So a funny thing happened….

…a few days ago I published a little article on some rather esoteric issues in metaphysics as part of an unending dialogue between myself and Matthew David Segall. One of the central concepts discussed is the just-a-tad abstruse (but very important, honest!) distinction between treating “variation” as an operation and substantialising it.

Soon after publishing, I received the comment pictured below. My initial thought was “wow, this person really gets it!” I was a little surprised, but hey, they said they’d confronted the issue themselves (the status of adjacent possibilities in evolutionary models) and even alluded to the (Deleuzian) notion of a transcendental illusion, so it seemed pretty legit….right!?

I was gratified. I even sent this screenshot to Matt and another philosopher friend saying “someone groks it!”

Now, the funny bit. I realised that in intending to reply to some of the comments left on the article, I’d accidentally posted some general replies. I tried to delete those replies to ensure they were reinstated as clearly pertaining to the specific comments they were intended for, but, being the cack-handed Substack n00b that I evidently am, I deleted this lovely comment by accident and immediately discovered that there is no “undo delete comment” function (at least on the mobile app?).

“Shit!” I thought, “I’ve deleted this preternaturally lucid comment from my one true fan!”. So I msged Neural Foundry saying “I know this is awkward, but do you reckon you could repost your comment…?” - pathetic, I know.

In the meantime, rereading the comment (and receiving no reply) I started to feel a bit suss. Was this almost too lucid and sympathetic to be true? Then the following article popped up on my feed:

OMG! I’m that “lonely Substack writer” …..well, no, not really, but sorta kinda, you know….?

Soooooo, just putting this out there, partly because I’ve just seen another similarly lucid comment from this account on an almost-equally-abstruse philosophy post by a friend of mine and because yeah……this is lame (frowny face).

To the entity (animal, mineral, or vegetable) running the Neural Foundry account…..mate (this is a non-specific greeting where I’m from), if I wanted my writing presented in palatable, bite-sized, chunks that made it more “approachable”, I’m perfectly capable of using an LLM myself. The reason I do not is because I write to organise my own thinking - if I delegate that task to a machine-learned model it kinda defeats the point, eh? Furthermore, it’s just a teensy weensy bit disingenuous to not tag model-generated content with a declaration of its origin…..

….pull your head in, mate.