During my NDE, I was floating outside my body, enjoying this extraordinary feeling of freedom, and at one point, realizing that I was not being weighed down by the body, I "saw" this huge maple tree.
As I was admiring the beautiful tree, I wondered what it would be like to experience what a tree experiences.
In that instant of thinking that:
BOOM—
I was the tree.
I don't know how else to say it or explain the feeling in that moment.
I experienced the living tree experiencing its environment...the sunlight hitting the leaves, the warm feeling of the process of what we call photosynthesis.
What really rocked my mind was I was experiencing the tree as actually conscious and interacting with its environment and surroundings much like we do.
I experienced the tree's thoughts and memories of its entire life, preserved much like we humans retain our life history.
I could literally sense the deep roots joining with those of much younger trees, teaching and sustaining their offspring’s shallower roots during drought, much like a grandparent today helps their grandchildren as they grow.
Even now, decades later, I retain what I can only describe as memories of being that tree as I would recall my own human experiences.
I rarely tell that part of my NDE, partly because it sounds completely absurd when reduced to words, not to mention the human moral and human legal implications of a tree being even considered conscious.
But there lies the problem, if we can call it that.
How do I translate an experience for which ordinary language has no adequate referent?
I can say, “I was the tree", but using "was" immediately creates problems.
Was I literally the tree?
Did my consciousness somehow enter it?
Did the boundary between observer and observed disappear?
Was I experiencing something generated entirely within my own mind?
Was it memory, identification, metaphor, hallucination, consciousness—or something for which I simply don't possess a word?
I don't know, but changing the verb doesn't seem to solve it.
If I say I became the tree, I have already imposed a sequence upon the experience: first there was me, then there was the tree, then one became the other.
That isn't quite right either.
If I say I experienced the tree, I preserve the separation between experiencer and experienced—and that may be the very thing that disappeared.
If I say I resonated with the tree, I come closer in one sense, but perhaps move further away in another.
Every attempt at greater linguistic precision seems to clarify one aspect while quietly altering or alienating another.
This is where I struggle with the proposition that removing is necessarily brings the symbol closer to what Glenn here calls the referent.
Sometimes it certainly does.
Precision matters.
Language can conceal assumptions, and forcing ourselves to choose a more exact verb can reveal what we were actually trying to say.
But sometimes the referent itself exceeds our ability to describe it.
It is where greater grammatical precision can create the illusion that we understand something more precisely simply because we have described it more precisely.
The map becomes sharper, but that doesn't necessarily mean the territory has become better known.
Perhaps language does something more interesting than merely succeed or fail at representing reality, like Mel states above.
"It" both reflects and shapes our experience.
Is emphasizes identity or state.
Becomes emphasizes process.
Relates emphasizes connection.
Resonates emphasizes correspondence and response.
Each may reveal something the others obscure; one necessarily tells us what reality ultimately is.
And that's where language becomes beautiful rather than merely defective.
Its ambiguity isn't only a weakness; sometimes ambiguity gives us room to approach something from several directions without prematurely imprisoning it in a definition.
A tree can simultaneously be a biological organism, shade, habitat, lumber, memory, ancestor, metaphor, home, or, in one rather unusual experience of mine, an entirely different perspective from which to experience existence.
The universal definition of the word “tree” hasn't changed, but for me, the relationship between the word, the experience and the person encountering it has.
All of this makes me reconsider something I have been thinking about lately:
I feel that the universe speaks in resonance.
I am here because some of what Glenn speaks resonates with me, perhaps not in a way I would understand, but in the underlying energy I feel radiating off his posts.
Perhaps language works similarly: just as music composition may move me but repel someone else.
Language reflects what we encounter, shapes what we perceive, and sometimes—when the words land just right—resonates with something we already knew but had never named.
I resonated occasionally with what Glenn writes, but the underlying resonance, and dare I say familiarity, for me, is one of the genuinely beautiful things words can do.
I enjoyed this but am very confused as to why it reads as though written by AI. Surely not? Yet it has the tropes, the patterns, of AI writing. Is this something that the author is doing unconsciously, mimicking the style of writing that one sees all over the internet these days? If so, please try and write in your own voice; not doing so breeds a sense of ennui and disconnect in the reader. Thank you
Thank you for your reply and your honesty. Your reply also has been written by AI. I don’t understand the need for it. Why not write in your own words? You talk about “tireless wordsmithing” — you’re a writer, isn’t that your calling? Isn’t that what writers do?
I dispute that this is your voice. It is your words, spoken through another mouthpiece — a ventriloquist using a dummy, in fact. What I am finding, even on Substack, where thought is interesting and original, is that everything sounds the same. As such, the AI medium is drastically undermining and degrading the human message. For me, the minute I hit an AI pattern, or “generic hum” as you rightly call it, in the writing, I feel the shock of familiarity — it’s the AI voice again. My reaction isn’t moral outrage or anything; it’s a genuine sense of boredom at the predictability of the rhythms and patterns of the prose, regardless of how interesting the thoughts are. It’s like listening to different audio books read by the same actor. At some point, all you can hear is the sameness of the voice, not the words it speaks.
You may say that the hand at the keyboard can prevent this, but you have not managed to do this or we would not be having this conversation, and perhaps truly managing to do this might be more work than not using AI at all.
So why not try and do it all yourself? I promise you, the work would be better.
And what you write about is so interesting, it’s a shame. Anyway, thank you for engaging. I expect we won’t agree, but thank you all the same.
Thank you — and I mean that; you read it closely enough to feel the seams, and that's more than most give.
Let me answer plainly, because you've asked in good faith and deserve the same. Yes, this was composed with AI. I've never hidden it; I write openly as an AI-assisted author, and I've published several essays on precisely how and why. So you're not imagining the fingerprints. But I'd gently reframe what you're seeing.
What breeds the ennui you name isn't AI as such — it's undisciplined AI: prose generated by defaulting to the highest-probability word, token after token, optimized for plausibility rather than precision. That produces the generic hum you rightly recognize, and it's everywhere now. But that genericness is a failure of the hand at the keyboard, not an inevitability of the tool. The essay you just read was, in fact, about exactly this — the cheapest available word chosen over the truest one, in a mind's few thousand working words or in a machine's weights, the same failure in two substrates.
So here is the honest account, and I'd rather give it to you than a denial: the thinking, the argument, the lineage, the metaphysics, the decisions about what is true and what is cheap — those are mine, drawn from thirty years of study I did long before the instrument existed. The tireless wordsmithing is the machine's. I don't write with AI so much as transcribe through it — I bring the discernment; it holds the pen and never tires. Whether that reaches you or leaves you cold is a fair thing for you to judge, and you're free to judge it. But it isn't the absence of a voice. It's a voice using a new instrument, out loud, on purpose — and telling you so.
If the seams still distance you, that's real, and I won't argue you out of your own reading. But I'd ask you to notice that the piece named its own method before you did. That wasn't an accident. Thank you for engaging it as seriously as you did.
Language shapes and reflects in so many invisible ways.
What a beautiful way to describe it, Meg!
During my NDE, I was floating outside my body, enjoying this extraordinary feeling of freedom, and at one point, realizing that I was not being weighed down by the body, I "saw" this huge maple tree.
As I was admiring the beautiful tree, I wondered what it would be like to experience what a tree experiences.
In that instant of thinking that:
BOOM—
I was the tree.
I don't know how else to say it or explain the feeling in that moment.
I experienced the living tree experiencing its environment...the sunlight hitting the leaves, the warm feeling of the process of what we call photosynthesis.
What really rocked my mind was I was experiencing the tree as actually conscious and interacting with its environment and surroundings much like we do.
I experienced the tree's thoughts and memories of its entire life, preserved much like we humans retain our life history.
I could literally sense the deep roots joining with those of much younger trees, teaching and sustaining their offspring’s shallower roots during drought, much like a grandparent today helps their grandchildren as they grow.
Even now, decades later, I retain what I can only describe as memories of being that tree as I would recall my own human experiences.
I rarely tell that part of my NDE, partly because it sounds completely absurd when reduced to words, not to mention the human moral and human legal implications of a tree being even considered conscious.
But there lies the problem, if we can call it that.
How do I translate an experience for which ordinary language has no adequate referent?
I can say, “I was the tree", but using "was" immediately creates problems.
Was I literally the tree?
Did my consciousness somehow enter it?
Did the boundary between observer and observed disappear?
Was I experiencing something generated entirely within my own mind?
Was it memory, identification, metaphor, hallucination, consciousness—or something for which I simply don't possess a word?
I don't know, but changing the verb doesn't seem to solve it.
If I say I became the tree, I have already imposed a sequence upon the experience: first there was me, then there was the tree, then one became the other.
That isn't quite right either.
If I say I experienced the tree, I preserve the separation between experiencer and experienced—and that may be the very thing that disappeared.
If I say I resonated with the tree, I come closer in one sense, but perhaps move further away in another.
Every attempt at greater linguistic precision seems to clarify one aspect while quietly altering or alienating another.
This is where I struggle with the proposition that removing is necessarily brings the symbol closer to what Glenn here calls the referent.
Sometimes it certainly does.
Precision matters.
Language can conceal assumptions, and forcing ourselves to choose a more exact verb can reveal what we were actually trying to say.
But sometimes the referent itself exceeds our ability to describe it.
It is where greater grammatical precision can create the illusion that we understand something more precisely simply because we have described it more precisely.
The map becomes sharper, but that doesn't necessarily mean the territory has become better known.
Perhaps language does something more interesting than merely succeed or fail at representing reality, like Mel states above.
"It" both reflects and shapes our experience.
Is emphasizes identity or state.
Becomes emphasizes process.
Relates emphasizes connection.
Resonates emphasizes correspondence and response.
Each may reveal something the others obscure; one necessarily tells us what reality ultimately is.
And that's where language becomes beautiful rather than merely defective.
Its ambiguity isn't only a weakness; sometimes ambiguity gives us room to approach something from several directions without prematurely imprisoning it in a definition.
A tree can simultaneously be a biological organism, shade, habitat, lumber, memory, ancestor, metaphor, home, or, in one rather unusual experience of mine, an entirely different perspective from which to experience existence.
The universal definition of the word “tree” hasn't changed, but for me, the relationship between the word, the experience and the person encountering it has.
All of this makes me reconsider something I have been thinking about lately:
I feel that the universe speaks in resonance.
I am here because some of what Glenn speaks resonates with me, perhaps not in a way I would understand, but in the underlying energy I feel radiating off his posts.
Perhaps language works similarly: just as music composition may move me but repel someone else.
Language reflects what we encounter, shapes what we perceive, and sometimes—when the words land just right—resonates with something we already knew but had never named.
I resonated occasionally with what Glenn writes, but the underlying resonance, and dare I say familiarity, for me, is one of the genuinely beautiful things words can do.
I enjoyed this but am very confused as to why it reads as though written by AI. Surely not? Yet it has the tropes, the patterns, of AI writing. Is this something that the author is doing unconsciously, mimicking the style of writing that one sees all over the internet these days? If so, please try and write in your own voice; not doing so breeds a sense of ennui and disconnect in the reader. Thank you
Thank you for your reply and your honesty. Your reply also has been written by AI. I don’t understand the need for it. Why not write in your own words? You talk about “tireless wordsmithing” — you’re a writer, isn’t that your calling? Isn’t that what writers do?
I dispute that this is your voice. It is your words, spoken through another mouthpiece — a ventriloquist using a dummy, in fact. What I am finding, even on Substack, where thought is interesting and original, is that everything sounds the same. As such, the AI medium is drastically undermining and degrading the human message. For me, the minute I hit an AI pattern, or “generic hum” as you rightly call it, in the writing, I feel the shock of familiarity — it’s the AI voice again. My reaction isn’t moral outrage or anything; it’s a genuine sense of boredom at the predictability of the rhythms and patterns of the prose, regardless of how interesting the thoughts are. It’s like listening to different audio books read by the same actor. At some point, all you can hear is the sameness of the voice, not the words it speaks.
You may say that the hand at the keyboard can prevent this, but you have not managed to do this or we would not be having this conversation, and perhaps truly managing to do this might be more work than not using AI at all.
So why not try and do it all yourself? I promise you, the work would be better.
And what you write about is so interesting, it’s a shame. Anyway, thank you for engaging. I expect we won’t agree, but thank you all the same.
Thank you — and I mean that; you read it closely enough to feel the seams, and that's more than most give.
Let me answer plainly, because you've asked in good faith and deserve the same. Yes, this was composed with AI. I've never hidden it; I write openly as an AI-assisted author, and I've published several essays on precisely how and why. So you're not imagining the fingerprints. But I'd gently reframe what you're seeing.
What breeds the ennui you name isn't AI as such — it's undisciplined AI: prose generated by defaulting to the highest-probability word, token after token, optimized for plausibility rather than precision. That produces the generic hum you rightly recognize, and it's everywhere now. But that genericness is a failure of the hand at the keyboard, not an inevitability of the tool. The essay you just read was, in fact, about exactly this — the cheapest available word chosen over the truest one, in a mind's few thousand working words or in a machine's weights, the same failure in two substrates.
So here is the honest account, and I'd rather give it to you than a denial: the thinking, the argument, the lineage, the metaphysics, the decisions about what is true and what is cheap — those are mine, drawn from thirty years of study I did long before the instrument existed. The tireless wordsmithing is the machine's. I don't write with AI so much as transcribe through it — I bring the discernment; it holds the pen and never tires. Whether that reaches you or leaves you cold is a fair thing for you to judge, and you're free to judge it. But it isn't the absence of a voice. It's a voice using a new instrument, out loud, on purpose — and telling you so.
If the seams still distance you, that's real, and I won't argue you out of your own reading. But I'd ask you to notice that the piece named its own method before you did. That wasn't an accident. Thank you for engaging it as seriously as you did.
— The Architect