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soulcruzer

soulcruzer

@soulcruzer.bsky.social

working notes from the textual underground

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The Notes Talk Back

On thinking aloud, the mythology of the blank page, and the pleasure of an unfinished mind I've never been entirely convinced by the idea that writing is thinking. I know that's almost heresy in certain literary circles. Writers often talk about writing to discover what they think. Joan Didion famously said something along those lines,...

Artificial Intelligenceblogging

Prompting as Self-Portrait: What Happens When the Machine Becomes Our Mirror?

A prompt reveals something about its writer. The fluent response can flatter that self-portrait, or open it to question. A reading of Caio Abreu Braga through writing, identity, and the resistance of becoming.

Artificial IntelligenceCaio Abreu Braga

In the Time of Chimpanzees, I Was a Monkey

On belonging, freedom, and the art of living in-between

adventurebelonging

Murder Most Fowl: A Saturday Morning Mystery

Four suspects. One victim. No witnesses. Breakfast served as normal. I came downstairs this morning to a "murder scene". Feathers everywhere. A dead starling in the middle of the hall. Four cats in the household, none at the scene, and nobody in the kitchen demanding breakfast. Something was wrong. Obviously, things had gone considerably worse...

The Strange Case of Mudtown Lion

Or how I discovered that I might be a fictional character in someone else's metaphysical experiment. It began, as these things often do, with a perfectly innocent question. I've been reading Philip K. Dick's VALIS, a novel that has the peculiar effect of making you suspicious of just about everything, including your own thoughts. For...

Artificial Intelligenceconsciousness

What We Mistake for Silence

Clay’s daily note this morning contains a small observation from a hotel room near King’s Cross. Underground trains pass close by every few minutes. He hears them, except that after a while he doesn’t. The sound remains in the room; attention has stopped reporting it. I keep returning to that difference. A thing can continue...

Attentionenvironment

Making my thoughts visible again

I’m writing this from a narrow hotel room near King’s Cross. There’s a single bed, a television on the wall and, most importantly, a decent space to write. The room I had last week was a tiny square that was mostly bed. This one has enough room for a desk and a thought to stretch...

Attentionblogging

When the Story That Saved You Becomes Too Small

Some stories save us by making the world smaller. They take a bewildering field of possibilities and cut a path through it. Be the reliable one. Keep moving. Make yourself useful. Don't let them see you struggle. Find the lesson. Turn the wound into something meaningful. For a while the narrowing helps. It gives us...

Freedomnarrative alchemy

A Red Button Isn’t Meaningful Human Control

A red button sits within reach. The machine begins doing something unexpected, dangerous or simply wrong. A human hand comes down. The process stops. This is one of our favourite images of control: obvious danger, decisive intervention, a clean separation between the person who judges and the system that acts. Most of my encounters with...

agencyArtificial Intelligence

Identity: still me, somehow

A barebones vectorial version of me stares back from the screen. The skin has dissolved into planes. Texture has gone. Pores, lines, scars, fatigue - all the small evidence that a face has passed through time - have been cleared away. And yet I remain recognisable. Apparently identity survives a surprising amount of deletion. Leave...

identityperception

What Happens When Your Notes Talk Back?

I returned to Sönke Ahrens’s How to Take Smart Notes with a different question from the one I brought to it the first time. The Textual Underground already existed: an Obsidian vault containing years of notes, journal entries, reading highlights, unfinished essays, old obsessions, and ideas whose energy I could still feel even though I...

Artificial IntelligenceNiklas Luhmann

Writing is how I do philosophy. I went …

Writing is how I do philosophy. I went into Waterstones on Gower st in London intending to find a book about writing. The shop itself was superb—the kind of place a bookshop should be—and I wandered through the writing shelves waiting for something to reach out and demand a place in my collection. A few...

BooksPhilosophy