Tag: fiction

Architecture of Encounter – Indexing with Claude AI

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5–7 minutes

Dear diary…

I’m not ashamed to say that AI is a significant part of my publishing workflow. In my latest project, The Architecture of Encounter, I’ve added indexing to the roles it serves. Other roles were prepping the index and footnotes, as I shared recently.

I expect the book to be available by next week. Time will tell.

I’ve included the full index below for reference. I’ve also included the title and copyright pages and other back matter.

Architecture of Encounter – v1.0 – IndexDownload

What will a visitor do with a bookless index? I don’t know, but sharing is caring in my book. For the interested, you can get a sense of the contents. I’ll be sharing more details over the coming weeks – and beyond, I’m sure.

Earlier, I shared that Claude had offered index candidates. I started executing on that list by indexing the first few terms. It took me about an hour to do these, searching for each term and documenting the page number and context – around 250 pages. The book itself is 292 – 6″ x 9″ pages, but more than 50 of these are appendices, and others are front matter. Still.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic. (Another one that misses some points but make others. Fair enough.)

Then it dawned on me to ask Claude to help me with the index. Claude interpreted ‘help’ by spitting out the entire index, formatted and organised. If the book were formatted in 8½” x 11″ Letter size, I could have appended it as-is, but I still had to pour the output into the InDesign template I was composing through and make it look like it was part of the same manuscript, but that took minutes, not days of hours. Appendix E.

Given that I also rely heavily on novel concepts and specifically-defined terms – language insufficiency notwithstanding – I felt that a glossary would be useful. I tasked Claude with this, too. Again, it output a fully-formed list.

I noticed that a couple of terms I wanted defined were absent, so I fed the list into ChatGPT and asked it to consider these and let me know, given the manuscript, what other terms might be absent. It agreed with the two I wanted and suggested three more. It also pointed out an error Claude had made in counting. It also provided the definitions for the glossary entries, so I poured Claude’s output into InDesign. Appendix D.

AI is also a helper. For example, I wanted my index to flow into 2 columns. I’ve done this before. In the old days, I’d have scanned the menus (Adobe products are infamous for convoluted, nested menus), read the manual, and/or Googled for the answer – perhaps queried YouTube, a great resource for such things. Now, I ask AI. In this case, I asked ChatGPT. To be honest, it’s a little verbose, where ‘it’s option X under Y menu’ would suffice, but I ignore the banter.

If you need to know…

If the index is already placed in a text frame

  1. Select the text frame containing the index.
  2. Go to Object → Text Frame Options.
  3. Set the Number of Columns you want, usually 2 for a 6×9 book, sometimes 3 if the type is small and the entries are short.
  4. Adjust the Gutter spacing between columns.
  5. Click OK.

Criticise AI all you want, but having access to in-built assistance 24/7 is a huge time-saving benefit.

Do I still use Google and YouTube? Yes, often.

Speaking of Google, I was searching for a cover image, and I discovered something I need for the fiction title I paused in September to focus on nonfiction. Sidenotes. Perhaps I’ll employ a similar mechanism.

The nonfiction book I am writing is somewhat epistolary, and I want to place internal dialogue as marginalia, employing a scripted font face. I am even considering a ‘deluxe’ version that renders this content in colour, but that’s an extra expense, first for the colour, then the full-page bleed, and perhaps thicker paper stock. Likely hardbound, reserving the paperback for a lower price point.

So, what’s next?

I finished both paperback and hardcover designs today.

I still need to review the index for hallucinated errors. This will still take less time than manually constructing it.

On the copyright page, there are a few classifiers. There are ISBNs for each format and a Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN). These are done, as you can see, but the ISBN system in the United States is antiquated. It looks like it’s a museum piece from the mid-1990s. In fact, I believe I first accessed it around 2000 or 2001, when I published my first book – before AI, before print on demand (POD).

A bit of nostalgia. The WWW, the internet as most people know it, was made public around 1994. Google hit it in 1998. Web 1.0. Facebook blighted the world around 2004, though less invasively at the start. I digress. Technology is a mixed bag.

Returning to ISBNs… These are managed in a system built circa 1997. It seems it is still managed with a host of cron jobs, so not much is processed in real time unless it’s a trivial record entry.

Each ISBN references a title and a format, as well as other odds and ends. In my case, I also use an imprint to separate my fiction from nonfiction. I started Microglyphics – tiny writing– in the mid-90s. When I published other authors, I used this name. I also used it for some of my fiction writing. I decided to create a Philosophics Press imprint for my philosophy and adjacent work.

It turns out that the printer needs to ensure that a book’s title and ISBN match the imprint. The system default is the company name, but I changed it to my imprint. This causes a workflow event on their end. Until it propagates, it doesn’t match, and the printer won’t allow the print run.

I’m writing this blog entry as I wait. I’m not sure if it’s automated – I’d like to assume it is – or if a human has to do something. AI might help. Just saying.

EDIT: The imprint has now been updated to Philosophics Press, but it still doesn’t work at the printer. Evidently, it can take up to 5 days for the data to propagate. I’m not sure who owns the fail on this one? Is the printer waiting for a data push? Can’t they pull the data? They seem to be live from my perspective. Is there an API, or is it truly old-school?

Whilst I’m here wittering on, WordPress have deprecated the little widget below – the one with my (old) thumbnail picture and ‘written by’ tag. I adopted it last year, but it’s been killed off. I’ve been copying the object from old posts, but I’ll probably switch to whatever they’ve replaced it with. I wasn’t keen on the options I’ve seen so far. First-world problems, I suppose.

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Written by Bry Willis

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On Footnotes

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
1–2 minutes

Two consecutive posts on writing. What gives?

As a writer, I have a kind of workflow in mind. It differs for fiction and nonfiction, though there are similarities. The main differences are indexes, references, and footnotes. I thought I was nearly finished with my latest book.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I rendered the first couple of chapters in ElevenLabs so I could listen to the text. It helps me assess pacing, continuity, and the like. It also gives me one more thing to fix, since the digital voices occasionally pronounce things differently from the way I’d prefer. Usually, choosing a voice that sounds roughly like Standard Southern British English helps, though not always. In any case, I survive.

While listening and following along in the manuscript, I discovered that I still haven’t fully footnoted the book.

When I write, I tend to jot down sources and references as I go, but I leave the footnoting until the final revision. There is little point in spending time drafting footnotes for material that may not survive the cut. So here I am, drafting footnotes.

I am of two minds about footnotes and citations, especially in academic work. On the one hand, they can feel performative, a way of signalling that one has incorporated so-and-so, a kind of name-dropping appeal to authority. As a heterodox writer, this is risky anyway, because I am liable to cite one of the approved villains. God forbid a Nietzsche, a Heidegger, or a Foucault. Analytic philosophers, in my experience, can be remarkably thin-skinned.

On the other hand, I do want to acknowledge those whose ideas I have borrowed. Even that, of course, is also a signal. Perhaps it all comes down to intent. As I mean it, I want to leave breadcrumbs for anyone who feels inclined to follow them back to the source.

I’ll let you decide where I’ve landed.

I’ve procrastinated long enough. Time to get back into the word mine.

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Bry Willis

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Advantagement and Modelment

Posted in language, philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
3–5 minutes

I wrote an experimental short story, the details of which I’ll presently share, but first, I wish to describe an encounter with AI – NotebookLM. Firstly, I want to disclose that I am not an AI hater. Secondly, I understand its limitations. Thirdly, I understand the limitations of language. Fourthly, I understand the limitations of people. Let this set the stage.

In this short story that I named Advantagement, there is an inspector in Victorian London working with his partner on a missing-person case, the daughter of the mayor. A piece of evidence is a hairbrush left on her dresser. None of this is important for now.

Exhibit 1: The NotebookLM summary podcast with the silver hairbrush.

After I wrote it, I posted it to my Ridley Park blog, not intending to share it here, though I had reasons I might have instead. I fed it to NotebookLM to get an AI summary podcast, something I do routinely even here on Philosphics blog. The interpretation led to this post.

I like NotebookLM, but it has its flaws. Some are trivial, some comical. This one is curious and might shed light on how LLMs process information.

Let’s return to the hairbrush. NotebookLM keyed in on the hairbrush as the evidence it was, but then it strayed off the reservation. Suddenly, an ordinary hairbrush was now silver and monogrammed. I had to revisit my manuscript to see if I had subconsciously scribbled these details. Nope. No such description.

I’m not done noting errors, but I’ll pause to suss out the LLM. What I think might have happened is that it took in the notions of a posh house set in late nineteenth century London and presumed that a brush would appear like this. I considered retroactively adding the detail. As a writer, I struggle with deep POV because I don’t experience the world so vividly. But this hallucination isn’t the worst of it.

Next, the LLM noted that the hairbrush was orientated with bristles facing down on her dresser. This was stated in the story. Then, it went off the tracks again. This monogrammed silver hairbrush, bristles down, was a clue because anyone with such an expensive artefact would want to show it off, so showcase the fancy monogram.

But here’s the rub: if the bristles were down, the monogramme would be prominently displayed. To be obscured, it would have been positioned with the bristles facing up. This is a logical error I can’t explain.

Scratch that, I understand full well that LLMs are, by definition, Large Language Models – the acronym is a dead giveaway. These are not logic models, though, I suppose, one might assume one of the Ls stands for logic – Like Large Logic Model or Logical Language model of some such, but one would be mistaken.

Audio: ‘Dramatisation’ of the Advantagement

What about the story?

Advantagement

I might as well spill the tea on the motivation of the story. Although it is a detective story, this was just a vehicle.

I had been watching this video, ‘Why don’t we have words for these things?‘ I love these guys, even if only for this inspiration.

Video: My primary inspiration for Advantagement.

I thought it might be a fun idea to create a character who speaks in these terms – malformed English. I immediately thought of Mr Burns from The Simpsons and his anachronisms, or someone ripe with malaprops. It suggested that I might choose Victorian England, Sherlock Holmes, a detective, a sidekick… vying for promotion. A high-profile case.

But not Sherlock Holmes – more Inspector Clouseau or Mr Bean, successful in spite of himself. I decided to offset his inanity with a logical partner, but it would be a woman, as unlikely as this might be given the period. Now it’s open to topical management politics.

When I told my sister the story idea, she thought of Get Smart, the 1960s comedy with Don Adams and Barbara Feldon. Yes, that too, but my goal wasn’t comedy. It was satire – and absurdism.

At uni, I enjoyed the short stories of Donald Barthelme. He was generally a lighter version of Kafka, and orthogonal to Kurt Vonnegut, especially Harrison Bergeron, a favourite classic. I wanted to shoot for that.

In conceit to the Peter principle of management, I decided to name the lead character Peter. For the rest, I adopted period-appropriate names.

My primary goal was to employ these confabulated words. In practise, it’s easy anough to suss out their meanings in context. Give it a read. It’s under 3,500 words.

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Written by Bry Willis

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The Useful Fiction of Atoms and Selves

Posted in identity, ontology, philosophy, podcast, societyTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

There is a peculiar anachronism at work in how we think about reality. In physics, we still talk as if atoms were tiny marbles. In everyday life, we talk as if selves were little pilots steering our bodies through time. In both cases, we know better. And in both cases, we can’t seem to stop.

Audio: NotebookLM summary of this podcast

Consider the atom. Every chemistry textbook shows them as colorful spheres, electrons orbiting like planets. We teach children to build molecules with ball-and-stick models. Yet modern physics dismantled this picture a century ago. What we call ‘particles’ are really excitations in quantum fields—mathematical patterns, not things. They’re events masquerading as objects, processes dressed up as nouns.

The language persists because the maths doesn’t care what we call things, and humans need something to picture. ‘Electron’ is easier to say than ‘localised excitation in the electromagnetic field’.

The self enjoys a similar afterlife.

We speak of ‘finding yourself’ or ‘being true to yourself’ as if there were some stable entity to find or betray. We say ‘I’m not the same person I was ten years ago’ while simultaneously assuming enough continuity to take credit – or blame – for what that ‘previous person’ did.

But look closer. Strip away the story we tell about ourselves and what remains? Neural firing patterns. Memory fragments. Social roles shifting with context. The ‘you’ at work is not quite the ‘you’ at home, and neither is the ‘you’ from this morning’s dream. The self isn’t discovered so much as assembled, moment by moment, from available materials.

Like atoms, selves are inferred, not found.

This isn’t just philosophical hand-waving. It has practical teeth. When someone with dementia loses their memories, we wrestle with whether they’re ‘still themselves’. When we punish criminals, we assume the person in prison is meaningfully continuous with the person who committed the crime. Our entire legal and moral framework depends on selves being solid enough to bear responsibility.

And here’s the thing: it works. Mostly.

Just as chemistry functions perfectly well with its cartoon atoms, society functions with its fictional selves. The abstractions do real work. Atoms let us predict reactions without drowning in field equations. Selves let us navigate relationships, assign accountability, and plan futures without collapsing into existential vertigo.

The mistake isn’t using these abstractions. The mistake is forgetting that’s what they are.

Physics didn’t collapse when atoms dissolved into probability clouds. Chemistry students still balance equations; medicines still get synthesised. The practical utility survived the ontological revolution. Similarly, ethics won’t collapse if we admit selves are processes rather than things. We can still make promises, form relationships, and hold each other accountable.

What changes is the confusion.

Once you see both atoms and selves as useful fictions – pragmatic compressions of unmanageable complexity – certain puzzles dissolve. The ship of Theseus stops being paradoxical. Personal identity becomes a matter of degree rather than an all-or-nothing proposition. The hard problem of consciousness softens when you stop looking for the ghost in the machine.

We’re pattern-seeking creatures in a universe of flux. We freeze processes into things because things are easier to think about. We turn verbs into nouns because nouns fit better in our mental hands. This isn’t a bug in human cognition – it’s a feature. The problem comes when we forget we’re doing it.

So we end up in the peculiar position of defending little billiard balls in a field universe, and little inner captains in a processual mind, long after the evidence has moved on. We know atoms aren’t solid. We know selves aren’t fixed. Yet we persist in talking as if they were.

Perhaps that’s okay. Perhaps all language is a kind of useful betrayal of reality – solid enough to stand on, but not so solid we can’t revise it when needed.

The half-life of knowledge keeps ticking. Today’s insights become tomorrow’s anachronisms. But some fictions are too useful to abandon entirely. We just need to remember what they are: tools, not truths. Maps, not territories.

And every once in a while, it helps to check whether we’re still navigating by stars that went out long ago.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Bonus 2025 Post + Books

Posted in ontology, updateTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

2025 has been a good year for this blog. I’ve crossed the 1,000-post mark, and this year it has had over 30,000 page views – best year ever. This month was the best month ever, and 1st December was the most popular day ever. That’s a lot of ‘evers’.

I shared the remainder of this post on my Ridley Park fiction blog – same reader, same books, same opinion. Any new content added below is in red.

I genuinely loathe top X lists, so let us indulge in some self-loathing. I finished these books in 2026. As you can see, they cross genres, consist of fiction and non-fiction, and don’t even share temporal space. I admit that I’m a diverse reader and, ostensibly, writer. Instead of just the top 5. I’ll shoot for the top and bottom 5 to capture my anti-recommendations. Within categories are alphabetical.

Fiction

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – A slow reveal about identity, but worth the wait.

This was very philosophical and psychological. Nothing appeared to happen until chapter 7, as I recall. I felt like I was just eavesdropping on some school chums, which I was. Then came the big reveal.

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky – Classic unreliable narrator.

Again, philosophical, psychological. I liked it.

There Is No Antimemetics Division by QNTM (AKA Sam Hughes) – Points for daring to be different and hitting the landing.

This, I read because I was attracted to the premise of memory as it might affect language. It touched on this a tad, but it was mostly about memory, anti-memory, and constructed selves. How can one experience a contiguous, diachronic self with memory gaps? It never quite got that deep, that on occasion it did, as far as I recall.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh – Scottish drugs culture and bonding mates narrative.

This is an age-old cult classic – much better than the already excellent films. Fills in what the film cut for its medium. I read several other Welsh books. Filth was an honourable mention, which I also made connexions to Antimemetics, above.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin – In the league of 1984 and Brave New World, but without the acclaim.

This flagged a tad at the end, but it was prescient and released in 1922, decades before 1984 and Brave New World. Worth the read.

Nonfiction

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher – Explains why most problems are social, not personal or psychological. Follows Erich Fromm’s Sane Society, which I also read in 2025 and liked, but it fell into the ‘lost the trail’ territory at some point, so it fell off the list.

Moral Politics by George Lakoff

Evidently, I forgot to explain myself in my prior post. I refer to this book and its trade counterpart, Don’t Think of an Elephant, which is more of a political polemic, but still worth the read. It’s also shorter. This is about Moral politics – duh! – but it’s about moral language. It was a precursor to Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion or Kurt Gray’s Outraged! I found Haidt’s work interesting but reductive; I found Gray’s work merely reductive.

This said, Lakoff and Haidt were the vector through which I came upon my language ontology theory that further confounds language insufficiency. To be sure, Haidt was an unnecessary point, but it did emphasise it. Haidt’s frameworks also give me something to riff on.

Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis – Explains why Capitalism is already dead on arrival.

Nothing much to add here. Technofeudalism is economic fare, albeit with philosophical implications. I enjoyed it. Yanis is also an interesting speaker.

NB: Some of the other books had great pieces of content, but failed as books. They may have been better as essays or blog posts. They didn’t have enough material for a full book. The Second Sex had enough for a book, but then Beauvoir poured in enough for two books. She should have quit whilst she was ahead.

Image: Books I read in 2025 on Goodreads.
Full disclosure: I don’t always record my reading on Goodreads, but I try.

Bottom of the Barrel

Crash by J.G. Ballard – Hard no. I also didn’t like High-rise, but it was marginally better, and I didn’t want to count an author twice.

Nah. I felt he was trying to hard for shock value. It didn’t shock, but it put me off. At least High-rise represented an absurd cultural microcosm. I just wanted the story to be over. Luckily, I read both of these sequentially whilst on holiday, so I wasn’t looking to ingest anything serious.

Neuromancer by William Gibson – I don’t tend to like SciFi. This is a classic. Maybe it read differently back in the day. Didn’t age well.

Nexus by Yuval Harari – Drivel. My mates goaded me into reading this. I liked Sapiens. He’s gone downhill since then. He’s a historian, not a futurist.

Outraged! by Kurt Gray – Very reductionist view of moral harm, following the footsteps of George Lakoff and Jonathan Haidt.

See comments above. ☝️

Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord – A cautionary tale on why writing a book on LSD may not be a recipe for success.

Honourable Mention

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer was also good, but my cutoff was at 5. Sorry, Jeff.

I did like this, and it was much better than the Natalie Portman film adaptation. This is the first book in a trilogy. I absolutely hated the second instalment. The third was not as good as the first, but it tried to get back on track from the derailment of the second. As I wrote in public reviews, the second book could have been a prologue chapter to the third book with all of the relevant information I cared about. You could skip the second story with almost no material effect on the story or character arcs.

When Aliens Speak English: The False Promise of Linguistic Familiarity

Posted in consciousness, intelligence, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, post-enlightenment, postmodernism, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
5–7 minutes

Why shared language creates the illusion – not the reality – 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 — 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 – 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 “cold” 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 – biological or artificial – 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 a local 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. It’s an oddly provincial stance for a culture that prides itself on rational self-awareness.

To be clear, I have nothing against Alex O’Connor. He’s 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 one’s 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, I’m 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 – not a vantage point outside the world, but one local ecology among many possible ones.

Until this recognition becomes basic philosophical hygiene, we’ll continue to confuse linguistic familiarity for shared ontology and to mistake the limits of our own embodiment for the limits of consciousness itself.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Editing Is Hard and Propensity

Posted in art, fiction, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

Well, not so much hard as not particularly or inherently enjoyable.

I estimate I’ve got about a day left to complete this manuscript – ‘done’ done. When I open InDesign, it shames me – 3 days ago, I last touched this document. It doesn’t feel like 3 days have passed, but time flies.

On the right is an older version. I began reworking it into this new version over the summer, and here I am come autumn. It’s even worse if I use the Chinese calendar. Evidently, 7th November is the first day of winter. They can’t wait until soltace.

Anyway, just a brief update. This isn’t going to edit itself, and I can’t afford to pay an editor for a passion project. Besides – and let’s be honest – I can’t afford an editor in general – or at least can’t cost-justify it – and all my writing is a passion project.

Of course, editors (and cover artists) insist that one would sell more book if only they were edited or professionally rendered. There is an element of truth to this, but I’ve read some gawdawful books that were professionally edited and published through a traditional publisher, because publishers publish.

Me, I operate on razor-thin margins. Most of my publications haven’t even broken even – even if I ignore opportunity costs, which I can’t because I’m an economist. Accountants get to play that trick.

This said, I do hire reviewers, editors, and artists in small doses – homoeopathic as they might be – and I’ve had mixed results.

I’m rambling

Must really be avoiding the editing process…

Recently, I wanted to redesign the cover of one of my Ridley Park fiction books.

Image Comparison: A Tale of Two Propensities

The cover on the left is the original. It is intentionally a minimal 2-D construction – a representation of the first section of the book, the first 15 chapters.

The cover on the right is the update. It is also minimalist, representing the second section of Propensity. I’m not sure how I would depict the third section. If it comes to me, I may render a third version.

There’s a story to this. I reached out to some cover artists and told them I was unhappy with my original design but had no visual ideas. I’d leave this to the artist. It turns out that some artists don’t want full control over the design process. I can understand the hesitation.

They asked for covers that I might like, so I researched some covers and saved them to a Pinterest board.

As it turned out, after some inspiration, I decided to render this one myself, too. Hey, I tried.

What happened to the rest of the time?

OK, so there’s more. I also created a video book trailer in the evening.

It was fun enough. Give it a watch. It also represents part one of Propensity.

OK, this time for real. Let me know what you think…about anything in particular.

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Written by Bry Willis

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How to Avoid Reading

Posted in language, modernism, philosophy, podcast, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
The Intellectual Origins of Modernity
2–3 minutes

Rather, how to optimise your time commitment to reading.

I came across a digital copy of The Intellectual Origins of Modernity by David Ohana as I was purusing titles on PhilArchive. The title piqued my interest, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to reading it. What’s a bloke to do? Feed it to ChatGPT, of course.

Let’s just say, M. GPT was not amused.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

My first question: Is this at least tangential to my work?

Yes, it wanders. He tends to smuggle in parallel intellectual developments (Kantian autonomy, Cartesian doubt, social contract theory) even when they’re only indirectly related to his main thread. It’s a common sin in “origins of modernity” texts: the net gets cast so wide that causation and correlation start swapping costumes.

If you’re looking for the through-line, it’s probably his effort to show how early modern conceptions of reason metastasised into a moral and political framework, not just an epistemic one. But, yes — tangential is fair.

Is it more of a superficial survey with some connective tissue?

That’s a precise way to put it. Ohanav’s book reads like a well-informed synthesis—competent, even elegant—but not a deep excavation. He’s stitching together recognizable figures (Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hume) into a narrative arc about “modernity” rather than uncovering new terrain. The connective tissue is mostly thematic rather than argumentative: reason → autonomy → secular moral order → political liberalism.

It’s a survey that flatters the reader into thinking they’re tracing the genealogy of modern thought, but it rarely descends into the messy underlayers—say, the theological anxieties, material conditions, or institutional contexts that actually gave those ideas traction. In short: wide lens, thin soil.

Wow. Not a rousing endorsement.

So in a world of publish or perish, he’s publishing something more approachable than academic?

Exactly. It’s the kind of book that keeps tenure committees content and undergrads awake. Respectable citations, accessible prose, and a digestible thesis that flatters modernity while hinting at critique.

He’s not trying to break ground—he’s curating a gallery of the usual suspects and arranging them under good lighting. The prose carries that faint aroma of Routledge house style: serious but safe, just speculative enough to appear bold without alienating reviewers.

In the “publish or perish” economy, it’s survival by synthesis.

So closer to an undergraduate project than a grad school thesis?

Pretty much. It’s polished enough to pass for advanced scholarship if you don’t poke too hard, but structurally it’s more akin to a well-executed upper-level survey paper—ambitious in scope, cautious in depth.

He gestures toward big philosophical debates without really committing to any. The text moves like a docent through a museum: “Here we have Descartes, note his influence on Kant; over here, the Enlightenment’s moral optimism, soon to be critiqued by Nietzsche—moving on…”

You can tell he’s read widely, but the apparatus of argument—archival work, textual analysis, theoretical risk—is minimal. It’s competent, not adventurous.

OK, so dodged that bullet. I may still skim it.

Don’t do this to any of my books. 🧐🫠

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Written by Bry Willis and Chat GPT

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Propensity of the Illusion of Light

Posted in art, philosophy, updateTagged , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

I just received two proof copies in the post this afternoon.

Propensity

I created a “Book Club Edition” of Propensity, a Ridley Park book of fiction primarily for the European market – specifically in the UK – though it’s available elsewhere. I altered the cover art. As an author, I also wanted to compare KDP and IngramSpark as printers and distributors.

I find the cover texture on this version interesting, but I don’t have a word to describe it. I like it. There’s a certain je ne sais quoi about it – the texture. I reworked the art to track the second section of the book. The original cover tracks the first section.

Image: Propensity by Ridley Park; original book cover

At least in this proof version, the black ink is not 100% and is streaky. The KDP version is 100% K and solid black. I mightn’t have noticed except that some section division pages were mostly black, and it is quite evident. I don’t discern a difference in the quality of the text itself.

Illusion of Light

The Illusion of Light is a cloth version of a book also available in paperback. I like the cloth-bound. There is a nostalgic elegance about it. It feels durable – more so than a paperback for sure. I’m not sure about versus the case laminate versions. They come off like textbooks to me – not the vibe I am aiming for.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Baudrillard in Latex: Why The Matrix Was Right About Everything Except Freedom

Posted in agency, fiction, free will, identity, intelligence, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, power, psychology, reality, science, society, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

In the late 1990s, the Wachowskis gave us The Matrix – Keanu Reeves as Neo, the Chosen One™, a man so bland he could be anyone, which was the point. Once he realised he was living inside a simulation, he learned to bend its laws, to dodge bullets in slow motion and see the code behind the curtain. Enlightenment, Hollywood-style.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

But here’s the twist, the film itself couldn’t stomach: realising the simulation doesn’t free you from it.

Knowing that race and gender are social constructs doesn’t erase their architecture. Knowing that our economies, legal systems, and so-called democracies are fictions doesn’t get us out of paying taxes or playing our assigned roles. “The social contract” is a collective hallucination we agreed to before birth. That and a dollar still won’t buy you a cup of coffee.

Baudrillard, whose Simulacra and Simulation the film name-dropped like a trophy, argued that simulation doesn’t hide reality – it replaces it. When representation becomes indistinguishable from the thing it represents, truth evaporates, leaving only consensus. We don’t live in a system of power; we live in its performance.

The Matrix got the metaphor half right. It imagined the bars of our cage as a digital dream – glossy, computable, escapable. But our chains are older and subtler. Rousseau called them “social”, Foucault diagnosed them as “biopolitical”, and the rest of us just call them “normal”. Power doesn’t need to plug wires into your skull; it only needs to convince you that the socket is already there.

You can know it’s all a fiction. You can quote Derrida over your morning espresso and tweet about the collapse of epistemic certainty. It won’t change the fact that you still have rent to pay, laws to obey, and identities to perform. Awareness isn’t liberation; it’s just higher-resolution despair with better UX.

Neo woke up to a ruined Earth and thought he’d escaped. He hadn’t. He’d only levelled up to the next simulation – the one called “reality”. The rest of us are still here, dutifully maintaining the system, typing in our passwords, and calling it freedom.

NB: Don’t get me wrong. I loved The Matrix when it came out. I still have fond memories. It redefined action films at the time. I loved the Zen messaging, but better mental acuity doesn’t grant you a pass out of the system.

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Written by Bry Willis

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