Tag: philosophy of mind

Titrating Hegel

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

Allow me to start with a declaration: I am no Hegel expert, and whether I am an expert at anything is debatable. Still, I’ve been reflecting on Hegel through my own lenses, and I have an opinion – because of course I do. My comment isn’t on a single Hegel publication. Rather, it’s a commentary on some of his general ideas – some more specific than others – that just so happen to be rattling around my noggin as I type.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I know I’ve already claimed to have started, but this is the real start. Let’s talk translations.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

I recently discussed the problem with translating Meursault’s French maman. The short version: English lacks a clean equivalent. Every option – Mother, Mummy, Mama – over-interprets the son’s relation to his mother, leaning warmer or colder or more infantile than the French allows. Camus’ problem is at the level of affective register. The ambiguity is tonal, intimate, and culturally situated. English simply can’t carry it without choosing a side.

Hegel has a different problem, more philosophically weighty. His problem is Geist. Almost immediately, I think of zeitgeist and Poltergeist. Ghosts. Spirits. Phenomenology of Spirit, right? Easy peasy.

Not so fast. Some translators render it as Mind, in an attempt to distance themselves from theological baggage. The problem is that Hegel himself equivocates – so he’s of little help. He may have been intentionally cheeky, being stuck in the milieu of his day, as well as a product of it and producer through it.

Where maman exposes language’s insufficiency at the level of affective register, Geist exposes it at the level of metaphysical architecture. English can’t preserve the conceptual promiscuity by which Hegel binds mind, spirit, culture, history, and ontology into one unfolding term. The word doesn’t just mean something; it enacts a view of what is real and how the real moves. If that weren’t bad enough, enter ontological grammar commitments. (I’m a teetotaller, so someone else hold the bear.)

Video: Hold my bear

The translator is not neutrally asking: What does Geist mean? They are already asking, even if silently: What kind of reality do I think Hegel is describing?

Translation here isn’t the neutral transfer of meaning – it’s the exposure of ontological allegiance. The quarrel over Geist is not a lexical dispute. It is ontology laundering itself through vocabulary.

Let’s consider the two camps.

The Mind camp hears:

“You are importing theology into what is fundamentally a logic of intelligibility.”

The Spirit camp hears:

“You are evacuating the historical-metaphysical depth of the term and pretending Hegel was doing philosophy of cognition with better hats — nicer hats, perhaps, but hats all the same.”

Neither objection is irrational from within its own grammar. Both are locally coherent. They simply don’t share the same ontology of the term.

Reason doesn’t choose between Mind and Spirit from nowhere. It adjudicates from within a prior ontological settlement, then mistakes that settlement for neutrality. This is worth remembering well beyond the Hegel literature.

In disputes over Geist, reason doesn’t fail because the parties are irrational. It fails because each party’s reason operates inside a different ontological grammar. What appears as clarification within one frame appears as distortion within the other. A reason is not self-legitimating. It becomes a reason only inside a grammar that knows how to receive it.

Which brings us back to the title. Titration works when you have a known reagent and a neutral solvent – you add one to the other until the system reaches equilibrium. The whole method assumes there is an equilibrium to reach. Geist has no neutral solvent. Mind and Spirit are not two concentrations of the same substance. They are different substances, differently constituted, differently reactive. There is no volume at which one cancels the other out. You can titrate the word all you like. The indicator never changes colour. What you are left with is not a settled meaning but a record of your own ontological commitments, precipitated out of solution and sitting at the bottom of the flask – which, in the end, is more than most translations will admit.

Door Prize: Here’s your parting gift courtesy of NotebookLM…

Titrating_HegelDownload

Living in the House of the Bat Man

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
6–9 minutes

On God, Objectivity, and the Grammar That Outlives Both

NB: After I posted this, I put some more thought into the notion. Rather than extending this post, I decided to post the follow-up on Substack. Where Nagel asks, What’s it like to be a bat? I ask What’s It Like to Be a Human?

I know a nice philosophical parlour trick. It’s performed by asking someone whether they believe in objective truth. If they say yes, ask them where it comes from; if they say no, ask them whether that denial is objectively true. The trick is not a refutation of anything. It is a demonstration: the concept of the Objective has been installed so deeply in the grammar of the question that you can’t coherently step outside of it long enough to evaluate it. In this respect, you’re a starling who can’t see the murmuration from within it.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Let’s start with Nagel. In 1974, Thomas Nagel published a paper that broke a perfectly serviceable assumption in half. The assumption was that consciousness, while subjective in character, was at least comparably subjective across humans – that the gap between my inner life and yours was a matter of degree, navigable by imaginative projection and shared biology, whereas the gap between me and a bat was of a different order entirely. Nagel’s intervention was to question the first assumption by taking the second seriously. If the bat’s echolocation is genuinely inaccessible – not merely unfamiliar but structurally unreachable, given that I have no experiential raw material from which to construct what sonar feels like – then the inference from ‘I can’t imagine this being’s experience‘ to ‘this being probably has no experience worth worrying about‘ is invalid. Not difficult. Invalid. The bat has a perspective; I can’t access it. These two facts are entirely compatible, not mutually exclusive.

The extension Nagel resisted, but which his own argument demands, is this: the same epistemic closure obtains everywhere. Not merely between humans and bats, or humans and artificial systems, but between any two subjects whatever. What we call human-to-human understanding is not epistemic access to another’s inner life. It’s coordination: shared linguistic conventions, overlapping heuristics, statistical regularities of behaviour stable enough to be gamed and relied upon. We don’t experience each other’s experience. We model each other, well enough for most practical purposes, but then mistake the model for the contact. It’s all too common.

The murmuration of starlings is useful here. A rule of seven: Each bird responds to its seven nearest neighbours. Local rules, local information, irreducibly individual embodiment. The apparent organism wheeling across the sky – that single fluid entity that seems to breathe and turn as one – is a scale-dependent phenomenon that observers impose from a sufficient distance. Pareidolia at work. There is no murmuration-subject, and there is no fact of the matter about what it is like to be the flock, because the flock is not the level at which anything is happening. Whilst the coherence is real, the subject isn’t.

A statistical person is the murmuration.

A statistical person is the murmuration. Every apparatus of governance, moral philosophy, and institutional coordination operates by constructing a subject at the flock scale – the rational agent, the bearer of rights, the member of the moral community, the person before the court. These constructions aren’t errors at all. They’re necessary compressions. Courts can’t adjudicate the irreducible particularity of each defendant; they need the type. But the utility of the compression at the institutional scale isn’t evidence that the compression names anything real at the experiential scale. As the average human isn’t actually a human, the murmuration is not a starling.

What does this mean for the consciousness debate – about bats, digital systems, or the person sitting across from you? The question ‘is there something it is like to be X?‘ isn’t merely unanswered, but it’s malformed as posed. It presupposes a subject-object grammar within which the question makes sense: a discrete, bounded subject, either possessing or lacking inner experience, in principle distinguishable from other such subjects. That grammar produces the apparent problem. Dissolve the grammar, and the problem doesn’t get solved; rather, it gets diagnosed. Which brings us to God…

if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him

Here, Voltaire’s quip – if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him – is almost right. But its failure is in the verb. Invention implies architects: identifiable agents who construct a useful fiction and install it in a credulous population. This is the wrong model for how the objective world works. No one decided to construct it. Rather, it accreted. Each starling wasn’t conspiring to produce the murmuration; the murmuration is what the local rules produce at scale – No intention necessary. The exogenous imposition has no imposer behind it, which is precisely why it presents with such unimpeachable authority. Expose an inventor, and you discredit the invention. But when there isn’t an inventor – when the cage precipitated rather than being built – there isn’t a conspiracy to unmask; there’s no priest to dismiss – only the structure itself, which continues to function regardless of whether anyone believes in it.

Nietzsche understood this better. The death of God, for Nietzsche, wasn’t the liberation it appeared to be. It was the removal of the only anchor the entire normative structure had, without anyone noticing what was actually anchoring what. The Enlightenment didn’t interrogate the theological grammar. It secularised it. Reason, Nature, Science, Progress, History – each of these performed the same function God had performed: the external, authoritative, mind-independent referent against which claims could be measured and from which institutional authority could flow downward to the subject. The architecture was identical; only the tenant changed.

Objective is the edifice. When God was evicted, Reason, Science, Objective Truth became the new tenants

And that’s the point. The Objective isn’t a discovery. It’s a slot, a structural position in the grammar of subject-object discourse that requires an occupant if coördination at scale is to function. God was an early and effective tenant. When God was evicted, the slot didn’t disappear. It couldn’t because it’s not a belief but a grammatical necessity. It was immediately re-occupied, with the additional ideological advantage that the new tenants – Reason, Science, Objective Truth – present themselves as discovered rather than inherited. You can lose faith in God. You can’t, without apparent irrationality, lose faith in Objective Reality, because Objective Reality is now the precondition of the concept of rationality itself. The successor is more entrenched than the original. The slot has been occupied so continuously that it now looks like part of the foundation.

But it’s not. The building is the subject-object grammar, which generates the Objective slot as a structural correlate of the Subject. What fills the slot – God, Reason, the Market, the Algorithm – is the history of ideas, the history routinely mistaken for intellectual progress: the mature species finally locating the real external anchor, after centuries of superstitious misdirection. What’s actually happening is tenant succession. Each eviction is experienced as crisis, where each new occupant presents as the permanent solution. The edifice is never inspected because it’s always occupied, and this occupied building looks like a home.

The diagnostic move, then, isn’t to find a better tenant. Every reform programme, every Enlightenment, every revolution has done exactly that, and the slot fills again within a generation. The diagnostic move is to show that there is an edifice, that the grammar has a structure, that the structure generates the slot, and that the slot’s current occupant inherited its authority from the grammar rather than earning it from the world.

This is a different kind of intervention. Rather than a replacement, it produces a recognition that the coordinating function of the Objective is genuine and the ontological claim isn’t, that the murmuration coheres and the murmuration-subject doesn’t actually exist, that we are starlings – or turtles – all the way down, responding to our seven nearest neighbours, producing from the outside the appearance of a unified orientation toward a common truth.

the statistical person is regular enough to be governed, predicted, and addressed

A relativistic social model operates well enough on this account: It doesn’t require an objective world; it simply requires stable enough local rules that the flock coheres, that the statistical person is regular enough to be governed, predicted, and addressed. The objective world is the name we give to that coherence when observed from a sufficient distance. It’s robust enough for almost every practical purpose. What it isn’t is foundational. Remove the coordinating conventions, and it simply stops being produced.

The starlings don’t need gods. They don’t need Objective Reality either. They only need the local rules, which, unlike their theological and epistemological successors, make no claim about what they are. Which is, in the end, the only honest position available.

Je m’accuse, on s’accuse

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The LLM Witch-Hunt and the Enemy Within

I recently read a piece arguing, with considerable sophistication, that LLMs represent an unprecedented psychological threat – that conversational systems operating at a planetary scale change the geometry of human susceptibility in ways that demand serious governance responses. The author wasn’t wrong about the effects. This isn’t the debate, but she was wrong about the story. The effects are real, and the narrative erected around them is the oldest displacement manoeuvre in the repertoire

Continued on Substack.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The Grammar of Bettering Yourself

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
7–10 minutes

Self-help, pop psychology, LinkedIn, and the metaphysics smuggled into advice

Self-improvement books rarely begin by telling you what it believes a person is. That would be too honest, and honesty is bad for conversion funnels. Instead, it begins with verbs.

Choose. Decide. Commit. Heal. Optimise. Manifest. Reframe. Own. Level up. Set boundaries. Do the work. Become intentional. Stop self-sabotaging. Unlock your potential. Be your authentic self. Take radical responsibility.

The vocabulary shifts depending on the tradition. One speaks of healing, one of discipline, one of nervous systems, one of leadership, one of purpose, one of abundance. What they share is not a doctrine but a grammar: a way of arranging the person before the advice begins. The subject is always inward, sovereign, and temporarily malfunctioning. The problem is always locatable. The solution is always available, often for $29.99 or in a free webinar that becomes a masterclass for $299.

But here is where the easy cynicism runs out of road, because the people writing this stuff — by and large — believe it.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

That is the part of the critique that tends to get skipped, because it is less satisfying than imagining a cynical operator deliberately strip-mining the anxious for recurring revenue. Most self-help authors arrived at their framework the same way their readers are about to: they were struggling, they encountered a grammar that organised their experience, they felt the specific relief of suddenly being intelligible to themselves, and they mistook that relief for discovery. Then they wrote a book about it. The author is not the shark. The author is a previous customer who graduated to the front of the room.

The framework they found — and are now evangelising — is what I call, in The Architecture of Encounter, an ontological grammar: a set of prior commitments about what kind of thing a person is, which arrives upstream of any specific advice and quietly determines what advice is even thinkable. You cannot recommend reframing without first presuming a self transparent enough to observe its own cognitions and sovereign enough to revise them. You cannot prescribe boundaries without presuming a self whose territory is violable and whose autonomy is the relevant moral unit. You cannot offer alignment without presuming a self that has a true direction, temporarily obscured, patiently awaiting discovery through either a values exercise on page forty-seven or a retreat in somewhere with good lighting and worse plumbing.

The grammar arrives first. The advice follows from it. And the person reading it is not being shown a mirror. They are being issued a lens.

The lens finds its wearer. “Take ownership” resonates with people already invested in the idea of themselves as agents who have been insufficiently deliberate — it confirms the worldview while appearing to challenge the behaviour. “Your nervous system is dysregulated” resonates with people for whom the moralised language of laziness and discipline has become intolerable; here is a vocabulary that removes the accusation while retaining the explanation, which is a genuinely useful service even if the mechanism on offer is borrowed loosely from neuroscience and the rest is borrowed from hope. “Mindset is your prison” resonates with people who need their suffering to remain individually tractable — solvable, that is, without anyone having to redistribute anything expensive or inconvenient. “Manifest your abundance” resonates with people who find both structural analysis and self-blame equally unappealing and would like a third option involving the universe.

Each grammar finds its congregation. Which is precisely the problem.

A grammar propagates not because it has been tested against alternatives or evaluated for efficacy, but because it maps onto a prior self-conception cleanly enough to produce the sensation of being understood. The entrepreneur already believes in agency-language: execution, discipline, ownership, leverage. The book that tells them their discipline is the differentiator is not offering new information; it is offering comfortable confirmation in a more expensive format. The therapeutic reader already suspects their relational difficulties involve something called attachment. The book that tells them so is not illuminating; it is flattering them with their own vocabulary. The LinkedIn professional already believes their career is a project of self-authorship. The thought leader who tells them to communicate their value and build authentic leadership is not giving them a strategy; they are giving them a liturgy.

The community that forms around a grammar is a church, not a seminar. It has converts, not students. And like most churches, it is considerably better at solidarity than at falsifiability.

This matters because the mechanism by which self-help content spreads — resonance, recognition, testimonial, referral — is entirely decoupled from the mechanism by which we would establish that it works. A sentence resonates because it fits a grammar the reader has already adopted. That tells you something real: about the anxieties structuring a cohort’s self-understanding, the stories they are trying to make liveable, the descriptions of themselves they find tolerable or intolerable. It does not tell you whether the intervention produces the claimed effect, in whom, under what conditions, and compared with what alternative. Those are duller questions. Less shareable. They do not fit on a carousel post with a soft gradient and a mountain.

Horoscopes also resonate. So do conspiracy theories, national myths, and the first chapter of any book you buy during a difficult stretch of your life.

The point is not that the advice is necessarily wrong. Sometimes “set boundaries” is exactly right. Sometimes “take ownership” is precisely what someone has been avoiding hearing. Sometimes a new frame genuinely reorganises attention in ways that produce durable change, and the person is measurably better off for having found it. None of that is in question. The question is whether a framework that produced one useful instance has any reliable claim to truth beyond that instance — and whether the person reaching for it during a difficult period is in any position to make that evaluation carefully.

They usually are not. That is not stupidity. That is the condition of being in difficulty: you reach for intelligibility, and whoever offers it collects a great deal of credit. The problem is not the reaching. The problem is that the self-help ecosystem — including the parts of it operated by entirely sincere people who believe every word they publish — has no reliable mechanism for distinguishing frameworks that help from frameworks that merely feel like help while the underlying situation continues undisturbed. The true believer and the true seeker share the same vulnerability. Both reached for a grammar. One of them got to write the book.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

It is also worth noting that commerce is the easy villain here, and an overrated one. The same dynamic runs through pop psychology, where the grammar of individual cognitive mechanisms tends to dominate because it produces legible interventions in a way that structural analysis never quite does; blaming cognition is tractable, blaming the organisation of society is dispiriting and hard to monetise, even when it is accurate. It runs through LinkedIn, where the grammar is not therapeutic but managerial — the self reimagined as an optimisable professional asset — and where burnout becomes a boundary failure, precarity becomes an invitation to upskill, and alienation becomes a purpose deficit. Nobody on LinkedIn is necessarily trying to extract money from anyone. Many of them are trying to be useful, or to be visible, or both, which is human enough. But the grammar they are deploying disappears material conditions into interior architecture with the same efficiency as the most cynically produced wellness content. The mechanism does not require a profit motive. It requires only a grammar and an audience that already shares it.

The useful response to all of this is not wholesale dismissal, which would be too easy and almost certainly wrong. Some people need clearer habits. Some need better descriptions of their own conduct. Some need permission to stop tolerating what they have been tolerating. Some need a vocabulary that makes their own patterns visible, and a framework — however approximate — is better than none. These are real services. The fact that they are sometimes delivered inside a dubious metaphysics of the person does not automatically negate them.

But there is a question worth developing the habit of asking, before the grammar installs itself: what kind of person does this advice presume? Is the self it describes sovereign, where I am actually constrained? Wounded where I am actually responsible? Deficient where I am actually being exploited? Misaligned where I am actually just bored? In need of self-belief, where I am in need of rent?

These questions are less fun than a morning routine designed by someone who has never had a difficult commute. They do not come with a community or a badge or an accountability partner who sends encouraging voice notes. But they do something the grammar on its own cannot: they ask whether the patient described in the diagnosis is the one actually in the room.

Most self-help skips that step. So, not infrequently, does the person who wrote it. They found a grammar that made their experience legible, felt the relief that comes from that, and never quite got around to distinguishing legibility from truth. Which is understandable. It is also, for everyone downstream of that decision, a problem.

I don’t occupy this shared space of ontological grammar, so I call bollox.

Full Disclosure: This article was drafted by ChatGPT 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 upon a discussion of my perspective on self-help, pop psychology, and LinkedIn. I am busy with other projects, but I wanted to share my position. Apologies to those who don’t prefer LLM-authored or assisted articles.

My goal is to articulate the connexion between ontological grammar commitments, the noted disciplines, and more. As should be evident, I am not a fan of self-help or some adjacent modalities.

Perish the Thought: You Didn’t Override Anything

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
4–6 minutes

Je m’accuse. I find myself bickering on social media again. Zut, alors! Unfortunately, I struck a nerve with otherwise unidentified Adam. He may believe that I need to be right; rather, I’d like to help him not be wrong – presuming there are such states. In a post, Adam makes an assertion that one can override one’s, let’s call it, intuition. He ends with:

👉 Just don’t silence the most experienced pattern-reader in the room and call it maturity.

💭 What decision are you defending right now that your body already vetoed?

I feel that we are on the same page, or I wouldn’t bother to engage. The point I want to make with this blog article is that one does not override or veto one’s body. You rationalise what your body tells you to do. Just be careful with your language and how you frame it.

Audio: NotebookLM summary of this topic.

On why “reason defeating intuition” is a comforting fiction

There is a familiar story we tell about decision-making: First, the body speaks. A tightening. A lurch. A sense of foreboding or pull.

Then, reason arrives late, clipboard in hand, issuing corrective instructions:

  • ‘Be rational’
  • ‘Sleep on it’
  • ‘Run the numbers’

When things go badly, we narrate the failure like this: I knew. But I overruled it. This story feels true. It is also almost certainly wrong. Not morally wrong. Not introspectively dishonest. Conceptually wrong.

Image: NotebookLM infographics on this topic.

The experiential mistake

Let’s grant the phenomenology immediately. People routinely report that:

  • A decision felt wrong before it was articulated.
  • The articulation came later.
  • The eventual outcome carried an unmistakable sense of fatigue or dissonance.
  • Retrospectively, they say: I ignored the signal.

That experience is real. The inference drawn from it is not.

What the experience shows is temporal asymmetry, not architectural hierarchy. One process surfaces earlier than another. That does not mean a later process overruled it.

It means you are narrating a system whose operations are largely opaque to itself.

What the science actually killed decades ago

The idea that ‘reason’ steps in as a distinct, supervisory faculty that overrides intuition is not merely unproven. It is historically obsolete.

It belongs to the same conceptual family as:

  • The rational actor
  • The detached chooser
  • The inner executive standing above cognition

That family did not survive the twentieth century.

There is no independent referee.

Start with Herbert Simon, who dismantled the fantasy of global optimisation with bounded rationality. Human decision-making does not survey option-spaces and then choose. It satisficies under constraint. There is no god’s-eye view from which “reason” could intervene.

Move to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who made it painfully clear that what we call reasoning is deeply entangled with heuristics, framing effects, and affective weighting. System 2 does not rule System 1. It just writes better prose.

Add Thomas Sowell, whose critique of unconstrained rationalism was never about feelings versus facts, but about the fantasy of an overseeing mind unbound by trade-offs.

Or George Lakoff, who quietly erased the idea that political or moral reasoning could ever be disembodied in the first place.

Or Jonathan Haidt, who showed that moral reasoning overwhelmingly functions as post-hoc justification. The elephant moves. The rider explains.

Or Joshua Greene, whose dual-process models still do not resurrect a sovereign rational self. They show competition, not command.

Or Kurt Gray, whose work on moral perception demonstrates that what we experience as “judgment” is already structured before conscious deliberation enters the scene.

Across these literatures, one conclusion recurs with tedious consistency: There is no independent referee.

Why the “override” story feels so compelling

If reason does not overrule intuition, why does it feel like it does?

Because what you experience as “override” is competition between pre-reflective evaluations, not a coup staged by rationality.

Different subsystems evaluate:

  • social risk
  • loss exposure
  • identity coherence
  • narrative defensibility
  • anticipated regret

Whichever configuration wins becomes the decision. The explanation comes later. Calling that explanation “reason” flatters us. It also confuses sequence with sovereignty. When someone says, ‘I ignored my intuition’, what they usually mean is:

A later-arriving evaluation carried more weight than an earlier one, and I disliked the downstream cost.

That is not an override. That is the outcome.

Exhaustion is not evidence of rational domination

There is a popular add-on to the override story:

We override intuition, and that’s why we’re exhausted.

Again, the fatigue is real. The diagnosis is not. Cognitive fatigue does not indicate that reason heroically suppressed instinct. It indicates conflict resolution under uncertainty without stable convergence.

When multiple evaluative systems fail to cohere cleanly, the result is:

  • prolonged rumination
  • narrative patching
  • justificatory rehearsal
  • defensive rationalisation

That is tiring. Not because reason triumphed, but because coherence never fully arrived.

The real mistake

The mistake is not ‘trusting the body’ or ‘listening to reason’. The mistake is re-importing a discredited architecture because the introspection sounds nice.

You do not have:

  • intuition vs reason
  • signal vs override
  • body vs mind
  • elephant vs rider with veto power

You have distributed pattern-recognition systems, operating at different speeds, with different representational affordances, producing outputs that consciousness stitches into a story after the fact. The story is useful. It is not causal.

What is worth noticing

There is something worth salvaging from the original intuition-first narrative, once it’s stripped of myth.

Early signals matter not because they are purer or wiser, but because they encode long-trained pattern sensitivity that may never become fully articulate.

Ignoring them does not mean you “chose reason.”
It means another pattern won.

And sometimes that pattern is worse.

Not because it was rational.
Because it was legible, defensible, or socially safer.

No resurrection required

None of this requires reviving the rational chooser, the sovereign self, or Homo economicus with a new haircut. The work is already done. The literature is settled. The corpse stays buried. What remains is learning to live without the comforting fiction that someone, somewhere inside you, was supposed to be in charge. That absence is not immaturity. It is the condition under which decisions actually occur. And pretending otherwise only gives the clipboard another imaginary promotion.

Philosophics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Moral Psychology and the Art of Not Believing Your Own Results

Posted in philosophy, podcast, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

Over the past few decades, moral psychology has staged a quiet coup against one of our most cherished fantasies: that human beings are, at bottom, rational moral agents. This is not a fringe claim. It is not a Twitter take. It is the mainstream finding of an entire research programme spanning psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience.

We do not reason our way to moral conclusions. We feel our way there. Instantly. Automatically. And only afterwards do we construct reasons that make the judgment sound respectable.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

This is not controversial anymore. It is replicated, taught, and celebrated. And yet, if you read the most influential books in this literature, something strange happens. The diagnosis is devastating. The prescription is reassuring.

I’ve just published a long-form video walking through five canonical books in moral psychology that all uncover the same structural problem, and then quietly refuse to live with the implications.

What follows is a brief guide to the argument.

The shared discovery

Across the literature, the same conclusions keep reappearing:

  • Moral judgement is intuitive, not deliberative
  • Reasoning is largely post-hoc
  • Emotion is not noise but signal
  • Framing and metaphor shape what even counts as a moral fact
  • Group identity and tribal affiliation dominate moral perception

In other words: the Enlightenment picture of moral reasoning is wrong. Or at least badly incomplete.

The rider does not steer the elephant. The rider explains where the elephant has already gone.

Audio: NotebookLM infographic

Where the books go wrong

The video focuses on five widely read, field-defining works:

  • The Righteous Mind (reviewed here and here… even here)
  • Moral Politics (mentioned here – with Don’t Think of an Elephant treated as its popular sequel)
  • Outraged! (reviewed here)
  • Moral Tribes (reviewed here)

Each of these books is sharp, serious, and worth reading. This is not a hit piece.

But each follows the same arc:

  1. Identify a non-rational, affective, automatic mechanism at the heart of moral judgement
  2. Show why moral disagreement is persistent and resistant to argument
  3. Propose solutions that rely on reflection, dialogue, reframing, calibration, or rational override

In short: they discover that reason is weak, and then assign it a leadership role anyway.

Haidt dismantles moral rationalism and then asks us to talk it out.
Lakoff shows that framing is constitutive, then offers better framing.
Gray models outrage as a perceptual feedback loop, then suggests we check our perceptions.
Greene diagnoses tribal morality, then bets on utilitarian reasoning to save us.

None of this is incoherent. But it is uncomfortable. Because the findings themselves suggest that these prescriptions are, at best, limited.

Diagnosis without prognosis

The uncomfortable possibility raised by this literature is not that we are ignorant or misinformed.

It is that moral disagreement may be structural rather than solvable.

That political conflict may not be cured by better arguments.
That persuasion may resemble contagion more than deliberation.
That reason often functions as a press secretary, not a judge.

The books sense this. And then step back from it. Which is human. But it matters.

Why this matters now

We are living in systems that have internalised these findings far more ruthlessly than public discourse has.

Social media platforms optimise for outrage, not understanding.
Political messaging is frame-first, not fact-first.
AI systems are increasingly capable of activating moral intuitions at scale, without fatigue or conscience.

Meanwhile, our institutions still behave as if one more conversation, one more fact-check, one more appeal to reason will close the gap. The research says otherwise.

And that gap between what we know and what we pretend may be the most important moral problem of the moment.

No solution offered

The video does not end with a fix. That’s deliberate.

Offering a neat solution here would simply repeat the same move I’m criticising: diagnosis followed by false comfort. Sometimes orientation matters more than optimism. The elephant is real. The elephant is moving.And most of us are passengers arguing about the map while it walks.

That isn’t despair. It’s clarity.

Philosophics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Qualified Subjectivism

Posted in podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
4–7 minutes

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.

Philosophics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

When Aliens Speak English: The False Promise of Linguistic Familiarity

Posted in consciousness, intelligence, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, post-enlightenment, postmodernism, videoTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
5–7 minutes

Why shared language creates the illusion – not the reality – of shared experience

Human beings routinely assume that if another agent speaks our language, we have achieved genuine mutual understanding. Fluency is treated as a proxy for shared concepts, shared perceptual categories, and even shared consciousness. This assumption appears everywhere: in science fiction, in popular philosophy videos, and in everyday cross-cultural interactions. It is a comforting idea, but philosophically indefensible.

Video: Could You Explain Cold to an Alien? – Hank Green

Recent discussions about whether one could ‘explain cold to an alien’ reveal how deeply this assumption is embedded. Participants in such debates often begin from the tacit premise that language maps transparently onto experience, and that if two interlocutors use the same linguistic term, they must be referring to a comparable phenomenon.

A closer analysis shows that this premise fails at every level.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.

Shared Language Does Not Imply Shared Phenomenology

Even within the human species, thermal experience is markedly variable. Individuals from colder climates often tolerate temperatures that visitors from warmer regions find unbearable. Acclimation, cultural norms, metabolic adaptation, and learned behavioural patterns all shape what ‘cold’ feels like.

If the same linguistic term corresponds to such divergent experiences within a species, the gap across species becomes unbridgeable.

A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense

A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense, but by adjusting metabolic output. A thermometer measures cold without experiencing anything at all. Both respond to temperature; neither inhabits the human category ‘cold’.

Thus, the human concept is already species-specific, plastic, and contextually learned — not a universal experiential module waiting to be translated.

Measurement, Behaviour, and Experience Are Distinct

Thermometers and reptiles react to temperature shifts, and yet neither possesses cold-qualia. This distinction illuminates the deeper philosophical point:

  • Measurement registers a variable.
  • Behaviour implements a functional response.
  • Experience is a mediated phenomenon arising from a particular biological and cognitive architecture.

Aliens might measure temperature as precisely as any scientific instrument. That alone tells us nothing about whether they experience anything analogous to human ‘cold’, nor whether the concept is even meaningful within their ecology.

The Problem of Conceptual Export: Why Explanation Fails

Attempts to ‘explain cold’ to hypothetical aliens often jump immediately to molecular description – slower vibrational states, reduced kinetic energy, and so forth. This presumes that the aliens share:

  • our physical ontology,
  • our conceptual divisions,
  • our sense-making framework,
  • and our valuation of molecular explanation as intrinsically clarifying.

But these assumptions are ungrounded.

Aliens may organise their world around categories we cannot imagine. They may not recognise molecules as explanatory entities. They may not treat thermal variation as affectively laden or behaviourally salient. They may not even carve reality at scales where ‘temperature’ appears as a discrete variable.

When the conceptual scaffolding differs, explanation cannot transfer. The task is not translation but category creation, and there is no guarantee that the requisite categories exist on both sides.

The MEOW Framework: MEOWa vs MEOWb

The Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) clarifies this breakdown by distinguishing four layers of mediation:

  • T0: biological mediation
  • T1: cognitive mediation
  • T2: linguistic mediation
  • T3: social mediation

Humans run MEOWa, a world structured through mammalian physiology, predictive cognition, metaphor-saturated language, and social-affective narratives.

Aliens (in fiction or speculation) operate MEOWb, a formally parallel mediation stack but with entirely different constituents.

Two systems can speak the same language (T2 alignment) whilst:

  • perceiving different phenomena (T0 divergence),
  • interpreting them through incompatible conceptual schemas (T1 divergence),
  • and embedding them in distinct social-meaning structures (T3 divergence).

Linguistic compatibility does not grant ontological compatibility.
MEOWa and MEOWb allow conversation but not comprehension.

Fiction as Illustration: Why Aliens Speaking English Misleads Us

In Sustenance, the aliens speak flawless Standard Southern English. Their linguistic proficiency invites human characters (and readers) to assume shared meaning. Yet beneath the surface:

  • Their sensory world differs;
  • their affective architecture differs;
  • their concepts do not map onto human categories;
  • and many human experiential terms lack any analogue within their mediation.

The result is not communication but a parallel monologue: the appearance of shared understanding masking profound ontological incommensurability.

The Philosophical Consequence: No Universal Consciousness Template

Underlying all these failures is a deeper speciesist assumption: that consciousness is a universal genus, and that discrete minds differ only in degree. The evidence points elsewhere.

If “cold” varies across humans, fails to apply to reptiles, and becomes meaningless for thermometers, then we have no grounds for projecting it into alien phenomenology. Nor should we assume that other species – biological or artificial – possess the same experiential categories, emotional valences, or conceptual ontologies that humans treat as foundational.

Consciousness is not a universal template awaiting instantiation in multiple substrates. It is a local ecological achievement, shaped by the mediations of the organism.

Conclusion

When aliens speak English, we hear familiarity and assume understanding. But a shared phonological surface conceals divergent sensory systems, cognitive architectures, conceptual repertoires, and social worlds.

Linguistic familiarity promises comprehension, but delivers only the appearance of it. The deeper truth is simple: Knowing our words is not the same as knowing our world.

And neither aliens, reptiles, nor thermometers inhabit the experiential space we map with those words.

Afterword

Reflections like these are precisely why my Anti-Enlightenment project exists. Much contemporary philosophical commentary remains quietly speciesist and stubbornly anthropomorphic, mistaking human perceptual idiosyncrasies for universal structures of mind. It’s an oddly provincial stance for a culture that prides itself on rational self-awareness.

To be clear, I have nothing against Alex O’Connor. He’s engaging, articulate, and serves as a gateway for many encountering these topics for the first time. But there is a difference between introducing philosophy and examining one’s own conceptual vantage point. What frustrates me is not the earnestness, but the unexamined presumption that the human experiential frame is the measure of all frames.

Having encountered these thought experiments decades ago, I’m not interested in posturing as a weary elder shaking his stick at the next generation. My disappointment lies elsewhere: in the persistent inability of otherwise intelligent thinkers to notice how narrow their perspective really is. They speak confidently from inside the human mediation stack without recognising it as a location – not a vantage point outside the world, but one local ecology among many possible ones.

Until this recognition becomes basic philosophical hygiene, we’ll continue to confuse linguistic familiarity for shared ontology and to mistake the limits of our own embodiment for the limits of consciousness itself.

Philosophics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

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

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

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

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

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

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

Stephen Batchelor vs Transductive Subjectivity: A Brief Comparative Note

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

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

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

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

2. Divergent Aims: Inner Liberation vs Structural Clarity

This is where the paths fork.

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

Batchelor wants flourishing. I want rigour. Accidental cousins.

3. Methodological Differences: Distillation vs Reconstruction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Different Stakes

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

One is therapeutic; the other is diagnostic.

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

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

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

Transductive Subjectivity takes a different route entirely.

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

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

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

In other words:

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

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

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

Closing Note

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

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

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

Philosophics's avatar

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

Philosophics