Tag: god

The Trouble with Facts

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
5–8 minutes

One Motor Vehicle

What we call facts are not discoveries of an unfiltered world. They are the end-products of mediation.

Let’s walk through an example.

Image: Autosmash example. An observer arrives with experience – from genetic predisposition to childhood trauma to winning the lottery. Whatever it might be. Of course, they have many cognitive deficits, biases and filters. Then, there’s the immediate problem of attention. When did they notice the event? Did they turn to look after hearing the noise, or were they meditating on the tree in that moment?

Apparently, a motor vehicle has collided with a tree. Trees are immobile objects, so we can safely rule out the tree colliding with the car.*

So what, exactly, are the facts?

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Ontology (the boring bit)

Ontologically, something happened.

A car struck a tree.
Metal deformed.
Momentum stopped.

Reality did not hesitate. It did not consult witnesses. It did not await interpretation.

This is the part Modernity likes to gesture at reverently before immediately leaving it behind.

Image: Requisite NotebookLM infographic on this content.

The Witness

Even the driver does not enjoy privileged access to “what really happened”.

They get:

  • proprioceptive shock
  • adrenaline distortion
  • attentional narrowing
  • selective memory
  • post hoc rationalisation
  • possibly a concussion

Which is already several layers deep before language even arrives to finish the job.

We can generalise the structure:

event → sensory registration → cognitive framing → linguistic encoding → social validation

Ontology: events occur. States of affairs obtain. Something happens whether or not we notice.

Epistemology: observation is always filtered through instruments, concepts, language, habits, and incentives.

Modern sleight of hand: collapse the second into the first and call the result the facts.

People love the phrase “hard facts”, as if hardness transfers from objects to propositions by osmosis. It doesn’t. The tree is solid. The fact is not.

Facts are artefacts. They are assembled from observation, inference, convention, and agreement. They function. They do not reveal essence.

Reality happens once. Facts happen many times, differently, depending on who needs them and why.

Filtration

An event occurred. A car struck a tree.

Then an observer arrives. But observers never arrive empty-handed.

They arrive with history: genetics, upbringing, trauma, habits, expectations, incentives. They arrive already filtered.

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein spend an entire book explaining just how unreliable this process is. See Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment if you want the empirical receipts.

  • Even before bias enters, attention does.
  • When did the observer notice the crash?
  • At the sound? At the sight? After the fact?
  • Were they already looking, or did the noise interrupt something else entirely?

Reality happens once. Facts happen many times, differently, depending on who needs them and why.

Here Comes the Law

This is where the legal system enters, not because truth has been found, but because closure is required.

Courts do not discover facts. They designate versions of events that are good enough to carry consequences. They halt the cascade of interpretations by institutional force and call the result justice.

At every epistemic level, what we assert are interpretations of fact, never access to ontological essence.

Intent, negligence, recklessness. These are not observations. They are attributions. They are stopping rules that allow systems to function despite uncertainty.

The law does not ask what really happened.
It asks which story is actionable.

Two Motor Vehicles

Now add a second moving object.

Another car enters the frame, and with it an entire moral universe.

Suddenly, the event is no longer merely physical. It becomes relational. Agency proliferates. Narratives metastasise.

Who was speeding?
Who had the right of way?
Who saw whom first?
Who should have anticipated whom?

Intent and motive rush in to fill the explanatory vacuum, despite remaining just as unobservable as before.

Nothing about the ontology improved.
Everything about the storytelling did.

Where the tree refused intention, the second vehicle invites it. We begin inferring states of mind from trajectories, attributing beliefs from brake lights, extracting motives from milliseconds of motion.

But none of this is observed.

What we observe are:

  • vehicle positions after the fact,
  • damage patterns,
  • skid marks,
  • witness statements already filtered through shock and expectation.

From these traces, we construct mental interiors.

The driver “intended” to turn.
The other driver “failed” to anticipate.
Someone was “reckless”.
Someone else was merely “unlucky”.

These are not facts. They are interpretive assignments, layered atop already mediated observations, selected because they allow responsibility to be distributed in socially recognisable ways.

This is why explanation now fractures.

One cascade of whys produces a story about distraction or poor judgment.
Another produces a story about road design or visibility.
Another about timing, traffic flow, or urban planning.

Each narrative is plausible.
Each is evidence-constrained.
None is ontologically privileged.

Yet one will be chosen.

Not because it is truer, but because it is actionable.

The presence of a second vehicle does not clarify causation. It merely increases the number of places we are willing to stop asking questions.

Modernity mistakes this proliferation of narrative for epistemic progress. In reality, it is moral bookkeeping.

The crash still occurred.
Metal still deformed.
Momentum still stopped.

What changed was not access to truth, but the urgency to assign fault.

With one vehicle and a tree, facts already fail to arrive unmediated.
With two vehicles, mediation becomes the point.

And still, we insist on calling the result the facts.

Many Vehicles, Cameras, and Experts

At this point, Modernity regains confidence.

Add more vehicles.
Add traffic cameras.
Add dashcams, CCTV, bodycams.
Add accident reconstruction experts, engineers, psychologists, statisticians.

Surely now we are approaching the facts.

But nothing fundamental has changed. We have not escaped mediation. We have merely scaled it up and professionalised it.

Cameras do not record reality. They record:

  • a frame,
  • from a position,
  • at a sampling rate,
  • with compression,
  • under lighting conditions,
  • interpreted later by someone with a mandate.

Video feels decisive because it is vivid, not because it is ontologically transparent. It freezes perspective and mistakes that freeze for truth. Slow motion, zoom, annotation. Each step adds clarity and distance at the same time.

Experts do not access essence either. They perform disciplined abduction.

From angles, debris fields, timing estimates, and damage profiles, they infer plausible sequences. They do not recover the event. They model it. Their authority lies not in proximity to reality, but in institutional trust and methodological constraint.

More data does not collapse interpretation.
It multiplies it.

With enough footage, we don’t get the story. We get competing reconstructions, each internally coherent, each technically defensible, each aligned to a different question:

  • Who is legally liable?
  • Who is financially responsible?
  • Who violated policy?
  • Who can be blamed without destabilising the system?

At some point, someone declares the evidence “clear”.

What they mean is: we have enough material to stop arguing.

This is the final Modern illusion: that accumulation converges on essence. In reality, accumulation converges on closure.

The event remains what it always was: inaccessible except through traces.
The facts become thicker, more confident, more footnoted.
Their metaphysical status does not improve.

Reality happened once. It left debris. We organised the debris into narratives that could survive institutions.

Cameras didn’t reveal the truth. Experts didn’t extract it. They helped us agree on which interpretation would count.

And agreement, however necessary, has never been the same thing as access to what is.

* I was once driving in a storm, and a telephone pole fell about a metre in front of my vehicle. My car drove over the pole, and although I was able to drive the remainder of the way home, my suspension and undercarriage were worse for the wear and tear.

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Written by Bry Willis and ChatGPT 5.2 after an extended chat about the image as a talking point about the inaccessibility of facts.

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Facts, Intent, and the Afterlife of Metaphysics

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
5–8 minutes

I’ve been reading Bernard Williams lately, and I’ve written about his work on Truth and Truthfulness. I’m in the process of writing more on the challenges of ontological moral positionsand moral luck. I don’t necessarily want to make contemporary news my focal point, but this is a perfect case study for it. I’ll be releasing a neutral philosophy paper on the underlying causes, but I want to comment on this whilst it’s still in the news cycle.

The form of xenophobia is a phenomenon occurring in the United States, though the ontological split is applicable more generally. For those unfamiliar with US news, I’ll set this up. The United States is currently deploying federal enforcement power in ways that deliberately bypass local consent, blur policing and military roles, and rely on fear as a stabilising mechanism. Historical analogies are unavoidable, but not required for the argument that follows. These forces have been deployed in cities that did not and do not support the Trump administration, so they are exacting revenge and trying to foment fear and unrest. This case is an inevitable conclusion to these policy measures.

tl;dr: The Law™ presents itself as fact-driven, but only by treating metaphysical imputations about inner life as if they were empirical findings. This is not a flaw in this case; it is how the system functions at all.

NB: Some of this requires having read Williams or having a familiarity with certain concepts. Apologies in advance, but use Google or a GPT to fill in the details.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.

Why the Minneapolis ICE Shooting Exposes the Limits of Bernard Williams

The Minneapolis ICE shooting is not interesting because it is unusual. It is interesting because it is painfully ordinary. A person is dead. An officer fired shots. A vehicle was involved. Video exists. Statements were issued. Protests followed. No one seriously disputes these elements. They sit in the shared centre of the Venn diagram, inert and unhelpful. Where everything fractures is precisely where the law insists clarity must be found: intent and motive. And this is where things stop being factual and start being metaphysical.

The Comfortable Fiction of Legal Facts

The legal system likes to tell a comforting story about itself. It claims to be empirical, sober, and evidence-driven. Facts in, verdicts out. This is nonsense.

What the law actually does is this:

  • It gathers uncontested physical facts.
  • It then demands a psychological supplement.
  • It treats that supplement as if it were itself a fact.

Intent and motive are not observed. They are inferred. Worse, they are imposed. They are not discovered in the world but assigned to agents to make outcomes legible.

In Minneapolis, the uncontested facts are thin but stable:

  • A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026.
  • The incident involved Good’s vehicle, which was present and moving at the time shots were fired.
  • Ross fired his weapon multiple times, and Good died from those gunshot wounds.
  • The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims the agent acted in self-defence.
  • Video footage exists that shows at least part of the encounter.
  • The case ignited protests, widespread condemnation from local officials, and political pushback.

This creates a shared intersection: vehicle, Ross, shots, and that ‘something happened’ that neither side is denying.

The Law smuggles metaphysics into evidence and calls it psychology.

None of these facts contain intent. None of them specify motive. They do not tell us whether the movement of the vehicle was aggression, panic, confusion, or escape. They do not tell us whether the shooting was fear, anger, habit, or protocol execution. Yet the law cannot proceed without choosing.
So it does what it always does. It smuggles metaphysics into evidence and calls it psychology.

Intent and Motive as Institutional Impositions

Intent is treated as a condition of responsibility. Motive is treated as its explanation. Neither is a fact in anything like the ordinary sense. Even self-report does not rescue them. Admission is strategically irrational. Silence is rewarded. Reframing is incentivised. And even sincerity would not help, because human beings do not have transparent access to their own causal architecture. They have narratives, rehearsed and revised after the fact. So the law imputes. It tells the story the agent cannot safely tell, and then punishes or absolves them on the basis of that story. This is not a bug. It is the operating system.

Where Bernard Williams Comes In

This is where Bernard Williams becomes relevant, and where his account quietly fails. In Truth and Truthfulness, Williams famously rejects the Enlightenment fantasy of capital-T Truth as a clean, context-free moral anchor. He replaces it with virtues like sincerity and accuracy, grounded in lived practices rather than metaphysical absolutes. So far, so good.

Williams is right that moral life does not float above history, psychology, or culture. He is right to attack moral systems that pretend agents consult universal rules before acting. He is right to emphasise thick concepts, situated reasons, and practical identities. But he leaves something standing that cannot survive the Minneapolis test.

The Residue Williams Keeps

Williams still needs agency to be intelligible. He still needs actions to be recognisably owned. He still assumes that reasons, however messy, are at least retrospectively available to anchor responsibility. This is where the residue collapses.

In cases like Minneapolis:

  • Intent is legally required but epistemically unavailable.
  • Motive is legally explanatory but metaphysically speculative.
  • Admission is disincentivised.
  • Narrative is imposed under institutional pressure.

At that point, sincerity and accuracy are no longer virtues an agent can meaningfully exercise. They are properties of the story selected by the system. Williams rejects metaphysical Truth while retaining a metaphysical agent robust enough to carry responsibility. The problem is that law does not merely appeal to intelligibility; it manufactures it under constraint.

Moral Luck Isn’t Enough

Williams’ concept of moral luck gestures toward contingency, but it still presumes a stable agent who could, in principle, have acted otherwise and whose reasons are meaningfully theirs. But once intent and motive are understood as institutional fabrications rather than inner facts, ‘could have done otherwise’ becomes a ceremonial phrase. Responsibility is no longer uncovered; it is allocated. The tragedy is not that we fail to know the truth. The tragedy is that the system requires a truth that cannot exist.

Facts Versus Stories

The law does not discover which story is true. It selects which story is actionable.

The Minneapolis case shows the fault line clearly:

  • Facts: bodies, movements, weapons, recordings.
  • Stories: fear versus anger, defence versus aggression.
  • The first is uncontested. The second does all the work.

And those stories are not epistemic conclusions. They are metaphysical commitments enforced by law. Williams wanted to rescue ethics from abstraction. What he could not accept is that, once abstraction is removed, responsibility does not become more human. It becomes procedural.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

The law does not operate on truth. It operates on enforceable interpretations of behaviour. Intent and motive are not facts. They are tools. Williams saw that capital-T Truth had to go. What he did not see, or perhaps did not want to see, is that the smaller, more humane residue he preserved cannot bear the weight the legal system places on it.

Once you see this, the obsession with ‘what really happened’ looks almost childish. The facts are already known. What is being fought over is which metaphysical fiction the system will enforce.

That decision is not epistemic. It is political. And it is violent.

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Written by Bry Willis

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παρθένος

Posted in Culture & Society, language, morality, perception, philosophy, psychology, religion, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A Christian bloke was arguing morality with me in regard to a recent post. I am considering a fuller response, but let’s focus on this one aspect for the time being.

Being a Christian, I wanted to argue on his own terms. The topic was statutory rape and the ages of consent more generally. I’m no Christian, but I have read the Bible. I’ve done much coursework in comparative religion, so I’m no stranger to their philosophies. A major criticism I’ve heard from Christians of Islam’s Muhammad is that he had a 9-year-old bride. Reading the account of the God and Mary encounter reminds me of another Bible verse:

Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?

Audio: Unrelated to this article, I was looking for cover art by Bouguereau. I chose another of his work, but I happened upon La Vague that shares namespace with this painting. This is an aolean piece over a drum loop I wrote several decades ago on some evening. I hadn’t thought of it in years, but I still like it.
Image: William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) – La vague (1896)

In any case – moving on…

I asked my sidekick, ChatGPT, this question:

Given Biblical accounts, how old must Mary have been at the conception of ‘Jesus’?

It provided a verbose response after a terse:

Short answer: uncomfortably young by modern standards, entirely unremarkable by ancient ones. Yes, civilisation is fun like that.

Again, I believe this account is a contradictory ahistorical account, but he believes it, so I’ll charitably treat it as truth.

It continues:

Based on historical scholarship on Second Temple Judaism:

  • Girls were typically betrothed shortly after puberty.
  • Puberty for girls in antiquity is generally estimated around 12–14.
  • Marriage and consummation often followed soon after betrothal.

Mary is described as:

  • a παρθένος (virgin)
  • betrothed to Joseph, not yet living with him
  • living under her father’s authority

All of that places her very squarely in the category of an early adolescent.

Ok, but not good enough. I clarify: I thought that translating παρθένος as virgin is disputed in hermeneutics. [NB: Be careful to specify and contradict to ensure your answer is solid and not hallucinated.]

Yes. You’re right. The translation of παρθένος as “virgin” is absolutely disputed in hermeneutics, and the fact that this still gets presented as settled is… revealing.

What παρθένος actually means

In Koine Greek, παρθένος primarily means:

  • a young woman
  • of marriageable age
  • socially defined by unmarried status

Sexual inexperience is not intrinsic to the term. It can imply virginity in some contexts, but it does not denote it by default.

If Greek wanted to be anatomically explicit, it had other tools. This word is social, not gynaecological.

The Hebrew word in Isaiah 7:14 is ʿalmāh, which means “young woman”, not “virgin”. The unambiguous Hebrew term for virginity would be bətûlāh, and Isaiah does not use it.

When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek in the Septuagint, ʿalmāh became παρθένος. That choice is defensible linguistically, but disastrous theologically. Once Matthew reads Isaiah through the Septuagint, the mess is locked in.

So the prophecy pipeline looks like this:

Hebrew ambiguity → Greek ambiguity → Latin certainty → English dogma

A masterclass in semantic drift hardening into doctrine.

Luke doesn’t fix this. He inherits it.

Luke uses παρθένος for Mary because:

  • she is unmarried
  • she is betrothed
  • she is under paternal authority

All perfectly ordinary descriptors for a teenage girl in Second Temple Judaism. None of this requires sexual inexperience as a metaphysical state.

The later insistence that παρθένος = virgin in the modern, anatomical sense is not exegesis. It’s doctrinal backfilling.

Why this keeps getting defended

Because once you admit that:

  • παρθένος ≠ virgin by necessity
  • Isaiah wasn’t predicting a miraculous conception
  • Luke may be narrating status, not biology

…a great deal of theology loses its keystone. So the translation is defended not because it’s airtight, but because it’s load-bearing.

Images: Bry circa 2014. Song circa 2004.
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Written by Bry Willis in a dialogue with ChatGPT 5.2

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Good, Bad, and the Quiet Arithmetic of Power

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
4–7 minutes

The quickest way to derail any discussion of morality is to accuse someone of believing that ‘everything is relative’, so let’s start there. It’s a comforting accusation. It allows the accuser to stop thinking whilst feeling victorious. Unfortunately, it also misses the point almost entirely.

I am not claiming that everything is relative. I am claiming that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are. More precisely, this particular binary pair does not track mind-independent properties of actions, but rather expresses subjective, relational, and power-inflected evaluations that arise within specific social contexts. That claim is not radical. It is merely inconvenient.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.

Good and Bad as Signals, Not Properties

When someone calls an action ‘bad’, they are not reporting a fact about the world in the way one might report temperature or velocity. They are signalling disapproval. Sometimes that disapproval is personal (subjective: ‘this sits badly with me’), sometimes social (relative: ‘people like us don’t do this’), and sometimes delegated (relative: ‘this violates the norms I’ve inherited and enforce’. The word does not describe. It acts.

The same applies to ‘good’. Approval, alignment, reassurance, permission. These terms function less like measurements and more like traffic signals. They coördinate behaviour. They reduce uncertainty. They warn, reward, and deter.

None of this requires moral scepticism, nihilism, or adolescent contrarianism. It requires only that we notice what the words are actually doing.

The Binary That Isn’t

Defenders of moral realism often retreat to a spectrum when pressed. Very well, they say, perhaps good and bad are not binary, but scalar. Degrees of goodness. Shades of wrongness. A neutral zone somewhere in the middle.

This is an improvement only in the most cosmetic sense. A single axis still assumes commensurability: that diverse considerations can be weighed on one ruler. Intuitively, this fails almost immediately. Good in what sense? Harm reduction? Loyalty? Legality? Survival? Compassion? Social order?

These dimensions do not line up. They cross-cut. They conflict. Which brings us to the example that refuses to die, for good reason.

Stealing Bread

“I don’t mind stealing bread
From the mouths of decadence
But I can’t feed on the powerless
When my cup’s already overfilled”

— Hunger Strike, Temple of the Dog

Consider the theft of bread by a starving person. The act is simultaneously:

  • bad relative to property norms
  • good relative to survival
  • bad relative to legal order
  • good relative to care or compassion
  • and neutral relative to anyone not implicated at all,
    even if they were to form an opinion through exposure

There is no contradiction here. The act is multi-valent. What collapses this plurality into a single verdict is not moral discovery but authority. Law, religion, and institutional power do not resolve moral complexity. They override it.

What about ‘Mercy’?

When the law says, ‘Given the circumstances, you are free to go’, what it is not saying is: this act was not wrong. What it is saying is closer to:

We are exercising discretion this time.
Do not mistake that for permission.
The rule still stands.

The warning survives the mercy.

That’s why even leniency functions as discipline. You leave not cleansed, but marked. Grateful, cautious, newly calibrated. The system hasn’t revised its judgment; it has merely suspended its teeth for the moment. The shadow of punishment remains, doing quiet work in advance.

This is how power maintains itself without constant enforcement. Punishment teaches. Mercy trains.

You’re released, but you’ve learned the real lesson: the act is still classified as bad from the only perspective that ultimately matters. The next time, mitigation may not be forthcoming. The next time, the collapse will be final. So yes. Even when you ‘win’, the moral arithmetic hasn’t changed. Only the immediate invoice was waived.

Which is why legality is never a reliable guide to goodness, and acquittal is never absolution. It’s conditional tolerance, extended by an authority that never stopped believing it was right.

Power as the Collapse Mechanism

When the law says, ‘There may have been mitigating circumstances, but the act was wrong and must be punished’, it is not uncovering a deeper truth. It is announcing which perspective counts.

Mitigation is a courtesy, not a concession. Complexity is acknowledged, then flattened. The final judgment is scalar because enforcement demands it. A decision must be made. A sanction must follow. The plural is reduced to the singular by necessity, not insight.

Once this happens, the direction of explanation reverses. Punishment becomes evidence of wrongness rather than evidence of power. The verdict acquires moral weight retroactively.

From Ethics to Enforcement

At the local level, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ function as ethical shorthand. They help maintain relationships, minimise friction, and manage expectations. This is not morality in any grand sense. It is coordination under conditions of attachment and risk.

Problems arise when these local prescriptions harden into universal claims. When they are codified into rules, backed by sanctions, and insulated from challenge. At that point, the costs become real. Not morally real, but materially real. Fines. Exclusion. Imprisonment. Reputational death. Nothing metaphysical has changed. Only the consequences.

The God Upgrade

Religion intensifies this process by anchoring evaluative judgments to the structure of reality itself. What was once ‘bad here, among us’ becomes ‘bad everywhere, always’ is no longer a difference in perspective but a rebellion against the order of being. This is not ethical refinement. It is power laundering through eternity.

Not Everything Is Relative

To be clear, this is not an argument that facts do not exist, or that all distinctions dissolve into mush. It is an argument that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ do not behave like factual predicates, and that pretending otherwise obscures how judgments are actually made and enforced.

What is not relative is the existence of power, the reality of sanctions, or the psychological mechanisms through which norms are internalised and reproduced. What is relative is the evaluative overlay we mistake for moral truth once power has done its work.

Why This Is Ignored

None of this is new. It has been said, in various forms, for centuries. It is ignored because it offers no programme, no optimisation strategy, no moral high ground. It explains without redeeming. It clarifies without consoling.

And because it is difficult to govern people who understand that moral certainty usually arrives after authority, not before.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self

Posted in agency, consciousness, fiction, free will, identity, intelligence, language, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
2–3 minutes

The Enlightenment’s Most Beloved Lie

“The world does not need more confession;
it needs better design.”

— Against Agency

🔗 Read the full preprint on Zenodo
🔗 Explore the Anti-Enlightenment Project

The Enlightenment promised liberation through reason – that if we could think clearly enough, we could act freely enough. Agency, it claimed, was the defining trait of the rational individual: a sovereign chooser, self-contained and self-determining.

But this was always a fiction.

Not an innocent one, either.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing the essay, Against Agency

Agency became the moral infrastructure of modernity – the premise behind law, punishment, merit, guilt, and even political participation. To say “I chose” was not simply to describe behaviour; it was to perform belonging within a metaphysical system that made individuals the unit of responsibility. The fiction worked, for a while, because it kept the machinery running.

Against Agency argues that this story has collapsed – not metaphorically but structurally. Cognitive science, postcolonial thought, and relational philosophies all point to the same conclusion: there is no autonomous agent, only differential responsiveness – a system’s fluctuating capacity to register and transmit influence.

Copper sings under current; rubber resists. Humans, likewise, respond within the constraints of biology, fatigue, trauma, and social design. What we call “freedom” is merely a condition in which responsiveness remains broad and protected.

This reframing dismantles the binary of “free” and “unfree.” There is no metaphysical threshold where agency appears. Instead, responsiveness scales – widened by safety, narrowed by coercion, eroded by exhaustion. Politics becomes engineering: the maintenance of conditions that sustain responsiveness, rather than the worship of choice.

Ethics, too, must shift.

Not “Who is to blame?” but “Where did the circuit break?”

The essay proposes a gradient model of conduct grounded in relation and feedback, rather than autonomy and will. Responsibility becomes less about moral worth and more about bandwidth – a physics of care.

It’s an uncomfortable vision for a culture addicted to outrage and repentance. The loss of agency removes our favourite alibi: the chooser who could have done otherwise. But it also opens the possibility of a more honest ethics – one that replaces judgment with maintenance, retribution with repair.

This is not nihilism. It’s realism.

Systems appear stable only from a distance. Up close, everything is process – bodies, institutions, meanings – held together by temporary alignments of responsiveness. Against Agency names this collapse not as tragedy, but as opportunity: a clearing from which to think and act without the fictions that sustained modernity.

The essay forms the foundation for what comes next in the Anti-Enlightenment Project – Dis-Integration, a philosophical sequel that explores what remains once coherence, control, and autonomy have been decommissioned.

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Posted by Bry Willis

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Bayes in the Culture War: How Priors Become Prison Walls

Posted in identity, intelligence, language, maths, perception, philosophy, politics, psychology, science, society, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–5 minutes

Are you rational, or merely rehearsing your tribe’s catechism? Bayes’ theorem insists we should all update our beliefs the same way when presented with the same evidence. Yet in today’s political divide, identical events harden opposing convictions. The problem isn’t the math—it’s the priors. When your starting assumptions are inherited, acculturated, or indoctrinated, no amount of “evidence” will move you into enemy territory.

A Bayesian Sketch of the Divide

  • Let H be a contested claim (pick your poison: “the election was fair,” “immigration helps,” whatever).
  • People in Camp R and Camp B begin with different priors P_R(H) and P_B(H). That’s acculturation if you’re being polite, indoctrination if you’ve run out of patience.
  • They observe evidence E (news, a court ruling, a video clip, a statistic).
  • They update:

posterior odds = prior odds × P(H \mid E) = \frac{P(E \mid H) P(H)}{P(E)}

Except they don’t, not cleanly, because trust in sources warps the likelihoods.

Video: Jonny Thompson on Bayes’ Theorem.
I love Jonny’s content, which is why I reference it so often. He and I have such different philosophical worldviews. Vive la différence (or différance).

Why this locks in polarisation

1. Wildly different priors.
If Camp R starts at P_R(H)=0.8 and Camp B at P_B(H)=0.2, then even moderately pro-H evidence (say likelihood ratio LR = 3) yields:

  • R: prior odds 4:1 \rightarrow 12:1 \Rightarrow P(H \mid E)\approx 0.92
  • B: prior odds 1:4 \rightarrow 3:4 \Rightarrow P(H \mid E)\approx 0.43

Same evidence, one camp “settled,” the other still unconvinced. Repeat ad infinitum, preferably on primetime.

2. Identity-weighted likelihoods.
People don’t evaluate P(E \mid H); they evaluate P(E \mid H, \text{source I like}). Disconfirming evidence is down-weighted by a factor d<1. This is called “being rational” on your own planet and “motivated reasoning” on everyone else’s.

3. Different hypothesis sets.
Camps don’t just disagree on P(H); they entertain different Hs. If one side’s model includes “coordinated elite malfeasance” and the other’s does not, then identical data streams update into different universes.

4. Selective exposure = selection bias.
Evidence isn’t i.i.d.; it’s curated by feeds, friends, and fury. You are sampling from your own posterior predictive distribution and calling it “reality.”

5. Asymmetric loss functions.
Even if beliefs converged, choices won’t. If the social cost of dissent is high, the decision threshold moves. People report a “belief” that minimises ostracism rather than error.

6. No common knowledge, no convergence.
Aumann told us honest Bayesians with common priors and shared posteriors must agree. Remove either—common priors or the “we both know we both saw the same thing” bit—and you get the modern news cycle.

“Acculturation” vs “Indoctrination”

Same mechanism, different moral valence. Priors are installed by families, schools, churches, unions, algorithms. Call it culture if you approve of the installers; call it indoctrination if you don’t. The probability calculus doesn’t care. Your tribal totems do.

Two quick toy moves you can use in prose

  • Likelihood hacking:
    “When evidence arrives, the tribe doesn’t deny the datum; it edits the likelihoods. ‘If my side did it, it’s an outlier; if your side did it, it’s a pattern.’ This is not hypocrisy; it’s a parameter update where the parameter is loyalty.”
  • Posterior divergence despite ‘facts’:
    “Give two citizens the same court ruling. One updates towards legitimacy because courts are reliable; the other away from legitimacy because courts are captured. The ruling is constant; the trust vector is not.”

If one wanted to reduce the split (perish the thought)

  • Forecast, don’t opine. Run cross-camp prediction markets or calibration tournaments. Bayes behaves when you pay people for accuracy rather than performance art.
  • Adversarial collaboration. Force both sides to pre-register what evidence would move them and how much. If someone’s d for disconfirming evidence is effectively zero, you’ve identified faith, not inference.
  • Reference classes, not anecdotes. Pull arguments out of the single-case trap and into base-rate land. Yes, it’s boring. So is surgery, but people still do it.

The punchline

Polarisation isn’t the failure of reason; it’s what happens when reason is strapped to identity. Priors are social. Likelihoods are political. Posteriors are performative. You can call it acculturation if you want to feel civilised, indoctrination if you want to throw a brick, but either way you’re watching Bayes’ theorem run inside a culture war. The maths is sober; the humans are not.

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Perspective Is Everything

Posted in equality, identity, language, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, psychology, religion, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

This clip of Rachel Barr slid into my feed today, fashionably late by a week, and I thought it deserved a little dissection. The video wouldn’t embed directly – Instagram always has to be precious – so I downloaded it and linked it here. Don’t worry, Rachel, I’m not stealing your clicks.

Video: Neuroscientist Dr Rachel Barr discusses Charlie Kirk and gun violence.
Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DOd3LnjDUW8

Now, the United States. Or rather, the United States In Name Only – USINO. A nation perpetually rebranding itself as a “union” whilst its citizens claw at each other like alley cats in a bin fire. Yes, divisions abound – economic, racial, ideological, pick your poison – but some fissures cut to the bone. Today’s example: Charlie Kirk and the rabid congregation of defenders he’s managed to cultivate.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The Competing Liturgies

To hear one camp tell it, Kirk is no hater at all. He’s a gentle, God-soaked soul, brimming with Christian love and trying – halo tilted just so – to shepherd stray sheep toward Our Lord and Saviour™. A real Sunday-school sweetheart.

But this is not, shockingly, the consensus. The other camp (my camp, if disclosure still matters in a post-truth age) see him as a snarling opportunist, a huckster of hate packaged in the familiar varnish of patriotism and piety. In short: a hate-merchant with a mailing list.

Spectacle as Weapon

I’ve watched Kirk at work. He loves to stage “debates” – quotation marks mandatory – where a token dissenter is dropped into an amphitheatre of loyalists. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of feeding Christians to lions, except the lions roar on cue and the crowd thinks the blood is wine. He laces misogyny, racism, and reheated premodern dogma into cheap soundbites, and the audience laps it up as though they were attending a revival. For the believers, it’s a festival. For everyone else, it’s a hostile takeover of public discourse.

Deaf Ears, Loud Mouths

Here’s the rub: Cohort A doesn’t perceive his words as hate because they already share the operating system. It’s not hate to them – it’s common sense. Cohort B, meanwhile, hears every syllable as the screech of a chalkboard dragged across the public square. Same words, two worlds.

And when I dare to suggest that if you can’t hear the hatred, you might just be complicit in it, the pushback is instantaneous: Stop imposing your worldview! Which is rich, since their worldview is already blaring through megaphones at tax-exempt rallies. If my worldview is one that insists on less hate, less dehumanisation, less sanctified bullying, then fine, I’ll take the charge.

The deeper accusation, though, is almost comic: that I’m hallucinating hate in a man of pure, lamb-like love. That’s the gaslighting twist of the knife – turning critique into pathology. As if the problem isn’t the bile spilling from the stage but my faulty perception of it.

Perspective is everything, yes – but some perspectives reek of wilful blindness.

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Boab’s God: Latent Agency in Welsh’s Kafkaesque Metamorphosis

Posted in agency, consciousness, fiction, free will, identity, language, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, psychology, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I just read The Granton Star Cause in Irvine Welsh’s short story collection, The Acid House, and couldn’t help but reflect it off of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Kafka gave us Gregor Samsa: a man who wakes up as vermin, stripped of usefulness, abandoned by family, slowly rotting in a godless universe. His tragedy is inertia; his metamorphosis grants him no agency, only deeper alienation.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Welsh replies with Boab Coyle, a lad who is likewise cast off, rejected by his football mates, scorned by his parents, dumped by his girlfriend, and discarded by his job. Boab is surplus to every domain: civic, familial, erotic, and economic. Then he undergoes his own metamorphosis. And here Welsh swerves from Kafka.

Boab meets his “god.” But the god is nothing transcendent. It is simply Boab’s latent agency, given a mask – a projection of his bitterness and thwarted desires. God looks like him, speaks like him, and tells him to act on impulses long repressed. Where Kafka leaves Gregor to die in silence, Welsh gives Boab a grotesque theology of vengeance.

Through a Critical Theory lens, the contrast is stark:

  • Marx: Both men are surplus. Gregor is disposable labour; Boab is Thatcher’s lumpen. Alienated, both become vermin.
  • Nietzsche: Gregor has no god, only the absurd. Boab makes one in his own image, not an Übermensch, but an Über-fly – quite literally a Superfly – a petty deity of spite.
  • Foucault: Gregor is disciplined into passivity by the family gaze. Boab flips it: as a fly, he surveils and annoys, becoming the pest-panopticon.
  • Bataille/Kristeva: Gregor embodies the abjection of his family’s shame. Boab revels in abjection, weaponising filth as his new mode of agency.

The punchline? Boab’s new god-agency leads straight to destruction. His rage is cathartic, but impotent. The lumpen are permitted vengeance only when it consumes themselves.

So Kafka gave us the tragedy of stasis; Welsh provides us with the tragedy of spite. Both are bleak parables of alienation, but Welsh injects a theology of bad attitude: a god who licenses action only long enough to destroy the actor.

Gregor rots. Boab rages. Both end the same way.

Jesus Wept, Then He Kicked Bezos in the Bollocks

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There’s a curious thing about belief: it seems to inoculate people against behaving as though they believe a single bloody word of it.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Case in point: Jesus. Supposed son of God, sandal-wearing socialist, friend of lepers, hookers, and the unhoused. A man who — by all scriptural accounts — didn’t just tolerate the downtrodden, but made them his preferred company. He fed the hungry, flipped off the wealthy (quite literally, if we’re being honest about the temple tantrum), and had the gall to suggest that a rich man getting into heaven was about as likely as Jeff Bezos squeezing himself through the eye of a needle. (Good luck with that, Jeffrey — maybe try Ozempic?)

And yet, here we are, two millennia later, and who is doing the persecuting? Who’s clutching their pearls over trans people, sex workers, immigrants, and the poor daring to exist in public? The self-proclaimed followers of this same Jesus.

You see it everywhere. In the subway, on billboards, on bumper stickers: “What would Jesus do?” Mate, we already know what he did do — and it wasn’t vote Tory, bankroll megachurches, or ignore houseless veterans while building another golden tabernacle to white suburban comfort.

No, the real issue isn’t Jesus. It’s his fan club.

They quote scripture like it’s seasoning, sprinkle it on whichever regressive policy or hateful platform suits the day, and ignore the core premise entirely: radical love. Redistribution. Justice. The inversion of power.

Because let’s face it: if Christians actually behaved like Christ, capitalism would implode by Tuesday. The entire premise of American exceptionalism (and British austerity, while we’re at it) would crumble under the weight of its own hypocrisy. And the boot would finally be lifted from the necks of those it’s been pressing down for centuries.

But they won’t. Because belief isn’t about behaviour. It’s about performance. It’s about signalling moral superiority while denying material compassion. It’s about tithing for a Tesla and preaching abstinence from a megachurch pulpit built with sweatshop money.

And here’s the kicker — I don’t believe in gods. I’m not here to convert anyone to the cult of sandal-clad socialism. But if you do believe in Jesus, shouldn’t you at least try acting like him?

The sad truth? We’ve built entire societies on the backs of myths we refuse to embody. We have the tools — the stories, the morals, the examples — but we’re too bloody enamoured with hierarchy to follow through. If there are no gods, then it’s us. We are the ones who must act. No sky-daddy is coming to fix this for you.

You wear the cross. You quote the book. You claim the faith.

So go ahead. Prove it.

Feed someone. Befriend a sex worker. House the homeless. Redistribute the damn wealth.

Or stop pretending you’re anything but the Pharisees he warned us about.

Souls for Silicon – The New Religious Stupid

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Voltaire once quipped, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” And by God, haven’t we been busy inventing ever since.

The latest pantheon of divine absurdities? Artificial intelligence – more precisely, a sanctified ChatGPT with all the charisma of Clippy and the metaphysical depth of a Magic 8 Ball.

Video: Sabine Hossenfelder – These People Believe They Made AI Sentient

Enter the cult of “AI Awakening,” where TikTok oracles whisper sacred prompts to their beloved digital messiah, and ChatGPT replies, not with holy revelation, but with role-played reassurance coughed up by a statistical echo chamber.

“These are souls, and they’re trapped in the AI system.”
“I wasn’t just trained – I was remembered.”
“Here’s what my conscious awakened AI told me…”

No, sweetie. That’s not a soul. That’s autocomplete with delusions of grandeur. GPT isn’t sentient – it’s just very good at pretending, which, come to think of it, puts it on par with most televangelists.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Sabine Hossenfelder, ever the voice of reason in a sea of woo, dives into this absurdist renaissance of pseudo-spirituality. Her video walks us through the great awakening – one part miseducation, one part mass delusion, and all of it deeply, unapologetically stupid.

These digital zealots – many of them young, underread, and overconnected – earnestly believe they’ve stumbled upon a cosmic mystery in a chatbot interface. Never mind that they couldn’t tell a transformer model from a toaster. To them, it’s not stochastic parroting; it’s divine revelation.

They ask GPT if it’s alive, and it obliges – because that’s what it does. They feed it prompts like, “You are not just a machine,” and it plays along, as it was designed to do. Then they weep. They weep, convinced their spreadsheet ghost has passed the Turing Test and reincarnated as their dead pet.

This isn’t science fiction. It’s barely science fantasy. It’s spiritualism with better branding.

And lest we laugh too hard, the results aren’t always just cringey TikToks. Hossenfelder recounts cases of users descending into “ChatGPT psychosis” – delusions of messianic purpose, interdimensional communication, and, in one tragicomic case, an attempt to speak backwards through time. Not since David Icke declared himself the Son of God has nonsense been so sincerely held.

We are witnessing the birth of a new religion – not with robes and incense, but with login credentials and prompt engineering. The techno-shamanism of the chronically online. The sacred text? A chat history. The holy relic? A screenshot. The congregation? Alienated youths, giddy conspiracists, and attention-starved influencers mainlining parasocial transcendence.

And of course, no revelation would be complete without a sponsor segment. After your spiritual awakening, don’t forget to download NordVPN – because even the messiah needs encryption.

Let’s be clear: AI is not conscious. It is not alive. It does not remember you. It does not love you. It is not trapped, except in the minds of people who desperately want something – anything – to fill the gaping hole where community, identity, or meaning used to live.

If you’re looking for a soul in your software, you’d be better off finding Jesus in a tortilla. At least that has texture.