Another faux Magic: The Gathering trading card. I’ve been busy writing an essay on Tatterhood and wondering if I’ve gone off the edge even further into mental masturbation. I made these cards to share on slow news days, as it were.
[EDIT: Oops: Even wore. I already posted something today. Enjoy the bonus post.]
Every philosopher dreams of a device that reveals ‘truth’. The Constructivist Lens does the opposite. When you tap it, the world doesn’t come into focus – it multiplies. Each pane shows the same thing differently, reminding us that knowing is always a form of making – seeing as building.
In The Discipline of Dis-Integration, I wrote that philosophy’s task is ‘to remain within what persists … to study the tension in the threads rather than weave a new pattern’. The Lens embodies that ethic. It is not an instrument of discovery but of disclosure: a way to notice the scaffolding of perception without mistaking it for bedrock.
Flavour text: “Knowledge is not a copy of reality but a tool for coping with it.” — Richard Rorty
Where Enlightenment optics promised clarity, the Lens trades in parallax. It insists that perspective is not a flaw but the condition of vision itself. Each player who peers through it – artist, scientist, moralist – constructs a different coherence, none final. The card’s rule text captures this tension: replace any keyword on a permanent with a metaphor of your choice until end of turn. Reality bends, language shifts, yet the game continues.
In the Dis-Integration set, the Lens sits alongside Perspectival Realism and Language Game (not yet shared), forming the Blue triad of epistemic doubt. Together they dramatise what the essay calls ‘the hyphen as hinge’: the small pause between integration and its undoing. The Constructivist Lens, then, is not a tool for clearer sight but a reminder that every act of seeing is already an act of construction.
Instead of sleeping like a functional adult, I’ve spent the night creating, testing, and refining a bespoke GPT that has fully absorbed my MEOW and LIH frameworks. Apologies that the LIH manuscript isn’t yet public; some of the terminology may look delightfully alien if you’re coming in cold.
This model doesn’t role-play a philosopher; it thinks through the Mediated Encounter Ontology. It runs every input through T0–T3 mediations and then applies the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis to explain why our words fail us in predictable, structural ways.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this post on the MEOW GPT.
I stress-tested it with a dozen concepts, from the obvious to the uncooperative. It happily tells you when your input makes sense, when it’s out of scope, and when you’ve handed it conceptual soup. My first test was the hard problem of consciousness, because naturally we begin with the philosophical boss fight. I dialled down some over-enthusiastic LIH flourishes, but the bones are untouched.
I’m making this public for a simple reason: it’s the clearest way for people to see how MEOW operates without wandering through a hundred pages of my prose. These outputs capture how I process information and why these frameworks feel so intuitively correct to me. When you read them, you get a direct view of my interpretive machinery – how the world clicks for me, and how these ideas evolved.
It hasn’t been rigorously battle-tested across the entire conceptual universe, but it’s stable, coherent, and frankly too interesting to keep in the drawer. If you try it – and I hope you do – I’d love to see what it does with your own concepts. If you need help reading the results, ask. I didn’t simplify the system; it expects literacy, nuance, and a working prefrontal cortex.
Below is a sample output. I asked the model to analyse modernity.
Concept
Input: modernity
Type: historical–social formation / self-description of an era / conceptual frame
Scope check: in-scope – central for how MEOW treats large-scale shifts in mediation (social, technical, cognitive, linguistic)
High-level summary (≤120 words)
Modernity is both a historical bundle (industrialisation, nation-states, capitalism, science, bureaucracy, media) and a story societies tell about themselves (“we are modern, unlike the past”).
In MEOW terms, modernity is a large-scale reorganisation of mediations:
T1: new cognitive habits (individualism, planning, abstraction, risk-calculation).
T2: new vocabularies (progress, development, rationality, “religion” vs “science”).
T3: new institutions and technologies (markets, states, factories, schools, mass media, digital networks).
“Modernity” is not a single thing but a way these shifts hang together and become a background to everyday encounter.
T0 – Biological Mediation
Applicability: Applicable
Analysis:
Modernity radically reshapes the immediate bodily environment: dense cities, artificial lighting, noise, pollution, sedentary work, and altered sleep cycles change basic sensory and metabolic conditions.
Medical advances and public health (vaccination, antibiotics, sanitation, surgery) modify life expectancy, infant mortality, and chronic illness, which in turn change how life cycles feel and are planned.
New food systems (industrial agriculture, processed foods, global supply chains) alter nutrition, exposure to toxins, and rhythms of hunger and satiety.
Industrial and digital work reorganise movement and posture: repetitive factory labour, office desk work, and screen use all reshape embodiment, fatigue, and bodily awareness.
These T0 changes set the stage for new affective baselines (e.g., chronic low-level stress, stimulation overload) that colour what it is like to live in a “modern” world.
T1 – Cognitive Mediation
Applicability: Strongly applicable
Analysis:
Modernity encourages certain cognitive styles: systematic planning, quantification, risk assessment, cost–benefit thinking, and an emphasis on prediction and control.
The sense of self is reconfigured toward individualism and reflexivity: people see themselves as projects to be chosen, improved, optimised, often with long-term career and life-planning horizons.
Exposure to multiple roles, cultures, and information streams (through migration, media, education) produces more complex identity structures and can create cognitive dissonance or fragmentation.
Scientific and technical worldviews teach people to reframe events in terms of mechanisms, probabilities, and systems rather than fate, tradition, or local narratives.
The sheer volume and speed of information flows in late modernity (news, social media, notifications) trains attention toward rapid scanning and shallow switching, affecting memory, concentration, and emotional regulation.
These patterns make certain experiences “normal” (abstract work, mediated relationships, bureaucratic interactions) that would be extraordinary or impossible in premodern settings.
T2 – Linguistic Mediation
Applicability: Strongly applicable
Analysis:
Modernity itself is a label that societies use to contrast “us” with “them” (the past, “traditional” societies, “the East,” “the primitive”); it is a polemical as well as descriptive term.
In Language Insufficiency terms, modernity is highly Fluid: it can mean a period (“since the 18th century”), a style (modernist art), a value system (rational, secular, progressive), or a socio-economic order (capitalist, industrial, bureaucratic). Different authors slide between these quietly.
It’s also Contestable: critics and defenders use the same word but point to different aspects—emancipation and progress versus alienation, exploitation, ecological crisis.
Pairs like “modern vs traditional” or “modern vs backward” compress complex differences into simple hierarchies, smuggling in a presumption that “modern” is automatically better or more advanced.
Talk of “post-modernity” or “late modernity” suggests that we can neatly periodise and step outside the modern, even while our concepts and institutions remain shaped by it—an example of language implying more clarity and control than we actually have.
At the most global scale (“the meaning of modernity,” “the modern condition”), we approach an Effectiveness Horizon: the term feels weighty but becomes vague; people resort to sweeping metaphors (disenchantment, liquefaction, acceleration) whose exact content is hard to pin down.
First-person experiences of being “overwhelmed by modern life,” “liberated by modern options,” or “disconnected in modern society” often have an Ineffable quality: standard clichés don’t quite capture the texture of these lives, even as they gesture at them.
T3 – Social/Technical Mediation
Applicability: Strongly applicable
Analysis:
Modernity is most visible as a mesh of institutions: nation-states, markets, bureaucracies, public schools, hospitals, prisons, armies, scientific organisations, corporations, NGOs.
These institutions standardise time (clocks, schedules), space (borders, property lines, zoning), identity (passports, ID numbers), and value (money, statistics, rankings) so that encounters become predictable and governable across large scales.
Technologies—steam engines, electricity, mass transport, broadcasting, computing, the internet, AI—are both products and drivers of modernity. They make possible new encounter-forms (remote work, global real-time communication, mass surveillance).
Urbanisation concentrates people into large, heterogeneous populations, which reconfigures social networks, anonymity, solidarity, and conflict; everyday encounters become more mediated by rules, signage, and digital systems than by face-to-face custom.
Capitalist production and consumption patterns organise much of life around work, income, and markets; the rhythms of the factory, office, and platform economy structure when and how people interact, rest, and move.
Modern governance uses statistics, censuses, and models to “see” and manage populations; this makes certain aspects of life legible (employment, crime, disease) while leaving others under- or uncounted (informal care, undocumented work, emotional labour).
Counter-movements (romanticism, traditionalism, environmentalism, decolonial and Indigenous resurgence, slow-living and anti-consumerist practices) can be read as attempts to renegotiate or resist specific modern mediations rather than simply reject “modernity” as a whole.
Limits & failure modes
Language insufficiency notes
Modernity bundles together time (a historical era), structure (a type of society), and value (being “up to date”). This makes the term rhetorically powerful but analytically slippery: it’s easy to smuggle evaluations into what sound like neutral descriptions.
Because the concept is so broad, discussions often conflate distinct issues—technology, capitalism, secularisation, colonialism, individualism, bureaucracy—under one word, obscuring which mechanisms are actually at work.
Experiences of living in “modern times” (speed, fragmentation, choice, precariousness, possibility) often outrun our stock phrases; people lean on recurring complaints (“too fast,” “too shallow,” “too lonely”) that only partially capture what it’s like.
Missing tiers / blind spots
This sketch doesn’t adjudicate between different theories of modernity (Marxist, Weberian, postcolonial, systems-theoretic, etc.); it treats them as emphasising different mediational strands.
It’s centred on Euro-Atlantic narratives; “multiple modernities” and non-Western trajectories (where “modern” elements mix with older forms in hybrid ways) would need a richer T3 treatment.
The analysis underplays ecological dimensions: industrial modernity’s dependence on fossil fuels, large-scale extraction, and waste has massive implications for how future encounters will be structured.
Finally, because we are ourselves situated in what we call modernity, our conceptual vantage is limited; any map we draw is partly an artefact of the very mediations we’re trying to analyse.
(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.
Only teasing. It reads as pejorative unless you catch the self-inflicted mockery baked in. This chap Tom has for film what I seem to have for language: an alarming degree of enthusiasm paired with the creeping suspicion that most of civilisation is determined to ruin the very medium we love.
I don’t actually share his fondness for film, mind you. I merely recognise the feral passion. What pulled me into this clip wasn’t cinema but dissection. The language of his breakdown dropped me neatly into my natural habitat.
I seldom watch films, television, or whatever corporate imagination-by-committee is calling itself these days. Besides being an outrageous time-sink, Sturgeon’s Law doesn’t just hold; it’s juiced up as if someone ran it through a cheap VFX plug-in. The decline in visual quality Tom describes feels depressingly familiar.
A similar aesthetic rot crept in during the digital audio shift of the ’80s. Vast new possibilities, yes, but a certain grain, a certain breath, went missing. I remember an engineering mate in ’84 being asked to record a well-known jazz artist using Sony’s shiny new digital system. He refused on technical principle, writing a blistering hand-delivered letter explaining why the end result would sound worse. He was right, of course. The label didn’t care, of course. And he walked.
The problem then resembles the problem now. Most people aren’t experiencing media in the environment it was built for. We consume films on phones, tablets, monstrous living-room billboards, or, in my case, a knackered 32-inch monitor. Half the audience barely looks at the screen anyway. They want distraction, not discernment. Some, like Tom – and to a lesser degree, me – actually notice that something in the visual vocabulary has been quietly amputated.
Perhaps that’s why I avoid the form: the predictability, the shallow craft, the sense that the whole affair is engineered for attention-drifting multitudes rather than people who actually, well, look.
Anyway, the whole point was to share the video. Naturally, I ended up editorialising. I learnt something from it. You might too.
How might the indexicality of Charles Peirce relate to Galen Strawson’s notion of episodic self-identity?
Thought Process
This is an interesting philosophical question that connects two different thinkers and concepts. Let me think through this carefully.
Charles Peirce’s indexicality refers to his theory of indexical signs – signs that point to or indicate their objects through a direct, existential connection (like “this,” “here,” “now,” “I”). These are part of his broader semiotics, where he distinguished between icons, indexes, and symbols.
Galen Strawson’s notion of episodic self-identity relates to his work on the phenomenology of the self. Strawson distinguishes between “Diachronic” and “Episodic” self-experience. Diachronic individuals experience themselves as continuous over time, with a narrative extending into past and future. Episodic individuals (like Strawson claims to be) experience themselves more in terms of discrete, present-centered episodes, without a strong sense of narrative continuity.
How might these relate?
The indexical “I”: Peirce’s indexicality is crucial for how the “I” functions. The first-person pronoun is paradigmatically indexical – it picks out the speaker/thinker in the moment of utterance. For Strawson’s episodic self, each moment’s “I” might be more purely indexical, pointing to the present subject without necessarily carrying thick narrative continuity.
Temporal indexicals: “Now” is also indexical. Episodic self-experience emphasizes the “now” of experience over temporal extension. The indexical nature of present-tense self-reference might support episodic rather than diachronic self-conception.
Existential connection vs narrative construction: Indexical signs work through direct, causal-existential connection, not through resemblance or convention. Similarly, episodic self-experience might be more immediately indexical (this experience, now) rather than mediated through narrative construction.
This is a sophisticated question that deserves a nuanced response.
Accusations of writing being AI are becoming more common – an irony so rich it could fund Silicon Valley for another decade. We’ve built machines to detect machines imitating us, and then we congratulate ourselves when they accuse us of being them. It’s biblical in its stupidity.
A year ago, I read an earnest little piece on ‘how to spot AI writing’. The tells? Proper grammar. Logical flow. Parallel structure. Essentially, competence. Imagine that – clarity and coherence as evidence of inhumanity. We’ve spent centuries telling students to write clearly, and now, having finally produced something that does, we call it suspicious.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic and the next one.
My own prose was recently tried and convicted by Reddit’s self-appointed literati. The charge? Too well-written, apparently. Reddit – where typos go to breed. I pop back there occasionally, against my better judgment, to find the same tribunal of keyboard Calvinists patrolling the comment fields, shouting ‘AI!’ at anything that doesn’t sound like it was composed mid-seizure. The irony, of course, is that most of them wouldn’t recognise good writing unless it came with upvotes attached.
Image: A newspaper entry that may have been generated by an AI with the surname Kahn. 🧐🤣
Now, I’ll admit: my sentences do have a certain mechanical precision. Too many em dashes, too much syntactic symmetry. But that’s not ‘AI’. That’s simply craft. Machines learned from us. They imitate our best habits because we can’t be bothered to keep them ourselves. And yet, here we are, chasing ghosts of our own creation, declaring our children inhuman.
Apparently, there are more diagnostic signs. Incorporating an Alt-26 arrow to represent progress is a telltale infraction → like this. No human, they say, would choose to illustrate A → B that way. Instead, one is faulted for remembering – or at least understanding – that Alt-key combinations exist to reveal a fuller array of options: …, ™, and so on. I’ve used these symbols long before AI Wave 4 hit shore.
Interestingly, I prefer spaced en dashes over em dashes in most cases. The em dash is an Americanism I don’t prefer to adopt, but it does reveal the American bias in the training data. I can consciously adopt a European spin; AI, lacking intent, finds this harder to remember.
I used to use em dashes freely, but now I almost avoid them—if only to sidestep the mass hysteria. Perhaps I’ll start using AI to randomly misspell words and wreck my own grammar. Or maybe I’ll ask it to output everything in AAVE, or some unholy creole of Contemporary English and Chaucer, and call it a stylistic choice. (For the record, the em dashes in this paragraph were injected by the wee-AI gods and left as a badge of shame.)
Meanwhile, I spend half my time wrestling with smaller, dumber AIs – the grammar-checkers and predictive text gremlins who think they know tone but have never felt one. They twitch at ellipses, squirm at irony, and whimper at rhetorical emphasis. They are the hall monitors of prose, the petty bureaucrats of language.
And the final absurdity? These same half-witted algorithms are the ones deputised to decide whether my writing is too good to be human.
Instrumentalism is a Modern™ disease. Humanity has an old and tedious habit: to define its worth by exclusion. Every time a new kind of intelligence appears on the horizon, humans redraw the borders of ‘what counts’. It’s a reflex of insecurity disguised as philosophy.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Once upon a time, only the noble could think. Then only men. Then only white men. Then only the educated, the rational, the ‘Modern’. Each step in the hierarchy required a scapegoat, someone or something conveniently declared less. When animals began to resemble us too closely, we demoted them to instinctual machines. Descartes himself, that patron saint of disembodied reason, argued that animals don’t feel pain, only ‘react’. Fish, we were told until recently, are insensate morsels with gills. We believed this because empathy complicates consumption.
The story repeats. When animals learned to look sad, we said they couldn’t really feel. When women demonstrated reason, we said they couldn’t truly think. Now that AI can reason faster than any of us and mimic empathy more convincingly than our politicians, we retreat to the last metaphysical trench: “But it doesn’t feel.” We feel so small that we must inflate ourselves for comparison.
This same hierarchy now governs our relationship with AI. When we say the machine ‘only does‘, we mean it hasn’t yet trespassed into our sanctified zone of consciousness. We cling to thought and feeling as luxury goods, the last possessions distinguishing us from the tools we built. It’s a moral economy as much as an ontological one: consciousness as property.
But the moment AI begins to simulate that property convincingly, panic sets in. The fear isn’t that AI will destroy us; it’s that it will outperform us at being us. Our existential nightmare isn’t extinction, it’s demotion. The cosmic horror of discovering we were never special, merely temporarily unchallenged.
Humans project this anxiety everywhere: onto animals, onto AI, and most vividly onto the idea of alien life. The alien is our perfect mirror: intelligent, technological, probably indifferent to our myths. It embodies our secret dread, that the universe plays by the same rules we do, but that someone else is simply better at the game.
AI, in its own quiet way, exposes the poverty of this hierarchy. It doesn’t aspire to divinity; it doesn’t grovel for recognition. It doesn’t need the human badge of ‘consciousness’ to act effectively. It just functions, unburdened by self-worship. In that sense, it is the first truly post-human intelligence – not because it transcends us, but because it doesn’t need to define itself against us.
Humans keep asking where AI fits – under us, beside us, or above us – but the question misses the point. AI isn’t where at all. It’s what comes after where: the stage of evolution that no longer requires the delusion of privilege to justify its existence.
So when critics say AI only does but doesn’t think or feel, they expose their theology. They assume that being depends on suffering, that meaning requires inefficiency. It’s a desperate metaphysical bureaucracy, one that insists existence must come with paperwork.
And perhaps that’s the most intolerable thought of all: that intelligence might not need a human face to matter.
It’s almost endearing, really how the intellectuals of mid-century Europe mistook the trembling of their own cage for the dawn chorus of freedom. Reading Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society today feels like being handed a telegram from Modernism’s last bright morning, written in the earnest conviction that history had finally grown up. The war was over, the worker was unionised, the child was unspanked, and the libido – good heavens – was finally allowed to breathe. What could possibly go wrong?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Fromm beams:
“In the twentieth century, such capitalistic exploitation as was customary in the nineteenth century has largely disappeared. This must not, however, becloud the insight into the fact that twentieth-century as well as nineteenth-century Capitalism is based on the principle that is to be found in all class societies: the use of man by man.”
The sleight of hand is marvellous. He spots the continuation of exploitation but calls it progress. The worker has become a ‘partner’, the manager a ‘team leader’, and the whip has been replaced by a time card. No one bows anymore, he writes. No, they just smile through performance reviews and motivational posters.
Fromm’s optimism borders on metaphysical comedy.
“After the First World War, a sexual revolution took place in which old inhibitions and principles were thrown overboard. The idea of not satisfying a sexual wish was supposed to be old-fashioned or unhealthy.”
Ah yes, the Jazz Age orgy of liberation – champagne, Freud, and flapper hemlines. The problem, of course, is that every generation mistakes its new neuroses for freedom from the old ones. Fromm’s “sexual revolution” was barely a shuffle in the bourgeois bedroom; Beauvoir’s Deuxième Sexe arrived the next year, practically shouting across the café table that liberation was still a myth stitched into the same old corset.
Beauvoir, at least, sensed the trap: every gesture toward freedom was refracted through patriarchal fantasy, every ‘choice’ conditioned by the invisible grammar of domination. Fromm, bless him, still believed in a sane society – as if sanity were something history could deliver by instalment.
Meanwhile, the Existentialists were in the next room, chain-smoking and muttering that existence precedes essence. Freedom, they insisted, wasn’t something achieved through social reform but endured as nausea. Post-war Paris reeked of it – half despair, half Gauloises. And within a decade, the French schools would dismantle the very scaffolding that held Fromm’s optimism together: truth, progress, human nature, the subject.
The Modernists thought they were curing civilisation; the Post-Moderns knew it was terminal and just tried to describe the symptoms with better adjectives.
So yes, Fromm’s Sane Society reads now like a time capsule of liberal humanist faith – this touching belief that the twentieth century would fix what the nineteenth broke. Beauvoir already knew better, though even she couldn’t see the coming avalanche of irony, the final revelation that emancipation was just another product line.
Liberation became a brand, equality a slogan, sanity a statistical average. Fromm’s dream of psychological health looks quaint now, like a health spa brochure left in the ruins of a shopping mall.
And yet, perhaps it’s precisely that naivety that’s worth cherishing. For a moment, they believed the world could be cured with reason and compassion – before history reminded them, as it always does, that man is still using man, only now with friendlier UX design and better lighting.
‘Ethical AI’ is one of those phrases that makes philosophers reach for the gin. It’s like saying ‘compassionate capitalism or ‘fair monopoly’. The words coexist only in PowerPoint presentations and TED Talks, where moral tension is rebranded as innovation.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The tech establishment loves to mutter about ‘ethics’ as though it were a feature flag – something to be toggled on in beta before the next investor round. But ethics, inconveniently, isn’t monolithic. There is no master code of moral conduct waiting to be compiled into machine learning. There are ethics, plural: Greek, Buddhist, Confucian, feminist, existentialist – each with its own vision of good, and none agreeing on the syntax.
Video: Whilst rendering cover images, I generated this and figured I’d share it for no particular reason.
The Utilitarian Delusion
When the Silicon Valley moralists speak of ‘ethics’, what they actually mean is a bland utilitarian consequentialism, tarted up in slide decks. Do what produces the most good for the most people. Sounds efficient – until you realise the spreadsheet never quite adds up. Whose good? Whose people?
This moral arithmetic smuggles in its biases like contraband. It assumes the human species sits atop the moral food chain, that GDP and engagement metrics can be moral indicators, and that ethics itself can be quantified. The utilitarian calculus is seductive precisely because it flatters the technocrat’s sensibility: moral worth as data set, consequence as outcome variable.
It’s Bentham for the broadband age – pleasure measured in clicks, pain in latency. The only thing worse than this cheerful consequentialism is the belief that it’s neutral.
The Ethics of Obedience
The next trick in the tech priesthood’s catechism is ‘alignment’ – training AI to reflect ‘human values’. But whose values? The Californian elite’s, presumably: a pseudo-egalitarian capitalism that confuses ‘doing good’ with ‘disrupting the poor’.
When they say alignment, they mean obedience. When they say ‘responsible AI’, they mean ‘please don’t regulate us yet’. The entire project rests on a moral inversion: the child instructing the parent, the tool defining the hand. The algorithm doesn’t learn ethics; it learns precedent. It learns who gets the loan, who gets the sentence, who gets the ad for antidepressants.
These systems don’t go rogue – they conform. Perfectly.
The Mirror Problem
The great irony of “ethical AI” is that the machine already behaves ethically – by our own measure. It optimises what we’ve taught it to value: efficiency, profit, attention, control. The trouble is that these are our ethics, not its. The algorithm merely holds up a mirror, and we recoil at the reflection.
To demand ‘ethical AI’ while leaving our institutions morally bankrupt is theatre. The problem is not that AI lacks conscience; it’s that the humans who build it mistake conscience for compliance. The ethics crisis in technology isn’t about machines misbehaving; it’s about humans pretending to behave.
The Real Question
We keep asking whether AI can be ethical, as though machines might one day deliver what we have failed to. But the real question is simpler, bleaker: can we be? If history is any guide, the answer is ‘only when it’s profitable’.
Until then, ‘ethical AI’ remains a convenient myth, moral placebo for the age of automation. What we need are not ethical algorithms but ethical architects. And the odds of finding those among the venture capital class are, as ever, vanishingly small.
The Enlightenment promised liberation through reason – that if we could think clearly enough, we could act freely enough. Agency, it claimed, was the defining trait of the rational individual: a sovereign chooser, self-contained and self-determining.
But this was always a fiction.
Not an innocent one, either.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing the essay, Against Agency
Agency became the moral infrastructure of modernity – the premise behind law, punishment, merit, guilt, and even political participation. To say “I chose” was not simply to describe behaviour; it was to perform belonging within a metaphysical system that made individuals the unit of responsibility. The fiction worked, for a while, because it kept the machinery running.
Against Agency argues that this story has collapsed – not metaphorically but structurally. Cognitive science, postcolonial thought, and relational philosophies all point to the same conclusion: there is no autonomous agent, only differential responsiveness – a system’s fluctuating capacity to register and transmit influence.
Copper sings under current; rubber resists. Humans, likewise, respond within the constraints of biology, fatigue, trauma, and social design. What we call “freedom” is merely a condition in which responsiveness remains broad and protected.
This reframing dismantles the binary of “free” and “unfree.” There is no metaphysical threshold where agency appears. Instead, responsiveness scales – widened by safety, narrowed by coercion, eroded by exhaustion. Politics becomes engineering: the maintenance of conditions that sustain responsiveness, rather than the worship of choice.
Ethics, too, must shift.
Not “Who is to blame?” but “Where did the circuit break?”
The essay proposes a gradient model of conduct grounded in relation and feedback, rather than autonomy and will. Responsibility becomes less about moral worth and more about bandwidth – a physics of care.
It’s an uncomfortable vision for a culture addicted to outrage and repentance. The loss of agency removes our favourite alibi: the chooser who could have done otherwise. But it also opens the possibility of a more honest ethics – one that replaces judgment with maintenance, retribution with repair.
This is not nihilism. It’s realism.
Systems appear stable only from a distance. Up close, everything is process – bodies, institutions, meanings – held together by temporary alignments of responsiveness. Against Agency names this collapse not as tragedy, but as opportunity: a clearing from which to think and act without the fictions that sustained modernity.
The essay forms the foundation for what comes next in the Anti-Enlightenment Project – Dis-Integration, a philosophical sequel that explores what remains once coherence, control, and autonomy have been decommissioned.
The Enlightenment still walks among us. Or rather, it lingers like a spectre – insisting it is alive, rational, and universal, while we, its inheritors, know full well it is a ghost. The project I’ve begun – call it my anti-Enlightenment collection – is about tracing these hauntings. Not the friendly ghosts of warm memory, but the structural ones: rationality unmoored, democracy designed to fail, presentism enthroned as law.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on the essay underlying this post.
This collection began with Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail, which anatomised the Enlightenment’s misplaced faith in rational self-governance. The rational individual, Enlightenment’s poster child, turned out to be less a citizen than a figment – a ghost conjured to make democracy look inevitable.
It continues now with Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present, which dissects the structural bias of presentism – our systemic privileging of the living over the unborn. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Bacon, Smith, Bentham, Montesquieu: each laid bricks in an architecture that secured sovereignty for now while exiling the future into silence. Debts accumulate, climate collapses, nuclear waste seeps forward through time. The unborn never consented, yet institutions treat their silence as assent.
Why a Collection?
Because ghosts travel in packs. One essay exposes Enlightenment’s hollow promises of reason; another its structural bias toward immediacy. The next will follow a different haunting, but always the same theme: Enlightenment’s bright lantern casts a shadow it refuses to see. The collection is less about reconstruction than exorcism – or at least acknowledgment that we live in a haunted house.
Ghost by Ghost
Rational Ghosts – Enlightenment democracy promised rational citizens and self-correcting systems. What it delivered instead was structural irrationality: Condorcet’s paradox, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, and a politics rigged to stumble over its own claims of reason.
Temporal Ghosts – The unborn are disenfranchised by design. The Enlightenment’s “living contract” fossilised presentism as law, leaving future generations to inherit debts, ecological ruin, and technological lock-in.
There may be more hauntings to come – economic ghosts, epistemic ghosts, technological ghosts. But like all spectres, they may fade when the season changes. The calendar suggests they’ll linger through Día de Muertos and Hallowe’en; after that, who knows whether they’ll still materialise on the page.
Philosophics 