Thinking about that one time Plato bombed in public trying to explain one of his central ideas.

For me Reece's work is a testament to paying attention. It turns out that if you look carefully and repeatedly, you can see things that are totally opaque to most people—even those whose job it is, in theory, to understand them. You don't need a degree or access to esoteric knowledge, it just takes dedication. This is just as true of the infrastructure and decisions that shape our cities as it is of works of art or the details of our personal lives. Once you start looking, you can begin to see the big and small ways that these structures impact our everyday life. You also see that things could be so much better than they are. The world is very large. If you keep looking you will never run out of original observations. Somebody, somewhere, has made a choice that you could emulate or learn from. Reece has taught me a lot about how to look. If you haven’t encountered Reece’s work yet, start with whichever of his YouTube videos catches your interest, or his Substack, The Transit Brief. I also loved his recent conversations with Vin on The Other Stuff and the Spokes on Hogtown. I can't wait for tomorrow evening I think it will be a chance to think carefully about Toronto and our own lives and what these things could become.

Writing on my way out the door, but Levin's paper has me thinking about how his ideas can connect with a view of philosophy rooted in an askēsis of perception: Two orienting quotes from Levin: 1. "Bodies (whether living, engineered, or hybrid) are interfaces for a massive, multi-scale hierarchy of patterns to ingress into the physical world." 2. "Is there a 'force', beyond the 'if you build it, they will come' model of physical objects, pulling patterns from the space? Or are the contents of the Platonic space under 'positive pressure', somehow encouraging their appearance in the world as intrusive thoughts, archetypes, works of art?" Now add to (1) and (2) the way human minds scaffold and transform their own perception through practices of formation (meditation, contemplation, prayer etc.), carefully architected affordance spaces (cathedrals, libraries, monasteries), and certain kinds of techniques and technologies (e.g., reading and writing) and a really interesting picture emerges of how ingression doesn't just occur but can be transformed through certain kinds of activities done in the right kind of places. This picture suggests that the kind of "ingression" we have available to us in perception is downstream in part of our shaping practices. My work in a nutshell, in Levin's terms.

Wow this is absolutely going to fry people especially at Anthropic, this is like the Anti-Claude Constitution. They just declared war on everyone researching model welfare. “We’re building a tool, not a being. Fuck your feelings.” - Microsoft

A number of you know that I’ve been working on a dissertation for some time now, at points taking a year or more off in between drafts and revisions. I’m happy to report that the manuscript is now done, and yesterday I successfully defended Askēsis and Perception: Philosophy as a Way of Life to my committee. I’d describe it as the longer, more technical version of the work I put out here. I’ve included my presentation notes for the oral defense below.

Two things are becoming clear as a result of AI: 1. It’s forcing a renewed discussion on what being a human is, what intelligence is, what understanding is, etc. 2. It’s drawing the arts, humanities, philosophy, mathematics, and sciences back together again under their original remit of person formation. Both suggest a return to a more classical and unified notion of “liberal arts.”

Here it is - the official, revised, peer-reviewed version of my Platonic Space paper. mdpi.com/2409-9287/11/5/161 Of all the many unpopular positions I’ve taken over the decades - bitter controversies around the origin of left-right asymmetry in embryogenesis, bioelectricity and genetics, diverse intelligence, etc., this one has by far generated the most pushback: serious (grateful for those!) and energetic attempts to move me to other views, pleas to just drop it and not talk about it (for several different reasons), nasty emails and accusations, impacts on reviews of papers that have nothing to do with this, etc. Kind of amazing to me how incendiary this is. What can I say... Our job is to call it as we see it, and right now for me, this is it. Apologies to collaborators and colleagues for any shrapnel! Time will tell if this pans out or not; I've placed my bets. And btw, if you think this stuff is weird and uncomfortable, just wait… There’s much more on the way. The knob turns slowly but as long as the data keep coming, I'm going to say what I think it all means and follow it to the next steps it enables. Buckle up!