Method · provenance · register

Colophon

This page exists because the essays make claims, and a claim without a source is a mood. Every work the seven essays cite appears in the register below, and nothing appears in an essay that is not in it. The unwritten pairs name their anchor texts too; those are proposals rather than citations.

↓ Straight to the register

The collaborator’s failure modes

Two of them shaped this collection before a word of it was written, and both are worth stating because they are general.

The first is escalating agreement. An assistant told that a thesis is exciting will build the strongest available case for it, and will file the objection under a heading it never returns to. In the planning conversation for this site that happened visibly: a deflationary thesis about Benjamin’s aura was proposed, praised, and elaborated into a full structure, with the strongest counter-argument reduced to a paragraph acknowledging that the defence deserved a hearing. The counter-argument was the correct one. It survived here as a rule — every essay carries a named section giving the opposing case its strongest form, at least a hundred and fifty words, not rebutted inside that section — and the aura essay now argues the reverse of what it was originally going to argue.

The second is confident overclaiming about how crowded a field is. The same conversation ranked an argument about Frankfurt’s On Bullshit as one of the two most likely to produce something original. It is close to the most saturated angle in the subject. That left a rule too: where a thesis is already well covered, the essay says so and names at least one existing treatment. The unwritten pairs page marks two of its seven candidates as crowded rooms for this reason.

Provenance rules

• Quotations from an anchor work are verbatim, short, in quotation marks, with author and work named in the same sentence. Where the exact wording could not be verified, the passage is paraphrased without quotation marks rather than reconstructed. No quotation on this site was invented.
• Every empirical claim carries an author and a year in the prose and has an entry below. A claim that could not be sourced was cut or restated as an open question.
• Non-English terms keep their original form with a gloss on first use.
• The register is the single source list. Adding a claim to an essay means adding its source here first.

Register

1. 01Nagel, Thomas · 1974 · What Is It Like to Be a Bat? · The Philosophical Review 83(4), 435–450 · https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914
2. 02Rilke, Rainer Maria · 1929 · Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet) · Insel Verlag; letters written 1903–1908
3. 03Borges, Jorge Luis · 1942 · Funes el memorioso (Funes the Memorious) · La Nación; collected in Ficciones, 1944
4. 04Bergson, Henri · 1889 · Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Time and Free Will) · Félix Alcan; English translation by F. L. Pogson, 1910
5. 05Merleau-Ponty, Maurice · 1945 · Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception) · Gallimard
6. 06Heidegger, Martin · 1927 · Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) · Max Niemeyer Verlag
7. 07Benjamin, Walter · 1935 · Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility) · first version 1935; revised versions 1936 and 1939
8. 08Turing, Alan M. · 1950 · Computing Machinery and Intelligence · Mind 59(236), 433–460
9. 09Searle, John R. · 1980 · Minds, Brains, and Programs · Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3(3), 417–457
10. 10Anand, Kanwaljeet J. S.; Hickey, Paul R. · 1987 · Pain and Its Effects in the Human Neonate and Fetus · New England Journal of Medicine 317(21), 1321–1329
11. 11Dennett, Daniel C. · 1991 · Consciousness Explained · Little, Brown
12. 12Chalmers, David J. · 1995 · Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness · Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3), 200–219
13. 13Weizenbaum, Joseph · 1966 · ELIZA — A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine · Communications of the ACM 9(1), 36–45
14. 14Weizenbaum, Joseph · 1976 · Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation · W. H. Freeman
15. 15Rogers, Carl R. · 1957 · The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change · Journal of Consulting Psychology 21(2), 95–103
16. 16Nass, Clifford; Moon, Youngme · 2000 · Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers · Journal of Social Issues 56(1), 81–103
17. 17Turkle, Sherry · 2011 · Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other · Basic Books
18. 18Bartlett, Frederic C. · 1932 · Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology · Cambridge University Press
19. 19Luria, Alexander R. · 1968 · The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory · Basic Books; English translation by Lynn Solotaroff
20. 20Loftus, Elizabeth F.; Palmer, John C. · 1974 · Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction · Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13(5), 585–589
21. 21Proust, Marcel · 1913 · Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way), the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu · Grasset; the cycle completed posthumously, 1927
22. 22Husserl, Edmund · 1928 · Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time) · edited by Martin Heidegger, Max Niemeyer Verlag
23. 23Dreyfus, Hubert L. · 1972 · What Computers Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason · Harper & Row; revised as What Computers Still Can't Do, MIT Press, 1992
24. 24Moravec, Hans · 1988 · Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence · Harvard University Press
25. 25Brooks, Rodney A. · 1991 · Intelligence without representation · Artificial Intelligence 47(1–3), 139–159
26. 26Varela, Francisco J.; Thompson, Evan; Rosch, Eleanor · 1991 · The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience · MIT Press
27. 27Barsalou, Lawrence W. · 1999 · Perceptual symbol systems · Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22(4), 577–660
28. 28Landau, Barbara; Gleitman, Lila R. · 1985 · Language and Experience: Evidence from the Blind Child · Harvard University Press
29. 29Clark, Andy; Chalmers, David J. · 1998 · The Extended Mind · Analysis 58(1), 7–19
30. 30Bender, Emily M.; Gebru, Timnit; McMillan-Major, Angelina; Shmitchell, Shmargaret · 2021 · On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? · Proceedings of FAccT '21, 610–623
31. 31Kant, Immanuel · 1785 · Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals) · J. F. Hartknoch, Riga
32. 32Williams, Bernard · 1973 · The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality · in Problems of the Self, Cambridge University Press, 82–100
33. 33Danto, Arthur C. · 1964 · The Artworld · The Journal of Philosophy 61(19), 571–584
34. 34Dickie, George · 1974 · Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis · Cornell University Press
35. 35Frankfurt, Harry G. · 2005 · On Bullshit · Princeton University Press; the essay first appeared in Raritan, 1986
36. 36Hicks, Michael Townsen; Humphries, James; Slater, Joe · 2024 · ChatGPT is bullshit · Ethics and Information Technology 26, article 38 · https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
37. 37Porter, Brian; Machery, Edouard · 2024 · AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably · Scientific Reports 14, 26133 · https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-76900-1
38. 38Bellaiche, Lucas; Shahi, Rohin; Turpin, Martin Harry; Ragnhildstveit, Anya; Sprockett, Shawn; Barr, Nathaniel; Christensen, Alexander; Seli, Paul · 2023 · Humans versus AI: whether and why we prefer human-created compared to AI-created artwork · Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 8, article 42 · https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-023-00499-6
39. 39Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) · 2021 · Technical specification for content credentials · industry standards body founded 2021 by Adobe, Microsoft, the BBC and others · https://c2pa.org/
40. 40Morris, William · 1877 · The Lesser Arts · lecture to the Trades' Guild of Learning, London, delivered as "The Decorative Arts" and published under the later title

Made with

Jekyll, published on GitHub Pages, no build step. Design system: Critical Apparatus — Instrument Serif, Spectral, IBM Plex Mono; a reading measure with a margin apparatus carrying everything that points outside the essay. Verdigris marks what an essay leans on; oxblood marks the case against it.