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.
(For the constructive exposition of Perspectival Realism—its three layers of mediation, its commitments, and its ontology without footnotes—see the main article. This piece deals with the predictable objection.)
The moment you say “our access to reality is mediated,” someone inevitably performs their civic duty as Defender of Enlightenment Orthodoxy and announces, as if discovering fire, “So you’re a relativist, then?”
It’s a comforting little reflex. If a position denies universality, it must be relativism. If it rejects the view from nowhere, it must reject the very idea of truth. If it acknowledges cultural scaffolding, it must be one critique away from saying flat-earthers and astrophysicists are peers.
This objection misunderstands both relativism and Perspectival Realism.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising this topic.
Let’s begin with the essential distinction—think of this as the tattoo at the base of the spine:
Relativism says: all maps are equally valid. Perspectival Realism says: all maps are partial, and some are better.
Better at predicting.
Better at surviving.
Better at cohering with everything else we know.
Better at not getting you killed.
This is the spine of the position. Everything else is elaboration.
Relativism’s Self-Destruct Button
Relativism denies that reality has enough structure to constrain belief. According to its logic, perspectives are sovereign. The world bends to interpretation.
If that were true:
Gravity would turn itself off for anyone sufficiently committed to optimism.
Viruses would consult your cosmology before infecting you.
The Müller–Lyer illusion wouldn’t vary between populations because there’d be no stable perceptual machinery for it to fool.
Relativism collapses because the world does not permit it.
Perspectival Realism begins from the opposite premise:
There is one reality.
It resists us.
Perspectives rise or fall by how well they handle that resistance.
You can’t get further from relativism than that.
Why Perspective ≠ Prison
Another familiar confusion: “If access is perspectival, aren’t we trapped in our own little worlds?”
No. Mediation isn’t isolation. It’s a shared condition.
You and I may wear sunglasses of different tint, but we still walk the same street. Your glasses may darken the building I call “red,” so you call it “dark red.” That’s not incommensurability—that’s disagreement within a shared world. We argue, we adjust, we converge.
Perspectival Realism doesn’t say “worlds are sealed off.” It says we are situated—embodied, encultured, cognitively structured. Our lenses differ. The street does not.
The Crucial Point: The World Pushes Back
Relativism has no mechanism for adjudication. Perspectival Realism has the best one available: reality’s structured resistance.
If your perspective predicts, explains, and survives contact with the world, it’s better. If it collapses upon use, it’s worse. If it transfers across contexts, it’s better. If it leaves you dead, it’s worse.
This is not metaphysics. It’s survival.
And it is very explicitly not relativism.
Logic: Form Universal, Application Situated
A predictable objection:
Objection: “Isn’t logic universal? Doesn’t that kill perspectivalism?”
Response: Basic inferential forms—modus ponens, contradiction—are indeed widespread. That’s Layer 2 architecture: the cognitive machinery we all share.
But what counts as a valid premise, which inferences feel compelling, and which conclusions are considered exhaustive vary across cultures (Layer 3). Logic’s form is stable; its deployment is contextual.
Perspectival Realism doesn’t deny logic. It denies the fantasy that logic operates in a cultural vacuum.
Relativism’s Moral Collapse
Why “anything goes” goes nowhere
Relativism becomes lethal the moment ethics enters the scene. If all perspectives are equally valid, you lose the ability to critique harmful practices. Torture, forced servility, institutionalised cruelty—all become “just different frameworks.”
Perspectival Realism rejects this.
You don’t need a metaphysical skyhook to condemn torture. You need:
Shared vulnerability – all humans are embodied beings capable of pain.
Empirical observation – societies that normalise cruelty become unstable and self-poisoning.
Pragmatic convergence – diverse cultures can agree that some practices destroy the conditions of flourishing.
Reality-tested norms – ethical systems survive because they work, not because they download from a Platonic server.
This is not relativism. It’s ethics under realism-without-universality.
You can condemn harmful practices without pretending to be the mouthpiece of timeless universal Reason. You can ground human rights in intersubjective evidence—not metaphysical fiat.
No view from nowhere required.
The Three-Way Contrast (The Only Chart You Need)
Naive Realism: There is one perfectly accurate map.
Relativism: All maps are equally good.
Perspectival Realism:
All maps are partial.
Some are atrocious.
Some work astonishingly well because they track deeper regularities of the terrain.
No map is complete.
No map is sovereign.
The terrain adjudicates between them.
You don’t need omniscience to compare maps. You need terrain. And we all share the same one.
Prediction: The Final Judge
If you want the single litmus test:
Does the perspective predict anything?
Does it do so consistently?
Does it correct itself when wrong?
Does it transfer beyond its original context?
If yes → closer to reality. If no → a charming story, but please don’t build bridges with it.
Relativism has no concept of “closer to.” Perspectival Realism depends on it.
Putting It All Together
Perspectival Realism maintains:
Realism: the world exists independently of our representations.
Anti-universalism: no representation escapes mediation.
Anti-relativism: some representations perform better because they align more closely with what the world actually does.
Humility: we navigate through partial perspectives, comparing, refining, and error-correcting.
No one gets to declare universal sovereignty. Everyone gets tested by the same reality.
Relativism says everything is equally true. Perspectival Realism says everything is equally mediated—but not equally successful.
Reality decides.
Perspectives compete.
And relativism loses on the first contact.
COMMENTARY: To be fair, the argument about relativism is a strawman argument against virtually no one who would hold or defend this position. For whatever reason, the training data indicated that this was a significant contender. I’ve heard similar weak strawmen in other disciplines, and I felt I should address the invisible elephant in the room. — Bry Willis
DISCLAIMER: This article was written or output by ChatGPT 5.1. It started as a conversation with Claude Sonnet 4.5, where I had input days of output for evaluation. One of these outputs was the post about Erasmus and the Emissary Who Forgot to Bow. A group chat ensued between me, Claude and ChatGPT.
What started as a discussion about the merits of my position, expressed in the Erasmus-influenced essay, drifted to one about Perspectival Realism. That discussion deepened on ChatGPT, as I further discussed my recent thoughts on the latter topic. I had rendered a Magic: The Gathering parody trading card as I contemplated the subject. It’s how my brain works.
All of this led me to ask ChatGPT to summarise the conversation, and, upon further discussion, I asked it to draft this article – the second of five.
Perspectival Realism: The First Ontology Without an Asterisk This article discusses what Perspectival Realism means to me and how I got to this position.
Why Perspectival Realism Is Not Relativism 👈 Further discussion prompted me to differentiate this ontology from other perspectives.
Arriving Late to Massimi’s Party: Perspectival Realism in Parallel I spent another half-hour following Google search results as I wanted to see if anyone else had already been using the term, Perspectival Realism. I ended up on the Oxford publishing site. I found a 2022 book with this name, authored by Michela Massimi. They allowed me to download the book, so I asked ChatGPT to summarise our positions, specifically where we agreed and differed.
Against the Vat: Why Perspectival Realism Survives Every Sceptical Hypothesis At 0500, I returned to bed, but I woke up again at 0700, thinking about how one might differentiate between Putnam’s brain in a vat from Perspectival Realism. ChatGPT asked if I wanted that output in long-form.
The Constraint Interface: Toward a Nexal Ontology Being uncomfortable with the dichotomy between Realism and Idealism, I chatted to come up with terminology that disrupts what I consider a false dichotomy, focusing on the nexus rather than privileging one or the other. Consider this similar to the debate on sex and gender binaries.
As I mentioned at the end of the first series, I may return to this series and publish a coherent expository version more in line with my usual style. Meantime, this allows me to share my ideas unvarnished and unpolished at the same time, granting me more time to focus on other matters. Apologies to those who may disagree with the outline format. Honestly, it annoys me, but I am choosing function over form at the moment.
Update: Please note that I have refined my position on this and documented it in a newer post. It builds upon this idea but clarifies some disconnects and provides me with some ontological distance from Massimi.
There comes a moment in any serious thinker’s life when the metaphysical menu starts looking like a bad buffet: too much on offer, none of it quite edible, and the dishes that appear promising turn out to depend on ingredients you can’t stomach. Realism insists the world is simply there, chugging along regardless of your opinions. Anti-realism points out, inconveniently, that all your access is wildly mediated. Perspectivism adds humility. Constructivism chastises you for overconfidence. Analytic Idealism sweeps matter off the table entirely, until you ask why consciousness spits out such stubbornly consistent patterns.
I’ve been through all of them. Realism*—asterisk for “but what about mediation?” Idealism*—asterisk for “but what about resistance?”
Everything almost worked. And “almost” is the metaphysical kiss of death. “Almost” is where the asterisks live.
Perspectival Realism is the first position I can hold without planting that apologetic little star in the margins.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast summary on this topic.
The Asterisk Journey (Brief, Painless, Necessary)
This isn’t a conversion narrative. It’s a salvage operation. Each station on the journey left me with tools worth keeping.
Layer 1: Iconography (Hoffman, minus the metaphysics)
Perception is not a window. It’s an interface. A species-specific dashboard designed for survival, not truth. Evolution gave you a set of icons—colour patches, contrast edges, looming shapes—not an accurate rendering of reality’s architecture.
Uexküll called this the umwelt: every organism inhabits its own perceptual slice of the world. Bees see ultraviolet; snakes sense heat; humans see embarrassingly little.
This is Layer 1 mediation: Reality-as-filtered-for-primates.
Layer 2: Instrumentation (Kastrup, minus the leap)
Consciousness is the instrument through which reality is measured. Measuring instruments shape the measurements. That doesn’t make the world mind-shaped; it just means you only ever get readings through the apparatus you’ve got.
This is Layer 2 mediation: Your cognitive architecture—predictive priors, attentional limitations, spatial-temporal scaffolding—structures experience before thought arrives.
Where I leave Kastrup behind is the familiar leap: “Because consciousness measures reality, reality must be made of consciousness.” That’s the instrumentality fallacy.
You need consciousness to access the world. That tells you nothing about what the world is.
Layer 3: Linguistic–Cultural Carving (Your home field)
And then comes the mediation philosophers most reliably ignore: language. Language does not describe reality. It carves it.
Some cultures divide colour into eleven categories; some into five. The Müller-Lyer illusion fools Westerners far more than it fools hunter-gatherers. Concepts feel natural only because you inherited them pre-packaged.
This is Layer 3 mediation: the cultural-linguistic filter that makes the world legible—and in the same breath, distorts it.
You mistake the map for the territory because it’s the only map you’ve ever held.
The Hard Problem, Dissolved — Not Solved
When English splits the world into “mental” and “physical,” it accidentally manufactures the “hard problem of consciousness.” Sanskrit traditions carve reality differently and end up with different “mysteries.”
The hard problem isn’t a revelation about reality. It’s a conceptual knot tied by Layer 3 mediation.
Changing the ontology to “everything is mind” doesn’t untie the knot. It just dyes the rope a different colour.
The Triple Lock
Put the three layers together and you get the honest picture:
Your senses give you icons, not the thing-in-itself.
Your cognition structures those icons automatically.
Your culture tells you what the structured icons mean.
And yet—despite all of this—the world pushes back.
Gravity doesn’t care about your interpretive community. Arsenic does not negotiate its effects with your culture. Your beliefs about heat won’t keep your hand from burning.
This is the fulcrum of Perspectival Realism:
Reality is real and resists us, but all access is triply mediated.
The realism remains. The universality does not.
Why Perspectival Realism is Not Relativism
Relativism says: “Everyone’s perspective is equally valid.” Perspectival Realism says: “Everyone’s perspective is equally situated.”
Very different claims.
Some perspectives predict better. Some cohere better. Some survive reality’s resistance better. Some transfer across contexts better. Some correct their own errors faster.
You don’t need a view from nowhere to say that. You just need to notice which maps get you killed less often.
What This Framework Enables
1. Progress without foundation myths
Science improves because reality resists bad models. Mediation doesn’t prevent progress; it’s the condition of it.
2. Critique without arrogance
You can rank perspectives without pretending to hover above them.
3. Cross-cultural dialogue without imperialism or despair
Cultures carve experience differently, but they’re carving the same underlying world. Translation is hard, not impossible.
4. Honest metaphysics
No glamourised escape from sensory embodiment, cognitive bias, or cultural inheritance. Just the patient business of refining our mediated grip on the real.
What Perspectival Realism Actually Claims
Let me make the commitments explicit:
There is a world independent of our representations.
All access to it is mediated by perception, cognition, and culture.
Perspectives can be compared because reality pushes back.
No perspective is unmediated.
The asymptote—Reality-as-it-is—is unreachable.
This isn’t pessimism. It’s maturity.
Why This Is the First Ontology Without an Asterisk
Every worldview before this needed the quiet, shamefaced footnote:
Realism*: “But access is mediated.”
Idealism*: “But resistance is real.”
Perspectivism*: “But we still need to rank perspectives.”
Constructivism*: “But the world’s invariances aren’t constructs.”
Perspectival Realism eats the objections instead of dodging them. There is no asterisk because the worldview is built from the asterisks.
No promises of transcendence. No pretense of universality. No linguistic sleight-of-hand.
Just embodied beings navigating a real world through fallible instruments, shared practices, and cultural grammars—occasionally catching a clearer glimpse, never stepping outside the frame.
The realism remains. The universality does not. And for once, metaphysics isn’t lying to you.
DISCLAIMER: This article was written or output by ChatGPT 5.1. It started as a conversation with Claude Sonnet 4.5, where I had input days of output for evaluation. One of these outputs was the post about Erasmus and the Emissary Who Forgot to Bow. A group chat ensued between me, Claude and ChatGPT.
What started as a discussion about the merits of my position, expressed in the Erasmus-influenced essay, drifted to one about Perspectival Realism. That discussion deepened on ChatGPT, as I further discussed my recent thoughts on the latter topic. I had rendered a Magic: The Gathering parody trading card as I contemplated the subject. It’s how my brain works.
All of this led me to ask ChatGPT to summarise the conversation, and, upon further discussion, I asked it to draft this very article – the first of five.
Perspectival Realism: The First Ontology Without an Asterisk 👈 This article discusses what Perspectival Realism means to me and how I got to this position.
Arriving Late to Massimi’s Party: Perspectival Realism in Parallel I spent another half-hour following Google search results as I wanted to see if anyone else had already been using the term, Perspectival Realism. I ended up on the Oxford publishing site. I found a 2022 book with this name, authored by Michela Massimi. They allowed me to download the book, so I asked ChatGPT to summarise our positions, specifically where we agreed and differed.
Against the Vat: Why Perspectival Realism Survives Every Sceptical Hypothesis At 0500, I returned to bed, but I woke up again at 0700 thinking about how one might differentiate between Putnam’s brain in a vat from Perspectival Realism. ChatGPT asked if I wanted that output in long-form.
The Constraint Interface: Toward a Nexal Ontology Being uncomfortable with the dichotomy between Realism and Idealism, I chatted to come up with terminology that disrupts what I consider a false dichotomy, focusing on the nexus rather than privileging one or the other. Consider this similar to the debate on sex and gender binaries.
Could I have improved on these articles if I had rewritten or polished them? Maybe. What’s the purpose? This is all a result of my concepts and inquiries. I endorse the output. I may return to make edits in future, or I may restate this information in my own voice, but for now, let this serve as notice that I am not afraid of generative AI; I am not afraid that it is going to supplant my thinking. I find that whilst I can prompt GPTs to make connexions or to query who else might be relevant to a topic, it doesn’t generally offer its own initiative, what we term Agency.
As for this particular post, it reads more like a listicle. I could have rendered it more expositional, but the structured thinking is all here; why should I reinvent the wheel just to put skin on these bones? As I said, perhaps I’ll flesh this out for elaboration or publication in future, for now, let this serve as a waypoint and a record of how I got here. This supplants my prior position, the asterisked Analytic Idealism, published in 2022, which supplanted my asterisked Realism. Perhaps I’ll finally be able to settle for an ontology and epistemology with no stars.
Philosophics 