As the publication date of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH) draws nearer, I feel it’s a good time to promote it (obviously) and to introduce some of the problems it uncovers – including common misperceptions I’ve already heard. Through this feedback, I now understand some of the underlying structural limitations that I hadn’t considered, but this only strengthens my position. As I state at the start of the book, the LIH isn’t a cast-in-stone artefact. Other discoveries will inevitably be made. For now, consider it a way to think about the deficiencies of language, around which remediation strategies can be developed.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.
Let’s clear the undergrowth first. The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is not concerned with everyday ambiguity, garden-variety polysemy, or the sort of misunderstandings that vanish the moment someone bothers to supply five seconds of context. That terrain is already well-mapped, thoroughly fenced, and frankly dull.
Take the classic sort of example wheeled out whenever someone wants to sound clever without doing much work:
‘I made a 30-foot basket’.
Video: a woman making a large basket
If you’re a basketweaver, you picture an absurdly large basket and quietly question the maker’s life choices. If you’re watching basketball, you hear ‘score’. If you’re anywhere near the context in which the sentence was uttered, the meaning is obvious. If it isn’t, the repair cost is trivial. Add context, move on, live your life.
Language did not fail here. It merely waited for its coat. This is not the sort of thing the LIH loses sleep over.
The Groucho Marx Defence, or: Syntax Is Not the Problem
Logicians and armchair philosophers love to reach for jokes like Groucho Marx’s immortal line:
‘I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. Why it was wearing my pyjamas, I’ll never know’.
Video: A man and elephant in pyjamas (no sound)
Yes, very funny. Yes, the sentence allows for a syntactic misreading. No, nobody actually believes the elephant was lounging about in striped silk. The humour works precisely because the “wrong” parse is momentarily entertained and instantly rejected.
Again, language is not insufficient here. It’s mischievous. There’s a difference.
If the LIH were worried about this sort of thing, its ambitions would be indistinguishable from an undergraduate logic textbook with better branding.
Banks, Rivers, and the Myth of Constant Confusion
Likewise, when someone in a city says, ‘I went to the bank’, no sane listener imagines them strolling along a riverbank, unless they are already knee-deep in pastoral fantasy or French tourism brochures. Context does the heavy lifting. It almost always does.
Video: Rare footage of me trying to withdraw funds at my bank (no sound)
This is not a crisis of meaning. This is language functioning exactly as advertised.
Where the Trouble Actually Starts: Contestables
The LIH begins where these tidy examples stop being helpful. It concerns itself with Contestables: terms like truth, freedom, justice, fairness, harm, equality. Words that look stable, behave politely in sentences, and then detonate the moment you ask two people what they actually mean by them. These are not ambiguous in the casual sense. They are structurally contested.
In political, moral, and cultural contexts, different groups use the same word to gesture at fundamentally incompatible conceptual frameworks, all while assuming a shared understanding that does not exist. The conversation proceeds as if there were common ground, when in fact there is only overlap in spelling.
That’s why attempts to ‘define’ these terms so often collapse into accusation:
That’s not what freedom means. That’s not real justice. You’re redefining truth.
No, the definitions were never shared in the first place. The disagreement was smuggled in with the noun.
‘Just Ignore the Word’ Is Not a Rescue
A common response at this point is to suggest that we simply bypass the troublesome term and discuss the concrete features each party associates with it. Fine. Sensible. Often productive. But notice what this manoeuvre concedes. It does not save the term. It abandons it.
If meaningful discussion can only proceed once the word is set aside and replaced with a list of clarifications, constraints, examples, and exclusions, then the word has already failed at its primary job: conveying shared meaning. This is precisely the point the LIH is making.
The insufficiency is not that language is vague, or flexible, or context-sensitive. It’s that beyond a certain level of conceptual complexity, language becomes a confidence trick. It gives us the feeling of agreement without the substance, the appearance of communication without the transaction.
At that point, words don’t merely underperform. They mislead.
It’s finally arrived, and now I have to review it.
I’ve published books before. In fact, this one is number nine – cue the Beatles’ White Album. I was nervous as I released my first fiction as Ridley Park, and I released three more before I released my first nonfiction as myself. But this one means the most to me.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content – sort of.
I am well aware that artists tend to say that about each piece of work as it is born into the world, but this one actually started before any of the other ones. About a year ago, it had twice as many pages, and I’ve been whittling it down to 132 pages. At the same time, I am trying to cut the fat, new meat appears, and I have to decide how to treat it. In this social media world, I can instantiate some of it through this lens. At some point, I may publish a second edition. I may even produce a version that incorporates several of my ideas with connective tissue.
My near-term goal is to review this page-by-page for mistakes – misstatements – and to see how it lays out on the page. Obviously, I produce my work on a computer – a PC. I tend to write in Microsoft Word and format in InDesign. I output to PDF, as required by printers. Although I print pages for review, there is still something different about a physical, bound book. I’ve even printed it in a folded booklet style, which gets mostly there, but it’s still deficient.
This is an announcement, not a promotion. I’m not trying to pad out an entry, but I wanted to share. I’ll end here.
My Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is finished, the cover is designed, and everything is in order for a January 2026 release – save for one administrative detail: the ISBN. I expect this to be resolved presently. The Bowker distribution system in the US appears to have been set up circa 1997, and that’s just the web interface. Who knows how long the database has been in place? I’d bet circa 1955. Most countries provide ISBNs for free. Not the US. Kinda bollox. Meantime, I’ve now got three lenses through which to inspect the world.
[EDIT: ISBN issue has been resolved. I am awaiting a proof copy that should be arriving today.]
From the outside, some of my recent work can look untidy. A hypothesis about language. An ontology about mediated encounters. A paper on why moral disagreement refuses to resolve itself politely. No master theory. No clean ladder. No promised synthesis at the end. This is not an accident. It is a refusal.
What links the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH), the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW), and Disagreement Without Referees is not a shared doctrine, but a shared function. They are lenses, not foundations. Diagnostics, not blueprints. Each takes aim at a different site where Enlightenment habits quietly overpromise – meaning, access, adjudication – and shows what breaks when we stop pretending those promises were ever cashable. They form a family. Not a system. And certainly not a programme for rebuilding.
Three Lenses, Three Failure Sites
Each of these frameworks operates at a different level, but they all do the same kind of work: they explain why something we rely on feels indispensable, fails repeatedly, and yet stubbornly survives.
LIH operates at the linguistic level.
It asks why language fails precisely where we expect it to secure clarity, precision, or consensus. Its answer is unromantic: language is not uniformly capable. As we move from invariants to contestables to fluids and ineffables, its representational power degrades. The failure mode is familiar: we mistake grammatical stability for ontological stability, and then act surprised when disagreement hardens rather than dissolves.
MEOW operates at the ontological level.
It asks what kind of ‘world’ we are actually dealing with once we abandon the fantasy of unmediated access. There is no clean mind–world interface, no privileged vantage point. Every encounter is mediated – biologically, cognitively, linguistically, socially. Realism and idealism alike fail here, each clinging to a different myth of access. What remains is not scepticism, but constraint.
Disagreement Without Referees operates at the normative and political level.
It asks why moral and political disagreement persists even when all parties appear informed, sincere, and articulate. The answer is ontological incommensurability. Where frameworks do not overlap, there are no neutral referees. Argument does not converge because it cannot. What remains is persuasion, coalition, power, and consequence—moral life without an umpire.
None of these lenses replaces what it critiques. Each refuses the repair instinct that says: if we just fix the model, the system will work again. That instinct is the pathology.
What They Share (And What They Don’t)
What unites these lenses is not a set of positive claims about how the world really is. It is a shared posture:
no privileged access
no neutral ground
no final adjudication
no redemptive synthesis
But also:
no quietism
no nihilism
no ‘anything goes’
no abdication of responsibility
They do not tell you what to believe. They tell you why believing harder won’t save you.
Importantly, they are non-hierarchical. LIH does not ground MEOW. MEOW does not explain away disagreement. Disagreement does not ‘apply’ LIH in some linear fashion. They intersect. They overlap. They illuminate different failure modes of the same inherited fantasy: that there must be a place where things finally settle. There isn’t.
Image: Three Diagnostic Lenses Infographic¹
Why This Is Not a System
Systems promise closure. These lenses do not. They explain why closure is repeatedly promised, urgently demanded, and reliably missed. To systematise them would be to betray them.
What they offer instead is a kind of intellectual hygiene: a way of recognising when we are asking language, reality, or morality to do work they were never capable of doing – and then blaming one another when they don’t comply.
If there is a unifying thread, it is this:the demand for foundations is itself the problem.² These lenses do not solve that problem. They show you where it operates, how it reproduces itself, and why refusing it feels so uncomfortable. That discomfort is the point.
Footnotes
This is another NotebookLM infographic – my second. It’s not half-bad. I had to adjust some elements in Photoshop and Illustrator, and there are still textual anomalies, but all in all, I’m impressed with what 60 seconds of generation yielded – along with a 5-minute prompt and 15 minutes of touchup. It’s just a novelty for now – certainly not necessary. What do you think?
Naturally, it will make more sense alongside the book. But it may still provide a bit of entertainment – and mild discomfort – in the meantime.
tl;dr: Language is generally presumed to be stable. Words mean what you think they mean, right? A table is a table. A bird is a bird. Polysemy aside, these are solid, dependable units.
Then we arrive at freedom, justice, truth, and an entire panoply of unstable candidates. And let’s not even pretend qualia are behaving themselves.
So when someone says ‘truth’, ‘free speech’, or ‘IQ’, you may suddenly realise you’ve been arguing with a cardboard cut-out wearing your own assumptions. That isn’t just interpersonal mischief. It’s language doing exactly what it was designed to do: letting you glide over the hard problems while sounding perfectly reasonable.
Audio: Short NotebookLM summary of this page content*
Video: Legacy video explaining some features of the LIH.
If that sounds banal, you’ve already fallen for the trap.
Give it a try – or wait until you’ve digested the book. Not literally, unless you’re short on fibre.
Cheers.
Written by Bry Willis
microglyphics
* As I’ve cited previously, the quality of NotebookLM varies – usually in predictable directions. This one does well enough, but it doesn’t have enough context to get the story right (because it was only drawing from this page rather than from a fuller accounting of the LIH). Its trailing comment reveals that it doesn’t grasp that “new words” don’t solve the problem.
Earlier, it suggests that language is intentionally vague. This is not an assertion I make. You can read some of the earlier incarnations, or you can wait for it to be published.
A NotebookLM Cautionary Tale for the Philosophically Curious
Apologies in advance for the didactic nature of this post.
Every so often, the universe gives you a gift. Not the good kind, like an unexpected bottle of Shiraz, but the other kind – the ‘teachable moment’ wrapped in a small tragedy. In this case, a perfectly innocent run of MEOW GPT (my Mediated Encounter Ontology engine) was fed into NotebookLM to generate a pseudo-podcast. And NotebookLM, bless its little algorithmic heart, proceeded to demonstrate every classic mistake people make when confronting a relational ontology.
Audio: The misinterpretation of MEOW GPT: On Progress by NotebookLM that spawned this post.
It’s perfect. I couldn’t have scripted a better example of How Not To Read MEOW GPT if I’d hired a team of Enlightenment rationalists on retainer.
So consider this your public service announcement – and a guide for anyone experimenting with MEOW GPT at home, preferably while sitting down and not holding onto any cherished metaphysical delusions.
Video: Surreal Light through a Prism Clip for no particular reason (No sound)
Mistake 1: Treating a Thick Concept as a Single Glorious Thing
NotebookLM began, earnestly, by trying to uncover the ‘inner architecture of honour’, as if it were a cathedral with blueprints lying around.
This is the central error:
Honour is not a thing. There is no inner architecture.
There are only patterns – drifting, contested, historically mangled patterns – that happen to share a word. If you start with ‘What is honour?’, you’ve already fallen down the stairs.
Mistake 2: Rebuilding Essence From the T0–T3 Layers
MEOW GPT gives you biological (T0), cognitive (T1), linguistic (T2), and institutional/technical (T3) mediation because that’s how constraints emerge. NotebookLM, meanwhile, reconstructed these as ‘layers’ of the same virtue – like honour was a three-storey moral townhouse with a loft conversion.
No. The tiers are co-emergent constraints, not components of a moral particle. If your conclusion looks like a metaphysical onion, you’ve misread the recipe.
Mistake 3: Sneaking Virtue Ethics in Through the Fire Exit
NotebookLM kept returning to:
an ‘internal compass’
a ‘core record of the self’
a ‘lifelong ledger’
a ‘deep personal architecture’
At this point we might as well carve Aristotle’s name into the hull.
MEOW’s stance is simple: the self is not a marble statue – it’s an ongoing social, cognitive, and technical scandal. Treating honour as a personality trait is just the old moral ontology with a new hairstyle.
Mistake 4: Treating Polysemy as Noise, Not Evidence
NotebookLM acknowledged the differing uses of ‘honour’, but always with the implication that beneath the variations lies one pure moral essence. This is backwards. The ambiguity is the point. The polysemy isn’t messy data; it’s the signature of conceptual drift.
If you treat ambiguity as a problem to be ironed out, you’ve missed half the LIH and all of the MEOW.
Mistake 5: Turning MEOW Into a TED Talk
The podcast tried to wrap things up by contrasting honour’s “deep internal permanence” with the ephemerality of digital rating systems.
It’s cute, but it’s still modernist comfort-food. MEOW does not mourn for the ‘permanent self’. It doesn’t recognise such a creature. And digital honour doesn’t ‘replace’ the old patterns; it aggressively rewrites the honour-economy into algorithmic form. If your conclusion sounds like ‘ancient virtue meets modern technology’, that’s TED, not MEOW.
So How Should You Interpret MEOW GPT?
A short cheat-sheet for anyone experimenting at home:
There is no essence. Concepts like honour, truth, integrity, and justice are drift-patterns, not objects.
The tiers describe mediation, not ingredients. They’re co-emergent pressures, not building blocks.
Thick terms lie to you. Their apparent unity is linguistic camouflage.
Ambiguity is structural. If the term looks fuzzy, that’s because the world is fuzzy there.
If a concept feels granite-solid, you’re standing on conceptual quicksand. (Sorry.)
A Friendly Warning Label
Warning: If you believe thick moral concepts have single, universal meanings, MEOW GPT may cause temporary metaphysical discomfort. Consult your ontological physician if symptoms persist.
A surprising number of people have been using the MEOW GPT I released into the wild. Naturally, I can’t see how anyone is actually using it, which is probably for the best. If you hand someone a relational ontology and they treat it like a BuzzFeed quiz, that’s on them. Still, I haven’t received any direct feedback, positive or catastrophic, which leaves me wondering whether users understand the results or are simply nodding like priests reciting Latin they don’t believe.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
The truth is uncomfortable: if you haven’t grasped the Mediated Encounter Ontology (of the World), the outputs may feel like a philosophical brick to the face. They’re meant to; mediation has consequences. I’m even considering adding a warning label:
If you hold an unwavering commitment to a concept with any philosophical weight, perhaps don’t input it. There is a non-zero chance the illusion will shatter.
Below is a sampling of the concepts I tested while inspecting the system’s behaviour. I’m withholding the outputs, partly to avoid influencing new users and partly to preserve your dignity, such as it is.
authenticity
anattā (Buddhist)
character (in Aristotle’s virtue-ethical sense)
consciousness
dignity
freedom
hózhó (Navajo)
justice
karma
love
progress
ren ( 仁 )
table
tree
truth
I may have tried others, depending on how irritated I was with the world at the time.
(Now that I think of it, I entered my full name and witnessed it nearly have an aneurysm.)
My purpose in trying these is (obviously) to test the GPT. As part of the test, I wanted to test terms I already considered to be weasel words. I also wanted to test common terms (table) and terms outside of Western modalities. I learned something about the engine in each case.
Tables & Trees
One of the first surprises was the humble ‘table’ which, according to the engine, apparently moonlights across half of civilisation’s conceptual landscape. If you input ‘table’, you get everything from dinner tables to data tables to parliamentary procedure. The model does exactly what it should: it presents the full encounter-space and waits for you to specify which world you meant to inhabit.
The lesson: if you mean a table you eat dinner on, say so. Don’t assume the universe is built around your implied furniture.
‘Tree’ behaves similarly. Does the user mean a birch in a forest? A branching data structure? A phylogenetic diagram? MEOW GPT won’t decide that for you; nor should it. Precision is your job.
This is precisely why I tested ‘character (in Aristotle’s virtue-ethical sense)’ rather than tossing ‘character’ in like a confused undergraduate hoping for luck.
Non-Western Concepts
I also tested concepts well outside the Western philosophical sandbox. This is where the model revealed its real strength.
Enter ‘karma’: it promptly explained that the Western reduction is a cultural oversimplification and – quite rightly – flagged that different Eastern traditions use the term differently. Translation: specify your flavour.
Enter ‘anattā’: the model demonstrated that Western interpretations often reduce the concept to a caricature. Which, frankly, they do.
Enter ‘hózhó’: the Navajo term survives mostly in the anthropological imagination, and the model openly described it as nearly ineffable – especially to those raised in cultures that specialise in bulldozing subtlety. On that score, no notes.
Across the board, I was trying to see whether MEOW GPT would implode when confronted with concepts that resist neat Western categorisation. It didn’t. It was annoyingly robust.
Closing Notes
If you do try the MEOW GPT and find its results surprising, illuminating, or mildly offensive to your metaphysical sensibilities, let me know – and tell me why. It helps me understand what the engine does well and what illusions it quietly pops along the way. Your feedback may even keep me from adding further warning labels, though I wouldn’t count on it.
I couldn’t resist feeding another concept into the MEOW GPT – ‘Progress’. Now you don’t have to. The results are as expected.
Video: Robot reading a newspaper whilst watching news on the telly. NB: This has little to do with the page content. I rendered it for another project, but didn’t use it.
Concept
Input: progress
Type: Normative–evaluative temporal concept (idea of improvement over time; macro-comparison rule)
Scope check: In-scope – central to Enlightenment narratives, clearly multi-tier, perfect for MEOW+LIH framing.
High-level summary (≤120 words)
“Progress” isn’t a neutral description of change; it’s a way of coding sequences of encounters as “getting better” according to some (often hidden) metric. Biologically, we enjoy mastery, relief from threat, and efficiency gains, which make certain changes feel like progress. Cognitively, we impose arrows, ladders, and stories of advancement onto messy histories. Linguistically, “progress” is a heavily contested macro-term that slides between technology, morals, economics, and personal growth. Socially and technically, institutions build progress into metrics (GDP, innovation indices, “development”), roadmaps, and infrastructures, which then enforce one vision of betterment. In MEOW terms, “progress” is a family of mediated encounter-patterns, not an objective direction baked into the world.
T0 – Biological Mediation
Applicability: Weakly to moderately applicable – there is no innate “sense of progress”, but bodies provide priors for what will be experienced as progress.
Analysis:
Organisms are tuned to reduce pain and increase security; changes that lower threat or effort (less hunger, more shelter, shorter paths) tend to feel intrinsically “better” at a bodily level.
Learning and mastery trigger reward signals: successfully performing a task faster or with less error produces bodily satisfaction, giving micro-encounters of “I’m progressing”.
However, bodies are also present-biased (we discount distant benefits), which conflicts with grand narratives of long-term progress that demand near-term sacrifice.
Chronic stress, disability, or aging can radically invert intuitive progress narratives: what counts as “improvement” may become extremely local (less pain today, one more functional ability retained).
T1 – Cognitive Mediation
Applicability: Strongly applicable – “progress” is largely a cognitive imposition on temporal change.
Analysis:
We construct temporal schemas (arrows, ladders, stages) and then fit history, technology, or personal life into them: primitive → advanced, childhood → maturity, underdeveloped → developed.
Progress judgments always depend on chosen metrics and baselines: we decide which variables to track (comfort? equality? power? lifespan? biodiversity?) and from which starting point, then declare a direction “up”.
Hindsight bias and survivor bias make progress narratives seductive: we mainly see successful pathways and reinterpret past suffering as necessary stepping stones.
Many minds default to a teleological story (“things are heading somewhere”) and smuggle in inevitability: once something happened, it was “on the path of progress”.
Personal identity work often leans on progress schemas (“I’m better than I was”, “I’ve grown”), which can be empowering—but also oppressive when life moves sideways or backwards.
T2 – Linguistic Mediation
Applicability: Maximally applicable – “progress” is a classic case for the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.
Analysis:
On LIH’s topography, “progress” is a Contestable term: central, value-saturated, and permanently argued over (like justice, freedom, development). People vigorously disagree on what counts as “better”.
It also behaves as a Fluid: the same word ranges over technological advance, moral improvement, economic growth, scientific accumulation, personal healing, social liberation, and more, with blurry boundaries.
There is a huge Presumption Gap: speakers talk as if “progress” were almost self-explanatory (“we need progress”, “don’t stand in the way of progress”), while quietly plugging in different metrics and beneficiaries.
Political rhetoric (e.g., “progressive”, “pro-growth”) makes “progress” sound descriptive (“this is progress”) when it’s largely a normative claim about which trade-offs to accept.
Attempts to spell out “real progress” in detail (sustainable, inclusive, decolonial, post-growth, etc.) risk crossing the Effectiveness Horizon: each added qualifier improves precision for some audiences but makes the term heavier, more contested, and less communicatively effective for others.
Metaphors of forward motion and height (“moving forward”, “lagging behind”, “advanced”, “backward”) naturalise a directional axis and position whole peoples or practices on it, with obvious power implications.
T3 – Social/Technical Mediation
Applicability: Strongly applicable – progress is institutionalised in metrics, infrastructures, and stories.
Analysis:
Modern states and markets operationalise “progress” via indicators: GDP, productivity, patent counts, test scores, life expectancy, HDI, etc. What’s measured becomes what “progress” officially means.
Institutions plan through progress narratives: roadmaps, five-year plans, “maturity models”, technology readiness levels, academic rankings. These formats stage reality as a path with rungs and milestones.
Struggles over progress show up as conflicts between infrastructures: highways vs public transit, fossil fuels vs renewables, prisons vs restorative systems, expansion vs conservation.
Progress talk often justifies harm or sacrifice: displacement, environmental damage, labour exploitation, or cultural erasure are framed as unfortunate but necessary costs of “advancement”.
Tech culture enacts a particularly strong progress script (“disruption”, “version 2.0”, “moonshots”), which can overshadow regressions (loss of privacy, fragility, inequality) that don’t fit the official metric.
Counter-movements (degrowth, disability justice, decolonial thought, climate activism) challenge dominant progress patterns, proposing alternative metrics (care, resilience, biodiversity, repair) and thus different encounter-patterns to call “better”.
Limits & failure modes
Language insufficiency notes
LIH suggests “progress” will remain permanently unstable: it lives in a region where our need for a powerful, simple word outruns our ability to fix its content across contexts.
Because “progress” feels both descriptive and obviously good, the Presumption Gap is structurally dangerous: it allows one group’s gain to be presented as universal improvement, even when others clearly lose.
Attempts to define progress once and for all tend to hit the Effectiveness Horizon: more detailed definitions reveal underlying value conflicts rather than resolving them.
Missing tiers / blind spots
A purely T3 view (“progress is whatever our metrics say”) ignores embodied and psychological costs that never enter the indicators.
A purely T1 view (“progress is just a narrative”) underestimates how deeply infrastructures and institutions lock in certain trajectories and make alternatives materially difficult.
MEOW framing itself can tempt us toward a detached stance (“just different mediations”), but with progress this is politically loaded: deciding which encounter-patterns we count as “better” is not neutral analysis, it’s a moral and political act.
Instead of sleeping like a functional adult, I’ve spent the night creating, testing, and refining a bespoke GPT that has fully absorbed my MEOW and LIH frameworks. Apologies that the LIH manuscript isn’t yet public; some of the terminology may look delightfully alien if you’re coming in cold.
This model doesn’t role-play a philosopher; it thinks through the Mediated Encounter Ontology. It runs every input through T0–T3 mediations and then applies the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis to explain why our words fail us in predictable, structural ways.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this post on the MEOW GPT.
I stress-tested it with a dozen concepts, from the obvious to the uncooperative. It happily tells you when your input makes sense, when it’s out of scope, and when you’ve handed it conceptual soup. My first test was the hard problem of consciousness, because naturally we begin with the philosophical boss fight. I dialled down some over-enthusiastic LIH flourishes, but the bones are untouched.
I’m making this public for a simple reason: it’s the clearest way for people to see how MEOW operates without wandering through a hundred pages of my prose. These outputs capture how I process information and why these frameworks feel so intuitively correct to me. When you read them, you get a direct view of my interpretive machinery – how the world clicks for me, and how these ideas evolved.
It hasn’t been rigorously battle-tested across the entire conceptual universe, but it’s stable, coherent, and frankly too interesting to keep in the drawer. If you try it – and I hope you do – I’d love to see what it does with your own concepts. If you need help reading the results, ask. I didn’t simplify the system; it expects literacy, nuance, and a working prefrontal cortex.
Below is a sample output. I asked the model to analyse modernity.
Concept
Input: modernity
Type: historical–social formation / self-description of an era / conceptual frame
Scope check: in-scope – central for how MEOW treats large-scale shifts in mediation (social, technical, cognitive, linguistic)
High-level summary (≤120 words)
Modernity is both a historical bundle (industrialisation, nation-states, capitalism, science, bureaucracy, media) and a story societies tell about themselves (“we are modern, unlike the past”).
In MEOW terms, modernity is a large-scale reorganisation of mediations:
T1: new cognitive habits (individualism, planning, abstraction, risk-calculation).
T2: new vocabularies (progress, development, rationality, “religion” vs “science”).
T3: new institutions and technologies (markets, states, factories, schools, mass media, digital networks).
“Modernity” is not a single thing but a way these shifts hang together and become a background to everyday encounter.
T0 – Biological Mediation
Applicability: Applicable
Analysis:
Modernity radically reshapes the immediate bodily environment: dense cities, artificial lighting, noise, pollution, sedentary work, and altered sleep cycles change basic sensory and metabolic conditions.
Medical advances and public health (vaccination, antibiotics, sanitation, surgery) modify life expectancy, infant mortality, and chronic illness, which in turn change how life cycles feel and are planned.
New food systems (industrial agriculture, processed foods, global supply chains) alter nutrition, exposure to toxins, and rhythms of hunger and satiety.
Industrial and digital work reorganise movement and posture: repetitive factory labour, office desk work, and screen use all reshape embodiment, fatigue, and bodily awareness.
These T0 changes set the stage for new affective baselines (e.g., chronic low-level stress, stimulation overload) that colour what it is like to live in a “modern” world.
T1 – Cognitive Mediation
Applicability: Strongly applicable
Analysis:
Modernity encourages certain cognitive styles: systematic planning, quantification, risk assessment, cost–benefit thinking, and an emphasis on prediction and control.
The sense of self is reconfigured toward individualism and reflexivity: people see themselves as projects to be chosen, improved, optimised, often with long-term career and life-planning horizons.
Exposure to multiple roles, cultures, and information streams (through migration, media, education) produces more complex identity structures and can create cognitive dissonance or fragmentation.
Scientific and technical worldviews teach people to reframe events in terms of mechanisms, probabilities, and systems rather than fate, tradition, or local narratives.
The sheer volume and speed of information flows in late modernity (news, social media, notifications) trains attention toward rapid scanning and shallow switching, affecting memory, concentration, and emotional regulation.
These patterns make certain experiences “normal” (abstract work, mediated relationships, bureaucratic interactions) that would be extraordinary or impossible in premodern settings.
T2 – Linguistic Mediation
Applicability: Strongly applicable
Analysis:
Modernity itself is a label that societies use to contrast “us” with “them” (the past, “traditional” societies, “the East,” “the primitive”); it is a polemical as well as descriptive term.
In Language Insufficiency terms, modernity is highly Fluid: it can mean a period (“since the 18th century”), a style (modernist art), a value system (rational, secular, progressive), or a socio-economic order (capitalist, industrial, bureaucratic). Different authors slide between these quietly.
It’s also Contestable: critics and defenders use the same word but point to different aspects—emancipation and progress versus alienation, exploitation, ecological crisis.
Pairs like “modern vs traditional” or “modern vs backward” compress complex differences into simple hierarchies, smuggling in a presumption that “modern” is automatically better or more advanced.
Talk of “post-modernity” or “late modernity” suggests that we can neatly periodise and step outside the modern, even while our concepts and institutions remain shaped by it—an example of language implying more clarity and control than we actually have.
At the most global scale (“the meaning of modernity,” “the modern condition”), we approach an Effectiveness Horizon: the term feels weighty but becomes vague; people resort to sweeping metaphors (disenchantment, liquefaction, acceleration) whose exact content is hard to pin down.
First-person experiences of being “overwhelmed by modern life,” “liberated by modern options,” or “disconnected in modern society” often have an Ineffable quality: standard clichés don’t quite capture the texture of these lives, even as they gesture at them.
T3 – Social/Technical Mediation
Applicability: Strongly applicable
Analysis:
Modernity is most visible as a mesh of institutions: nation-states, markets, bureaucracies, public schools, hospitals, prisons, armies, scientific organisations, corporations, NGOs.
These institutions standardise time (clocks, schedules), space (borders, property lines, zoning), identity (passports, ID numbers), and value (money, statistics, rankings) so that encounters become predictable and governable across large scales.
Technologies—steam engines, electricity, mass transport, broadcasting, computing, the internet, AI—are both products and drivers of modernity. They make possible new encounter-forms (remote work, global real-time communication, mass surveillance).
Urbanisation concentrates people into large, heterogeneous populations, which reconfigures social networks, anonymity, solidarity, and conflict; everyday encounters become more mediated by rules, signage, and digital systems than by face-to-face custom.
Capitalist production and consumption patterns organise much of life around work, income, and markets; the rhythms of the factory, office, and platform economy structure when and how people interact, rest, and move.
Modern governance uses statistics, censuses, and models to “see” and manage populations; this makes certain aspects of life legible (employment, crime, disease) while leaving others under- or uncounted (informal care, undocumented work, emotional labour).
Counter-movements (romanticism, traditionalism, environmentalism, decolonial and Indigenous resurgence, slow-living and anti-consumerist practices) can be read as attempts to renegotiate or resist specific modern mediations rather than simply reject “modernity” as a whole.
Limits & failure modes
Language insufficiency notes
Modernity bundles together time (a historical era), structure (a type of society), and value (being “up to date”). This makes the term rhetorically powerful but analytically slippery: it’s easy to smuggle evaluations into what sound like neutral descriptions.
Because the concept is so broad, discussions often conflate distinct issues—technology, capitalism, secularisation, colonialism, individualism, bureaucracy—under one word, obscuring which mechanisms are actually at work.
Experiences of living in “modern times” (speed, fragmentation, choice, precariousness, possibility) often outrun our stock phrases; people lean on recurring complaints (“too fast,” “too shallow,” “too lonely”) that only partially capture what it’s like.
Missing tiers / blind spots
This sketch doesn’t adjudicate between different theories of modernity (Marxist, Weberian, postcolonial, systems-theoretic, etc.); it treats them as emphasising different mediational strands.
It’s centred on Euro-Atlantic narratives; “multiple modernities” and non-Western trajectories (where “modern” elements mix with older forms in hybrid ways) would need a richer T3 treatment.
The analysis underplays ecological dimensions: industrial modernity’s dependence on fossil fuels, large-scale extraction, and waste has massive implications for how future encounters will be structured.
Finally, because we are ourselves situated in what we call modernity, our conceptual vantage is limited; any map we draw is partly an artefact of the very mediations we’re trying to analyse.
In the last post, I argued that the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness‘ was never a problem with consciousness. It was a problem with language – specifically, the English language’s unfortunate habit of carving the world into neat little substances and then demanding to know why its own divisions won’t glue back together.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic, on resolving the hard problem of consciousness.
The response was predictable.
‘But what about subjective feel?’
‘What about emergence?’
‘What about ontology?’
‘What about Chalmers?’
‘What about that ineffable thing you can’t quite point at?’
All fair questions. All built atop the very framing that manufactures the illusion of a metaphysical gap.
So here’s the promised demonstration: not yet a full essay (though it may evolve into one), but a clear application of MEOW – the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World – to the hard problem itself. Consider this a field test of the framework. A tidy autopsy, not the funeral oration.
The Set-Up: Chalmers’ Famous Trick
Chalmers asks:
How do physical processes give rise to experience?
The question feels profound only because the terms ‘physical’ and ‘experience’ smuggle in the very metaphysics they pretend to interrogate. They look like opposites because the grammar makes them opposites. English loves a comforting binary.
But MEOW doesn’t bother with the front door. It doesn’t assume two substances – ‘mind’ over here, ‘world’ over there – and then panic when they refuse to shake hands. It treats experience as the way an encounter manifests under a layered architecture of mediation. There’s no bridge. Only layers.
T₀ – Biological Mediation
The body is not a barrier. It is the encounter’s first architecture.
At T₀, the world is already transformed: transduction, gating, synchrony, inhibition, adaptation. Organisms don’t receive ‘raw’ physical inputs. They metabolise them. The form of contact is biological before it is anything else.
The hard problem begins by assuming there’s a realm of dumb physical mechanisms that somehow need to ‘produce’ experience. But organisms do not encounter dumb mechanism. They encounter structured contact –biological mediation – from the first millisecond.
If you insist on thinking in substances, T₀ looks like a problem. If you think in mediations, it looks like the beginning of sense-making.
T₁ – Cognitive Mediation
Where the Enlightenment saw a window, cognition installs a newsroom.
Prediction, priors, memory, inference, attention – all shaping what appears and what never makes it into view. Experience at T₁ is not something ‘added’. It is the organisational structure of the encounter itself.
The hard problem treats ‘experience’ as a mysterious extra–something floating atop neural activity like metaphysical cream. But at T₁, what appears as experience is simply the organisation of biological contact through cognitive patterns.
There is no ‘what emerges from the physical’. There is the way the encounter is organised.
And all of this unfolds under resistance – the world’s persistent refusal to line up neatly with expectation. Prediction errors, perceptual limits, feedback misfires: this constraint structure prevents the entire thing from collapsing into relativist soup.
T₂ – Linguistic–Conceptual Mediation
Here is where the hard problem is manufactured.
This is the layer that takes an ordinary phenomenon and turns it into a metaphysical puzzle. Words like ‘experience’, ‘physical’, ‘mental’, ‘subjective’, and ‘objective’ pretend to be carved in stone. They aren’t. They slide, drift, and mutate depending on context, grammar, and conceptual lineage.
The hard problem is almost entirely a T₂ artefact – a puzzle produced by a grammar that forces us to treat ‘experience’ and ‘physical process’ as two different substances rather than two different summaries of different mediational layers.
If you inherit a conceptual architecture that splits the world into mind and matter, of course you will look for a bridge. Language hands you the illusion and then refuses to refund the cost of admission.
T₃ – Cultural–Normative Mediation
The Western problem is not the world’s problem.
The very idea that consciousness is metaphysically puzzling is the product of a specific cultural lineage: Enlightenment substance dualism (even in its ‘materialist’ drag), Cartesian leftovers, empiricist habits, and Victorian metaphysics disguised as objectivity.
Other cultures don’t carve the world this way. Other ontologies don’t need to stitch mind back into world. Other languages simply don’t produce this problem.
The hard problem is not a universal insight. It’s a provincial glitch.
Reassembling the Encounter
Once you run consciousness through the mediational layers, the hard problem dissolves:
Consciousness is not an emergent property of neural complexity.
Consciousness is not a fundamental property of the universe.
Consciousness is the reflexive mode of certain mediated encounters, the form the encounter takes when cognition, language, and culture become part of what is appearing.
There is no gap to explain because the ‘gap’ is the product of a linguistic–conceptual framework that splits where the world does not.
As for the ever-mystical ‘what-it’s-like’: that isn’t a metaphysical jewel buried in the brain; it is the way a T₀–T₃ architecture manifests when its own structure becomes reflexively available.
A Brief Disclaimer Before the Internet Screams
Pointing out that Chalmers (and most of modern philosophy) operates within a faulty ontology is not to claim MEOW is flawless or final. It isn’t. But if Occam’s razor means anything, MEOW simply removes one unnecessary supposition — the idea that ‘mind’ and ‘world’ are independent substances in need of reconciliation. No triumphalism. Just subtraction.
Where This Leaves Chalmers
Chalmers is not wrong. He’s just asking the wrong question. The hard problem is not a metaphysical insight. It’s the moment our language tripped over its shoelaces and insisted the pavement was mysterious.
MEOW doesn’t solve the hard problem. It shows why the hard problem only exists inside a linguistic architecture that can’t model its own limitations.
This piece could easily grow into a full essay – perhaps it will. But for now, it does the job it needs to: a practical demonstration of MEOW in action.
And, arguably more important, it buys me one more day of indexing.
This whole misadventure began sometime in 2018, when I started documenting what has now metastasised into the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. If I weren’t typing this, I’d be doing the honourable thing and finishing the index, but here we are, procrastinating with purpose. I had a suspicion, even then, that language was up to something. Something slippery. Something evasive. At first, it was just a motley catalogue of weasel words that refused to sit still long enough to be given a meaning. I should have taken the hint when the list kept expanding like a Victorian railway: terminally over-budget and convinced of its own grandeur.
But, naturally, I pressed on.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast and conversation around this topic.
At the time I had that slow-burn itch about identity, selfhood, free will, agency – you know, the usual metaphysical tat we’re reared on like a Victorian child raised on laudanum. It wasn’t that these things didn’t exist; it was that the words simply couldn’t bear the conceptual load we’d been piling onto them. And so I found myself in the company of philosophers who either tried to rescue these terms (Dennett, ever the valiant firefighter with a damp match), complicate them (Searle, constructing houses of cards under wind machines), or dissolve them outright (Parfit, smiling serenely as the rest of us panic).
Meanwhile, Strawson was somewhere in the corner insisting experience is all there is, Putnam was in his perennial retraction phase, and I was merely trying to keep my own conceptual apparatus from collapsing like an undercooked soufflé.
I’ll admit I had a long-standing soft spot for Dennett’s consciousness-as-emergence hypothesis. It made a certain intuitive sense at the time: pile up enough neural machinery, sprinkle in some feedback loops, and consciousness would bubble up like steam from a kettle. It felt elegant. It felt mechanistically honest. And, crucially, it made perfect sense within the inherited Realist framework I was still tacitly lugging around. Of course, experience ’emerges’ from physical processes if you start from a worldview already partitioned into physical substrates and mental phenomena waiting to be accounted for. Dennett wasn’t wrong so much as operating within the same architectural error the rest of us had been marinating in. Once I began reframing the whole encounter through mediation rather than emergence, the elegance dissolved. What had looked like metaphysics turned out to be a conceptual afterimage generated by a language that couldn’t model its own limitations.
And then there was Chalmers.
Ah, the ‘hard problem’. I lost count of how many times it surfaced. Like mould. Or a debt collector. Chalmers’ dilemma – how physical processes give rise to experience – is purportedly the Mount Everest of metaphysics. Yet the more I thought about it, the more it reeked of a linguistic parlour trick. A conceptual magic eye puzzle: stare long enough and a unicorn appears, provided you’ve surrendered your scepticism and a good measure of oxygen.
The problem isn’t that consciousness is ‘hard’. The problem is that the linguistic scaffolding we’re using was never built for this terrain. ‘Experience’. ‘Physical’. ‘Mental’. ‘Explain’. These words pretend to be steel beams when they’re actually damp cardboard.
What remains isn’t a cosmic riddle but a linguistic artefact. A conceptual false path carved by centuries of grammatico-metaphysical enthusiasm – the unfortunate habit of mistaking grammatical symmetry for metaphysical necessity.
Which brings me to the present, having at last gelled the LIH and published the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World – a relational metaphysics that has the decency not to hallucinate substances it can’t justify. MEOW clears the fog rather neatly: the so-called ‘hard problem’ is only ‘hard’ because we continue to treat ‘mind’ and ‘world’ as two independent substances requiring metaphysical reconciliation. Together, LIH and MEOW provide a double exposure of the problem: LIH shows why the language fails; MEOW shows what the language was failing to describe.
So here we are. I’d like to reconsider Chalmers through the dual lenses of LIH and MEOW – not to ‘solve’ the hard problem, but to show it was never the right problem to begin with. The difficulty isn’t consciousness; it’s the language we’re forced to use, the same language that refuses to sit still, the same language that keeps trying to trick us into mistaking grammatical symmetry for metaphysical necessity.
In a coming post, I intend to pry open that illusion with a crowbar. Delicately, of course. One must be civilised about these things.
Because if language is insufficient – and it is – then perhaps what Chalmers discovered was not the abyss of consciousness, but the limit of the dictionary.
Philosophics 