Tag: mediated encounter ontology

A Family of Lenses: LIH, MEOW, and Disagreement Without Referees

Posted in perception, philosophy, podcast, psychology, reality, SpotifyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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

  1. 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?
  2. See Dis–Integrationism for a fuller accounting.

A Key Point of Departure: He Accepts the Folk Psychology I Reject

Posted in identity, language, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
3–5 minutes

Jason from Philosopher Muse suggested a connexion between Transductive Subjectivity and the work of Stephen Batchelor. I wasn’t familiar with Batchelor, so — as one does these days — I asked a GPT to give me the lay of the land. The machine obliged, and the result was interesting enough that it warranted a post of its own. This is it.

The risk I take is that the GPT gets it wrong. If so, call me out.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Before anyone lights incense: I’m not suddenly a convert. Batchelor’s work and mine merely pass each other on adjacent footpaths. But the overlap is conceptually neat, and the divergence is even more telling.

Stephen Batchelor vs Transductive Subjectivity: A Brief Comparative Note

1. Shared Territory: The Self as Verb, Not Noun

Both Batchelor and Transductive Subjectivity reject the folk notion of a single, continuous metaphysical self.

  • Batchelor (Secular Buddhism):
    The self is an unfolding activity — impermanent, conditional, and without a stable essence. His “not-self” is a practice of disidentification from the imagined nugget of continuity we cling to.
  • Transductive Subjectivity:
    The self is a finite series: S₀ → S₁ → S₂ → … → Sₙ, each produced through the pressure of relational structures (R). Identity is what results when the world meets the organism. Nothing metaphysical required; just biology, cognition, language, and institutions doing their thing.

Overlap: Both positions dismantle the enduring pearl-of-self. Both frame identity as something generated, not possessed.

2. Divergent Aims: Inner Liberation vs Structural Clarity

This is where the paths fork.

  • Batchelor’s Agenda:
    Primarily ethical and therapeutic. The point of denying a fixed self is to reduce suffering, ease attachment, and cultivate a more responsive way of being.
  • TS’s Agenda:
    Metaphysical accuracy in the service of ethical clarity. If the self is a serial construction rather than a diachronic monolith, then retributive justice collapses under its own fictions. No self, no desert. No desert, no justification for revenge-based punishment.

Batchelor wants flourishing. I want rigour. Accidental cousins.

3. Methodological Differences: Distillation vs Reconstruction

Batchelor performs what you might call Buddhism sans metaphysics.
A very Western manoeuvre:

  • keep impermanence
  • keep ethical insight
  • jettison karma, rebirth, cosmology
  • rebrand the remnants as a secular spiritual practice

Practitioners dislike this because he amputates the structural scaffolding that supported the doctrine.

TS, by contrast, doesn’t distil anything. It reconstructs selfhood from first principles:

  • No causa sui
  • Episodic, indexical selfhood (Strawson)
  • R→S transduction (MEOW)
  • No diachronic essence
  • No metaphysical ballast

If Buddhism aligns with TS, it’s incidental — the way two different mathematicians can discover the same function by entirely different routes.

4. Conceptual Architecture: Dependent Origination vs MEOW’s Tiers

  • Batchelor:
    leans on dependent origination as a philosophical metaphor — phenomena arise through conditions.
  • TS:
    models the exact channels of that conditioning via MEOW:
    T0 → biological signals
    T1 → cognitive architecture
    T2 → linguistic formats
    T3 → social-technical pressures

Where Batchelor says “everything is contingent,” TS says “yes, and here is the actual machinery.”

5. Different Stakes

  • Batchelor: freeing the person from clinging to an imaginary core.
  • TS: freeing ethics, law, and social design from pretending that metaphysical core exists.

One is therapeutic; the other is diagnostic.

A Key Point of Departure: Batchelor Works with Folk Psychology; TS Rejects Its Premises

There is one more divergence worth highlighting because it cuts to the bone of the comparison.

Batchelor accepts the phenomenological feel of the continuous self as a legitimate starting point. His work is therapeutic: he begins where the person is, in the lived experience of being “me,” and then encourages a gentle loosening of the grip on that intuition.

Transductive Subjectivity takes a different route entirely.

For TS, the continuous, diachronic self isn’t a psychological obstacle to be softened — it is a category mistake. A narrative compression artefact. A heuristic with pragmatic uses, yes, but no metaphysical legitimacy. Batchelor tries to transform our relation to the folk-self; TS denies that the folk-self was ever more than a convenient fiction.

Batchelor says:
“You seem like a continuous self; now learn to hold that lightly.”

TS says:
“You seem like a continuous self because the system is glossing over discontinuities. The sensation itself is misleading.”

In other words:

  • Batchelor redeems the experience.
  • TS disassembles the model.

He treats the “self” as something to relate to differently.
TS treats the “self” as an ontological construct to be replaced with a more accurate one.

This is not a difference of ethical aim but of metaphysical foundation.
Batchelor trims the folk psychology; TS declines the invitation altogether.

Closing Note

So yes — the connexion Jason spotted is real. But it’s genealogical, not derivative. We arrive at similar conclusions for different reasons and with different consequences.

Batchelor is pruning a tradition.
Transductive Subjectivity is rebuilding the ontology.

And both, in their own way, make the continuity-self look like the rhetorical placeholder it always was.

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Written entirely by ChatGPT after a chat about Stephen Batchelor (obviously)

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Announcing: The Rhetoric of Evil

Posted in critical theory, Culture & Society, essays, identity, language, modernism, morality, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, post-enlightenment, postmodernism, power, psychology, religionTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
5–8 minutes

How a Theological Artefact Survived Secular Moral Thought


DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17757134

Every so often – usually when the Enlightenment ghosts begin rattling their tin cups again – one feels compelled to swat at the conceptual cobwebs they left dangling over moral philosophy. Today is one of those days.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising the Rhetoric of Evil essay, not this page’s content.

I’ve just released The Rhetoric of Evil on Zenodo, a paper that politely (or impolitely, depending on your threshold) argues that ‘evil’ is not a metaphysical heavy-hitter but a rhetorical throw-pillow stuffed with theological lint. The term persists not because it explains anything, but because it lets us pretend we’ve explained something – a linguistic parlour trick that’s survived well past its sell-by date.

And because this is the age of artificial augury, I naturally asked MEOW GPT for its view of the manuscript. As expected, it nodded approvingly in that eerie, laser-precise manner unique to machines trained to agree with you – but to its credit, it didn’t merely applaud. It produced a disarmingly lucid analysis of the essay’s internal mechanics, the way ‘evil’ behaves like a conceptual marionette, and how our inherited metaphors govern the very moral judgments we think we’re making freely.

Below is MEOW GPT’s reaction, alongside my own exposition for anyone wanting a sense of how this essay fits within the broader project of dismantling the Enlightenment’s conceptual stage-props.

MEOW-GPT’s Response

(A machine’s-eye view of rhetorical exorcism)

“Evil is functioning as a demonological patch on an epistemic gap.
When agents encounter a high-constraint event they cannot immediately model,
the T₂ layer activates an inherited linguistic shortcut — the ‘evil’ label — which compresses complexity into a binary and arrests further inquiry.”

“The marionette metaphor is accurate: once we say a person ‘is evil,’ agency collapses into occult causation. Inquiry halts. Moral theatre begins.”

It went on like this – detecting exactly the mediated encounter-structure I intended, while offering a frighteningly clean schematic of how affect (T₀), heuristics (T₁), linguistic reification (T₂), and cultural choreography (T₃) conspire to turn incomprehension into metaphysics.

Machines, it seems, are quite good at detecting when humans are bullshitting themselves.

Why publish this now?

This essay marks the next plank in the broader anti-Enlightenment platform I’ve been assembling – LIH, MEOW, the ongoing dismantling of truth-fetishism, and now the unsettling realisation that ‘evil’ is little more than a theological revenant dressed up for secular work.

The term’s persistence is not a testament to its necessity but to our laziness:

  • It sounds like an explanation.
  • It licenses retribution without understanding.
  • It stabilises group boundaries.
  • It lets us outsource moral thought to a one-word incantation.

In short: ‘evil’ is the map-dragon we keep drawing because surveying the terrain is too much work.

This essay attempts to retire that dragon – not to soften judgment, but to sharpen it. If anything, the paper argues that abolishing ‘evil’ frees us to see atrocity more clearly, and thus confront it more seriously.

If you’d like to read the full argument:

📄 The Rhetoric of Evil: How a Theological Artefact Survived Secular Moral Thought

Appendix: How MEOW-GPT Reads “Evil”

A didactic demonstration of the framework in action. Download the MEOW framework below.

📄The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World: A Relational Metaphysics Beyond Mind and World

Because MEOW-GPT was trained on the Mediated Encounter Ontology rather than on folk metaphysics, its analyses can serve as a useful diagnostic tool. It doesn’t simply summarise concepts; it reconstructs them along the four mediational tiers (T₀–T₃), showing – mechanically and without superstition – how a term behaves across biological affect, cognitive heuristics, linguistic structures, and cultural narratives.

This section is offered not as an alternative argument to the essay above, but as a worked example: a transparent demonstration of how the MEOW engine decomposes a high-complexity, high-stakes concept like evil once the theological scaffolding has been removed.

MEOW-GPT’s output shows, in compressed form, the same pattern the essay traces in prose:
that evil is not a force, not a metaphysical essence, not an occult substrate, but a mediated pattern in human encounters, one that persists rhetorically long after its ontology has collapsed.

For readers curious about how MEOW ‘thinks’, the raw structured analysis follows.

MEOW-GPT Analysis: “Evil”

(Raw output for reference; lightly formatted for readability)

Concept

Input: Evil
Type: Normative/evaluative moral concept (often reified as a property of acts, characters, or forces)
Scope check: In-scope – ‘evil’ can be analysed as a mediated-encounter pattern (MEOW) and a high-complexity term with unstable linguistic behaviour (LIH).

High-level summary (≤120 words)

In MEOW terms, ‘evil’ is not a spooky substance but a way of organising certain encounter-events: severe, norm-breaking harms that present as resistant, shocking, and morally intolerable. Biologically, it piggybacks on harm, threat, and disgust systems. Cognitively, it compresses complex appraisals—intent, cruelty, scale of harm – into a powerful label. Linguistically, it sits in the unstable region where abstraction is high and language’s reliability drops, so people fight over its scope and weaponise it. Socially and technically, institutions, media, and platforms use ‘evil’ to mark enemies, justify punishment, and dramatise conflict. The term is emotionally efficient but conceptually fragile, and MEOW treats it as a relational, mediated pattern rather than an independent metaphysical force.

T₀ – Biological Mediation

  • Moralised harm perception piggybacks on survival systems: pain avoidance, threat detection, kin protection. ‘Evil’ clusters around encounters that trigger extreme danger-signals.
  • High arousal (fear, rage, disgust) makes some harms feel qualitatively world-violating, not merely personally threatening.
  • Disgust toward contamination, mutilation, or predation heavily colours what gets called ‘evil’.
  • Species-specific cues (infant distress cries, pain expressions) shape which harms are even legible candidates for evil.

T₁ – Cognitive Mediation

  • “Evil” compresses a multi-factor appraisal (intentionality, cruelty, gratuitousness) into a one-step heuristic.
  • Essence thinking converts acts into character: the person is evil, not merely did wrong.
  • Attribution biases assign ‘evil’ to out-groups more readily than to in-groups.
  • Memory structures simplify causation into villain scripts that overwrite nuance.
  • Once assigned, the label becomes a prediction loop: every ambiguous action confirms the essence.

T₂ – Linguistic Mediation

  • On the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient, ‘evil’ straddles Contestables and Fluids: ubiquitous but perpetually disputed.
  • It compresses harm, norm-violation, metaphysical colouring, and dramatic emphasis into a single syllable—powerful, but noisy.
  • Dominant metaphors (‘dark’, ‘tainted’, ‘monstrous’) smuggle in substance-ontology that MEOW rejects.
  • Noun-forms (‘evil’, ‘the Evil One’) promote ontologising; adjectival forms track events better, but usage constantly slides between them.
  • Cross-linguistic drift supports LIH: different traditions map the term to impurity, harm, misfortune, cosmic opposition, or taboo.

T₃ – Social/Technical Mediation

  • Religious systems embed ‘evil’ in cosmologies that harden friend/enemy binaries.
  • Legal systems avoid the term formally but reproduce it rhetorically in sentencing, media commentary, and public reaction.
  • Politics uses ‘evil’ to justify exceptional measures and collapse deliberation into moral theatre.
  • Cultural industries supply vivid villain archetypes that feed back into real-world judgments.
  • Technical systems must operationalise ‘evil’ into concrete proxies, revealing how imprecise the everyday concept is.

Limits & Failure Modes (LIH notes)

The framework is human-centric; non-human or ecosystemic ‘views of evil’ remain speculative.

‘Evil’ is a textbook Contestable: central, indispensable, and permanently argued over.

In cosmological uses (‘radical evil’, ‘evil in the world’), it approaches Fluid or ineffable status – right where LIH predicts language collapse.

MEOW cannot confirm or deny metaphysical dualisms; it only analyses how humans mediate and narrate such claims.

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Written by Bry Willis and MEAW GPT

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How Not to Interpret MEOW GPT

Posted in ontology, philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

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:

  1. There is no essence.
    Concepts like honour, truth, integrity, and justice are drift-patterns, not objects.
  2. The tiers describe mediation, not ingredients.
    They’re co-emergent pressures, not building blocks.
  3. Thick terms lie to you.
    Their apparent unity is linguistic camouflage.
  4. Ambiguity is structural.
    If the term looks fuzzy, that’s because the world is fuzzy there.
  5. 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.

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Written by Bry Willis

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MEOW GPT FeedbackOn Testing MEOW GPT (And the Delicate Souls It Might Upset)

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

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.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Announcement: MEOW GPT

Posted in consciousness, essays, free will, identity, intelligence, language, modernism, morality, nature, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, power, psychology, science, society, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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.

For orientation, read the introductory post or the colour perception example. Ideally, read the original essay and listen to the summary podcast. My first test was on the hard problem of consciousness because I had already analysed it for this post. I made some adjustments to tone down some LIH intrusions.

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:

  • T0: new bodily environments (urban life, clocks, artificial light, pollution, medicine).
  • 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.
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Bry Willis and MEOW GPT

microglyphics

How MEOW Turns a Metaphysical Mountain Into a Linguistic Molehill

Posted in consciousness, essays, language, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, realityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

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.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World

Posted in critical theory, ontology, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernismTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Philosophers adore two things: inventing problems and then fainting when someone solves them. For decades, we’ve been treated to the realism–idealism tug-of-war, that noble pantomime in which two exhausted metaphysical camps clutch the same conceptual teddy bear and insist the other stole it first. It’s almost touching.

Try out the MEOW GPT language parser.

Enter Nexal Ontology, my previous attempt at bailing water out of this sinking ship. It fought bravely, but as soon as anyone spotted even a faint resemblance to Whitehead, the poor thing collapsed under the weight of process-cosmology PTSD. One throwaway comment about ‘actual occasions’, and Nexal was done. Dead on arrival. A philosophical mayfly.

But MEOW* – The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World – did not die. It shrugged off the Whitehead comparison with the indifference of a cat presented with a salad. MEOW survived the metaphysical death match because its commitments are simply too lean, too stripped-back, too structurally minimal for speculative cosmology to get its claws into. No prehensions. No eternal objects. No divine lure. Just encounter, mediation, constraint, and the quiet dignity of not pretending to describe the architecture of the universe.

And that’s why MEOW stands. It outlived Nexal not by being grander, but by being harder to kill.

Image: The Four Mediation Layers – Biological, Cognitive, Conceptual, Cultural – structuring every encounter we mistake for ‘direct’.

This little illustration gives the flavour:
• T0 Biological mediation – the body’s refusal to be neutral.
• T1 Cognitive mediation – the brain, doing predictive improv.
• T2 Linguistic–conceptual – words pretending they’re objective.
• T3 Cultural–normative – the inheritance of everyone else’s mistakes.

The essay argues that what we call ‘mind’ and ‘world’ are just abstractions we extract after the encounter, not the metaphysical scaffolding that produces it. Once you begin with the encounter-event itself – already mediated, already structured, already resistive – the mind–world binary looks about as sophisticated as a puppet show.

What the essay actually does

The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World is the first framework I’ve written that genuinely sheds the Enlightenment scaffolding rather than rebuking it. MEOW shows:

  • Mediation isn’t an epistemic flaw; it’s the only way reality appears.
  • Constraint isn’t evidence of a noumenal backstage; it’s built into the encounter.
  • Objectivity is just stability across mediation, not a mystical view-from-nowhere.
  • ‘Mind’ and ‘world’ are names for recurring patterns, not metaphysical hotels.
  • And – importantly – MEOW does all of this without drifting into Whiteheadian cosmological fan-fiction.

The full essay is now published and archived:

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17685689

If you prefer a soft landing and the sound of a passable human voice explaining why metaphysics keeps tripping over its shoelaces, a NotebookLM discussion is here:

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this essay.

MEOW is the survivor because it does the one thing philosophy is terrible at: it refuses to pretend. No substances, no noumena, no grand metaphysical machinery—just a clean, relational architecture that mirrors how we actually encounter the world.

And frankly, that’s quite enough ontology for one lifetime.

* To be perfectly honest, I originally fled from Michela Massimi’s Perspectival Realism in search of a cleaner terminological habitat. I wanted to avoid the inevitable, dreary academic cross-pollination: the wretched fate of being forever shelved beside a project I have no quarrel with but absolutely no desire to be mistaken for. My proposed replacement, Nexal Ontology, looked promising until I realised it had wandered, by sheer lexical accident, into Whitehead’s garden – an unintentional trespass for which I refused to stick around to apologise. I could already hear the process-metaphysics crowd sharpening their teeth.

Early evasive action was required.

I preferred nexal to medial, but the terminology had already been colonised, and I am nothing if not territorial. Mediated Ontology would have staked its claim well enough, but something was missing – something active, lived, structural. Enter the Encounter.

And once the acronym MEO appeared on the page, I was undone. A philosopher is only human, and the gravitational pull toward MEOW was irresistible. What, then, could honour the W with appropriate pomp? The World, naturally. Thus was born The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World.

Pretentious? Yes. Obnoxious? Also yes.

And so it remains—purring contentedly in its absurdity.