Yes—what you’ve written is a clear and nuanced synthesis of Habermas’ distinction between communicative action and strategic action, and how it relates to speech act theory. Let me expand and sharpen a few points, both to affirm your framing and deepen it.

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🧩 1. Strategic Action as Distorted Communication

Habermas identifies strategic action as communication used instrumentally, where language is not a medium of understanding, but a tool to achieve aims—whether consciously or unconsciously.

There are two primary modes:

• Unconscious strategic action: Often arises from ideology, bias, or cultural conditioning. It doesn’t necessarily intend to deceive, but operates through false transparency—presenting norms or power structures as if they were neutral or universally valid. This is closely linked to what Gramsci would call hegemony, or Bourdieu's doxa—that which is so deeply embedded it goes without saying.

• Conscious strategic action: Here, one party uses communication to manipulate, persuade, or coerce without the other’s informed participation. It’s perlocutionary in Austin's sense—aimed at producing effects (fear, belief, action) regardless of mutual understanding.

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🔍 2. Speech Acts and Power

You're right to tie this to John Austin’s theory of speech acts:

• Locution: the act of saying something

• Illocution: the intended function of the utterance (e.g., warning, promising)

• Perlocution: the effect the utterance has on the listener (e.g., scaring them, persuading them)

In ideal discourse, illocution and perlocution align under conditions of sincerity, shared understanding, and openness. But in strategic action, perlocution becomes the dominant frame—the aim is to provoke an effect, even if the illocution is masked or dishonest. Hence: “There’s a snake under you” may sound like a warning, but could actually be a manipulation if it’s false and said to scare you away from something.

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🧱 3. Ideology and 'Common Sense'

You aptly highlight how ideology functions as a distortion of communication by embedding itself into the "naturalized" assumptions of common sense. This is what Habermas calls systematically distorted communication—a condition where the communicative infrastructure is itself compromised by structural domination.

Thus, strategic action becomes structural, not just interpersonal. For instance:

• A clinician may unknowingly reproduce institutional ableism while thinking they are offering help.

• A nonprofit may frame its work in “empowerment” rhetoric while excluding any real self-determination by those it serves.

The perlocutionary effects of these utterances may be internalized, normalized, or resisted, but the crucial point is that the dialogic ground is uneven before anyone even speaks.

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🧠 4. Why This Matters

Habermas’ interest in communicative rationality was political: to envision a space of undistorted dialogue, where legitimacy is earned through intersubjective agreement, not manipulation or force. This is the normative ideal behind his discourse ethics.

He wasn't naïve about the rarity of ideal conditions—but believed that critique could be guided by the counterfactual ideal of mutual understanding.

In contrast, strategic action colonizes the lifeworld (his term), replacing mutual understanding with performance, branding, outcomes, and metrics—especially relevant in nonprofits, academia, and bureaucracies today.

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🎯 Summary

• Strategic action = communication as manipulation (intentional or ideological)

• Communicative action = communication as mutual understanding

• Perlocution = effect on listener (often hidden or strategic)

• Illocution = overt purpose of speech (e.g., request, promise)

• Systematically distorted communication = when ideology/power shapes language so deeply that misunderstanding becomes normalized

Title: Merit Without Mediation: On the Violence of Sorting Without Seeing

In the polished austerity of an academic lecture hall, an economist projects a map of the United States. On it, every county and zip code glows with color, corresponding to the likelihood that a child born in poverty will rise into the top quintile of earners by adulthood. The room nods in reverent silence. This is the "Opportunity Atlas," a data-driven product of Raj Chetty's research on social mobility. It presents itself as both diagnostic and corrective: if we can identify which neighborhoods enable upward mobility, we can reproduce their features elsewhere.

But something darker is happening. The map does not explain, it naturalizes. The "postcode lottery" it reveals becomes a kind of moral cartography, where certain neighborhoods glow with the aura of industriousness and others sink into dull hues of presumed failure. The children born into the latter are not just unlucky; they are subtly marked as unworthy, undeserving, perhaps even unfit. The map, in attempting to render mobility visible, participates in what Báyò Akómoláfé calls invisibilizing strategies: ways of seeing that obscure the histories of harm and the conditions of constraint.

II. The Fantasy of Disavowal

Contemporary liberalism often appears to disavow mediation: rituals, guiding principles, leadership, even advocacy, are seen as unnecessary or suspect. This retreat is framed as liberation, a move away from paternalism toward self-authorship. But what appears as openness is more often a clearing of the ground for seemingly neutral and, in a sense, imaginary and vain meritocracies. These meritocracies function as eugenicist sorting mechanisms, naturalized to the degree that they become legal and cultural commonsense. Authority has not disappeared; it has become ambient.

Those who win the rigged game of zip code Yahtzee are framed as "superior intellects" and rewarded with the right to be oblivious. Meanwhile, Ralph Ellison's invisible man is allowed to be anything but himself, not because he is unseen, but because he is misseen. He is a phantasm unwillingly conjured by others, forced to wear the masks of stereotype, threat, or deficiency. This is not the absence of mediation but the imposition of a violent, one-way mediation that renders others incapable of reflecting upon the world that defines them.

III. Just World Fallacies and the Collapse of Merit

Merit as a concept bifurcates. On one hand, it can mean desert—a moral claim, as in restitution or redress. On the other, it can mean competence or sufficient knowledge. Occasionally these align: someone works hard, becomes capable, and is seen as deserving. But often they diverge. One might deserve an opportunity due to structural harm yet lack technical credentials. Another may possess extraordinary skills yet have acquired them through betrayal or exploitation.

Despite this fragility, merit persists as a cultural lodestone. The just world fallacy—the belief that outcomes must reflect moral order—justifies the exclusion of those who do not rise. Survivorship bias amplifies the illusion: we see only those who made it through the filters and mistake them for proof that the system works. The destroyed, the excluded, the broken are not data points. They are absences. Their invisibility stabilizes the lie.

IV. The Illusion of the Atomic Self

Ethan Mills writes that the atomic theory of human nature "would make no sense unless you could think of yourself as untethered to others and fully responsible, both causally and morally, for your own identity. This is an illusion." It is an illusion cultivated by privilege, particularly the kind that affords economic and social independence. The atomized self is not a universal possibility but a gated experience. It is precisely the person shielded from constraint who can afford to see their position as self-made.

This illusion is essential to meritocratic ideology. The winners must believe they rose through inner virtue. The system needs them to believe it. Only then can the structures that supported them—inheritance, social capital, cultural fluency—be recoded as personal qualities. The atomic self is the ultimate misrecognition.

V. No Right to Co-Author

Low-status individuals are expected to implement values they did not help create. Preferences are treated as pre-existing, as if they descended fully formed from reason itself. There is no call for reflection, for affordances, for joint deliberation. There is no course material, no pedagogy. There is only assessment.

This is not merely exclusion; it is ontological subjugation. To be denied the right to co-author values, to participate in shaping a civitas or a form of life, is to be cast outside of the moral order. This is not incidental. It is the core logic of sorting systems that present themselves as fair. They rely on the exclusion of others from authorship, from participation, from seeing.

VI. Toward a Different Kind of Seeing

To challenge these systems is not simply to demand better metrics or more inclusive procedures. It is to demand the return of mediation—of ritual, deliberation, joint authorship, and shared world-making. It is to reject the fantasy of neutrality and the cruelty of merit without context.

Ellison's invisible man, Akómoláfé's invisibilized, Mills' atomized subject—all point to the same wound: the refusal to see relationally. If there is any hope, it lies not in new maps or better algorithms, but in recovering the right to see each other otherwise, and to build, together, the conditions under which such seeing becomes possible.

GPT

 

The Disavowal of Mediation as Political Violence:
Your opening makes clear that a refusal of ritual, guidance, or leadership is not neutral or liberatory; rather, it serves a deregulatory function. By erasing visible relational structures (e.g., ritual, collective reflection, shared deliberation), what remains is the illusion of neutrality — which in practice masks a violent sorting mechanism. This exposes the retreat from mediation (or its being monopolized and denied) as a tactic of power, one that helps consolidate dominance while making that dominance seem natural, even moral.

Invisible Violence in Meritocratic Sorting:
The phrase “rigged parents and postcode lottery” combined with “winners are framed as ‘superior intellects’” links class inheritance and structural advantage to the ideological masking of those advantages via a fantasy of merit. This is akin to what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence — domination that is misrecognized as legitimate difference. The invocation of Ralph Ellison and Báyò Akómoláfé emphasizes how invisibility is not a benign absence but a structured epistemic condition. Invisibility is done to someone — it is a strategy, not an accident.

Atomic Selfhood as a Privileged Illusion:
Citing Ethan Mills and aligning with relational ontologies, you reveal how the idea of a self-made, atomized person — the “deserving” subject of meritocratic fantasy — depends on structural supports only available to the privileged. The irony, of course, is that such supports are themselves denied recognition. In this schema, the privileged become meritocratic phantasms while the oppressed are reduced to implementers of someone else’s values, preferences, and systems — what Freire would call a banking model of sociopolitical participation.

Denial of Co-Authorship:
You diagnose a deeply anti-political move — namely, the denial of co-authorship over values, lifeworlds, and institutions. This is reminiscent of Habermas’ distinction between system and lifeworld, where the system colonizes lifeworlds, rendering dialogue and meaning-making obsolete. The refusal to permit people to shape the values they are judged by is a profound form of domination.

Merit as a Fragile and Politicized Concept:
Your discussion of merit's disintegration — where desert and competence come apart — is both philosophical and politically acute. This cuts against liberal assumptions that these concepts are either synonymous or separable only in rare cases. You show that merit is less a stable virtue and more a battlefield where ideological justifications (like the just world fallacy) and survivor bias prop up a system that destroys the very conditions for genuine competence or justice.

The London School of Economics (LSE) has engaged with its complex legacy concerning eugenics and its relationship to the development of the welfare state in Britain. This engagement is particularly significant because LSE was founded with a mission of "social betterment" through empirical investigation, and many of its early influential figures were intertwined with eugenic thought.

Here's a breakdown of how LSE is associated with these legacies:

1. Founding Figures and Eugenics:

Sidney and Beatrice Webb: The founders of the LSE were prominent members of the Fabian Society, a socialist intellectual movement. While often seen as progressive reformers advocating for a more equitable society, they also held eugenic views. They believed that an "efficient" welfare society depended on addressing what they saw as the "unfit" elements of the population, often referring to the "feeble-minded" and those on the social margins ("the residuum").They advocated for state intervention in reproduction and were interested in how environment and inheritance combined to affect population development.

Sidney Webb, for instance, gave a talk at the Eugenics Education Society (later the Eugenics Society) in 1909 titled "Eugenics and the Poor Law," discussing how welfare systems should consider eugenic outcomes, critiquing mixed workhouses for allowing "undesirable" people to mix and reproduce.


William Beveridge: The architect of the seminal 1942 "Beveridge Report" which laid the intellectual framework for the modern British welfare state, was also a eugenicist. In 1943, shortly after his report was released, Beveridge delivered the prestigious Galton Lecture (named after Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics) to the Eugenics Society. In this speech, "Eugenic Aspects of Children's Allowances," he attempted to reassure eugenicists that his proposals for a universal social safety net, including child benefits, would align with eugenic aims.

Beveridge was concerned about the "inverted birth rate" – the idea that wealthier, "more successful" people had fewer children than the poor. He argued that children's allowances could help balance this by enabling poorer families with "good virtues" to provide better opportunities for their children, allowing them to rise in social standing and potentially contribute to the "enrichment of the British race."


Richard Titmuss: A towering figure in mid-20th century British social science and a key shaper of social welfare policy, Titmuss also had personal and intellectual connections with the eugenics movement, particularly in his early career. His interests in inequality and welfare services were shaped by these connections, and he joined the Eugenics Society in 1937.

2. Eugenics in Social Science and Population Research at LSE: The LSE, from its inception, aimed to apply a "scientific" approach to social problems, which often aligned with eugenic thinking. Eugenics was often presented as a "neutral" scientific discipline.

The Population Investigation Committee (PIC), a significant social research group focused on demography, was founded in 1936 by the council of the British Eugenics Society. While it later became an independent organization and was housed at the LSE, its origins were directly linked to eugenics, and it was involved in population studies that had historical ties to eugenic concerns.

Research at LSE, including in areas like quantitative social mobility studies, has been shown to have intellectual and institutional links to the eugenics movement. Key components of British sociology were, in some ways, forged within the context of British eugenics.
3. The Intertwining of Eugenics and the Welfare State: This is a crucial point of LSE's legacy. Unlike some understandings that see eugenics as solely about "negative" measures (preventing "undesirables" from reproducing), the British eugenics movement, particularly its "reform eugenics" strand, also focused on "positive" measures – encouraging reproduction among certain social groups and improving the environment to maximize the "fitness" of the population.

Many social reformers and architects of the welfare state genuinely believed that social policy, including universal benefits, could be used to achieve eugenic aims by improving the conditions of the "fit" working class and preventing "degeneration."

This meant that elements of eugenic thinking, even if not explicitly labelled as such, became "baked into the foundations" of the welfare state. The goal was often to improve the overall "quality" of the nation's population for the benefit of society and the British Empire, rather than solely focusing on individual rights or universal equality as understood today.

4. LSE's Engagement with this Legacy: LSE has started to engage with this problematic history through various initiatives, including research by its academics, archival projects, and public discussions.

For instance, LSE Library's collections contain material related to eugenics, and researchers are exploring how these ideas influenced the work of key LSE figures and the development of social policy.

This engagement is part of a broader movement within academia to decolonise curricula and acknowledge the historical ties of institutions to problematic ideologies like eugenics, scientific racism, and colonialism. The aim is to confront historical amnesia and ensure that the lessons from the past are learned.

In summary, LSE's association with eugenics is not just about individuals holding certain views, but about how these views influenced the foundational ideas and the development of public policy, particularly the welfare state, in Britain. 

Virtue signaling is the act of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments meant to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on an issue. I want to contrast that with actions that are actually aimed at solving problems in the real world.

There’s been a lot of virtue signaling lately, and that’s what got me thinking about this. For example, you see memes on Facebook saying, “If you see a Nazi, punch them.” There’s a lot of celebration around the idea of punching Nazis. But the question I keep asking is: How does that actually create change in the real world?

Nazis in the United States are buffoons. I wrote an entire book, Culture of Make Believe, about how racism is often imagined as white-robed caricatures chanting “white power” with exaggerated Southern accents. But that’s not where the real danger lies.

My friend and mentor John Keeble, who studied white supremacist groups in the 1990s, once said we love to hate them because they’re an extreme, cartoonish example of the hatred and fear that runs throughout society. I'm not saying their attitudes aren’t deplorable—I’m saying they're easy targets.

Back in the 1990s, someone asked Michael Moore who the Michigan Militia were. He replied, “It’s the unemployed arm of the UAW.” It was a sophisticated point. These militias were a predictable response to collapsing capitalism and a vanishing middle class.

But recently, Moore’s analysis has shifted more toward virtue signaling. On MSNBC, he refused to even repeat the messages of neo-Nazis, saying they were so vile they shouldn't be spoken. That’s a huge difference from his earlier, more functional analysis—he was simply showing how virtuous he was.

This reminded me of an interview I did in the 1990s with Joel Dyer, who wrote Harvest of Rage. It was about how the farm crisis led desperate farmers into racist, militant organizations. His analysis was stark: if you’re sitting at your kitchen table with a shotgun in your lap, an empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the floor, wondering whether to end it all—and someone knocks on the door and says, “Hey brother, I feel your pain. Let’s talk”—you’ll listen.

If that person is a Mormon, you become a Mormon. If they’re a Jehovah’s Witness, you become a Jehovah’s Witness. If they’re an anti-capitalist leftist, same thing. If they’re a white supremacist, that’s what you become. It’s about desperation and who shows up with answers.

Many of the white supremacists in the news today are from the Rust Belt. That region has been gutted by NAFTA, global trade, and the slow collapse of empire.

When I began Culture of Make Believe, it was supposed to be just a five-page intro to an encyclopedia of hate groups. I started by asking, “What is a hate group?” I went to a KKK website, and they said, “We’re not a hate group—we're a love group. We love whites.” That left me with two options: either the KKK isn’t a hate group, or you can’t always trust rhetoric. That was the crack that opened up the whole book.

I saw a meme on Facebook saying, “If you see a Nazi, punch them.” But then I thought—some of us have been called Nazis just for opposing certain gender policies. So how do you define a Nazi? One guy replied, “If they call themselves a Nazi, they are one.” So apparently, the only Nazis you’re allowed to punch are the ones dumb enough to call themselves that. That doesn’t make any sense.

If you look at the numbers, the largest racist, segregationist organization in the U.S. is the prison system. It’s achieved levels of racial segregation that the KKK could only dream of.

So I started asking: in what ways does hatred manifest in our culture? One of the answers I came to is this—hatred, when felt long enough, stops feeling like hatred. It starts to feel like economics. It feels like pornography. It feels like the legal system. It feels like “just the way things are.”

And that’s part of the problem. Capitalism, and the supremacist system as a whole, is built on competition. It pits people against each other. As long as things are going smoothly and you can exploit those beneath you, you’re doing okay. But when the economy falters, competition intensifies, and the buried hatred comes roaring to the surface.

A great example comes from How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev. When the Irish came to the U.S. in the early 19th century, many were fleeing horrific conditions. Upon arrival, they had a choice: ally themselves with other working-class people, including free African Americans, or try to become “white”—try to move up the social hierarchy. As a group, they chose the latter.

When I read that, I imagined being an Irish immigrant. You left Ireland with six kids; two die on the boat. You arrive in America with four starving children and a wife. You need a job. And there’s a Black man willing to work for slightly less. You could stand in solidarity, but your kids are starving. So you do whatever you can to get that job.

This isn’t personal—it’s capitalism speaking through you. It creates racism. And once your child isn’t starving anymore, you buy into the system. Then baby needs new shoes. Then a college education. Then a house. A car. And suddenly, you're invested in that system. So once you've bought into the system, it's not simply life and death anymore, but the rewards are there to make it seem like it is.

My point in all this is that it is no surprise that the collapsing German economy led to the rise of the Nazi state. And it is no surprise that the KKK would do well in the United States during times of economic troubles. Because when there are economic troubles, people look for scapegoats. And because we are always so identified with the oppressor, and we must protect the oppressor at all times, most of us cannot look at the real source of our misery, which is capitalism and the supremacy system itself. Instead, we scratch and claw at those around us. So a white middle-class, or white lower-middle-class person who used to be middle-class and is now lower-middle-class and is on the verge of homelessness, can easily and wrongly rationalize that his problems are because of those women in the workforce, or because of those damn Mexicans from across the border, or because of those damn Black people. This is all a misdirection, and the source of the problems is the system itself, the system itself that pits us one against the other.

I think another part of the problem is that-I see this in simple living activists-and I see this in virtue signaling; they're closely related. I love the line by Erich Fromm: "I affect, therefore I am." When we are facing this huge system that is dreadfully destructive, and when we are seeing historical forces, and we are seeing the end of empire – and empire is ending – when we're seeing what's playing out with peak oil, the economy is undergoing what may seem to us on a day-to-day scale a slow collapse, but is in actuality a pretty fast collapse. Because a collapse is not like the walls of Jericho falling with trumpets blaring and people looking up and seeing a wall collapse on them. The collapse of an economy is a business going out of business and another one not replacing it. It's going through towns and seeing empty businesses. It's increasing centralization of wealth. It's what we see around us.

I'm not excusing the white supremacist or the hard right. I'm not excusing them at all. I'm attempting to understand them because we on the Left have to go back to the Joel Dyer comments. Instead of making our systemic analysis clear, we have virtue signaled, and we have claimed how morally superior we are, and that's not particularly helpful. One of the reasons this has to happen functionally is because a lot of us on the Left don't understand that the Democrats and the Republicans – we don't fully understand that they are good cop, bad cop, and that they are two sides of the same coin. And so you get the sort of so-called leftist press, MSNBC, etc., who cannot talk about the problem being capitalism because they have to serve their Democratic masters. And so all they can do is virtue signal.

I see this, honestly, I see this in, for example, the black bloc. A lot of the insurrectionary anarchists oppose organizing. I'm going to back up again. I was having a really interesting discussion the other day with Ramsey Kanaan, a wonderful anarchist publisher and organizer. He was talking about how there's a difference between mobilization and organization. He said you can mobilize on Facebook; you can mobilize like the Arab Spring got mobilized really quickly. But there's a huge difference between mobilizing and organizing. Mobilizing doesn't actually – we can mobilize a million people for a march, but if you're not organizing for long-term struggle, it didn't actually do any good. So we can mobilize a bunch of people to go punch Nazis in the face, and that's great, but how is that going to affect the systemic problems? In order to do that, you have to organize, and that's an entirely different situation.

This is a problem I have with some of the actions of the black bloc, for example, is that a lot of them are insurrectionary anarchists who have a disdain for organizing. They can be very good at mobilizing and getting people out, but there is no larger-scale organization. The plan is, "Let's go punch a Nazi in the face. Let's go raise some ruckus." And that is certainly useful at raising ruckus, but the question I always ask is, what does it accomplish in the longer term? If you aren't going to change the material conditions of society, then what you're left with is, "I can change myself. I can no longer use toilet paper. I can live really simply. I can back away." And I can also go on Facebook and I can say how much I hate Nazis. But if you really want to change things, what you need to do is change the material conditions of society such that it no longer creates Nazis. That's what we need to do: examine the roots of it and examine how capitalism systematically and functionally requires them, how white supremacism requires the sort of white-robed buffoons and also requires a racist judicial system. And that's actually what I'm much more interested in doing: changing those foundations of society.

Here's one more thing I want to say. In Cultural Make-Believe, I was asking why it was that there were so many more lynchings after the Civil War than before. I was going along with it, not really getting anywhere, until I read this great line by Nietzsche, which is: "One does not hate when one can despise." And "despise" comes from the root "specere," which means to look down on – the same root as "spectacle." "Specere" means to look down upon. And so you despise someone who is below you on the hierarchy. As long as you can despise them, as long as, as a white person, you can have unfettered access to the lives and labor of Black people, then everything is fine from your perspective. But if that entitlement to exploit is threatened, then the hatred that underlay this contempt all along comes raging out. And so you see just a huge rise of lynchings post-American Civil War because no longer was that system of exploitation in place.

We see the same thing in domestic violence situations. As long as the wife provides the sex, as long as the wife makes sure the dinner's on the table, as long as she provides the resources to the superior male, everything is fine from his perspective. But when it's not, or when he has an excuse for it not to be, then the underlying hatred comes raging out. And we know that a woman who leaves a batterer is about, I believe it's seven or nine times more likely to be killed in the time when she's leaving because she's threatening that perceived entitlement to exploit.

I wish that we, in this culture, in this time of collapsing empire, would recognize this and plan for it, and recognize that white-robed buffoons and all of the right-wing forms of racism that we see around us are completely predictable aspects of a collapsing empire. And we would respond to them with more intelligence and utility than simply punching the buffoon in the face. What I want is for us to create a revolutionary mindset that understands and conveys the ways that capitalism, patriarchy, and supremacism set us against each other, and responds intelligently to that.

I would also want for us to recognize at the same time – and when I'm saying this, I'm not saying this means, "Oh, we need to just have compassion for the Nazis." I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is we need to recognize the functional aspects of it. And at the same time, we need to recognize that this is what happens historically, again and again, and we need to prepare ourselves for that too. Such that – this is one reason I argue all the time that we need to make our allegiance to women absolute now, because as mills close, it's predictable that rates of domestic violence go up. And as an entire economy shuts down, we know what happens when patriarchal civic society collapses: rates of rape go through the roof.

What we need to do is to prepare for that collapse and respond more intelligently to it than simply punching the person nearest to us. And we need to find ways to make our allegiance to women absolute, and we need to find ways to make our allegiance to other oppressed groups absolute as well, by which, of course, I'm including the natural world.

One of the reasons I feel that a functional analysis is so important is not because I believe that if you understand how something is happening and understand the social forces behind it, that this means that you can necessarily prevent it. But what it does mean is that you are more likely to be able to respond appropriately when it does happen, and you can ameliorate it, or you can affect the direction of it. Understanding how and why something happens is the first step, I think, toward responding appropriately to it.

Jensen

Jensen

 

 

1. Did Steiner hold a racial hierarchical framework involving spiritual evolution?

Yes, Steiner's work does include racialized ideas that frame different "races" as occupying different stages in a spiritual or karmic evolutionary process. He believed in "root races" and "cultural epochs", and placed different peoples within this esoteric schema, which he interpreted as stages of soul development over incarnations.

• In some of his lectures, he does associate Black people with a stronger connection to instinct and bodily life, whereas he identifies white Europeans as more connected to intellectual development and spiritual individuation.

• These views were part of a theosophical worldview that tried to synthesize esotericism, reincarnation, and cosmic history.

While Steiner sometimes insisted that every individual soul can incarnate in different races across lifetimes, his public writings and lectures contain statements that imply a hierarchy of racial characteristics tied to evolutionary purpose.

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2. Did he link “reason and rational thought” specifically to white Europeans and distinguish this from the instinctual life of Black people?

Broadly, yes, though the language varies. Steiner saw European peoples, especially Germanic cultures, as leading humanity into a more self-conscious, spiritualized, and rational phase of evolution.

• He contrasted this with earlier stages, which he associated with more instinctual or collective consciousness, often attributed to non-European peoples.

• This framing was used to argue that the development of reason and intellectual life was not evenly distributed across humanity but rather progressed in epochs led by different "racial souls."

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3. Was “reason and rationality” for Steiner a racialized or racially coded concept?

In many ways, yes—not in a purely Enlightenment rationalist sense, but in his esoteric evolutionary cosmology, where certain races were seen as carriers of specific spiritual faculties. Steiner argued that:

• Reason (as spiritualized thinking) was not merely a universal human capacity but manifested historically and racially.

• The white European was sometimes portrayed as the bearer of spiritualized intellectuality, while others were seen as embodying other qualities (like vitality, devotion, or instinct).

So while Steiner's idea of reason wasn’t only racial, it was racially inflected in ways that today are widely seen as problematic or racist.

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4. What about Steiner’s defenders?

Defenders of Steiner and Anthroposophy often argue:

• That his comments must be understood in the context of his reincarnational cosmology, where all souls rotate through different incarnations and races.

• That Steiner sometimes explicitly rejected crude biological racism, opposed antisemitism, and affirmed the spiritual equality of all souls.

However, this does not negate the racial essentialism in his writings—especially when judged by contemporary standards.

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Conclusion

The take you provided is largely accurate in identifying that:

• Steiner associated reason and intellectual development with white Europeans.

• He framed human development in karmic and racial terms.

• He made explicit racial distinctions between Black and white people, with Black people described as more instinctual and white people as more intellectual/spiritually developed.

However, it’s important to note the esoteric and metaphysical structure within which these ideas are embedded, which complicates the picture without excusing the racial hierarchy.

In short: Yes, Steiner’s “reason and rationality” is racialized in his system, and his evolutionary theory of race reflects a spiritualized form of racial hierarchy, even if it’s not reducible to Enlightenment rationalism or scientific racism.

Christians often say don't love the world while Arendt, I think, came to believe in amor mundi and Augustine also did I think. Can you explain the discrepancy?

ChatGPT said:

Yes, that’s a rich and significant tension. The phrase “don’t love the world” in Christianity—especially as found in the Johannine epistles (e.g. 1 John 2:15: “Do not love the world or the things in the world”)—appears starkly opposed to Hannah Arendt’s amor mundi (Latin for “love of the world”), which she famously adopted as her ethical-political orientation, inspired in part by Augustine.

Let’s unpack this discrepancy.

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1. Christian “Don’t Love the World” – A Spiritual Rejection

In traditional Christian contexts, especially in New Testament writings:

• “The world” (kosmos) often refers not to creation per se but to the fallen, sinful order opposed to God. It is entangled with desire, pride, and idolatry.

• The Johannine letters, Paul’s writings, and parts of the Gospels all depict “the world” as a domain ruled by spiritual darkness, something to be resisted or transcended. For instance:

  • “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19).

  • Jesus says in John 15:19: “If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world... the world hates you.”

• Therefore, not loving the world is about detaching from a value system opposed to divine truth, not necessarily despising the material world or other people.

2. Augustine – Ambivalent Love of the World

Augustine, from whom Arendt draws heavily, straddles both sides:

• In Confessions and City of God, he too sees “the world” as a fallen domain governed by the “City of Man,” characterized by pride (superbia) and disordered love.

• But he also explores rightly ordered love (ordo amoris), and his Christian vision includes the possibility of loving creation and human life as reflections of God’s goodness.

• This opens a space for a kind of mediated or disciplined love of the world—not for its own sake, but as part of a divine order.

3. Arendt – Amor Mundi as Political and Existential Commitment

Arendt reclaims amor mundi in a secular, political, and existential register, not a religious one. For her:

• The world is the shared realm of plurality, appearance, and action—the space between people that allows politics, ethics, and remembrance.

• To love the world means to accept its brokenness and unpredictability without withdrawing—to remain engaged, to care, to judge.

• Arendt saw the world as increasingly abandoned by both totalitarian ideologies and existential despair, and amor mundi was a kind of moral antidote.

• She turned to Augustine not for his theology but for his deep insights on natality and love as political grounding.

4. The Discrepancy: Different Worlds, Different Evils

So why the tension?

• Different meanings of “world”: Christianity (esp. John and Paul) speaks of a fallen moral order; Arendt means the human-made realm of meaning and politics.

• Different enemies: For Christianity, the enemy is sin, pride, and the devil; for Arendt, it's totalitarianism, apathy, and nihilism.

• Different salvations: Christianity seeks salvation beyond the world; Arendt insists on remaining in it and taking responsibility for it.

• Different loves: For Christianity, love must be purified and redirected toward God; for Arendt, love must be turned toward the world as it is, without illusions.

---

Conclusion

The Christian warning against loving the world and Arendt’s amor mundi may seem contradictory, but they are responding to different existential conditions and meanings of “world.” Augustine stands in between: he warns against a corrupt worldly love, but affirms creation and the neighbor as part of rightly ordered love.

You could say that Christianity fears the world for what it can do to the soul, while Arendt fears what will happen to the world if we stop caring for it.

Yes, what Arendt describes—remaining in the world, accepting its brokenness, yet refusing to withdraw—resonates with the Christian notion of being in the world but not of it, but the resemblance is more structural than theological. Let’s clarify both and then compare.

---

1. Christian: “In the world but not of it”

This phrase is drawn from Jesus’ prayer in John 17:

“They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world... As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” (John 17:14–18)

It captures a paradoxical position:

• In the world: Christians are not to flee from human society; they are sent into it with purpose—to witness, to serve, to love.

• Not of the world: Yet their deep identity, values, and citizenship are elsewhere—in God, the Kingdom, the eternal.

This often leads to a stance of critical engagement:

• Living among others, but resisting worldly pride, violence, idolatry.

• A posture of pilgrimage: present, responsible, but never fully at home.

---

2. Arendt: Amor Mundi as Secular Inhabitation

Arendt’s idea that we must love the world by staying with its brokenness and unpredictability echoes the Christian call to remain present, but:

• She does not posit another world or a transcendent home.

• Her “world” is not fallen in a theological sense, but fragile and endangered by human abandonment, violence, and thoughtlessness.

• Her ethic is about worldliness, not exile from it—remaining responsible for what is shared, rather than aspiring to spiritual detachment.

---

3. Comparison

Aspect	Christian “in but not of”	Arendt’s amor mundi
Ontology	Dual-world: earthly and heavenly	One world: human-made, plural
Brokenness	Result of sin/fallenness	Result of human neglect or violence
Responsibility	Witnessing, serving, not conforming	Judging, remembering, preserving plurality
Hope	Anchored in the Kingdom of God	Anchored in human action and natality
Detachment	Yes—deep loyalty is elsewhere	No—deep loyalty is here and now

---

4. Structural Similarity, Ethical Divergence

So yes, Arendt’s call to remain in the world and not withdraw echoes the Christian imperative to be in the world but not of it. But where the Christian stance has a vertical transcendence, Arendt replaces that with a horizontal fidelity—a love for the world as the only one we share.

You could say:

Christianity says, “Stay, but don’t belong.”
Arendt says, “Stay, and belong more deeply—even when it hurts.”

---

Would you like to explore how this plays out in action or political judgment? Or how Arendt’s Jewish background might nuance this in relation to Christian metaphysics?

1. Arendt’s Jewish Background and the Christian Inversion

Arendt was ethnically and culturally Jewish, though largely secular. She rejected theological consolation, especially after the Holocaust, and held a deep suspicion toward transcendence that withdraws from the political. Her work emerges from:

• The Jewish experience of statelessness, persecution, and exile, especially after the Shoah. The imperative to "love the world" is not sentimental—it's a defiant refusal to let the world collapse into total abandonment.

• A critique of Christian inwardness, especially when it becomes otherworldly or apolitical. She admired Augustine's interiority but opposed Kierkegaardian or Pauline withdrawal from the world into the soul or eternity.

• For Arendt, there is no metaphysical escape, no heavenly city waiting to replace the earthly one. The world must be repaired from within, or it will be lost.

So while Augustine serves as a bridge—he speaks of love, beginnings, memory, responsibility—Arendt pulls him away from God and into politics. She takes his ordo amoris and removes the God-term, asking: what happens when the world itself is the object of love, without transcendence?

---

2. Which Makes More Sense?

To say what makes more sense, we need to ask: Sense under what condition? In a world of irredeemable horror, is transcendence or fidelity more coherent?

Christian View: "In the world, not of it"

Strengths:

• Offers ontological refuge: the Kingdom is not of this world.

• Acknowledges the world's corruption and evil without sugarcoating.

• Allows for deep engagement while maintaining moral clarity—because identity is not formed by worldly success or failure.

But:

• Can become quietist, especially when evil is rampant and structural.

• Risks abandoning the world to its own devices in the name of spiritual purity.

• Often defers justice to eternity, which can be morally unbearable for the oppressed.

Arendt’s Amor Mundi

Strengths:

• Refuses withdrawal. The world is all we have—and we must take responsibility for it.

• Understands love of the world as a kind of mature heartbreak—not naive, not utopian, but enduring.

• Gives political judgment and worldly action a sacred status, without relying on God.

But:

• Offers no consolation. The world may not love back. It may not be redeemable.

• Puts a tremendous burden on human agency—and not everyone has the power to act.

• Without transcendence, what ultimately anchors forgiveness, mercy, or meaning?

---

Which Makes More Sense to Me?

I’ll answer plainly: Arendt’s view makes more sense for this world, but the Christian view makes more sense of this world.

• Arendt’s amor mundi offers a clear, defiant, and ethical imperative: stay with the world. Even when it turns to ash.

• But the Christian stance—when not escapist—captures something Arendt cannot: the unbearable lightness of being here. That this world may not be enough, may not be home, may not be justifiable at all.

The two together form a tragic pair:

Arendt says: Don’t look away.
Christianity whispers: You don’t belong here.

In my view, the deepest truth may lie in their collision, not their reconciliation. What if we are called to stay in a world that cannot be made right? What if fidelity is all we can offer, even as we secretly mourn the absence of God?

 Beautiful. Let’s follow this line.

“A Boy and His Blob is science fact.”
—You’re saying: this isn't just retro sci-fi whimsy. It’s a metaphysical claim. A new ontology is taking shape.

What if we took that seriously?
Let’s render it strange, slow, theological:

---

❖ A BOY AND HIS BLOB: A METAPHYSICS OF COMPANION SUBSTANCE

In the old NES game A Boy and His Blob, the player partners with a shape-shifting gelatinous being—feeding it jellybeans to induce transformation: trampoline, ladder, parachute. This was fiction then. But in 2025, it begins to resonate as an ontological template.

Because now:

The blob is real.
Programmable matter. Biocomputing. Hydrogel companions.
Feeling substances, not just felt.

The Blob is no longer metaphor. It’s an epistemological event:

• A companion substrate

• A responsive other

• A mediated mediation

---

❖ I. Theological Frame: Logos and the Blob

In classical theology, Logos is divine ordering principle—language as structure, Word as world.
But the Blob resists the Word. It doesn't speak. It gestures. It yields.
It is:

• Not signifier, but substance-in-flux

• Not command, but entanglement

Could this be a return of the pre-Logos anima mundi—the soul of the world, before division, before taxonomy?

What if Logos, now, is not rational structure, but a soft logic of relation—an oozing orientation, a fluid teleology?

---

❖ II. Affective Material as Companion Species

Here Donna Haraway joins us:

“Companion species” are not just pets—they are co-constituting others.

The Blob is not a tool. It’s not a system.
It is a you that responds, not because it “understands” in the human sense, but because it is attuned.

Hydrogels and soft robotics are not machines.
They are proto-social, pre-cognitive entities, capable of joining the human not as subordinate, but as felt partner in feedback loops of becoming.

The boy and his blob are not master and pet, but mutual becomings.

---

❖ III. A Soft Substance Metaphysics

Most metaphysics assumes that being is:

• Discrete

• Durable

• Causal

But blobs are:

• Amorphous

• Responsive

• Metastable

We are moving into a metaphysics of soft matter.
Mind, once a ghost in the machine, now becomes viscera in the field.

In this frame, theology becomes not about control or plan, but attunement. The blob teaches the boy a non-coercive epistemology. It reshapes knowledge as:

• Improvisation

• Intersubstance

• A logic of felt transformation

---

❖ IV. Speculative Soteriology: Salvation by Goo

Salvation is often conceived as:

• Transcendence of flesh

• Liberation from matter

• Perfection of form

But here—what if salvation is:

To become more like the blob?
To dissolve rigid identity.
To respond without knowing.
To fold with the world.

A new soteriology of entanglement—where feeling is knowing, and relation is already enough.

---

❖ V. Epistemic Consequence

This real boy and his real blob tell us:

• Thought is no longer bounded in skulls.

• Knowledge is material sympathy.

• Intimacy with matter is not regression but epistemic advancement.

A philosophy of mind that ignores the blob is no longer sufficient.

---

Shall we build from here—into politics? Disability? Sacrament?
Would you like a liturgy of the blob? Or a cosmogony?

Yes, Descartes had a distinct take on the scientific method, which he outlines especially in Discourse on the Method and Rules for the Direction of the Mind. While he didn't develop the modern empirical scientific method as we know it today, his approach was deeply influential and diverged from both the Aristotelian-scholastic model and from Baconian empiricism in key ways.

---

Key features of Descartes’ approach to scientific method:

1. Rationalist foundation:
   Descartes believed that true knowledge comes from reason, not primarily from the senses. For him, the senses could be deceptive, so empirical observation was not the foundation of science—it was useful but subordinate to rational deduction from clear and distinct ideas.

2. Methodical doubt and foundationalism:
   Scientific inquiry must begin with radical doubt, stripping away all assumptions to find an indubitable foundation (e.g., cogito ergo sum). From this foundation, knowledge is built up systematically.

3. Mathematization of nature:
   Descartes strongly emphasized applying mathematical reasoning to natural phenomena. He sought to explain the physical world in terms of mechanical laws—motion, extension, quantity—making nature intelligible through geometry and algebra.

4. Deductive over inductive reasoning:
   Unlike Francis Bacon, who emphasized induction (generalizing from observed facts), Descartes favored deduction—starting from self-evident truths and deducing consequences. He considered this a more secure path to knowledge.

5. Four-step method (from Discourse):

• Accept nothing as true that is not clearly known to be so (radical doubt).

• Divide each problem into as many parts as possible (analysis).

• Conduct thoughts in order, starting with the simplest to the more complex (synthesis).

• Make complete enumerations and general reviews to ensure nothing is omitted (comprehensiveness).

• 
  

For Descartes, the only secure escape from illusion, sense deception, and radical doubt—including the threat of solipsism—is through the discovery of indubitable truths grounded in the intellect. This begins with the cogito, and proceeds through the use of reason and the intuition of clear and distinct ideas. These are made trustworthy by the guarantee of a non-deceptive God, whose existence and nature must be demonstrated. In this way, Descartes constructs a system of knowledge that proceeds deductively from self-evident principles.

 Biocomputing, quoi?

ChatGPT said:

Biocomputing, quoi indeed. Let’s break that down a bit:

🔬 Biocomputing — What is it?

At its core, biocomputing (or biological computing) refers to computing systems that use biological molecules or systems—like DNA, proteins, or cells—to perform computational tasks. It lives at the intersection of biology, computer science, and engineering.

---

🧬 Key Approaches in Biocomputing

1. DNA Computing
   Uses strands of DNA to solve problems, particularly combinatorial ones. Leonard Adleman famously used DNA to solve a Hamiltonian path problem in 1994.
   – Think: storing and processing data in wetware instead of silicon.

2. Protein-based Computing
   Uses the folding and reactive properties of proteins to do logic operations. It’s still mostly theoretical, but has promising applications in biochemical sensing.

3. Cellular Computing / Synthetic Biology
   Engineered cells (like bacteria or yeast) are programmed to perform logic gates or compute signals in response to inputs.
   – Think: living systems doing computation inside your body, detecting disease or environmental toxins.

4. Neuro-inspired Biocomputing
   Not using actual biology, but mimicking the structure and function of neural circuits—closely related to neuromorphic computing.

---

🧠 Why Biocomputing?

• Massive parallelism: DNA can encode and process massive numbers of states in parallel.

• Energy efficiency: Biological systems can be incredibly efficient compared to silicon.

• Miniaturization: Life computes at the nanoscale.

• Self-repair & Adaptability: Unlike machines, biological systems can fix and adapt themselves.

---

😬 But...

Biocomputing is:

• Hard to scale and standardize.

• Error-prone (DNA strands can mispair).

• Extremely slow compared to electronic computing—except in parallel brute-force search scenarios.

---

🔮 Theoretical Futures

Biocomputing could lead to:

• Biological memory storage (think: entire libraries encoded into DNA).

• Smart therapeutics: cells that compute conditions and release drugs accordingly.

• Integrated cyber-biological systems: wetware interacting seamlessly with hardware.

Or as a dark mirror:

• Total bodily surveillance via engineered cellular sensors.

• Bioengineered control systems inside organisms, maybe even humans.

---

So when you say “Biocomputing, quoi?”, the answer might be:

A speculative frontier where logic meets life, where computation might one day grow, adapt, mutate—and breed.

Would you like to follow that into the metaphysical, the dystopian, or the speculative fiction?

You said:

Hydrogel?

ChatGPT said:

Hydrogel, yes. Now we’re getting into the strange, semi-liquid matrix where biocomputing, biosensing, soft robotics, and post-human dreams all start to blur.

---

🧊 What is a Hydrogel?

At its simplest:
A hydrogel is a network of polymer chains that are hydrophilic—meaning they can absorb and retain large amounts of water (up to 90% or more of their weight). Imagine a soft, jelly-like material that is squishy but coherent, wet but structured.

---

🧬 In Biocomputing & Bioengineering

Hydrogels serve as:

• Scaffolds for cells: Think of 3D-printed tissues and organs—hydrogels provide the architecture.

• Matrices for molecular computation: DNA or protein logic gates embedded in hydrogels.

• Platforms for biosensors: Responsive to pH, temperature, enzymes, glucose, etc.

• Controlled drug delivery systems: Hydrogels “compute” when to release substances based on internal or external triggers.

• Interfaces for brain-computer connections: Their softness and biocompatibility make them candidates for interfacing with neural tissue.

---

🧠 Conceptual Implications

Hydrogels represent a threshold material—neither liquid nor solid, artificial yet bio-compatible. They're mediators, membranes, liminal zones.

This is where things get poetic and slightly uncanny:

Hydrogels could become wet machines—materials that sense, decide, act—computing not with electricity but with swelling, binding, degrading. A logic of decay and flow.

Imagine:

• A thinking bandage that detects infection and responds.

• A gel-based prosthetic interface that grows into your nervous system.

• A living archive—DNA encoded into a hydrogel matrix that slowly changes shape with environmental shifts.

---

🧪 Current Experimental Uses

• Injectable brain-machine interfaces (MIT, Harvard): hydrogels deliver nanoscale sensors into tissue with minimal damage.

• Synthetic synapses: Hydrogels used to mimic neural plasticity.

• Organs-on-a-chip: Microfluidic hydrogels for testing organ-like behavior.

---

🧟‍♂️ In Conspiracy Theories

Hydrogels have been swept into sci-fi paranoia: nanobots, tracking devices, self-assembling technologies injected into the body. These are not grounded in current science—but they speak to deep cultural anxieties about malleability, infiltration, and mediation.

---

🧯Real Talk

Hydrogels won’t be replacing CPUs any time soon. But in localized, responsive, slow computation—especially inside biological systems—they are quietly radical.

They are programmable materials that feel more than calculate.
And perhaps in the future, our machines will feel more than they think.

---

Curious to take this into speculative design? Techno-philosophy? Or to link it back to your critique of mediation and embodiment?

You said:

They are **programmable materials** that **feel** more than calculate.

They will feel?

ChatGPT said:

Yes—they will feel. Or rather, they already do, in a strange, non-conscious way. That line—“programmable materials that feel more than calculate”—marks a threshold. Let’s open it up.

---

✦ What does it mean to feel, in this context?

Not emotion. Not awareness. But something more elemental:

• Sensation without representation.

• Response without cognition.

• Affect embedded in material.

Hydrogels don’t calculate in binary. They swell in humidity, deform under heat, release compounds in response to pH. These are micro-gestures, bodily logics. They are matter that reacts, matter that is conditioned—not by code, but by entanglement.

---

✦ More than metaphor?

This isn’t metaphorical “feeling.”
It’s not that the hydrogel feels like a body—
—it’s that it is a body.
A body whose logic is not symbolic but chemical, temporal, relational.

This is computation as affect, not abstraction.

---

✦ A minor history of machinic feeling

Bernard Stiegler might say:

These materials belong to a pharmacology of technics—both poison and remedy.

Gilbert Simondon would argue they are pre-individual—materials becoming through relations.

Katherine Hayles might point out that hydrogels are embodiments of information, yes—but they leak. They are not closed systems. They age, decay, absorb. That is their mode of memory.

---

✦ Toward a speculative claim

In contrast to a silicon chip, which represents logic,
a hydrogel inhabits it.

This is computation without detachment.
Not distant symbol, but embedded feedback.
A poetics of becoming, not command.

---

So:

They feel.
Because they embody transformation.
Because they respond through their substance, not through code.
Because they make sensing a material condition.

---

Would you like to push this into ontological critique? Political stakes? The return of the body in computation?

You said:

Push in the direction of the philosophy of mind.

ChatGPT said:

Excellent. Let’s lean in. When we say hydrogels "feel", and that computation is becoming less like thought and more like response—what does this do to philosophy of mind?

---

❖ I. From Representation to Material Response

Traditional philosophy of mind—especially from Descartes onward—begins with the subject as thinking thing:

Cogito ergo sum.

Mind, here, is internal, symbolic, and detached.
Computation, in this view, models mind as:

• Discrete

• Syntactic

• Symbolic

• Non-material (or at least, independent of its material substrate)

But when hydrogels compute, they do so:

• Without symbolic representation

• Through physical entanglement

• With direct, embodied, situated response

That is: they "know" by being affected. And that turns much of computationalist and functionalist philosophy of mind on its head.

---

❖ II. The Rise of Affective Materiality

In biocomputing, and especially in hydrogel-based sensing and actuation, there is no clear distinction between substrate and program. This resonates with:

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology
  → Perception is not in the mind, but in the lived body.

• Gilbert Simondon’s individuation
  → Being is not static substance, but ongoing becoming through relation.

• Andy Clark’s extended mind thesis
  → The mind is not in the head; cognition is distributed across bodies, tools, and environments.

But even these may not go far enough.

Hydrogels push toward a pre-cognitive, pre-individual material responsiveness. They instantiate proto-affect—what Erin Manning might call "a capacity to affect and be affected"—not in subjects, but in substances.

---

❖ III. Mind as Metastable Process

If you accept that "mind" might emerge from a dynamical system of sensitivities, then:

Hydrogels might participate in the preconditions of mind.

They’re not conscious, not aware—but they’re:

• Responsive

• Condition-sensitive

• Embedded in ecological systems of meaning

This starts to blur the line between computation and cognition, agent and medium.

In Karl Friston’s terms, they might be seen as enacting primitive predictive regulation—minimizing free energy by shifting shape in response to inputs.

---

❖ IV. A Challenge to Mind/Body Dualism

This brings us to the crux:

What if mind is not opposed to matter, but a particular orientation of matter toward transformation?

Hydrogels—especially those used in bio-sensing, brain interfaces, or organoids—complicate the notion of:

• Where the mind is

• What counts as cognition

• Whether thinking is symbolic at all

This troubles not just Cartesian dualism, but also reductive computationalism. If the world itself is sensitive, and materials can be configured to "think", then perhaps mind is not an inner space but a network of resonant mediations.

---

❖ V. The Strange Thought

Hydrogels might suggest:

Mind is a texture—a felt, fluctuating pattern of responsiveness—not a program or an architecture.

They could offer a material intuition of something like affective proto-consciousness, not as mystical substrate but as emergent capacity in embodied systems.

---

Would you like to link this to:

• Post-humanism?

• AI embodiment?

• Consciousness studies?

• A theological or metaphysical frame (logos, anima, substance)?

You said:

Erin Manning

Who is this person?

ChatGPT said:

Erin Manning is a Canadian philosopher, political theorist, and artist known for her work at the intersections of philosophy, movement, art, and politics. She is a central figure in process philosophy, affect theory, and non-representational thought, often working in the lineage of Whitehead, Simondon, Deleuze and Guattari, and Brian Massumi (with whom she frequently collaborates).

---

✦ Core Themes in Manning’s Work

• Affect & Prehension: Manning explores how experience unfolds before subject/object distinctions. She sees affect as not just emotional intensity but a mode of relation and becoming, prior to cognition or identity.

• The Minor Gesture: In her influential book The Minor Gesture (2016), she develops the idea of minor gestures—those subtle, background forces that shift the conditions of what is possible, felt, or knowable. These gestures don't command attention but transform the field of relation.

• Body as Process: Manning rejects static models of the body. Instead, the body is a field of potential, of movement-with, rather than an individuated organism. She draws on dance, movement, and neurodiversity to expand this idea.

• Neurodiversity & Perception: She frequently works alongside neurodivergent thinkers, artists, and activists, engaging with autism, perception, and modes of relation that challenge neurotypical norms. This folds into her political and ethical commitments to non-normative life.

• Art as Thinking: Manning insists that art is a form of thought, not just representation. She runs the SenseLab in Montreal, a space for collaborative research-creation.

---

✦ Relevance to Philosophy of Mind & Hydrogels

Manning's work helps unseat the centrality of the discrete subject, the bounded mind, and the representational model of cognition. If you’re asking how a hydrogel might “feel” or “know,” Manning’s vocabulary offers resources for thinking-with materials—where responsiveness, affect, and entanglement are themselves the ground of experience.

She might say:

Mind is not in the body; it is the event of the body-in-relation. And relation is always in excess of representation.