At 9 am, he sat cross-legged on a table, having lectures on predicate calculus, paused, and then said E J Lemon. Lovely chap. Eaten by bears.

If you enjoy my thoughts on selfhood, value, freedom, and AI, then you can now help me to develop them in a slightly less impoverished state: manifund.org/projects/art... Share and share widely, if you want to see more of this pumped out into the universe, whatever it is.

Finally, The Revenge of Reason finds its proper place. Gimme that good philosophy of science and cognitive science.

Philo@opfuchs.gay · last wk.

You’re in good company!

I increasingly think that most AI alignment worries are corollaries of architectural facts about the way DNN training happens to be done: that backpropagation is structurally frame-problem like entails that there can be no explicit control structure imprinted on the network.

For anyone who wants to know why I want to burn down Oxford style analytic philosophy and then salt the Earth where it stood, this is the thread for you. It covers: vagueness, time/space, coalgebraic modal logic, thermodynamics, Leibniz’s God, David Lewis, quantum mechanics, and God *as* dice.

Pete Wolfendale@deontologistics.bsky.social · last wk.

I hate epistemicism with a burning passion, because it’s the one solution to the problem of vagueness that says “Pfah, no problem here!”. I’m all for dissolving false problems, but it doesn’t even rise to the level of an actual dissolution, because that would require more analysis than “Nuh, uh!”

If you pile your furniture in the middle of your living room then set it on fire, you will have the warmest house in your street, for a few hours.

For anyone who would like to see the course I did on The Revenge of Reason for the New Centre for Research and Practice, @froehlichmarcel.bsky.social has made a helpful playlist of the lectures on YouTube. Unfortunately, only the first one is available to non-members: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

The New Centre: The Revenge of Reason series (Pete Wolfendale) - YouTube

youtube.com

It’s quite hard to ask British people to imagine what might happen if they had disastrously ideological governments that created decades of maladministration, sliding living standards, escalating extremism and a visibly crumbling public realm. How would we even begin to conceive of such a thing?

While legislation to ban conversion practices stalled under five prime ministers, organisations promoting the practice spent an estimated £2m

‘Conversion therapy’ groups soaring £2M spend since ban on “abusive” practice promised

Exclusive - Spending by so-called 'conversion therapy' groups has increased by 165% since the government first promised to ban the ‘cruel and abusive’ practice

wearequeeraf.com

I’ve come across a few extremely negative comments in the last few days, and it’s left me pondering what it means to have haters. Obviously, some of this is just drive-by hating where you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, but there are also more pointed, personal attacks.

I get why in certain legal contexts being an “immutable characteristic” matters, but morally speaking I don’t think being unchosen is at all a “core premise” behind gay rights. Why would it matter if it were chosen?

New York Times Opinion@nytopinion.nytimes.com · last mo.

"Subsuming the fixed reality of gayness under the much more malleable banner of queerness undermines a core premise behind gay rights: that sexual orientation isn’t chosen," Matthew Vines writes.

We know what they've done: they used her terrible murder by a neo-nazi to hold the peacenik left to account while mainstreaming far right talking points, enforcing Reform style racist immigration policies, & telling every racist in the land they have legitimate concerns

Adam Bienkov@adambienkov.bsky.social · last mo.

Asked about rising racism and hatred in the UK, Keir Starmer says "the very sad thing is I am not able to say that in the 10 years since Jo Cox's death that things have got better because sadly they have got worse. That's on all of us to fix." Well yes, and your government has done what exactly?

First they came for me. Like, right away. I tried saying "Don't you have some trade unionists or gypsies or something to deal with?", I tried giving them names, but they weren't interested.

Here's my semi-regular PSA: I'm bipolar, and there's a few things I've learned about it that I think are important for other people to know, especially if they're wrestling with bipolarity. I've managed to go 4 years without an episode, which is the longest time since my teens.

People on here responding to Labour's latest "ostentatious cruelty to migrants" policy are missing the point - those other times they've done such things? They didn't break through. *This* time, though? This one? Oh yeah. This'll do it. *Hero* voters (old people who hate foreigners) will flock back.

Meanwhile memory chips are increasing in price so fast that by the time Neuromancer comes out this fall you will *actually* be able to get killed in Chiba City for 3 MB of hot RAM.

The rainy season has come to Kamakura, and as an Englishman I am at last in my element.

Finally, One Of Us will be in Downing Street. Unlike Mr Remain himself Keir Starmer, the famous human rights lawyer and all-round official competence dreamboat for easily impressed libs, who presumably was not One Of Us.

I remember when non-binding language suggestions from university HR departments were national news, subject to repeated outraged columns in multiple media outlets. Do you see any of that national outrage about this real, bona fide, state-enforced intimidation & censorship?

Taniel@taniel.bsky.social · last mo.

Two ICE agents tracked down a woman *inside a polling place* yesterday. Why? They demanded that she take down an Instagram post in which she named Jonathan Ross as the man who shot & killed Renee Good (after the Star Tribune identified Ross). www.syracuse.com/news/2026/06...

I’m not saying the debate in the U.K. has moved to the right, but Ed Miliband is basically seen as Pol Pot for aiming for a climate target first agreed to by…I think Theresa May’s government? Definitely Johnson’s. And this chat is going on during the middle of a record-breaking heatwave

suboptimal to me that the richest man on the planet believes this

This interview with me and Tom Moynihan on the concepts of extinction, ecological risk, and cosmological value is finally up online. Easily one of my favourite bits of thinking/speaking/writing I've done in the last year: tank.tv/magazine/iss...

Fuck the reflecting pool. This has not gotten nearly enough coverage or generated the proper outrage. People thrown in prison for 30-50 years for the "crime" ofmaking zines and belonging to a book club!! This is straight-up totalitarian atrocity. Political prisoners thrown in a gulag to rot.

‘This is injustice’: how leftist zines were used to sentence anti-ICE protesters to decades in prison

Advocates sound alarm after zines were used as evidence to convict protesters of terrorism charges tied to 2025 protest at Texas ICE facility

theguardian.com

I don't know who needs to hear this, but the new album from The Burning Hell and Carsie Blanton is absolutely fantastic in every respect: theburninghell.bandcamp.com/album/everyt...

Everything is Great!, by Carsie Blanton & The Burning Hell

13 track album

theburninghell.bandcamp.com

My strongest memory of Starmer will be his 2024 conference speech, where he said "every child deserves respect", a young activist said "does that include the children of Gaza?", and he laughed and said "he's obviously got a pass to the 2019 conference".

Let me mark this one up. Now it includes the moment it became very clear that the dominant political and economic system and philosophy of the era was very bad and damaging, and that it needed to change ASAP, but then everyone dug their heels in and vowed to instead do it twice as hard.

I feel like at this point @flyingrodent.bsky.social should write a short, incisive book on all this. Even just a 20 page pamphlet that can be passed around and referenced like Payne’s Common Sense. The analysis and patter have already been polished smooth like a pebble on the microblogging beach.

flyingrodent@flyingrodent.bsky.social · last mo.

This is much worse than Johnson, BTW. Shitehousing the public into accepting Boris and hard Brexit took about five months of everyone repeating bullshit from Tory PRs and pretending not to see things. From the launch of the secret wrecking campaign to the 2024 election took six *years* of that stuff

I think the pertinent issue is that Times columnists can self-identify as ‘lefty-liberals’, and what this tells us about what liberalism has become in the UK. More a transatlantic cultural signifier evacuated of philosophical content than anything recognisable to Mill or TH Green.

One of the fascinating things about Starmer's consumate vacuity is that he functioned as a sort of Rorsach test for the liberal commentariat, where what they project onto him, even when it is utterly cynical, reveals a huge amount about the psychology and ideology of British liberalism.

lowtax speedrun enjoyer@rickywlmsbong.bsky.social · 2mo ago

the pundits will tell you starmer has no real accomplishments, but no one in british history has ever made a columnist write something this unhinged

AI consciousness discourse not just reinventing Leibniz’s Mill challenge (impossible)

Matthew Gault@mjgault.bsky.social · 2mo ago

look upon my works ye might and despair, for I have constructed a thinking machine using naught but goats and grass from Age of Empires II