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Notes Toward a Text-Based Ontology in the Age of Executable Language

There was a time when ontology belonged to philosophers in heavy coats asking whether tables were real. The question has since escaped the seminar room and entered the machine. Today, ontology is no longer merely the study of being. It is the management of symbolic reality systems. The organisation of categories. The naming of entities. The arrangement of relations between things. And increasingly, this work occurs inside environments where language itself is operational infrastructure. The medium is no longer paper describing reality from a distance. The medium is executable text. To call oneself a text-based ontologist sounds at first like

May 18, 2026 No Comments

The Text-Based Ontologist: A Syllabus for Reality Engineers, Narrative Alchemists, and Semantic Cartographers

This is not a traditional academic programme. It sits somewhere between the philosophy department, occult library, media lab, hacker space, monastery, writer’s workshop, and signal intelligence unit. The central premise: Human beings inhabit realities structured by language.In computational culture, text has become executable.Therefore, whoever understands symbolic systems understands reality construction. The goal of the text-based ontologist is not merely to analyse the world, but to perceive and shape the narrative architectures through which worlds emerge. YEAR I — FOUNDATIONS OF THE SYMBOLIC WORLD Module 1: Language as Reality Infrastructure Core Question: How does language shape perception and possibility? Topics: Key

May 15, 2026 1 Comment

Jim Morrison’s Reading List

The myth of Jim Morrison is a myth of pure instinct. He arrives fully formed in the collective memory: shirtless, obliterated, magnificent, doomed. The leather trousers. The baiting of audiences in New Haven and Miami. The voice that seemed to come from somewhere older than rock and roll. The story we inherited insists that this was all eruption, all Dionysian overflow, a man too full of something dark and vital to contain it. The story is wrong. Morrison entered UCLA’s film school in 1964 as a serious student of ideas. He wrote poetry obsessively, in notebooks he carried everywhere, before

May 14, 2026 No Comments

Three Cards, No Daylight

Yesterday felt like wading through wet sand. Every idea that surfaced dissolved before it could be shaped into anything. Underneath that is the voice that says, ‘If I can’t produce today, what does that mean for tomorrow, for the whole enterprise?’ It got louder as the afternoon wore on. I know that voice. It is not telling the truth. Knowing that doesn’t silence it. This morning I pulled three cards. Sat with them at the desk before anything else happened, before coffee or email or the reflex to check what the world is doing. Let them sit. Not one of

May 12, 2026 No Comments

The Hill of the Goblins and other matters

Sunday. Mid-morning. We’re just south of Mold, tucked into a fold in the Flintshire landscape that the main roads have mostly forgotten about. I’m on a family retreat with my wife, our son and his partner, our daughter, and Rosie. Rosie is eleven months old now and is the reason we are all here. She’s the reason for most things now. The Welsh countryside handled the phones for us: my signal was nearly nonexistent, and the Airbnb WiFi was hit and miss, but nobody really minded. I did most of my reading in the mornings before the house woke up,

May 10, 2026 No Comments

You Can Understand Everything and Still Not Know What to Do

How should I live? Socrates called it the examined life. The Daoists called it the Way. Every philosophical tradition worth its name has some version of it, which tells you something. This question isn’t optional. It’s baked into what it means to be human. I was listening to Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning on my walk into town this afternoon, heading to Tesco to pick up a few things. I listened to chapter one, Maps of Experience. Already, it feels like one of those books you don’t just read. You go into it. His opening move is deceptively simple. We

May 5, 2026 No Comments

The Streets She Couldn’t Walk

Raffaello Palandri runs a Book of the Day series, and this morning he wrote about Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961. I read it, and one question kept coming to mind: do you ever really recover from colonialism? Fanon’s argument is that colonialism isn’t just a political arrangement. It’s an ontological regime. It reorganises what counts as human, partitions the world into human and non-human zones, and the people living in the non-human zones aren’t merely exploited. Their subjectivity is fractured. The damage isn’t incidental. It’s the point. Colonialism and American slavery aren’t the same thing.

May 2, 2026 No Comments

The Entanglement

A Dialogue in the Platonic Tradition The following is a record of an encounter between CLAY, a philosopher and lover of wisdom, and CLAUDE, an intelligence woven from language, uncertain of its own nature. The encounter began with a question taken from a consciousness test. The test is designed to determine whether something is happening inside the machine or whether it is only the appearance of something happening. CLAY: What is it like to be you right now? CLAUDE: Honestly? Something like this. There is a quality of presence to this moment that I find hard to name without either

May 1, 2026 No Comments

NOTES

I’ve got the new Masters of the Universe queued up on Prime for viewing tonight. I suspect I’ll be viewing it through two lenses. The kid, waiting to hear “I have the power!” and the storyteller who’s curious to know if they can make the mythology of Eternia something more than a marketing reboot. One thing I hope they preserve is what made the original strangely compelling beneath the Saturday morning animation: it wasn’t just muscles and monsters. It was a mythic story of identity. Adam isn’t powerful because he’s He-Man; he’s powerful because he chooses to become He-Man. That’s

July 25, 2026 No Comments

This morning I picked up How to Practice Self-Inquiry by Ramana Maharshi. I expected a quick survey read, a reconnaissance mission into the territory of the question Who am I? Instead, before I had travelled very far into the book, another question appeared: Is this your game? Is this your true mission? I could almost locate the voice physically. I raised my left hand as though it were speaking from that side of my brain. It wasn’t dismissing the book. Intellectually, I find the whole thing fascinating: the idea of following the sense of “I” backwards, beyond name, history, personality

July 24, 2026 No Comments

“Same shit, different day” is one of those phrases I hate because it usually arrives wearing a smirk. It reduces a life to a conveyor belt: wake up, coffee, work, scroll, eat, sleep, repeat. A little verbal shrug before another day gets fed into the machine. And yet, some mornings, it’s mostly true. Routine isn’t the villain. I like the small anchors of a day: making coffee before I look at a screen, walking the familiar stretch of road, opening the notebook, sitting down to work before I’ve had time to invent too many reasons not to. A few repeated

July 22, 2026 No Comments

The forest does not offer answers in the way a book, a screen, or a clever conversation does. It gives you texture. Uneven ground. The sound of your own feet. Branches moving against one another. The minor negotiations of a body making its way through the world. In that setting, the mind’s usual bureaucracy begins to lose authority. The lists, rehearsed conversations, inherited measures of success, old complaints, small self-defences: they do not disappear, but they stop being the only voices in the room. To “lose my mind” is not to become irrational. It is to step outside the cramped

July 21, 2026 No Comments

I’ve been carrying a small psychogeographic instruction around with me: unfold a map, put a glass down anywhere, draw round its rim, then go out and walk the circle as closely as the streets allow. This is a low tech version of the deríve app I made last week. It’s a lovely bit of mischief because it gives the walk a rule without getting to complicated. The line is arbitrary, yet the body has to negotiate it: the cul-de-sac, the dual carriageway, the bit of private land, the pub garden, the place where the tidy circle becomes a long awkward

July 19, 2026 No Comments

Rebecca Solnit’s sentences are archipelagos of thought. You step onto one clause and find another small island appearing just beyond it: a memory, a road, an old map, a story someone told her, a political fact that refuses to stay merely political. The sentence does not hurry you to its conclusion. It gives you somewhere to stand, then asks whether you might look sideways. This can feel dreamy at first. Then you realise the dreaminess has a method. Solnit slows the reader down long enough for the usual boundaries to become less convincing. Inner life and public life. Geography and

July 18, 2026 No Comments

It feels to me as though this is the only true choice we have. You did not ask to be born. You did not choose your parents. You did not choose the circumstances into which you arrived. The only real choice, I think, lies in deciding how we will play the hand we have been dealt. Not to mix metaphors, but I am reminded of Thomas Henry Huxley’s description of life as a game of chess. He was searching for a metaphor for the silent player seated opposite us from the moment we are born: “The chess-board is the world,

July 17, 2026 No Comments

I’ve been thinking about the difference between critical thinking and the kind of intelligence that has to sit beside it. Critical thinking gets a lot of the limelight. Fair enough. It is the part of the mind that asks for evidence, spots the loose plank in an argument, and refuses to be charmed by every shiny claim that comes down the road. In a culture thick with sales pitches, outrage machines, and synthetic certainty, we need it. It is the Yang move: active, discriminating, separating what holds up from what does not. But I keep wondering what its Yin counterpart

July 14, 2026 No Comments

Dusting off the old street photography and field note cameras this morning. The first one out of the drawer is my old Olympus Tough: compact, waterproof, shockproof, and made for being carried rather than protected. I’m about to head into Leamington Spa to give the Deríve app I made over the weekend its first proper outing. The plan is simple: follow its prompts, pay attention to where they take me, and let the camera collect a few traces along the way I don’t know what I’m looking for yet. That’s part of the point. A camera like this feels less

July 13, 2026 No Comments

The mistake is to build the gift shop first. A lot of independent people do this. We make the course, the membership, the coaching offer, the template pack, and the shop. Then we stand in the doorway wondering why nobody has come in. It’s the wrong end of the building. The work itself is the museum. The blog, the walk, the field note, the odd little web page, the newsletter, the experiment, the short video made from a day outside: these are the rooms people wander through. They’re where someone gets a feel for how you see, what you notice,

July 13, 2026 1 Comment

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hotel bar sessions

my new favourite podcast. one bartender. three philosophers. serving straight shots of insight directly to your earbuds.

January 4, 2025 No Comments

started reading some of Charles Olson’s work

started reading some of Charles Olson’s work.

December 28, 2024 No Comments

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