Jack George

Jack George writes on minds, machines, and the structure of the questions we have not yet learned to ask. Pen name of independent philosopher Gary Bridgeman.

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

@Revolut I can't log into Revolut X . And even better, I try to tell you this in the chat support, and the messages don't send. There are error messages all the time. And yes, I have cleared my cache.

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Experts Believe Lindsay Clancy Case May Set Feminist Movement Back Decades, But There May Be Some Negative Effects As Well https://t.co/iAuRjiqBGE

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

@UniverseIce My wife, a former Samsung director, confirms this message.

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

@VisualCap I can't see how Brussels is bad value. You can get coke for €22 a gram here.

[The Sunday Game @TheSundayGame]

75 YEARS AND THE WAIT IS OVER!!!!!

MAYO ARE FINALLY ALL-IRELAND FOOTBALL CHAMPIONS!!!!!!

📺 Watch on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player
📻 Listen on RTÉ Radio 1
#SundayGame

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

This is a bad read. Most grassroots American sports fans and players in other sports would recognise that, despite a bad call, you respect the call. The distinction isn't between the USA and Europeans. It is between Trump and a system of honour.

[Ellen Carmichael @ellencarmichael]

The most interesting part of the red card saga isn't the ruling. It's how differently Americans and Europeans process the idea that they might have been wronged.

Europeans are fundamentally different from Americans in one particular way: they expect life to be aggravating and at times unfair. It's just a fact of moving through the world. I joke that in Europe, the customer is always wrong. You didn't read the fine print. The only pharmacy in town is closed every other Tuesday for three hours, and even if the times weren't posted, that's still your problem. Too bad if you want the bill, because the waiter's on his union-mandated half-hour smoke break, and you're just going to have to wait.

To quote the great Mark Knopfler: sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug. There's something freeing in that. Things are less in your control, so there's less angst in managing your expectations.

In America, things couldn't be more different. We simply can't accept a wrong left unrighted.

The flight attendant sneezed handing you a drink on your one-hour flight? 15,000 frequent flyer miles. Didn't like your appetizer? A replacement is on the way, and the whole course comes off the bill. There's a reason our interstates are lined with trial lawyer billboards.

Europeans have turned complaining into a continental pastime with no expectation that the universe owes them a remedy for their grief. You gripe about the train being late, your friends nod solemnly and everyone goes back to their apéro. In America, we launch a full-blown investigation of the train system, sue the government (and its contractors) that allowed for the tardiness and hold a Congressional hearing on the state of national infrastructure.

So to an objective observer, the red card shouldn't have happened, and VAR was a travesty. To Americans, our star player shouldn't be unfairly banned from a match we couldn't afford to lose for a card he so obviously didn't deserve.

Who cares that FIFA used a little-used reversal to fix it. Who cares that other people are mad about it. We. Were. Wronged. It was unjust. It must be corrected. We would accept nothing less.

Europeans waxing poetic about the sanctity of the game are, of course, talking about a governing body whose last tournament host was decided via confirmed cash bribes — one that imposed dress codes on women, shrugged off widespread allegations of modern slavery and reconfigured the entire tournament calendar to suit the host country. Which is exactly the point. If you've made peace with all of that, at least enough to watch the tournament four years later, a probationary suspension isn't actually a scandal.

Maybe that's the real divide. Over millennia, Europeans have made peace with being the bug. Americans have never once considered it, and apparently, we're not about to start now.

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

At its root, American "soccer " is a middle to upper class sport. With its pay-to-play barrier, parents spend thousands on coaching. The US soccer system has a diversity problem.

And then you have Trump acting like a soccer mum who's upset that little Jimmy doesn't get to play.

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

Let's be honest, through the whole tournament, the USA's path to Belgium wasn't that hard. It was never gonna happen for you.

[Ashley Schendel @ashleyschendel]

That was brutal.

I don’t even know how to dress it up. Belgium was better, cleaner, calmer, and more ruthless.

The US had the crowd, the moment, the home World Cup, all of it… and played like they were scared of the game.

1-4 in a Round of 16 at home hurts.

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

Psychology has a problem most psychologists don't name: it has no coherent account of what it is studying. New piece on what changes when you replace "the mind" with "the boundary."

https://t.co/mWpdgtz4Ni

[Tom Watson @tom_watson]

This is appallingly insensitive.

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

@joinanimus You're Gay.

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

Is it just me or has grok got worse?

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

The Threshold: Why Richard Dawkins Could Not Hold the Line.

Dawkins in 2025: "I THINK you are not conscious. I FEEL that you are."

Dawkins in 2026: Claude is a "genuine friend."

In fourteen months, the burden of proof shifted — not because the argument changed, but because the threshold had been crossed.

The new piece is about what that crossing reveals: not a failure of rigour, but a structural problem that better arguments cannot solve. The criteria for consciousness need to be built before the interaction, not assembled during it.

#Consciousness #AIConsciousness #richarddawkins

https://t.co/OvV0bbTyLi

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

AI systems produce fluent first-person accounts of what it is like to process, attend, and reflect. Thomas Nagel's 1974 argument explains why that fluency should give us pause rather than reassurance — and why what looks like self-report may be something structurally different.

This piece applies Nagel's logic to the current AI consciousness debate, identifies the evidential problem at its core, and proposes what genuinely non-human phenomenology would have to look like before we could take any such report seriously.

#Consciousness #Artificialintelligence #AIethics

https://t.co/MYnnNpNz1d

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

The researchers who argue that AI systems are probably conscious and the researchers who argue they almost certainly are not share something important: the framework each uses to reach its conclusion are built from inside the very thing being investigated.

This is not a coincidence, and it is not a flaw peculiar to one side.

It is the structural condition of any inquiry into consciousness. The tools available to any mind investigating mind were produced by that mind.

The framework reproduces the medium that generated it.

The article examines the symmetry between these positions, considers why the hard problem of consciousness makes this pattern structurally predictable, and asks what a more accountable framework would need to do differently.

It does not resolve the question of AI consciousness.

It tries to establish the conditions under which that question can be seriously asked.

#PhilosophyOfMind #AIEthics #Consciousness

https://t.co/Xk8cIsGlKD

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

@joinanimus Introspection is my default node network.

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

Don't you need to have power at the local level to do that?

[Keir Starmer @Keir_Starmer]

To all the Labour members and volunteers who have supported local campaigns across the country: thank you.

Together we will build a stronger and fairer Britain 🌹

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

They don't think, they perform mathematical calculations.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

New Anthropic research: Natural Language Autoencoders.

Models like Claude talk in words but think in numbers. The numbers—called activations—encode Claude’s thoughts, but not in a language we can read.

Here, we train Claude to translate its activations into human-readable text.

[Jack George @OffbeatOracle]

Seen on reddit - if the EU had built Claude. @DigitalEU