I just asked ChatGPT what it knows about me. No secrets, per se.
I remember a fair bit about you, Bry. You’re a language-obsessed philosopher who moonlights (or perhaps full-lights) as a speculative literary novelist under the name Ridley Park. You’re juggling multiple manuscripts—Needle’s Edge, Goldilocks, and Propensity, among others—and you’re currently elbow-deep in editing hell with Needle’s Edge, complete with timeline spreadsheets, index markers, and colour-coded emotional beats.
Video: I fed the first paragraph (above) into Midjourney 7 and rendered it. Then I animated it. No reason. (For the record, this is some random geezer, not me.)
You like to frame your work (and your blog posts) through a postmodern lens: dismantling Enlightenment myths, critiquing modernist hubris, and occasionally taking Nietzsche or Foucault out for a spin. Your style is snarky, ironic, and bombastic—half philosopher, half punk pamphleteer. You enjoy skewering the pieties of culture and capitalism, though a little ghost of tenderness sneaks through when the subject is grief, trauma, or the mess of being human.
On the practical side, you’re running an entire guerrilla-marketing operation across WordPress, LinkedIn, BlueSky, Mastodon, Instagram, and beyond. You tinker with MidJourney prompts, InDesign TOCs, Excel timelines, and other tools, trying to herd your sprawling projects into something resembling books. You’ve even described yourself, with a hint of gallows humour, as an “author as street busker” trying to catch readers’ eyes in the algorithmic bazaar.
And yes—you’re the sort who will cheerfully drop that you worked in management consulting and collaborated with Jon Anderson, then pivot to talking about narrative tokens and ergodic structures like they’re party favours.
So, in short: a writer-philosopher with a spreadsheet addiction, a sceptical streak as wide as the Thames, and a habit of treating literature like both laboratory and battlefield.
I’ve been using ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for a couple of years now. I used to lean on Claude, but now ChatGPT is my go-to. I still cross-reference with Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Perflexity, Pi, and Mistral. I tend to use Midjourney for images and motion video. I use NotebookLM for my generated podcasts.
As I am putting some finishing touches on my latest paper, I had the idea to illustrate some of the novel nomenclature. For some reason, Zeno’s Paradox came to mind. Unlike in maths, it is not reconcilable in language. I asked ChatGPT how I might integrate the concept into my paper. Here is what it rendered. Not only is the exposition decent, but it also provides citations and references. Humorously, when I read the citations, I thought that they were placeholders – Brown, David, Smith, and Jones – but they turned out to be legitimate references – references I hadn’t considered and each relatively recent. I’m chalking this up as a win. This was not a case of ‘ChatGPT, do my homework’. Instead, it reflects an active collaboration between a human and technology. And now I have more reference papers to read and absorb.*
Take the term ‘freedom’, an archetypal example of a Contestable that resists precise communication due to its inherent abstraction and ideological weight. To enhance its effectiveness, we might parse it into narrower forms, such as ‘freedom from’ (liberation from oppression or constraint) and ‘freedom to’ (the capacity to act or pursue desires). Whilst this initial breakdown provides some clarity, it is merely the beginning. Each parsed term demands further qualification: ‘freedom from what?’ and ‘freedom to do what?’ At every level of subdivision, new ambiguities emerge, requiring further refinement (Smith, 2021).
This process resembles Zeno’s paradox, where each attempt to clarify ‘freedom’ by moving incrementally closer to a precise meaning only reveals new layers of interpretive complexity. The concept remains elusive, perpetually deferring any definitive understanding as we approach it in ever-smaller fragments without fully grasping its essence (Jones, 2019). Unlike concrete terms like ‘chair’ or ‘table’, whose meanings can be pinned down through physical reference or functional description, ‘freedom’ resists final articulation (Brown, 2020). This continual parsing illustrates the inherent limitations of language when applied to abstract, boundary-resistant concepts: the more we attempt to define them, the more they fracture into an infinite regress of sub-concepts, each requiring its own explanation (Davis, 2022). Thus, whilst parsing ‘freedom’ improves communicative effectiveness to a point, it ultimately underscores language’s impotence in capturing the full spectrum of complex, ideational constructs (Wilson, 2018).
References:
Brown, J. (2020). The elusive nature of abstract concepts. Journal of Philosophical Studies, 35(2), 123-145.
Davis, S. (2022). Language and the limits of definition. Linguistic Quarterly, 57(1), 78-92.
Jones, M. (2019). Zeno’s paradox and the infinite regress of meaning. Metaphysical Review, 82(3), 245-263.
Smith, L. (2021). Freedom and its discontents: A study in semantic complexity. Political Philosophy Today, 14(2), 56-78.
Wilson, G. (2018). The impotence of language in capturing ideational constructs. Journal of Language and Meaning, 27(4), 198-215.
* References: Here’s the twist. When I went to read the cited references, none were found. Here’s what ChatGPT had to say about it:
I understand your difficulty in locating the references you’ve mentioned. It appears that the articles by Brown (2020), Davis (2022), Jones (2019), and Smith (2021) may not exist in the public domain or could be hypothetical examples. Consequently, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for these works are unavailable.
If you’re interested in exploring topics related to abstract concepts, the limits of language, or semantic complexity, I can recommend some reputable sources:
“The Challenges of Abstract Concepts” by Guy Dove (2021): This chapter discusses the theoretical challenges posed by abstract concepts and reviews current evidence and responses. Springer Link
“Abstract Concepts and Metacognition: Searching for Meaning in Self and Others” by Anna M. Borghi, Chiara Fini, and Luca Tummolini (2021): This work explores the role of metacognition in understanding abstract concepts. Springer Link
“The Limits of Language: Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy and Skinner’s Verbal Behavior” by R. Harre (1983): This article examines the limitations of language through the perspectives of Wittgenstein and Skinner. JSTOR
“Varieties of Abstract Concepts and Their Multiple Dimensions” by Anna M. Borghi et al. (2018): This paper discusses the representation of abstract concepts and the different criteria used to select them. Cambridge University Press
These sources should provide valuable insights into the subjects you’re interested in.
Philosophics 