Christopher J Stevens
LightNews LightNews
banner
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Christopher J Stevens
@metaphysiology.bsky.social
940 followers 1.2K following 3.1K posts
Lecturer/researcher in phil & neuro.
Éireannach en France/immigrant.
Education, evolution, embodied mind/metaphysiology, memory, deliberation, myside bias, representation, reasoning, perspectivism, pragmatism.

Universités de Bordeaux & Bdx-Montaigne.
Posts Replies Media Videos
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Paul Whitehouse as his character Ron "jumpers for goalposts" Manager, saying "Marvellous."
November 7, 2025 at 9:21 AM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
"But one man had seen it all coming..."
Photo of a young David Chalmers holding a model of a brain.
November 7, 2025 at 9:00 AM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
This, but it's the library in hell and me saying: "Oh, man! All the notes are *endnotes*! They thought of *everything*!"
Famous Far Side cartoon: We see hell pictured, demons with whips, flames, etc. People are serving themselves coffee from a large canteen-style cafetière. Man saying to his neighbour: "Oh, man! The coffee's *cold*! They thought of *everything*!"
October 30, 2025 at 5:25 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
The only thing Bernard Henri-Levy has to fear is receiving an n-th cream tart to the face. Or maybe he's on high alert for cream cheese bagels!
Photo of cream tart hitting Bernard Henri-Levy's face.
October 29, 2025 at 8:41 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Father Ted 'Is there anything to be said for another mass?' meme but with text translated into (unreliable) Latin as 'Estne aliquid dicendum pro alia missa?'
October 23, 2025 at 10:51 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Sure it was a robber baron who wrote the literal gospel on philanthropy:
Front cover of early (1901) edition of Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth.
October 23, 2025 at 1:37 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Screenshot from Spinal Tap. David St. Hubbins speaking: "I mean, it's not your job to be as confused as Nigel is."
October 21, 2025 at 1:57 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
The Venn diagram of 'What Would Jesus Do?' and 'What Would Enoch Burke Do?'
Two adjacent black outlined circles, no intersection.
October 18, 2025 at 3:27 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Happy belated birthday Fred!

This appeared in my timeline and, presumably since I'm working on him atm, it instantly struck me how ironically Baconian a statement it is. Then again, already in Nietzsche's day, science had drifted away from Baconian concerns about idola mentis, aka cognitive biases.
Black and white photo of Nietzsche, close-up on face. Text above photo: The great Friedrich Nietzsche was born on this day in 1844: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truths than lies."
October 16, 2025 at 10:15 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Is there a soundbite of her "congratulating" them? In the tv spot from the time she says "Is it the start of a new dawn? I don't think so." In general, her positions at the time strike me as being more nuanced than she is given credit for. Maybe I'm being too charitable. Maybe I've missed things.
Catherine Connolly statement extract from Oireachtas, 2016: "Some of the leaders on the Brexit side carefully and systematically misused the issue of immigration to support their cause. I utterly deplore such actions. However, to seek to explain Brexit on that basis, or to explain it on the basis that the 17 plus million people who voted to leave did not quite understand what they were voting for is not only contemptuous of the electorate, it is also a seriously dangerous interpretation which ignores the real reasons for the Brexit vote. More important, such shallow analysis and explanations are not conducive to a proper debate on the significance of Brexit."
October 15, 2025 at 9:52 AM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
This YouGov survey plots voting against wealth & education. As wealth increases, so does trend to vote Remain. As level of education increases, so does trend to vote Remain. That is what I refer to as the empirical wealth/opportunity inequality question
d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/EU...
Screenshot from pdf within, showing Remain and Leave vote as a function of Social Grade and Education Level.
October 15, 2025 at 8:38 AM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Paywalls generate three things: private corporate profit, frustration of public curiosity, and endless irony at the interface of both via the medium of literal price-tags on "the divide between science and the public", the proceeds of which benefit neither science nor the public 🤓
Screenshot from the publisher's page of an article entitled "Science must break its silence to rebuild public trust", published in Nature Neuroscience. Abstract of paper: "This Comment calls on scientists to acknowledge how *insufficient communication and limited engagement beyond academia have deepened the divide between science and the public*. Restoring trust requires a paradigm shift in which scientists accept that the responsibility to champion science lies with us. We propose a new model in which public communication and advocacy are considered as essential to our mission as rigor and reproducibility — critical not only for safeguarding science, but also for ensuring that its benefits reach all segments of the societies we serve." Beneath this the access options for getting past the paywall are visible.
October 14, 2025 at 9:57 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
See these pics btw?
Set of pics of Morfydd Clark at a table read of Pride and Prejudice in aid of medical relief in Gaza.
October 14, 2025 at 6:08 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Israel maintains collective punishment & totalitarian control as core policies with respect to Gaza.
Two consecutive posts from timeline. First from @marisakabas.bsky.social, a screenshot from AP News: "Israel plans to halve aid into Gaza over slow return of dead hostages, a test for the Gaza ceasefire." Marisa comments: "a teest"? you mean...a violation?" Second from @antizionistjew.bsky.social "Israeli officials say the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt will remain closed, blocking the flow of desperately needed aid into the enclave, despite the ceasefire."
October 14, 2025 at 4:45 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
But you are not doing it. I believe Connolly was doing that. Look again, this time with a minimum of charity in your reading, at what she said on this precise point in the Oireachtas statement you seem to believe is damning of her:
"Some of the leaders on the Brexit side carefully and systematically misused the issue of immigration to support their cause. I utterly deplore such actions. However, to seek to explain Brexit on that basis, or to explain it on the basis that the 17 plus million people who voted to leave did not quite understand what they were voting for is not only contemptuous of the electorate, it is also a seriously dangerous interpretation which ignores the real reasons for the Brexit vote. More important, such shallow analysis and explanations are not conducive to a proper debate on the significance of Brexit."
October 14, 2025 at 2:01 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Shared with me by a graphic artist friend.
theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art
Screenshot of one section of comic from link: Sparsely illustrated text which says: "Someone once told me that art is like emotional nutrition. [image of a plate of food stuff plus a floating sad blue emoji, pink heart, happy gold emoji, angry brown emoji] That made sense to me. Art feeds [written in pink with happy pink emoji below] my feelings [written in blue with sad blue emoji below]. And if that's the case, consuming AI art is like eating styrofoam."
October 14, 2025 at 10:28 AM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Different ways of framing the question give rise to different results, but the trend towards more support for reunification as time progresses seems quite robust. Nothing wrong with hoping that trend continues, or even accelerates, given that there's nothing morally objectionable about the end goal.
Screenshot from article in The Times from 2022. Headline: Majority in North back Irish unity within next 20 years. Image: Mural in north of Ireland promoting "Unity In Our Time." Legend: An extra 10 per cent of voters are open to voting "yes" years down the line. Header: A majority of voters in Northern Ireland support joining a united Ireland either now or within the next 15 to 20 years, according to the latest opinion poll by LucidTalk.
October 8, 2025 at 4:04 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
No, you got snide and heartless. Or rather, you allowed your snideness to reveal your heartlessness. I do in fact engage with every homeless person who solicits me, whether that be with money, food, or, as the case may be, a genuine, "Sorry, I've nothing on me this time, all the best." Always have:
Screenshot of Facebook post from me in 2015: "You may not believe this, but when you give a homeless person something, be it some change, a fiver, or something to eat; the simple fact that you acknowledged their existence, their equality with you as a human being, means more to them than anything else. So, if you don't have anything on you, at least give them the breath it takes to say so. And if you find there are just too many, then take it up with your local politicians. For every million euros profit some pissant corporation makes, there's a poor unfortunate in pain or coughing their last."
October 7, 2025 at 6:17 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Directly à propos, when Connolly referred to what had already been said by "other colleagues on the left", she was referring in part to what Richard Boyd-Barrett, also not shying away from being blunt about Russian aggression, had said just a few minutes before her:
"Some of the most horrific outcomes of the new cold war and the confrontation between the major power blocs have been played out in Syria, with disastrous consequences. We are under no illusions about what Mr. Putin represents. He is an authoritarian warmonger who is, frankly, capable of anything. We saw what he is capable of in eastern Ghouta with the use of chemical weapons there. Interestingly, when Deputy Gino Kenny and I asked the Government last week in a Topical Issue debate if it would call in the Russian ambassador to answer questions, never mind expel anybody, on what Russia is doing in eastern Ghouta, it was ignored. The Government did not want to know and did not want to do it."
October 6, 2025 at 12:36 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
At this point in her speech, this was a comment about "war" writ large, not the one specific war between Russia and Ukraine:
"They tell us that the biggest threat is from cyberspace and from those people out there who are different from us. The threat, however, is from poverty, lack of justice, war pushed by the United States of America, the EU and Russia, and climate change. None of these threats is mentioned in the discussion document, just threats from people who do not look like us, do not act like us and do not speak like us. The document says that we need to defend fortress Europe against those people and those barbarians."
October 6, 2025 at 12:23 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
She might rather be trying to win Gript & Co back, after McGuirk seemingly gave Connolly a veiled and back-handed, anti-establishment endorsement:
Screenshot of tweet exchange from 4th October 2025: John McGuirk: There will be immense pressure applied in the wake of that poll to centre-right voters to suck it up and vote for Humphreys. I won't be doing that. FG and FF cooked up this mess for themselves. Let them wallow in it, is my view. Davey Donnelly: They did indeed but then you have to listen for [sic] Connolly for 7 years [shrugging shoulders emoji] John McGuirk: She's exactly what this country deserves. Perhaps the perfect President for modern Ireland.
October 6, 2025 at 11:22 AM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Read this while picturing all the US military brass gathered in front of him in the auditorium, flown in from around the world for an emergency meeting at the Pentagon, and it is 100% a scene from Hot Shots or something.
“America is respected again as a country. We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling down stairs every day. Every day, the guy’s falling down stairs.” Trump continued: “I said: ‘It’s not our president. We can’t have it.’ I’m very careful, you know, when I walk downstairs for – like I’m on stairs, like these stairs, I’m very – I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record, just try not to fall because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. “We don’t want that. Need to walk nice and easy. You not have – you don’t have to set any record. Be cool, be cool when you walk down, but don’t, don’t bop down the stairs. That’s the one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs, I’ve never seen – da da da da da da, bop, bop, bop, he’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on. I said, it’s great, I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually bad things are going to happen and it only takes once, but he did a lousy job as president.”
October 5, 2025 at 9:25 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Feb 2025: "I, Donald J. Trump, POTUS, find that the International Criminal Court has engaged in baseless actions targeting America."

Sep 2025: "We don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill."
Screengrab of page from White House website announcing "IMPOSING SANCTIONS ON THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT" from February 2025.
September 30, 2025 at 1:56 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
My exceptionally talented lifelong friend Holly Pereira in the Irish Times today, talking about some of the positive and negative responses elicited by her 'The North Strand Welcomes All' mural in Dublin:
[unpaywalled] archive.is/x2r5K
Photo from article: "Holly Pereira with her North Strand Welcomes All mural on North Strand Road, Dublin."
September 30, 2025 at 1:00 PM
metaphysiology.bsky.social
Regarding what the article is referring to specifically, not a lot:
Screenshot of passage from article: "Both poverty and child poverty hit record lows, thanks to Biden’s American Rescue Plan further expanding social welfare after the CARES Act and Consolidated Appropriations Act. The horrifying surge in poverty — and economic insecurity more broadly — afterward is attributable to pandemic aid programs expiring or being eliminated during a cost-of-living crisis. In 2024, Kamala Harris chose not to campaign on resurrecting a version of the pandemic welfare state, despite it having led to a historic reduction in economic hardship in 2021 and the cost of living having been voters’ top concern since 2022."
September 26, 2025 at 2:42 PM