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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 keep coming back to this: people are looking for something genuine. They might call it good work, a useful tool, a decent conversation, a song that gets under the ribs, a place where they can take their guard down for five minutes. The label changes. The hunger doesn’t You can feel the difference when somebody has tried to make contact rather than merely perform. There’s a person in the thing. A bit of risk. A lived question. Maybe a rough edge left in because polishing it away would have taken the life out of it. Genuine does not mean

July 13, 2026 No Comments

Thinking with my feet I have started calling them Wisdom Walks, which sounds a little grand for what usually begins with me putting on my shoes and trying to get out of the house before I disappear too far into the screen. But the name has earned its keep. I go walking when something in me has become stuck: a question about work, a snag in a piece of writing, a feeling I have been carrying round without properly looking at it. I don’t go out with a plan to solve it. I take it with me and see what

July 12, 2026 No Comments

This morning I had one of those spells where there were so many possible things to do that I couldn’t bring myself to choose any of them. Nothing dramatic. Just the little wheel-spin of a mind faced with too many open tabs and too many worthy directions. Then I decided to walk into town for sausages and hot dog buns. That gave the day a shape. There’s fresh sunshine in Southam to enjoy. I’ll light the barbecue this afternoon, cook a few sausages, and sit outside for a while in the shade and drink a few IPAs my daughter dropped

July 11, 2026 No Comments

I don’t usually weigh in on political matters, but as an independent creator, discovery is already hard enough. Now the UK government is putting its thumbs down on the scale. YouTube & TikTok Compelled To Boost BBC & ITV Content Under UK Government Plans The government’s argument is basically that the media landscape has changed, and public-service broadcasters are getting buried inside algorithmic platforms. People increasingly get news and culture through YouTube, TikTok, etc., so the UK wants trusted public service content (BBC, ITV, Channel 4, 5) to remain visible rather than disappear behind whatever the recommendation engines reward. I

July 10, 2026 No Comments

The brain is a meaning-making machine. It’s constantly trying to connect dots, predict what happens next, and turn scattered information into a coherent shape. When everything is already explained, the pattern is complete. The brain can relax or get bored. But when there is uncertainty like a missing piece, an unanswered question, a strange detail, or an unfinished story, the brain becomes more alert. It “leans forward” psychologically, searching for the pattern that will resolve the tension. The uncertainty creates an open loop. We want closure, so we keep reading, watching, listening, or exploring. In writing, this means you don’t

July 10, 2026 No Comments

Everything becomes source material. I have been reading an old mythogeography interview with Phil Smith. The thread has me thinking about walking, place, story, performance, and the odd things that gather around a route once I stop treating it as just a way of getting somewhere. On my own much smaller patch of ground, that might mean the walk to the gym with my Plaud running, capturing the ordinary moments of people beginning their day. Or it might be a half-formed thought about the old industrial clock that The Man uses to keep us marching in step. Or maybe it’s

July 10, 2026 No Comments

There is a particular comedy in being your own publisher, your own platform, your own little one-person media empire. The upside is freedom. The downside is that when the site falls over, there is no calm tech team in matching hoodies quietly restoring the kingdom while you sip coffee and think writerly thoughts. It’s just you. You and the critical error message. Which is how I found myself this morning laughing at the strange bargain I’ve made with the open web. I left Substack last year because I didn’t want to build my house inside someone else’s walled garden. I

July 9, 2026 No Comments

I’m sure one of the worst nightmares for any parent is your child going missing. I was out on my morning Wisdom Walk today and noticed an unusual number of people in the fields where I usually walk. There are often dog walkers about, but this felt different. At one point, I saw a woman looking into an old cowshed. I thought maybe she was a photographer trying to catch the shed in the morning light. But then she came toward me and explained that she was searching for a young girl who had gone missing. No one had seen

July 8, 2026 No Comments

A walk is never just a walk. The ground beneath our feet is layered with stories. Streets carry memories. Landscapes hold arguments. A statue, a sign, a fence, an empty building – each one quietly tells us something about power, belonging, and how we are allowed to move through the world. Smith’s radical walker becomes part explorer, part artist, part troublemaker. Someone who looks for the cracks. Someone who questions the map they have been handed. But what I enjoyed about Wilson’s reflection is that he doesn’t simply follow the trail. He pushes back. He questions the radical angle: Must

July 6, 2026 No Comments

I keep thinking about the idea of writing an ebook that doesn’t perpetuate the expectation that a book needs to be read in a straight line. I know this isn’t a new idea; that’s what the hypertext movement was all about. But the idea of doing this resurfaced for me again this morning while reading Phil Smith’s book on mythogeography. He has embedded hyperlinks in the ebook that encourage you to go off on tangents. I like the idea of a reader following whatever catches their attention and being able to move through the text by curiosity rather than obedience.

July 6, 2026 No Comments

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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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