I am decidedly not a proponent of panpsychism. Most philosophers – and, let us be honest, most people – cannot deconstruct without immediately reconstructing; the rubble has barely settled before they are pouring fresh foundations. I decline that reflex, and I call the declining Dis–Integration – the term chosen partly to keep my distance from Derrida, whose own coinage is abused by more people than have even read him.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Alex Connor begins well. He Dis–Integrates the folk package of consciousness, and he does it cleanly. Respect. Set aside that ‘consciousness’ carries literally dozens of definitions across disciplines and subdisciplines. Just grant him the ordinary picture and watch him strip it. Memory, sensory richness, identity, deliberation, narrative selfhood – he shows that none of these is intrinsic to consciousness as ordinarily imagined. As he says, close your eyes and subtract sight; still conscious. Subtract hearing, subtract touch, subtract memory until no instant is ever laid down. What remains, he says, is bare awareness. So far, so good. Descartes would have been proud.
But then Alex makes the same mistake as René, mistaking the dust for an ontological primitive. That a folk bundle can be decomposed entails precisely nothing about the fundamentality of whatever is left at the bottom of the barrel. It may show only that ‘consciousness’ was never a stable kind-term – that we have been pointing at an assortment and calling it a thing.
This subtraction is only Dennett’s intuition pump, not the engine, which arrives at the end, when Alex argues that you can’t assemble a substance from parts that lack it – that the familiar emergence analogies, temperature from molecules, an image from pixels, all smuggle in the very phenomenality they pretend to derive, because temperature ’emerges’ only for someone who already feels heat. No good analogy survives, he concludes; therefore, consciousness cannot be built; therefore, it must already be down there in the atoms. Nope.
Leave that standing and the subtraction argument was never load-bearing at the start. The stripping was only ever ostensive, a way of pointing at minimal consciousness, but the fundamentality claim never rested on it.
The subtraction works only by thinning ‘consciousness’ to bare awareness – by evacuating redness, the unified first-person feel, the entire rich remainder, on purpose and as a matter of method. The anti-emergence argument works only by treating ‘consciousness’ as a robust substance whose assembly from non-conscious parts is incoherent – and every ounce of that incoherence is borrowed from exactly the rich phenomenal features the subtraction he’d just tossed overboard. ‘First-person unified experience’. ‘The redness of red’. Those were his words, and they are doing the work in the argument that needs consciousness to be thick, moments after he has insisted it is thin. Oops.
So the noun equivocates inside his own case. Damn dirty objects. It’s a decomposable bundle when he needs minimality; an indecomposable substance when he needs non-emergence. He can’t eat his cake and have it, too. There’s no single referent for the emergence to succeed or fail at. Some bundled features plainly emerge – that’s what bundling is. The bare what-it-is-like-ness is the contested remainder. And ‘it’s all one substance that can’t be built’ is simply the reification I diagnosed earlier.
This is why I decline the question. It’s not ‘consciousness is emergent‘ set against his ‘consciousness is fundamental‘ – that trade keeps the bad noun on the pitch. The framing of substance-versus-emergence is what fails. So, I’m not adjudicating the dispute. I’m just declining its terms after showing that its terms weren’t ever coherent to begin with.
This episode is an introduction to the 7-part series that discusses phenomenologists who laid the foundation on which the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) is built.
Audio: Introductory Podcast for The Architecture of Encounter
This series begins with philosophers from Descartes through Berkeley, Locke, and Hume to Kant, who will be the focus of the first episode. Except for this introduction, which is 15 minutes. Each episode is around 7 minutes because I wanted to keep them bite-sized.
Or, to put it in one line fit for people skimming with one eye while pretending to work:
Goodman asks how versions make worlds intelligible. MEOW asks what kind of reality makes mediated intelligibility possible at all.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Tl;dr
Goodman and MEOW are neighbours, but not housemates.
Both reject the childish fantasy that the world arrives already parcelled, labelled, and politely awaiting description by some neutral observer. Both are suspicious of naïve realism, fixed essences, and the conceit that language simply mirrors what is there. Both recognise that description, classification, and articulation are active, selective, and world-shaping.
But Goodman’s emphasis falls on versions, symbol systems, and the making of worlds through classificatory practice. MEOW and The Architecture of Encounter go elsewhere. They do not treat symbolic versioning as primary. They treat encounter as primary: mediated, structured interaction under constraint. Language and world-versioning come later, as derivative, partial, and often clumsy attempts to stabilise, synchronise, and re-present what is first given in encounter.
So the shortest contrast is this:
Goodman pluralises worlds. MEOW pluralises mediation while retaining constraint.
That is the hinge.
The longer version
Goodman is often useful precisely because he helps loosen the grip of a bad picture: the notion that there is one fully furnished world, discretely laid out in advance, which language then copies with greater or lesser success. In Ways of Worldmaking, description is not passive transcription. Versions organise, sort, foreground, suppress, classify, and compose. They do not simply mirror. They make.
This much sits quite comfortably beside MEOW and The Architecture of Encounter. MEOW has never been sympathetic to the old theatre in which a subject peers out at a ready-made object-world and then tries to report back accurately. That picture has always seemed less like sober metaphysics and more like a grammatical superstition. It is one of those inherited arrangements that philosophy keeps polishing rather than questioning, as if centuries of confusion were somehow evidence of depth.
On that score, Goodman is an ally. He helps dissolve the myth of innocent description.
He also overlaps with MEOW in his suspicion of essentialist carving. There is no reason to suppose reality presents itself in one uniquely natural partition, fully jointed in the exact way our preferred nouns imply. Goodman’s attention to alternative versions, symbolic orderings, and rival systems of classification fits comfortably with the broader MEOW suspicion that what we call “objects” are not self-announcing substances but stabilised articulations within a mediated field. In The Architecture of Encounter, this becomes still sharper: subjects and objects are not ontological primitives but abstractions from recurring encounter-structures. That already places the framework some distance from ordinary metaphysical furniture.
So far, then, the affinity is genuine.
But it is just as important not to overstate it.
Goodman’s centre of gravity is symbolic and versional. His concern is with how worlds are made through systems of description, notation, projection, ordering, and exemplification. The operative verbs are things like sort, render, compose, construct. The world is inseparable from the version.
MEOW and The Architecture of Encounter are doing something heavier. They are not merely offering a theory of how descriptions organise a world. They are offering an ontology in which encounter-events are primary. The basic unit is not an interpreted object, nor a version, nor a sentence, but a structured event of mediated contact under constraint. Mediation is not a regrettable screen placed between mind and world. It is constitutive of whatever relation there is. But neither is mediation free invention. Encounter is answerable to what resists, pushes back, stabilises, recurs, and converges. That is the role of constraint.
This is where the deepest divergence emerges.
Goodman is often read, not unfairly, as weakening the notion of a single underlying world more radically than MEOW can tolerate. His pluralism risks allowing “worldmaking” to carry most of the ontological burden. The result can begin to sound as though right versions are all the realism one is entitled to. There are worlds, or world-versions, and their legitimacy depends less on correspondence to a singular underlying reality than on fit, function, coherence, utility, and internal rightness.
MEOW resists that move. It does not return to vulgar realism, with its fantasy of a view from nowhere, but it also refuses to let mediation collapse into fabrication. Constraint is not a decorative afterthought. It is the realist anchor. One may have multiple mediations, multiple articulations, multiple ontological grammars, multiple local stabilisations, but these are not unconstrained improvisations. They are answerable to an invariant field of relational resistance.
Put more brutally: Goodman destabilises the ready-made world and then tends to leave us with versions. MEOW destabilises the ready-made world and then asks what must be true for divergent mediations nonetheless to converge, however partially, on the same resistant reality.
That difference matters.
It matters again when language enters the picture. Goodman grants an enormous role to symbol systems in worldmaking. MEOW, especially once read through The Architecture of Encounter and A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, treats language more suspiciously. Language matters, certainly, but it is late, compressed, and lossy. It is not the primordial engine of world-constitution. It is a finite synchronisation technology layered atop more basic forms of mediation: biological, perceptual, attentional, cognitive, social. Language helps coordinate. It helps compress. It helps stabilise public handling. But it also distorts, truncates, nominalises, and overcommits.
That is where LIH adds a useful corrective to Goodman. If Goodman sometimes sounds like a connoisseur of world-versioning, LIH reminds us that our versioning machinery is often embarrassingly underpowered for the tasks philosophers assign to it. Human beings keep trying to force syntax to carry ontological burdens it was never built to bear. We take grammatical distinctions for metaphysical disclosures. We inherit noun-heavy structures and then wonder why the world starts looking like a warehouse of things. We reify processes, discretise continua, and carve durational realities into portable lexical chunks. Then, having manufactured these pseudo-stabilities, we congratulate ourselves for discovering “selves”, “minds”, “meanings”, “moral facts”, and other linguistic taxidermy.
Goodman certainly helps expose the active role of symbolic systems. But LIH presses further by insisting that symbolic systems are not merely worldmaking tools. They are also bottlenecks. They fail. They coarsen. They generate ontological illusions through the very act of public coordination.
That is why I would not place Goodman and MEOW in opposition, but in a relation of partial inheritance and correction.
Goodman is valuable because he helps dismantle the myth of passive representation. He is right to resist the idea that language or symbolisation merely records a pre-cut world. He is right to foreground selection, ordering, categorisation, and articulation. He is right to reject the transparent-window fantasy.
But from a MEOW standpoint, he does not go far enough into encounter, and perhaps goes too far into version.
What is missing is a richer account of pre-linguistic mediation, presentational structure, salience, affordance, and the layered constraints under which any symbolic practice becomes possible in the first place. Symbol systems do not float free. They do not arise in a void. They are parasitic upon lived, embodied, constrained encounter. Nor is their plurality enough, by itself, to explain why some articulations fail, why some converge, why some distort in systematic ways, or why reality resists our preferred descriptions with such vulgar persistence.
That last point is worth dwelling on, because it is where many anti-realist gestures lose their nerve. The fact that access is mediated does not imply that reality is manufactured. The fact that articulation is active does not imply that resistance is optional. The fact that classifications vary does not imply that there is nothing to be classified beyond the classificatory act.
So the bottom line remains the same.
Goodman is useful for breaking the spell of the one already-made world and for showing that symbolisation is not passive mirroring. But MEOW and The Architecture of Encounter push in a different direction. They relocate the primary philosophical action from symbol systems to encounter-events, from worldmaking to world-disclosure under mediation, and from plural worlds to plural access under constraint. A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis then sharpens the point by showing that language is not an omnipotent engine of constitution but a compression scheme with predictable failure modes.
What if the biggest trick language played on you is convincing you that the world is made of things?
Every sentence you speak installs a hidden assumption. ‘The rock falls.’ ‘The mind thinks.’ ‘The electron orbits.’ Each one presupposes a thing – a noun – that exists before anything happens to it. Your grammar tells you: first, there are objects, then they do stuff. But what if that’s backwards?
The Mediated Encounter Ontology – MEOW – proposes that it is. Reality isn’t made of things. It’s made of structured interactions. Encounter-events – relational, patterned, constrained – are what’s ontologically basic. Objects, subjects, minds, worlds: these are all downstream. They’re what you get when structured interaction stabilises within a given scale of encounter.
I’ve commenced a new series in support of my new book. First, I’m building a glossary.
Video: Bry – Architecture of Encounter
On the docket in this segment are affordance, salience, and valence as they relate to the book. I selected these terms from the glossary in the appendix.
Over the next few weeks, I plan to produce videos on other terms and additional videos explaining key concepts. This one is straightforward and academic. Others will be less formal, hoping to accommodate different learning styles.
Does anyone subscribe to Kindle Unlimited? I may take time to create Kindle and eBook versions.
My fiction books had some formatting issues with Kindle, but these titles are more standard – no fancy layouts or fonts, and not too many images.
The first step is to stop pretending that ‘truth’ names a single thing.
Philosopher Bernard Williams helpfully distinguished between thin and thick senses of truth in Truth and Truthfulness. The distinction is simple but instructive.
In its thin sense, truth is almost trivial. Saying ‘it is true that p’ typically adds nothing beyond asserting p. The word ‘true’ functions as a logical convenience: it allows endorsement, disquotation, and generalisation. Philosophically speaking, this version of truth carries very little metaphysical weight. Most arguments about truth, however, are not about this thin sense.
In practice, truth usually appears in a thicker social sense. Here, truth is embedded in practices of inquiry and communication. Communities develop norms around sincerity, accuracy, testimony, and credibility. These norms help stabilise claims so that people can coordinate action and share information.
At this level, truth becomes something like a social achievement. A statement counts as ‘true’ when it can be defended, circulated, reinforced, and relied upon within a shared framework of interpretation. Evidence matters, but so do rhetoric, persuasion, institutional authority, and the distribution of power. This is the sense in which truth is rhetorical, but rhetoric is not sovereign.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic. I prompted NotebookLM to illustrate a 4-layered model that shows how removed language is from encounter, attention, conception, and representation of what we normally consider to be reality. This view is supported by both MEOW and LIH.
Human beings can imagine almost anything about the world, yet the world has a stubborn habit of refusing certain descriptions. Gravity does not yield to persuasion. A bridge designed according to fashionable rhetoric rather than sound engineering will collapse regardless of how compelling its advocates may have been.
This constraint does not disappear in socially constructed domains. Institutions, identities, norms, and laws are historically contingent and rhetorically stabilised, but they remain embedded within material, biological, and ecological conditions. A social fiction can persist for decades or centuries, but eventually it encounters pressures that force revision.
Subjectivity, therefore, doesn’t imply that ‘anything goes’. It simply means that all human knowledge is mediated.
We encounter the world through perception, language, culture, and conceptual frameworks. Every description is produced from a particular standpoint, using particular tools, within particular historical circumstances. Language compresses experience and inevitably loses information along the way. No statement captures reality without distortion. This is the basic insight behind the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.
At the same time, our descriptions remain answerable to the constraints of the world we inhabit. Some descriptions survive repeated encounters better than others.
In domains where empirical constraint is strong – engineering, physics, medicine – bad descriptions fail quickly. In domains where constraint is indirect – ethics, politics, identity, aesthetics – multiple interpretations may remain viable for long periods. In such cases, rhetoric, institutional authority, and power often function as tie-breakers, stabilising one interpretation over others so that societies can coordinate their activities. These settlements are rarely permanent.
What appears to be truth in one era may dissolve in another. Concepts drift. Institutions evolve. Technologies reshape the landscape of possibility. Claims that once seemed self-evident may later appear parochial or incoherent.
In this sense, many truths in human affairs are best understood as temporally successful settlements under constraint.
Even the most stable arrangements remain vulnerable to change because the conditions that sustain them are constantly shifting. Agents change. Environments change. Expectations change. The very success of a social order often generates the tensions that undermine it. Change, in other words, is the only persistence.
The mistake of traditional realism is to imagine truth as a mirror of reality – an unmediated correspondence between statement and world. The mistake of crude relativism is to imagine that language and power can shape reality without limit. Both positions misunderstand the situation.
We do not possess a final language that captures reality exactly as it is. But neither are we free to describe the world however we please. Truth is not revelation, and it is not mere invention.
It is the provisional stabilisation of claims within mediated encounter, negotiated through language, rhetoric, and institutions, and continually tested against a world that never fully yields to our descriptions. We don’t discover Truth with a capital T. We negotiate survivable descriptions under pressure.
A thought experiment by Derek Parfit, here’s the setup: ostensibly, a human is cloned, but they aren’t so much cloned as teleported to Mars, à la Star Trek – there, not here, particle by particle.
The question and seeming paradox is whether the reconstructed person and the original are the same, identical.
In deference to my upcoming book, The Architecture of Encounter, I want to revisit this problem and show how there is no paradox. Let’s take a look.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Parfit’s Teletransporter Is Not a Paradox. It Is a Hangover.
Derek Parfit’s teletransporter thought experiment has become one of philosophy’s favourite parlour tricks. A person steps into a machine on Earth. The machine records their physical structure in total detail, destroys the original body, and reconstructs an exact counterpart on Mars from local matter. The person on Mars wakes with the same memories, the same character, the same projects, and the same unearned confidence that philosophers are asking sensible questions. Parfit uses such cases to press the thought that personal identity may not be what matters; psychological continuity may matter more.
The supposed paradox is familiar enough: is the person on Mars the same person, or has the original died and been replaced by a copy?
My answer is that there is no paradox here, unless one insists on dragging in precisely the assumptions that ought to be under suspicion.
This is where my forthcoming book, The Architecture of Encounter, becomes relevant. The teletransporter puzzle only looks deep if one begins with a poor ontology and a clumsy model of selfhood. Once those are withdrawn, the mystery evaporates.
The first mistake: substance nostalgia
The teletransporter story is framed as though a human being were fundamentally a thing made of parts, a self-identical object that might either persist through rearrangement or fail to do so. We are invited to imagine a body atomised here and recomposed there, then asked whether the ‘same person’ has survived. But this framing already cheats.
If substance ontology is not basic, then there is no hidden metaphysical pellet of selfhood waiting to be shepherded from Earth to Mars. On a relational picture, what is fundamental is not a stockpile of little self-identical things but organised relation, structured energetic differentiation, constraint, response, and persistence-pattern. The old metaphysics of enduring stuff survives mostly because grammar flatters it.
So the first reason the teletransporter is not paradoxical is that it begins by treating persons as though they were furniture.
The second mistake: reifying the self
The second assumption is just as dubious. The problem presumes that there must be a deep self, some enduring owner of experience, whose fate the machine must settle. I don’t grant that either.
I am much closer here to Galen Strawson’s episodic flavour than to the pious diachronic picture in which one’s life forms a single, extended inner possession. Strawson’s distinction is useful because it reminds us that not everyone experiences themselves as a long, narratively unified entity stretching robustly across time. An episodic self need not deny practical continuity, memory, or biography; it simply refuses to inflate them into a metaphysical core.
That is also how I think identity should be understood more generally: as a scale-dependent heuristic.
The self is not nothing. But neither is it an ontological pearl. It is a compression. A convenience. A useful index over continuities that matter for some purposes and not others. At one grain, sameness appears stable enough. At another, it dissolves into drift, revision, replacement, and selective narrative smoothing.
The “I” is not a tiny monarch enthroned behind the eyes. It is an indexical function within organised experience.
The third mistake: treating mind and world as pre-fabricated blocks
The teletransporter story also inherits a bad picture of mind and world. It imagines a ready-made mind confronting a ready-made external world, then asks whether one of those ready-made minds has been shifted from one location in the world to another. I reject that framing, too.
Mind and world, on my view, are post hoc constructions of mediated interface. Encounter comes first. Organisation comes first. Constraint comes first. Only later do we abstract “mind” on one side and “world” on the other as though these were primordial blocks of reality instead of conceptual products of a deeper relation.
Once one starts there, the question changes. We are no longer asking whether some occult owner-substance has been preserved. We are asking what kind of continuity, if any, is being tracked across interruption, re-instantiation, and resumed encounter. That is a very different matter.
Under episodic time, the paradox collapses immediately
Image: Notice that if we reject the diachronic self in favour of an episodic self, when the ‘self’ migrates from Earth to Mars, it just carries on indexing, so the paradox vaporates.
If one takes the episodic view seriously, Parfit’s machine is mostly theatre.
Why? Because strict numerical sameness was never available between temporal intervals in the first place. The self at one interval and the self at the next are not joined by a metaphysical thread hidden beneath change. They are linked, where linked, by organised continuity, practical function, memory inheritance, bodily persistence, and narrative convenience.
The teletransporter does not introduce some unprecedented rupture into an otherwise pristine metaphysical order. It merely exaggerates what was true all along: selfhood is not an invariant core but a heuristic over organised succession.
That means the Mars person is not paradoxical. They are simply a case in which our ordinary identity-compression is being stress-tested.
Call them the same person if your explanatory threshold is coarse enough. Refuse the label if your threshold is stricter. There is no further hidden fact trembling in the wings.
Even under diachronic time, the issue is still heuristic
Suppose, however, that one relaxes the episodic commitment and grants a diachronic self. Even then, the machine does not resurrect a deep identity problem. It only relocates the issue to threshold-setting.
How much continuity is enough?
Enough for legal identity? Enough for moral responsibility? Enough for marriage? Enough for debt? Enough for grief? Enough for survival?
These are not one question. They never were one question. Philosophy often gets itself into trouble by pretending that practical, phenomenological, ethical, and metaphysical criteria must all cash out in the same currency. They do not.
Parfit himself is famous precisely for pressing the thought that what matters may be psychological continuity and connectedness rather than some further fact of identity. My complaint is that one can go further still. Once identity is treated as a heuristic rather than a metaphysical absolute, the need for a single all-purpose answer begins to look like a bad demand rather than an unsolved mystery.
Why the duplicate case makes the illusion obvious
The variant with duplication makes the point even more brutally. If one person enters on Earth and two successors emerge elsewhere, both inheriting the same memories and both insisting “I am the original,” then the problem is no longer whether identity has become spooky. The problem is that our ordinary identity-talk has finally been pushed beyond its comfort zone.
Once there are two successors, the inherited continuity-profile has branched. That does not produce metaphysical magic. It produces two loci of encounter with the same initial macro-organisation.
At time-nought, perhaps we may stipulate identical configuration for the sake of the thought experiment. Fine. Humans adore their stipulations. At the first non-zero interval thereafter, they are already different. Different position, different sensory input, different salience, different bodily relation, different thermal and spatial microconditions, different affordances. Their trajectories begin to separate immediately. So even there, no paradox. Only the collapse of a coarse heuristic under finer scrutiny.
The real lesson
Parfit’s teletransporter is often presented as though it reveals some terrible instability in personal identity. I think it reveals something duller and more devastating. It reveals that our language of identity was never as deep as we pretended.
We say “same person” because it is useful. We use it to stabilise law, memory, blame, love, property, and biography. Fair enough. But utility should not be mistaken for metaphysical revelation. The thought experiment merely embarrasses that confusion.
So when asked whether the reconstructed person on Mars is really the same person, my answer is:
Under an episodic model, strict sameness was never on offer across temporal intervals anyway. Under a diachronic model, sameness is still a heuristic judgement about acceptable continuity. In neither case is there a paradox. There is only an old habit of substance-thinking refusing to die.
The shorter version
The teletransporter does not expose a contradiction in selfhood. It exposes the poverty of the ontology brought to the problem.
If selves are indexical, scale-dependent heuristics arising from organised encounter, then the machine does not pose a metaphysical puzzle about whether some hidden essence made it to Mars. It only asks how much continuity we are willing to treat as enough.
That is not a paradox. That is a policy decision disguised as metaphysics.
I’ve been writing. In fact, I’ve been clarifying A Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW) and expanding and extending it into a book with a broader remit. This might well be the cover, following the monograph layout for Philosophics Press.
Image: Mockup of cover art.
As shown, the working title is The Architecture of Encounter: A Mediate Encounter Ontology. I’ve swapped the slate cover for a magenta in this volume.
So what’s it all about?
I’m not going to summarise the book here, but I’ll share some tidbits. I’ve settled on these chapter names:
The Mediated Encounter Ontology
Ontology
Subjecthood
Logic
Epistemology
Perception and Affordances
Language
Social Ontology
Realism
Application
The Normativity Frontier
Conclusion
Chapter 1, The Mediated Encounter Ontology, is a summary and update of the original essay, which will be included in full as an appendix item for reference, but this update will become canonical.
Chapter 2, Ontology: Interaction, Constraint, and the Rejection of Substance, will describe what I mean by ontology and what my proposed ontology looks like.
Chapter 3, Subjecthood: Modal Differentiation Within the Field, will explain how the subject-object relationship changes, and what a subject is in the first place.
Chapter 4, Logic: Coherence Grammar Under Constraint, will explain what logic is and how it operates in this paradigm.
Chapter 5, Epistemology: Convergence, Error, and the Structure of Justification, will describe what knowledge looks like. IYKYK.
Chapter 6, Perception and Affordances: Encounter as Orientation, extends Gibson’s work to comport with MEOW 2.0 (or 1.1).
Chapter 7, Language: Synchronisation, Ontological Grammar, and Structural Limits, explains how language works and how it limits our perception. We’re not talking Sapir-Whorf here, but what respectable language philosopher wouldn’t reserve a chapter for language?
Chapter 8, Social Ontology: Second-Order Constraint Systems. MEOW has a lot to say about first-order constraints, but there are higher-order considerations. I discuss them here.
Chapter 9, Realism: Cross-Perspectival Convergence and the Invariant Anchor, talks about the real elephant in the room. Since MEOW challenges both realism and idealism, we need to talk about it.
Chapter 10, Application: The Apophatic Mind, is mostly an observation on artificial intelligence as it relates to the mind-consciousness debate, primarily scoped around LLMs and similar machine processes.
Chapter 11. The Normativity Frontier, doesn’t yet have a subtitle, but this is where I discuss issues like normative ethics and morality.
I probably don’t need to tell you how Conclusion chapters work.
I expect to have 3 appendices.
Summary of commitments, which will summarise and distil key topics – so like a cheat sheet for reference – a bit more robust than a glossary.
Bibliography of reference material. As this is not an essay, it won’t be chock-full of citations – only a few, where I feel they are necessary. Much of this work represents years of thinking, and in many cases, the attribution has been lost; I remember the contents and not necessarily the attribution. I will prompt AI to fill in some missing pieces, but that’s that. The bibliography attempts to capture the general flavour.
The original MEOW essay. This is already freely available on several platforms, including Zenodo. Download it here if you haven’t already – or wait for the book.
The rest of the story
This book not only extends MEOW, but it also ties in concepts from A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and other of my already published and yet unpublished work.
I expect to produce a decent amount of explanatory and support material, though to be fair, I tell myself that every time until I get distracted by the next project. I need a producer to manage these affairs.
I’ve received feedback like, ‘Not everything you believe is right’ and ‘What if you’re not right?’
First: I agree. Second: And what if I’m not?
This isn’t new feedback, but I’ll address it in terms of my latest work.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast
Not everything you believe is right
This is true, but one cannot hold an idea one believes to be false as true, so the idea that one believes what one believes to be true to tautological. This is also why I continue to research and attempt to expand my horizon. I even wander outside of my discipline at the risk of Dunning-Kruger errors.
In my recent work on ontology and grammar, I collided with Bourdieu, so I read his work. As helpful as it was, it served to reinforce my position, but from a position of Social Theory instead of Philosophy. When I read Judith Butler, I see how I might connect my ideas to Gender theory. It should be obvious that I’ve read much on Linguistics, but I am not a linguist. Our lenses all differ to some extent.
I’ve even corrected some of the ideas I’ve posted on this blog as I gain new information. To be fair, it’s a reason I post here. I hope to get feedback. I may not fully pursue alternative disciplines, but it’s nice to know they exist, and I can at least perform cursory surveys.
If I am wrong – or if you think I am wrong – tell me. If you can, tell me why. If not precisely why, then what’s your intuition?
NotebookLM Infographic
Historically, many times I’d been claimed to be wrong because the person was coming from a differnt ontology. I might have been arguing something within the realm of Continental philosophy, and I’d get a critique from an Analytical philosopher. This is akin to a vegan critiquing a steak dinner. It may be valid within their ontological grammar, but it is not otherwise universal. It usually doesn’t take very long to assess one’s commitments to other grammars. That happened recently, when I encountered a philosophical Realist.
When I wouldn’t accept their position, eventually we arrived at this foundational point. Realism is a position I ontologically and grammatically reject. I’ve written several pieces defending or at least articulating my position, notably the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW). Disagree? Tell me.
I used to be a Realist with an asterisk; then I was an Analytical Idealist with an asterisk; now, I believe in MEOW. The asterisk was necessary because there were holes in the position. When Analytical Idealism came around, there was still an asterisk, but it felt better than that of Realism. When I came up with MEOW, the asterisk went away. Perhaps you might consider that MEOW has an asterisk, if you believe it’s plausible at all. If so, what’s missing – what’s the known unknown? You obviously can’t articulate an unknown unknown.
When I write about ontology, grammar, and commensurability, I do not exempt myself from these biases. I have all of these challenges – perhaps even more so because I don’t tend to fit into the round holes very well myself. This helps me with intellectual humility.
Politically, I am often accused of being on the Left, but I reject the Left-Right paradigm as a valid lens for me; I am on a different axis. The Libertarians added an Authority-Liberty Y-axis to the Progressive-Conservative X-axis, but I am on a Z-axis, which is not to be fully described or accounted for on these planes. Think of the message of Flatland.
What if you’re wrong?
Hopefully, every philosopher understands this and has noticed the dustbin of history littered with wrong ideas.
When I publish essays, they are the result of research and deliberation. Could I be wrong? Again, I’ve been wrong before. I’ll be wrong again, but I need to understand why to change my position. I could shift my position or abandon it outright.
There was a time I believed people to be rational. I was an economist. I studied finance. I believed it until I didn’t. Behavioural Economics likely did the heavy lifting, but it’s likely that they believe that rationality-based systems are salvageable. I don’t. Not meaningfully. Not sustainably.
So, I can be wrong, and I can admit it.
I was once a closet (or adjacent) Libertarian until I realised it didn’t cohere with reality. My last declared stance was an Anarchosydicalist, but I know this isn’t quite right either – on multiple accounts.
Anyway, I’m not afraid of being wrong, and I’m not afraid of wittering on about it. Again, I appreciate constructive criticism. I’m also amicable to non-solutions in the manner of my Dis–Integration approach, but at least break down the pieces.
I Am a Qualified Subjectivist. No, That Does Not Mean ‘Anything Goes’.
Make no mistake: I am a subjectivist. A qualified one. Not that kind of qualified – the qualification matters, but it’s rarely the part anyone listens to.
Image: Not that kind…
Here is the unglamorous starting point: all human encounters with the world are mediated. There is no raw feed. No unfiltered access. No metaphysical lead running directly from ‘reality’ into the human mind. Every encounter is processed through bodies, nervous systems, cultures, languages, technologies, institutions, and histories.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content – See addendum below.
Whilst I discuss the specific architecture of this mediation at length in this preprint, here I will keep it simple.
If you are human, you do not encounter reality as such. You encounter it as processed. This is not controversial. What is controversial is admitting the obvious consequence: the subject is the final arbiter.
Image: NotebookLM Infographic of Qualified Subjectivism
The Subject Is the Final Arbiter
Every account of truth, reality, meaning, value, or fact is ultimately adjudicated by a subject. Not because subjects are sovereign gods, but because there is literally no other place adjudication can occur.
Who, exactly, do critics imagine is doing the adjudicating instead? A neutral tribunal floating outside experience? A cosmic referee with a clipboard? A universal consciousness we all forgot to log into?
There is no one else.
This does not mean that truth is ‘whatever I feel like’. It means that truth-claims only ever arrive through a subject, even when they are heavily constrained by the world. And constraint matters. Reality pushes back. Environments resist. Bodies fail. Gravity does not care about your personal narrative.
Why This Is Not Solipsism
Solipsism says: only my mind exists. That is not my claim. My claim is almost boring by comparison: subjects are situated, not sovereign.
We are shaped by environments we did not choose and histories we did not write. Mediation does not eliminate reality; it is how reality arrives. Your beliefs are not free-floating inventions; they are formed under biological, social, and material pressure. Two people can be exposed to the same event and encounter it differently because the encounter is not the event itself – it is the event as mediated through a particular orientation.
Why Objectivity Keeps Sneaking Back In
At this point, someone usually says: ‘But surely some things are objectively true.’
Yes. And those truths are still encountered subjectively. The mistake is thinking that objectivity requires a ‘view from nowhere’. It doesn’t. It requires stability across mediations, not the elimination of mediation altogether. We treat some claims as objective because they hold up under variation, while others fracture immediately. But in all cases, the encounter still happens somewhere, to someone.
The Real Source of the Panic
The real anxiety here is not philosophical. It’s moral and political. People are terrified that if we give up the fantasy of unmediated access to universal truth, then legitimacy collapses and ‘anything goes’.
This is a category error born of wishful thinking. What actually collapses is the hope that semantic convergence is guaranteed. Once you accept that mediation is unavoidable, you are forced to confront a harder reality: disagreement is often structural, not corrigible. Language does not fail because nothing is true. Language fails because too much is true, incompatibly.
So Yes, I Am a Qualified Subjectivist
Interpretation only ever occurs through subjects. Subjects are always mediated. Mediation is always constrained. And constraint does not guarantee convergence.
That is the position. It is not radical, fashionable, or comforting. It is simply what remains once you stop pretending there is a god’s-eye view quietly underwriting your arguments. Discomfort is simply a reliable indicator that a fantasy has been disturbed.
Addendum: Geworfenheit and the Myth of the Neutral Subject
Audio: NotebookLM summary of this Geworfenheit addendum
If all this sounds suspiciously familiar, that’s because it is. Heidegger had a word for it: Geworfenheit – usually translated as thrownness.
The idea is simple, and deeply irritating to anyone still hoping for a clean start. You do not enter the world as a neutral observer. You are thrown into it: into a body, a language, a culture, a history, a set of institutions, a moment you did not choose. You do not begin from nowhere and then acquire a perspective. You begin already situated, already oriented, already implicated.
This is not a poetic flourish. It is a structural claim about human existence.
Image: Another NotebookLM infographic for the fun of it.
What my qualified subjectivism insists on – without Heidegger’s ontological theatre – is the same basic constraint: there is no view from nowhere because there is no nowhere to stand. The subject does not float above mediation; the subject is constituted by it. Thrownness is not an accident to be corrected by better theory. It is the condition under which any theorising occurs at all.
Seen this way, the demand for pure objectivity starts to look less like a philosophical ideal and more like nostalgia for an impossible innocence. A wish to rewind existence to a point before bodies, languages, power, and history got involved. That point never existed.
Geworfenheit matters here because it dissolves the caricature that subjectivism is about arbitrary choice. Being thrown is the opposite of choosing freely. It is constraint before reflection. Orientation before argument. Salience before reasons. You do not decide what matters from a neutral menu; what matters shows up already weighted, already charged, already resistant.
This is why appeals to “just be objective” always ring hollow. Objectivity does not mean escaping thrownness. It means achieving relative stability within it. Some claims hold across many thrown positions. Others fracture immediately. That distinction matters. But none of it happens outside mediation.
So when I say the subject is the final arbiter, I am not crowning the subject king of reality. I am pointing out the obvious: adjudication happens somewhere, to someone, from within a situation they did not author. Thrownness guarantees that there is no cosmic referee waiting to overrule the encounter.
If that makes you uncomfortable, good. It should. Discomfort is often just the sensation of a fantasy losing its grip.
