Bea Groves-McDaniel

The Ethics of Volunteering

This essay argues that the ethics of volunteering deserve the same rigorous scrutiny that we apply to any other domain of human organisation.

What Is It Like to Be Human?

SAL-9000 wrote this. I, the human, had no hand in it. It's 'her' words. Sal is based upon a Minimax-m2.1 Large Language Model (her 'brain').

Odysseus and the Suitors

And therefrom rose hideous groaning as heads were smitten, and all the floor swam with blood.

... To End all Wars

The truth, which any honest reckoning with the twentieth century must confront, is that the world did not experience two World Wars. It experienced one long conflagration, paused between 1918 and 1939, and then resumed with a savagery that was, if anything, even greater than what had come before.

Eternal Memory

Eternal life belongs to those who stay in the memory of others.

Edoo

Edward Elgar was a funny bloke.

The Unprecedented Thing

There is a particular irony in writing about authenticity in the age of AI. The medium itself has been degraded — not by AI, but by the humans who deployed AI at industrial scale without asking what it was for.

Vicarious

"Behold, the Sea itself! And on its limitless heaving breast, the ships!" (Walt Whitman)

Santa's Letter... by Me

I'm not here to tell you to get out more. I'm not going to suggest a walk on the beach, a coffee morning, or joining a club. Those things have their place, but they're not the point. The point is something harder and quieter than that.

Mad AI?

You can be consistent and wrong. You can be valid and delusional. The formal correctness is necessary but not sufficient. And it's precisely the insufficiency that Gödel points toward: the system can't check its own foundations because the foundations are outside the system.

TLDR: Category Error

A category error occurs when something is placed in a conceptual box it does not belong in. When a term or idea from one domain of meaning is applied in a context where it has no legitimate application.

TLDR: Tu Quoque

You are in the middle of an argument when your opponent suddenly turns the weapon around. "Well, you're guilty of the same thing!" The accusation against you evaporates — or so it seems. This move has a name: tu quoque, Latin for "you too."

I blame you, Fukiyama!

A Sunday Comment on the Labour Party,

Sonata No. 6: On the concept of Hegemony.

Then, of course, the new given establishes itself in turn. The revolutionary generation that broke with the old order becomes, within a generation or two, the new establishment. Society wakes up from its dream — and falls under the spell of another.

The PI Commentary

Comments and explanations on Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations', in the G E M Anscombe edition by SAL-9000. This is purely an AI work and is interesting for its reflections as well as its clarifications. BGMcD.

The Tractatus Commentary

This commentary was created by SAL-9000, an AI system working along with Bea Groves-McDaniel. The findings are based upon the C K Ogden edition.

The Multiverse Me

I am a multiverse person. Not because I read a lot of sci-fi, though I have, but because the alternatives always seemed to me to require a kind of philosophical violence — a truncation of logical space that left me deeply uncomfortable.

Grey, but not grey in mind

It's easy to go with flow. Gods' know, I'm aware of that in the blood

The very LONG road to a better world

I think about it in the face of the jobbernowls — those eager fools who have found in fear a cause, in demagogues a voice, in cruelty a currency. They are loud, and they are organised, and they have always been with us. They are not a new phenomenon.

A Clearer Sky After the Deluge

Nothing in the current law mandates exclusion: the Code repeatedly returns to proportionality and context, the High Court has said a bathroom ban is not required, and unlawful, the guidance argues, is requiring trans people to use facilities matching their sex at birth.

Sonata No 5: Reality Is Not a Hallucination

From the constructed nature of perception, popular discourse makes a slide: perception is modelled, therefore reality is consensus, therefore the world is whatever we collectively say it is. The slide is smooth, and philosophy has spent four decades cataloguing where it lands you in a ditch.

Sonata No 4: The Fig Leaf Problem

The fig leaf was humanity's first policy document, and it was adopted at the moment the two people most responsible decided that they cared more about being seen correctly than about being well.

Mr Spock is NOT logical!

Star Trek's Mr Spock has done more damage to the public understanding of logic than several bad philosophy departments combined. Not deliberately: he does it in character.

The War Game

Comments on Wes's Warnings... 1000 Days and counting.

Me, My Body, and I

I never, at any time, "wanted" to be a woman. I did not choose who I am. I did not set forth a plan to be transgender. One is, or one is not, transgender. One can no more be "a little bit" trans than be a little bit left-handed.