Thank you, Robert. After reading this essay I'm not sure how to answer the following question: Is mistaking the self as a fixed entity a category error or ignorance/confusion? It seems it could be either, depending on the context?
If you’re talking about how the sense of self persists and reasserts itself in lived experience, words like “confusion” or “ignorance” can mislead. What’s happening is not an error so much as a functional stabilization: the system maintains a self-model because it supports coordination, memory, and social navigation.
If you’re talking about whether there is such a thing as a fixed self at all, then it’s a category error. A process is treated as an object, and a verb is treated as a noun. That’s not just a lack of information; it’s a misclassification, like asking where the whirlpool goes when the river goes dry.
Thanks, that's very clear. I appreciate how your response highlights "confusion" and "ignorance" as potentially misleading. It shows me there's a consistency in my thinking around the sense of a self in lived experience being confusion and/or ignorance, therefore something to oppose and fix. Whereas in loop dynamics it's functional, it stabilizes. Those are two very different approaches.
Really appreciate the dive into category error. It's an essay I didn't know I needed. And again, thanks for the response. So often the Q&A that occurs after you post an essay adds such a valuable dimension. What a gold mine.
Once the sense of self is understood as a functional stabilization rather than a mistake, the whole project of opposing it collapses. There’s nothing to fix, only something to recognize. The pressure to improve or eliminate experience dissolves because no error is being diagnosed.
The view that “myself” is an actual entity is where the category error earns its keep. Flagging a category mistake doesn’t invite a better strategy; it removes the problem definition altogether. A process can be described, traced, or even appreciated. It can’t be “repaired” into an entity it never was.
Yes, these exchanges matter. Essays lay out the terrain, but the questions that follow often expose what still needs clarification.
I came across the following quote this morning: "The Ego results in part from the constant attempt to sustain its own coherence and that of the organism harboring it; thereby arises the constant temptation to sacrifice intellectual honesty in favor of emotional well-being." It's from The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger.
It strikes me as a solid explanation for when I observe myself using language in a way that can feel "off" or burdened with an agenda. I'm trying to protect coherence and identity, and in doing so clarity is sacrificed. I'm wondering your thoughts on this, Robert, if you like. Are cetegory and semantic errors potential "language slips" betraying a need for the organisms emotional well being?
Nothing here is chosen. There is no someone deciding to protect identity or to trade clarity for comfort. What’s happening is mechanical.
Any living system must maintain stability in order to function at all. Without sufficient coherence, coordination fails. So whatever supports stability tends to be retained. Whatever threatens it is softened, rephrased, or excluded. That isn’t strategy. It’s persistence.
Language is one of the primary regulators in this process. It doesn’t merely report experience; it helps hold the system together. When conditions are unsettled, language shifts away from precision toward formulations that preserve coherence. Categories blur. Meanings stretch.
This is not dishonesty. It is not ignorance. It is the system doing what systems do.
Clarity is not a corrective. It is simply seeing this function operating, without assigning fault or proposing repair.
Thanks, Robert. Not strategy but persistence. Not corrective but seeing without assigning fault. So there's not really anything to do or to fix, then, because there's not an really an I that can do those things.
Yes. Agreed wholeheartedly they matter. And yes, the questions that follow often expose what still needs clarification, but I also see that the Q&A exposes where I'm not using language as accurately as possible. I cherish correcting those semantic errors, for lack of a better word, toward deeper and deeper clarity.
What I'm cherishing most right now? Recognizing the collapse of the fixing project I've long been hard at working. Thanks for the influence. I'm grateful.
Ryle’s point was that category mistakes arise when we posit an extra something where a competence already suffices.
When you say humans correct category errors through “ownership of the framing stance,” it’s unclear whether you’re naming a distinct capacity or merely redescribing norm-governed linguistic practice.
If the former, that seems to reintroduce precisely the kind of supervisory element Ryle warned against. If the latter, then the contrast with AI appears functional and contextual, not categorical.
I’m not disagreeing, just asking which category you intend and what explanatory work “ownership” is doing here.
Aaron, I’m not positing a distinct capacity or an inner overseer. By “ownership of the framing stance,” I mean something much more ordinary and much less metaphysically loaded: humans are the ones who set, revise, and abandon the frame in which a question is asked.
That control is grammatical and practical, not supervisory. A human can re-ask the question, notice that it is the wrong kind of question, or drop it altogether. In doing so, they can both commit a category mistake and recognize it as such. Nothing beyond participation in norm-governed linguistic practice is required.
The contrast with AI is not categorical in the Rylean sense of introducing a new mental faculty. It’s architectural. An AI does not control the framing stance at all. It inherits a frame via a prompt and operates entirely within it, optimizing for fluency and coherence. Because of that, it cannot notice many category errors, even obvious ones, unless the task of error detection is explicitly built into the prompt.
So “ownership” here is not an additional something over and above competence. It’s simply the fact that, right or wrong, humans are the ones doing the framing, and machines are not.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. It sounds like “ownership of the framing stance” is fully grounded in participation in norm-governed linguistic and practical practices, rather than any inner overseer or additional faculty. That aligns closely with my view that agency is a functional capacity arising from the structured loops humans participate in: it is real and distinct in what it does, but does not require a separate self. One point I’m still curious about, though: when you say humans can notice and revise a frame “without feedback from the world,” is that meant to include internalized feedback loops, or something else? Understanding this will help me see how category correction fits within your loop-based account.
By “without feedback from the world,” I don’t mean without feedback at all. I mean without having to trace consequences outward or wait for practical failure.
Many people can notice a category error immediately, not by inference or outcome analysis, but because the formulation simply doesn’t sit right. The mismatch is felt at the level of sense-making itself. In that respect, I have in mind Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of embodied perception: intelligibility is already organized pre-reflectively, and some moves are experienced as misaligned before they are reasoned about.
That doesn’t introduce an inner overseer or a special meta-capacity. It’s an internalized loop, as you put it, but not a private monitor. It’s the same loop that makes a sentence feel awkward, a gesture feel off, or a question feel wrongly posed. Category correction happens there, as a competent adjustment within the practice, not as supervision from outside it.
So the contrast with AI isn’t about inner versus outer feedback, but about where feedback is available at all. Humans participate in loops where intelligibility itself exerts pressure. AI systems inherit a frame and optimize within it unless a different task is explicitly imposed.
Thanks, Robert. That clarification lands very clearly. What you describe here is exactly what I’ve been calling pre‑reflective agency: a functional, embodied, loop‑based capacity that operates at the level of sense‑making itself, without a separate self or inner overseer. On that reading, the human–AI contrast isn’t metaphysical at all, but architectural: humans participate in loops where intelligibility exerts pressure pre‑reflectively, whereas AI inherits a frame and optimizes within it unless another loop is explicitly imposed.
Yes. And that architectural distinction becomes more consequential, not less, as machines grow more coherent, fluent, and domain-competent.
The difference isn’t metaphysical, and it isn’t about depth or consciousness. It’s about where pressure shows up. Human sense-making is coupled to embodied loops in which intelligibility itself exerts force pre-reflectively. When something is off, it is felt as such before it is analyzed.
AI systems don’t participate in that kind of loop. They inherit frames and optimize within them unless another task is imposed. As fluency increases, the absence of pre-reflective pressure becomes easier to miss, not easier to see.
That’s why embodied cognition still matters, not as a theory of mind, but as a constraint that keeps sense-making answerable to something other than coherence alone.
Thank you for restacking Category Mistakes and Elegant Nonsense, Dab Dib. I found it interesting that you also restacked the essay on cybernetics by The Living Fractal, which is a theme that runs through my work too.
Yes, as you see, another reader of mine, Dab Dib, restacked Category Mistakes and Elegant Nonsense just below an essay on cybernetics by The Living Fractal. I do see a resemblance between her work and mine.
Stan, you may be confusing clarity with authority. I’m clear about what my ideas are and what follows from them, but that isn’t the same as claiming they are ultimately true or final.
When I’ve said that “awakening never ends,” I meant precisely this: ideas arise, stabilize for a time, and then change as conditions change. Seeing that process clearly doesn’t confer certainty. It removes the need for it.
Not sure why Robert, but these two sentences seem to be pointing to something I truly struggle with: “Seeing that process clearly doesn’t confer certainty. It removes the need for it.” I vacillate very stubbornly between wanting certainty - perhaps even obsessively - and relaxing into “it is unknowable”.
I don’t think there’s anything unusual about that oscillation. Wanting certainty and recognizing that it may be unavailable are not two positions to be reconciled. They are two pressures that coexist.
The desire for certainty isn’t a mistake. It’s a stabilizing impulse. It wants the ground to stop moving. The problem isn’t that the impulse arises, but when it’s mistaken for something that can actually be satisfied.
When I say that seeing the process clearly removes the need for certainty, I don’t mean the desire disappears. I mean it no longer has to be obeyed. It can be felt without being acted on.
Thank you Robert! “The problem isn’t that the impulse arises, but when it’s mistaken for something that can actually be satisfied.” That feels related to a belief in a “doer”, a separate self - the belief that certainty can be obtained. And that relates directly to “I mean it no longer has to be obeyed. It can be felt without being acted on” because the belief in control by a separate self is gone. Sorry to be so “explanatory”.
Sounds like fear has not yet turned into fear-as-wisdom.
I trained in many improvisational techniques in the past - theater/acting/comedy/etc.
The major distillation I got from all those years of wading into the unknown without a plan is this: "confusion is the pre-eminent creative state."
This means that the addiction or craving for certainty arises from our fear of survival, but with enough practice, that fear and that uncertainty/confusion can be perceived as creative potential and/or a creative invitation.
But one MUST ACTUALLY PRACTICE ENOUGH. This is what is missing in my estimation from most people engaged in these quasi-spiritual inquiries.
They contemplate (think with their habituated thinking mode) a lot, but they never creatively design the requisite practices or "plays", that would answer their own questions.
robert is just a fucking dude, just a guy, none of us has any way of knowing shit about his real experience. the idea of "enlightened" or whatever adjective people is frankly bizarre. policing, fetishizing, feeling confirmed or validated are similar flavors of our human fallibility. at the end of the day, well-meaning people do horrific things when given asymmetric power (racial, economic, etc). but i suppose these kinds of weird interactions are par for the course on the internet. enjoy "freedom"!
Thank you, Robert. After reading this essay I'm not sure how to answer the following question: Is mistaking the self as a fixed entity a category error or ignorance/confusion? It seems it could be either, depending on the context?
If you’re talking about how the sense of self persists and reasserts itself in lived experience, words like “confusion” or “ignorance” can mislead. What’s happening is not an error so much as a functional stabilization: the system maintains a self-model because it supports coordination, memory, and social navigation.
If you’re talking about whether there is such a thing as a fixed self at all, then it’s a category error. A process is treated as an object, and a verb is treated as a noun. That’s not just a lack of information; it’s a misclassification, like asking where the whirlpool goes when the river goes dry.
Thanks, that's very clear. I appreciate how your response highlights "confusion" and "ignorance" as potentially misleading. It shows me there's a consistency in my thinking around the sense of a self in lived experience being confusion and/or ignorance, therefore something to oppose and fix. Whereas in loop dynamics it's functional, it stabilizes. Those are two very different approaches.
Really appreciate the dive into category error. It's an essay I didn't know I needed. And again, thanks for the response. So often the Q&A that occurs after you post an essay adds such a valuable dimension. What a gold mine.
What a thread!
Thank you both so much… really helpful.❤️
Right, Kate—
Once the sense of self is understood as a functional stabilization rather than a mistake, the whole project of opposing it collapses. There’s nothing to fix, only something to recognize. The pressure to improve or eliminate experience dissolves because no error is being diagnosed.
The view that “myself” is an actual entity is where the category error earns its keep. Flagging a category mistake doesn’t invite a better strategy; it removes the problem definition altogether. A process can be described, traced, or even appreciated. It can’t be “repaired” into an entity it never was.
Yes, these exchanges matter. Essays lay out the terrain, but the questions that follow often expose what still needs clarification.
I came across the following quote this morning: "The Ego results in part from the constant attempt to sustain its own coherence and that of the organism harboring it; thereby arises the constant temptation to sacrifice intellectual honesty in favor of emotional well-being." It's from The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger.
It strikes me as a solid explanation for when I observe myself using language in a way that can feel "off" or burdened with an agenda. I'm trying to protect coherence and identity, and in doing so clarity is sacrificed. I'm wondering your thoughts on this, Robert, if you like. Are cetegory and semantic errors potential "language slips" betraying a need for the organisms emotional well being?
Kate—
Nothing here is chosen. There is no someone deciding to protect identity or to trade clarity for comfort. What’s happening is mechanical.
Any living system must maintain stability in order to function at all. Without sufficient coherence, coordination fails. So whatever supports stability tends to be retained. Whatever threatens it is softened, rephrased, or excluded. That isn’t strategy. It’s persistence.
Language is one of the primary regulators in this process. It doesn’t merely report experience; it helps hold the system together. When conditions are unsettled, language shifts away from precision toward formulations that preserve coherence. Categories blur. Meanings stretch.
This is not dishonesty. It is not ignorance. It is the system doing what systems do.
Clarity is not a corrective. It is simply seeing this function operating, without assigning fault or proposing repair.
Thanks, Robert. Not strategy but persistence. Not corrective but seeing without assigning fault. So there's not really anything to do or to fix, then, because there's not an really an I that can do those things.
Huh. Easy. Huh. Wild.
Yes. Agreed wholeheartedly they matter. And yes, the questions that follow often expose what still needs clarification, but I also see that the Q&A exposes where I'm not using language as accurately as possible. I cherish correcting those semantic errors, for lack of a better word, toward deeper and deeper clarity.
What I'm cherishing most right now? Recognizing the collapse of the fixing project I've long been hard at working. Thanks for the influence. I'm grateful.
Ryle’s point was that category mistakes arise when we posit an extra something where a competence already suffices.
When you say humans correct category errors through “ownership of the framing stance,” it’s unclear whether you’re naming a distinct capacity or merely redescribing norm-governed linguistic practice.
If the former, that seems to reintroduce precisely the kind of supervisory element Ryle warned against. If the latter, then the contrast with AI appears functional and contextual, not categorical.
I’m not disagreeing, just asking which category you intend and what explanatory work “ownership” is doing here.
Aaron, I’m not positing a distinct capacity or an inner overseer. By “ownership of the framing stance,” I mean something much more ordinary and much less metaphysically loaded: humans are the ones who set, revise, and abandon the frame in which a question is asked.
That control is grammatical and practical, not supervisory. A human can re-ask the question, notice that it is the wrong kind of question, or drop it altogether. In doing so, they can both commit a category mistake and recognize it as such. Nothing beyond participation in norm-governed linguistic practice is required.
The contrast with AI is not categorical in the Rylean sense of introducing a new mental faculty. It’s architectural. An AI does not control the framing stance at all. It inherits a frame via a prompt and operates entirely within it, optimizing for fluency and coherence. Because of that, it cannot notice many category errors, even obvious ones, unless the task of error detection is explicitly built into the prompt.
So “ownership” here is not an additional something over and above competence. It’s simply the fact that, right or wrong, humans are the ones doing the framing, and machines are not.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. It sounds like “ownership of the framing stance” is fully grounded in participation in norm-governed linguistic and practical practices, rather than any inner overseer or additional faculty. That aligns closely with my view that agency is a functional capacity arising from the structured loops humans participate in: it is real and distinct in what it does, but does not require a separate self. One point I’m still curious about, though: when you say humans can notice and revise a frame “without feedback from the world,” is that meant to include internalized feedback loops, or something else? Understanding this will help me see how category correction fits within your loop-based account.
You're welcome, Aaron.
By “without feedback from the world,” I don’t mean without feedback at all. I mean without having to trace consequences outward or wait for practical failure.
Many people can notice a category error immediately, not by inference or outcome analysis, but because the formulation simply doesn’t sit right. The mismatch is felt at the level of sense-making itself. In that respect, I have in mind Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of embodied perception: intelligibility is already organized pre-reflectively, and some moves are experienced as misaligned before they are reasoned about.
That doesn’t introduce an inner overseer or a special meta-capacity. It’s an internalized loop, as you put it, but not a private monitor. It’s the same loop that makes a sentence feel awkward, a gesture feel off, or a question feel wrongly posed. Category correction happens there, as a competent adjustment within the practice, not as supervision from outside it.
So the contrast with AI isn’t about inner versus outer feedback, but about where feedback is available at all. Humans participate in loops where intelligibility itself exerts pressure. AI systems inherit a frame and optimize within it unless a different task is explicitly imposed.
Thanks, Robert. That clarification lands very clearly. What you describe here is exactly what I’ve been calling pre‑reflective agency: a functional, embodied, loop‑based capacity that operates at the level of sense‑making itself, without a separate self or inner overseer. On that reading, the human–AI contrast isn’t metaphysical at all, but architectural: humans participate in loops where intelligibility exerts pressure pre‑reflectively, whereas AI inherits a frame and optimizes within it unless another loop is explicitly imposed.
Yes. And that architectural distinction becomes more consequential, not less, as machines grow more coherent, fluent, and domain-competent.
The difference isn’t metaphysical, and it isn’t about depth or consciousness. It’s about where pressure shows up. Human sense-making is coupled to embodied loops in which intelligibility itself exerts force pre-reflectively. When something is off, it is felt as such before it is analyzed.
AI systems don’t participate in that kind of loop. They inherit frames and optimize within them unless another task is imposed. As fluency increases, the absence of pre-reflective pressure becomes easier to miss, not easier to see.
That’s why embodied cognition still matters, not as a theory of mind, but as a constraint that keeps sense-making answerable to something other than coherence alone.
Thank you for restacking Category Mistakes and Elegant Nonsense, Dab Dib. I found it interesting that you also restacked the essay on cybernetics by The Living Fractal, which is a theme that runs through my work too.
Hi Robert, I've been thinking of mentioning the Living Fractal to you as I see a similarity in her work with yours.
To paraphrase from one of her recent posts.
She considers awareness to be a process and not the ultimate witness. It is not a divine substance. It is not what I am.
"And more than that it is a process deeply dependent on the body" So we are afraid of being just the body as the body can die.
Yes, as you see, another reader of mine, Dab Dib, restacked Category Mistakes and Elegant Nonsense just below an essay on cybernetics by The Living Fractal. I do see a resemblance between her work and mine.
Stan, you may be confusing clarity with authority. I’m clear about what my ideas are and what follows from them, but that isn’t the same as claiming they are ultimately true or final.
When I’ve said that “awakening never ends,” I meant precisely this: ideas arise, stabilize for a time, and then change as conditions change. Seeing that process clearly doesn’t confer certainty. It removes the need for it.
Not sure why Robert, but these two sentences seem to be pointing to something I truly struggle with: “Seeing that process clearly doesn’t confer certainty. It removes the need for it.” I vacillate very stubbornly between wanting certainty - perhaps even obsessively - and relaxing into “it is unknowable”.
I don’t think there’s anything unusual about that oscillation. Wanting certainty and recognizing that it may be unavailable are not two positions to be reconciled. They are two pressures that coexist.
The desire for certainty isn’t a mistake. It’s a stabilizing impulse. It wants the ground to stop moving. The problem isn’t that the impulse arises, but when it’s mistaken for something that can actually be satisfied.
When I say that seeing the process clearly removes the need for certainty, I don’t mean the desire disappears. I mean it no longer has to be obeyed. It can be felt without being acted on.
Thank you Robert! “The problem isn’t that the impulse arises, but when it’s mistaken for something that can actually be satisfied.” That feels related to a belief in a “doer”, a separate self - the belief that certainty can be obtained. And that relates directly to “I mean it no longer has to be obeyed. It can be felt without being acted on” because the belief in control by a separate self is gone. Sorry to be so “explanatory”.
Sounds like fear has not yet turned into fear-as-wisdom.
I trained in many improvisational techniques in the past - theater/acting/comedy/etc.
The major distillation I got from all those years of wading into the unknown without a plan is this: "confusion is the pre-eminent creative state."
This means that the addiction or craving for certainty arises from our fear of survival, but with enough practice, that fear and that uncertainty/confusion can be perceived as creative potential and/or a creative invitation.
But one MUST ACTUALLY PRACTICE ENOUGH. This is what is missing in my estimation from most people engaged in these quasi-spiritual inquiries.
They contemplate (think with their habituated thinking mode) a lot, but they never creatively design the requisite practices or "plays", that would answer their own questions.
it sounds like you are saying that because many people are immature, Robert should stoop to their level as a means of predictive harm reduction?
robert is just a fucking dude, just a guy, none of us has any way of knowing shit about his real experience. the idea of "enlightened" or whatever adjective people is frankly bizarre. policing, fetishizing, feeling confirmed or validated are similar flavors of our human fallibility. at the end of the day, well-meaning people do horrific things when given asymmetric power (racial, economic, etc). but i suppose these kinds of weird interactions are par for the course on the internet. enjoy "freedom"!