Jack Maguire

Category: Essays & Thinking

Philosophy, analysis, book-related posts

  • Mutual Parasociality: What Happens to Friendships in a Digital World

    How high school friends, college roommates, and old coworkers quietly become an audience

    The Framework: A Two-Axis Map of Every Relationship in Your Life

    I think about relationships on a simple grid. Two axes. Four quadrants.

    The vertical axis measures depth. How much does this person matter to you emotionally? Do you trust them with the real stuff? Would you call them at 2am?

    The horizontal axis measures proximity. How much do they show up in your daily life? Do you share a commute, a lunch spot, a neighborhood? Do they see you on a bad Tuesday?

    Plot anyone in your life on that grid and you get one of four zones.

    The Core Circle sits in the top right. High depth, high proximity. Your partner, your local best friend, a sibling you live near. These people know you in real time.

    The Anchors Afar sit in the top left. High depth, low proximity. Your high school best friend who moved across the country. Your college roommate. The coworker you were genuinely close to before one of you left. The emotional bond is real, but the daily contact is gone.

    The Circumstantial Network sits in the bottom right. Low depth, high proximity. Coworkers. Neighbors. The barista who knows your order. They shape your daily environment but not your inner life.

    The Distant Periphery sits in the bottom left. Low depth, low proximity. Acquaintances. People you follow online. And, as I will get to, something more uncomfortable than either of those.

    The Reminiscence Window

    When a friendship moves from the top right to the top left, it does not die immediately. There is a window.

    For a while, you still have shared memory to draw from. You can call this person, say “remember when,” and both of you feel the warmth of it. That connection is real, and some friendships live in this space for years.

    But the window does not stay open forever.

    As time passes, the shared memories get older. They become stories you have both already told. And at some point, the conversations shift. You are no longer reminiscing. You are reporting.

    The Problem with Long Distance Friendships: Why Quadrant 2 Is Unstable

    Relationships in the top left are structurally unstable. Not because the love goes away, but because love alone does not hold a relationship in its original position on the grid.

    What holds it there is shared reality. The texture of being in the same world. When proximity is gone, that dissolves. And without active effort, a top-left friendship drifts downward.

    This happens with high school friends after everyone scatters. It happens with college friends after graduation. It happens with coworkers after someone leaves. The relationship was built in a specific environment, and when that environment ends, the foundation quietly shifts.

    The Pipeline: How Long Distance Communication Becomes Content Production

    The drift moves through stages.

    First comes reporting. You can no longer observe each other casually, so you fill each other in. This is natural.

    Because you cannot report everything, you start curating. You pick the stories worth telling. The small, formless stuff gets left out.

    Then comes performing. The curated updates get polished. You think about how to tell the story before you tell it.

    And finally, if you let it go long enough, you arrive at what I call contentification. The relationship now consists entirely of two people producing digital content for an audience of one. Long voice notes. Scheduled calls. A text thread that reads like a newsletter exchange. It has all the surface features of closeness, but something essential is gone.

    Mutual Parasociality: When Both People Become Each Other’s Audience

    A parasocial relationship is the one-sided feeling of connection you have with someone who does not know you exist. A podcaster. An athlete. A creator you have followed for years.

    What I am describing is different.

    When a friendship decays all the way through that pipeline, it lands in a state I call mutual parasociality. Both people still care. Both people still show up. But what they are showing up for is a performance. Person A is consuming a curated version of Person B. Person B is consuming a curated version of Person A.

    The relationship feels alive because of its history. But the thing that created that depth, which was shared reality and being seen before you had a chance to prepare, is no longer running.

    Why This Matters More If You Live Digitally

    Digital communication makes the content pipeline feel invisible. When everything is a message or a post or a call, it is easy to confuse activity with connection.

    If you zoom out and look at where most of your connections actually sit on the grid, especially the ones you feel close to, you might find that a lot of them have quietly drifted to the bottom left corner. Not as a moral failure. Just as what distance does over time when digital tools give you the feeling of closeness without the substance.

    Of the people you feel connected to right now, how many actually know what your life looks like this week? Not the version you put in a voice note. The actual texture of it.

    Can Mutual Parasociality Be Reversed?

    Yes. But not by messaging more often.

    The way back is through shared reality, and there are a few ways to create it even across distance.

    Exchange ideas, not updates. When you share an idea and someone pushes back on it or builds on it, you are thinking together. That is a form of shared reality even without physical proximity.

    Meet in person. An afternoon together does more for a relationship than months of scheduled calls. You exist in the same physical moment, and that is something digital cannot replicate.

    Have a real impact on each other’s lives. Ask for something. Offer something. Give advice that actually changes a decision. Connect someone to a person or an opportunity. When you matter to each other’s actual lives, you move back up the grid.

    The friendships worth keeping are the ones where at least one of these is possible.

    Where Do You Sit on the Grid?

    Most of us carry a mental model of our relationships based on how they used to feel. The high school friend who was once your closest person. The college roommate who knew everything about you. The coworker who made a hard job worth showing up to.

    Those histories are real.

    But where are those relationships now on the grid? And where do you want them to be?

  • When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön: A Book for the Breaking Open

    I read When Things Fall Apart during one of the hardest stretches of my life. I lost something that felt extremely important to me, and then not long after, I lost something much, much more important. I needed something that could hold the weight of that without turning away.

    It did not fix me or offer a roadmap to get past what I was feeling. Instead, it taught me how to be with what was happening, and that changed everything.

    When I was in the middle of my losses, I kept trying to think my way out. I kept looking ahead to some future moment when I would feel better, when I would have processed everything. What Chödrön helped me see is that my impulse to escape the present moment was itself a form of suffering. I could see how much energy I was putting into making everything make sense, into finding a reason for what had happened, into creating a narrative that would let me feel okay again.

    The book invited me to stop doing that—to let the ground be groundless, and to let the story stay messy and incomplete.

    That said, not everything resonated. The sections on compassion felt less urgent to me than the core teaching about “being with what is.” I also found the references to her teachers and mentors extraneous; they often pulled me out of the teaching and into someone else’s biography. There were moments where the framework felt like it was asking for something I wasn’t ready to give.

    But I am grateful it was recommended it to me. It gave me permission to stop trying to fix myself and start being with myself instead.

    Get more of my book recommendations here.

  • The Only Place Skunk Cabbage Ever Lived

    I want to talk about skunk cabbage.

    This sounds like the kind of sentence that usually precedes a digression, an apology, or a footnote explaining that skunk cabbage is a metaphor for something else. It is not. I literally want to talk about skunk cabbage. Specifically, the skunk cabbage that grew in the woods behind my childhood house in Finksburg, Maryland, and nowhere else in the world that I have ever been.

    This is strange, because I have been to a lot of places. My brother and I hiked the entire Appalachian Trail together. Two thousand miles of ridgelines, valleys, shelters, rhododendron tunnels, bog bridges, alpine meadows, and wet forests. If skunk cabbage were a normal plant, we would have seen it again. If it were even a slightly common plant, it would have shown up at least once. It never did.

    Which means that for my brain, skunk cabbage is not a plant. It is a location.

    The plant that taught me what resistance smells like

    If you have never seen skunk cabbage in the wild, here is the important part. It does not look like a plant that belongs here.

    It looks like something that crash landed.

    In early spring it comes up as a purple hood sticking out of black mud, like a prop from a low budget science fiction movie. Later it turns into enormous, glossy green leaves that feel less like vegetation and more like a failed attempt at biological armor. If you step on it, it releases a smell that your brain immediately classifies as a warning. Not rotten. Not floral. Just wrong.

    As kids, we did not know any of this intellectually. We knew it tactically.

    The wetland behind our house was small. Not a swamp you would mark on a map. Just a low, muddy area fed by groundwater that stayed wet even in summer. You could not walk through it unless you cleared a path, and clearing a path meant knocking down skunk cabbage. There was no stepping delicately around it. It grew in dense, hostile clusters. Progress required violence.

    So we learned that skunk cabbage was tough, territorial, and smelled like punishment.

    This gave it personality.

    Why this thing existed only behind our house

    Finksburg is not wilderness. It is rural in the sense that there are trees and lawns and people who own riding mowers. Most kids I knew did not have wetlands behind their houses. They had woods that were dry enough to run through without thinking.

    Our woods were different. They squelched. They sucked at your boots. They required trail maintenance.

    This matters, because skunk cabbage does not grow in all wetlands. It grows in very specific ones. Groundwater fed, wooded, permanently mucky, stable over decades. The kind of place that never quite dries out and never quite freezes solid. These places are rare, and they are often small. According to ecological surveys, skunk cabbage colonies persist for decades or longer because their underground structures are massive and slow growing, essentially anchoring them to a specific hydrological niche.

    As a child, you do not experience this as niche ecology. You experience it as ownership.

    This was our plant. Our smell. Our monster.

    An exhaustive field study of everywhere it was not

    One of the quiet shocks of hiking the Appalachian Trail was discovering how generic most forests are.

    This is not an insult. Forests are wonderful. But after a few hundred miles, you start to notice how often the same patterns repeat. Oak hickory slopes. Fern covered understories. Mud that looks like other mud.

    And there was never skunk cabbage.

    Not in Pennsylvania. Not in Vermont. Not in the Smokies. Not even in the cold seepage areas where, on paper, it could have existed. Every time we crossed a wet area, some part of my brain expected it. Like waiting to see an old friend in a crowd. It never happened.

    This is how a childhood detail turns into a symbol. Not because it is profound, but because it refuses to generalize.

    Why nostalgia works better when it refuses to generalize

    Nostalgia usually works by abstraction. You remember summer. You remember bikes. You remember the feeling of being bored in a way that felt infinite.

    Skunk cabbage does the opposite. It refuses abstraction.

    You cannot remember skunk cabbage without remembering that exact patch of woods. The angle of the trees. The way the mud swallowed sticks. The fort we half built and abandoned. The path we cleared and recleared because plants do not respect childhood infrastructure.

    It is not a memory you can export.

    There is no skunk cabbage in my adult life, and that is the point. It anchors a version of me that cannot be recreated by visiting similar places. The plant is too specific. The wetland is too small. The conditions too exact.

    What childhood wonder looks like in retrospect

    I think part of what we mean by childhood wonder is not that the world was bigger, but that it was more uneven.

    Certain things mattered enormously because they were rare and local and demanded interaction. You could not just observe skunk cabbage. You had to deal with it. It pushed back. It smelled. It forced decisions.

    As an adult, I see skunk cabbage described as a thermogenic wetland plant with ancient evolutionary origins, a keystone species in certain seepage ecosystems. This is all true. It is also irrelevant to why it matters to me.

    What matters is that it only existed there.

    That the world once had corners that were not interchangeable.

    That somewhere behind a house in Maryland, a weird plant grew in a weird patch of mud, and my brain decided, very early on, that this was what reality looked like up close.

  • The Structural Turn, or: Why Analytic Philosophy Spent the Last Decade Staring at the Skeleton of Reality (2015-2025)

    I want to tell a story about analytic philosophy over the last ten years. It is not a clean story, and it does not end with a moral, but it does have a recognizable arc. If you had asked me in, say, 2005 what analytic philosophy was about, I probably would have said something like “language, logic, and modality.” If you asked me the same question in 2025, I would say “structure.”

    By structure, I mean something like this. Instead of asking what words mean, or what is possible in other worlds, philosophers have become increasingly obsessed with the architecture of reality itself. What is fundamental. What depends on what. Whether the world has sharp edges or blurry ones. How social facts latch onto physical facts. How norms attach to nature. What kinds of explanations bottom out and which ones keep going.

    This is not a return to old fashioned metaphysics exactly. It is more like a retooling. The new metaphysician is not cataloging entities so much as mapping dependency relations. The new epistemologist is not just asking whether a belief counts as knowledge but how inquiry should proceed under uncertainty and social constraint. The new ethicist is not just asking what is right but how to act when unsure what right even means.

    I am going to call this cluster of moves the structural turn. I am not claiming everyone signed a manifesto. I am claiming that if you skim the major journals from 2015 to 2025, this is the shape that emerges whether anyone intended it or not.

    What follows is a guided tour of the major open problems across five domains: metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language and logic, and metaethics and normative theory. I am not trying to solve these problems. I am trying to show why they stubbornly refuse to go away.

    Contents

    1. Metaphysics, or: What Depends on What and Why That Might Not Be Well Defined

    1.1 Grounding and the Dream of a Single “In Virtue Of”

    If you want one concept that captures the metaphysical mood of the decade, it is grounding. Grounding is supposed to be the non causal relation that explains why some facts obtain in virtue of others. The statue exists in virtue of the clay. The mental exists in virtue of the physical. The moral exists in virtue of the natural. And so on.

    At first glance, this looks like a godsend. We get to talk about metaphysical explanation without pretending it is causation. We get hierarchy without time. We get dependence without dynamism.

    The big question is whether grounding is one thing.

    Jonathan Schaffer and Kit Fine think it is. On their view, grounding is a primitive relation that structures reality into levels. Fundamental facts ground derivative facts. The job of metaphysics is to identify the base and describe how everything else flows from it.

    Schaffer even gives us formal tools for this. He adapts structural equation modeling from causal inference and uses it to model metaphysical dependence. The idea is roughly this: just as causal equations tell us how changing one variable would change another over time, grounding equations tell us how changing the grounds would change the grounded. This lets us make sense of metaphysical counterfactuals like “if the physical facts had been different, the mental facts would have been different.”

    This picture is elegant. It also makes metaphysics feel like a serious theoretical science.

    Jessica Wilson thinks this picture is misleading. On her view, capital G Grounding is not doing real work. What does the work are many different small g relations: realization, constitution, determinable to determinate, type identity, and so on. When we say “the mental is grounded in the physical,” what we really mean is something more specific like “the mental is realized by the physical.” Lumping all of these together under one label hides the machinery.

    This is sometimes called the coarseness problem. Saying “A grounds B” often tells you less than saying exactly how A relates to B. Unitary grounding theorists reply that this is fine. “Cause” is also coarse, and we still think it is a real relation with many species. Kicking and pushing are different, but they are both causal. Likewise, realization and constitution might be species of grounding.

    Things get even messier when we look at the logic of grounding. If grounding is one relation, it should probably be irreflexive, asymmetric, and transitive. Nothing grounds itself. If A grounds B, B does not ground A. If A grounds B and B grounds C, then A grounds C.

    Each of these principles has been challenged. There are plausible cases where transitivity seems to fail, especially once we allow contrastive explanation. There are proposals involving metaphysical loops, where entities mutually ground one another. At that point, the nice hierarchical picture starts to wobble.

    Why does any of this matter? Because grounding is doing enormous work across philosophy. Physicalism is often stated as a grounding thesis. So is moral naturalism. If grounding turns out to be disunified or incoherent, then “naturalism” might mean very different things in different domains, and metaphysics loses its unifying backbone.

    1.2 Vagueness in the World Itself

    For a long time, analytic philosophers were pretty confident that vagueness lived in language, not in reality. Mountains do not have vague boundaries. Words do. The world itself is perfectly precise. We just talk about it sloppily.

    This view was supported by a famous argument from Gareth Evans against vague identity. If a is vaguely identical to b, then b has the property of being vaguely identical to a, which a lacks. By Leibniz’s Law, they are not identical. So vague identity is impossible.

    Over the last decade, this consensus has cracked.

    Elizabeth Barnes and J.R.G. Williams argue that Evans’ argument assumes what is at issue. It assumes that vagueness must be modeled as a property of relations. They propose instead that the world itself might be unsettled. On their view, reality corresponds not to one perfectly precise world but to a range of precise “ersatz” worlds. A proposition is metaphysically indeterminate if it is true in some of these worlds and false in others, and reality has not settled which one is actual.

    Jessica Wilson proposes a different model. She suggests that indeterminacy can arise when an object instantiates a determinable property without instantiating any single determinate. The particle has a position determinable but no precise position determinate. This is not semantic vagueness and not mere ignorance. It is a specific way of being.

    Quantum mechanics looms large here. Superposition looks a lot like metaphysical indeterminacy. Treating the wavefunction as representing genuine indeterminacy may be more parsimonious than adding hidden variables or branching worlds. Some have even suggested that Everettian many worlds is just metaphysical indeterminacy in disguise.

    If the world is vague, what logic applies to it? Does classical logic still hold, or do we need truth value gaps or gluts? What about the open future? Is “there will be a sea battle tomorrow” already true or false? Or is reality genuinely unsettled?

    What once looked like a technical issue about borderline cases has turned into a fundamental question about the shape of reality.

    1.3 Social Reality and the Trouble with Construction

    Social ontology has become unavoidable. Race, gender, money, institutions, and social roles all have real causal power. At the same time, they are clearly not fundamental in the way quarks are.

    Sally Haslanger’s work reframed the debate by introducing ameliorative analysis. Instead of asking what our concept of race is, or what race really is, she asks what the concept should be for legitimate purposes. Her answer defines race and gender in terms of social hierarchy and oppression.

    This creates a dilemma. If race is socially constructed and biologically unreal, should we eliminate it? But if we eliminate it, how do we track injustice? Haslanger resolves this by being a realist about social kinds. Race is real as a social structure, even if it is not a biological one.

    Critics have raised worries about inclusion, especially regarding trans identities. If womanhood is defined by subordination on the basis of observed sex, what about trans women who have not been subordinated in that way? Or trans men who have?

    This has pushed some philosophers toward conferralism. On this view, social properties are conferred in context by social recognition. You are a woman in a context if you are treated as one by those with standing. This shifts focus from static structure to dynamic interaction.

    Race debates have similarly splintered. Some defend social realism. Others argue for a revised biological realism based on population genetics. Others are eliminativists. Still others treat race as primarily political and historical.

    A lurking question is whether there can be a unified theory of social kinds at all. Money, gender, and race might all be constructed, but they might be constructed in importantly different ways. Pluralism may be unavoidable.

    2. Philosophy of Mind, or: Explaining Why Consciousness Feels Like a Problem

    2.1 The Meta Problem of Consciousness

    The hard problem of consciousness asks how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. The meta problem asks why we think there is a hard problem.

    David Chalmers frames the meta problem as explaining our problem intuitions. Why do we say things like “there is something it is like” or “no physical explanation seems sufficient”? This is an “easy” problem in the technical sense. It concerns behavior and judgments.

    Illusionists like Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett argue that solving the meta problem is enough. If we can explain why brains generate reports about ineffable qualia, there is nothing left to explain. Consciousness, as ordinarily conceived, is a user illusion.

    Realists reply that this misses the residue. Even if we fully explain why a system claims to have experiences, the question remains whether it actually has them. If introspection reveals the essence of experience, physicalism is in trouble. If introspection is systematically misleading, illusionists owe us a story about how a physical process produces the appearance of non physical properties.

    This debate increasingly intersects with epistemology. If our beliefs about consciousness are shaped by evolutionary and cognitive biases, should we trust them? This mirrors evolutionary debunking arguments in ethics.

    2.2 Predictive Processing and Representation Anxiety

    Predictive processing has become the dominant framework in cognitive science. The brain is modeled as a prediction error minimizer. It maintains a generative model of the world and updates it to reduce surprise.

    The philosophical fight is over representation. Andy Clark argues that predictive processing vindicates representationalism. The generative models function as maps. The brain builds representations because they are useful.

    Others argue that this is a category mistake. The models are mathematical descriptions of system dynamics, not internal symbols with semantic content. The brain is regulating itself, not representing the world.

    The dark room problem sharpens the issue. If the brain wants to minimize prediction error, why not sit in a dark, silent room? The standard reply appeals to higher level expectations about action. We predict that we will explore. But this collapses desire into prediction. Wanting becomes expecting.

    Is that right? Does it capture the phenomenology of desire? Or are we losing something important?

    Some propose structural representation as a compromise. A state counts as a representation if it stands in a structural homomorphism with its target and is used for control. The open question is whether predictive processing models meet this criterion or whether they are just control loops all the way down.

    3. Epistemology, or: How to Reason While Being Human

    3.1 Inquiry Versus Belief

    Traditional epistemology focuses on belief states. Zetetic epistemology focuses on inquiry.

    Jane Friedman points out a tension. Evidentialism says you should believe what your evidence supports. Zetetic norms say you should take the means necessary to answer your question.

    Suppose your evidence supports a belief to a high degree, but you could easily gather more evidence. Should you believe now or suspend judgment and keep investigating? Being a good believer and being a good inquirer can pull apart.

    Some respond by making epistemic norms instrumental. Beliefs are tools for inquiry. Others argue that belief is just a stopping point of inquiry, and inquiry norms are primary. Others try to dissolve the tension by separating norms governing states from norms governing actions.

    The deeper question is whether rationality is static or dynamic. Is it about matching mind to world at a time, or about improving that match over time?

    3.2 Higher Order Evidence and Rational Akrasia

    Higher order evidence is evidence about your own reliability.

    The hypoxia case is standard. A pilot calculates that she has enough fuel. Then she learns she is cognitively impaired. Should she trust the calculation?

    Conciliationists say higher order evidence defeats first order justification. Your confidence in the belief should match your confidence in your reliability.

    Level splitters disagree. Maria Lasonen Aarnio argues that you can be justified in believing P and justified in believing that your belief in P is unreliable. Rationality is about responding to reasons, not about internal coherence. The result is epistemic akrasia: believing P while believing you should not believe P.

    This is uncomfortable, but maybe reality is uncomfortable. The debate pits internalist coherence against externalist truth tracking.

    3.3 Epistemic Injustice Grows Teeth

    Fricker’s original framework focused on credibility deficits and hermeneutical gaps. More recent work emphasizes agency and power.

    Contributory injustice occurs when marginalized groups have the concepts to understand their experience, but dominant groups refuse to uptake them. This is not absence. It is active blockage.

    Epistemic exploitation highlights the wrong of demanding that marginalized people do the labor of educating others about oppression. A request for evidence can be virtuous inquiry or vicious exploitation depending on context.

    This forces epistemology to confront its own norms. Asking for reasons is not always innocent.

    4. Language and Logic, or: Fixing Our Tools While Standing on Them

    4.1 Conceptual Engineering and the Implementation Problem

    Conceptual engineering aims to improve our concepts, not just analyze them.

    The implementation problem asks how this is supposed to work. If meanings are fixed by social usage, how can philosophers change them from the armchair?

    If redefining “woman” does not change public meaning, engineering is toothless. If it does change meaning, we need a story about metasemantic control.

    Some appeal to speaker meaning and gradual uptake. Others argue that we cannot control meaning directly and must engage in conceptual activism, hoping the metasemantics follow.

    There is also the problem of topic continuity. If we change the meaning of “freedom” to make it compatible with determinism, are we still talking about freedom, or have we changed the subject? Solving a problem by changing topics is not obviously progress.

    4.2 Logical Pluralism and the Fear of Collapse

    Logical pluralists argue that there is more than one correct logic. Validity is truth preservation across cases, and different notions of case yield different logics.

    Williamson argues for monism and anti exceptionalism. Logic is a scientific theory of the most general structure of reality. We should choose the one best supported by abductive fit.

    Pluralism faces the collapse problem. If one logic says you must believe P and another says you may refrain, normativity seems to side with the stronger logic. Pluralism collapses into monism in practice.

    Some propose domain specific logics. Quantum theory might need one logic. Database theory another. There may be no single global logic.

    4.3 Slurs and the Semantics of Offense

    Slurs test the boundary between semantics and pragmatics.

    Pure expressivism says slurs just express contempt. Hybrid views add descriptive content plus derogatory force.

    Appropriation creates trouble. When members of a target group reclaim a slur, the valence flips.

    Prohibitionist views explain this by taboo violation. Echoic accounts explain it by ironic quotation. A remaining puzzle is subject dependent semantics: how a word’s meaning changes based on who says it.

    5. Ethics, or: What to Do When Everything Is Uncertain

    5.1 Moral Uncertainty

    Normative uncertainty asks how to act when unsure which moral theory is correct.

    Maximizing expected choice worthiness treats moral theories like hypotheses and weights them by credence. The problem is intertheoretic comparison. How do you compare utility to duty?

    Variance normalization tries to fix this by equalizing influence. Critics say this is arbitrary. Others give up and act on their favorite theory.

    The deeper issue is whether moral theories share a common scale at all.

    5.2 Population Ethics and Impossibility

    The repugnant conclusion says that a huge population with barely good lives can be better than a smaller population with excellent lives.

    Arrhenius shows that you cannot avoid this while satisfying a few plausible axioms. Something has to give.

    Responses include abandoning transitivity, embracing skepticism about large numbers, or biting the bullet and accepting the conclusion.

    No option is comfortable.

    5.3 Evolutionary Debunking

    If evolution shaped our moral beliefs for fitness, not truth, why trust them?

    Realists appeal to third factors. Critics say this begs the question. Others argue debunking spreads too far. Math and logic were also selected for usefulness.

    Vavova argues that debunking only works if we assume massive error. We can correct for bias using our existing beliefs.

    5.4 Transformative Experience

    Some choices change who you are. You cannot know their value in advance because you cannot know what it is like, and because the evaluator changes.

    Decision theory breaks. Testimony does not solve the problem. Some suggest we choose for discovery, not utility.

    This threatens the rational agent model itself.

    6. AI Alignment, or: When Philosophy Stops Being Optional

    AI alignment forces all of these issues into practice.

    If intelligence and goals are orthogonal, value loading is hard. Inverse reinforcement learning tries to infer values from behavior. But behavior is messy.

    Should AI follow revealed preferences or idealized ones? What counts as idealization? This is moral philosophy in code.

    Constitutional AI makes the problem explicit. We are writing a constitution for a non human agent. Every unresolved normative question matters.

    If AI systems appear conscious, the other minds problem becomes urgent. If consciousness is an illusion, what does that imply for artificial agents?

    Summary Table

    Domain Core question Technical pivot Key debate
    Metaphysics Grounding unity Structural equation modeling Unitary realism vs pluralism
    Metaphysics Worldly indeterminacy Precisificational models Semantic vs metaphysical vagueness
    Mind Meta problem Problem intuitions Realism vs illusionism
    Mind Predictive processing Free energy principle Representation vs enactivism
    Epistemology Inquiry norms Instrumental principles Evidentialism vs zeteticism
    Epistemology Higher order evidence Level splitting Conciliation vs right reasons
    Logic Logical choice Anti exceptionalism Monism vs pluralism
    Ethics Moral uncertainty Variance normalization MEC vs incomparability
    Ethics Population ethics Impossibility theorems Totalism vs impossibility acceptance

    If there is a unifying theme here, it is this. Analytic philosophy spent decades refining its tools. Now it is asking whether the tools themselves are adequate to the shape of reality, agency, and value. The answers are not in. But the questions are sharper than they have been in a long time.

    And yes, some of this sounds bonkers. But it is the good kind of bonkers.

    Back to top

  • William Gaddis’ Recognitions: My thoughts

    I found The Recognitions interesting at first, especially in the way it jumps between characters and scenes. There is some sharp dialogue and a few moments that really stand out, and I liked how much academic and historical material gets woven in. That part felt ambitious and kind of exciting. But after about a hundred pages, the structure started to wear me down. It felt too chaotic for me to follow any clear storyline, and I never got a strong sense of where it was headed. I was not bored so much as tired of the effort it took to keep track of everything. Eventually it felt like I was just moving through a series of loosely connected scenes rather than a developing narrative, and I could not quite stick with it.