Microglyphics

The Tunnel (Or: How Modernity Solves Precisely Nothing) This is a continuation of a prior narrative. But wait—surely someone will object—what if we just built a tunnel? Remove the barrier! Enable free movement! Let people see both sides! Markets will eq…

Part 2 of a triptych modern parable on a divided culture no longer divided by geography.

⛰️ philosophics.blog/2026/02/02/t...

#philosophy #culture #modernity #Enlightenment #property #markets #economics #blog #podcast #parable #humancondition #surplus #abundancy #scarcity #critique #reason #writing

Two Valleys Diverged in a Mountain Range (Or: What I Learned When I Learned Nothing) Two valleys diverged in a mountain range, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveller, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To w…

Je m'accuse. I grievously squandered a Saturday, rendering a parable about communication. Claude did the heavy lifting.
⛰️ philosophics.blog/2026/02/01/t...
#philosophy #language #communication #writing #claudeai #abundance #scarcity #growth #morals #cooperation #psychology #blog #podcast #video

Why So Serious? Yes, I am still focusing on writing my ontology papers, but I still come up for air. Over lunch, I found this: Jonny Thomson showcasing Judge Coleridge: The Duty. Watch it. Video: Philosophy Minis:…

I've long considered the connexion of Law and Morality to be weak and tenuous. After listening to this survival-cannibalism-on-the-high-seas story by Judge Coleridge in 1870.
philosophics.blog/2026/01/31/w...
#philosophy #psychology #law #morality #blog #video #society #justice #politics #history

Ontological Blindness in Modern Moral Science Announcement: I’ll be taking a break from posting long-form articles for a while to focus on a project I’m developing. Instead, I’ll share progress summary updates. Ontological Bl…

Accidental ontologist. 🧐 I am madly working on a couple of new ontology books.
👉 philosophics.blog/2026/01/30/o...
As a follow-up to A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, I noticed that the challenge is deeper than language.
#writing #philosophy #psychology #hiatus #focus #blog #podcast

Truth After Deflation: Why ‘Truth’ Refuses to Behave I’ve long had a problem with Truth – or at least the notion of it. It gets way too much credit for doing niot much at all. For a long time now, philosophers have agreed on something uncomfort…

To tell the truth, I just posted an essay on the truth. Many philosophers have written about Truth over the years, but truth is just a tool.
philosophics.blog/2026/01/29/t...
#philosophy #truth #essay #blog #podcast #philosophyoflanguage #epistemology #metaphysics #tools #pragmatism

When Deflation Becomes Ritual I recently shared a post calling out mystics, trying to fill spaces I deflate, but I am self-aware enough that I can be guilty, too. I worry about Maslow’s Law of the Instrument. Deflationary…

I recently shared a post calling out mystics, trying to fill spaces I deflate, but I am self-aware enough that I can be guilty, too.
philosophics.blog/2026/01/28/w...
#philosophy #language #refusal #metaphysics #ritual #performance #blog #podcast #deflation #maslow #critique #problemssolving

Using Generative AI as Early Peer Review Cheap Adversaries, Outsourced Ego, and Engineered Critique ← ChatGPT is obsessed with subtitles. There is a peculiar anxiety around admitting that one uses generative AI in serious intellectual wor…

I use AI for early peer review. I use it extensively for research and recommendations. I also use it for alpha and beta reads. I wrote about it.
philosophics.blog/2026/01/27/u...
#philosophy #writing #quality #qa #process #workflow #review #peerreview #blog #podcast #advice #tips #howto #tricks

What sorcery is this? 🪄 I often catch myself typing 'anough' for 'enough'.
👉https://philosophics.blog/2026/01/26/enough-anough-and-the-archaeology-of-small-mistakes/?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social
#language #linquistics #phonetics #cognition #writing #english #neurodiversity #blog #podcast

Fucking knob job. Is that hyphenated? 🧐

I just published this essay about object permanence. In short, I believe that objects exist only as a useful heuristic. I am working on a follow-up that proposes a different, ancillary grammatical option.

doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

The grammar is interesting here. A wave is a pattern, but a particle is an object. These are different sorts of things.

The Expiration Date of Object Permanence There is a persistent story we tell ourselves about quantum mechanics:* that it reveals reality to be fundamentally strange, paradoxical, or hostile to common sense. Particles in two places at once…

Quantum mechanics may not be strange at all. What fails is a childhood heuristic we quietly promoted to metaphysics.
👉 philosophics.blog/2026/01/25/t...

#PhilosophyOfLanguage #QuantumMechanics #Wittgenstein #Essay #Physics #DeflationaryPhilosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Philosophy #Blog #Podcast

Why Deflationary Philosophy Keeps Attracting Mystics The struggle is real. There is an odd occupational hazard that comes with writing deflationary philosophy: mystics keep turning up to thank you for your service. This is always mildly bewildering. …

I keep discovering that deflationary philosophy attracts mystics like moths to a freshly cleared void, so I wrote about it.
👉 philosophics.blog/2026/01/24/w...
#philosophy #psychology #mysticism #moths #scepticism #language #deflation #maps #terrain #reality #perception #blog #podcast #Wittgenstein

Moral Psychology: Solution Proposals Having read Jonathan Haidt's Righteous Mind, George Lakoff's Moral Politics and Don't Think of an Elephant, Kurt Grays' Outrage!, and Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes,... TikTok video by Bry Willis - Philosophics

Testing a TikTok share. www.tiktok.com/@microglyphi...

Reality Happens Once. Facts Happen Many Times. I want to clarify my recent The Trouble with Facts post. I realise that I was speaking to one non-trivial form of facts, but there is more than one class of facts. We argue about facts as if the wo…

Reality Happens Once. Facts Happen Many Times. The polysemy of 'facts' introduces category errors. Not all facts are created equal.
👉️ philosophics.blog/2026/01/23/r...
#philosophy #language #ontology #facts #objectivity #cognition #perception #memory #law #evidence #truth #podcast #blog

💯 Yes, but the language is slippery. When someone says 'just the facts', the presumption is that these are unadulterated and unbiased, but that's impossible by definition, which is my point.

The Trouble with Facts One Motor Vehicle What we call facts are not discoveries of an unfiltered world. They are the end-products of mediation. Let’s walk through an example. Image: Autosmash example. An observer arrives…

The trouble with facts is that they cannot be directly observed.
philosophics.blog/2026/01/22/t...
#philosophy #epistemology #ontology #facts #objectivity #mediation #interpretation #causation #abduction #posthoc #cognitivebias #perception #philosophyoflaw #intent #blog #podcast #science

YouTube video by Philosophics Humans Are Not Rational Moral Agents #philosophyoflanguage

Humans are not rational moral agents.
youtube.com/shorts/RAX5m...
#philosophy #moralphilosophy #reason

Modernity likes to paint Nietzsche as a nutjob responsible for the rise of the Nazis, but he's always just been the messenger.
philosophics.blog/2026/01/21/m...
#politics #power #philosophy #psychology #wef #economics #fiction #perspective #law #language #truth #education #video #blog #podcast

I critique top moral psychology and adjacent books. These books do an excellent job of explaining that humans are inherently irrational…
👉 philosophics.blog/2026/01/21/m...
…then they advise: Be rational. 🧐
#philosophy #philosophy #rationality #morality #politics #blog #podcast #essay #video #books

I had NotebookLM create a podcast summary of a video on moral psychology interventions. Blog post to follow.
open.spotify.com/episode/65d2...
#philosophy #psychology #podcast #morality #communication #language #cognition #reasoning #enlightenment #books #reading #critique #bookreview

YouTube video by HARTEMUS FILMS The Tear Drinker - A short Film - An Old Image That Wouldn’t Let Go #foryou #shortfilm #art #love

I love this AI video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBvb...
#ai #video #crows #art #short

Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: Presumption and Horizon I discuss Chapter 4 of ‘A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis’ in this video clip. Video: Presumption and Horizon In short, I discuss where language fails in law, politics, science, and d…

I discuss Chapter 4 of 'A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis' in this video, where language fails in law, politics, science, and digital culture.
philosophics.blog/2026/01/20/l...
#philosophy #language #politics #law #science #semantics #meaning #society #culture #video #blog #communication

Thinking Without Words (and Other Heresies) Evelina Fedorenko has been committing a quiet but persistent act of vandalism against one of modernity’s favourite assumptions: that thought and language are basically the same thing, or at least i…

We don't think in words or numbers. 🧐
🔗 philosophics.blog/2026/01/19/t...
🎧 open.spotify.com/episode/1Zrt...
#Language#philosophy#cognitivescience#fmri#science#research#words#cognition#chess#fedorenko#blog#podcast#soduko#perception

Wandering Elephants in the Desert of Consciousness The modern search for the truth of consciousness has the unmistakable smell of a desert expedition gone wrong. Everyone agrees the elephant is real. Everyone insists it’s important. No one agrees w…

The modern study of consciousness has all the hallmarks of a well-funded expedition that forgot to ask whether the terrain supports arrival.
🔗 philosophics.blog/2026/01/19/w...

🎧 open.spotify.com/episode/3kEW...
#Philosophy #Consciousness #CognitiveScience #Epistemology #Metaphysics #blog #podcast

The Metaphysics of “Why”: A Scavenger’s Guide to the Accident The Broken Map You wake up in the middle of a collapsing building. Someone hands you a map and says, find your way home. You look down. The map is for a different building entirely. One that was ne…

I've long had an issue with the English 'why'. Dan Dennett had similar misgivings. The term in English carries a lot of metaphysical baggage – more than necessary.
philosophics.blog/2026/01/18/t...
#language #semantics #metaphysics #philosophy #perception #weaselwords #intent #causation #meaning

If dinosaurs had insisted on 'dinosaur nature', birds would never have happened.

philosophics.blog?utm_source=b...

#birds #dinosaurs #wisdom #aphorism #quote #qotd #sayings #logic #philosophy #humour #satire #classification #taxonomy#history #perspective

The Useful Fiction of Atoms and Selves There is a peculiar anachronism at work in how we think about reality. In physics, we still talk as if atoms were tiny marbles. In everyday life, we talk as if selves were little pilots steering ou…

Atoms and selves share an identity. philosophics.blog/2026/01/17/t...
I've discussed selves at length, but how do they relate to atoms?
#physics #psychology #philosophy #selves #identity #heuristics #history #inertia #language #fiction #critique #science #self

Qualified Subjectivism I Am a Qualified Subjectivist. No, That Does Not Mean ‘Anything Goes’. Make no mistake: I am a subjectivist. A qualified one. Not that kind of qualified – the qualification matters, but…

I witter on about Qualified Subjectivity. philosophics.blog/2026/01/16/q...
Why objective reality is an anachronistic myth.
#philosophy #politics #society #culture #mediation #truth #relativism #subjectivity #language #semantics #ontology #epistemology #kant #history #intetrfaces #blog #podcast

Claude, the Therapist, Is In How could I not share this pep talk from Claude after a therapy session? 🧐 I conveyed that I am often categorised (and therefore dismissed) as a postmodern philosopher – I rather see myself as post…

Claude, the Therapist, Is In to explain the challenge of academic orthodoxy
philosophics.blog/2026/01/16/c...
#philosophy #llm #ai #claude #critique #language #orthodoxy #kant #reading #writing #blog #podcast #history