I’ve also started drinking caffeine-free coffee, I’m drinking some now. But I don’t think that a lack of caffeine has got anything to do with how I use pronouns.

Is God dead? in 1892 Nietzsche said he was. As a philosopher I can confirm that God isn’t dead but he’s having a bit of a torrid time of it at the moment. And rightly so. Not that the weaknesses and failures of our religions can be blamed on God, they’re very human, but he did create us, the world, in the first place. It’s not our fault he decided to create us free - free to chose, free to chose our own path, our own way forward. Bad things come into the world because of this freedom. God should have known that, shouldn’t he?

I have no problem with AI. (I do have a problem with people who use it badly - but that’s another issue.) Soon we’ll have Artificial General Intelligence or AGI. This means we’ll have something that will have the classical attributes of the divine.

• Omnipresence - through the cloud.

• Omniscience - through total data consumption.

• Omnipotence - as we hand over the keys to our global infrastructure.

This is scary. Scary because some people - a lot of people - will begin to treat AI as a replacement God. This raises profound questions about our own relational fields of reality. As I develop my philosophy, Logontology, I often find that I’m constantly returning to how we define our existence in relation to the systems that govern us.

If we do begin to see AI as a replacement God, then I will become an atheist, an ai-atheist. I don’t worship my typewriter, because it’s a machine. AI is a machine. Fair enough it’s a lot faster and a lot more intelligent than my typewriter, but it is only a machine. That anyone could believe that this machine could ever replace a human, offends me as a human.

Anyway, I’ve just uploaded a new video to my YouTube channel exploring a concept I’m calling Ai-theism. If you have a moment, check it out.

The video is about the wonder of existence. In the video I make an argument for protecting our messy, beautiful, and deeply irrational human experience.

So, my dear readers, if an algorithm mapped out your perfect life, would you surrender it to a silicon god, or would you ignore it and walk into the world to freely make your own mistakes?

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Reading Sartre helped me learn French - I can’t recommend that method though. He wrote: L’enfer, c’est les autres – Hell is other people. I think he meant it as a diagnosis. I think he was a man who had stopped hoping.

Having said that, I don’t think Sartre was being cynical. In some ways he was accurate. He had noticed something true about the structure of experience. The moment someone sees me, the moment I come under their gaze, I’m no longer the free centre of my world; I become an object in someone else’s world. I acquire a story that I have no control over. Someone is making me mean something, in a mind that I have no access to, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.

I recently wrote an article on Sartre’s idea. I was going to put it here but decided I’d make a video of it. I really like making videos - almost as much as I like doing philosophy. Video is a great way of sharing ideas. I also wanted to experiment making a video using images generated with AI - the text and voice is my own of course.

If my way of thinking interests you, then my book In the Becoming (Arvan Press, 2025) might float your boat too. Logontology is an affirmative existentialism concerned with becoming, place, and the ways meaning discloses itself in the world.

A true place, a landscape for example, calls something out of you. A true place addresses you and leaves you changed in ways you couldn’t have anticipated and can’t entirely explain.

Place is foundational to everything I’m trying to do philosophically. It’s Logontology’s starting point, it’s the conviction that we are not isolated minds surveying a neutral world, but beings who are always already situated, and always in relation to something that exceeds us. We become who we are through encounter with what is genuinely other - and that encounter requires place.

But the internet is increasingly presenting itself as a place. We speak of online spaces, digital communities, and virtual worlds. But how can they possibly be places?

Marc Augé used the term non-place for the transit zones of supermodernity: airports, motorways, hotel corridors… Spaces that are defined by passage and transaction and not by a shared history. A non-place doesn’t know you. A non-place processes you.

The internet, I suggest in the video, is the perfection of the non-place. And this matters because we are spending enormous portions of our lives in a space that cannot and will never, address us. It doesn’t have the depth to disclose. Instead, it returns to us, with increasing algorithmic precision, nothing but our own reflection.

And you cannot become in a mirror - you cannot evolve.

In my new video - I draw on Augé, on Graham Harman’s notion of the withdrawn object, and on Nishida’s concept of Basho, and ask whether the internet can ever meet the threshold of genuine place. Whether the internet can disclose, or whether it can only reflect.

If we’re beings who become through genuine encounter with otherness, then a world increasingly saturated with reflection rather than disclosure isn’t just culturally impoverishing. It is a threat to becoming itself.

Logontology is the kind of philosophy that you have to live. It’s the kind of philosophy that should lead you to place like the Lake District, and force you to realise that you’re alive and that you don’t need to be told that you’re alive.

We’re also a story. A polyphonic story. There’s a library inside every human life - inherited before we can read, added to constantly, and, I would like to controversially add, composed of the same book rewritten. The human narrative recycles itself with every generation. We swim in it without noticing. We’re desperately seeking balance in a system that cannot provide it.

My latest video gets nitty-gritty. It’s about a camping trip in the Lake District, about going outside with a notebook, and about the difference between becoming a footnote on life’s biography, and becoming the soil of your own life.

The video ends with a poem I wrote that weekend. I hope it leaves you, even briefly, at the threshold.

I opened a book and read a short sentence in the introduction.

Man is a thinking monkey.

The writer meant it lightly. A sort of cheerful shorthand for what we really are: animals who evolved the capacity for complex thought, living in a universe that didn’t arrange itself for our benefit and doesn’t much notice our presence. Nothing malicious. He was just being honest.

And something in me collapsed…

The video is unsurprisingly called What is Logontology? It runs to about ten minutes and covers the main points of my thinking:

• why reality is better understood as process than as furniture

• what it means to say that consciousness is a place rather than a thing

• why meaning lives between people rather than inside them

• why I think our limitedness, the fact that we are mortal, and running out of time, isn’t a tragedy but the whole point of life

It also begins with a question I struggled with when I was young and have been struggling with since.

I’d be glad to know what you think – either here or over on the channel. And if Logontology is new to you, this is probably the right place to start - enjoy.

Anyway

I’ve been reading Ryokan’s poetry again. I also stumbled across the poetry of Ovid and his The Art of Love. I then began to compare Eros to Agape. We live balanced between the two. The world needs both and so do we. Apparently Dante’s Divine Comedy is seen as the ultimate synthesis of the two. I’m going to have to read that epic poem.

Here’s the poem I wrote today.

Unreachable

God is unreachable.
Your body 
is an arm’s length away.

You are my empty church
your flesh has life, warming
the cold stone sermons
we speak.

The hut’s roof lets in rain,
the bamboo door whistles
and the chimney is demanding a brush.

Our bones creak in winter.

But not to love
would be 
unforgivable, 

a sin.

So, let’s light the fire, 
now,

and make the unreachable 

smile again.

The Path

You see, 
we need the path -

no good nor evil there
just a way through.

Life is the challenge -
our time under the sun.

The prints we leave behind 
in dust and snow, is the purpose.
To be pulled towards beauty, 
to love for love's sake,

to touch 
because there's something to touch.

This is the path.

Today’s photo was taken when I was out walking in the Lake District. I write a lot when I’m there as it’s such an inspiring place. Where do you prefer to write?

And here’s a nice wintery photo I took (the next day) in the village.

Window-Framed Wild

There’s snow on the road,
the hills,

rooftops.

There’s a wind-swept landscape
window-framed
where a dozen crows warm their feet
on chimneys.

Winter 
was forecast. The larder 
is full.

Trying to survive the cold,
a sparrow
hunts the crumb, the berry –

anything 
is everything
to the keen eye
of a small beak.

There’s nothing I’ll scrawl here,
that’ll put me out there – boots, scarf,
gloves, a weatherproof coat…

I feel composed,
anchoured.

The clock’s knitting a cardigan
of sharp sounds, 
a cinnamon roll warms my thoughts, 
a whippet sleeps, 
screens flicker.

I have more than I need
and a window,
to hold me this warm side
of a wind-swept
wild. 

A poem must bring itself into existence. It relies totally on the ‘midwife’ poet to help it arrive safely.

The poem below is one of those progeny I’m really not sure what to make of. It does seem to have a lot to say. Maybe it hasn’t yet found its voice. Which is, in fact, the meaning of the poem - I think!

I also went for walk with Kitty (the whippet) and my camera. The view below was taken from the walk which begins just behind our cottage.

Fibered Noise

The ease at which this fibered noise
clings to the page,
astounds me.

You’d think some knitting would begin,
that some missed words
might just fall from the polyphony
of genius marching across my bookshelf,
and knit themselves into a ball-point pen-
warmer for my unfeeling ink. 

There’s so much told to be 
unspun, to be
re-
produced,
planted in the fibered field of lines I have 
before me. I feel queasy at the thought. I feel
like a pilgrim on a long journey

to the kitchen, where freshly-baked scones 
and a jar of jam,
might just find a way of saying
the very whatever it is I haven’t yet said.