes the evolution of tools for the evolution of the tool-user.
Not always, not necessarily, but often enough that the slogan deserves being dragged into the alley and relieved of its metaphysical wallet.
Philosophics 