Tag: encounter-events

MEOW GPT FeedbackOn Testing MEOW GPT (And the Delicate Souls It Might Upset)

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3–4 minutes

A surprising number of people have been using the MEOW GPT I released into the wild. Naturally, I can’t see how anyone is actually using it, which is probably for the best. If you hand someone a relational ontology and they treat it like a BuzzFeed quiz, that’s on them. Still, I haven’t received any direct feedback, positive or catastrophic, which leaves me wondering whether users understand the results or are simply nodding like priests reciting Latin they don’t believe.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The truth is uncomfortable: if you haven’t grasped the Mediated Encounter Ontology (of the World), the outputs may feel like a philosophical brick to the face. They’re meant to; mediation has consequences. I’m even considering adding a warning label:

If you hold an unwavering commitment to a concept with any philosophical weight, perhaps don’t input it. There is a non-zero chance the illusion will shatter.

Below is a sampling of the concepts I tested while inspecting the system’s behaviour. I’m withholding the outputs, partly to avoid influencing new users and partly to preserve your dignity, such as it is.

  • authenticity
  • anattā (Buddhist)
  • character (in Aristotle’s virtue-ethical sense)
  • consciousness
  • dignity
  • freedom
  • hózhó (Navajo)
  • justice
  • karma
  • love
  • progress
  • ren ( 仁 )
  • table
  • tree
  • truth

I may have tried others, depending on how irritated I was with the world at the time.

(Now that I think of it, I entered my full name and witnessed it nearly have an aneurysm.)

My purpose in trying these is (obviously) to test the GPT. As part of the test, I wanted to test terms I already considered to be weasel words. I also wanted to test common terms (table) and terms outside of Western modalities. I learned something about the engine in each case.

Tables & Trees

One of the first surprises was the humble ‘table’ which, according to the engine, apparently moonlights across half of civilisation’s conceptual landscape. If you input ‘table’, you get everything from dinner tables to data tables to parliamentary procedure. The model does exactly what it should: it presents the full encounter-space and waits for you to specify which world you meant to inhabit.

The lesson: if you mean a table you eat dinner on, say so. Don’t assume the universe is built around your implied furniture.

‘Tree’ behaves similarly. Does the user mean a birch in a forest? A branching data structure? A phylogenetic diagram? MEOW GPT won’t decide that for you; nor should it. Precision is your job.

This is precisely why I tested ‘character (in Aristotle’s virtue-ethical sense)’ rather than tossing ‘character’ in like a confused undergraduate hoping for luck.

Non-Western Concepts

I also tested concepts well outside the Western philosophical sandbox. This is where the model revealed its real strength.

Enter ‘karma’: it promptly explained that the Western reduction is a cultural oversimplification and – quite rightly – flagged that different Eastern traditions use the term differently. Translation: specify your flavour.

Enter ‘anattā’: the model demonstrated that Western interpretations often reduce the concept to a caricature. Which, frankly, they do.

Enter ‘hózhó’: the Navajo term survives mostly in the anthropological imagination, and the model openly described it as nearly ineffable – especially to those raised in cultures that specialise in bulldozing subtlety. On that score, no notes.

Across the board, I was trying to see whether MEOW GPT would implode when confronted with concepts that resist neat Western categorisation. It didn’t. It was annoyingly robust.

Closing Notes

If you do try the MEOW GPT and find its results surprising, illuminating, or mildly offensive to your metaphysical sensibilities, let me know – and tell me why. It helps me understand what the engine does well and what illusions it quietly pops along the way. Your feedback may even keep me from adding further warning labels, though I wouldn’t count on it.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World

Posted in critical theory, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernismTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Philosophers adore two things: inventing problems and then fainting when someone solves them. For decades, we’ve been treated to the realism–idealism tug-of-war, that noble pantomime in which two exhausted metaphysical camps clutch the same conceptual teddy bear and insist the other stole it first. It’s almost touching.

Try out the MEOW GPT language parser.

Enter Nexal Ontology, my previous attempt at bailing water out of this sinking ship. It fought bravely, but as soon as anyone spotted even a faint resemblance to Whitehead, the poor thing collapsed under the weight of process-cosmology PTSD. One throwaway comment about ‘actual occasions’, and Nexal was done. Dead on arrival. A philosophical mayfly.

But MEOW* – The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World – did not die. It shrugged off the Whitehead comparison with the indifference of a cat presented with a salad. MEOW survived the metaphysical death match because its commitments are simply too lean, too stripped-back, too structurally minimal for speculative cosmology to get its claws into. No prehensions. No eternal objects. No divine lure. Just encounter, mediation, constraint, and the quiet dignity of not pretending to describe the architecture of the universe.

And that’s why MEOW stands. It outlived Nexal not by being grander, but by being harder to kill.

Image: The Four Mediation Layers – Biological, Cognitive, Conceptual, Cultural – structuring every encounter we mistake for ‘direct’.

This little illustration gives the flavour:
• T0 Biological mediation – the body’s refusal to be neutral.
• T1 Cognitive mediation – the brain, doing predictive improv.
• T2 Linguistic–conceptual – words pretending they’re objective.
• T3 Cultural–normative – the inheritance of everyone else’s mistakes.

The essay argues that what we call ‘mind’ and ‘world’ are just abstractions we extract after the encounter, not the metaphysical scaffolding that produces it. Once you begin with the encounter-event itself – already mediated, already structured, already resistive – the mind–world binary looks about as sophisticated as a puppet show.

What the essay actually does

The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World is the first framework I’ve written that genuinely sheds the Enlightenment scaffolding rather than rebuking it. MEOW shows:

  • Mediation isn’t an epistemic flaw; it’s the only way reality appears.
  • Constraint isn’t evidence of a noumenal backstage; it’s built into the encounter.
  • Objectivity is just stability across mediation, not a mystical view-from-nowhere.
  • ‘Mind’ and ‘world’ are names for recurring patterns, not metaphysical hotels.
  • And – importantly – MEOW does all of this without drifting into Whiteheadian cosmological fan-fiction.

The full essay is now published and archived:

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17685689

If you prefer a soft landing and the sound of a passable human voice explaining why metaphysics keeps tripping over its shoelaces, a NotebookLM discussion is here:

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this essay.

MEOW is the survivor because it does the one thing philosophy is terrible at: it refuses to pretend. No substances, no noumena, no grand metaphysical machinery—just a clean, relational architecture that mirrors how we actually encounter the world.

And frankly, that’s quite enough ontology for one lifetime.

* To be perfectly honest, I originally fled from Michela Massimi’s Perspectival Realism in search of a cleaner terminological habitat. I wanted to avoid the inevitable, dreary academic cross-pollination: the wretched fate of being forever shelved beside a project I have no quarrel with but absolutely no desire to be mistaken for. My proposed replacement, Nexal Ontology, looked promising until I realised it had wandered, by sheer lexical accident, into Whitehead’s garden – an unintentional trespass for which I refused to stick around to apologise. I could already hear the process-metaphysics crowd sharpening their teeth.

Early evasive action was required.

I preferred nexal to medial, but the terminology had already been colonised, and I am nothing if not territorial. Mediated Ontology would have staked its claim well enough, but something was missing – something active, lived, structural. Enter the Encounter.

And once the acronym MEO appeared on the page, I was undone. A philosopher is only human, and the gravitational pull toward MEOW was irresistible. What, then, could honour the W with appropriate pomp? The World, naturally. Thus was born The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World.

Pretentious? Yes. Obnoxious? Also yes.

And so it remains—purring contentedly in its absurdity.