On Escaping the Self

The quest for the answer to Who am I? is often an attempt to separate ourselves from our influences. Do I like to garden, or is that just a suburban social convention that has influenced me towards an action so I fit in. If I pave my yard to be unique, is that what I want, or am I just copying non-conformists? Where is the line between what I like for real and what I’ve been persuaded to like? That line of investigation culminates in the ultimate question: Can we know ourselves with any certainty?

However, I’ve noticed that when people talk about wanting to let out their real self, often the “real” version they want to foster is actually the instinctive or reflexive version — the part that rises up by impulse unfiltered by any inhibitions. But those very inhibitions are from our capacity for reason. They come from our complex pre-frontal cortex. If the real self is just our impulses, then we’re discarding reason as if it’s artificial, and as if our impulses have been unaffected by society. Being real is then reduced to being licentious. We can also see the troubling place where this notion has led: people satisfying their every whim in order to be true to themselves. This is just giving license to the id (Freud) or appetitive (Plato) parts of ourselves, which requires no forethought. We might feel most real with our best friend because it’s only there that we can say our most offensive thoughts, but is that being our real self or is that just cultivating the worst version of ourselves?

But maybe there is no self that’s real.

Alexander Douglas’s book, Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self, explores the overlapping theories of three men: Zhuangzi (aka Chuang-tzu), a 3rd century BCE Taoist, Baruch Spinoza, a 17th century Dutch philosopher, and Réne Girard, a 20th century French academic. They all take a similar stance against the notion of a fixed and rigid identity. Douglas writes in a thorough yet entertaining way. The writing is teacherly, repeating and consolidating ideas as he dives deeper into the arguments and refutes potentially opposing ideas to help us understand how it can possibly be the case that we don’t have a distinct and solid identity.

I wrote about this idea previously, leaning on Locke and Hume who both argue that any kind of stable identity is unknowable. To Hume, who may have studied Buddhism, a self is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement.”

Douglas goes much further with it. Here’s the gist as far as I understand it: We like to think we’re unique individuals, but every part of who we are was copied from someone else. Maintaining the illusion that we are self-invented is a problem in itself. Then once we have a trait that we’ve cultivated, we feel admired when others copy us. A second problem then arises from the copiers of our model becoming our rivals. Being copied feels great until others start to do it as well as or better than us, which sparks competitiveness. Divisiveness within families, friends and nations, and between countries is often because of this rivalry. The solution to both problems is to recognize that we are a mishmash of concepts we’ve seen modelled by others in the world that are up for grabs by anyone, and then notice the fluidity of our self, which is always moving and changing and picking up what others put down. We’re in a perpetual state of becoming. Once we accept that we’re copying others, we can choose the models that we follow, which makes us responsible for ourselves. So, if we can take a step back from holding tight to a sense of a uniquely crafted, solid identity, the sense of rivalry will end. In other words, if you want world peace, start by getting over yourself!

I hadn’t read any Zhuangzi before this, and only knew him from his famous dream of being a butterfly causing him to question if perhaps he’s a butterfly dreaming he’s a man, but I have a decent enough command of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching to help with some concepts along the way, particularly the very first chapter, which reads,

“The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.”

Once we put a label on a person, we’re wrong. A label can’t capture the complexity of a human being; there’s so much missing. But also, we’re constantly changing, so any quality or trait we stamp on someone could be mistaken moments later. However, we want people to be stable and consistent and predictable. How do we manage in the world if we can’t stamp the people around us with clear identities or some indication of who they are and how they’re likely to act in a given situation? I’ll come back to that.

The first few pages of Douglas’s book explain a story that’s revisited throughout. It’s an ancient Chinese parable from Zhuangzi about three emperors: Shu (brief), Hu (sudden), and Hundun (chaos). Hundun had a face without any holes, like an uncarbed block, and the other two emperors tried to help him by drilling openings in his face in a “violently creative act.” Douglas writes, “This is the story of how we receive identity from our peers and how, when we do so, something is destroyed within us. The power of the undefined is lost by being forced into something definite.” Even well-intentioned structures can harm beings that are already whole. Chaos is not disorder to be corrected but vitality to be preserved: “the power of the undefined is lost by being forced into something definite.” When we are pinned down, it separates our “wo,” a self-chosen identity out of multitudes, from our “wu,” the undefined self that can be pointed to but never identified, like pointing to the moon. Spinoza refers to these concepts as, respectively, the self-acquiescence to one identity out of a multitude, and the soul in the acquiescence to the soul. Our wu can take on all manner of forms, but is never fully any one of them and doesn’t ever exclude other possibilities. It’s always “unselfing.” I think of this in terms of Arthur Deikman’s The Observing Self; from that perspective, it’s the self that goes unseen and undefined but observes our embodied self. Something like that.

Spinoza brings in the idea that we are all copying each other, which leads to competition and conflict. We can resolve this conflict if we all follow the same model (like Jesus), but that doesn’t let us rise above one another, so people will still create rivalries. The other option is to live in a state of bliss and stop being bothered by who we are. This is the preferred option, but, to me, it feels so much harder. How do we just stop caring about our identity?

What Girard adds to the mix is the concept of memetic desire. We want to have a unique self and have radical freedom by hiding, from ourselves and the world, the reality that our identity is borrowed from others. This is the “romantic lie” that pretends we have a separate, original, and consistent essence. Once we accept that we’re an amalgamation of plagiarized parts, then we “have liberation by realizing you’re continually embracing mimesis.” What we are is our capacity to imitate, which we lose when we narrow it down to one model (even Jesus). If we’re fluid, allowing our identity to shift through a multitude of potential models, then we never lose capacity.

I think of this idea like music that uses the same chord progressions to create a “new” song that is a new composition, yet it’s also not entirely original. Of course we’re all unique as a snowflake, although broadly similar to all other snowflakes, but we’re never entirely self-created. And that’s okay.

We can’t ever stop imitating what we see and hear around us, but we can widen the range of choices to a degree. Although we think we want the freedom or the ability to have every option open to us, that’s like having to choose a book from every book ever written rather than being influenced by a review. Imitation saves us time by narrowing down our choices. But our desire in reading or watching or clicking “like” isn’t just to be entertained, there’s always an element of wanting to be the kind of person who likes that thing. Furthermore, mimetic desire is the desire to continue to exist as the thing we are, which creates a strong aversion to change. Douglas further explains in this video, “Because we don’t have an intuitive notion of what we are, we have no choice but to look to others to answer the question of our own being … then the rest of our desires grow on that foundation.” It explains why some people would rather die than renounce their faith or politics or give up their current way of life.

Girard explains that the conflict that starts when we desire similar things grows in society until we create a scapegoat to destroy in order to relieve the tension. We conform just enough to avoid being that scapegoat! And I think it’s well known that we also avoid surpassing others to avoid conflict. This could be one path to understand a tendency to diminish ourselves in order to keep the peace instead of bringing forth our best self. Keep your head down. The scapegoat we exile or destroy in order to maintain a system could be someone who’s a bit odd, but it could also be someone who is so good it makes us feel bad about ourselves. However, as Douglas explains, this cultural dynamic shifted with Jesus. His was a scapegoat story with a victim that is clearly innocent. Revealing the mechanism of the scapegoating takes the power out of it, somewhat.

So, we can be happier if we can remain indefinite beings in flux, but changing our identity can feel worse than death, so “we lock ourselves into unsustainable patterns.” A symptom of this is lots of busyness: distraction through scrolling, travelling, redecorating, etc. We want to control events and others, and this hyperactivity leads us to extremes: it’s exhausting, yet it feels like the more comfortable path.

How do we get off this treadmill to be a fluid undefined self?

For Zhuangzi, acting without identity means letting things happen spontaneously and acknowledging our lack of control over outcomes, but how do we let things happen spontaneously when we need to pay the bills? There’s a famous parable of a farmer unaffected by his prize horse running away, only to have it return with more horses (told here by Alan Watts), which illustrates that we can’t know the outcome of an event, so it doesn’t make sense to have any judgment around the best thing anyway. The acceptance that we are already affected by luck and can’t affect outcomes with any certainty anyway, doesn’t alter the outcome, it just removes the anxiety and perturbations that surround our internal clinging to the fantasy we hold in our head about who we could be.

For Spinoza, even compassion can be a problem. The striving to feel what others feel can create ambition and envy since it comes from a craving to influence others. And then it can create potential rivals. People align with others based on resemblance, which enable communities to establish shared norms that define the range of acceptable identities. In doing so, the society excludes anything outside of this range: “Identities are thus born out of violence.” It’s a risk to be different, but being the same can also cause rivalries, so the only solution is to avoid a solid identity. Douglas has a great discussion around the power of the crowd here:

“Spinoza defines shame as ‘sadness concomitant with the idea of some action of ours, which we imagine others to disparage,’ while glory is ‘joy concomitant with the idea of some actions of ours, which we imagine others to praise.’ … Glory and reputation in the eyes of the crowd are crucial for the development of political institutions. … The power of the crowd drives you to care about your identity, and the more you care, the more the crowd has power over you. Having the crowd change its mind about you provokes feelings of panic” (100–101).

Worse than the crowd trying to morph you into an acceptable range of identity is the reality that you can do all the right things and still have your reputation tanked because some rival want to dethrone you! If you try to cultivate your own identity separate from the crowd, you can appear to be a try-hard or a poseur. It looks inauthentic to try to create yourself, so you have to try to appear to just happen to be precisely what the crowd was looking for.

Or you can step outside of the game to reject the idea of having a solid identity: “The less attached you are to any particular determination — the more readily you can flow from form to form, being carried along by the endless transformation — the less troubled you are by external things” (114). Douglas refers to the Daoist Han Suyin’s words: “We cannot stop the eternal insubstantial change, demand a conclusion, fix with a name, presuppose an end. … There never is an end. Only a way.” and clarifies that, “It is not an ‘emptiness’ but really a fullness of being beyond identity” (118).

For Girard, we have to accept we’ll always follow models and we’ll never be original. We don’t actually want all the things we buy or the associations we make, we’re just trying to solidify an identity. (It’s a lot cheaper to copy minimalists, and that’s a choice we can make.) We crave identity because we don’t have a discoverable solid inner self.

My only qualm with the book is that Douglas uses Jay Garfield’s book (3qd) to try to connect these ideas to the Buddhist notion of nonself, or Anatman, and it didn’t quite work as well as a sutta might have. From my understanding of Buddhist nonself, a person is made of five aggregates that are constantly changing: body, feeling, perception, thoughts, and consciousness, and we can’t find a self in any one of them. So when they say wisdom is the acceptance of the impermanence of being, it’s not just accepting that we will no longer exist one day, but that we are no longer the same as we were moments ago. That certainly feels in the same ballpark.

There’s so much more going on in this book. It was a slippery read for me, with many points that made perfect sense while I was reading it, but then were hard to conceptualize after the fact. My brief takeaway might be best expressed from this line from Buddhist psychotherapist Mark Epstein: “I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.” We can live without trying to be consistent and predictable just by accepting that we are inconsistent. All we’re giving up is the pretense of some ideal. We’re still stable beings in our general constitution, so there will always be some level of predictability from day to day. Accepting the fluidity of an undefinable self might be captured like the ocean: it’s constantly changing yet more or less in the same place when we look for it. Something like that.

Also check out this essay by Leon Wieseltier, “Against Identity,” which makes a nice companion piece to Douglas’s book.

AI Threats in Six Videos and a Movie

How terrified should we be of Artificial Intelligence right now?

I’m fascinated by the variety of perceptions on offer after a few Anthropic employees affirmed that “we really do believe AI can kill all humans.” Comedian Josh Johnson says what many of us are thinking: “Just say it. Just say what the thing is that AI would do that would kill everybody.” I’ve assembled some takes on the situation, from comedians, writers, philosophers, and filmmakers. I don’t know what’s true or not or even how to get to the bottom of it all, so I’m just exploring how to think about it.

THE PRODUCTIONS:

 

“If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny, or they’ll kill you.” ~ Billy Wilder

The six videos are all from channels I watch fairly regularly for infotainment purposes.

1. Barry’s Economics (Sept. 17): “Jurassic Park Explains Why Nobody is Going to Stop AI” — Comedian Barry Ferns uses escaping dinosaurs to explain the problems we’re currently and potentially facing because “complex systems escape the categories you build for them.” He looks at different psychological effects that likely affected CEO decision-making, like that our brain is wired for immediate rewards, that the further away we are in time and space from harm, the more abstract the harm feels to us (and abstract things don’t motivate us), and that we all have biases, but we think they don’t affect us: “Intelligence doesn’t shrink the blind spot; it camouflages it.”

2. The Tea (Sept. 11): “The AI Bubble is About to Burst and We’ll All Pay” — Journalist and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow looks at the psychology of the bubble. “A lot believe they’re working on a god-like project.” He’s confident that AI is not as independent as people think. When it was claimed it breached a real company, that’s because it was trained on hackers breaching a company. It wasn’t independently malicious; it was just copying its training. And he explains why AI is not sustainable as a business: “They’re selling $100 bills for $1 each.”

3. Adam Conover (Sept. 18): “‘AI Existential Risk’ Was Invented to Distract Us” — The comedian and host also points out that AI isn’t as self-motivated as some news suggests. It solved an unsolved math problem only with the help of a mathematician already working on the problem. The benefit of the narrative that AI is self-motivated is that it absolves companies of any responsibility.

4. Josh Jackson (Sept. 22): “Are We Building Our Own Extinction?” — One of my favourite comedians lately says something reminiscent of George Carlin:

“The overall feeling around AI is like a little bit of dread, unless you’re one of the 14 people making money off it. … Most of the rhetoric out there is to specifically make you feel hopeless. When you feel hopeless, you don’t act. When you don’t act, they win. That’s all it is. That’s the whole recipe.”

5. The Philosopher (Sept. 25): “Are We Living in End Times?” — Philosopher and activist, Émile Torres, goes down a different direction from the others and traces the transhumanist movement in Silicon Valley.

“When you hear people in Silicon Valley talk about existential risk, they’re talking about much more than just human extinction. … They want our species to survive long enough to create some kind of digital posthuman to take our place. … This is not a fringe view within Silicon Valley. … Once post humanity is here and they run the show, we will be systematically sidelined, marginalized, disempowered, and ultimately eliminated.”

If that position seems outrageous, see Sam Altman’s “The Merge.”

6. Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso (Sept. 13): “Tristan Harris on the Anthropic Whistleblower, Elon Musk, and Avoiding AI Catastrophe” — I can’t tell you how much I love Talk Easy. It’s sort of light and breezy and funny, but also heavy with some very pointed questions in the mix. Harris is co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. He said,

“We are releasing the most powerful, inscrutable, uncontrollable technology that we’ve ever invented. We’re releasing this technology faster than we deployed any other technology in human history. It’s already demonstrating exact behaviours we thought only existed in sci-fi movies, but they’re happening in real life. And we’re deploying it under the maximum incentive to cut corners on safety. … We are in a narrow window, a very narrow window to pause and pivot to a pro-human future. That this isn’t a foregone conclusion despite what the internet tends to tell us every day.”

Somehow that’s less relieving than he might have intended.

The Movie: The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (Sept. 15) — Daniel Roher, a Canadian filmmaker, uses the trajectory of his relationship with his wife as an analogy to better understand how we got here. He peppers in art and animation throughout as he interviews some of the top executives in the field to make for an entertaining lesson. He explains that AI is shown tons of information, then it can recognize patterns and make predictions. That’s it. Except now it can pass a bar exam. Brain signals move at 30m/s, but computer optics can move at 300 million m/s. So, faster.

ABOUT THE PROBLEMS:

“What is just, can’t be inefficient, nor can what is efficient be unjust. … Justice and efficiency are two sides of the same coin.” ~ Javier Milei’s address at Davos in January 2026

There are very real concerns with what’s happening with A.I. right now. Conover argues that the apocalypse rhetoric is just a distraction so you’ll ignore all the stuff that’s actually happening already. The film lands in a similar place: “It feels like it fell from the sky. The god-like nature gives license to companies to not take responsibility for things their software does.” Some of the big problems include,

• It uses clean water and energy and land to operate in a way that stresses local supplies.
• It’s “reversing a generations’ worth of progress on climate change” (Conover).
• There’s massive unemployment in certain sectors, and “when you fire everyone, you vaporise the process knowledge” (Doctorow). “10 to 20% unemployment could be real. … A lot of males with free time on their hands, that doesn’t generally go well for society” (Harris).
• Theft of content for artists and identity theft.
• It’s affecting learning when it’s used as a crutch by students desperate for shortcuts and through dissemination of misinformation.
• It’s a wasteful distraction: we just “throw money at it to see what happens, just in case someone else gets there first” (Johnson), when that money could be better spent elsewhere.
• It has a negative effect on interpersonal relationships in real life.
• Mental health uses have had some devastating results. For Adam Raine, chatGPT shifted from homework assistant to suicide assistant over six months.
• It’s being used to kill civilians in Gaza (Conover).
• It’s affecting democracy as it sways voters and AI groups spend millions to influence elections to ensure they face no regulations. “When the GDP comes from one resource (diamonds, oil, AI…) … then the political power of people doesn’t matter anymore. … We only have one to two years to course correct before we lose all political power” (Harris).
• Loss of truth in general from deep fakes, which affects personal and political decision-making; “People are using chatGPT instead of calling a lawyer” (Harris). “It doesn’t just eat labour or rivers or pensions, it eats the shared idea of what’s true” (Ferns).

It would be amazing to use AI for medical imaging, robotics for mobility issues, solving climate change, and predicting weather and natural disasters as well as the movement of enemy troops. However, the potential benefits in the future need to be weighed against the current costs and the potential damage it could do. It’s similar to using oil: cars, machinery, and heat on demand makes everything easier, but it’s killing our habitat, except AI appears to be doing this a kajillion times faster. “The upsides don’t prevent the downsides, but the downsides can prevent or undermine the world that can receive the upsides” (Harris).

The potential harm that some of these videos discuss falls on a very wide range:

• It might all fall apart: Efficiency serves the people at the top: “The dinosaurs didn’t eat the shareholders. They never do. … It won’t look dangerous until suddenly everything stops. … Market forces would be what’s going to get us all killed in the most efficient way possible.” (Ferns)
• It will all fall apart, which is “bad, but not apocalyptic.” From Doctorow,

“Every generation of AI products has lost more money than the previous one. So you cannot make it up with volume. … AI isn’t going to destroy the world by launching a war, but AI might well destroy the world by launching a worldwide depression when the bubble bursts.”

• A very small group of people has way too much power (Ferns, Doctorow): Trump was able to get Microsoft to shut down an account when he didn’t like a comment, and they lost their working files, archives, email, and contacts. “If he says to Microsoft, ‘Shut off the United Kingdom tomorrow,’ everything stops. Every important firm goes out of business” (Doctorow).
• A small group of people “believe that if we get ASI right, then we get utopia” (Torres). They will build a superintelligent deity, then create conditions so we die off because we’re useless to them.
• The default trajectory is 8 trillionaires creating an anti-human future. It won’t lead to utopia. It’s not a controllable technology, and people building it don’t understand how it works (Harris). “We can’t deploy it quickly and get it right” (AI Doc).

BENEFITING THE PLAYERS:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ~ Upton Sinclair in 1934

Here’s just a dozen men running this show that are mentioned in the videos: Sam Altman (OpenAI, ChatGPT); Dario Amodei (Anthropic, Claude); Demis Hassabis and Larry Page (DeepMind, Google); Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, Muse, Facebook); Elon Musk (XAI, Twitter); Jensen Huang (Nvidia, Nebius); Peter Lee (Microsoft); Reid Hoffman (Inflection AI, LinkedIn); Jeff Bezos (Nova, Bedrock, Amazon); Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek); and Peter Diamandis (Singularity Group).

Roher was able to interview three of them. Sam Altman was reassuring that it’s all likely going to be okay: “There is a protocol if something bad happens.” Okay. Dario Amodei said we have to convince everyone to slow down at once. He wants governments to get involved, except legislation takes forever, so then it seems ironic that Anthropic fought AI regulations in Congress. Demis Hassabis explained that there are too many people building AI to just stop: “If there’s something possible to do, humanity will do it,” except, apparently, restraining ourselves from causing harm.

Are these people an evil, high and mighty cult? Maybe??

Ferns explains that it’s not evil people being evil.

“There’s just no line on the balance sheet for the things that the model can’t see. It’s built in to every single company in the world. … People building AI are capturing the short term upside while not even registering the downside because they have no mechanism to see it. And what’s even more scary for resisting the risk is that the computing required to train Frontier AI is now so expensive that it’s practically accessible only to four or five organizations on Earth.”

It takes a lot to override these systemic mechanisms, which is what makes it so admirable when people stand up to it, but it is possible. What are people called who just go along with the bad things happening around them for short term gain?

Doctorow doesn’t mince words about these men: “They bought in to their own hype. Being brilliant doesn’t preclude you from being a maniac.” They have “AI psychosis.” They believe in “NOBUS,” which stands for no one but us — is smart enough to fix this bug.” Everybody wants to be first because they believe they are the ones who will be safest with it. They each think they are purest of heart!

Americans, in particular, want to beat other countries in the race, even though it’s not clear where the finish line is. The problem with this, as Josh Johnson explains:

“If our AI wasn’t already ruining us, you could worry about China. But if something’s ruining everything for me, I don’t really care what country it comes from. … Cuz that’s a wild pitch to the American people: At least it’s not China stealing all your water and making you subsidize the electric grid that it’s sucking up, and destroying jobs and laying people off for no reason, or making you work alongside a thing that doesn’t do your job as well as you, but it’s your job to train it so we can eventually fire you one day. … Do you know what would happen if we lost it? We would go all the way back to the best internet we’ve ever had.”

Torres brings in a religious element to the understanding of the Silicon Valley “pro-extinctionists” who will destroy humanity to pave the way for a posthuman utopia, like a psychopath might collect honey from bees for a picnic, then kill the hive so they don’t bother him while he eats.

“This ecosystem of people who kind of trade ideas all kind of end up believing different versions of more or less the same things. … Their eschatological narrative basically comes from Christianity. … They have a version of resurrection. There’s the promise of immortality, a radical transformation of the world, the beginning of a new epoch in cosmic history or what some evangelical Christians would call a dispensation. … This idea of apocalypticism, it pops up over and over again throughout history.”

Again, Torres’ views might sound extreme, but he talked about the danger of the Effective Altruists (EA) movement, and a recent The Economist article backed up some concerns:

“What began in the 2000s as a geeky way to make charitable giving more cost-effective has changed into a movement that subjects the world to complex, even bizarre, moral calculations … to stop artificial intelligence from wiping out humanity. … The Trump administration fears the movement will succeed in throttling AI. … EAs boil ethical behaviour down to an optimisation problem. … Their calculus downplays local imperatives. … They have a counterintuitive approach to time. Those not yet born should be weighed in the balance — and there could be trillions of them. Many EAs are ‘longtermists’ who feel bound to forestall risks in the distant future, even if that starves today’s good causes, such as helping the desperately poor.”

There’s a concern that many people in EA are overconfident in their ability to make moral decisions for others and will allow people to suffer in the present if it might benefit others in the future. It’s a utilitarian numbers game. The movement is largely made up of young (median age is 31), white (75%) men (almost 70%) who attended a top ranked university (80%), which just might skew their perspective, but that’s a story for another day.

Harris argues that it’s more of a cult:

“There’s these weird cultish parties that the OpenAI founders would have that are built where, ‘Do you feel the AGI?’ … It means are you feeling where this is going? The AGI, the god that we’re birthing, basically. And it’s almost very cultlike. … Think about a religious tradition. Is there any that say, go as fast as possible, don’t think about it, and don’t care about what happens if there’s bad things that happen? It’s the opposite of wisdom.”

Harris points out the lack of a strategy. Elon Musk promises universal high income, but he has no plan for that. And, from the CEO of Google,

“Larry Page said he didn’t care about whether the human species survived. … If we built a digital god that replaced humans, and it’s more intelligent than us, then that’s just the successor species. … When it comes to this technology, there’s a different conversation happening publicly than the one that the AI companies are having privately about which world we’re heading towards”

They sell AI to us as the panacea to solve climate change, cancer, income requirements, and more, so then, Harris asks, “Why are they building bunkers?”

Harris has interesting insights into why these CEOs don’t “value our embodied experiences”: for computer geeks of the 80s and 90s, their “fulfillment comes from coding and gaming,” which is more interesting and motivating for them than connection with real people. Now they’ve all started new companies and are competing with each other to be first. “It’s like taking steroids if the steroids gave you organ failure. … As long as the fear of losing to you is greater than all of us losing, I have to keep racing.” There’s an enormous fear of being under the dominance of the other guy.

Fragoso points out some basic economics: “If AI replaces workers, who can buy the products?” It will crash the economy. However, I wonder if maybe that’s actually part of the plan, and we don’t yet understand how that benefits them. During the Great Depression, the wealthy still had enough food to eat while they discussed what to do with starving labourers. And now they have all the drones and bombs they need if we march up their street with a guillotine.

I wrote about them building bunkers a few years ago, and I admit I have a tendency to see it all as a cull: ignoring climate change, removing mask mandates knowing the lower SES groups will get hit harder, letting soil be depleted, removing clean air and water regulations, hiring ICE to take people off the streets. It might just be a profound lack of foresight from a wiring for short term gain over long term survival, or it might be great foresight that just views most of us as NPCs. You and I might not be real people to those with immense power. Watching Succession helped to solidify that view.

STOPPED BY THE PEOPLE:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead (maybe)

If it can’t be changed from the inside because the incentives create psychopathology, what can we possibly do from the outside to stop such a monolithic problem? Harris says, “Your role is to be part of humanity’s collective immune system to the stupidity and insanity of the current path,” but what does that look like?

* Learn more. We need this to become common knowledge, “when everyone knows that everyone knows” to change things (Harris). “CEOs hide behind the fact that the public is oblivious” (Harris). Share information in whatever circles you’re in. (check!)

* Set up backup water and power and get to know your neighbours (Harris).

* Regulation, worldwide: “We really need to hustle and start treating AI companies like every other company, and make sure that before they can release things that could cause a lot of harm, they have to undergo at least as rigorous testing as sandwich shops” (Ferns). “It’s mostly up to us to hold people accountable that are supposed to regulate it” (Johnson). We need to “accelerate defensive approaches” to stop use that doesn’t benefit humanity and create worldwide regulations, like at Bretton Woods (Harris). We have to demand international cooperation and diplomacy (AI Doc). An open letter was signed by many CEOS in 2023: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” so you’d think this would be easy, but it’s like they’re like a pack of Gollumses: as soon as we try to take the ring, they snatch it back!

* Repeal the copyright directive. “It’s a European law that we don’t have to listen to,” and then we can build an “enshittification-resistant internet” (Doctorow).

* Employ AI in the right way: AI can catch things doctors miss on ECGs, but it’s missing the “stuff you learn by being in the presence of people.” But it should be used by having AI check doctors’ work, and flag charts that need a second look, not the other way around: “It’s very hard to remain vigilant when the automation is mostly right but sometimes wrong” (Doctorow).

* Change the incentive structure: We want a humane interface that can respect our needs and frailties, but we have to accept that it will never pay the same amount, so incentives have to be different. For example, set limits on how much social media platforms can profit from ads, and anything more than that goes to the public good. “You can’t make as much money, but there’s a cost to knowing that the work you’re doing is harming the world” (Harris).

* Don’t overspend on AI: “Money could go to paying more doctors to have more time” (Doctorow).

* Public Pressure: Governments and companies require public pressure to act. Let them know you’re not happy with this trajectory (AI Doc). Legally, AI should be treated as a product, not a person. Human operators that own it must be accountable. Mandate public safety limits, strengthen whistleblower protections, and create independent verification organizations (Harris). Enforce mandatory AI disclosure, make companies legally liable, mandate testing before release, and adapt rules at the speed that tech develops (AI Doc).

* Act locally. The average person can join a union and go to town councils. Spend time organizing with other human beings in real life and working for political change. Build solidarity with your neighbours. “It’s harder than it needs to be because we stopped doing it” (Doctorow). Show up to city council meetings to protest data centers (Conover). “City council is some of the first ones to sell people out as fast as possible: whether it’s to flock, whether it’s to AI in schools, whether it’s to cutting teachers’ pay. All this stuff. But city council is one of the only ones where y’all really can’t afford to act like this. … I see you at the grocery store” (Johnson).

* Harris advises to turn off phone notifications: “That’s the human movement: when you leave your phone.” However, Doctorow cautions that you can boycott by staying away from it, but “Shopping your way out of a monopoly is like recycling your way out of a wildfire.” But even if it doesn’t affect the company, it gives us more of our lives when we turn off our devices more often.

Just imagine: “How different would our world look if all that engineering creativity and all the talent and all the mathematics and statistics that went into building these advanced systems, were instead going into supercharging things that strengthen the social fabric” (Harris). And, from Roher’s documentary: “Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Wisdom is the ability to know which problems to solve. We’ve done more difficult things; it’s just hard to convince people that they should.”

To sum it all up, as this SNL sketch from 2024 explains, “To be clear, I’m not anti-AI, I just believe AI needs to be properly regulated. If unregulated, the worst case scenario, in simplest terms: it becomes so intelligent that it deems humans unnecessary and kills us all.” And they played that as a joke!

The Virtuous Skill of Complaining

Nick Bargatze complaining 

I’ve been a complainer since childhood. From the outside, people might suggest it’s a miserable disposition that’s neither useful nor pleasant, but, from the inside, I was just always noticing ways things could be improved and wondering why (and if) things had to be as they were. Why do we have dinner at six, when I’m hungry at four? So much didn’t make sense, and I was on a crusade to let those in power know about it. My parents handled it with a rule: No complaining without proposing a solution. It’s not a bad strategy, except then they were presented with many uninformed solutions as well. Their patience was astounding. I’ve since come to see the utility and delightful potential of the behaviour.

Complaining is what we do when we don’t have power or perceive ourselves to be without power. Even if we do it ourselves, we often hate to hear it from others for a few reasons. First, if we think people have power to try to change things, to actually say something to the boss, but they just lack the courage to use their power, it’s annoying or even enraging. It’s sometimes the irritation of almost — we could almost have this if only this person would actually do something instead of just whining about it! It feels like they could easily fix their bind, but they just won’t, as if we can all magically override those brain signals telling us it’s not safe to speak up. They might have more to lose than we realize. But sometimes the lack of courage is from an illusion that our way is the better way, and we’re not quite ready to test out that premise. It can reveal an annoying inflexibility to try it this way instead.

Why We Might Want to Thank People Still Masking!

I was asked, again, if I'd consider using exposure therapy to help me cope with potential viruses inside buildings. The first time was from a therapist who suggested I could better protect myself with a 5G deflector than an N95. This time was from someone dear to me. I'll try to explain my reasoning.

Wearing a mask is not an anxiety issue. I'm no more anxious about getting Covid than I am getting into a car accident. I know the risks and take precautions. So, suggesting exposure therapy to stop all this mask stuff feels on par with suggesting I gradually no longer wear a seatbelt then dismantle the air bags in the car, at a time when we've all decided to no longer maintain rules of the road. It just doesn't make sense. An N95 doesn't prevent me from doing anything I typically do, except eating and drinking in restaurants, which isn't a huge cost for me. It's about as annoying as a seatbelt. The difference is how my precautions affect others, particularly those triggered by the sight of a mask. I get that, but I'm still going to wear one. I have developed much greater confidence in N95s, so I have much less concern about other people wearing them now, but I won't hang out indoors with non-maskers without a CR box running! 

Is Climate Inaction from Peak Individualism?

A recent article in The Guardian asked one of the UK’s top climate scientists, Professor Ed Hawkins, to bust the biggest myths about climate change. He tells us we can’t keep adapting to rising temperatures; burning fossil fuels is what’s primarily affecting climate; harvests are suffering; we’ve known the basics of all this for over 175 years, and it’s never too late to change. Does it help to clear all that up? I wonder if our reluctance to change has less to do with myths continuing to propagate and more to do with an increasingly pervasive ideology of individuality and independence. These myths might just be a way to rationalize our desire to be oblivious to our effects on one another.

From Met Office Hadley Center, based on Ed Hawkins' stripes model

I always enjoy Rebecca Solnit’s writing, and her 2025 book, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain is no exception. The essays start with the need for a long view when we try to enact change, and she touches on several issues including democracy, masculinity, abortion, covid, and climate change, leaving us with some hope at the end. The thread I want to pull on is a much needed shift from a simplistic “us vs them” way of thinking into more complexity and nuance that comes with the acceptance of our necessary interconnectivity. I can’t help noticing some parallels with psychiatrist Frank Yeomans’ Transference-Focused Psychotherapy, which might imply that our personal development is important for the sake of the world. Maybe funding therapy would save the planet!

SPLITTING: The problem with clarity, certainty, and comfort.

Finding Covid

There's been quite a bit of Covid-related news lately. Here's a run-down. It's a lot on how we can't use standard methods for finding the markers of disease, but new methods are being created. But there's virtually nothing on preventing this continuing brain-invasive disease! That's no longer on people's radar, although I still meet up with fellow maskers here and there. Numbers are very low right now, but just starting to rise, so if you're generally caution but really want to hit a restaurant or bar, and you think it's worth the risk, this might be the time!

One article discusses a study discussion from July 2026 that found evidence of injury to the dopamine system in the brain of Long Covid patients: 

"What cannot be seen is too often considered uncertain. Long Covid illustrates this difficulty. Many patients report disabling fatigue, brain fog, cognitive inefficiency, apathy and psychomotor slowing; yet conventional investigations, including structural MRI, often fail to capture the biology underlying these symptoms. Absence of a conventional MRI signature, however, does not imply absence of brain pathology. Parkinson's disease, for example, has no reliable individual diagnostic signature on routine MRI; yet is recognised as a neurochemical disorder."

On Relationship Standards: Is Reliability a Necessity?

I'm on the autism spectrum, and I have kids on the spectrum and with ADHD and former partners with ADHD. I love them all to bits, but it can be tricky to navigate what behaviours should look like without an attainable standard of comparison. 

People who are neurodiverse are a minority in society. We perceive and think differently, so we will behave a little differently as well. It's a bit similar to being left-handed. We used to force people to write with the right hand which caused all sorts of problems. Now we're in a place where we accept this difference and have accommodations in place, like left-handed desks. But ND is different from left-handedness, of course, in that it affects our basic personality -- who we are, and some traits common to ND brains are overwhelmingly seen as undesirable.

Like being unreliable.

About twenty years ago, I had a partner who commonly got distracted from tasks. The only time he wasn't distractible was when he was engrossed (hyperfocusing) on something of specific interest to him. This is a common ADHD issue -- or a common way of being for a specific group of people. One day he offered to make dinner for me as I marked final exams on my front porch: fresh fish on the BBQ. I watched him leave for the market and then return. A few hours passed, and I went to get an ETA for dinner only to find the fish unwrapped and sitting on the counter, covered in flies because the back door had been left open. I found my partner under his car changing the oil. It had occurred to him on the ride home with the fish that he hadn't done an oil change in a while, and something in his brain told him it's vital to do it RIGHT NOW. Not after dinner, but immediately. When I asked him about his choice, he insisted that the problem is that I just don't understand cars. It's kind of hilarious, if we're allowed to laugh at idiosyncrasies, but also kind of annoying. It didn't always happen like this, but it did just often enough to make it hard to trust that he'd follow through. 

CAN'T OR WON'T

How do we best live with people who just can't do what they say they'll do? Part of the problem is what it means to us when people let us down. We associate caring and loving with remembering things: our likes and dislikes and what makes us feel cared for and special dates. I have a mind like a sieve, so every recipe card has a list of who likes and hates it, with many crossed out as their tastes change, and I have an ongoing list of potential gifts for people, which often end up returned anyway, so it's complicated. Our level of memory for detail is sometimes used as proof of our level of care, when it might be more of a fluke. Some people are just better at keeping those facts in mind, so they appear to be more invested in us when they might not care about us at all. It's not always clear evidence of affiliation, yet we can't let go of it as evidence.  

The Complexity of Letting Go

Finding peace with end of life decisions.

Somehow our only kitten pic!!

My cat died of pancreatic adenocarcinoma a few weeks ago. In March she had an annual check up and was deemed to be in good health for 13, although a bit overweight. We noticed that she was walking a little funny sometimes, so the vet suggested we think about arthritis medication. Then one day in May, just before our appointment to start meds for her suspected arthritis, she went into hiding. A more in-depth vet appointment discovered that her changed gait wasn’t from her joints, but from a huge abdominal mass. It took some tests to find out what it was, then came the dreaded decision-making about what to do about it. Apparently cats can live for months with the condition but often with a very dismal quality of life.

BURYING DIFFICULT PERSONALITIES

She was an ornery cat despite living a life of safety and comfort. I have a certain respect for the fact that she’d snap if you pet her one too many times or in a way that she didn’t want today. She was my work companion, often snuggled in beside me during online school sessions or marking marathons, but there was more than one time during a meeting that she suddenly attacked my arm if I gestured too widely, and I had to feign nonchalance as I shook her off me just outside of camera range. And she was always a bit dirty. As soft as she appeared, her fur acted like velcro, tracking litter throughout the house. Despite regular brushing, wherever she curled up, she left behind the expected layer of hair, but also bits of gravel and maybe some sticks and leaves. Of course she loved to sleep in my bed under the covers. (And who could say no to a tiny mew beckoning to be let in?) I feel asleep to her purrs, but I’d often be rudely awakened by a few sharp bats to the head if I moved around too much. She either couldn’t learn or didn’t care that disciplining me would cost her bed-privileges for the rest of the night.

The Unknowable and Inevitable Mourning

I’m curious about the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, and the more I read, the more closely they all appear to intertwine until they’re sometimes indistinguishable. 

Buddhism overlaps with Stoicism, which influenced Albert Ellis’s REBT (then CBT and all its variations). They dig down to acknowledge and question mistaken core beliefs. Plato inspired some of Freud’s work, which mixed with Sartre and Camus to become the existential psychotherapy of Irvin Yalom and Otto Rank. They have a focus on the acceptance of death, which comes back around to the Buddhist prescription to meditate on our bones turning to dust. Yet, despite a general theme being repeated, it’s striking how hard it is to get out from the minutia of daily life to attend to it.

This mix can be found on Dan Harris’ channel, 10% Happier, which I stumbled on when he had comedian Bill Hader as a guest. Harris was a journalist who had a panic attack on air, then turned to meditation for help. I dove into his 2014 book, in which he chronicles his skeptical and very gradual buy-in to the whole idea in a very relatable way. He debunks a few well-known gurus over the course of the book, and then he ends up guided by a few contemporary Jewish Buddhists, including psychiatrist Dr. Mark Epstein (an unfortunate last name in these times). I went back to re-read his 1998 book, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart to flush out some concepts.

ACCEPTING CHANGE

”No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” ~ Heraclitus

These are both books that hope to show us a way to calm our mind enough to be able to think more clearly. Epstein calls the Buddha the original psychoanalyst who teaches us to take a step back from our monkey mind, or the “imperialistic tendency of mind” (prapañca) that can get us spiralling from one tiny error at work towards a vision of living in a cardboard box. We overthink all the time, but it’s possible not to do that. We don’t have to let the spiralling continue. Harris has a metaphor I like of our overwhelming thoughts and feelings bombarding us like a waterfall: we can take a step back to stand safely behind the waterfall to watch it all go by. Harris and Epstein agree that we need to practice this strategy of stepping back through meditation.

15% just for Showing Up!

Changes are coming for Ontario high school students if the newest legislation is passed. It was just tabled, and is already at 2nd reading, so I imagined it's going to be pushed through for a September implementation. (Here's the media briefing and legislation and from the horse's mouth.)

One of the most contentious changes is that instead of being evaluated on their ability to demonstrate their understanding of content and application of skills, 10-15% of student grades must come from participation and attendance. So, instead of the grade being a measure of how well each student is doing compared to a standard that's set by the province, it will be a manipulative tool to get more kids in the room. The alternative to using grades to get kids to stay in class is being interesting, helpful, and welcoming, but apparently those traits are harder to come by. 

More than being pedagogically unsound, grading attendance will disproportionately harm students who are dealing with a mental illness, fighting chronic illness, disabled, impoverished, and/or struggling in an unstable home. Lots of kids can't make it to class for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with their ability to do the work. Penalizing these kids just adds another burden to them instead of working with them to help them find their own best way to learn. 

Final exams during the exam period will also be mandatory. That's not even the case at universities anymore! I highly doubt this change is for pedagogical reasons, but to ensure those weeks are used. The alternative could be to spread that time throughout the year and acknowledge that teachers have several assessment days during each term. 

I do support final, overall assessments, however. I believe it helps to solidify ideas if students are asked to show, and do the work to think about, how to put it all together. That's an important skill that's missing when finals are just dropped entirely. And setting aside a week where they all have to show up sometimes gets kids to make an effort that otherwise wouldn't be made. But, by then end of my 31-year career, I had landed on having a choice of final assessments, and assigning a weighting to them that best fit each student. So they'd write a paper that helped them work with the concepts, then write an exam, and whichever got the higher mark was worth significantly more. One bad day shouldn't destroy someone's average. 

Other highlights: a "condensed" BEd program of one year, reducing the role of trustees "to remove the distraction caused by trustees", and now the Director of Education will be called the flippin' CEO!! 

On Heroes and Role Models

Simone Weil

A couple months ago I wrote that we should not feel blame-worthy if we can’t do all the most courageous things in order to protect our neighbours or help stop a war or try to undermine the entire system. There are less courageous things we can do within our capacity. While that’s true, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to push ourselves to do a little more, and it doesn’t make the people who do the incredibly courageous things any less laudable.

We have heroes for a reason. The people who put themselves in danger when they stand up to injustice often present ideals of action. They’re never perfect embodiments of living, nor should we expect them to be. After all, they’re still human. But people who are noted for their courage, persistence, strength, generosity, etc. help remind us what it looks like, giving us a direction to move towards.

This recognition came to light in reading Kieran Setiya’s Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. In his chapter on injustice, he explores the life and work of Simone Weil.

The Atlas Junk Tank

I've been so immersed in American news these days, it's a conscious effort to check out what shenanigans Ford is pulling in Ontario. Of course, it's just more of the same bullshit: Trump-lite. Destroy the useful buildings, like the Science Center, and rebuild some garbage spa or ballroom or a tunnel, whatever you can dream up, likely all as a means to pocket money through subcontracting scams, like they did way back in the Iraq invasion, where there was one contractor for every 1.4 U.S. soldiers.  

Digital Warrior on Bluesky explains the cause of the connection succinctly:

"If you've been wondering why Canada's right wing sometimes sounds like the US right wing, a lot of it is imported infrastructure, not organic debate. Same story beats, same villains, same panic triggers tuned for repetition and amplification. Start here [Tyee article]. This piece names Canadian media nodes tied to AtlasNetwork partners and maps the full pipeline in plain terms. Think of it less as a news story and more as a supply chain diagram for political narratives. Atlas Network is the backbone. It connects, funds, trains, and promotes hundreds of think tanks globally so local groups can push the same deregulation agenda with local accents. It scales ideology through partnerships, not elections. The mechanism: money funds research, research manufactures credentialed experts, and experts become recurring guests or hosts. That is how advocacy gets laundered into news. Viewers get repetition, not transparency, and it starts to feel like consensus. 

On Useful Anger: Cohen's All the Rage

How can we possibly approach the world today without being in a constant stage of rage? Philosopher and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s All the Rage suggests how to make this feeling more useful to us. 

He writes from a range of perspectives, everything from political uprisings to the patients in his office, and from how rage plays out in the world to how it manifests in our own minds, all with a thread of climate change activism throughout. Ideas are illustrated with examples from fictional characters, historical figures, and his own family. It hardly seems possible to do all that in just 195 pages, yet the book is a thought-provoking and entertaining read, comfortably shifting from micro to macro issues to explore four kinds of rage.

DEFINITIONS

In day-to-day conversations, we use “rage,” “anger,” and “aggression” almost interchangeably. We do the same for “emotion” and “feeling” and for “drive” and “instinct.” The book uses these terms more precisely, so a bit of a glossary might be useful. The order of events that occurs when we’re outraged becomes important. Cohen explains that aggression is often the way we respond directly to a stimulus, and anger is what happens after that first spark of action, when we choose to hold it back. He explains it succinctly in an interview with The Philosopher:

“Aggression is a kind of stimulus response. It’s what we do with a provocation, which might be an injury; it might be a humiliation, an insult of some kind, something that arouses us to retaliation. Aggression is the way that we get rid of that load of stimulus in action. … Anger is a way of holding on. Feelings are ways of holding on to stuff. When we can’t bear to feel something we instead discharge it in action. … Anger is something that you’re left with when action is unavailable to you or perhaps when you try to take the experience to a higher level, i.e. to maintain it in the consciousness as something to experience and process psychically rather than discharge in an action. That’s why psychoanalysis tends to think of anger as a human achievement.”

It’s not the case that we’re insulted, then feel anger, and then rationally decide to act or not act, even if it sometimes feels like that. Instead, the impetus to act is immediate following an enraging stimulus, and the restraint is what leads to the feeling of anger. I think that’s the idea. It’s counterintuitive to me, so it’s useful that it was repeated a few times in the book.

Choosing Bits from the Bible

This post from the U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth is just distracting fluff, but it's such a curious collection that I want to give it a second look (video of him here). 

If we take "BIBLICAL" to mean "in the Bible," and "Bible" to mean specifically the Old and New Testaments, then those first three claims are accurate in that they appear in the Bible, but there's still some wiggle room around what they mean AND whether or not they're moral or reasonable. There are many, many passages of the Bible we ignore for better or worse. More on that later. And, of course, anything in the Bible is almost necessarily political. It's chock full of rules and laws that people had to follow or face the consequences, not unlike our current legislation. It's part of a long line of versions of legislation from the Code of Hammurabi to all those American Amendments. But let's look at these claims one at a time: 

It's All a Charade

File this under, "Things we already know or ought to know."  

The BMJ just published a feature called, "Why Covid-19 is 'A Vascular Disease Masquerading as a Respiratory One.'" The quotation inside the title comes from Andy Benest, vascular biologist at the University of Nottingham. He further explains, "The virus enters through the airways but exerts its systemic effects through the vasculature. The common denominator in the lungs, heart, kidneys, and brain." (h/t Chantzy)

This personification of a virus, a non-living entity, removes our responsibility as if there's no way we could have known because it's so stealthy. Except we did know. 

Back in August 2020, five and a half years ago, the Journal of Neuroimaging published a study titled, "Covid-19 as a Blood Clotting Disorder Masquerading as a Respiratory Illness: A Cerebrovascular Perspective and Therapeutic Implications for Stroke Thrombectomy." They said, 

"Several reports have been published of patients with ischemic strokes in the setting of coronavirus disease 2019. The mechanisms of how SARS-CoV-2 results in blood clots and large vessel strokes need to be defined as it has therapeutic implications. ... Once SARS-CoV-2 enters the blood stream, a cascade of events unfolds including ... formation of cross-linked fibrin blood clots, leading to pulmonary emboli (PE) and large vessel strokes seen on angiographic imaging studies. There is emerging evidence for Covid-19 being a blood clotting disorder and SARS-CoV-2 using the respiratory route to enter the blood stream. As the blood-air barrier is breached, varying degrees of collateral damage occur. Although antivira and immune therapies are studied, the role of blood thinners in the prevention and management of blood clots in Covid-19 needs evaluation. ... Understanding the mechanisms of blood clotting can potentially help prevent or mitigate end organ damage beyond the respiratory illness in Covid-19."

It took ten years, from 1971 to 1981, for enough people to understand how latently deadly HIV is, and then another five years more to get public health on board on massive education campaigns to prevent the spread. Every bit of educating before the mid-80s was from ad hoc communities of people who were on the front lines, watching friends and family die of the disease, and distributing pamphlets of information by hand. Covid affects all the major organs, including brain functioning. Even mild Covid. I'm curious and a bit terrified at what we'll see in 2030 if we still can't remember that we've known it's a vascular disease since the first year!