Tag: psychology

The Useful Fiction of Atoms and Selves

Posted in identity, ontology, philosophy, podcast, societyTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

There is a peculiar anachronism at work in how we think about reality. In physics, we still talk as if atoms were tiny marbles. In everyday life, we talk as if selves were little pilots steering our bodies through time. In both cases, we know better. And in both cases, we can’t seem to stop.

Audio: NotebookLM summary of this podcast

Consider the atom. Every chemistry textbook shows them as colorful spheres, electrons orbiting like planets. We teach children to build molecules with ball-and-stick models. Yet modern physics dismantled this picture a century ago. What we call ‘particles’ are really excitations in quantum fields—mathematical patterns, not things. They’re events masquerading as objects, processes dressed up as nouns.

The language persists because the maths doesn’t care what we call things, and humans need something to picture. ‘Electron’ is easier to say than ‘localised excitation in the electromagnetic field’.

The self enjoys a similar afterlife.

We speak of ‘finding yourself’ or ‘being true to yourself’ as if there were some stable entity to find or betray. We say ‘I’m not the same person I was ten years ago’ while simultaneously assuming enough continuity to take credit – or blame – for what that ‘previous person’ did.

But look closer. Strip away the story we tell about ourselves and what remains? Neural firing patterns. Memory fragments. Social roles shifting with context. The ‘you’ at work is not quite the ‘you’ at home, and neither is the ‘you’ from this morning’s dream. The self isn’t discovered so much as assembled, moment by moment, from available materials.

Like atoms, selves are inferred, not found.

This isn’t just philosophical hand-waving. It has practical teeth. When someone with dementia loses their memories, we wrestle with whether they’re ‘still themselves’. When we punish criminals, we assume the person in prison is meaningfully continuous with the person who committed the crime. Our entire legal and moral framework depends on selves being solid enough to bear responsibility.

And here’s the thing: it works. Mostly.

Just as chemistry functions perfectly well with its cartoon atoms, society functions with its fictional selves. The abstractions do real work. Atoms let us predict reactions without drowning in field equations. Selves let us navigate relationships, assign accountability, and plan futures without collapsing into existential vertigo.

The mistake isn’t using these abstractions. The mistake is forgetting that’s what they are.

Physics didn’t collapse when atoms dissolved into probability clouds. Chemistry students still balance equations; medicines still get synthesised. The practical utility survived the ontological revolution. Similarly, ethics won’t collapse if we admit selves are processes rather than things. We can still make promises, form relationships, and hold each other accountable.

What changes is the confusion.

Once you see both atoms and selves as useful fictions – pragmatic compressions of unmanageable complexity – certain puzzles dissolve. The ship of Theseus stops being paradoxical. Personal identity becomes a matter of degree rather than an all-or-nothing proposition. The hard problem of consciousness softens when you stop looking for the ghost in the machine.

We’re pattern-seeking creatures in a universe of flux. We freeze processes into things because things are easier to think about. We turn verbs into nouns because nouns fit better in our mental hands. This isn’t a bug in human cognition – it’s a feature. The problem comes when we forget we’re doing it.

So we end up in the peculiar position of defending little billiard balls in a field universe, and little inner captains in a processual mind, long after the evidence has moved on. We know atoms aren’t solid. We know selves aren’t fixed. Yet we persist in talking as if they were.

Perhaps that’s okay. Perhaps all language is a kind of useful betrayal of reality – solid enough to stand on, but not so solid we can’t revise it when needed.

The half-life of knowledge keeps ticking. Today’s insights become tomorrow’s anachronisms. But some fictions are too useful to abandon entirely. We just need to remember what they are: tools, not truths. Maps, not territories.

And every once in a while, it helps to check whether we’re still navigating by stars that went out long ago.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Facts, Intent, and the Afterlife of Metaphysics

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
5–8 minutes

I’ve been reading Bernard Williams lately, and I’ve written about his work on Truth and Truthfulness. I’m in the process of writing more on the challenges of ontological moral positionsand moral luck. I don’t necessarily want to make contemporary news my focal point, but this is a perfect case study for it. I’ll be releasing a neutral philosophy paper on the underlying causes, but I want to comment on this whilst it’s still in the news cycle.

The form of xenophobia is a phenomenon occurring in the United States, though the ontological split is applicable more generally. For those unfamiliar with US news, I’ll set this up. The United States is currently deploying federal enforcement power in ways that deliberately bypass local consent, blur policing and military roles, and rely on fear as a stabilising mechanism. Historical analogies are unavoidable, but not required for the argument that follows. These forces have been deployed in cities that did not and do not support the Trump administration, so they are exacting revenge and trying to foment fear and unrest. This case is an inevitable conclusion to these policy measures.

tl;dr: The Law™ presents itself as fact-driven, but only by treating metaphysical imputations about inner life as if they were empirical findings. This is not a flaw in this case; it is how the system functions at all.

NB: Some of this requires having read Williams or having a familiarity with certain concepts. Apologies in advance, but use Google or a GPT to fill in the details.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.

Why the Minneapolis ICE Shooting Exposes the Limits of Bernard Williams

The Minneapolis ICE shooting is not interesting because it is unusual. It is interesting because it is painfully ordinary. A person is dead. An officer fired shots. A vehicle was involved. Video exists. Statements were issued. Protests followed. No one seriously disputes these elements. They sit in the shared centre of the Venn diagram, inert and unhelpful. Where everything fractures is precisely where the law insists clarity must be found: intent and motive. And this is where things stop being factual and start being metaphysical.

The Comfortable Fiction of Legal Facts

The legal system likes to tell a comforting story about itself. It claims to be empirical, sober, and evidence-driven. Facts in, verdicts out. This is nonsense.

What the law actually does is this:

  • It gathers uncontested physical facts.
  • It then demands a psychological supplement.
  • It treats that supplement as if it were itself a fact.

Intent and motive are not observed. They are inferred. Worse, they are imposed. They are not discovered in the world but assigned to agents to make outcomes legible.

In Minneapolis, the uncontested facts are thin but stable:

  • A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026.
  • The incident involved Good’s vehicle, which was present and moving at the time shots were fired.
  • Ross fired his weapon multiple times, and Good died from those gunshot wounds.
  • The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims the agent acted in self-defence.
  • Video footage exists that shows at least part of the encounter.
  • The case ignited protests, widespread condemnation from local officials, and political pushback.

This creates a shared intersection: vehicle, Ross, shots, and that ‘something happened’ that neither side is denying.

The Law smuggles metaphysics into evidence and calls it psychology.

None of these facts contain intent. None of them specify motive. They do not tell us whether the movement of the vehicle was aggression, panic, confusion, or escape. They do not tell us whether the shooting was fear, anger, habit, or protocol execution. Yet the law cannot proceed without choosing.
So it does what it always does. It smuggles metaphysics into evidence and calls it psychology.

Intent and Motive as Institutional Impositions

Intent is treated as a condition of responsibility. Motive is treated as its explanation. Neither is a fact in anything like the ordinary sense. Even self-report does not rescue them. Admission is strategically irrational. Silence is rewarded. Reframing is incentivised. And even sincerity would not help, because human beings do not have transparent access to their own causal architecture. They have narratives, rehearsed and revised after the fact. So the law imputes. It tells the story the agent cannot safely tell, and then punishes or absolves them on the basis of that story. This is not a bug. It is the operating system.

Where Bernard Williams Comes In

This is where Bernard Williams becomes relevant, and where his account quietly fails. In Truth and Truthfulness, Williams famously rejects the Enlightenment fantasy of capital-T Truth as a clean, context-free moral anchor. He replaces it with virtues like sincerity and accuracy, grounded in lived practices rather than metaphysical absolutes. So far, so good.

Williams is right that moral life does not float above history, psychology, or culture. He is right to attack moral systems that pretend agents consult universal rules before acting. He is right to emphasise thick concepts, situated reasons, and practical identities. But he leaves something standing that cannot survive the Minneapolis test.

The Residue Williams Keeps

Williams still needs agency to be intelligible. He still needs actions to be recognisably owned. He still assumes that reasons, however messy, are at least retrospectively available to anchor responsibility. This is where the residue collapses.

In cases like Minneapolis:

  • Intent is legally required but epistemically unavailable.
  • Motive is legally explanatory but metaphysically speculative.
  • Admission is disincentivised.
  • Narrative is imposed under institutional pressure.

At that point, sincerity and accuracy are no longer virtues an agent can meaningfully exercise. They are properties of the story selected by the system. Williams rejects metaphysical Truth while retaining a metaphysical agent robust enough to carry responsibility. The problem is that law does not merely appeal to intelligibility; it manufactures it under constraint.

Moral Luck Isn’t Enough

Williams’ concept of moral luck gestures toward contingency, but it still presumes a stable agent who could, in principle, have acted otherwise and whose reasons are meaningfully theirs. But once intent and motive are understood as institutional fabrications rather than inner facts, ‘could have done otherwise’ becomes a ceremonial phrase. Responsibility is no longer uncovered; it is allocated. The tragedy is not that we fail to know the truth. The tragedy is that the system requires a truth that cannot exist.

Facts Versus Stories

The law does not discover which story is true. It selects which story is actionable.

The Minneapolis case shows the fault line clearly:

  • Facts: bodies, movements, weapons, recordings.
  • Stories: fear versus anger, defence versus aggression.
  • The first is uncontested. The second does all the work.

And those stories are not epistemic conclusions. They are metaphysical commitments enforced by law. Williams wanted to rescue ethics from abstraction. What he could not accept is that, once abstraction is removed, responsibility does not become more human. It becomes procedural.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

The law does not operate on truth. It operates on enforceable interpretations of behaviour. Intent and motive are not facts. They are tools. Williams saw that capital-T Truth had to go. What he did not see, or perhaps did not want to see, is that the smaller, more humane residue he preserved cannot bear the weight the legal system places on it.

Once you see this, the obsession with ‘what really happened’ looks almost childish. The facts are already known. What is being fought over is which metaphysical fiction the system will enforce.

That decision is not epistemic. It is political. And it is violent.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

James Talks Truth

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

I’ve read about 85 per cent of James by Percival Everett. I recommend it. On the surface, it is simply a very good story set in the narrative universe of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. I will avoid spoilers as best I can.

The novel is set in the antebellum American South. James and the others move through Missouri, a state that openly supported slavery, and at one point into Illinois, a state that officially opposed it but quietly failed to live up to its own rhetoric. Illinois, it turns out, is no safe haven. Ideology and practice, as ever, are on speaking terms only when it suits them.

Audio: Short NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.

This is not a book review. I may write one later for my Ridley Park site once I’ve finished the book. What interests me here are two philosophical tensions Everett stages with remarkable economy.

There are two characters who are Black but able to pass as white. One of them feels profound guilt about this. He was raised as a slave, escaped, and knows exactly what it means to be treated as Black because he has lived it. Passing feels like theft. Survival, perhaps, but theft all the same.

The other is more unsettled. He was raised as a white man and only later discovers that he is not, as the language goes, “pure-bred”. This revelation leaves him suspended between identities. Should he now accept a Black identity he has never inhabited, or continue to pass quietly, benefitting from a system that would destroy him if it knew?

James offers him advice that is as brutal as it is lucid:

“Belief has nothing to do with truth. Believe what you like. Believe I’m lying and move through the world as a white boy. Believe I’m telling the truth and move through the world as a white boy anyway. Either way, no difference.”

This is the philosophical nerve of the book.

Truth, Everett suggests, is indifferent to belief. Belief does not mediate justice. It does not reorganise power. It does not rewire how the world responds to your body. What matters is not what is true, nor even what is believed to be true, but how one is seen.

The world does not respond to essences. It responds to appearances.

Identity here is not an inner fact waiting to be acknowledged; it is a surface phenomenon enforced by institutions, habits, and violence. The truth can be known, spoken, even proven, and still change nothing. The social machine runs on perception, not ontology.

In James, Everett is not offering moral comfort. He is stripping away a modernist fantasy: that truth, once revealed, obliges the world to behave differently. It doesn’t. The world only cares what you look like while moving through it.

Truth, it turns out, is perfectly compatible with injustice.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

When Words Do the Work: A Case Study in Nomenclature Drift

Posted in philosophy, podcast, politicsTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–5 minutes

Lewis Goodall, a talk show host, calls the cross-border seizure of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro a ‘kidnapping’. His guest and Trump apologist, Angie Wong, rejects the word. She first says ‘arrest’, then ‘extradition’, then finally the improvised ‘special extradition’. Around that single lexical choice, a 12-minute standoff unfolds.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

As a language philosopher, I am evaluating the language and am less concerned with the underlying facts of the matter. Language serves to obscure these facts from the start and then rhetorically controls the narrative and framing.

Video: Source segment being analysed

There is a familiar mistake made whenever public discourse turns heated: the assumption that the real disagreement lies in the facts. This is comforting, because facts can, at least in principle, be checked. What follows examines a different failure mode altogether. The facts are largely beside the point.

Consider a broadcast exchange in which a political commentator and an interviewer argue over how to describe the forcible removal of a head of state from one country to another. The interviewer repeatedly uses the word kidnapping. The guest repeatedly resists this term, preferring arrest, extradition, and eventually the improvisational compromise ‘special extradition’.

What matters here is not which term is correct. What matters is what the interaction reveals about how meaning is negotiated under pressure.

The illusion of disagreement

Superficially, the exchange appears to be a dispute about legality. Was there a treaty? Was due process followed? Which court has jurisdiction? These questions generate heat, but they are not doing the work.

The real disagreement is prior to all of that: which lexical frame is allowed to stabilise the event.

Once a label is accepted, downstream reasoning becomes trivial. If it was an extradition, it belongs to one legal universe. If it was a kidnapping, it belongs to another. The participants are not arguing within a shared framework; they are competing to install the framework itself.

Equivocation as method, not error

The guest’s shifting vocabulary is often described as evasive or incoherent. This misreads what is happening. The movement from extradition to special extradition is not confusion. It is a deliberate widening of semantic tolerance.

‘Special extradition’ is not meant to clarify. It is meant to survive. It carries just enough institutional residue to sound procedural, while remaining sufficiently vague to avoid binding criteria. It functions less as a description than as a holding pattern.

This is equivocation, but not the amateur kind taught in logic textbooks. It is equivocation under constraint, where the aim is not precision but narrative continuity.

Why exposure fails

The interviewer repeatedly points out that extradition has a specific meaning, and that the situation described does not meet it. This is accurate, and also ineffective.

Why? Because the exchange is no longer governed by definitional hygiene. The audience is not being asked to adjudicate a dictionary entry. They are being asked to decide which voice has the authority to name the act.

Once that shift occurs, exposing misuse does not correct the discourse. It merely clarifies the power asymmetry. The guest can concede irregularity, precedent-breaking, even illegality, without relinquishing control of the label. The language continues to function.

Truth as a downstream effect

At no point does the exchange hinge on discovering what ‘really happened’. The physical sequence of events is relatively uncontested. What is contested is what those events are allowed to count as.

In this sense, truth is not absent from the discussion; it is subordinate. It emerges only after a rhetorical frame has been successfully installed. Once the frame holds, truth follows obediently within it.

This is not relativism. It is an observation about sequence. Rhetoric does not decorate truth here; it prepares the ground on which truth is later claimed.

Language doing institutional work

The most revealing moment comes when the guest effectively shrugs at the legal ambiguity and asks who, exactly, is going to challenge it. This is not cynicism. It is diagnostic.

Words like arrest and extradition are not merely descriptive. They are operational tokens. They open doors, justify procedures, and allow institutions to proceed without stalling. Their value lies less in semantic purity than in administrative usability.

‘Kidnapping’ is linguistically precise in one register, but administratively useless in another. It stops processes rather than enabling them. That is why it is resisted.

What the case study shows

This exchange is not about geopolitics. It is about how language behaves when it is tasked with carrying power. Meaning drifts not because speakers are careless, but because precision is costly. Labels are selected for durability, not accuracy. Truth does not arbitrate rhetoric; rhetoric allocates truth. Seen this way, the debate over terminology is not a failure of communication. It is communication functioning exactly as designed under modern conditions. Which is why insisting on ‘the correct word’ increasingly feels like shouting into a ventilation system. The air still moves. It just isn’t moving for you.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Bonus 2025 Post + Books

Posted in ontology, updateTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

2025 has been a good year for this blog. I’ve crossed the 1,000-post mark, and this year it has had over 30,000 page views – best year ever. This month was the best month ever, and 1st December was the most popular day ever. That’s a lot of ‘evers’.

I shared the remainder of this post on my Ridley Park fiction blog – same reader, same books, same opinion. Any new content added below is in red.

I genuinely loathe top X lists, so let us indulge in some self-loathing. I finished these books in 2026. As you can see, they cross genres, consist of fiction and non-fiction, and don’t even share temporal space. I admit that I’m a diverse reader and, ostensibly, writer. Instead of just the top 5. I’ll shoot for the top and bottom 5 to capture my anti-recommendations. Within categories are alphabetical.

Fiction

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – A slow reveal about identity, but worth the wait.

This was very philosophical and psychological. Nothing appeared to happen until chapter 7, as I recall. I felt like I was just eavesdropping on some school chums, which I was. Then came the big reveal.

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky – Classic unreliable narrator.

Again, philosophical, psychological. I liked it.

There Is No Antimemetics Division by QNTM (AKA Sam Hughes) – Points for daring to be different and hitting the landing.

This, I read because I was attracted to the premise of memory as it might affect language. It touched on this a tad, but it was mostly about memory, anti-memory, and constructed selves. How can one experience a contiguous, diachronic self with memory gaps? It never quite got that deep, that on occasion it did, as far as I recall.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh – Scottish drugs culture and bonding mates narrative.

This is an age-old cult classic – much better than the already excellent films. Fills in what the film cut for its medium. I read several other Welsh books. Filth was an honourable mention, which I also made connexions to Antimemetics, above.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin – In the league of 1984 and Brave New World, but without the acclaim.

This flagged a tad at the end, but it was prescient and released in 1922, decades before 1984 and Brave New World. Worth the read.

Nonfiction

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher – Explains why most problems are social, not personal or psychological. Follows Erich Fromm’s Sane Society, which I also read in 2025 and liked, but it fell into the ‘lost the trail’ territory at some point, so it fell off the list.

Moral Politics by George Lakoff

Evidently, I forgot to explain myself in my prior post. I refer to this book and its trade counterpart, Don’t Think of an Elephant, which is more of a political polemic, but still worth the read. It’s also shorter. This is about Moral politics – duh! – but it’s about moral language. It was a precursor to Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion or Kurt Gray’s Outraged! I found Haidt’s work interesting but reductive; I found Gray’s work merely reductive.

This said, Lakoff and Haidt were the vector through which I came upon my language ontology theory that further confounds language insufficiency. To be sure, Haidt was an unnecessary point, but it did emphasise it. Haidt’s frameworks also give me something to riff on.

Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis – Explains why Capitalism is already dead on arrival.

Nothing much to add here. Technofeudalism is economic fare, albeit with philosophical implications. I enjoyed it. Yanis is also an interesting speaker.

NB: Some of the other books had great pieces of content, but failed as books. They may have been better as essays or blog posts. They didn’t have enough material for a full book. The Second Sex had enough for a book, but then Beauvoir poured in enough for two books. She should have quit whilst she was ahead.

Image: Books I read in 2025 on Goodreads.
Full disclosure: I don’t always record my reading on Goodreads, but I try.

Bottom of the Barrel

Crash by J.G. Ballard – Hard no. I also didn’t like High-rise, but it was marginally better, and I didn’t want to count an author twice.

Nah. I felt he was trying to hard for shock value. It didn’t shock, but it put me off. At least High-rise represented an absurd cultural microcosm. I just wanted the story to be over. Luckily, I read both of these sequentially whilst on holiday, so I wasn’t looking to ingest anything serious.

Neuromancer by William Gibson – I don’t tend to like SciFi. This is a classic. Maybe it read differently back in the day. Didn’t age well.

Nexus by Yuval Harari – Drivel. My mates goaded me into reading this. I liked Sapiens. He’s gone downhill since then. He’s a historian, not a futurist.

Outraged! by Kurt Gray – Very reductionist view of moral harm, following the footsteps of George Lakoff and Jonathan Haidt.

See comments above. ☝️

Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord – A cautionary tale on why writing a book on LSD may not be a recipe for success.

Honourable Mention

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer was also good, but my cutoff was at 5. Sorry, Jeff.

I did like this, and it was much better than the Natalie Portman film adaptation. This is the first book in a trilogy. I absolutely hated the second instalment. The third was not as good as the first, but it tried to get back on track from the derailment of the second. As I wrote in public reviews, the second book could have been a prologue chapter to the third book with all of the relevant information I cared about. You could skip the second story with almost no material effect on the story or character arcs.

When the Brain Refuses Your Categories: Sapolsky and the Neuro-Biology of Transness

Posted in agency, identity, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, science, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

Looking through some of the drafts clogging the blog, I decided to whittle away at the queue. I started this months ago. It’s here now, not particularly in sync with the season or recent topics, but I like Sapolsky.

‘Biology is destiny’, say the Christian Right, the bland bureaucrats of morality, the loud whisperers at Sunday school. They want gender to be a tomb carved in marble: you’re assigned at birth, and you stay a perfect statue. But Sapolsky waltzes in and says, ‘Hold up – what do you mean by biology? Which biology? Which markers count?’

Video: Neuro-biology of Transsexuality, Prof. Robert Sapolsky

In the clip above, Sapolsky unpacks neurological evidence that upends the essentialist cheat codes. He doesn’t pretend we now have the final answer to gender. He does something scarier to fundamentalists: he shows just how messy biology is.

The Bed Nucleus, the Finger Ratio, and the ‘Wrong Body’ Hypothesis

Sapolsky discusses three pieces of neurobiological evidence:

  1. Digit ratio (2nd vs 4th finger length): In lesbians, on average, the ratio is closer to what you see in straight men than straight women. That’s a correlation, an eyebrow-raiser, hardly a decree.
  2. Acoustic reflexes (auto-acoustic reflex): Another early finding in women’s sexual orientation, though faint and underexplored.
  3. The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc): Here we reach heavy artillery. There is a neuron population in this region that, on average, is about twice as large in males as in females. In postmortem analyses of trans women (male → female), this region’s size corresponds to their identified gender, not their natal sex. Crucially, that alignment is seen even in trans individuals who never underwent full hormone therapy or surgical changes.
    • Sapolsky recounts astute controls: men treated (for, say, testicular cancer) with feminising hormones don’t show the same shift.
    • Also, using the phantom-limb analogy: men who lose their penis to cancer often report phantom sensations; trans women rarely do. That suggests the body map in the brain never fully “registered” that organ in the same way.

He doesn’t overclaim. He doesn’t say, ‘Case closed, biology proves everything’. He says: These data complicate your neat categories. They force you to ask: which biological measure do you privilege? Hypertrophied neurons? Chromosomes? Receptor density? Hormones? All of them simultaneously? None of them?

Essentialism as a Trap

Fundamentalists and anti-trans ideologues deploy essentialism because it’s convenient. They demand an ironclad ‘essence’ so they can exclude anyone who fails their test. But what Sapolsky shows is that essence is simply a scaffold; we get to pick which biological scaffolds we accept. They may choose genes and genitals; the neurobiologist gives them neuron counts and brain-maps. When your ideology elevates one scaffold and ignores the others, it betrays its own contingency.

Moreover, the evidence suggests that identity, experience, insistence (in Sapolsky’s language: ‘insisting from day one’), and internal brain structure might converge. The ‘wrong body’ isn’t a metaphor. It’s a mismatch between internal brain architecture and external form. The stubborn fragments of biology that fundamentalists accept are torn by the dissonance that science increasingly reveals.

What This Means for Trans Rights, Discourse & Strategy

  • Science is never ‘conclusive’. Sapolsky offers compelling support, not gospel. Anyone claiming this settles everything has never looked at a scatter plot.
  • Lived experience still matters. Even if we never had brain slices, self-reports, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, narratives remain valid. Brain studies supplement, not supplant, testimony.
  • Essentialist opponents have boxed themselves in. When they demand biology decides everything, they hand the baton to neuroscientists – and neuroscientists keep running with it. The entire ‘biology’ equals only what I like’ regime is exposed.
  • Ambiguity is a strength, not a liability. If we insist identity is linear and tidy, we re-enact their demand for purity. Recognising complexity, mess, and variance is radical resistance.
microglyphics's avatar

Post by Bry Willis

microglyphics

On Mediation, or: Why I Let an AI Write My Last Post

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

…and this one. A clarification that is also a demonstration. If anything, the Americanisms should give it away.

The Preamble as Method

A previous post—the one with Foucault, Arendt, Sontag, Fish, Mill, and Girard all lined up like theoretical ammunition—was drafted entirely by ChatGPT after a conversation about the Dershowitz piece before it. I fed it my argument about moral contamination and asked it to expand the thesis with additional thinkers. It obliged. I posted it unedited.

I mention this not as confession but as method. If my core claim is that truth equals rhetoric—that there is no unmediated access to reality, only constructed positions negotiated through language, power, and interpretation—then having an AI mediate my argument while I mediate its output is not a bug. It’s a feature.

The question is never “who really wrote this” but “what work does this text do, and under what conditions?”

This is a non-foundationalist position. There is no neutral ground from which to assess claims. There is no Logic floating above rhetoric, no Reason untouched by affect, no Truth prior to its articulation. What we have are competing rhetorical constructions, each shaped by interests, histories, and power arrangements, each claiming—to varying degrees of honesty—to represent something beyond themselves.

The game is not to transcend this condition. The game is to stop pretending we ever could.

What I’m Actually Arguing

Let me be direct about what those two posts were defending, since the theoretical apparatus apparently obscured more than it clarified.

I am not arguing that:

  • Age of consent laws should be abolished
  • The French intellectuals were right to sign those petitions
  • Association with Epstein is irrelevant
  • Analysis automatically immunizes anyone from moral judgment

I am arguing that:

  1. Liberal discourse routinely launders emotional and political commitments as self-evident logic, then treats anyone who exposes this process as morally suspect.
  2. Legal thresholds are negotiated rhetorical compromises, not mathematical truths. They reflect harm minimization, cultural anxiety, enforcement pragmatics, and historical contingency. To analyze their construction is not to advocate their abolition.
  3. The “moral contamination reflex” treats inquiry as confession—not because the inquiry threatens truth, but because it threatens the claim that certain positions are simply Logic Itself rather than one rhetorical construction among others.
  4. Guilt by association is both a logical fallacy and sometimes a reasonable heuristic. The trick is admitting which one you’re doing at any given moment, rather than claiming your heuristic is deductive proof.

These claims are rhetorical positions. They are not transcendent truths. But neither are the positions they critique.

The Hypocrisy I’m Diagnosing

When someone argues that a 16-year-old capable of choosing abortion should be capable of choosing sex, they are making a rhetorical move. The argument has gaps—abortion concerns bodily autonomy in ways that sex with others does not; capacity for one decision doesn’t automatically transfer to capacity for another; power dynamics matter.

Fine. Point those out. Explain why the analogy fails.

But what actually happens is different. The argument is not refuted. The arguer is diagnosed. Making the argument becomes evidence of desire. Analyzing it becomes evidence of endorsement. Logic is treated as circumstantial proof of guilt.

This is not because the argument is uniquely dangerous. It’s because it threatens a stabilizing fiction: that our current legal thresholds are both pragmatically necessary and philosophically coherent. They are the former. They are not the latter. And the moral panic that greets anyone who points this out is not about protecting children. It’s about protecting the claim that our compromises are something more than compromises.

The same pattern plays out with Epstein associations. Some people knew him socially or professionally in contexts that had nothing to do with his crimes. Some people continued relationships after credible allegations emerged. Some people were directly complicit. These are different categories.

But the discourse collapses them. Everyone in the address book becomes suspect. Association becomes evidence. And anyone who suggests “we should distinguish between these cases” is immediately accused of defending predators.

This is not logic. This is moral theatre. And the fury it provokes when exposed is not righteous. It’s defensive.

The Difference Between Rhetoric and Relativism

Saying “truth equals rhetoric” sounds like relativism. It sounds like I’m claiming all positions are equal, nothing matters, anything goes.

I’m not.

I’m claiming that all positions are constructed through rhetoric, but that doesn’t make them equal. It means we should argue about them on the terms they actually operate—consequences, values, power, effects—rather than pretending one side has Logic and the other side has Emotion.

Some rhetorical constructions are more defensible than others. Age of consent laws, as constructed compromises aimed at harm reduction, are defensible. That doesn’t mean they’re philosophically coherent or that analyzing their incoherence is an attack on children.

Maintaining professional relationships with powerful people who were later revealed to be criminals does not make you guilty of their crimes. But it might raise questions about judgment, complicity, or willful blindness—questions that should be asked specifically, not universally.

The difference is this: I’m not claiming my position is Logic. I’m claiming it’s a rhetorical construction I find more defensible than the alternatives, for reasons I’m willing to argue about.

What I’m criticizing is the move where liberal discourse presents its rhetorical positions as self-evident moral truths, then treats dissent as pathology.

Why the Theoretical Version Failed

The expanded post tried to universalize the pattern—to show that this reflex appears across domains, across thinkers, across history. It succeeded at that. What it failed to do was stay grounded enough for readers to assess whether the pattern I was describing was real or whether I was constructing a persecution narrative.

The problem was strategic evasiveness. By staying abstract, the piece avoided being testable. It gestured at examples without committing to them. It borrowed authority from Foucault and Arendt without doing the work of showing how their critiques apply to the specific cases I had in mind.

This created a gap between what the essay claimed to be doing (defending analysis against moral panic) and what it was actually doing (defending specific controversial figures using theory as cover).

That gap is what critics correctly identified as bad faith.

What I Should Have Said

Here’s the honest version:

The Dershowitz argument is bad. The abortion-sex analogy doesn’t hold. But “the argument is bad” and “making the argument is evidence of pedophilia” are not the same claim. One is logical critique. The other is moral contamination. We should be able to distinguish them.

The 1977 French petitions were misjudged. Calling for the abolition of age of consent laws in that context, with those specific cases, was not wise. But signing a petition is not the same as committing the acts in question, and treating mid-century French intellectual culture as self-evidently monstrous erases the specific debates they were having about law, psychiatry, and state power. We can think they were wrong without treating the question itself as unspeakable.

Epstein’s network matters. Some associations are meaningful. Power enabled his abuse, and understanding how requires looking at who knew what and when. But not every name in a flight log or party photo is evidence of complicity, and the current discourse often treats them as such. We should distinguish between innocent contact, poor judgment, and active enablement—not flatten everything into “guilt by proximity.”

These are all messy positions. They require distinctions, context, and willingness to live in discomfort. That’s harder than moral certainty. But it’s also more honest.

The Meta-Point About AI Generation

The fact that the previous post was AI-generated does something interesting to all of this.

It was rhetorically effective. It marshaled the right theoretical authorities. It structured the argument coherently. It sounded like philosophy. And it was assembled by a pattern-matching system with no beliefs, no commitments, no stakes.

This should tell us something about the nature of rhetoric itself. The text worked—or didn’t—based on what it did, not where it came from. Authenticity is not truth. Authorship is not authority. What matters is whether the construction holds, and under what conditions.

I could have hidden the AI involvement. Many would. The disclosure feels like it undermines the argument’s authority—if a machine wrote it, does it count?

But that reaction itself proves the point. We want arguments to come from authenticated sources, from proper authority, from legitimate speakers. We want to know who’s talking so we can decide whether to trust them. This is not Logic. This is rhetoric all the way down.

The AI wrote a version of my argument that was cleaner and more theoretically sophisticated than I would have produced alone. It was also more evasive, more abstract, less committed. Those aren’t bugs in the process. They’re features of how the system generates text—maximizing coherence, minimizing controversy, staying in safe abstraction.

That I chose to post it anyway, knowing these limitations, is itself a rhetorical move. It says: “I’m willing to use mediated tools to construct my position, and I’m not pretending otherwise.”

What This Leaves Us With

I started with a claim about moral contamination—that liberal discourse treats certain kinds of inquiry as self-incriminating. I then demonstrated this by making precisely the kind of inquiry that provokes that reflex, using examples I knew would be read as defensive rather than analytical.

The responses proved the thesis. Analysis was read as confession. Theory was read as cover. Even asking whether a distinction exists between argument and endorsement was taken as evidence that no such distinction can be maintained.

But here’s what I didn’t make clear enough: I’m not claiming to be above this dynamic. I’m in it too. I have commitments, interests, and positions I’m defending. The difference is I’m naming them as such, rather than claiming they’re simply What Logic Demands.

Truth equals rhetoric. We’re all doing motivated reasoning. The question is not “who has transcended their motivations” but “whose motivations, toward what ends, with what consequences?”

I think the moral contamination reflex produces bad discourse—not because it’s emotional, but because it claims not to be. I think guilt by association is overused—not because association never matters, but because we’ve stopped distinguishing between different kinds of association. I think legal thresholds should be analyzable—not because they should be abolished, but because unexamined laws are dangerous even when well-intentioned.

These are rhetorical positions. I’m arguing for them. I’m not pretending they’re Logic Itself.

If you disagree, argue back. But argue with what I’m actually saying, not with what analysis supposedly reveals about my secret desires.

That’s all I’m asking for. And apparently, it’s too much.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5

microglyphics

Statutory Rape Is An Outdated Concept

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
3–5 minutes

I’ll bite. This notion is in the news again, dredged up with the Epstein Files™, as though moral panic were a renewable resource.

NB: This is the post that inspired me to write the essay on voting age restrictions.

if a 16-year-old can choose abortion,
then she should be able to choose to have sex

In the newspaper clipping above, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz argues that if a 16-year-old can choose abortion, then she should be able to choose to have sex. The argument is presented as sober, rational, and juridical. A syllogism offered as disinfectant.

There are many philosophical problems with the equivalence. I am not interested in most of them.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.

I’ve written before that age as a proxy for maturity collapses immediately into a Sorites paradox. It assumes commensurability where none exists. It treats human development as discretised and legible, when it is anything but. The law must draw lines. Philosophy does not have that luxury. But that is not why this argument resurfaces now.

What interests me is the moral contamination reflex it reliably provokes. The rule is tacit but rigid: if you reason calmly about a taboo subject, you must be defending it. If you defend it, you must desire it. If you desire it, you must be guilty of it. Logic becomes circumstantial evidence.

This reflex is not new. Nor is it confined to contemporary Anglo-American culture. Half a century ago, it played out publicly in France, with consequences that are now being retrospectively moralised into caricature.

In January and May of 1977, a petition published in Le Monde floated the abrogation of what was then called the “sexual majority”. In January of the same year, a separate petition called for the release of three men accused of having sex with boys and girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Among the signatories were Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze.

Today, this episode is typically invoked as a moral mic drop. No argument is examined. No context is interrogated. No distinction is drawn between legal reasoning, political provocation, and moral endorsement. The conclusion is immediate and terminal: these figures were monsters, or fools, or both.

The logic is familiar by now. If they signed, they must have approved. If they approved, they must have desired. If they desired, they must have practised. Analysis collapses into accusation.

None of this requires defending the petitions, the arguments, or the acts in question. It requires only defending a principle that has apparently become intolerable: that an argument can be examined without imputing motive, desire, or personal conduct to the person making it.

This is where liberal societies reveal a particular hypocrisy. They claim to value reasoned debate, yet routinely launder moral intuitions through rationalist language, then react with fury when someone exposes the laundering process. Legal thresholds are treated as if they were moral truths rather than negotiated compromises shaped by fear, harm minimisation, optics, and historical contingency.

Once the compromise hardens into law, the line becomes sacred. To question it is not civic scrutiny but moral trespass. To analyse it is to signal deviance. This is why figures like Foucault are not criticised for being wrong, but for having asked the question at all. The question itself becomes the crime.

It is often said, defensively, that emotion precedes logic. True enough. But this is usually offered as an excuse rather than a diagnosis. The supposed human distinction is not that we feel first, but that we can reflect on what we feel, examine it, and sometimes resist it. The historical record suggests we do this far less than we like to believe.

The real taboo here is not sex, or age, or consent. It is the suggestion that moral reasoning might survive contact with uncomfortable cases. That one might analyse the coherence of a law without endorsing the behaviour it regulates. That one might describe a moral panic without siding with its villains.

Instead, we have adopted a simpler rule: certain questions may not be asked without self-implication. This preserves moral theatre. It also guarantees that our laws remain philosophically incoherent while everyone congratulates themselves for having the correct instincts.

Logic, in this arrangement, is not a virtue. It is a liability. And history suggests that anyone who insists on using it will eventually be posthumously condemned for doing so.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Democracy, Competence, and the Curious Case of the Missing Test

Posted in Culture & Society, morality, philosophy, podcast, political theory, politicsTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
3–5 minutes

This is awkward. I’d been preparing some posts on the age of consent, and I decided to write a formal essay on ageism. Since the age of consent is a moral hot-button topic for some, I decided to frame the situation in a political framework instead. The setup isn’t much different, but it keeps people’s heads out of the gutter and removes the trigger that many people seem to pull. It’s awkward because none of these posts has yet been posted. Spoiler alert, I guess. I could delay this announcement, but I won’t. Here it is.

Full essay on Zenodo: Competency, Proxies, and Political Standing: A Conceptual Diagnosis or On the Rhetoric of Democratic Inclusion, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18063791

Democracy is often defended in lofty terms. We are told that citizens are rational agents, capable of judgment, autonomy, and reasoned participation in collective decision-making. Voting, on this story, is not just a procedure. It is the expression of agency by competent participants. That all sounds reassuring.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this essay and concept.

What’s curious is that no democratic system actually checks whether any of this is true.

There are no assessments of political understanding. No evaluation of judgment. No test of civic competence. You become a fully empowered political agent overnight, not because you demonstrate anything, but because the calendar flips. Turn eighteen. You’re in. This isn’t a minor oversight. It’s the central puzzle my recent preprint explores.

The Proxy Nobody Questions

Modern democracies assign political standing using proxies: simple categorical markers that stand in for more complex qualities. Age is the most obvious. It is treated as a substitute for maturity, judgment, autonomy, and responsibility. But here’s the key point: age doesn’t approximate competence. It replaces it.

If age were a rough indicator, we might expect flexibility at the margins. Exceptions. Supplementary criteria. Some attempt to track the thing it supposedly represents. Instead, we get a hard boundary. Below it, total exclusion. Above it, permanent inclusion. Capacity doesn’t matter on either side. The proxy isn’t helping institutions identify competence. It is doing something else entirely.

Competence Talk Without Competence

Despite this, democratic theory remains saturated with competence language. We are told that participation is grounded in rational agency. That citizens possess the capacities needed for self-government. That legitimacy flows from meaningful participation by autonomous agents. None of this is operationalised.

Competence is never specified, measured, or verified. It functions purely as justificatory rhetoric. A moral vocabulary that explains why inclusion is legitimate, without ever guiding how inclusion actually happens. This isn’t confusion; it’s design.

Why the Gap Doesn’t Collapse

At this point, a reasonable person might expect trouble. After all, if the justification doesn’t match the mechanism, shouldn’t the system wobble? It doesn’t. And the reason matters.

Political participation generates very weak feedback. Outcomes are mediated through institutions. Causal responsibility is diffuse. Success criteria are contested. When things go badly, it’s rarely clear why, or what a better alternative would have been.

Under these conditions, dissatisfaction becomes affective rather than analytic. People sense that things aren’t working, but lack the tools to diagnose how or where the system failed. Crucially, they also lack any way to recalibrate the link between competence and political standing, because that link was never operational in the first place. The system doesn’t aim for optimisation. It aims for stability.

Boundary Drawing Without Saying So

This structure becomes clearest when we look at boundary cases. Why eighteen rather than sixteen? Or twelve? Or twenty-one? There is no competence-based answer. Developmental research consistently shows wide overlap between adolescents and adults, and massive variation within age groups. If competence were taken seriously, age thresholds would be indefensible.

Historically, when competence was operationalised such as through literacy tests, the result was transparent hierarchy and eventual delegitimation. Modern democracies avoid that by keeping competence abstract and proxies neutral-looking. The boundary remains. The justification changes.

What This Does and Does Not Argue

This analysis does not propose reforms. It does not advocate competence testing. It does not suggest lowering or raising the voting age. It does not claim voters are stupid, irrational, or defective. It describes a structural feature of democratic legitimacy:

Democracy works by saying one thing and doing another, and that gap is not accidental. Competence language stabilises legitimacy precisely because it is never put to work. You may think that’s fine. You may think it’s unavoidable. You may think it’s a problem. The paper doesn’t tell you which to choose. It simply insists that if we’re going to talk seriously about democratic legitimacy, we should notice what role competence actually plays. And what it doesn’t.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Good, Bad, and the Quiet Arithmetic of Power

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

The quickest way to derail any discussion of morality is to accuse someone of believing that ‘everything is relative’, so let’s start there. It’s a comforting accusation. It allows the accuser to stop thinking whilst feeling victorious. Unfortunately, it also misses the point almost entirely.

I am not claiming that everything is relative. I am claiming that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are. More precisely, this particular binary pair does not track mind-independent properties of actions, but rather expresses subjective, relational, and power-inflected evaluations that arise within specific social contexts. That claim is not radical. It is merely inconvenient.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.

Good and Bad as Signals, Not Properties

When someone calls an action ‘bad’, they are not reporting a fact about the world in the way one might report temperature or velocity. They are signalling disapproval. Sometimes that disapproval is personal (subjective: ‘this sits badly with me’), sometimes social (relative: ‘people like us don’t do this’), and sometimes delegated (relative: ‘this violates the norms I’ve inherited and enforce’. The word does not describe. It acts.

The same applies to ‘good’. Approval, alignment, reassurance, permission. These terms function less like measurements and more like traffic signals. They coördinate behaviour. They reduce uncertainty. They warn, reward, and deter.

None of this requires moral scepticism, nihilism, or adolescent contrarianism. It requires only that we notice what the words are actually doing.

The Binary That Isn’t

Defenders of moral realism often retreat to a spectrum when pressed. Very well, they say, perhaps good and bad are not binary, but scalar. Degrees of goodness. Shades of wrongness. A neutral zone somewhere in the middle.

This is an improvement only in the most cosmetic sense. A single axis still assumes commensurability: that diverse considerations can be weighed on one ruler. Intuitively, this fails almost immediately. Good in what sense? Harm reduction? Loyalty? Legality? Survival? Compassion? Social order?

These dimensions do not line up. They cross-cut. They conflict. Which brings us to the example that refuses to die, for good reason.

Stealing Bread

“I don’t mind stealing bread
From the mouths of decadence
But I can’t feed on the powerless
When my cup’s already overfilled”

— Hunger Strike, Temple of the Dog

Consider the theft of bread by a starving person. The act is simultaneously:

  • bad relative to property norms
  • good relative to survival
  • bad relative to legal order
  • good relative to care or compassion
  • and neutral relative to anyone not implicated at all,
    even if they were to form an opinion through exposure

There is no contradiction here. The act is multi-valent. What collapses this plurality into a single verdict is not moral discovery but authority. Law, religion, and institutional power do not resolve moral complexity. They override it.

What about ‘Mercy’?

When the law says, ‘Given the circumstances, you are free to go’, what it is not saying is: this act was not wrong. What it is saying is closer to:

We are exercising discretion this time.
Do not mistake that for permission.
The rule still stands.

The warning survives the mercy.

That’s why even leniency functions as discipline. You leave not cleansed, but marked. Grateful, cautious, newly calibrated. The system hasn’t revised its judgment; it has merely suspended its teeth for the moment. The shadow of punishment remains, doing quiet work in advance.

This is how power maintains itself without constant enforcement. Punishment teaches. Mercy trains.

You’re released, but you’ve learned the real lesson: the act is still classified as bad from the only perspective that ultimately matters. The next time, mitigation may not be forthcoming. The next time, the collapse will be final. So yes. Even when you ‘win’, the moral arithmetic hasn’t changed. Only the immediate invoice was waived.

Which is why legality is never a reliable guide to goodness, and acquittal is never absolution. It’s conditional tolerance, extended by an authority that never stopped believing it was right.

Power as the Collapse Mechanism

When the law says, ‘There may have been mitigating circumstances, but the act was wrong and must be punished’, it is not uncovering a deeper truth. It is announcing which perspective counts.

Mitigation is a courtesy, not a concession. Complexity is acknowledged, then flattened. The final judgment is scalar because enforcement demands it. A decision must be made. A sanction must follow. The plural is reduced to the singular by necessity, not insight.

Once this happens, the direction of explanation reverses. Punishment becomes evidence of wrongness rather than evidence of power. The verdict acquires moral weight retroactively.

From Ethics to Enforcement

At the local level, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ function as ethical shorthand. They help maintain relationships, minimise friction, and manage expectations. This is not morality in any grand sense. It is coordination under conditions of attachment and risk.

Problems arise when these local prescriptions harden into universal claims. When they are codified into rules, backed by sanctions, and insulated from challenge. At that point, the costs become real. Not morally real, but materially real. Fines. Exclusion. Imprisonment. Reputational death. Nothing metaphysical has changed. Only the consequences.

The God Upgrade

Religion intensifies this process by anchoring evaluative judgments to the structure of reality itself. What was once ‘bad here, among us’ becomes ‘bad everywhere, always’ is no longer a difference in perspective but a rebellion against the order of being. This is not ethical refinement. It is power laundering through eternity.

Not Everything Is Relative

To be clear, this is not an argument that facts do not exist, or that all distinctions dissolve into mush. It is an argument that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ do not behave like factual predicates, and that pretending otherwise obscures how judgments are actually made and enforced.

What is not relative is the existence of power, the reality of sanctions, or the psychological mechanisms through which norms are internalised and reproduced. What is relative is the evaluative overlay we mistake for moral truth once power has done its work.

Why This Is Ignored

None of this is new. It has been said, in various forms, for centuries. It is ignored because it offers no programme, no optimisation strategy, no moral high ground. It explains without redeeming. It clarifies without consoling.

And because it is difficult to govern people who understand that moral certainty usually arrives after authority, not before.

microglyphics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics