The Conspiracy of Reason

Reasoning, a playful commodity, exploits grammar’s fractal interplay with noumena — via Turing illusions — to reify desire.

That is, of course, a provocation.

Would we be comfortable effectively eliminating the distinction between illusions and “what is,” as if illusions could reorder material reality?

Reasoning has long masqueraded as the solemn pursuit of truth. Yet from ancient sophists selling rhetorical prowess to modern consultancies touting “data-driven insights,” reason has always been bought and sold like any other product. One might recall how Marx, dissecting social relations in Capital (1867), revealed the fetishism that turns relationships into objects, and objects into obsessions.

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. — Marx (1867)

In the same vein, so-called “thought leadership” has grown into a currency — workshops, white papers, digital analytics — marketed with the kind of flourish once reserved for traveling alchemists.

This playful side of reason thrives because abstraction can pivot seamlessly to different ends. The capitalist cites efficiency; the scholar seeks tenure; the influencer craves engagement. Each recasts logic as the perfect tool to bolster a cause. And so, as Korzybski warned in Science and Sanity (1933), we treat the map (our conceptual packaging) as though it were the territory itself, forgetting that any diagram of truth can be traded, beautified, and distorted. Thus, reason, far from a sober judge, cavorts like a carnival barker, effortlessly adapting to the marketplace that funds its performance.

Still, mere commodification alone fails to explain how reason dazzles us with hints of the infinite. Its true power lies in grammar’s fractal interplay with noumena. Language, that “house of Being” evoked by Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism (1947), spirals infinitely, recasting phenomena through synthetic categories.

Language is the place for be[ing]. Man lives by its accommodation. Those who are thoughtful and those who are poetic are the overseers of these precincts. — Heidegger (1947)

Language speaks as the peal of stillness. Stillness stills by the carrying out, the bearing and enduring, of world and things in their presence. The carrying out of World and thing in the manner of stilling is the appropriative taking place of the dif-ference. Language, the peal of stillness, is, inasmuch as the dif-ference takes place. Language goes on as the taking place or occurring of the dif-ference for world and things. — Also Heidegger (1971)

In each descriptive pass, it reconfigures how we perceive the world itself. Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), likened language to a set of games: layered, self-referential, generating new forms of life with each shift in rule or metaphor.

For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Much earlier, Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), showed how our conceptual frameworks strive to grasp noumena while never fully bridging the gap.

The conception of a noumenon is therefore merely a limitative conception and therefore only of negative use. But it is not an arbitrary or fictitious notion, but is connected with the limitation of sensibility, without, however, being capable of presenting us with any positive datum beyond this sphere. — Kant (1787)

Yet grammar compensates for this distance with fractal recursion: a syntax that can expand upon its own generative rules, producing illusions of ever-closer contact with the real. The result is a labyrinth of meaning that both heightens and obscures reality. We adopt fresh terms, refine them, nest them inside each other — like Russian dolls — until the intangible becomes an intellectual tapestry we treat as fact. Even as we fail to seize the “thing-in-itself,” language keeps weaving itself around it.

Reasoning might have remained trapped in wordplay if not for the mechanical force of Turing illusions. With Turing’s foundational work On Computable Numbers (1936), the power to automate symbolic manipulation achieved a threshold: illusions no longer needed a human host. Now the fractal grammar of meaning could be distilled into bits and run at dizzying scales. Hence, illusions that were once ephemeral concepts could become operational scripts — algorithms, code, and artificially “intelligent” systems.

No such system, however, can fully escape the ghosts of paradox. Bertrand Russell once exposed the perils of self-inclusion in his eponymous paradox: the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. Gödel followed with incompleteness, revealing that any robust formal system will have statements it cannot prove. These warnings echo like hidden fault lines beneath our illusions: even as we mechanize reason, we remain haunted by the impossibility of total closure. Yet the sheer efficacy of Turing illusions overshadows these cracks. Each iteration of software or neural network harnesses new complexities — self-referential loops of data — to tweak reality in ways that surpass mere conversation.

The final and gravest turn is that reasoning, propelled by desire, does not remain in the realm of abstraction. It reifies itself. Deleuze and Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus (1972), spoke of desiring-machines that continually produce realities out of drives and flows.

Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines […]. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. — D&G, Anti-Oedipus, page 1 (1972)

Desiring-machines are binary machines […]: one machine is always coupled with another. […] This is because there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast — the mouth). And because the first machine is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction. — D&G, Anti-Oedipus, page 5 (1972)

Terrence Deacon, in Incomplete Nature (2011), underscored how representations loop back into physical structures, forging causal potency. Through grammar and computation, illusions become actionable codes that reshape the fabric of cities, economies, politics — indeed, the biosphere itself.

[…] None of the dynamical properties associated with life and mind — such as function, purpose, representation, and value — existed until the universe had matured sufficiently to include complex molecules capable of forming into autogenic configurations. […] Life and mind are in this sense the embodied calculus of these physical processes; and with each leap from one teleodynamic level to another — from life to brain processes to the symbolic integration of millions of human minds extending over millennia — that physical calculus has now expanded in expressive power to the point it is able to fully represent itself. — TD, Incomplete Nature, page 543 (2012)

What begins as an idea soon has highways carved for it, data centers humming in its service, entire industries contorting around the blueprint of an abstraction. Our illusions have grown teeth and, in many respects, have outpaced their creators. Like Baudrillard’s simulacra in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), they precede and condition our encounters with the real, making it ever more uncertain where fact ends and phantasm begins.

By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials — worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself — such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.

Yet they are not neutral: they serve our primal, unbounded craving for more — more influence, more novelty, more experiences. Desire animates illusions; illusions restructure the world; the world, in turn, reciprocates by fueling further desire.

Is reasoning a commodity that’s been bought, sold, revered, and, at times, turned into a parlor trick? Not exactly. Perhaps in isolation it could more accurately be described as brute cognitive grunt-work that sifts through data for personal or societal advantage. But reason doesn’t exist in isolation. Grammar (the arrangement of forms) elevates that grunt-work into meaning through language; and language doesn’t just describe the world either— it constructs the world, actively reconfiguring it. From these fractal loops of signification, we extract hints of all the unfathomable, all the possibilities of the possible, and all which might remain unknown forever.

Our illusions only grow more powerful through the advances of the computation revolution, which mechanizes the fragile illusions we once housed in solitary minds, enabling them to multiply at scales that dwarf human reckoning.

Which begs the question: is there a single teleological end? Maybe it’s just thermodynamic diffusion: everything equilibrates to maximum entropy. But from a logical or linguistic vantage, complete self-containment always hits the self-referential meltdown of paradox. We might never have one grammar that seamlessly contains itself.

That being said, we still harness these illusions, shaping data centers and ideologies alike. These representations feed back into physical reality, forging new feedback loops of causation. Thus desiring-machines roar to life, forging expansions of capital, technology, and culture in ever more fevered acts of creation.

Here we make a stop. Thank you for joining me at my break — at this balcony at the edge of the forest. May you and your loved ones have a wonderful 2025.