substack – Philosophics

Piranesi, so far…

Sep 23, 2026Posted in fiction, philosophyTagged book, epistemology, fiction books, knowledge, memory, perception, philosophy, Piranesi, psychology, reading, review, substack, Susanna ClarkeLeave a comment

1–2 minutes

I commenced reading another LLM book recommendation, Piranesi. I share my thoughts on the first two chapters on my Substack.

Gemini Pro video representation of the sense of Piranesi.

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi comes in seven parts. I’ve read two. It’s the second of four recommendations an LLM gave me after I fed it ten books and authors I liked enough to inflict on other people. I wrote about that experiment, and about the first book I chose from the list, Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men.

I’ll call the parts chapters, because that’s how I read them, and it feels more natural to me. Clarke isn’t here to object, so this unilateral move happens in absentia.

So far the book is mostly world-building. There is a protagonist, Piranesi, a name he’s given and doesn’t seem particularly convinced is his. A second character is known only as the Other and who visits twice a week, enlisting Piranesi’s help in researching the Great and Secret Knowledge, whatever that turns out to be. I’ve spent two chapters trying to decide whether the Other is a foil, a mentor, an antagonist or something else. Please stand by…

Read the rest on Substack.

On Lenses and Reality

Aug 17, 2026Posted in philosophyTagged blog, blogging, books, substack, writingLeave a comment

As an economist, I used to instruct my Econ 101 students to consider economics as another lens to add to their inventory, but as a philosopher my advice gets somewhat altered. I’ve discussed lenses before, though I can’t seem to find my econ story.

In any case, I’m interested in the philosophers account now. I don’t rescind my previous account which works well enough in a social context, but I want to discuss the ontological deficits in this advice.

NB: Now that I seem to be authoring more on Substack, I am trying to figure out what to do with this blog that I’ve been maintaining since 2017. I am considering using it as a holder of summaries and related digital assets, for example the PDF from Google Notebook. I expect to include a paragraph of two from the Substack article as a preview for readers to determine if it’s worth clicking. If you start at Substack, you may find this ancillary information to be useful.

Also, Substack doesn’t allow me to embed PDFs (through you can download them for viewing), and it doesn’t facilitate tables and such, so I’ve had to resort to alternate formats or screengrabs to share them as image files – not my preference.

IMPORTANT: Please not that my Substack is substantially free, so I am not pulling a bait and switch. If and when I place content behind a paywall, I’ll have a reason or at least an excuse. I believe that information should be free and freely shared with minimal constraints, which is the reason I don’t yet have anything protected.

Of course, I do sell books, but I also discuss the contents here and in other social media contexts. The books are more for a convenience of having everything in one place and supporting my endeavours, to provide additional incentives to produce similar content.

If you have any ideas or preferences, let me know.

Beyond_the_Lens Download

My Philosophical Position: Language [5/10]

Jul 16, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcast, SpotifyTagged language, Language Effectiveness Complexity, Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, My Philosophical Position, philosophy, philosophy of language, Spotify, substackLeave a comment

This is the fifth 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.

Language works, but not uniformly.

Its effectiveness declines as the conceptual complexity, abstraction, contestability, contextual dependence, and institutional burden of what it is asked to communicate increase. We routinely mistake grammatical fluency for semantic precision and social agreement for shared reference.

I describe this through an Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient:

Invariants are comparatively stable terms with constrained error ranges.

Contestables remain usable but acquire their force within normative or institutional frameworks.

Fluids drift across contexts and disciplines, preserving family resemblance without reliable closure.

Ineffables mark domains where propositional language collapses into metaphor, gesture, paradox, or silence.

These are not ontological species. They are diagnostic regions along a gradient. The important feature is not the label but the rate at which apparent linguistic effectiveness decays as conceptual load increases.

My Philosophical Position: Selfhood and Personal Identity [4/10]

Jul 15, 2026Jul 16, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged Architecture of Encounter, Episodic Indexicalism, inheritance, language, My Philosophical Position, philosophy, philosophy of self, podcast, psychology, self identity, selfhood, Spotify, substackLeave a comment

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.

On LLMs and Understanding

Jul 14, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged artificial intelligence, attribution, cognitive science, compression, consciousness, crosspost, French, hallucinations, human exceptionalism, language, metaphysics, mind, philosophy, predictive behaviours, psychology, substack, understandingLeave a comment

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.

The_Lossy_Channel Download

My Philosophical Position: Ontology [2/10]

Jul 11, 2026Jul 16, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged mediated encounter ontology, mediated encounter realism, metaphysics, My Philosophical Position, ontology, philosophy, podcast, Spotify, substackLeave a comment

This is the second of a deeper look into ten philosophical positions. This one is on mediated encounter realism (ontology) within the category of metaphysics and ontology. 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.

My Philosophical Position: Metaphilosophy [1/10]

Jul 10, 2026Jul 16, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged anti-foundationalism, dis-integration, metaphilosophy, My Philosophical Position, philosophy, podcast, Spotify, substackLeave a comment

This is the first of a deeper look into my position of diagnostic anti-foundationalism within the category of philosophical method for metaphilosophy. 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.

Summary of Some of My Philosophical Positions

Jul 10, 2026Jul 10, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcast, videoTagged agency, ai, anti-realism, artificial intelligence, consciousness, epistemology, ethics, heuristics, identity, institutions, language, Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, mediated encounter ontology, metaethics, metaphysics, mind, morality, objectivity, ontological grammar, ontology, perception, philosophy, reality, selfhood, Spotify, substack, summary, video5 Comments

The question is reasonable, although belief may already be doing more work than I would permit it under cross-examination. My writing is generally diagnostic rather than doctrinal. I am more interested in identifying the architectural assumptions beneath a dispute than in selecting a furnished room within it. Where philosophy offers a contest between established positions, I often suspect that the arena itself has been badly designed.

Still, repeated diagnoses eventually disclose a pattern. Certain commitments recur: suspicion of substance, resistance to metaphysical inflation, distrust of linguistic confidence, rejection of moral realism, scepticism toward persistent personal identity, and an insistence that mediation does not entail fabrication.

What follows is therefore neither a creed nor a completed system. It is a provisional map of where I presently stand.

The labels are intended as coordinates, not allegiances. Where no established term quite fits, I have used my own. This is partly unavoidable and partly evidence for the very linguistic difficulty I spend so much time diagnosing.

This content, including video and podcast summary, are of a longer Substack article on my philosophical positions with descriptions.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Chess with Heidegger

Jun 20, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcast, videoTagged chess., critique, Heidegger, language, philosophy, substack, videoLeave a comment

On Heidegger, and the rook that was always, secretly, a bishop

Imagine, if you will, that you are playing chess with a grandmaster. Your opponent fingers his rook, slides it diagonally across the board, captures your queen and lifts the piece away. Nonplussed, you question the tactic. He defends it with vehemence.

Full story on Substack. Video and podcast summaries below.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

On the limitations of NotebookLM.

For most of my posts, I also share a summary processed by Google’s NotebookLM. Most of these summaries are decent enough – some are even excellent inasmuch as they shed a new light on the idea. Other times, they miss the point, are well off the mark, or inject concepts or translations, not only unintended, but markedly opposed to the point being made.

My recent Chess with Heidegger post is illustrative. Both the podcast and the video make errors – and I don’t mean the visual ones that occur as well.

As a page footer, I mention that I use LLMs as part of my workflow. This may be anywhere from 0–99%. The podcast asserted that I used an LLM as a significant part of this project. This is incorrect. Specifically, I didn’t feed Heidegger’s text into an LLM and ask it to digest and regurgitate it, parsing out some unlocked wisdom. Obviously, I used various LLMs for supporting content.

The video misrepresented my point about Wittgenstein, directionally off. He expressly does not support the specificity of language. My reference to him rolling over in his grave was triggered by the notion that language is determined by use – and language games.

What can we say about trust and guilt?

Jun 18, 2026Jun 19, 2026Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged epistemology, ethics, images, language, law, legal theory, linguistics, metaethics, philosophy, philosophy of language, substack, wittgensteinLeave a comment

Not as much as we might think.

I shared a post on Substack. It starts like this:

As I continue to read Heidegger’s On the Essence of Truth, I feel compelled to share my musings. Avert your eyes if this doesn’t work for you, but don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Read the rest of the article there, or listen to the podcast.