NB: The following post will be entirely human-generated, with no LLM involvement – except for the cover image rendered by Gemini. It will also be brief.
I am (still, perpetually) learning French, and I use Anki to help me. I recommend it for standard and non-standard flashcard uses. Recently, I asked ChatGPT to generate a CSV with phrases for the front and back of the cards, for example:
Front: I will be able to visit France next year.
Back: Je pourrai visiter la France l’année prochaine. (futur simple)
I found the pack useful, but a few days later (today), I asked for more than first-person perspectives, as well as additional tenses. I entered this prompt, which is what triggered this blog entry:
‘You’ rendered this for me. Might you generate a similar file that I can use to import to Anki that includes versions other than first-person singular? Future tenses would be helpful as well.
Notice the ‘you‘ in scare quotes – inverted commas.
It’s no secret that I am partial to the episodic selves of Galen Strawson in contrast with diachronic selves, which is to say that I don;t believe that the you or the I or yesterday – or even a second ago – is intrinsically the same person. I’ve explained this elsewhere, so I’ll leave it here.
As much as I feel this way, I don’t feel put off referring to myself as myself or I – me, myself, and I – or to you as you, but I am more consciously uncomfortable with addressing an LLM as you, as demonstrated.
I know full well that each prompt and response is to a different instance of the LLM – a different episode. Unless the LLM accesses an earlier conversation in memory – and I use this term loosely here, too – it would not retain context, and the absence of you-ness would be painfully obvious.
I don;t believe that the self of people is functionally any different. Obviously, humans are carbon-based rather than silicon-based, and storage and retrieval operate differently beyond the substrates, but the mechanism is metaphorically similar.
Does anyone else feel dis-ease in addressing an LLM in the second person? Or is it just me – or me?
Somebody somewhere made mention of The Social Construction of Reality, so I asked ChatGPT if I should engage with it directly, which is to say, to read it. Already believing that what we perceive and experience is a subjective construction, albeit shaped by relative forces, I thought it might be a lot of choir preaching.
ChatGPT admitted that this was partially true, but that the benefit would be to get a sociological rather than strictly philosophical account. Having read the introduction and started the first chapter, I already feel this to be true. The authors make it clear that Sociology is just a special philosophy that doesn’t aim quite so deep and has a specific and obvious focus on societies. Fair enough.
So far, I’m glad I picked it up. It’s relatively short, which was a deciding factor, and it’s giving me a break from the 1066 material I’ve otherwise been consuming as of late.
I don’t have more to add, save to say, so far so good. I look forward to the rest. I’ve got more to do today, including editing a video for YouTube, which is me rather than AI for a change – a process that reminds me why I use AI in the first place: so much time investment.
NB: I am actually listening to an Audible version of this book. Whilst searching for an apt cover image for this post, I found the associated image, and it is as apt as one might find.
Anyone familiar enough with my writing knows that I don’t support objectification – nounification – except as a scale-dependent heuristic shortcut. Victoria pulls memory out of the object of the brain and relocates it to time or, more specifically, to Bergson’s durée. But this move doesn’t make sense either. Plus, it adds an unnecessary or at least unearned metaphysical inflation. Whilst time may be containerised, durée can’t be by its very phenomenal nature.
In any case, after an extended chat with a GPT, I asked for a rendition to share. I’ll amend this in various ways, but for now, I wanted to capture the essence for review. I’ll describe the relata in more detail presently.
Image: ChatGPT render of memory process
Phenomenal Presentation Whatever is presently given in experience before it becomes a later recollection. This is not necessarily an unmediated encounter with reality, merely the phenomenal field available to apprehension.
Dynamically Weighted Relata Presentation, attention, salience, bodily condition, prior experience, habitus and ontological grammar operate relationally rather than as isolated faculties. Their relative influence shifts according to context, purpose and inherited orientation.
Selective Apprehension Only part of the phenomenal field is attended to or registered. Attention and salience are especially entangled here: what appears salient attracts attention, whilst attention may itself produce or intensify salience.
Lossy Collection / Compression What is apprehended is not preserved as a complete experiential copy. Some features are omitted, abstracted, merged or weighted more heavily than others, leaving a compressed consequence of the encounter rather than the encounter itself.
Retention as Altered System-State The event has ceased, but the apprehending system remains differently configured because it occurred. ‘Retention’, therefore, names a persisting alteration or inherited constraint, not an object stored intact within a container.
Cue-Dependent Recollection A later cue, whether sensory, linguistic, affective or contextual, recruits the retained alteration. Recollection is not simple retrieval but a present operation conditioned by both the earlier event and the system’s current state.
Reconstructed Re-Presentation The result is a new phenomenal presentation related to, but not identical with, the earlier one. Its vividness does not guarantee fidelity, since missing material may be supplied through expectation, narrative, habitus and present context.
The feedback loop indicates that recollection may itself revise the system. Each re-presentation can alter subsequent weighting, interpretation and recollection, so memory is not a static archive but a recursively reconstructive process.
I borrow some of this nomenclature from Iain McGilchrist, which I’ll also explain in future.
This is the fourth of a deeper look into ten philosophical positions. This one is on convergence realism within the category of epistemology. A full article is available on Substack, with supporting information on a recent post here on Philosophics Blog.
Below is a ~5-minute short podcast.
I don’t regard the self as a persistent entity travelling through time while accumulating experiences like stamps in a metaphysical passport.
The first-person “I” is an indexical compression. It marks the presently organised locus of perspective, salience, memory-access, and action. It is indispensable, but indispensability does not establish an inner owner to which the index refers.
The diachronic self is a broader compression: a narrative, biological, documentary, interpersonal, and institutional device for tracking selected continuities across time. Memory contributes to this, but memory is lossy, reconstructive, and uneven. The person remembered is not transported intact into the act of remembering.
In this Substack essay, I explore the flawed nature of human comprehension, arguing that our understanding is often just a calculation of probability rather than an objective grasp of truth. By examining linguistic errors like misheard lyrics and his own struggles with French phonemes, Willis demonstrates that humans frequently hallucinate or misinterpret data based on what seems most plausible. He compares these mental lapses to the ‘hallucinations’ of Large Language Models, suggesting that the mistakes made by AI are fundamentally similar to our own. The author contends that we apply a double standard by granting humans the status of ‘understanding’ while dismissing machines for the exact same predictive behaviours. Ultimately, the text challenges the metaphysical assumptions of human exceptionalism, asserting that what we call ‘understanding’ is merely an external attribution rather than a unique internal state.
Essentially, I am not advocating the view that LLMs have consciousness and understanding; rather, I am arguing that the human versions of these are inflated with metaphysics.
My initial thought was to rid the English language of administrators and dominatrices. Of course, I instantly considered French, and I write about that as well.
Here, I want to discuss the rift in Feminism:
One faction feels that we should eliminate sexist terms in the Modern world. This is where I was coming from.
Another faction claims this is a way of not being absorbed into an already male-dominated, dare I say, patriarchal culture.
Hence the title of this post.
If we were to swap or consolidate administrator and the less common administratrix into administrater in an act of rebellious conformity, women will be subsumed. As Simone de Beauvoir notes, the dominant lens is the male lens. Womanisother. As I say, this is why we have male and female versions of many, if not most, competitive sports, and certainly the professional ones. Thi sis also an instinct underlying trans-athletes competing in a contrasport – and it’s almost always about CIS-males performing in CIS-female events. I’m not aware of the contrary – and I don’t feel like looking it up. Opponents imagine fit males dressing as females in order to win some ribbons and medals, but I don’t really care to engage further in this conversational framing. I have no interest in sports, not even the World Cup being performed in my backyard.
The point is that females and other so-called minorities can be marginalised and lost to language. We preserve this identity through mechanics such as Best Actress to ensure representation.
Of course, I can also run off the reservation and down any number of rabbit holes: why don’t we have best black actor and/or actress? Why not left-handed? Height ranges? Weight ranges? Income ranges? Religious orientation? We quickly run into an intersectional challenge. I might imagine something like:
And I am proud to announce the winner of best left-handed, Asian Buddhist actress with a speech impediment
It’s easy to see where this goes off the rails – another Sorites problem hiding in plain sight.
I could go on. I won’t, but I wanted to make a point about my point. Check out the base post on Substack.
This is less a confession than an earmark. I came across a conversation with Michael Puett on Chinese philosophy, selfhood, ritual, and the modern Western compulsion to find oneself, and the whole thing caught on an old hook.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Synthèse audio de ce sujet en français dans le podcast NotebookLM.
I am already familiar with some high-level accounts of Asian philosophies, especially Buddhism and the doctrine of anattā (Pali) or anātman (Sanskrit): non-self. That idea has never seemed especially alien to me. If anything, it names with admirable economy a suspicion I already held: that the stable, discoverable, authentic Self is less a hidden metaphysical jewel than a bundle of habits wearing a name badge.
Puett’s point, as I take it, is not merely that the Western self is overblown. That would be too easy, and therefore popular. The sharper claim is that the search for one’s True Self may become dangerous precisely because it mistakes the current arrangement of ruts, reflexes, wounds, preferences, and defensive routines for an essence. ‘This is just who I am’, says the person, embracing not a soul but a sediment. The bad habit acquires a halo. Therapy-speak finds a throne. Another little sovereign subject is crowned in the bathroom mirror.
Against this, Puett presents Chinese philosophy as a tradition of cultivation: not self-discovery, but self-transformation. The point is not to excavate an authentic interior but to train perception, conduct, relation, and response. Ritual, in this frame, is not dead ceremony or social programming. It is a technology of de-naturalisation. It interrupts the little automatisms by which we become legible to ourselves and intolerable to everyone else.
This matters to me because I have long been suspicious of Western narratives and metanarratives, especially those that mistake local grammar for cosmic architecture. The year and a half I lived around Tokyo was instrumental here. I did not leave Japan with a doctrine, thankfully. Nothing so vulgar. But it loosened something. I had already begun to distrust the sovereign Western subject, the metaphysical executive behind the eyes, the heroic interiority forever pretending to be origin rather than residue. What I lacked was a broader vocabulary. A better frame.
As often happens, I later encountered thinkers who had already articulated versions of what I had been circling, usually with more patience, precision, and elegance. Such is the scholar’s reward: to discover that one’s private revelation has an older bibliography.
What struck me in Puett’s discussion was the movement from identity to practice. Religion, selfhood, reading, even attention itself: these need not be treated as badges to defend, but as disciplines to inhabit. This is a useful corrective to the modern anxiety of proof. The self must prove itself. The worker must prove worth. The believer must prove identity. The thinker must prove originality. Modern life becomes a Calvinist treadmill with better branding and worse lighting.
The alternative is not passivity. Nor is it the wet little slogan that everything is socially constructed, therefore nothing matters, therefore let us all dissolve into discourse and invoices. The alternative is practice: deliberate, repeated, embodied interruption. Ritual as a way of making habits visible. Reading as a ritual of humility. Attention as a cultivated stance. Relation as something made, not merely felt.
This is where Chinese philosophy may become especially useful for my own work. It offers neither the Western fantasy of the fixed self nor the lazy inversion of pure flux. It gives us formation, pattern, training, relation, and transformation. Not the Self as essence. Not the self as fiction. The self as practised arrangement. That, at least, is worth returning to.
I am busy, always busy, because apparently exhaustion has been mistaken for virtue by a civilisation that should know better by now. But I want to earmark this thread for further consideration: Chinese philosophy, ritual, anti-authenticity, non-self, practice over identity, and the possibility that what we call ‘who I am’ is often only what has not yet been interrupted.
I’ve just finished reading Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun, and I was scripting a video review, but I wanted to focus on one aspect in particular.
I’ve published a full piece on Substack, but here are summaries and artefacts from YouTube and Spotify.
Although I am not a linguist, I am a philosopher of language, so occasionally I cross into that territory through sheer love of the thing. I chat with a French interlocutor a couple of times a week, and today we discussed the French infinitive demander – a false friend (faux ami) in English, though a closer one than most.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic. Please excuse the poor French pronunciation of the podcasters.
Demander means to ask, not to demand, though an English speaker might notice that demanding is simply an elevated asking. Which raises the question: is there an elevated version of demander in French? It turns out there is – a whole ladder of them.
In English: to ask → to demand → to order → to command → to enjoin. In French: demander → exiger → ordonner → commander → enjoindre.
(Enjoin, for those who’ve only met it in legal documents, is the formal instrument of judicial compulsion – to enjoin someone is to prohibit or require by court order. It earns its place at the top of the ladder.)
I won’t get into the full nuances of each term. I’ll leave that to a linguist. But the false friend problem is worth pursuing, because it’s more interesting than a simple mismatch.
The trouble isn’t just that demander ≠ ‘demand’ etymologically. It’s that the English word ‘demand’ smuggles in a force condition that French distributes across different verbs depending on the source of that force. Exiger implies force from authority, entitlement, or insistence. Ordonner implies force from hierarchy – a command structure in which compliance is not optional. Demander, however formally framed, remains a request. English ‘demand’ collapses all of this into one word and leaves the source of force unspecified.
This becomes vivid with examples. A judge doesn’t demander; the authority relationship forecloses the mere-request reading entirely. Exiger captures the illocutionary force; this demand is backed by institutional power, and non-compliance has consequences. But a judicial order in English sits closer to ordonner than exiger; the court doesn’t merely insist, it commands with legal effect. And a military general? Ordonner again – unilateral, hierarchical, non-negotiable.
This brings us to restaurants, where things get strange. In English, customers order. The same verb a general uses. What gives?
Polysemy is the easy answer, but the cultural one is more interesting. The French model is closer to hospitality in the older sense – the restaurateur is the host, the diner is a guest, and the dynamic carries an implicit asymmetry in which the host has authority over the experience. One eats what is offered, at the pace the kitchen sets; complaining loudly is a breach of the guest’s role rather than an exercise of consumer rights. Commander fits this – one places a request within a framework that the host controls.
The American model inverts this. The customer is sovereign, the staff are in service to the customer’s preferences, and the transactional frame licenses a kind of authority that would read as rudeness in France. ‘Order’ in the American restaurant sense carries just enough of the command register to be revealing; you’re not asking, you’re directing.
This makes the English verb choice quietly ideological in a way the French isn’t. Commander is neutral about the power dynamic. English ‘order’ encodes the American consumer-as-patron assumption right into the lexicon.
And the word, patron, is almost too good to leave alone. In French, le patron is the boss, the owner, the one with authority. In American English, the patron is the customer. The semantic inversion is almost too neat to be coincidental. It maps the entire cultural difference onto a single word: in France, the restaurateur is the patron; in America, the diner is. When the two meet – a tête-à-tête between rival patrons – culture shock is the predictable result.
Reading Heidegger’s What Is Philosophy? set me going. Heidegger answers the question not by definition but by retrieval: he takes philosophia back into its Greek setting, as though the older word might disclose what philosophy is. The lecture is the occasion rather than the target. It offers a clean specimen of a manoeuvre that runs far wider. A word’s origin can show where a practice has been, but it can’t settle what the practice is. At least this is what I was thinking as he was making his case.
