John C. Brady

October 2025 | Epoché Magazine A free online philosophy magazine, delivered monthly

Issue #85 is now live! With writing on materialism, analytic philosophy, the paradox of clothing, and the sublime. Dive in~ #philosophy #philsky epochemagazine.org/issues/85/

Dude, there could only be at most 70 duplicates. You nuked the whole damn folder.

I’m worried all the nouns are secretly uncountable, and we’ve just been hoodwinked into arbitrary clusterings, but one morning I’ll wake up and they’ll all be uncountable. “Wait, you guys there all verbs?!” - “always have been” gun shot.

What the hell is going on with uncountable nouns? Is anyone looking into this?

Miami coach McDaniels

if the bassist looks like this you’re gonna die in the pit

I’m… wearing them? What’s the next instruction?

If we define the “Deleuze effect” as the renewed interest within English language scholarship in thinkers that are mentioned positively somewhere in Deleuze (so Albert Lautman, Gilbert Simondon, even Solomon Maimon as far as I can tell), is the current Bergson renaissance a product of this effect?

12:01 ÷73 + r/AskAnthropology •• What is the oldest lullaby or nursery rhyme that... 11 upvotes • 1 comment As far as the earliest we know of, it's another Babylonian tablet, about 4000 years old and most often known as Little Baby in the Dark House. We don't have the music for it, but again, the BBC article has a good go at describing some commonalities of the music that tends to accompany lullabies, so that might inspire you. The rough translation for that Babylonian lullaby, by the way, is: Little Baby in the dark house You have seen the sun rise Why are you crying? Why are you screaming? You have disturbed the house god. 'Who has disturbed me?' says the house god. 'It is the baby who has disturbed you! 'Who scared me?' says the house god. 'The baby has disturbed you, the baby has scared you, making noises like a drunkard who cannot sit still on his stool. He has disturbed your sleep! 'Call the baby now, says the house god. • 4 Reply A & Vote & Join the conversation

check out this absolutely terrifying ancient babylonian lullaby

Creative Simulacrum? Maritain’s Creative Intuition and Tolkien’s Sub-Creation applied to Large Language Models | Epoché Magazine A free online philosophy magazine, delivered monthly

Issue #84 September 2025

Creative Simulacrum? Maritain’s Creative Intuition and Tolkien’s Sub-Creation applied to Large Language Models

by John Hartley

epochemagazine.org/84/creative-...

Sorry, to clarify, my original riff was to take your point about the data hungriness of the technology, and then make a point that the hungriness shows us this is a dead end. The dead end part is my own thought I’m pursuing, not something I thought was part of the point you made originally.

-people do at all in producing sentences. It’s doing something else, a costly either way simulcra of speech. It’s like those mechanicons of the 18th and 19th century: if we just had more and tinier gears!

Again all speculation, but if the dilemma is we either need more examples of text than humans have ever produced, or, more compute power than humans have ever marshalled, in order for LLMs to lose their quirks and banality and be able to do interesting work, then this tech is not modelling what-

I think they can add nodes to the neural net, but with all the connectedness, I think you run into a “rice grains on the chessboard” problem really fast with compute power in adding more nodes. It just seems the whole approach is quite neat, but not anything like intelligence.

Yeah that’s what I mean. The disanalogy with human intelligence then is staggering, and the “tech” seems stagnant. If it actually is the case that more data is the only way to improve (whatever the metrics we define that improvement with), that is.

Like, if I had read the entirety of project Gutenberg txt files, and reddit, and the library of congress etc, I’m sure I’d have more interesting things to say than monsieur gpt.

Happy to stand corrected, but it then seems there are no “better” models, just larger sets (to make the models better). If that’s true the tech is real “oz is just some geezer behind a curtain” stuff: current ai is the best it can be with (gestures) all of that?

It’s the “movies cinematic universe”. All movies are set in the same universe, but it’s a multiverse. And every actor is always the same character, but some characters are played by different actors if they’re in different universes within the multiverse.

Once at school I had a teacher who introduced himself to us by saying "There are two things you need to know about me. First, if you don't give me any trouble, I won't give you any trouble. Second, I wear shorts all the time because I don't own any trousers"

But still redeemable via a period in purgatory. The designer who adds torx screws, on the other hand, they have a special ring in hell just for them:

Biblical liar paradox at Matthew 5:37, “Let your communication be, Yea,
yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.”

Ooooooof. Go straight to jail.

Wait, that means committing mutiny involves just doing a mut.

Sorry can’t hear you over all the scruting in here, three more scruts and I think it’d count as some serious scrutiny.

Oh it’s inscrutable, as in not scrutable, like, you’re unable scrut that? I can scrut it just fine. My abilities of scrutation must be more well trained.

The fall/garden of eden but it’s just the animal kingdom separating from the plant kingdom being all like “we have no need for the solar radiation!” But then evolving vision and being like “the solar radiation actually is boss, but now we’re so hungry…”

Someone in a frog costume facing down a line of police in riot gear

George Orwell’s Animal Crossing

computer

NATURE/LPEAK320.GIF

"Helen de Cruz (1978–2025): an academic and personal tribute" *Religious Studies* Published online 2025:1-4.
doi.org/10.1017/S003...
@helendecruz.net

September 2025 | Epoché Magazine A free online philosophy magazine, delivered monthly

Issue 84 is live and kicking, with writing and multimedia on Maritain, Tolkien, LLMs, Aurelius, Deleuze, theater, fascism, and events. 'Tis bleak and great.

epochemagazine.org/issues/84/

#Philosophy #Philsky