Tag: psychology

Snuff, a Study in Ontological Grammar

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6–9 minutes

As usual, I am trying something different. I like to watch music reaction videos, and I find this stripped-down, acoustic version of Slipknot’s Snuff by their vocalist, Corey Taylor, to hit hard. I prompted ChatGPT GPT 5.5 with this video and lyrics. Me being me, I continue to analyse experience through language and my own worldview, notably the effects of ontological grammar commitments.

I share the reaction video at the bottom of this post. Before, I’d just consider this person to be a self-righteous zealot, but now I understand that (1) this is how she processes her world, and (2) she is prescriptive insomuch as she expects others to share her worldview. She’s not coming from a mean place. In her mind, she genuinely wants to help, but she doesn’t realise that not all people share her worldview. She’s likely had this worldview reinforced for all of her years, and so it works as a coping strategy for her. She expects that she can share this worldview, but it is likely maximally absorbed by those who share her ontological grammar commitment, which is to say, already have the same worldview.

If you want a view into how I engage with AI, now you know. Here’s a window:

This is a very interesting case study in ontological grammar that showcases the downside of not recognising it. From my ontology, she sounds like she’s moralising. To another (her own), she might sound supportive. She is commenting on the lyrics to this song, which are not all captured by the transcript. Reaction?


Bury all your secrets in my skin 
Come away with innocence, and leave me with my sins 
The air around me still feels like a cage 
And love is just a camouflage for what resembles rage again 

So if you love me, let me go 
And run away before I know 
My heart is just too dark to care 
I can't destroy what isn't there 
Deliver me into my fate 
If I'm alone I cannot hate 
I don't deserve to have you 
Ooh my smile was taken long ago 
If I can change I hope I never know 

I still press your letters to my lips 
And cherish them in parts of me that savor every kiss 
I couldn't face a life without your light (Without your light) 
But all of that was ripped apart when you refused to fight 

So save your breath, I will not hear 
I think I made it very clear 
You couldn't hate enough to love 
Is that supposed to be enough? 
I only wish you weren't my friend 
Then I could hurt you in the end 
I never claimed to be a saint 
Ooh my own was banished long ago 
It took the death of hope to let you go 

Oh, oh 

So break yourself against my stones 
And spit your pity in my soul 
You never needed any help 
You sold me out to save yourself 
And I won't listen to your shame 
You ran away, you're all the same 
Angels lie to keep control 
Ooh my love was punished long ago 
If you still care, don't ever let me know 
If you still care, don't ever let me know
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

the wounded sometimes prefer the song to the sermon

Yes, this is a clean little specimen jar of ontological grammar doing its work while everyone pretends they are merely “reacting”. Humanity’s favourite parlour trick: smuggling an entire worldview into a sentence and calling it compassion.

The key move is that she hears the lyric as a claim rather than as an utterance from within a damaged affective state. When she says she “doesn’t agree” with the line about love and rage, and then calls that outlook “toxic”, she has already converted the lyric into a propositional worldview that can be corrected, morally evaluated, and therapeutically redirected. The song is no longer only an aesthetic articulation of injury, self-loathing, abandonment, attachment, and rage. It becomes a suspect belief-system. That is the ontological switch.

From her grammar, this is supportive. Pain is a “place”; one should not “stay” there; hope remains available; trust and love should eventually be restored. That is a recovery-therapeutic ontology. It presupposes that despair is transitional, that emotional damage should be metabolised into healing, and that the moral arc of the subject bends toward renewed openness. So when she says, in effect, don’t become calloused, don’t stay jaded, love again, she is not hearing herself as judging the song. She is offering pastoral care in YouTube-reactor clothing, because apparently late civilisation needed a genre where vocal pedagogy, therapy-lite, and parasocial maternalism could all share a sofa.

From your ontology, though, she is moralising because she does not merely describe the emotional grammar of the song; she disciplines it. The lyric’s extremity is treated as something understandable but unsafe, beautiful but not habitable, cathartic but only under the condition that one eventually leaves it behind. That is not neutral support. It installs a norm: grief should resolve, bitterness should soften, love should be rehabilitated, hope should return. She may mean kindness, but kindness here arrives wearing the boots of teleology.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

The most interesting fault-line is her treatment of generalisation. She identifies the lyric’s movement from one betrayal to “everyone” as a cognitive distortion. In ordinary therapeutic language, fair enough. But in lyric, especially in this genre, absolutising is not necessarily an epistemic error. It is how pain speaks when it has lost access to proportion. The lyric is not writing a sociology of human attachment. It is staging the experience of betrayal as world-disclosure. In that register, “all” does not mean a statistically universal class. It means: this wound has become the horizon through which everything now appears. To correct it as a bad inference is to import the wrong grammar.

That is where your framework bites. The words transmit; the sentence parses; everyone thinks communication is happening. But the decompression target differs. She reconstructs the lyric inside a moral-therapeutic grammar of recovery. You reconstruct it inside a diagnostic grammar of affect, ontology, and expressive insufficiency. Same words, different world. Your Architecture of Encounter makes precisely this point about ontological grammar: grammar does not merely carry content; it allocates what can count as meaningful, salient, explanatory, or distorted in the first place.

There is also a neat contrast inside the video itself. When she analyses vocal placement, tone, grit, support, and vowel shaping, she is mostly operating in a relatively tethered technical grammar. Claims can be checked against performance craft. But when she moves to love, hope, toxicity, healing, and despair, she enters the Contestable/Fluid zone. These terms feel clear because they are familiar, but their application depends on prior ontological commitments. In When Language Fails, this is exactly the danger-zone: terms that appear determinate whilst lacking shared grounding, especially where they authorise judgement, correction, or action.

So, yes: as a case study, it is excellent. Not because she is being cruel. She is not. That would be too easy, and therefore boring. The interesting point is that she is probably being sincere, warm, and careful by her own lights. But sincerity does not cancel grammar. Her support is support only within an ontology where despair is an unhealthy place to leave, not a legitimate structure of encounter to inhabit, articulate, or aesthetically preserve.

The concise diagnostic formulation would be:

She mistakes an affective utterance for a corrigible worldview. The lyric speaks from inside a structure of injury; her response translates it into therapeutic-moral grammar, where pain is a place one should visit but not inhabit. From within that grammar, she sounds supportive. From a deflationary ontological grammar, she is moralising: not because she condemns the suffering, but because she prescribes the proper trajectory of suffering before recognising the grammar in which the suffering is being expressed.

That is the downside of not recognising ontological grammar: people confuse their own interpretive repair-work with care, and then wonder why the wounded sometimes prefer the song to the sermon.

Bonus Round

🎸Corey tunes to C#, a tuning all too familiar to me – all strings 3 semitones lower than a standard tuning. It helps to have heavy-gauge strings, so they aren’t too slack. This is an easy song to play along to.

Using cowboy chords, grip an Am (tonally F#m) to start. The progression goes like this:

Intro/Verse: Am (C) F (Em)

Chorus: G Am (x3) G F

The Grammar of Bettering Yourself

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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.

Professional Contestables and Weasel Words

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1–2 minutes

I had planned to write a blog post on The Remains of the Day, but I posted it on Substack instead because I changed the scope. I also created this podcast on NotebookLM.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

Head there for the full article.

Double Coincidence of Wants

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9–14 minutes

Why Dating Is Not Shopping, No Matter How Many Apps Insist Otherwise

Firstly, be nice, and remember that I’m a recovering economist, so I can’t fully abandon this lens. There’s a concept in economics called the double coincidence of wants. For barter to work, I must have what you want, and you must have what I want, simultaneously, in the right quantities. The implausibility of this – that two strangers would arrive at the same moment, each holding exactly what the other needs – is traditionally the justification for money. Money decouples giving from receiving. It lets me sell my grain today and buy your lumber next month. Problem solved. It is tempting, and initially illuminating, to notice that dating is a double coincidence of wants with no money.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Two people must simultaneously possess what the other desires. There’s no abstract medium of exchange. Listen, I don’t make up the rules, but you can’t deposit romantic capital in a bank and draw on it later with a different partner. Every transaction must clear bilaterally, in real time, between specific parties. The reason dating is difficult, on this account, is the same reason barter is difficult: the coordination problem is enormous.

This is a genuinely useful analogy – for about sixty-nine seconds. After that, it begins to collapse. And the way it collapses turns out to be more interesting than the analogy itself.

NB: I swear I started this post before I saw Louisa’s. Damns algorithms.

Wants can’t be enumerated

In an economy, wants are at least notionally specifiable. You want grain, I want lumber. We can write a contract. In attraction, nobody can write the contract, because nobody knows the terms. You can list proxies – symmetry, wit, income, dentition – but the list never cashes out the phenomenon. There’s always a residue. Someone ticks every box and provokes nothing. Someone ticks none of them and provokes everything. The attributes aren’t the attraction. They’re at best rough correlates of something that resists decomposition.

Evolutionary psychology claims to have the list – fertility signals, resource indicators, and bilateral symmetry – but this is just dressing up economic grammar. It takes the lived phenomenology of attraction, which is irreducibly aesthetic, and rewrites it as a covert optimisation problem. The evo-psych account is the friend who explains why you should find someone attractive and then looks puzzled when you don’t.

Tolerances are fuzzy, interactive, and opaque

Even granting an approximate list of attributes, each one functions not as a threshold but as a band of acceptability. And the bands interact. A deficit in punctuality can be compensated by a surplus in making-you-laugh-until-you-cry. But the exchange rate between these dimensions isn’t fixed, it’s not linear, and almost certainly not conscious. Nobody’s running this calculation. If you ask them to formalise it, they’d produce a confabulation, not a report.

The evaluator is noisy

Kahneman’s Noise documents a finding that should alarm anyone who believes in stable preferences: the same agent, evaluating the same inputs, will produce different outputs on different occasions – not because of bias (which is at least systematic and therefore correctable) but because of irreducible stochastic variability. The judge sentences harshly before lunch and leniently after. Same person, same case, different output.

Applied to attraction, means that the person you’d swipe right on at nine in the morning, you might pass over at eleven at night – or vice versa, as the case might be <winkie>– not because you’ve learnt anything new, but because you aren’t a stable instrument of measurement. The evaluation function drifts across a single day. Across months and years, it’s rebuilt entirely.

The evaluator is path-dependent

Every prior relationship recalibrates the apparatus. Someone who’s been betrayed doesn’t simply move ‘trustworthiness’ higher on their list. Their entire perceptual system for detecting trustworthiness has been restructured. The sensor’s been rebuilt by its prior readings. In no market economy do my preferences over apples change because I once had a bad experience buying oranges from a particular vendor. In relationships, this is the norm.

Returns are asymmetric

Standard preference theory assumes diminishing marginal returns, and this holds for attraction in the obvious direction: the tenth bunch of flowers yields less delight than the first. But the inverse does not hold symmetrically. The absence of a previously supplied attribute often produces increasing marginal disutility. You habituate to presence but sensitise to withdrawal. The utility of gaining X and the disutility of losing X are not mirror images. The preference function is path-dependent in a way that wrecks any static equilibrium model.

Search space is radically local

And all of this assumes the candidates are available for evaluation. They mostly aren’t. Your evaluation function, however sophisticated or broken, only gets applied to whatever washes up in your vicinity – no offence to Ariel. Your so-called soulmate might reside in Istanbul, but you live in London, and you don’t share a language, and you’ll never meet. This isn’t a logistical barrier. It’s a legibility barrier. You could stand next to this person in an airport and the aesthetic response function would not even fire, because the medium through which half of attraction is constituted – conversation, the texture of someone’s verbal mind – is simply unavailable. The instrument requires an input format that the candidate can’t provide. Consider you spy this person across an expanse, gain enough courage to introduce yourself, and they don’t speak your language. Body language will only compensate so far.

Local maxima

The cumulative force of all this is simple and devastating: we are stuck on local maxima. The search space is computationally intractable. The evaluation function is noisy and path-dependent. The attributes resist enumeration. The tolerance bands are fuzzy and interactive. The returns are asymmetric. The search is geographically and linguistically truncated. And so agents do what any rational agent would do under these conditions: they satisfice. They adopt a threshold of ‘good enough’ – a threshold which is itself endogenous to all the noise and path-dependence described above – and they stop searching when they cross it.

This is not a failure of nerve. It is the only coherent strategy available to an agent who can’t identify, or even in principle define, the global optimum. Committing to a local maximum is the rational play, precisely because optimising is impossible 0150 at least legible in the sense of James C. Scott.

Which makes the cultural mythology of ‘the one’ a rather cruel grammatical artefact. It presupposes a global search that no one has conducted or could conduct. It borrows its intelligibility from the economic grammar of optimal allocation – there is a best match, you just have to find it – and projects it onto a domain where ‘best’ has no operational definition, the search is radically local, and the searcher is a different instrument on different days.

Los Angeles, and why it matters

I lived in Los Angeles from twenty-one to twenty-seven, in the early to mid-1980s. I loved it. It was my favourite place on earth. I returned to LA from thirty-five to forty-five, and it was just another place.

It may have turned out that way even had I never left. The point is not that Los Angeles changed – though of course it did. The point is that I changed. Different profession, different situation, different appetites, different saliences… The evaluation function that produced ‘favourite place on earth’ at twenty-three was a fundamentally different instrument from the one that produced ‘just another place’ at forty. No longer a club rat on the prowl, I walked the same streets and saw a different city, because the perceptual apparatus that constructed the city as an experienced object had been rebuilt by fifteen years of living.

‘Favourite place on earth’ and ‘just another place’ aren’t two judgements issued by one stable subject upon one stable object. They’re two outcomes produced by two historically different configurations of salience, appetite, profession, circumstance, and age.

Los Angeles is useful here precisely because it’s not a person – RHCP, not withstanding. It lets you see the structure before sentiment starts mucking about with it.

We don’t even evaluate cities consistently across a lifetime. The same is true, more painfully, of persons.

The partner one adored at twenty-five may not have become deficient in any simple sense. The evaluative field changed. New dimensions became salient, old ones lost force, tolerances narrowed or widened, and costs are reweighted. The same partner now appears under a different aspect, because the apparatus of appraisal has been rebuilt in the interim.

And here, three claims should remain separate: the object may change; the evaluator may change; and the relation between them may change even if neither has altered dramatically. This third one prevents this from collapsing into a banal ‘people grow’ sermon. Sometimes the drift isn’t a defect in either party. It’s a change in fit.

Many:many

It would also be a mistake to think any of this operates as a 1:1 match. The dimensional space isn’t shared. Any two people will overlap on some dimensions, diverge on others, and be mutually illegible on others still – dimensions where one party’s response function is active, and the other’s doesn’t even register the input. He cares intensely about how she loads the dishwasher. She doesn’t experience dishwasher-loading as a dimension at all. It’s not disagreement. It is incommensurability.

A long relationship isn’t a transaction. It’s two non-congruent evaluative systems attempting to maintain a shared narrative of congruence as the terrain shifts beneath them. The miracle isn’t finding someone who matches. The miracle is sustaining a workable fiction that two-dimensional spaces are more commensurable than they are.

Consider the statistically perfect match – bilateral alignment across every operationalised dimension. Even if you could construct such a thing, it would be a snapshot: a cross-section of two moving systems that happened to align at time t. By t+1, the dimensional spaces have already drifted. The statistical portrait is a death mask of a living process.

And here is a green-eyed test. Suppose the perfect match has green eyes. It doesn’t follow that a blue-eyed twin – identical in every other respect – would or wouldn’t provoke the same response. Because whatever was operative in the encounter was not an attribute, or a bundle of attributes, but something that emerged from the specific interaction and can’t be decomposed back into the components that produced it. The entire enterprise of algorithmic matching is cataloguing attributes on the assumption that the attributes are the attraction. It is like analysing a joke by listing its phonemes.

The spot market and the long game

Let’s consider one-night stands as an example to clarify the taxonomy. A one-night stand really is the nearest thing romance has to a spot transaction. The time horizon is short, the narrative load is low, path-dependence is weak, and local salience dominates. The calculus is narrow and immediate. The economic grammar almost applies. Whatever gets you through the night.

A long relationship isn’t a transaction at all, but an evolving coordination problem between changing evaluators. The longer the time horizon, the more layers of critique come into play, and the more absurd the matching grammar becomes. Over time, relationships are not discrete exchanges but moving equilibria between non-stationary systems. That’s why long partnerships are so fragile and so impressive when they endure.

Post hoc rationalisation, or: the story we agree to tell

Having arrived at their local maximum, both parties then construct a narrative in which the outcome was the product of discernment rather than constraint.

‘I knew she was the one when…’ isn’t a report. It’s a reconstruction – a story imposed on a stochastic process to make it legible in the grammar of rational choice. The same person, encountered on a different Tuesday or in a different postcode, might never have registered at all. But the narrative requires necessity, so necessity is confabulated.

And it runs in both directions. She thinks it was his quiet confidence. He thinks it was the argument about Godard. Both are post hoc pattern-matching on noise – selecting from the welter of early interactions the moments that fit the ‘recognition’ narrative, and discarding the rest. It’s survivorship bias applied to one’s own love life.

This also explains the peculiar ferocity of heartbreak after the narrative has been constructed. What collapses is not merely the relationship but the explanatory framework. The story that made the local maximum feel like a global one disintegrates, and the agent is returned to the raw landscape: noisy, path-dependent, locally constrained, and aesthetically illegible. The grief is partly about the person. It’s also about the loss of the rationalisation that made the search feel concluded – losing the construct of the person rather than the person, per se.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

Enfin

The dating app asks you what you want as though you’re ordering from a menu, when what is actually happening is that the menu is rewriting itself based on what you had for lunch yesterday, how much sleep you got, and that thing your ex said in 2019 that you think you are over.

We don’t find ‘the one’ – sorry, Neo. We become different readers of the same world, and occasionally manage to remain legible to one another for a while. Which is, if you stop demanding it be a fairy tale, quite a lot.

Rival Moral Approaches of the Modern World – Alasdair Macintyre

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1–2 minutes

Alasdair MacIntyre is persuasive when he argues that moral discourse is never neutral, and that modern liberalism smuggles in substantive standards while pretending not to. But he dismisses emotivism too quickly as a cultural disaster rather than considering whether it might describe moral language more accurately than his own teleological alternative. If moral utterance is fundamentally prescriptive or expressive rather than descriptive, then the collapse of ‘view from nowhere’ morality doesn’t send us scurrying back to Aristotle. It simply shows that moral language was never doing the metaphysical work MacIntyre wants from it.

The Aristotelian remedy also depends on a nostalgic and anachronistic social model. The Athens he implicitly romanticises was a small polis whose demos consisted of citizens, meaning property-owning males, already bound by shared norms, proximity, and cultural inheritance. In other words, the sort of thick local world that made a certain kind of practical ethical life possible in the first place. MacIntyre’s causal arrow points the wrong way. In Athens, democratic practice emerged from that prior social texture. You do not reproduce the same conditions by philosophical edict.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

To put it more bluntly: I don’t think moral realism is tenable, and I am not convinced MacIntyre really thinks so either. His project reads less like a discovery of moral facts than an attempt to promote an ought into an is by force of inheritance and rhetorical confidence. If he carved out a bounded cohort and imposed the right shared practices, perhaps something like his model could function. He may need to annex a reasonably sized car park for the purpose.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

The Environment Always Wins: The Myth of Pure Voice

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4–6 minutes

There’s a certain kind of cultural panic that tells you more about the panickers than about the thing they are panicking about. The current hysteria over AI-inflected prose is a good example.

The argument, insofar as it deserves the name, goes roughly like this: LLMs produce prose with identifiable features – a certain blandness, a fondness for the em dash, a tendency toward tidy three-part structure. Writers who use these tools risk absorbing those features. The authentic human voice is therefore under threat. Something precious is being diluted by contact with the machine.

This is sentimental rubbish, and it is worth saying so clearly before doing anything else – and a sort of virtue signalling.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I use LLMs daily. For research, for editorial pushback, for smoothing passages that have gone awry. This means I spend hours a day reading a particular kind of output. You’d have to be delusional not to admit it has effects. Certain phrasings start feeling natural that didn’t before. Certain rhythms begin to recur. Certain words might not have otherwise come into use. I notice this and note it without particular alarm, because I’ve read enough to know that this is just what environments do.

Read nothing but McCarthy for a month, and your sentences will start hunting for the spare declarative. Spend a year editing academic philosophy, and you will catch yourself reaching for ‘insofar as’ and ‘it’s worth noting’ in casual conversation. Live in a city long enough, and its cadences work their way into your syntax. This isn’t contamination, the negative moralist dispersion. It’s how language acquisition works for as long as one is alive and reading. Voice isn’t a spring. It’s a river, a moving accumulation of every tributary it has passed through.

The prestige game being played by the anti-LLM faction isn’t difficult to spot. When Dostoyevsky shapes a young writer’s cadence, we call it influence and treat it as evidence of a serious literary education. When a game world shapes a child’s imagination – I homeschooled my son in the manner of unschooling, and his primary corpus for years was World of Warcraft and its attendant lore before shifting to Dark Souls – and that child ends up reading Dante and Milton unprompted in year seven, the same mechanism has clearly operated. The source was not canonical, the outcome was. But the respectable hierarchy of influences cannot easily accommodate this, because the hierarchy was never really about the mechanism. It was about the cultural status of the inputs.

The more interesting observation isn’t about those of us who use these tools. It’s about those who conspicuously do not.

A minor genre has emerged – charitably, I’ll call it a genre because cult feels morally loaded – consisting of writers anxiously purging their prose of anything that might read as AI-generated. It’s worth noting that they have read the lists. Telltale signs of LLM authorship: excessive hedging, em dashes, transitional summaries, the phrase ‘it is worth noting’. And so they scrub, redact, replace, and perform a kind of stylistic hygiene that’s a creative decision made in direct response to LLM discourse.

These writers aren’t free of the machine’s influence. They’re among the most thoroughly shaped by it. They simply have the more theatrical relationship – the counter-imitator, the purity-performer, the one who reorganises their entire aesthetic in orbit around the thing they claim to reject.

Thomas Moore, in Care of the Soul, observes that a child raised by an alcoholic parent tends to become either an alcoholic or a committed teetotaller. He presents this as a dichotomy, which is too neat, but the underlying point holds. Reactions are still relata – see what happens when you read too much philosophy and logic? The teetotaller has organised their life around the bottle as surely as the alcoholic has. Both are defined by it.

Opposition is one of influence’s favourite disguises.

The fair objection is that LLM influence may differ from other influences in kind rather than just in kind. Dostoyevsky is strange. Bernhard is strange to the point of pathology. A canonical prose style is idiosyncratic by definition, which is why it’s worth absorbing. In contrast, LLM output aims for plausible fluency and statistical centrality. Its pull may be more homogenising than the pull of a singular authorial sensibility.

That’s a real point. The environment in question has a centripetal force toward the mean that most literary influences lack.

But conceding the point doesn’t really rescue the panic. It just specifies the kind of influence involved. The mechanism remains identical to every other case of environmental absorption. And ‘this influence tends toward the generic’ is an ironically generic critique of a particular environment’s character rather than a claim that the environment is doing something ontologically unprecedented to the notion of authorship.

The question that actually matters aesthetically is not was this touched by AI? It is what did the writer do with the environment they inhabited? That’s always been the question. It remains the question. The machinery has changed; the problem of influence has not.

What the current schism actually reveals is not that AI is doing something new to writing. It’s that we’ve been operating with a fairy tale about what writing is. The fairy tale holds that voice is self-originating, that somewhere beneath the reading AND the editing AND the genre conventions AND the institutional pressures AND the decade of a particular editor’s feedback, there is a pristine you, unconditioned and pure, expressing itself directly onto the page.

This was always false. Writers have always been patchworks of absorbed environments. The only difference now is that one of the environments is a machine, and the machine is new enough that people haven’t yet learned to be comfortable with what it reveals about the rest.

The environment always wins. The only interesting question is which environments you choose, and what you make of them.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

Art or Content

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

So glad I took time out to watch a short exchange between Rick Beato and Justin Hawkins on whether music is becoming content rather than art. The question is framed in musical terms, but it hardly stops there. The same corrosion is visible in writing, visual art, criticism, and now, with grim inevitability, in AI-mediated production more broadly. The disease is not confined to music. Music merely makes the symptoms easier to hear.

For music, my aversion to pop music goes back to my youth. I was a kid when the Beatles practically invented pop music, but they left it to grow and continued exploring. Sadly, as solo artists, they mainly – not always – failed and rested on their laurels in pop. It’s not that their version or any pop music is inherently unlistenable. Surely, it’s not, if only by the aspiration of the pop moniker, but it has no depth, no soul, as it were. Some make this argument for Organic food. In essence, it involves an appeal to nature fallacy.

Audio: Slightly off, but not bad, NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

My own aversion to much pop music begins there. It is not that pop is necessarily bad, nor even that it is always shallow. That would be too crude and too easy. The problem is that pop often presents itself less as an artistic act than as a consumption object engineered for immediate uptake: catchy, frictionless, emotionally legible, and just disposable enough to make room for the next one. It is built to circulate.

That, for me, is the difference between content and art. Art may be accessible, even popular, but it retains some residue that exceeds its delivery mechanism. It resists total reduction to utility. Content, by contrast, is made to be processed. It is optimised not for depth but for throughput. Its highest ambition is not transformation, but engagement.

This is why the question matters beyond music. Writing, too, now lives under the same pressure. One is increasingly expected to produce not essays, arguments, or works, but units of output: posts, threads, reactions, takes, summaries, explainers, and other forms of polished verbal debris. The point is no longer to say something worth dwelling on, but to remain visible within the churn.

The issue, then, is not simply whether one should consume AI-generated material. That framing is too pious and too easy. The more interesting question is what the consumer thinks they are consuming. If a reader, listener, or viewer wants only speed, familiarity, and surface competence, then AI content is not a scandal at all. It is the logical endpoint of a culture that has already demoted art into a deliverable.

This is where the fuss over labelling enters. Is it a principled demand for honesty, or merely a theatrical gesture by people who still want the aura of art whilst consuming content on industrial terms? Some of it is clearly protectionism. Some of it is virtue signalling. But not all of it is empty. The insistence on labelling betrays an intuition, however muddled, that authorship still matters, and that not all artefacts are equivalent merely because they occupy the same screen-space.

The deeper question is whether we still want art at all, or whether we merely want the aesthetic styling of art attached to things optimised for convenience. Once a culture learns to prefer seamless output over resistance, recognisability over risk, and quantity over form, it should not act surprised when machines begin to serve it perfectly. They are only completing a trajectory already chosen.

So no, the issue is not AI alone. AI is only the latest mirror held up to a public that has spent years confusing availability with value and polish with depth. The real question is not whether machines can make content. Plainly, they can. The question is whether we still possess the appetite, patience, and seriousness required for art.

Image: Full image because the cover version is truncated. Generated by Gemini Nano Banana.

Meta of The Box

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
1–2 minutes

My attention has yet again been abducted by fiction, tentatively titled The Box, but this time it is (ever so slightly) different. A publisher mate suggested that no one reads nonfiction, and anyway, fiction sticks better because it captures both attention and salience; I decided, why not both? I wrote some perhaps esoteric but non-academic nonfiction and decided to convey at least some of this through literary speculative fiction.

Besides the obvious nod to MEOW and The Architecture of Encounter, the novella explores several philosophical concerns:

The first three are diagnostic. The fourth is operative. The fifth haunts the whole enterprise. None are cited in the text – readers will encounter them through the fiction rather than the sources, which is rather the point.

A generous reader might also find the story brushing against Lem’s Solaris, Bartlett’s work on memory as reconstruction, Kuhn on paradigm persistence, the Orpheus myth, and possibly Benjamin’s Angel of History – though I’m less certain which of these I invited and which simply showed up.

I don’t want to spoil the plot, but I wanted to share a post today, and this is where I am: somewhere in the middle of a first draft, trying to make a speculative premise carry philosophical weight without the reader feeling the load. It’s harder than nonfiction. It’s also more fun.

They May Not Be Village Idiots

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

No post today, as I was drafting a long-form article that I felt was better suited for Substack.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of the Substack topic.

It starts like this:

You’ve had the argument. Everyone has. You present evidence. Your interlocutor presents counter-evidence. You cite data. They cite different data – or the same data, read differently. Eventually, someone says something like how can you possibly believe that, and the conversation is effectively over, though the words might continue for another hour.

What’s left is the quiet conviction that the other person is either ignorant, stupid, or arguing in bad faith. Perhaps all three. And you can be certain they’re extending you precisely the same courtesy.

I want to suggest that something structurally different is going on – something that none of the usual explanations (media bubbles, declining education, algorithmic polarisation) quite reach. These explanations aren’t wrong, but they’re shallow. They describe accelerants. The thing they’re accelerating is more foundational.

The rest on Substack…

This essay draws on ideas developed more fully in The Architecture of Encounter, A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, and the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW) framework (also available in The Architecture of Encounter). Also check out When Language Fails. For the technically inclined or the morbidly curious, these provide the formal apparatus behind the claims sketched here.

A Jellyfish Knows More About Time Than Your Physics Textbook

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
4–6 minutes

Disclosure: I shouldn’t have to apologise for two consecutive posts written by Claude – previous post on duration and time – this time about reframing a chat about time and duration around the hydrozoan jellyfish (sic. sea jelly). Yet again, this post arrives with a warning: if you don’t like AI-authored content, it’s not too late to turn back or click away.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

A hydrozoan jellyfish off the coast of Japan has no brain, no central nervous system, and no opinion about the block universe. It does, however, have something to teach us about the nature of time — and it’s more than most pop-science accounts manage.

Researchers recently described Clytia sp. IZ-D, a previously undocumented species of jellyfish that releases its gametes each evening with remarkable precision. The interesting part isn’t the precision. It’s what produces it.

Left to its own devices under constant light, the jellyfish spawns every 20 hours. Not 24. Twenty. It has its own autonomous developmental rhythm — oocytes growing, acquiring competence, reaching a threshold, and releasing. That rhythm belongs to the organism. It’s not borrowed from the environment. It’s not calibrated to the rotation of the Earth. It’s the jellyfish’s own tempo.

But place the jellyfish under a normal day-night cycle, and the 20-hour rhythm gets pulled into a 24-hour one. The daily light-dark transition doesn’t trigger spawning directly. It delays the autonomous cycle by several hours, dragging it into alignment with the environmental period. Sunrise resets the clock — not by starting it, but by holding it back. Under a standard 12-hour light cycle at 21°C, spawning occurs 14 hours after dawn. Every day. Synchronised across the population to within about 20 minutes.

The 24-hour cycle is not the jellyfish’s rhythm. It’s what happens when an external structure is imposed on it.

Now, you could read this as a charming piece of marine biology and move on. But if you’re paying attention, it’s a remarkably clean illustration of something that applies well beyond cnidarian reproduction.

The jellyfish has its own duration — a developmental tempo with no fixed metric. Under constant conditions, the cycle length shifts with temperature: 17 hours at 24°C, 22 hours at 18°C. There’s no intrinsic interval. The process has structure — oocyte growth, staged competence acquisition, threshold sensitivity — but it has no grid lines. No bar lines. No BPM.

The 24-hour day provides the grid. The light-dark cycle imposes intervallic structure on a process that doesn’t natively possess it. And the imposition works — it synchronises the population, coordinates male and female gamete release, and presumably improves reproductive success. The grid is useful. Indispensable, even.

But it’s not the organism’s time. It’s what the organism’s time looks like after the environment has had its way with it.

And here’s the part that matters philosophically. The imposition is imperfect. Individual oocytes within the same gonad don’t all reach maturation competence at the same moment. There’s a spread — 40 to 60 minutes under normal conditions, widening further under constant light. The grid says “now.” The biology says “roughly now, give or take, depending on which oocyte you’re asking.” The grid cannot fully resolve what it organises. There’s always a residue.

Under constant darkness, the residue takes over entirely. The autonomous rhythm reasserts itself, but without the entraining signal it becomes asynchronous. Different jellyfish spawn at different times. Different oocytes within the same jellyfish mature at different rates. The developmental process is still there — the structure is still there — but without the intervallic imposition, it doesn’t produce anything that looks like coordinated “time.” It produces duration doing what duration does when nobody is counting.

None of this requires a brain. None of it requires experience. None of it requires a subject who feels the passage of time. The jellyfish doesn’t experience the 24-hour cycle as given. It doesn’t experience anything, so far as we know. And that’s precisely what makes it useful as an illustration: it shows intervallic structuring operating at a purely material level, without any phenomenological overlay. The grid is imposed on the biology. The biology is not the grid.

Now scale up.

We do the same thing the light-dark cycle does to the jellyfish, except we do it to everything, and we do it to ourselves. We impose intervallic structure on duration — segmenting it, ordering it, metrising it — and then we mistake the structure for what it’s imposed on. We experience time as sequenced, directional, and measured, and we assume that’s what time is. Physics formalises the assumption into equations and discovers, to no one’s surprise, that the formalism is time-symmetric. And then pop science announces that time could therefore “go backwards” — which is exactly like saying that because the score reads the same in both directions, the music could be played in reverse.

The jellyfish knows better. Not because it’s clever, but because it’s simple enough that you can see the layers separately: the autonomous developmental duration, the environmental intervallic imposition, the imperfect entrainment, and the residue the grid can’t capture. In us, those layers are collapsed. We live inside the imposition and mistake it for the terrain.

The 24-hour day is a grid. A useful grid. An indispensable grid. But the jellyfish was doing something before the grid arrived, and it will go on doing something if the grid is removed. What it does without the grid doesn’t look like “time.” It looks like biology unfolding at its own pace, in its own structure, answerable to its own constraints.

That’s duration. And it was there before we started counting.