Consider all. Test All. Hold on to the good.

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Thomas Reid on Skepticism and Reasoning Oneself Out of Reason

Thomas Reid, Inquiry Into the Human Mind (Maclachlan and Stewart: 1846), p. 104.
Go He must either be a fool, or want to make a fool of me, that would reason me out of my reason and senses. ... If philosophy contradicts herself, befools her votaries, and deprives them of every object worthy to be pursued or enjoyed, let her be sent back to the infernal regions from which she must have had her original.

Defining “Artificial Intelligence” (AI)

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At a popular level, “AI” is the marketing label du jour for virtually every innovation in software, hardware, and technology that is up for sale or open to investment. Though the term is in ubiquitous use with vague semantic content, surely a more technical definition is on hand. Consider the literal definition of artificial: something made or produced by humans rather than occurring naturally. Everything about generative artificial intelligence is human in origin. Intelligence can also be difficult to define adequately. One fundamental definition is the ability to differentiate between this and that. Surely we can clarify this ubiquitous term.

Run Into Reality

"Run Into Reality", lyrics by Nathan Jacobson, sounds generated by Suno. Hat tip to the late, great Dallas Willard.
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With the emergence of generative software like Suno to generate music for texts and lyrics, I’ve become taken with songwriting. Ideas for stories and essays that have never seen the light of day have found expression. Because I tend to obsess over every word, the more limited word count makes songs more attainable; and, without the need for links and formatting, editing on the bus and train is easier while commuting. Finally, it’s just fun to listen to all the iterations Suno’s algorithms spit out on the way to the final version. So, thanks to a couple millennia of music makers that provided the training data; and, thanks to the developers who formulated the math to derive new songs from that deep sonic well. This song, “Run Into Reality”, is inspired by Dallas Willard’s potent observation that “reality is what you run into when you’re wrong”.

George Orwell on Propaganda and Art

George Orwell, "Why I Write" (1946). Cited in "Orwell Gets an Orwellian Rewrite" by James Freeman at WSJ (December 15, 2025).
Go What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

Thomas Jefferson on Arguing from Exceptions to the Rule

Thomas Jefferson, "Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, 13 June 1814" (1814)
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The creator would indeed have been a bungling artist, had he intended man for a social animal, without planting in him social dispositions. It is true they are not planted in every man; because there is no rule without exceptions: but it is false reasoning which converts exceptions into the general rule. Some men are born without the organs of sight, or of hearing, or without hands. Yet it would be wrong to say that man is born without these faculties: and sight, hearing and hands may with truth enter into the general definition of Man.

Richard Rorty on Human Rights and Free-loading Atheists

Richard Rorty, "Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism", The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 80, No. 10 (Oct., 1983), pp. 583-589. Reprinted in Postmodernism: A Reader, edited by Thomas Docherty.  
Go This Jewish and Christian element in our tradition is gratefully invoked by free-loading atheists like myself ... The existence of human rights, in the sense in which it is at issue in this meta-ethical debate, has as much or as little relevance to our treatment of such a child as the question of the existence of God.

AI Empowers Creativity and Creates Work

Nathan Jacobson
Go Many are anxious about the rise of generative software marketed as "artificial intelligence": software such as ChatGPT for text, Midjourney for images, Sora for video, and Suno for music. Some have raised concerns about a loss of truth and creativity, or about whole categories of gainful employment being decimated. To be sure, we've all seen our feeds populated by deceptive images and videos and lazy AI slop. There are bound to be many other harmful uses of generative software. Some jobs will be lost, others gained. Nevertheless, I’d like to make a case, from the perspective of a creator and graphic designer, that the anxiety about generative AI is largely unwarranted.

Cognitive Autonomy and Personal Truth

Nathan Jacobson
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We’ve been living in the lengthening shadow of postmodernism, relativism, subjectivism, and standpoint epistemology since at least the eighties, when I came of age. For the less philosophically inclined, I call it “mytruthism”. Transgenderism is the apotheosis of this spirit. Today I ran across a new term to add to the litany: “cognitive autonomy”. In response to a clever riposte by J.K. Rowling, X poster @zoverions makes the following case.

Truth Hidden when not Sought After

John Henry Newman, "Sermon XIII: Truth Hidden when not Sought After", delivered October 24, 1830, in Parochial and Plain Sermons (Longmans, Green, and Co.: 1891).
Go John Henry Newman preaches that religious truth cannot simply be passively received; it must be actively pursued and sincerely desired or it will remain obscure and inaccessible. He emphasizes that truth is complex, dispersed across history, and requires persistent effort, humility, and the willingness to change one’s life and habits to apprehend it. Newman also warns that without such seeking, people become susceptible to falsehoods and superficial beliefs, turning away from the transformative power of real truth. Ultimately, Newman insists that a living witness — someone who embodies truth in action — has far greater persuasive power than eloquent arguments alone, as truth is realized and made effective through personal integrity and lived example.

Undefining Sex and Sowing Chaos with Edge Cases

Nathan Jacobson
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Some things are this, and others are that. Some things are not like the others. We learn this. We know this. We depend upon our ability to discriminate between this and that. In a chaotic world, all is undefined and undifferentiated. Skeptics, subjectivists, and other agents of chaos are wont to undo that fundamental childhood skill of discriminating between spheres and triangles, lions and tigers, and boys and girls. If we are able to measure and cut reality along its seams, the skeptic’s epistemological pessimism is defeated. The subjectivist’s world-making is constrained. Today, for those who want to transcend our innate sexes, fuzzying the lines between male and female is the order of the day. The strategy goes like this. Instead of working from clear cases to understanding edge cases, the chaos agent argues from edge cases to deny there is any order or categories at all. Science News offers a typical example: “Biological Sex Is Not as Simple as Male or Female”. Surveying a variety of developmental sexual disorders and anomalies, Nathan Lents provides the conclusion: “These are not hard categories with clear definitions.”