Sebastian Benthall

cool

yes, it's pretty good at Tikz.

naturalized ethics and natural law One thing that’s become clear to me lately is that I now believe that ethics can be naturalized. I also believe that there is in fact a form of ‘natural law’. By this I mean that …

naturalized ethics and natural law digifesto.com/2026/01/02/n...

really explains it

If I actually finish any of these 4-5 projects I'm working on, it's going to be so great.

Florencia Marotta-Wurgler on a panel

Jeanne Fromer presents

Seb Benthall presents

Jeanne Fromer picks winners from the lucky box

Thank you KAIST for hosting our Legal Challenges in the AI Era workshop! @jeannefromer.bsky.social, @michaelweinberg.org, @sbenthall.bsky.social, & Florencia Marotta-Wurgler are representing NYU in Seoul

I remember when the big deal was whether their emotion manipulation study was ethical. Over a decade ago.

They have been doing psychographic monitoring for a very long time.

If there's something they don't know, it's because they choose not to know.

But we can slip accidentally into it?

If human beings are relationally constituted, they are in part relationally constituted by the legal systems in which they dwell. If the legal system treats them as autonomous beings, then that is, more or less, the case, even if they have very complex gut biomes.

At some point in either analysis or operations, distinctions must be drawn. Relations distinguished from other relations, their subjects, and objects.

There are relational liberal theorists -- feminist inspired, etc. It's good work. But the body reemerges at the intersections of (A-B) and (A-C)

As for Eastern philosophy, Varela spent time at Naropa and was one of the people who connected Eastern meditation to Western neuroscience through e.g. the Mind and Life Institute. Rosch and Thompson who developed the embodied mind theories with him are also Buddhists.

Haraway is great at unassailable fancy rhetoric, and is a good foil to Luhmann in that unassailability.
But taking Maturana and Varela as denying the relationality and entanglement of life is a misread, as both were in engaged in the ethical and phenomenological implications of their theory.

So I would be interested to know what additional value add a holobiontic view offers over an enactivists or Luhmannian one. I think you are saying there's more hierarchical complexity in the substrate. Ok. But identity is about operational closure and reproduction of systems at every level.

I.e. an "autopoietic" system is never "atomic" but always dynamically constituted from a substrate in a way that its identity is precariously maintained as an emergent property.

The "boundary" is stable at the system level but permeable at the substrate level in Maturana's biology etc, which is quite profound and subtle. Point being that I'm not sure Harroway improves the expressivity of the theories of autopoiesis, which arguably already contain the critique of liberalism.

In this line of thinking, an autonomous or autopoietic system is constituted by/within a substrate, and part of that process of constitution creates the system/boundary/environment distinctions.

"autopoiesis" has its original definition from Maturana, biological systems, and its later definition from Luhman, for social systems. There was a rift between the two over this.

Later enactivists like Varela moved away from it towards a "constitutive autonomy" which encompasses both contexts.

I think this is all correct. This paper reaches a similar conclusion through a different route sbenthall.net/papers/aipss... So, sound statistical social science requires a computational economics that takes artificial life, not artificial intelligence, as it's modeling metaphor.

This is my agenda!

new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

I'm very +1 the LeCun world model pivot.

Sampling issue, right? This is from a subpoena that was for trump related materials?

Europe once again realizes that it can get a lot of money out of US big tech companies by enforcing laws

I think it's good now.

I was worried about the endless shutdown -> SNAP riots -> martial law scenario for a bit there.

But instead we are getting the beginnings of a robust countermotion.

If and only if the crisis is really really really bad, there might be actual structural reform later.

They are saying this is reciprocal
US isn't sharing intelligence either.

Great piece by Fred Turner on the pivot from Californian ideology of connection (which built the web) to Texan ideology of extraction and theocracy thebaffler.com/salvos/the-t...

I am not aware of the V-model and will now look it up. Thanks!

drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/10/04/a...

I was thinking today that we need something like Marr's levels, but for software system design. Level one is for functional specification. Level 2 technical design. Level 3 is implementation. Level 0 is incentives and politics of design. System errors can happen at all levels.

This version isn't paywalled if that's the issue: [2308.02435] Designing Fiduciary Artificial Intelligence share.google/Eygrth3wVIY0...

I'm short, I agree. We address this somewhat in the article. The corporate person that operates the AI has the duties. Then there is a question of how they can design automated systems that are compliant.