Philosophics

This isn’t my first post discussing why not all political disagreement is rational, and your interlocutors may not be ignorant, stupid, or arguing in bad faith. open.substack.com/pub/brywillis6… #philosophy #politics #policy #intelligence #ontology #ignorance #blog #substack

Using AI in a legal context is perfectly defensible. Not following up and not performing due diligence is lazy and derelict. This extends to any serious endeavour. whro.org/2026-04-03/pen… #philosophy #law #legal #ai #negligence #lazy #duediligence #performance #article #npr #lawyers #lawschool #attorneys #authoship #responsibility #accountability #references #citations #writing #publishing

@rivermillion I am suspicious of claims of objecthood and subjecthood in general. In my terms, these are instrumental heuristics.

I’m not super familiar (this isn’t my day job) but I will note something from personal experience. My experience is much more episodic than diachronic in the sense that I don’t have a strong intuitive identification with past me or future me. And the present feels like all there is a lot of the time. But for me, that makes the role of narrative even more important. Since I don’t have that strongly-felt identification, it’s the narrative that provides the scaffolding of “that was really me”, “those things happened to me”, “that was a real part of my history that makes me who I am”. I’m not saying the self is effortlessly and intuitively narrative. There is work in the process, and I may just be more attuned to the effort than some.

@rivermillion Right. I tend to lean on the word 'heuristic' often – and the phrase 'useful fiction'.

In a post from 2024, I made a point on the insufficiency of language to faithfully render an image from a prompt. In this example, I wanted it to depict a specific woman and dog oriented to a tree in a forest. Although my endeavour was unsuccessful, it made my point. philosophics.blog/2024/11/08/the… #philosophy #language #llm #genai #ai #image #translation #interpretation #cognition #consciousness #perspective #mediation #representation #blog #history #instruction #art

@rivermillion Fair. Are you familiar with Galen Strawson's work on 'episodic selves'? I'm not into his panpsychic claims, but I like his work otherwise.

You’re right that the cosmic language outruns the formal tools — that’s the tension between writing accessibly and writing precisely. The core claim is closer to your “emergent organisational differentiation” than the poetic framing might suggest. The teleological phrasing is not necessary and may be over-emphasized, even if it speaks to me personally. To the reification point, for example with the Markov blanket, I think it can serve a purpose as a formal description of where the process is happening, but not the thing doing the happening. The self is not the blanket, it is the process that maintains itself at the blanket That’s a meaningful distinction to keep in mind.

BTW, love the Effing the ineffable since 1973 line. To focus on the pressure point after acknowledging our shared commitment to anti-substantialism and the process of selfhood (a heuristic in my ontological grammar), I diverge insomuch that subjecthood is not treated as a metaphysical glow generated by some boundaryhood, but as modal differentiation within an encounter-field: a self-maintaining, constraint-responsive process cluster that yields salience, affordance asymmetry, and, at the thicker end, reflexive integration. More fundamentally, I think we part ways on the notion of consciousness, which I don't believe is something requiring a positive ontological story about felt interiority. My take is that by 'nounifying' the process of consciousness, it creates a need to locate it in space-time. I prefer to retain the verb-process aspect instead.

I've finally published my essay resolving the Frege–Geach problem. philosophics.blog/2026/04/04/whe… Or have I? You tell me. I had worked to dissolve the problem in February, but I wasn't satisfied. I revised the manuscript in March, but I wasn't satisfied because I felt I could go further – and so I did. #philosophy #language #expressivism #essay #blog #semantic #identity #morals #ethics #emotivism #categoryerror #syntax

@EK62076 @chakravartiiin That's 54% at 3rd grade, the average being 6th.

@chakravartiiin It's actually true that 54% of American adults read below a sixth-grade level! Crazy 🤣

Iranian President when he finds out that roughly 50% of U.S. adults cannot read a book written at an eighth-grade level.

@chakravartiiin 54% of Americans read at a third-grade level.

@rawsalerts Pam Bondi goes down

🚨#BREAKING: Fox News is reporting that President Donald Trump has officially fired Pam Bondi from her role as Attorney General.

Third post on time versus duration, this time, brainless jellyfish are doing the teaching. philosophics.blog/2026/04/03/a-j… In this study, we unlink circadian rhythm from a 24-hour cycle. The time of physics is a feature of the map rather than of the universe. #psychology #philosophy #time #rhythm #terrain #map #jellyfish #brains #sun #days #temperature #environment #nature #life #reproduction #biology

@merikuh @unusual_whales Clearly trying to bait Trump.

BREAKING: Iranian officials announced that President Masoud Pezeshkian will release an important letter addressed directly to the American people, before Trump's announcement.

I use music and a ProTools example to illustrate the difference between duration and time. I even invoked the debate between Bergson and Einstein in 1922. philosophics.blog/2026/04/02/why… Time doesn't exist. It's merely a useful heuristic that humans use for social structure. Duration is more intrinsic. Physics has created a space-time map and confused it with the underlying terrain. #philosophy #physics #time #duration #blog #podcast #Einstein #Bergson #debate #music #metaphor #social #ClaudeAI

Time travel is impossible science fiction, but not for the reasons pop physics thinks. @brywillis634737/note/c-236459523?r=pvxh5&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@brywillis6347… #scifi #sciencefiction #reading #blog #posting #writing #time #travel #history #philosophy #perspective #timetravel #substack #wordpress #physics

@LibertyCappy Did I hear 'rocket launcher' before 35?

This is an absolute BANGER LOL The random "thirty five" in there 😭😭

Duration and the Intervalic Imposition: Thinking about TIME and DURATION. Looking for #feedback philosophics.blog/2026/04/01/dur… #philosophy #physics #time #duration #memory #bergson #kant #Heidegger #husserl #phenomenology #metaphysics #math #maps #blog #podcast #history #reading #writing #essay #comments

An outline of my approach to critique Parfit's moral maths open.substack.com/pub/brywillis6… #philosophy #morality #mathematics #parfit #ontologicalgrammar #writing #essay #academic #reading #books

After another 'AI Detected' flag, I resorted to Gemini to lay it out. philosophics.blog/2026/03/31/thi… Gemini produced an entire blog post. It did offer me tips to dumb down my writing, but I declined. I also had NotebookLM create a podcast, cuz that's how I roll. #philosophy #writing #ai #aidetectors #statistics #falsepositives #aipolice #bollox #blog #podcast #academicessays #lexicaldensity #LLMs #ontologicalgrammar #Parfit #perception #syntacticregularity #critique #Gemini #Kant #language #pooh