Pete Wolfendale

Getting a lot of replies from Americans today about how Labour’s woes portend doom for the Democratic Party, if they don’t mend their ways. I think that’s right, in one specific way: both wanted so badly, for so long, to claim the centre ground as the party of mean-as-fuck Business Win authority…

*My* preferred ethnic group's romantic self assertion would be good. For we suffered bad things, which obviously makes my armchair fantasising about apocalyptic violence meted out upon our enemies good. Totally unlike groups who do bad stuff, who obviously have no similar excuses in their own case.

bsky.app/profile/deon...

I think this is a general problem. Rolling media coverage now functions as something like a negative feedback mechanism dampening response to abnormal events by way of sheer professional inertia. If something must be reported on for more than a week or two it is now a normal part of reality.

The Revenge of Reason Book Launch - Peter Wolfendale in conversation with Jacob Parkin, 25th of February 2026, 17:00-19:30, Henry Daysh Building, Floor 1 Room 1.02, Newcastle University

A reminder for this coming Wednesday, for anyone near Newcastle:

He distinguishes intelligence from consciousness but spends all his time talking about conditions for consciousness (principally qualia/valence) when the ultimate import is personhood. The closest we get to an analysis of the connection between these comes at the very end:

The Mythology Of Conscious AI | NOEMA Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.

The new piece by Anil Seth in Noema (www.noemamag.com/the-mytholog...) is like a bingo card of currently popular anti-computationalist tropes, but above all it exemplifies the conflation of consciousness and personhood in debates about AI and potential human-likeness.

Already seen them. I think of them as Lemongrab Lightning Bolt.

My essay 'After Orthogonality,' the culmination of 4 years of work on virtue-ethics, rationality, AI, decision-theory, and praxis is out on The Gradient

I have friends being threatened by their workplaces over the use of toilets they've been using for years without problem.

This produces a weird dynamic of emotional outreach to the leftist base and non-engagement with leftist ideas, combined with intellectual engagement with rightist ideas without emotional outreach to the rightist base. A perfect recipe for overton window drift.

This sort of haranguing does not work on the right, but that means that the reactionary centre is often far more willing to discuss ends and principles with *their* intelligensia, and even to performatively concede and perhaps even be persuaded on topics like human rights and immigration.

Overtures are characteristically presented as instrumental tradeoffs forced by impossibility ('We wish that X were possible, but the best we can hope for is Y'). But the instrumental framing is set up to avoid any genuine discussion of the end in question. Closer to emotional blackmail than debate.

I'm not sure this is right, because there's a really significant difference between 'haranguing' and 'rational persuasion'. When reactionary centrists appeal to leftists, they tend to do so in a unilateral way that appeals to purportedly shared values while refusing examination of those values.

The cross-partisan delegitimation of human rights in Britain by Labour and Tory and then Reform has been an absolute disaster and handed an open goal to the far right.

laser_eyes_mandelson.jpg

I'd feel better if we hadn't been forced into it all by disclosure from the yanks tbh. This is what happens when our media-political omerta is broken from the outside.

And northern / Midlands towns that were already seeing youth flight and a lack of investment as well as a death of local industry haven't caught up because they have no means to. Just because a lot of journos went on poverty safari up north doesn't mean the council funding settlement was fixed.

TELEOLOGY MUST BE RESISTED AT ALL COSTS.

Sparta wrekd.

If children were more politically active they would be quite pissed to be told that their screen time is “the most urgent public health issue” while the largest measles outbreak since the vaccine sweeps their schools because of conspiracies that the adults in their life believed from social media.

Completed thread laying out my take on the pitfalls and promises of debates about whether AIs are or can be ‘intelligent’.

I'm sure someone must have written on this but where's good writing about how TTRPGs produce a psychedelic imaginary experience?

That’s all I came here to say. Hopefully I’ll have something published on this soon. Good luck weathering the culture war in the meantime. 🖖

Here’s the punchline: it’s reasonable to hold that current AI systems display a form of intelligence (problem-solving), without yet displaying characteristically human intellect (wisdom), and also insist that no extra-computational factor will preclude them from getting there.

If you’re interested in my antipathy to embodiment, maybe check out this in the meantime: t.co/Klcd8Jy2oY

I don’t think there’s any way to argue that an algorithmic approach to problems representation and reformulation needs either organic or hermeneutic supplement without reifying these things into non-mechanistic mysteries. But the full argument will have to wait for later.

By describing wisdom/metacognition as a capacity to approach problem-solving in a strategic manner, I am essentially describing it as a special sort of cognitive agency. But I see absolutely no reason to believe this requires either a body or needs as Dreyfus insists it must.

But this has vanishingly little to do with consciousness or personhood as generally conceived, and the associated putatively essential human qualities that are often bundled with them. The one exception is the notion of agency, but this should be no comfort to Dreyfusians.