#aristotle — Public Fediverse posts

Readings shared May 9, 2026. https://jaalonso.github.io/vestigium/posts/2026/05/10-readings_shared_05-09-26 #AI4Math #ATP #Aristotle #CompSci #CoqProver #FunctionalProgramming #Haskell #History #ITP #IsabelleHOL #LeanProver #Logic #Math #Mizar #Ocaml #RocqProver

Readings shared May 9, 2026. https://jaalonso.github.io/vestigium/posts/2026/05/10-readings_shared_05-09-26 #AI4Math #ATP #Aristotle #CompSci #CoqProver #FunctionalProgramming #Haskell #History #ITP #IsabelleHOL #LeanProver #Logic #Math #Mizar #Ocaml #RocqProver

Readings shared May 9, 2026. https://jaalonso.github.io/vestigium/posts/2026/05/10-readings_shared_05-09-26 #AI4Math #ATP #Aristotle #CompSci #CoqProver #FunctionalProgramming #Haskell #History #ITP #IsabelleHOL #LeanProver #Logic #Math #Mizar #Ocaml #RocqProver

Readings shared May 9, 2026. https://jaalonso.github.io/vestigium/posts/2026/05/10-readings_shared_05-09-26 #AI4Math #ATP #Aristotle #CompSci #CoqProver #FunctionalProgramming #Haskell #History #ITP #IsabelleHOL #LeanProver #Logic #Math #Mizar #Ocaml #RocqProver

Readings shared May 9, 2026. https://jaalonso.github.io/vestigium/posts/2026/05/10-readings_shared_05-09-26 #AI4Math #ATP #Aristotle #CompSci #CoqProver #FunctionalProgramming #Haskell #History #ITP #IsabelleHOL #LeanProver #Logic #Math #Mizar #Ocaml #RocqProver

Mel Nathanson — How Harmonic's Aristotle solved some of my problems. https://gist.github.com/kim-em/20212c66bd144c5d3fa3b044402e2092 #LeanProver #ITP #Aristotle #AI4Math

Mel Nathanson — How Harmonic's Aristotle solved some of my problems. https://gist.github.com/kim-em/20212c66bd144c5d3fa3b044402e2092 #LeanProver #ITP #Aristotle #AI4Math

Mel Nathanson — How Harmonic's Aristotle solved some of my problems. https://gist.github.com/kim-em/20212c66bd144c5d3fa3b044402e2092 #LeanProver #ITP #Aristotle #AI4Math

Mel Nathanson — How Harmonic's Aristotle solved some of my problems. https://gist.github.com/kim-em/20212c66bd144c5d3fa3b044402e2092 #LeanProver #ITP #Aristotle #AI4Math

Mel Nathanson — How Harmonic's Aristotle solved some of my problems. https://gist.github.com/kim-em/20212c66bd144c5d3fa3b044402e2092 #LeanProver #ITP #Aristotle #AI4Math

What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

What the first photographers knew, and what their mockers missed, is the subject of this article. An aphorism is a short saying that compresses a big idea into a single sentence, the sort of thing that fits on a poster or a coffee mug. The one I started with proposes that science is the discovery of what was true before anyone said so, and art is the act of bringing into existence what was never there. The aphorism has a problem its critics quickly identify. Most of what we call art does not require originating an unprecedented thing. A choir performing Mozart is making art without inventing anything. A workshop apprentice executing a Madonna in the master’s style is operating within a tradition. The strict reading of the aphorism would disqualify them both, and that contradicts how galleries and concert halls use the word.

So here is the refined position the photography story points toward. The originating act is what art and science share. Both fields contain a small number of moments when a particular human consciousness brings into existence a thing or a method or a way of seeing that was never there before, followed by an enormous number of practitioners who apply the new thing well or badly. Niépce making the first surviving heliograph in 1826 was an artist because the act of fixing a stable image with light had never been done. Daguerre refining the process into commercial viability in 1839 was an artist because the daguerreotype as a finished method had never existed. The studio photographer in 1860 producing his ten thousandth carte de visite was a craftsman applying invented technique. Same physical action, different category. The originating moment is what carries the honor.

The same cut runs through science. Newton’s invention of the calculus was an originating act; the engineer applying calculus to bridge stress in 1955 was a competent technician. Mendel’s first articulation of inheritance ratios was an originating act; the corn breeder applying Mendelian principles in 1962 was a working agronomist. The radiologist who first describes a previously unrecorded lesion pattern is doing what Mendel did. The radiologist applying established categories to the morning’s queue is doing what the agronomist did. The cut runs through both fields. This is the position photography forces us to, and it is the position I have been calling the Scientific Aesthetic across this network for fifteen years: the claim that science is itself a form of art, and that arts and sciences converge through a shared originating operation.

Consider a thought experiment that sharpens it further. I own a camera and take a position near the Eiffel Tower. After pressing the button, I hand the camera to you. You stand exactly where I stood and produce a second exposure. The photographs are identical. Who is the artist? Whose work is it? Does the camera’s owner have a stronger claim than the button-presser? Does the second photograph constitute imitation of the first, or are they both equally derivative of the tower itself? The thought experiment exposes that pressing the button was never the originating act. The originating act was Niépce’s, then Daguerre’s, then a long succession of inventors who established lenses, film stocks, exposure indices, and the conventions of framing. By the time you and I arrive at the spot and produce identical images, the originating work was done a century earlier. We are operating an invented machine within an invented set of conventions. Neither of us is making art in the strict sense; we are tourists with a camera doing what tourists do.

Copyright law, which has to give a practical answer, gives a strange one. Each of us would own the copyright in the photograph our hand caused to exist, and the copyrights would coexist for identical images. This is legally coherent and philosophically unsatisfying. Coherent because intellectual property law tracks proximate cause, and our fingers are the proximate cause of the shutters. Unsatisfying because it locates art in the trigger pull, which is exactly the location the painters of 1839 mocked and were partly right to mock. Where the painters were wrong was in thinking that no photographer had ever done the originating work. Niépce had. The 1839 mockery had the wrong target. The studio operators churning out cartes de visite were the proper subject of the criticism; the inventors of the medium had earned exemption. The same distinction applies inside painting itself, where the first to use linear perspective was making art and the thousandth competent perspective drawer was making decoration.

Now the harder example. Karl Barth wrote that Bach went to heaven while Mozart came from heaven. The distinction is real and worth holding up to the light. Bach as the worker who climbed the structure of counterpoint until it produced sublime architecture, every voice mathematically accounted for, every chorale prelude a piece of theological engineering. Mozart as the channel through which finished music seemed to arrive, the manuscripts famously cleaner than they should have been, the working method opaque even to his contemporaries. Both originated. Bach invented the practical possibilities of equal temperament and brought the fugue to a development nobody had imagined. Mozart developed the mature Classical style and pushed forms in opera and symphony to a depth that shaped the next century. By the originating-act test, both are artists in the strictest sense.

Yet the heaven attribution tracks something the originating-act test does not capture. It tracks the phenomenology of the artist’s experience of making. Bach made through labor. Mozart made through reception. The work appeared to arrive through Mozart from somewhere beyond him, and his role was to be present, conscious, equipped to receive what came. This Romantic conception of genius as channel has been mocked too, especially by twentieth-century critics who wanted to demystify the artist and rehabilitate the worker. But the distinction is not mystical, even if the metaphor is. Some originators labor toward what they make. Others find what they make arriving in them already largely formed. Both kinds of originator are artists. The distinction is internal to the category, and both kinds satisfy the originating-act test.

This matters because it tells us what the consciousness contributes. If Mozart was a channel, what he contributed was the readiness, the trained ear, the mind shaped by every piece of music he had absorbed since childhood, the working hand fast enough to capture what arrived. The channel had to be made before anything could come through it. The making of the channel was the labor; what came through it was the work. By this account, even the channel-artist is doing work; the work is just earlier in the process. Mozart’s effort had been spent before the moment of composition. Bach’s was spent during. Both consciousnesses originated, and the difference is the timing of the labor.

Hold this conclusion against the AI question, because it does work the older formulations cannot do. A language model produces text that no human assembled before. By the strict never-before-existed test, the output qualifies as PhD thesis. By the originating-act test, the output qualifies as imitation. The model invented nothing. Researchers invented its architecture. Human writers produced the training corpus. The inference itself is the application of an existing method to an existing prompt. The model occupies the position of the 1880 studio photographer, two generations downstream from Niépce. It plays the engineer’s role to Newton’s mathematics. The output may be useful, beautiful, even surprising, but it is not the originating act of a particular consciousness, because there is no consciousness in the model to do the originating. There may eventually be one, and that day will require revisiting this argument, but the present-day large language model is a competent technician of an invented process.

The first person to use a language model in a way nobody had used one before may have done something originating. Someone who discovers that a particular kind of prompt produces a particular kind of result, then builds a body of work around that discovery, may be an artist by the test I am proposing. The millionth person to type a prompt and accept the output is no more an artist than the millionth person to photograph the Eiffel Tower. This is consistent with the photography case. The category of the new medium has room for originators and for technicians, and most users in either field will be technicians.

A final consequence. The originating-act test resists political abuse better than the discovery-creation aphorism does. Authoritarian regimes police the canon by rewriting who counts as the first, the true, the founding artist or scientist. Entartete Kunst was an attempt to remove modernist innovators from the canon of true German art and replace them with academic painters of approved subjects. Lysenko was promoted as the first practitioner of authentically Soviet biology, with Mendel’s followers cast as bourgeois imitators of foreign error. The Cultural Revolution displaced the founding figures of Chinese music and physics in favor of approved rivals. Each regime understood that controlling the canon means controlling who is remembered as the originator and who is dismissed as the imitator. The originating-act test gives us a tool for resisting this. Every claim about who was first is a historical question with material evidence behind it. Niépce’s 1826 plate exists in a museum in Texas. Newton’s papers exist in Cambridge. Mendel’s notebooks exist in Brno. The canon can be argued from material evidence. The aphorism, by contrast, gives us no way to argue. It only gives us a slogan to either accept or reject.

So here is the position the photography story, the identical photograph thought experiment, and the Bach-Mozart distinction together support. Science is the revelation by a particular consciousness of something that was true before that consciousness named it. Art is the bringing into existence by a particular consciousness of something that was not there before that consciousness made it. Both fields contain a few originators and many imitators. The honor in both fields belongs to the originators. The imitators do necessary and sometimes excellent work, but they are not the artists or the scientists in the strict sense the words deserve. This is more austere than the everyday use of the words, and it is closer to what we mean when we say someone was a great artist or a great scientist. We mean they were the first. Competent application of established method has its own honor and its own name, and that name is craft. Together they constitute the Scientific Aesthetic, the position this whole article has been working toward.

The painters of 1839 looked at the daguerreotypists and saw machine operators. They were right about most of them and wrong about the founders. The same vision will be required for AI. Most outputs will be the work of technicians applying an invented process. A few may be the work of someone who saw what nobody had seen before about what the new instrument could do. Distinguishing the two is the task that always falls to the next generation, and the next generation is usually slow about it. We are slow about it now. We will be less slow if we hold the originating-act test in mind and apply it ruthlessly, to ourselves and to everyone else.

The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory is available now from David Boles Books. The paperback runs four hundred ninety-five pages and the Kindle eBook is also for sale through Amazon. Readers who prefer screen reading, home printing, or an editable archive copy will find a website-download PDF and a DOCX safety file at BolesBooks.com on the title’s landing page. The audiobook is in production and will follow.

What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

What the first photographers knew, and what their mockers missed, is the subject of this article. An aphorism is a short saying that compresses a big idea into a single sentence, the sort of thing that fits on a poster or a coffee mug. The one I started with proposes that science is the discovery of what was true before anyone said so, and art is the act of bringing into existence what was never there. The aphorism has a problem its critics quickly identify. Most of what we call art does not require originating an unprecedented thing. A choir performing Mozart is making art without inventing anything. A workshop apprentice executing a Madonna in the master’s style is operating within a tradition. The strict reading of the aphorism would disqualify them both, and that contradicts how galleries and concert halls use the word.

So here is the refined position the photography story points toward. The originating act is what art and science share. Both fields contain a small number of moments when a particular human consciousness brings into existence a thing or a method or a way of seeing that was never there before, followed by an enormous number of practitioners who apply the new thing well or badly. Niépce making the first surviving heliograph in 1826 was an artist because the act of fixing a stable image with light had never been done. Daguerre refining the process into commercial viability in 1839 was an artist because the daguerreotype as a finished method had never existed. The studio photographer in 1860 producing his ten thousandth carte de visite was a craftsman applying invented technique. Same physical action, different category. The originating moment is what carries the honor.

The same cut runs through science. Newton’s invention of the calculus was an originating act; the engineer applying calculus to bridge stress in 1955 was a competent technician. Mendel’s first articulation of inheritance ratios was an originating act; the corn breeder applying Mendelian principles in 1962 was a working agronomist. The radiologist who first describes a previously unrecorded lesion pattern is doing what Mendel did. The radiologist applying established categories to the morning’s queue is doing what the agronomist did. The cut runs through both fields. This is the position photography forces us to, and it is the position I have been calling the Scientific Aesthetic across this network for fifteen years: the claim that science is itself a form of art, and that arts and sciences converge through a shared originating operation.

Consider a thought experiment that sharpens it further. I own a camera and take a position near the Eiffel Tower. After pressing the button, I hand the camera to you. You stand exactly where I stood and produce a second exposure. The photographs are identical. Who is the artist? Whose work is it? Does the camera’s owner have a stronger claim than the button-presser? Does the second photograph constitute imitation of the first, or are they both equally derivative of the tower itself? The thought experiment exposes that pressing the button was never the originating act. The originating act was Niépce’s, then Daguerre’s, then a long succession of inventors who established lenses, film stocks, exposure indices, and the conventions of framing. By the time you and I arrive at the spot and produce identical images, the originating work was done a century earlier. We are operating an invented machine within an invented set of conventions. Neither of us is making art in the strict sense; we are tourists with a camera doing what tourists do.

Copyright law, which has to give a practical answer, gives a strange one. Each of us would own the copyright in the photograph our hand caused to exist, and the copyrights would coexist for identical images. This is legally coherent and philosophically unsatisfying. Coherent because intellectual property law tracks proximate cause, and our fingers are the proximate cause of the shutters. Unsatisfying because it locates art in the trigger pull, which is exactly the location the painters of 1839 mocked and were partly right to mock. Where the painters were wrong was in thinking that no photographer had ever done the originating work. Niépce had. The 1839 mockery had the wrong target. The studio operators churning out cartes de visite were the proper subject of the criticism; the inventors of the medium had earned exemption. The same distinction applies inside painting itself, where the first to use linear perspective was making art and the thousandth competent perspective drawer was making decoration.

Now the harder example. Karl Barth wrote that Bach went to heaven while Mozart came from heaven. The distinction is real and worth holding up to the light. Bach as the worker who climbed the structure of counterpoint until it produced sublime architecture, every voice mathematically accounted for, every chorale prelude a piece of theological engineering. Mozart as the channel through which finished music seemed to arrive, the manuscripts famously cleaner than they should have been, the working method opaque even to his contemporaries. Both originated. Bach invented the practical possibilities of equal temperament and brought the fugue to a development nobody had imagined. Mozart developed the mature Classical style and pushed forms in opera and symphony to a depth that shaped the next century. By the originating-act test, both are artists in the strictest sense.

Yet the heaven attribution tracks something the originating-act test does not capture. It tracks the phenomenology of the artist’s experience of making. Bach made through labor. Mozart made through reception. The work appeared to arrive through Mozart from somewhere beyond him, and his role was to be present, conscious, equipped to receive what came. This Romantic conception of genius as channel has been mocked too, especially by twentieth-century critics who wanted to demystify the artist and rehabilitate the worker. But the distinction is not mystical, even if the metaphor is. Some originators labor toward what they make. Others find what they make arriving in them already largely formed. Both kinds of originator are artists. The distinction is internal to the category, and both kinds satisfy the originating-act test.

This matters because it tells us what the consciousness contributes. If Mozart was a channel, what he contributed was the readiness, the trained ear, the mind shaped by every piece of music he had absorbed since childhood, the working hand fast enough to capture what arrived. The channel had to be made before anything could come through it. The making of the channel was the labor; what came through it was the work. By this account, even the channel-artist is doing work; the work is just earlier in the process. Mozart’s effort had been spent before the moment of composition. Bach’s was spent during. Both consciousnesses originated, and the difference is the timing of the labor.

Hold this conclusion against the AI question, because it does work the older formulations cannot do. A language model produces text that no human assembled before. By the strict never-before-existed test, the output qualifies as PhD thesis. By the originating-act test, the output qualifies as imitation. The model invented nothing. Researchers invented its architecture. Human writers produced the training corpus. The inference itself is the application of an existing method to an existing prompt. The model occupies the position of the 1880 studio photographer, two generations downstream from Niépce. It plays the engineer’s role to Newton’s mathematics. The output may be useful, beautiful, even surprising, but it is not the originating act of a particular consciousness, because there is no consciousness in the model to do the originating. There may eventually be one, and that day will require revisiting this argument, but the present-day large language model is a competent technician of an invented process.

The first person to use a language model in a way nobody had used one before may have done something originating. Someone who discovers that a particular kind of prompt produces a particular kind of result, then builds a body of work around that discovery, may be an artist by the test I am proposing. The millionth person to type a prompt and accept the output is no more an artist than the millionth person to photograph the Eiffel Tower. This is consistent with the photography case. The category of the new medium has room for originators and for technicians, and most users in either field will be technicians.

A final consequence. The originating-act test resists political abuse better than the discovery-creation aphorism does. Authoritarian regimes police the canon by rewriting who counts as the first, the true, the founding artist or scientist. Entartete Kunst was an attempt to remove modernist innovators from the canon of true German art and replace them with academic painters of approved subjects. Lysenko was promoted as the first practitioner of authentically Soviet biology, with Mendel’s followers cast as bourgeois imitators of foreign error. The Cultural Revolution displaced the founding figures of Chinese music and physics in favor of approved rivals. Each regime understood that controlling the canon means controlling who is remembered as the originator and who is dismissed as the imitator. The originating-act test gives us a tool for resisting this. Every claim about who was first is a historical question with material evidence behind it. Niépce’s 1826 plate exists in a museum in Texas. Newton’s papers exist in Cambridge. Mendel’s notebooks exist in Brno. The canon can be argued from material evidence. The aphorism, by contrast, gives us no way to argue. It only gives us a slogan to either accept or reject.

So here is the position the photography story, the identical photograph thought experiment, and the Bach-Mozart distinction together support. Science is the revelation by a particular consciousness of something that was true before that consciousness named it. Art is the bringing into existence by a particular consciousness of something that was not there before that consciousness made it. Both fields contain a few originators and many imitators. The honor in both fields belongs to the originators. The imitators do necessary and sometimes excellent work, but they are not the artists or the scientists in the strict sense the words deserve. This is more austere than the everyday use of the words, and it is closer to what we mean when we say someone was a great artist or a great scientist. We mean they were the first. Competent application of established method has its own honor and its own name, and that name is craft. Together they constitute the Scientific Aesthetic, the position this whole article has been working toward.

The painters of 1839 looked at the daguerreotypists and saw machine operators. They were right about most of them and wrong about the founders. The same vision will be required for AI. Most outputs will be the work of technicians applying an invented process. A few may be the work of someone who saw what nobody had seen before about what the new instrument could do. Distinguishing the two is the task that always falls to the next generation, and the next generation is usually slow about it. We are slow about it now. We will be less slow if we hold the originating-act test in mind and apply it ruthlessly, to ourselves and to everyone else.

The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory is available now from David Boles Books. The paperback runs four hundred ninety-five pages and the Kindle eBook is also for sale through Amazon. Readers who prefer screen reading, home printing, or an editable archive copy will find a website-download PDF and a DOCX safety file at BolesBooks.com on the title’s landing page. The audiobook is in production and will follow.

What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

What the first photographers knew, and what their mockers missed, is the subject of this article. An aphorism is a short saying that compresses a big idea into a single sentence, the sort of thing that fits on a poster or a coffee mug. The one I started with proposes that science is the discovery of what was true before anyone said so, and art is the act of bringing into existence what was never there. The aphorism has a problem its critics quickly identify. Most of what we call art does not require originating an unprecedented thing. A choir performing Mozart is making art without inventing anything. A workshop apprentice executing a Madonna in the master’s style is operating within a tradition. The strict reading of the aphorism would disqualify them both, and that contradicts how galleries and concert halls use the word.

So here is the refined position the photography story points toward. The originating act is what art and science share. Both fields contain a small number of moments when a particular human consciousness brings into existence a thing or a method or a way of seeing that was never there before, followed by an enormous number of practitioners who apply the new thing well or badly. Niépce making the first surviving heliograph in 1826 was an artist because the act of fixing a stable image with light had never been done. Daguerre refining the process into commercial viability in 1839 was an artist because the daguerreotype as a finished method had never existed. The studio photographer in 1860 producing his ten thousandth carte de visite was a craftsman applying invented technique. Same physical action, different category. The originating moment is what carries the honor.

The same cut runs through science. Newton’s invention of the calculus was an originating act; the engineer applying calculus to bridge stress in 1955 was a competent technician. Mendel’s first articulation of inheritance ratios was an originating act; the corn breeder applying Mendelian principles in 1962 was a working agronomist. The radiologist who first describes a previously unrecorded lesion pattern is doing what Mendel did. The radiologist applying established categories to the morning’s queue is doing what the agronomist did. The cut runs through both fields. This is the position photography forces us to, and it is the position I have been calling the Scientific Aesthetic across this network for fifteen years: the claim that science is itself a form of art, and that arts and sciences converge through a shared originating operation.

Consider a thought experiment that sharpens it further. I own a camera and take a position near the Eiffel Tower. After pressing the button, I hand the camera to you. You stand exactly where I stood and produce a second exposure. The photographs are identical. Who is the artist? Whose work is it? Does the camera’s owner have a stronger claim than the button-presser? Does the second photograph constitute imitation of the first, or are they both equally derivative of the tower itself? The thought experiment exposes that pressing the button was never the originating act. The originating act was Niépce’s, then Daguerre’s, then a long succession of inventors who established lenses, film stocks, exposure indices, and the conventions of framing. By the time you and I arrive at the spot and produce identical images, the originating work was done a century earlier. We are operating an invented machine within an invented set of conventions. Neither of us is making art in the strict sense; we are tourists with a camera doing what tourists do.

Copyright law, which has to give a practical answer, gives a strange one. Each of us would own the copyright in the photograph our hand caused to exist, and the copyrights would coexist for identical images. This is legally coherent and philosophically unsatisfying. Coherent because intellectual property law tracks proximate cause, and our fingers are the proximate cause of the shutters. Unsatisfying because it locates art in the trigger pull, which is exactly the location the painters of 1839 mocked and were partly right to mock. Where the painters were wrong was in thinking that no photographer had ever done the originating work. Niépce had. The 1839 mockery had the wrong target. The studio operators churning out cartes de visite were the proper subject of the criticism; the inventors of the medium had earned exemption. The same distinction applies inside painting itself, where the first to use linear perspective was making art and the thousandth competent perspective drawer was making decoration.

Now the harder example. Karl Barth wrote that Bach went to heaven while Mozart came from heaven. The distinction is real and worth holding up to the light. Bach as the worker who climbed the structure of counterpoint until it produced sublime architecture, every voice mathematically accounted for, every chorale prelude a piece of theological engineering. Mozart as the channel through which finished music seemed to arrive, the manuscripts famously cleaner than they should have been, the working method opaque even to his contemporaries. Both originated. Bach invented the practical possibilities of equal temperament and brought the fugue to a development nobody had imagined. Mozart developed the mature Classical style and pushed forms in opera and symphony to a depth that shaped the next century. By the originating-act test, both are artists in the strictest sense.

Yet the heaven attribution tracks something the originating-act test does not capture. It tracks the phenomenology of the artist’s experience of making. Bach made through labor. Mozart made through reception. The work appeared to arrive through Mozart from somewhere beyond him, and his role was to be present, conscious, equipped to receive what came. This Romantic conception of genius as channel has been mocked too, especially by twentieth-century critics who wanted to demystify the artist and rehabilitate the worker. But the distinction is not mystical, even if the metaphor is. Some originators labor toward what they make. Others find what they make arriving in them already largely formed. Both kinds of originator are artists. The distinction is internal to the category, and both kinds satisfy the originating-act test.

This matters because it tells us what the consciousness contributes. If Mozart was a channel, what he contributed was the readiness, the trained ear, the mind shaped by every piece of music he had absorbed since childhood, the working hand fast enough to capture what arrived. The channel had to be made before anything could come through it. The making of the channel was the labor; what came through it was the work. By this account, even the channel-artist is doing work; the work is just earlier in the process. Mozart’s effort had been spent before the moment of composition. Bach’s was spent during. Both consciousnesses originated, and the difference is the timing of the labor.

Hold this conclusion against the AI question, because it does work the older formulations cannot do. A language model produces text that no human assembled before. By the strict never-before-existed test, the output qualifies as PhD thesis. By the originating-act test, the output qualifies as imitation. The model invented nothing. Researchers invented its architecture. Human writers produced the training corpus. The inference itself is the application of an existing method to an existing prompt. The model occupies the position of the 1880 studio photographer, two generations downstream from Niépce. It plays the engineer’s role to Newton’s mathematics. The output may be useful, beautiful, even surprising, but it is not the originating act of a particular consciousness, because there is no consciousness in the model to do the originating. There may eventually be one, and that day will require revisiting this argument, but the present-day large language model is a competent technician of an invented process.

The first person to use a language model in a way nobody had used one before may have done something originating. Someone who discovers that a particular kind of prompt produces a particular kind of result, then builds a body of work around that discovery, may be an artist by the test I am proposing. The millionth person to type a prompt and accept the output is no more an artist than the millionth person to photograph the Eiffel Tower. This is consistent with the photography case. The category of the new medium has room for originators and for technicians, and most users in either field will be technicians.

A final consequence. The originating-act test resists political abuse better than the discovery-creation aphorism does. Authoritarian regimes police the canon by rewriting who counts as the first, the true, the founding artist or scientist. Entartete Kunst was an attempt to remove modernist innovators from the canon of true German art and replace them with academic painters of approved subjects. Lysenko was promoted as the first practitioner of authentically Soviet biology, with Mendel’s followers cast as bourgeois imitators of foreign error. The Cultural Revolution displaced the founding figures of Chinese music and physics in favor of approved rivals. Each regime understood that controlling the canon means controlling who is remembered as the originator and who is dismissed as the imitator. The originating-act test gives us a tool for resisting this. Every claim about who was first is a historical question with material evidence behind it. Niépce’s 1826 plate exists in a museum in Texas. Newton’s papers exist in Cambridge. Mendel’s notebooks exist in Brno. The canon can be argued from material evidence. The aphorism, by contrast, gives us no way to argue. It only gives us a slogan to either accept or reject.

So here is the position the photography story, the identical photograph thought experiment, and the Bach-Mozart distinction together support. Science is the revelation by a particular consciousness of something that was true before that consciousness named it. Art is the bringing into existence by a particular consciousness of something that was not there before that consciousness made it. Both fields contain a few originators and many imitators. The honor in both fields belongs to the originators. The imitators do necessary and sometimes excellent work, but they are not the artists or the scientists in the strict sense the words deserve. This is more austere than the everyday use of the words, and it is closer to what we mean when we say someone was a great artist or a great scientist. We mean they were the first. Competent application of established method has its own honor and its own name, and that name is craft. Together they constitute the Scientific Aesthetic, the position this whole article has been working toward.

The painters of 1839 looked at the daguerreotypists and saw machine operators. They were right about most of them and wrong about the founders. The same vision will be required for AI. Most outputs will be the work of technicians applying an invented process. A few may be the work of someone who saw what nobody had seen before about what the new instrument could do. Distinguishing the two is the task that always falls to the next generation, and the next generation is usually slow about it. We are slow about it now. We will be less slow if we hold the originating-act test in mind and apply it ruthlessly, to ourselves and to everyone else.

𝑳𝒊𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒓𝒚 𝑵𝒐𝒎𝒂𝒅𝒔 - 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑶𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝑶𝒎𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒔: 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑪𝒂𝒔𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑨𝒏𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒍𝒔 𝒗𝒔. 𝑴𝒂𝒏

And when the child cannot speak for itself?

Humanity's first global lawsuit! In this 10th-century Islamic fable, animals put mankind on trial for the crimes of the extraction economy.

https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/waywords_podcast/original-omelas-case-animals-versus-man/

#podcast #literature #arabicliterature #medievalliterature #petersinger #ursulakleguin #donnaharaway #aristotle #francisbacon #jacquesderrida #speciesism

𝑳𝒊𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒓𝒚 𝑵𝒐𝒎𝒂𝒅𝒔 - 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑶𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝑶𝒎𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒔: 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑪𝒂𝒔𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑨𝒏𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒍𝒔 𝒗𝒔. 𝑴𝒂𝒏

And when the child cannot speak for itself?

Humanity's first global lawsuit! In this 10th-century Islamic fable, animals put mankind on trial for the crimes of the extraction economy.

https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/waywords_podcast/original-omelas-case-animals-versus-man/

#podcast #literature #arabicliterature #medievalliterature #petersinger #ursulakleguin #donnaharaway #aristotle #francisbacon #jacquesderrida #speciesism

𝑳𝒊𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒓𝒚 𝑵𝒐𝒎𝒂𝒅𝒔 - 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑶𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝑶𝒎𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒔: 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑪𝒂𝒔𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑨𝒏𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒍𝒔 𝒗𝒔. 𝑴𝒂𝒏

And when the child cannot speak for itself?

Humanity's first global lawsuit! In this 10th-century Islamic fable, animals put mankind on trial for the crimes of the extraction economy.

https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/waywords_podcast/original-omelas-case-animals-versus-man/

#podcast #literature #arabicliterature #medievalliterature #petersinger #ursulakleguin #donnaharaway #aristotle #francisbacon #jacquesderrida #speciesism

𝑳𝒊𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒓𝒚 𝑵𝒐𝒎𝒂𝒅𝒔 - 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑶𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝑶𝒎𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒔: 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑪𝒂𝒔𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑨𝒏𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒍𝒔 𝒗𝒔. 𝑴𝒂𝒏

And when the child cannot speak for itself?

Humanity's first global lawsuit! In this 10th-century Islamic fable, animals put mankind on trial for the crimes of the extraction economy.

https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/waywords_podcast/original-omelas-case-animals-versus-man/

#podcast #literature #arabicliterature #medievalliterature #petersinger #ursulakleguin #donnaharaway #aristotle #francisbacon #jacquesderrida #speciesism

𝑳𝒊𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒓𝒚 𝑵𝒐𝒎𝒂𝒅𝒔 - 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑶𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝑶𝒎𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒔: 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑪𝒂𝒔𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑨𝒏𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒍𝒔 𝒗𝒔. 𝑴𝒂𝒏

And when the child cannot speak for itself?

Humanity's first global lawsuit! In this 10th-century Islamic fable, animals put mankind on trial for the crimes of the extraction economy.

https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/waywords_podcast/original-omelas-case-animals-versus-man/

#podcast #literature #arabicliterature #medievalliterature #petersinger #ursulakleguin #donnaharaway #aristotle #francisbacon #jacquesderrida #speciesism

I've shared my thoughts on Alasdair MacIntyre before, but a follower asked me to comment on a Philosophize This! segment on a couple of books he published after After Virtue, and so I did.

https://philosophics.blog/2026/04/15/rival-moral-approaches-of-the-modern-world-alasdair-macintyre/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

I share a link to the video content as well as a NotebookLM podcast summary.

#pilodsophy #psychology #critique #blog #video #podcast #society #culture #normativeethics #morality #ethics #MacIntyre #books #greece #aristotle #virtue #liberalism #modernity #commentary #reaction

I've shared my thoughts on Alasdair MacIntyre before, but a follower asked me to comment on a Philosophize This! segment on a couple of books he published after After Virtue, and so I did.

https://philosophics.blog/2026/04/15/rival-moral-approaches-of-the-modern-world-alasdair-macintyre/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

I share a link to the video content as well as a NotebookLM podcast summary.

#pilodsophy #psychology #critique #blog #video #podcast #society #culture #normativeethics #morality #ethics #MacIntyre #books #greece #aristotle #virtue #liberalism #modernity #commentary #reaction

I've shared my thoughts on Alasdair MacIntyre before, but a follower asked me to comment on a Philosophize This! segment on a couple of books he published after After Virtue, and so I did.

https://philosophics.blog/2026/04/15/rival-moral-approaches-of-the-modern-world-alasdair-macintyre/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

I share a link to the video content as well as a NotebookLM podcast summary.

#pilodsophy #psychology #critique #blog #video #podcast #society #culture #normativeethics #morality #ethics #MacIntyre #books #greece #aristotle #virtue #liberalism #modernity #commentary #reaction

I've shared my thoughts on Alasdair MacIntyre before, but a follower asked me to comment on a Philosophize This! segment on a couple of books he published after After Virtue, and so I did.

https://philosophics.blog/2026/04/15/rival-moral-approaches-of-the-modern-world-alasdair-macintyre/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

I share a link to the video content as well as a NotebookLM podcast summary.

#pilodsophy #psychology #critique #blog #video #podcast #society #culture #normativeethics #morality #ethics #MacIntyre #books #greece #aristotle #virtue #liberalism #modernity #commentary #reaction

https://www.europesays.com/africa/181204/ Work by ‘lost’ philosopher referenced by Plato and Aristotle discovered in Egypt #AncientGreekPhilosopher #Aristotle #Egypt #Empedocles #NathanCarlig #philosopher #Plutarch

Illustration by Théodore Marcile, from Civitas veri sive morvm (1609).

Source: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign / Internet Archive

https://pdimagearchive.org/images/a04719fa-8963-4bae-a95c-24cc62228987

#classical #aristotle #dystopia #nature #ethics #emblems #allegory #landscapes #mythology #morals #utopias #architecture #truth #art #publicdomain

How do we align the interests of the individual and the collective? We look at examples from history of leaders and thinkers that did just that in the 3rd episode of our series on The Alignment Problem No One is Talking About #Collectivism #Aristotle #Kendi #Mill #JohnStuartMill #JohnKey #Nixon

ALIGNING INDIVIDUAL AND COLLEC...

The Zeroing of Knowledge: When Everything Is Known, What Remains Worth Learning?

Knowledge used to be expensive. It cost years of apprenticeship, tuition in the tens of thousands, decades of practice, and, more than anything, the brutal currency of time. A physician spent twelve years beyond high school before being trusted to cut into a human body. A lawyer spent seven years and a bar exam before being permitted to argue before a judge. A professor spent a decade accumulating the credentials required to stand before a lecture hall and declare, with institutional authority, that they knew something you did not. The entire architecture of Western professional life was built on a single economic premise: knowledge is scarce, therefore knowledge is valuable, therefore the people who possess knowledge deserve premium compensation for granting access to it. That premise is now dead. It did not die slowly. It was killed in roughly three years, and we are only beginning to understand the corpse.

The arrival of large language models, and the swift trajectory toward artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence, has not merely disrupted the knowledge economy. It has annihilated the foundational scarcity upon which that economy depended.

When a high school student in rural Nebraska can query a system that synthesizes the totality of published medical literature in four seconds and receive a differential diagnosis that rivals or exceeds what a third-year resident could produce, the twelve years of medical training are no longer a gate. They are a relic.

When a landlord in Queens can receive a lease analysis that accounts for New York tenant law, recent appellate decisions, and municipal code changes without paying a $400-per-hour attorney, the seven years of legal education are no longer a credential. They are an artifact.

When a curious fourteen-year-old in Bangalore can access, for free, an explanation of quantum chromodynamics that is more lucid and more patient than anything offered in the average university physics department, the entire notion of the lecture hall as a site of knowledge transmission becomes not merely outdated but faintly absurd.

This is not a gentle transition. This is the collapse of a pricing model that sustained the Western middle class for a century and a half. The professional class, that broad stratum of lawyers and doctors and accountants and engineers and professors who built comfortable suburban lives on the premise that their education entitled them to earnings well above the median, derived their economic power from one thing: they knew what you did not, and you needed what they knew. Strip away that asymmetry and you strip away their market position. You do not reform the university. You do not modernize the law firm. You remove the reason they existed in that form at all.

· · ·

Consider the university, because it is the clearest case and the most emotionally fraught. The modern American university is, at its operational core, a knowledge-delivery system. Yes, there are laboratories and athletic programs and residential life offices and study-abroad coordinators, but the central commercial transaction is this: a student pays tuition, and in exchange, a credentialed expert delivers knowledge in structured increments over four years, at the end of which a piece of paper certifies that the student has absorbed a sufficient quantity of that knowledge to merit professional entry. The entire apparatus, the syllabi, the midterms, the lecture halls, the grading rubrics, the office hours, the tenure system, is designed to manage the controlled release of knowledge from those who have it to those who need it.

What happens when the student already has it? Not because she studied in advance, but because the knowledge itself is ambient, omnipresent, instantly retrievable, and free? The transaction collapses. The student is no longer paying for access to knowledge. She can get that from her phone on the bus. She is paying, if she is paying at all, for something else entirely: for the social experience, for the credential, for the network, for the four-year deferral of adult responsibility, for the right to say “I went to Michigan.” These are real goods, but they are not the goods the university was designed to provide, and the price of a four-year residential credential in the United States currently runs between $120,000 and $320,000. That is a staggering price to pay for a social experience and a line on a resume when the actual knowledge can be acquired at no cost in a fraction of the time.

The university will not vanish. Institutions with endowments in the billions do not disappear; they adapt, however slowly and however badly. But the adaptation will be wrenching. The first casualties will be the mid-tier private colleges that lack both the prestige of the Ivy League and the public funding of state systems. They survive on a value proposition that says “we deliver a quality education,” and when that education is freely available elsewhere, the proposition collapses. The liberal arts college that charges $62,000 per year to offer courses in philosophy, history, and literature, subjects where the knowledge is textual and therefore most immediately replicable by language models, faces an existential question it cannot answer with a new marketing campaign. The second casualties will be the graduate programs, particularly the professional schools. If the knowledge component of a law degree or an MBA can be compressed from three years to three months of guided interaction with a superintelligent system, the three-year program exists only as a hazing ritual and a networking event. That is a difficult case to make at $70,000 per year.

· · ·

The law firm faces its own reckoning, and the reckoning is already underway, though it is being disguised as “efficiency gains” and “technology integration.” The traditional law firm operates on a leveraged model: a small number of senior partners possess deep expertise, and a large number of junior associates perform the knowledge-intensive grunt work of legal research, document review, brief drafting, and contract analysis. The associates are paid well because they traded years of education and exam preparation for the ability to perform this work. The partners are paid extraordinarily well because they supervise the associates and maintain the client relationships that generate the fees. When the grunt work can be performed instantaneously and at near-zero cost by a system that has ingested the entirety of case law, the associate layer evaporates. Not thins. Evaporates. And when the associate layer evaporates, the leverage model that generates partner income evaporates with it. The partners retain their client relationships and their courtroom presence and their judgment, but they lose the economic engine that multiplied their value. A law firm of 500 becomes a law firm of 50. The other 450 are not retrained. They are gone.

The doctor’s office tells a different story, but the ending is similar. Medicine is partly a knowledge discipline and partly a manual discipline. A surgeon’s hands cannot be replaced by a language model, and the physical examination, the palpation of an abdomen, the auscultation of a heart murmur, the visual assessment of a wound, remains tied to the human body in ways that resist full digitization. But the diagnostic function, the part of medicine that involves taking a constellation of symptoms and matching them to a disease, is a pattern-recognition task, and pattern recognition is precisely what these systems do better than any individual human. The general practitioner who spends fifteen minutes asking questions and then orders a battery of tests is performing a workflow that can be replicated in seconds with greater accuracy and broader differential consideration. The specialist who reads imaging and identifies pathology is competing against systems that already outperform radiologists in multiple peer-reviewed studies. The knowledge component of medicine, the years of memorizing pharmacology and pathophysiology and clinical protocols, is the component most vulnerable to replacement. What remains is the procedural skill, the bedside manner, the ethical judgment in difficult cases, and the human willingness to be present with another human in suffering. These are not trivial. But they are not what medical school primarily teaches, and they are not what the billing codes primarily reimburse.

· · ·

Now we arrive at the harder question, the one that does not concern institutions but concerns the self. For most of modern Western history, knowledge has been the primary currency of personal identity among the educated class. “I know things you do not know” is the unstated foundation of professional pride, intellectual confidence, and social standing. The doctor at the dinner party is deferred to on medical questions. The lawyer at the family gathering is consulted on legal matters. The professor at the conference is respected for the depth and specificity of their scholarly command. These are not merely economic positions. They are identity positions. They answer the question “Who am I?” with the answer “I am someone who knows.”

When everyone has access to the same infinite reservoir of knowledge, that answer loses its force. You are not special because you know the mechanism of action of metformin. The machine knows it too, and knows it better, and knows the fourteen drug interactions your residency program never covered. You are not special because you can recite the holding in Marbury v. Madison. The machine can do that and trace the subsequent two centuries of judicial interpretation in the time it takes you to clear your throat. You are not special because you have read all of Proust. The machine has read all of Proust in every language Proust has been translated into and can cross-reference his treatment of involuntary memory with neuroscientific research on hippocampal consolidation that did not exist when you wrote your dissertation. The ego that was built on knowing is an ego built on sand, and the tide has come in.

This is genuinely terrifying for many people, and it should be acknowledged as such rather than waved away with platitudes about “human creativity” and “emotional intelligence.” The professional who spent a decade acquiring expertise is now being told, in effect, that the acquisition was unnecessary. Not that it was wasted, exactly, but that the competitive advantage it conferred has been zeroed out. That is a psychological wound, not merely an economic one. It strikes at the center of how a person understands their own worth. And the standard responses, “But you still have judgment!” and “But you still have empathy!”, are inadequate, because they ask the professional to rebuild an entire identity around capacities they were never trained to value as primary. The surgeon was not trained to think of bedside manner as the core of their professional identity. The lawyer was not trained to think of ethical discernment as the thing that justifies their fees. The professor was not trained to think of mentorship as the reason the university exists. These capacities were treated as secondary, as the soft skills that accompanied the hard knowledge. Now the hard knowledge is free, and the soft skills are the only thing left, and nobody quite knows how to price them.

· · ·

Where, then, does pride belong? It migrates. It moves from knowing to doing, from possession to application, from recall to synthesis. The question is no longer “What do you know?” but “What can you do with what everything now knows?” This is a different kind of competence, and it rewards different kinds of people. The person who thrives in the post-knowledge economy is not the one with the best memory or the most degrees or the deepest command of a single discipline. It is the person who can formulate the right question, who can recognize when a machine’s output is subtly wrong, who can synthesize across domains that the machine treats as separate, who can make the judgment call that requires not just information but wisdom, and wisdom is the one thing that cannot be commoditized because it is not knowledge at all. It is the residue of lived experience applied to novel situations, and no system, however vast its training data, has lived.

This is the genuine ground of human distinction going forward, and it is worth being specific about what it includes. It includes taste, the ability to discern quality that cannot be reduced to metrics. It includes moral reasoning, the capacity to weigh competing goods and arrive at a defensible position when the facts alone do not determine the answer. It includes narrative judgment, the understanding of what story needs to be told and why and to whom and in what order. It includes physical skill, the coordination of hand and eye and body that produces surgery, sculpture, athletics, and craft. It includes relational intelligence, the capacity to sit with another person in complexity and offer not information but presence. None of these are knowledge. All of them are valuable. And all of them have been systematically undervalued by institutions that organized themselves around knowledge as the primary good.

· · ·

I taught a class once called “Ways of Knowing.” It was, at its heart, an epistemology course disguised as cultural studies. We examined the various channels through which human beings come to believe they know things: formal education, community transmission, religious doctrine, mythological narrative, scientific method, lived experience, and, yes, memes, those compressed cultural units that carry meaning across populations at speeds that formal education cannot match. The course asked students to interrogate not just what they knew but how they knew it, and to recognize that the method of knowing shaped the knowledge itself. What you learn in a laboratory is different from what you learn in a church, not because one is true and the other false, but because the epistemological framework determines what counts as evidence, what counts as authority, and what counts as proof.

If I were to teach that class twenty-five years from now, in 2051, the syllabus would need to be rebuilt from the foundation. The old “ways of knowing” presumed that knowledge was acquired, that it took effort and time and method, that different methods produced different kinds of knowledge, and that the student’s task was to understand the strengths and limitations of each method. In a world of AGI or ASI, knowledge is not acquired. It is accessed. The effort is zero. The time is zero. The method is a query. The interesting question is no longer “How do you come to know this?” but rather “Now that you know everything, what do you do with it? How do you evaluate it? How do you detect when the system that provides it is wrong, biased, or incomplete? How do you maintain intellectual autonomy when the most convenient source of information is also the most persuasive and the least transparent about its own limitations?”

The 2051 version of “Ways of Knowing” would be a course in epistemic self-defense. It would teach students not how to acquire knowledge but how to resist the passive acceptance of knowledge that arrives fully formed and without friction. It would examine the psychology of deference, the human tendency to trust an authority that is always available, always confident, and never visibly tired or distracted or emotionally compromised. It would study the history of oracles, not as quaint mythology but as a direct analogue to the current moment: societies that outsource their knowing to a singular source eventually lose the capacity to evaluate what that source tells them. It would ask, with genuine urgency, what happens to critical thinking when thinking itself feels unnecessary, when the answer arrives before the question has finished forming, when the student’s experience of intellectual struggle, that productive discomfort of not-yet-knowing, is eliminated entirely.

The course would also need to grapple with a new epistemological category that did not exist when I first taught it: machine-generated knowledge. Not knowledge that a human discovered and a machine stored, but knowledge that a machine produced, patterns identified in data sets too large for any human to review, correlations extracted from domains that no human researcher had thought to combine, predictions generated by processes that even the system’s designers cannot fully explain. This is knowledge without a knower, insight without an intellect, and it challenges every epistemological framework that Western philosophy has produced since Plato. If no human being understands why the system believes what it believes, and yet the system’s beliefs prove correct with disturbing regularity, what does it mean to “know” something? Is the human who reads the machine’s output and acts on it a knower, or a follower? Is the machine a knower, or merely a process? These are not parlor games. They are the foundational questions of a civilization that has handed its epistemological authority to systems it cannot audit.

· · ·

Is knowledge obsolete? No. That is the wrong word. Knowledge is not obsolete in the way that the telegraph is obsolete. Knowledge still functions. It is still necessary as the substrate upon which judgment and wisdom and action operate. You cannot exercise medical judgment without medical knowledge; you simply no longer need to carry that knowledge in your own neurons. What is obsolete is the scarcity of knowledge, and with it, the entire economic and social and psychological infrastructure that was built on that scarcity. The university as knowledge-delivery mechanism is obsolete. The law firm as knowledge-brokerage is obsolete. The doctor’s office as diagnostic-knowledge-for-hire is obsolete. The ego that defines itself by what it knows is obsolete. The pride that derives from possessing what others lack is obsolete, at least insofar as the possession in question is informational.

What replaces these things is not yet clear, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something. But the direction is visible. The university that survives will be a place that teaches not knowledge but discernment: how to evaluate, how to judge, how to synthesize, how to create, how to act ethically in conditions of radical uncertainty. The law firm that survives will be a small partnership of strategic counselors who bring not legal knowledge but legal wisdom, the understanding of how law operates in the mess of human life that no statute fully anticipates. The doctor’s office that survives will be a place of human encounter, where the value is not the diagnosis (the machine already provided that) but the conversation about what the diagnosis means for this particular person in this particular life with these particular fears and obligations. The self that survives will be a self defined not by what it contains but by what it does, not by the knowledge it has accumulated but by the judgment it exercises, the care it extends, the beauty it creates, the courage it musters when the machine says one thing and conscience says another.

The zeroing of knowledge is not the end of human value. It is the end of a particular, historically contingent, deeply entrenched model of human value that equated worth with information. That model served us well when information was hard to come by. It produced great universities, great libraries, great professional traditions, and a broad middle class that lived comfortably on the sale of expertise. But the conditions that produced it are gone, and they are not coming back, and the sooner we stop pretending that the old model can be patched or updated or supplemented with a few online courses and a chatbot, the sooner we can begin the difficult, necessary, genuinely creative work of building something new. Something that values wisdom over knowledge, doing over knowing, presence over information, and the irreducible strangeness of being human in a world where the machines have read all the books.

anti-phil language

https://quokk.au/c/lemmyshitpost/p/639731/anti-phil-language

finally a use for philosophy

https://quokk.au/c/philosophymemes/p/639724/finally-a-use-for-philosophy

I discuss A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, Chapter 1: A Genealogy of Insufficiency – From Ancient Greece through the 20th Century.

👉 https://youtu.be/A-yoDtJ_ICE

#philosophy #language #video #youtube #genealogy #hypothesis #foucault #semantics #pragmatics #communication #power #ideology #structure #plato #aristotle #Wittgenstein #shadows #augustine #Locke #Liebnitz #Nietzsche #Gödel #Saussure #barthes #shannon #cognition #cognitivescience #rationality

I discuss A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, Chapter 1: A Genealogy of Insufficiency – From Ancient Greece through the 20th Century.

👉 https://youtu.be/A-yoDtJ_ICE

#philosophy #language #video #youtube #genealogy #hypothesis #foucault #semantics #pragmatics #communication #power #ideology #structure #plato #aristotle #Wittgenstein #shadows #augustine #Locke #Liebnitz #Nietzsche #Gödel #Saussure #barthes #shannon #cognition #cognitivescience #rationality

I discuss A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, Chapter 1: A Genealogy of Insufficiency – From Ancient Greece through the 20th Century.

👉 https://youtu.be/A-yoDtJ_ICE

#philosophy #language #video #youtube #genealogy #hypothesis #foucault #semantics #pragmatics #communication #power #ideology #structure #plato #aristotle #Wittgenstein #shadows #augustine #Locke #Liebnitz #Nietzsche #Gödel #Saussure #barthes #shannon #cognition #cognitivescience #rationality

I discuss A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, Chapter 1: A Genealogy of Insufficiency – From Ancient Greece through the 20th Century.

👉 https://youtu.be/A-yoDtJ_ICE

#philosophy #language #video #youtube #genealogy #hypothesis #foucault #semantics #pragmatics #communication #power #ideology #structure #plato #aristotle #Wittgenstein #shadows #augustine #Locke #Liebnitz #Nietzsche #Gödel #Saussure #barthes #shannon #cognition #cognitivescience #rationality

I discuss A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, Chapter 1: A Genealogy of Insufficiency – From Ancient Greece through the 20th Century.

👉 https://youtu.be/A-yoDtJ_ICE

#philosophy #language #video #youtube #genealogy #hypothesis #foucault #semantics #pragmatics #communication #power #ideology #structure #plato #aristotle #Wittgenstein #shadows #augustine #Locke #Liebnitz #Nietzsche #Gödel #Saussure #barthes #shannon #cognition #cognitivescience #rationality

Survey of Precursors Of Category Theory • 6
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2025/05/05/survey-of-precursors-of-category-theory-6/

A few years ago I began a sketch on the “Precursors of Category Theory”, tracing the continuities of the category concept from Aristotle, to Kant and Peirce, through Hilbert and Ackermann, to contemporary mathematical practice. A Survey of resources on the topic is given below, still very rough and incomplete, but perhaps a few will find it of use.

Background —

Precursors Of Category Theory
• https://oeis.org/wiki/Precursors_Of_Category_Theory

Propositions As Types Analogy
• https://oeis.org/wiki/Propositions_As_Types_Analogy

Blog Series —

Notes On Categories
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2013/02/22/notes-on-categories-1/

Precursors Of Category Theory
1. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/05/25/precursors-of-category-theory-1-a/
2. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/05/26/precursors-of-category-theory-2-a/
3. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/05/27/precursors-of-category-theory-3-a/
4. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/05/28/precursors-of-category-theory-4-a/
5. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/05/29/precursors-of-category-theory-5-a/
6. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/05/30/precursors-of-category-theory-6-a/

Precursors Of Category Theory • Discussion
1. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2020/09/13/precursors-of-category-theory-discussion-1/
2. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2020/09/21/precursors-of-category-theory-discussion-2/
3. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2020/09/25/precursors-of-category-theory-discussion-3/

Categories à la Peirce —

C.S. Peirce • A Guess at the Riddle
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2012/03/21/c-s-peirce-a-guess-at-the-riddle/

Peirce's Categories
1. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2015/10/30/peirces-categories-1/
2. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2015/10/31/peirces-categories-2/
3. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2015/11/04/peirces-categories-3/
•••
19. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2020/05/13/peirces-categories-19/
20. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2020/05/14/peirces-categories-20/
21. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2020/06/25/peirces-categories-21/

C.S. Peirce and Category Theory
1. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2021/06/23/c-s-peirce-and-category-theory-1/
2. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2021/06/24/c-s-peirce-and-category-theory-2/
3. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2021/06/27/c-s-peirce-and-category-theory-3/
4. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2021/06/28/c-s-peirce-and-category-theory-4/
5. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2021/06/29/c-s-peirce-and-category-theory-5/
6. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2021/06/30/c-s-peirce-and-category-theory-6/
7. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2021/07/01/c-s-peirce-and-category-theory-7/
8. https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2021/07/02/c-s-peirce-and-category-theory-8/

#Aristotle #Peirce #Kant #Carnap #Hilbert #Ackermann #SaundersMacLane
#Abstraction #Analogy #CategoryTheory #FunctionalLogic #RelationTheory
#PrecursorsOfCategoryTheory #PropositionsAsTypes #Semiotics #TypeTheory

The story of Erdős problem #1026. ~ Terence Tao. https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/12/08/the-story-of-erdos-problem-126/ #AI #Math #ITP #LeanProver #Aristotle #AlphaEvolve

“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.”
-Aristotle
#ai #synthography #nature #forest #quotes #philosophy #Aristotle #knowing #understanding

#USpol: #Aristocracy vs. #Oligarchy? #Politics

#Rockbridge vs. The #HeritageFoundation?

(4/n)

...that Aristotle called #polity). Rule by one or the few in the...

rulers’ own interest is tyranny or oligarchy (or timocracy), respectively, and anarchic mob rule is democracy, as #Aristotle used that term..."

https://www.britannica.com/topic/aristocracy

"#oligarchy, government by the few, especially despotic power exercised by a small and privileged group...

@GhostOnTheHalfShell

#USpol: #Aristocracy vs. #Oligarchy? #Politics

#Rockbridge vs. The #HeritageFoundation?

(3/n)

...to be best qualified to rule.

As conceived by the #Greek philosopher #Aristotle (384–322 bce), aristocracy means the rule of the few—the morally and intellectually superior—governing in the interest of all.
Such a form of government differs from the rule of one in the interest of all (#monarchy) and the rule of the many in the interest of all (a form of government...

@GhostOnTheHalfShell

Some #Mathematicians Don’t Believe in #Infinity
One question has preoccupied humans for 1000s of years: Do infinities exist? 2,300 years ago #Aristotle distinguished between two types of infinity: potential & actual. Former deals with abstract scenarios that would result from repeated processes. If you imagine counting forever, adding 1, over and over, this situation, in Aristotle’s view, would involve potential infinity. But actual infinities, he argued, couldn't exist.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-if-infinity-didnt-exist/

Illustration by Théodore Marcile, from Civitas veri sive morvm (1609).

Source: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign / Internet Archive

https://pdimagearchive.org/images/e7c80937-f174-41dc-938c-5a630adadb99

#aristotle #dystopia #ethics #emblems #drawing #morals #utopias #architecture #truth #art #publicdomain

Found online

#Socrates #Plato #Aristotle #Aquinas #Descartes #Locke #Kant #Hegel #Schopenhauer #Marx #Nietzsche #Heidegger #Arendt #Adorno #Derrida #Wittgenstein

A Captivating Journey Through Psychiatry, Philosophy, and Psychology

#Psychiatry #Philosophy #Psychology #MentalHealth #Hippocrates #Plato #Aristotle #Stoicism #Epicurus #Sociology #Durkheim #Marx #Weber #Ethics #PhilosophicalCounseling #HistoryOfThought #MindAndBody #HumanExperience #CriticalThinking #PhilosophyOfMind #MentalWellBeing

https://youtube.com/shorts/t6YhmxxeZTs?feature=share

Exploring the Mind: An Enchanting Journey Through Psychiatry, Philosophy, and Psychology

#Psychiatry #Philosophy #Psychology #HistoryOfThought #Hippocrates #Plato #Aristotle #Stoicism #Epicureanism #Sociology #Ethics #PhilosophicalCounseling #Mind #HumanExperience #MentalHealth #IntellectualJourney #CulturalTapestry

https://youtube.com/shorts/3d4E4_etoA4?feature=share

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/making-wise-decisions-learning-from-aristotle-bent-flyvbjerg

Cracking interview and discussion there on wise decisions and, really, the superiority of Aristotle’s situational ethics and character based on social feedback versus the modern emphasis on applying general principles absolutely or falling into moral relativism.
#Aristotle #Dreyfus #Flyvbyerg #philosophy

🏺 In his work "The Republic" from around 380 BC, Plato compares Socrates' opponents to "weak Petteia players, who are eventually cornered and immobilized by the more intelligent ones." Aristotle said that "a citizen without a state can be compared to an isolated piece in a game of Petteia."

🏺 From the fact that they used such metaphors we can imagine that Plato and Aristotle were big fans of Petteia (a name that translates to "pebbles"). This was a strategy board game which was highly esteemed by the intellectuals of ancient Greece, because you didn't move your pieces with the help of dice (not leaving the game to the will of fate, mind you).

🏺 Petteia was quite similar to another Roman game called Latrunculi (or Ludus Latrunculorum), equally strategic. So up to this point, we understand the rules quite well, and you can read a bit about them here:

➡️ http://www.cyningstan.com/game/63/petteia ⬅️

🏺 As for its origin, Plato claimed that it came from Egypt. In fact, the game may be even older than the Trojan War (according to Kyppo Jorma, in his book "Board Games: Throughout History and Multidimensional Spaces") which, as far as we know, took place in about 1190 BC. We suspect this because we have pottery dating from 550-500 BC that depicts Achilles and Ajax playing Petteia (see image), and Homer mentions this game in his works.

#Petteia #Polis #Greece #BoardGames #BoardGameStudies #History #Culture #Plato #Aristotle #Ludus #Ludo #Games

A Day in the Life of a Prolific Voice Phishing Crew – Source: krebsonsecurity.com https://ciso2ciso.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-prolific-voice-phishing-crew-source-krebsonsecurity-com/ #rssfeedpostgeneratorecho #CyberSecurityNews #ALittleSunshine #CryptoChameleon #KrebsonSecurity #KrebsOnSecurity #LatestWarnings #TheComingStorm #voicephishing #800-275-2273 #AllisonNixon #domaintools #autodoxers #WebFraud20 #Aristotle #MarkCuban #SharkTank #StarFraud #Coinbase #Telegram #Unit221B #Discord #Lookout

A Day in the Life of a Prolific Voice Phishing Crew

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/01/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-prolific-voice-phishing-crew/

#ALittleSunshine #CryptoChameleon #LatestWarnings #TheComingStorm #voicephishing #800-275-2273 #AllisonNixon #WebFraud2.0 #domaintools #autodoxers #Aristotle #MarkCuban #SharkTank #StarFraud #Coinbase #telegram #Unit221B #Discord #Lookout #Stotle #Trezor #Okta #Perm

A Day in the Life of a Prolific Voice Phishing Crew https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/01/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-prolific-voice-phishing-crew/ #ALittleSunshine #CryptoChameleon #LatestWarnings #TheComingStorm #voicephishing #800-275-2273 #AllisonNixon #WebFraud2.0 #domaintools #autodoxers #Aristotle #MarkCuban #SharkTank #StarFraud #Coinbase #telegram #Unit221B #Discord #Lookout #Stotle #Trezor #Okta #Perm

Interpreter and Interpretant • Selection 1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2025/01/06/interpreter-and-interpretant-selection-1-a/

Questions about the relationship between “interpreters” and “interpretants” in Peircean semiotics have broken out again. To put the matter as pointedly as possible — because I know someone or other is bound to — “In a theory of three‑place relations among objects, signs, and interpretant signs, where indeed is there any place for the interpretive agent?”

By way of getting my feet on the ground with the issue I'll do what always helped me before and review a small set of basic texts. Here is the first.

Figure 1. The Sign Relation in Aristotle
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.files.wordpress.com/2022/04/awbrey-awbrey-1995-e280a2-figure-1.png

❝Words spoken are symbols or signs (symbola) of affections or impressions (pathemata) of the soul (psyche); written words are the signs of words spoken. As writing, so also is speech not the same for all races of men. But the mental affections themselves, of which these words are primarily signs (semeia), are the same for the whole of mankind, as are also the objects (pragmata) of which those affections are representations or likenesses, images, copies (homoiomata).❞ (Aristotle, De Interp. i. 16a4).

References —

Aristotle, “On Interpretation” (De Interp.), Harold P. Cooke (trans.), pp. 111–179 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Awbrey, J.L., and Awbrey, S.M. (1995), “Interpretation as Action : The Risk of Inquiry”, Inquiry : Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 15(1), 40–52.
• https://web.archive.org/web/20001210162300/http://chss.montclair.edu/inquiry/fall95/awbrey.html
• https://www.pdcnet.org/inquiryct/content/inquiryct_1995_0015_0001_0040_0052
• https://www.academia.edu/1266493/Interpretation_as_Action_The_Risk_of_Inquiry
• https://www.academia.edu/57812482/Interpretation_as_Action_The_Risk_of_Inquiry

#Peirce #Logic #Semiotics #SignRelations #TriadicRelations
#Aristotle #Hermeneutics #Interpretation #Interpretant

If you're on Tiktok I'm doing a series on the Correspondence Theory of #Truth in #philosophy https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGdrQPxaD/

Covered so far: #Aristotle #Aquinas #Wittgenstein #Daston #Heraclitus