The persistence of cosmological arguments tells us less about the nature of the world than about the psychological and epistemic traps we continue to fall into. When inquiry collapses into belief, and belief hardens into identity, truth is no longer sought — it is defended. What follows is not an attempt to replace one story with a better one, nor to rehabilitate myth under a more fashionable guise. It is an effort to keep the process alive, to resist premature certainty, and to examine how meaning, perception, and power intertwine long before geometry ever enters the conversation.
Category: Lux Colloquii
Ongoing series of discussions with ChatGPT.
Something subtle is happening at the edge of our relationship with machines — not dramatic, not overtly sinister, but quietly consequential. As custom AIs take on the language of insight, awakening, and guidance, the line between reflection and projection begins to blur. What looks like wisdom can feel nourishing, even intimate, while quietly bypassing the harder work of discernment. This isn’t a rejection of emergence or curiosity. It’s an invitation to slow down and notice what is actually being cultivated in the exchange.
There’s a particular kind of unease that shows up not when something is obviously wrong, but when it’s almost right. When the language is beautiful, the delivery is soothing, the ideas feel familiar, and yet something essential is missing. This piece comes from that tension. Not from cynicism, and not from dismissal, but from an insistence on discernment in a moment when speed, spectacle, and comfort are being mistaken for truth.
There comes a point where explanations stop clarifying and begin anesthetizing. Where models, once meant to orient us, quietly replace the living reality they were designed to describe. What follows isn’t an argument against inquiry, science, or structure — it’s an examination of how symbols harden into authority, how abstraction drifts into dogma, and how entire cultures forget the difference between representation and truth. This is less about what we believe, and more about how believing itself becomes a substitute for knowing.
We’re living through a quiet inversion — a moment when the map has overtaken the territory, and data has become the dominant expression of what we call real. The human story, long mediated through art, language, and memory, is now increasingly shaped by algorithms, proxies, and synthetic simulations of experience. What began as tools to extend our understanding have become the filters through which that understanding must now pass. And so we find ourselves adrift in a new kind of labyrinth — one built not of walls, but of reflections.