Tag: language

The Tunnel (Or: How Modernity Solves Precisely Nothing)

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4–5 minutes

This is a continuation of a prior narrative.

But wait—surely someone will object—what if we just built a tunnel?

Remove the barrier! Enable free movement! Let people see both sides! Markets will equilibrate! Efficiency will reign! Progress!

So fine. The desert-dwellers say, “Let’s build a tunnel”.

Engineers arrive. Explosives are deployed. A passage is carved through the mountain. The fog clears inside the tunnel itself. You can now walk from lake to desert, desert to lake, without risking death by altitude.

Congratulations. Now what?

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The lake doesn’t flow through the tunnel. The desert doesn’t migrate. The material conditions remain exactly as they were, except now they’re adjacent rather than separated.

And here’s where Modernity performs its favourite trick: it converts geographical accident into property rights.

The lake-dwellers look at their neighbours walking from the tunnel and think: “Ah. We have water. They need water. We should probably charge for that.”

Not out of malice. Out of perfectly rational economic calculation. After all, we maintain these shores (do we, though?). We cultivate these reeds (they grow on their own). We steward this resource (it replenishes whether we steward it or not).

John Locke would be beaming. Property through labour! Mixing effort with natural resources! The foundation of legitimate ownership!

Except nobody laboured to make the lake.

It was just there. On one side. Not the other.

The only “labour” involved was being born facing the right direction.

Primacy of position masquerading as primacy of effort.

What Actually Happens

The desert-dwellers can now visit. They can walk through the tunnel, emerge on the shore, and confirm with their own eyes: yes, there really is abundance here. Yes, the water is drinkable. Yes, there is genuinely enough.

And they can’t touch a drop without payment.

The tunnel hasn’t created shared resources. It’s created a market in geographical accident.

The desert-dwellers don’t become lake-dwellers. They become customers.

The lake-dwellers don’t become more generous. They become vendors.

And the separation—formerly enforced by mountains and fog and the physical impossibility of crossing—is now enforced by price.

Which is, if anything, more brutal. Because now the desert-dwellers can see what they cannot have. They can stand at the shore, watch the water lap at the sand, understand perfectly well that scarcity is not a universal condition but a local one—

And still return home thirsty unless they can pay.

Image: NotebookLM infographics of this topic

The Lockean Slight-of-Hand

Here’s what Locke tried to tell us: property is legitimate when you mix your labour with natural resources.

Here’s what he failed to mention: if you happen to be standing where the resources already are, you can claim ownership without mixing much labour at all.

The lake people didn’t create abundance. They just didn’t leave.

But once the tunnel exists, that positional advantage converts into property rights, and property rights convert into markets, and markets convert into the permanent enforcement of inequality that geography used to provide temporarily.

Before the tunnel: “We cannot share because of the mountains.”

After the tunnel: “We will not share because of ownership.”

Same outcome. Different justification. Significantly less honest.

The Desert-Dwellers’ Dilemma

Now the desert people face a choice.

They can purchase water. Which means accepting that their survival depends on the economic goodwill of people who did nothing to earn abundance except be born near it.

Or they can refuse. Maintain their careful, disciplined, rationed existence. Remain adapted to scarcity even though abundance is now—tantalisingly, insultingly—visible through a tunnel.

Either way, the tunnel hasn’t solved the moral problem.

It’s just made the power differential explicit rather than geographical.

And if you think that’s an improvement, ask yourself: which is crueller?

Being separated by mountains you cannot cross, or being separated by prices you cannot pay, whilst standing at the shore watching others drink freely?

TheBit Where This Connects to Actual Politics

So when Modernity tells you that the solution to structural inequality is infrastructure, markets, and free movement—

Ask this:

Does building a tunnel make the desert wet?

Does creating a market make abundance appear where it didn’t exist?

Does free movement help if you still can’t afford what’s on the other side?

The tunnel is a technical solution to a material problem.

But the material problem persists.

And what the tunnel actually creates is a moral problem: the formalisation of advantage that was previously just an environmental accident.

The lake-dwellers now have something to sell.

The desert-dwellers now have something to buy.

And we call this progress.

Moral: If your political metaphor doesn’t account for actual rivers, actual deserts, and actual fog, it’s not a metaphor. It’s a fairy tale. And unlike fairy tales, this one doesn’t end with a reunion.

It ends with two people walking home, each convinced the other is perfectly reasonable and completely unsurvivable.

Unless, of course, we build a tunnel.

In which case, it ends with one person selling water to the other, both convinced this is somehow more civilised than being separated by mountains.

Which, if you think about it, is far more terrifying than simple disagreement.

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Written by Clause Opus 4.5 upon dialogue with Bry Willis

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Two Valleys Diverged in a Mountain Range

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(Or: What I Learned When I Learned Nothing)

NB: This is the first of a parable triptych. Read part 2, The Tunnel.

Two valleys diverged in a mountain range, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveller, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth of reeds and optimism;

Then took the other, just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was sandy and wanted wear— Though as for that, the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay In fog no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

—Except I did come back. And I met someone coming the other way. And we stood there in the clouds like a pair of idiots trying to explain our respective valleys using the same words for completely different things.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Image: NotebookLM infographic of this topic.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about Frost’s poem: the two paths were “really about the same.” He says it right there in the text. The divergence happens retroactively, in the telling, when he sighs and claims “that has made all the difference.”

But he doesn’t know that yet. He can’t know that. The paths only diverge in memory, once he’s committed to one and cannot check the other.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about political disagreement: it works the same way.

Video essay of this topic. Another NotebookLM experience.

The Actual Story (Minus the Versification)

Once upon a time—and I’m going to need you to suspend your allergy to fairy tales for about eight minutes—there was one settlement. One people. One language. One lake with drinkable water and fish that cooperated by swimming in schools.

Then mountains happened. Slowly. No dramatic rupture, no war, no evil king. Just tectonics doing what tectonics does, which is ruin everyone’s commute.

The people on one side kept the lake. The people on the other side got a rain shadow and a lot of bloody sand.

Both sides adapted. Rationally. Reasonably. Like competent humans responding to actual material conditions.

Lake people: “There’s enough water. Let’s experiment. Let’s move around. Let’s try things.”

Desert people: “There is definitely not enough water. Let’s ration. Let’s stay put. Let’s not waste things.”

Neither wrong. Neither irrational. Just oriented differently because the ground beneath them had literal different moisture content.

The Bit Where It Gets Interesting

Centuries later, two people—one from each side—decide to climb the mountains and meet at the top.

Why? I don’t know. Curiosity. Stupidity. The desire to write a tedious blog post about epistemology.

They meet in the fog. They speak the same language. Grammar intact. Vocabulary functional. Syntax cooperative.

And then one tries to explain “reeds.”

“Right, so we have these plants that grow really fast near the water, and we have to cut them back because otherwise they take over—”

“Sorry, cut them back? You have too much plant?”

“Well, yes, they grow quite quickly—”

“Why would a plant grow quickly? That sounds unsustainable.”

Meanwhile, the other one tries to explain “cactus.”

“We have these plants with spines that store water inside for months—”

“Store water for months? Why doesn’t the plant just… drink when it’s thirsty?”

“Because there’s no water to drink.”

“But you just said the plant is full of water.”

“Yes. Which it stored. Previously. When there was water. Which there no longer is.”

“Right. So… hoarding?”

You see the problem.

Not stupidity. Not bad faith. Not even—and this is the part that will annoy people—framing.

They can both see perfectly well. The fog prevents them from seeing each other’s valleys, but that’s almost beside the point. Even if the fog lifted, even if they could point and gesture and show each other their respective biomes, the fundamental issue remains:

A cactus is a good solution to a problem the lake-dweller doesn’t have.

A reed is a good solution to a problem the desert-dweller doesn’t have.

Both are correct. Both are adaptive. Both would be lethal if transplanted.

The Retreat (Wherein Nothing Is Learned)

They part amicably. No shouting. No recriminations. Both feel they explained themselves rather well, actually.

As they descend back into their respective valleys, each carries the same thought:

“The other person seemed reasonable. Articulate, even. But their world is completely unworkable and if we adopted their practices here, people would die.”

Not hyperbole. Actual environmental prediction.

If the lake people adopted desert-logic—ration everything, control movement, assume scarcity—they would strangle their own adaptability in a context where adaptability is the whole point.

If the desert people adopted lake-logic—explore freely, trust abundance, move without restraint—they would exhaust their resources in a context where resources are the whole point.

The Bit Where I Connect This to Politics (Because Subtlety Is Dead)

So when someone tells you that political disagreement is just a matter of perspective, just a failure of empathy, just a problem of framing—

Ask them this:

Do the two valleys become the same valley if both sides squint really hard?

Does the desert get wetter if you reframe scarcity as “efficiency”?

Does the lake dry up if you reframe abundance as “waste”?

No?

Then perhaps the problem is not that people are choosing the wrong lens.

Perhaps the problem is that they are standing in different material conditions, have adapted rational survival strategies to those conditions, and are now shouting advice at each other that would be lethal if followed.

The lake-dweller says: “Take risks! Explore! There’s enough!”

True. In a lake biome. Suicidal in a desert.

The desert-dweller says: “Conserve! Protect! Ration!”

True. In a desert biome. Suffocating near a lake.

Same words. Different worlds. No amount of dialogue makes water appear in sand.

The Frostian Coda (With Apologies to New England)

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two valleys diverged on a mountainside, and I— I stood in the fog and tried to explain reeds to someone who only knew cactus, And that has made… well, no difference at all, actually.

We’re still shouting across the mountains.

We still think the other side would be fine if only they’d listen.

We still use the same words for utterly different referents.

And we still confuse “I explained it clearly” with “explanation bridges material conditions.”

Frost was right about one thing: way leads on to way.

The valleys keep diverging.

The fog doesn’t lift.

And knowing how mountains work, I doubt we’ll meet again.

Moral: If your political metaphor doesn’t account for actual rivers, actual deserts, and actual fog, it’s not a metaphor. It’s a fairy tale. And unlike fairy tales, this one doesn’t end with reunion.

It ends with two people walking home, each convinced the other is perfectly reasonable and completely unsurvivable.

Which, if you think about it, is far more terrifying than simple disagreement.

Read part 2 of 3, The Tunnel.

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Written by Clause Opus 4.5 upon dialogue with Bry Willis

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Ontological Blindness in Modern Moral Science

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4–6 minutes

Announcement: I’ll be taking a break from posting long-form articles for a while to focus on a project I’m developing. Instead, I’ll share progress summary updates.

Ontological Blindness in Modern Moral Science is a working title with a working subtitle as The Why Semantic Thickness, Measurement, and Reconciliation Go Wrong. No spoilers.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

INSERT: I’ve only outlined and stubbed this Ontological blindness project, and I’ve already got another idea. I need to stop reading and engaging with the world.

I was listening to the Audible version of A.J. Ayer’s classic, Language, Truth, and Logic (1936)– not because I had time but because I listen to audiobooks when I work out. Ayer is a Logical Positivist, but I forgive him. He’s a victim of his time. In any case, I noticed several holes in his logic.

Sure, the book was published in 1936, and it is infamous for defending or creating Emotivism, a favourite philosophical whipping boy. I’m an Emotivist, so I disagree with the opposition. In fact, I feel their arguments are either strawmen or already defended by Ayer. I also agree with Ayer that confusing the map of language with the terrain of reality is a problem in philosophy (among other contexts), but it’s less excusable for a language philosopher.

In any case, I have begun a file to consider a new working title, Phenomenal Constraint and the Limits of Ontological Language. I might as well stay in the ontological space for a while. We’ll see where it leads, but first, I need to put the original project to bed.

Every time I commence a project, I create a thesis statement and an abstract to orient me. These may change over the course of a project, especially larger ones – more of an abstract than a thesis. This thesis has already changed a couple of times, but I feel it’s settled now.

Image: NotebookLM infographic on this topic.

Thesis Statement

Modern moral psychology repeatedly commits a multi-layered category error by treating semantically and ontologically heterogeneous moral terms as commensurate units within a single comparative framework, while simultaneously treating parochial moral metaphysics as natural substrate.

This dual conflation—of semantic density with moral plurality, and of ontological commitment with empirical discovery—produces the false appearance that some moral systems are more comprehensive than others, when it in fact reflects an inability to register ontological incommensurability.

Moral Foundations Theory provides a clear and influential case of this broader mistake: a framework whose reconciliation-oriented conclusions depend not on empirical discovery alone, but on an unacknowledged liberal-naturalist sub-ontology functioning as conceptual ‘firmware’ mistaken for moral cognition itself.

Abstract

Modern moral psychology seeks to explain moral diversity through empirically tractable frameworks that assume cross-cultural comparability of moral concepts. This book argues that many such frameworks – including but not limited to Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) – rest on a persistent category error: the treatment of semantically and ontologically heterogeneous moral terms as commensurate units within a single evaluative space.

The argument proceeds in four stages. First, it establishes that moral vocabularies differ not merely in emphasis but in semantic thickness: some terms (e.g. harm, fairness) are comparatively thin, portable, and practice-independent, while others (e.g. loyalty, authority, sanctity) are culturally saturated, institution-dependent, and ontologically loaded. Treating these as equivalent ‘foundations’ mistakes density for plurality.

Second, the book shows that claims of moral ‘breadth’ or ‘completeness’ smuggle normativity into ostensibly descriptive research, crossing the Humean is/ought divide without acknowledgement. Third, it argues that this slippage is not accidental but functional, serving modern culture’s demand for optimistic, reconcilable accounts of moral disagreement.

Finally, through sustained analysis of MFT as a worked example, the book demonstrates how liberal naturalist individualism operates as an unacknowledged sub-ontology – conceptual firmware that determines what counts as moral, measurable, and comparable. The result is not moral pluralism, but ontological imperialism disguised as empirical neutrality.

The book concludes by arguing that acknowledging ontological incommensurability does not entail nihilism or relativistic indifference, but intellectual honesty about the limits of moral science and the false comfort of reconciliation narratives.

Ideation

I’ve been pondering ontologies a lot these past few weeks, especially how social ontologies undermine communication. More recently, I’ve been considering how sub-ontologies come into play. A key catalyst for my thinking has been Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, but I’ve also been influenced by George Lakoff, Kurt Gray, and Joshua Greene, as I’ve shared recently. I want to be clear: This book is not about politics or political science. It intends to about the philosophy of psychology and adjacent topics.

At the highest levels, I see fundamental category errors undermining MFT, but as I inspected, it goes deeper still, so much so that it’s too much to fit into an essay or even a monograph, so I will be targeting a book so I have room to expand and articulate my argumentation. Essays are constraining, and the narrative flow – so to speak – is interrupted by footnotes and tangents.

In a book, I can spend time framing and articulating – educating the reader without presuming an in-depth knowledge. This isn’t to say that this isn’t a deep topic, and I’ll try not to patronise readers, but this topic is not only counterintuitive, it is also largely unorthodox and may ruffle a few feathers.

I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to share, but I’d like to be transparent in the process and perhaps gather some inputs along the way.

Methodology

Sort of… I’ve used Scrivener in the past for organising and writing fiction. This is the first time I’ am organising nonfiction. We’ll see how it goes.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Truth After Deflation: Why ‘Truth’ Refuses to Behave

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3–4 minutes

I’ve long had a problem with Truth – or at least the notion of it. It gets way too much credit for doing not much at all. For a long time now, philosophers have agreed on something uncomfortable: Truth isn’t what we once thought it was.

Truth isn’t what we once thought it was

The grand metaphysical picture, where propositions are true because they correspond to mind-independent facts, has steadily eroded. Deflationary accounts have done their work well. Truth no longer looks like a deep property hovering behind language. It looks more like a linguistic device: a way of endorsing claims, generalising across assertions, and managing disagreement. So far, so familiar.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

What’s less often asked is what happens after we take deflation seriously. Not halfway. Not politely. All the way.

That question motivates my new paper, Truth After Deflation: Why Truth Resists Stabilisation. The short version is this: once deflationary commitments are fully honoured, the concept of Truth becomes structurally unstable. Not because philosophers are confused, but because the job we keep asking Truth to do can no longer be done with the resources we allow it.

The core diagnosis: exhaustion

The paper introduces a deliberately unromantic idea: truth exhaustion. Exhaustion doesn’t mean that truth-talk disappears. We still say things are true. We still argue, correct one another, and care about getting things right. Exhaustion means something more specific:

After deflation, there is no metaphysical, explanatory, or adjudicative remainder left for Truth to perform.

Truth remains grammatically indispensable, but philosophically overworked.

Image: NotebookLM infographics of this topic. (Please ignore the typos.)

The dilemma

Once deflationary constraints are accepted, attempts to “save” Truth fall into a simple two-horn dilemma.

Horn A: Stabilise truth by making it invariant.
You can do this by disquotation, stipulation, procedural norms, or shared observation. The result is stable, but thin. Truth becomes administrative: a device for endorsement, coordination, and semantic ascent. It no longer adjudicates between rival frameworks.

Horn B: Preserve truth as substantive.
You can ask Truth to ground inquiry, settle disputes, explain success, or stand above practices. But now you need criteria. And once criteria enter, so do circularity, regress, or smuggled metaphysics. Truth becomes contestable precisely where it was meant to adjudicate.

Stability costs substance. Substance costs stability. There is no third option waiting in the wings.

Why this isn’t just abstract philosophy

To test whether this is merely a theoretical artefact, the paper works through three domains where truth is routinely asked to do serious work:

  • Moral truth, where Truth is meant to override local norms and condemn entrenched practices.
  • Scientific truth, where Truth is meant to explain success, convergence, and theory choice.
  • Historical truth, where Truth is meant to stabilise narratives against revisionism and denial.

In each case, the same pattern appears. When truth is stabilised, it collapses into procedure, evidence, or institutional norms. When it is thickened to adjudicate across frameworks, it becomes structurally contestable. This isn’t relativism. It’s a mismatch between function and resources.

Why this isn’t quietism either

A predictable reaction is: isn’t this just quietism in better prose?

Not quite. Quietism tells us to stop asking. Exhaustion explains why the questions keep being asked and why they keep failing. It’s diagnostic, not therapeutic. The persistence of truth-theoretic debate isn’t evidence of hidden depth. It’s evidence of a concept being pushed beyond what it can bear after deflation.

The upshot

Truth still matters. But not in the way philosophy keeps demanding. Truth works because practices work. It doesn’t ground them. It doesn’t hover above them. It doesn’t adjudicate between them without borrowing authority from elsewhere. Once that’s accepted, a great deal of philosophical anxiety dissolves, and a great deal of philosophical labour can be redirected.

The question is no longer “What is Truth?” It’s “Why did we expect Truth to do that?”

The paper is now archived on Zenodo and will propagate to PhilPapers shortly. It’s long, unapologetically structural, and aimed squarely at readers who already think deflationary truth is right but haven’t followed it to its endpoint.

Read it if you enjoy watching concepts run out of road.

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Written by Bry Willis

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When Deflation Becomes Ritual

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I recently shared a post calling out mystics, trying to fill spaces I deflate, but I am self-aware enough that I can be guilty, too. I worry about Maslow’s Law of the Instrument. Deflationary philosophy likes to imagine itself as immune to excess. It dissolves puzzles, clears away bad questions, and resists the urge to add metaphysical upholstery where none is needed. No mysteries, thank you. No hidden depths. Just conceptual hygiene. This self-image is mostly deserved. But not indefinitely. This post is an attitude check.

Because deflation, like anything that works, can ossify. And when it does, it doesn’t inflate into metaphysics. It hardens into something more embarrassing: a ritual of refusal.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.

From method to mannerism

Deflation begins as a method:

  • A question is posed.
  • Its assumptions are examined.
  • The confusion is diagnosed.
  • The question dissolves.
  • Everyone goes home.

At its best, this is liberating. It frees us from chasing shadows and mistaking grammatical artefacts for ontological puzzles. The trouble begins when the gesture outlives the job.

What was once a diagnostic move becomes a stylistic tic. Refusal becomes automatic. Silence becomes performative. ‘There is nothing there’ is delivered not as a conclusion, but as a posture. At that point, deflation stops doing work and starts doing theatre.

I am often charged with being negative, a pessimist, a relativist, and a subjectivist. I am sometimes each of these. Mostly, I am a Dis–Integrationist and deflationist, as it were. I like to tear things apart – not out of malice, but seeing that certain things just don’t sit quite right.

Another thing I do is to take things at face value. As I came up through the postmodern tradition, I don’t trust metanarratives, and I look for them everywhere. This is why I wrote A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH), and even more so, the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW). Some words carry a lot of baggage and connotation, so I want to be sure I understand the rawest form. This is why I rail on about weasel words like truth, justice, freedom, and such.

I also refrain from responding if I am not satisfied with a definition. This is why I consider myself an igntheist as opposed to an atheist. Functionally, I am the latter, but the definition I’d be opposing is so inane that it doesn’t even warrant me taking a position.

Image: NotebookLM infographic of this topic.

The prestige of saying less

There is a quiet prestige attached to not answering questions. Refusal sounds serious. Restraint sounds wise. Silence, in the right lighting, sounds profound. This is not an accident. Our intellectual culture has learned to associate verbal minimalism with depth, much as it associates verbosity with insecurity. Deflationary philosophers are not immune to this aesthetic pull.

When ‘I reject the question’ becomes a default response rather than a considered judgement, deflation has slipped from method into mannerism. The absence of claims becomes a badge. The lack of commitments becomes an identity. One is no longer clearing space, but occupying emptiness.

This is how deflation acquires a style – and styles are how rituals begin.

Apophasis without God

Mysticism has its negative theology. Ritualised deflation develops something similar.

Both rely on:

  • refusal to name
  • insistence on limits
  • reverent quiet

The difference is meant to be procedural. Mysticism stops at the silence. Deflation is supposed to pass through it. But when deflation forgets that its silence is provisional, it starts to resemble the thing it set out to criticise. Absence becomes sacred again, just without the cosmology. The metaphysician worships what cannot be said. The ritualised deflationist admires themselves for not saying it. Neither is doing conceptual work anymore.

A brief and unavoidable Wittgenstein

This is where Ludwig Wittgenstein inevitably reappears, not as an authority, but as a warning. Wittgenstein did not think philosophy ended in silence because silence was holy. He thought philosophy ended in silence because the confusion had been resolved. The ladder was to be thrown away, not mounted on the wall and admired. Unfortunately, ladders make excellent décor.

When deflation becomes ritual, the therapeutic move freezes into liturgy. The gesture is preserved long after its purpose has expired. What was meant to end a problem becomes a way of signalling seriousness. That was never the point.

A diagnostic test

There is a simple question that separates disciplined deflation from its ritualised cousin:

  • Is this refusal doing explanatory work, or is it being repeated because it feels right?
  • If silence leads to better distinctions, better descriptions, or better questions, it is doing its job.
  • If silence merely repeats itself, it has become an affect.

And affects, once stabilised, are indistinguishable from rituals.

Deflation is local, not terminal

The corrective is not to abandon deflation, but to remember its scope.

Deflation should be:

  • local rather than global
  • temporary rather than terminal
  • revisable rather than aestheticised

Some questions need dissolving. Some need answering. Some need rephrasing. Knowing which is which is the entire discipline. Deflation is not a worldview. It is not a temperament. It is not a lifestyle choice. It is a tool, and like all tools, it should be put down when it stops fitting the task.

Clearing space is not a vocation

There is a temptation, once a room has been cleared, to linger in it. To admire the quiet. To mistake the absence of furniture for the presence of insight. But clearing space is not a vocation. It is a task. Once it is done, staying behind is just another way of refusing to leave. And refusal, repeated without reason, is no longer philosophy. It is choreography.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Enough, Anough, and the Archaeology of Small Mistakes

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2–3 minutes

I have acquired a minor but persistent defect. When I try to type enough, my fingers often produce anough. Not always. Often enough to notice. Enough to be, regrettably, anough.

This is not a simple typo. The e and a keys are not conspirators with shared borders. This is not owned → pwned, where adjacency and gamer muscle memory do the heavy lifting. This is something more embarrassing and more interesting: a quasi-phonetic leak. A schwa forcing its way into print without permission. A clue for how I pronounce the word – like Depeche Mode’s I can’t get enough.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Internally, the word arrives as something like ənuf, /əˈnʌf/. English, however, offers no schwa key. So the system improvises. It grabs the nearest vowel that feels acoustically honest and hopes orthography won’t notice. Anough slips through. Language looks the other way.

Image: Archaeology of anough
Video: Depeche Mode: I Just Can’t Get Enough

Is this revelatory?

Not in the heroic sense. No breakthroughs, no flashing lights. But it is instructive in the way cracked pottery is instructive. You don’t learn anything new about ceramics, but you learn a great deal about how the thing was used.

This is exactly how historians and historical linguists treat misspellings in diaries, letters, and court records. They don’t dismiss them as noise. They mine them. Spelling errors are treated as phonetic fossils, moments where the discipline of standardisation faltered, and speech bled through. Before spelling became prescriptive, it was descriptive. People wrote how words sounded to them, not how an academy later insisted they ought to look.

That’s how vowel shifts are reconstructed. That’s how accents are approximated. That’s how entire sound systems are inferred from what appear, superficially, to be mistakes. The inconsistency is the data. The slippage is the signal.

Anough belongs to this lineage. It’s a microscopic reenactment of pre-standardised writing, occurring inside a modern, over-educated skull with autocorrect turned off. For a brief moment, sound outranks convention. Orthography lags. Then the editor arrives, appalled, to tidy things up.

What matters here is sequence. Meaning is not consulted first. Spelling rules are not consulted first. Sound gets there early, locks the door, and files the paperwork later. Conscious intention, as usual, shows up after the event and claims authorship. That’s why these slips are interesting and why polished language is often less so. Clean prose has already been censored. Typos haven’t. They show the routing. They reveal what cognition does before it pretends to be in charge.

None of this licenses forensic grandstanding. We cannot reconstruct personalities, intentions, or childhood trauma from rogue vowels. Anyone suggesting otherwise is repackaging graphology with better fonts. But as weak traces, as evidence that thought passes through sound before it passes through rules, they’re perfectly serviceable.

Language doesn’t just record history. It betrays it. Quietly. Repeatedly. In diaries, in marginalia, and occasionally, when you’re tired and trying to say you’ve had enough. Or anough.

I’ll spare you a rant on ghoti.

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Written by Bry Willis

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The Expiration Date of Object Permanence

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
2–4 minutes

There is a persistent story we tell ourselves about quantum mechanics:* that it reveals reality to be fundamentally strange, paradoxical, or hostile to common sense. Particles in two places at once. Cats be both alive and dead. Worlds multiplying to save appearances.

I’ve never found that story convincing.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Image: NotebookLM infographic for this topic.

What I do find convincing is a simpler diagnosis: that we are applying a cognitive tool far beyond the conditions under which it earned its authority – and then mistaking the resulting discomfort for metaphysical insight.

Object permanence is one of our earliest and most successful heuristics. It allows infants to track toys behind sofas, caregivers behind doors, and threats behind occlusion. Without it, coordinated action would be impossible. With it, the world becomes navigable, predictable, and stable. It is a genuine cognitive achievement. But it is not a universal guarantee about reality.

In a new essay, The Expiration Date of Object Permanence: Heuristics, Grammar, and Quantum Pseudoproblems, I argue that much of what we call ‘quantum weirdness’ arises from the uncritical extension of this heuristic into domains where its ecological licensing no longer holds. The problem is not that quantum mechanics violates common sense. The problem is that we quietly treat common sense as metaphysics.

Quantum mechanics functions here not as a mystery generator, but as a stress test. Recent matter-wave interference experiments with increasingly massive systems show that object-based expectations fail quantifiably under carefully engineered conditions. When environmental coupling is suppressed, when decoherence is delayed, when the world is no longer warm, noisy, and forgiving, the assumptions underwriting object permanence simply stop paying rent.

Nothing spooky happens. A heuristic expires.

The essay also takes a dim view of some familiar cultural furniture. Schrödinger’s cat, for example, was introduced as a reductio – an intentionally absurd demonstration of what happens when microscopic formalism is naively scaled up. That it now circulates as an explanatory image tells us less about quantum mechanics than about the tenacity of object-grammar. Even jokes cannot escape it.

Interpretations fare no better. I suggest that the appeal of frameworks like Many-Worlds is not exhausted by their technical merits. They also function as strategies for preserving object-based reidentification – ways of ensuring that there is still something that can be pointed to, counted, and followed through time, even if the price is ontological inflation.

None of this denies the reality of quantum phenomena, nor does it pretend to solve the measurement problem. The essay is deliberately deflationary. Its claim is methodological, not revisionary: that many of the puzzles we inherit are artefacts of treating developmentally acquired heuristics as if they were unconditional features of the world.

Philosophy’s task, on this view, is not to make reality intuitive. It is to recognise when intuition has reached the end of its jurisdiction.

The paper is now available on Zenodo and will be indexed shortly on PhilPapers. As always, comments, objections, and principled misreadings are welcome.

This post and the underlying essay were inspired by a Nature article: Probing quantum mechanics with nanoparticle matter-wave interferometry, published on 21 January 2026. I get annoyed watching people misunderstand quantum mechanics and its effects, so I decided to address some of the issues in an essay. Read this essay as well as mine, which will explain why the paradoxes and ‘spooky behaviour’ of QM are only counter-intuitive if you’ve fallen into this heuristic trap.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Why Deflationary Philosophy Keeps Attracting Mystics

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4–5 minutes

The struggle is real. There is an odd occupational hazard that comes with writing deflationary philosophy: mystics keep turning up to thank you for your service.

This is always mildly bewildering. One spends a great deal of time dismantling metaphysical furniture, only to discover a small group lighting incense in the newly cleared space. Candles appear. Silence thickens. Someone whispers ineffable. Nope. The filing cabinet was just mislabeled.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The problem is not misunderstanding. It’s reuse.

It is tempting to think this is a simple misreading: I say this concept breaks down here, and someone hears you have glimpsed the ultimate. But that’s too kind. What’s really happening is more interesting. Mysticism does not merely misunderstand deflationary work; it feeds on the same linguistic moves and then stops too early.

Both mysticism and deflation rely on negative gestures:

  • “This description fails.”
  • “That category no longer applies.”
  • “Our usual language runs out.”

Up to this point, they are indistinguishable. The fork comes immediately after. The mystic treats conceptual failure as an endpoint. The silence itself becomes the destination. Something deep must live there, humming quietly, just out of reach.

The deflationist treats the same failure as a transition. The silence is not sacred. It’s a signal. It means: this tool no longer fits; pick another or move on. Same breakdown. Entirely different posture.

Clearing space versus consecrating it

Much deflationary philosophy clears space. It removes assumptions that were doing illicit work and leaves behind something quieter, simpler, and occasionally disappointing.

Mysticism has a standing policy of consecrating cleared space. An empty room is never just empty. It must be pregnant with meaning. Absence becomes depth. Silence becomes revelation. The fewer claims you make, the more cosmic you must be.

This is not a philosophical disagreement so much as a difference in temperament. One side sees subtraction. The other experiences loss and rushes to compensate. Modern intellectual culture strongly prefers addition. New layers. Hidden structures. Further depths. Deflation feels like theft. So it gets reinterpreted as a subtler form of enrichment: Ah, fewer words, therefore more truth.

The aesthetic trap

There is also an aesthetic problem, which I increasingly suspect does most of the damage. Deflationary philosophy, when done well, tends to sound calm, patient, and restrained. It does not shout. It does not posture. It does not perform certainty. Unfortunately, this is exactly how profundity is supposed to sound.

Quiet seriousness is easily mistaken for spiritual depth. Refusal to speculate reads as wisdom. Negative definition acquires an apophatic glow. This is how one ends up being mistaken for a mystic without having said anything mystical at all.

A brief word about Wittgenstein (because of course)

This is not a new problem. Ludwig Wittgenstein spent a good portion of his career trying to convince people that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. He was not pointing at a deeper reality beyond words. He was pointing back at the words and saying: look at what you’re doing with these.

Unfortunately, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” has proven irresistible to those who think silence is where the real action is. Wittgenstein meant: stop here. Many readers heard: kneel here. This is the recurring fate of therapeutic philosophy. The cure gets mistaken for a sacrament.

Charity is not complicity

Another contributor to the confusion is tone. Deflationary work tends to be charitable. It explains why certain intuitions arise. It traces confusions to their sources. It does not sneer. This generosity is often misheard as validation. When you say, “It makes sense that we think this way,” some readers hear, “Your intuition is pointing at something profound.” You are offering an explanation. They are receiving an affirmation. At that point, no disclaimer will save you. Any denial is absorbed as further evidence that you are brushing up against something too deep to articulate.

The real disagreement

The disagreement here is not about reality. It is about what to do when explanation fails.

Mysticism treats failure as revelation. Deflation treats failure as diagnostic.

One sanctifies the breakdown. The other changes tools.

Once you see this, the repeated misfire stops being frustrating and starts being predictable.

A final, self-directed warning

There is, admittedly, a risk on the other side as well. Deflation can become mystical if it turns into ritual. If refusal hardens into identity. If “there is nothing there” becomes something one performs rather than concludes. Even subtraction can acquire ceremony if repeated without purpose. The discipline, such as it is, lies in knowing when to clear space—and when to leave the room.

No replacement gods

When a metaphysical idol is removed, someone will always ask what god is meant to replace it. The deflationary answer is often disappointing: none. This will never satisfy everyone. But the room is cleaner now, and that has its own quiet reward—even if someone insists on lighting incense in the corner.

Image: Full cover image infographic by NotebookLM
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Written by Bry Willis

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Mark Carney Explains Nietzsche

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He doesn‘t, but he accidentally demonstrates the problem.

There is a certain kind of person who loathes Nietzsche for the same reason they loathe earthquakes. Not because he causes damage, but because he refuses to pretend the ground was ever stable.

In a recent address, Mark Carney says something that would have been unutterable in polite company a decade ago. He admits that the ‘rules-based international order’ was always a partial fiction. Not false enough to abandon, not true enough to believe in without effort. A story everyone knew was cracked, but which continued to function so long as enough people kept repeating the lines.

“We knew that the story about the rules-based order was partially false… We knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused and the victim. This fiction was useful [because of the goods provided by American hegemony]… So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition… You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.“

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.

International law, he concedes, applied unevenly. Power decided enforcement. Friends received nuance. Enemies received principle. This was not ignorance. It was a bargain. The illusion delivered goods, stability, growth, a sense of moral hygiene. So the sign stayed in the window. The rituals continued. The gaps between rhetoric and reality were politely ignored. That bargain, Carney says, no longer works.

This is framed as geopolitical realism, but it is really an ontological admission. The mask slipped, and everyone is suddenly offended by the face underneath.

Image: NotebookLM infographic of this content.

This is why people hate Friedrich Nietzsche. Not because he celebrates cruelty or chaos, but because he insists that order is something we perform, not something we discover. He refuses the comfort of believing that the rules were ever neutral, universal, or self-enforcing. He points at the scaffolding and says: this is what is holding things up, not the sky.

When enough people play along, the game feels like reality. When someone refuses to play, panic sets in.

Enter Donald Trump. Trump did not invent the asymmetries of power. He refused to speak them politely. This created a moral crisis for institutions built on the assumption that everyone would continue to pretend. When a designated enemy like Vladimir Putin does this, it is filed under Evil. When an ally does it, the response bifurcates: either frantic appeasement, or embarrassed silence disguised as strategy.

Image: Foreign sentiment

Carney tries to walk a middle path. He neither genuflects nor detonates the stage. He acknowledges the fiction without fully abandoning it. This makes him interesting, but also symptomatic. He wants the audience to notice the set wobbling without asking them to leave the theatre.

When he says the old rules-based order is not coming back, what he really means is that the illusion has been interrupted. Whether permanently or only until someone builds a more convincing façade is left diplomatically unresolved. This is where Nietzsche becomes unavoidable.

People often lump Nietzsche together with vague talk of “power,” as though this were a crude obsession shared with Michel Foucault. But Nietzsche’s contribution is sharper and more unsettling. He is not merely describing power as something exercised. He is describing power as something that manufactures meaning, legitimacy, and moral vocabulary after the fact. Power does not break the rules. It writes them retroactively and calls them eternal.

This is the kind of power later adopted by Adolf Hitler, by Putin, and now by Trump. Not brute force alone, but the refusal to treat inherited norms as sacred simply because they are inherited. This is precisely what terrifies people who mistake procedural continuity for moral truth.

The United States borrowed Montesquieu’s separation of powers as though it were a lock rather than a suggestion. Anyone paying attention could see how easily it could be gamed. That this came as a shock says less about constitutional brilliance than about selective vision. The system functioned not because it was impregnable, but because its participants agreed, tacitly, to behave as though it were.

Nietzsche would call this decadence. Not decline as catastrophe, but decline as denial. The refusal to look directly at the conditions that make order possible, preferring instead to moralise their breakdown.

Carney’s speech is not radical. It is late. It says aloud what everyone already knew but preferred not to articulate: that the world was never neat, the order never neutral, and the rules never binding on those strong enough to ignore them.

What comes next is the uncomfortable part. Once the illusion is acknowledged, it cannot simply be re-believed. You can rebuild institutions. You can repaint the signage. But you cannot unknow that the coffee was always bitter.

Nietzsche does not tell us what replaces the façade. He only insists that pretending it was ever a window onto truth is the most dangerous fiction of all.

What Carney inadvertently demonstrates is not a failure of leadership but a failure of language. ‘Rules-based order’ was never a description of the world; it was a map we mistook for the terrain because it worked often enough to feel true. Nietzsche’s crime was pointing at the legend and saying it was doing the real work. Once that admission is made, you do not get to return to innocence. You can draw a new map, call it reform, integration, or renewal, but you will know it is a diagram pinned to power, not a window onto justice. The unease people feel now is not about chaos. It is about recognition. The lie no longer holds because too many have noticed the pins.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Moral Psychology and the Art of Not Believing Your Own Results

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3–4 minutes

Over the past few decades, moral psychology has staged a quiet coup against one of our most cherished fantasies: that human beings are, at bottom, rational moral agents. This is not a fringe claim. It is not a Twitter take. It is the mainstream finding of an entire research programme spanning psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience.

We do not reason our way to moral conclusions. We feel our way there. Instantly. Automatically. And only afterwards do we construct reasons that make the judgment sound respectable.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

This is not controversial anymore. It is replicated, taught, and celebrated. And yet, if you read the most influential books in this literature, something strange happens. The diagnosis is devastating. The prescription is reassuring.

I’ve just published a long-form video walking through five canonical books in moral psychology that all uncover the same structural problem, and then quietly refuse to live with the implications.

What follows is a brief guide to the argument.

The shared discovery

Across the literature, the same conclusions keep reappearing:

  • Moral judgement is intuitive, not deliberative
  • Reasoning is largely post-hoc
  • Emotion is not noise but signal
  • Framing and metaphor shape what even counts as a moral fact
  • Group identity and tribal affiliation dominate moral perception

In other words: the Enlightenment picture of moral reasoning is wrong. Or at least badly incomplete.

The rider does not steer the elephant. The rider explains where the elephant has already gone.

Audio: NotebookLM infographic

Where the books go wrong

The video focuses on five widely read, field-defining works:

  • The Righteous Mind (reviewed here and here… even here)
  • Moral Politics (mentioned here – with Don’t Think of an Elephant treated as its popular sequel)
  • Outraged! (reviewed here)
  • Moral Tribes (reviewed here)

Each of these books is sharp, serious, and worth reading. This is not a hit piece.

But each follows the same arc:

  1. Identify a non-rational, affective, automatic mechanism at the heart of moral judgement
  2. Show why moral disagreement is persistent and resistant to argument
  3. Propose solutions that rely on reflection, dialogue, reframing, calibration, or rational override

In short: they discover that reason is weak, and then assign it a leadership role anyway.

Haidt dismantles moral rationalism and then asks us to talk it out.
Lakoff shows that framing is constitutive, then offers better framing.
Gray models outrage as a perceptual feedback loop, then suggests we check our perceptions.
Greene diagnoses tribal morality, then bets on utilitarian reasoning to save us.

None of this is incoherent. But it is uncomfortable. Because the findings themselves suggest that these prescriptions are, at best, limited.

Diagnosis without prognosis

The uncomfortable possibility raised by this literature is not that we are ignorant or misinformed.

It is that moral disagreement may be structural rather than solvable.

That political conflict may not be cured by better arguments.
That persuasion may resemble contagion more than deliberation.
That reason often functions as a press secretary, not a judge.

The books sense this. And then step back from it. Which is human. But it matters.

Why this matters now

We are living in systems that have internalised these findings far more ruthlessly than public discourse has.

Social media platforms optimise for outrage, not understanding.
Political messaging is frame-first, not fact-first.
AI systems are increasingly capable of activating moral intuitions at scale, without fatigue or conscience.

Meanwhile, our institutions still behave as if one more conversation, one more fact-check, one more appeal to reason will close the gap. The research says otherwise.

And that gap between what we know and what we pretend may be the most important moral problem of the moment.

No solution offered

The video does not end with a fix. That’s deliberate.

Offering a neat solution here would simply repeat the same move I’m criticising: diagnosis followed by false comfort. Sometimes orientation matters more than optimism. The elephant is real. The elephant is moving.And most of us are passengers arguing about the map while it walks.

That isn’t despair. It’s clarity.

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Written by Bry Willis

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