Carlo Della Croce

This partly autobiographical essay explores the tension between rationalism, cultural polarization, and personal adversity through a candid narrative lens. Moving from the hyper-critical dynamics of modern cancel culture—illustrated through the public fallouts of figures like Germaine Greer and Jason Arday—the author examines how collective discourse has fractured into ideological extremes. Against this backdrop, the text shifts to an intimate account of the author's own psychological struggles, detailing a decade-long battle with drug-induced psychosis and OCD, and the surprising role Richard Dawkins' empiricism played in restoring mental stability. Blending cultural critique with personal history—including career detours in gemmology, pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago, and the existential fallout of a domestic disaster—the piece offers a nuanced reflection on the limits of pure logic, the lingering pull of irrational thought, and the difficult search for balance in a chaotic world.

This partly autobiographical essay explores the tension between rationalism, cultural polarization, and personal adversity through a candid narrative lens. Moving from the hyper-critical dynamics of modern cancel culture—illustrated through the public fallouts of figures like Germaine Greer and Jason Arday—the author examines how collective discourse has fractured into ideological extremes. Against this backdrop, the text shifts to an intimate account of the author's own psychological struggles, detailing a decade-long battle with drug-induced psychosis and OCD, and the surprising role Richard Dawkins' empiricism played in restoring mental stability. Blending cultural critique with personal history—including career detours in gemmology, pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago, and the existential fallout of a domestic disaster—the piece offers a nuanced reflection on the limits of pure logic, the lingering pull of irrational thought, and the difficult search for balance in a chaotic world.

This partly autobiographical essay explores the tension between rationalism, cultural polarization, and personal adversity through a candid narrative lens. Moving from the hyper-critical dynamics of modern cancel culture—illustrated through the public fallouts of figures like Germaine Greer and Jason Arday—the author examines how collective discourse has fractured into ideological extremes. Against this backdrop, the text shifts to an intimate account of the author's own psychological struggles, detailing a decade-long battle with drug-induced psychosis and OCD, and the surprising role Richard Dawkins' empiricism played in restoring mental stability. Blending cultural critique with personal history—including career detours in gemmology, pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago, and the existential fallout of a domestic disaster—the piece offers a nuanced reflection on the limits of pure logic, the lingering pull of irrational thought, and the difficult search for balance in a chaotic world.

This extremely brief essay responds to key counterarguments raised against my essay 'Qualia: Nothingness with Potential'. By examining the limits of probability and empirical verification—from unobserved physical paths to vanishing planetary signatures—I argue that our inference of qualia in others cannot achieve standard scientific certainty (90%+). Instead, because subjective experience permanently lacks falsifiability, our conviction caps at roughly 60%, sustained not by empirical verification but by deeply ingrained psychological habits.

If creativity is defined through a game-theoretic lens—characterized by dynamic exploration, risk-taking, and opponent exploitation—is an agent that is simultaneously unbeatable and creative a mathematical impossibility? Grounded in the classical game-theoretic foundations of von Neumann and Nash, this essay introduces The Engineer’s Dilemma—a thought experiment in AI chess architecture that exposes a fundamental trade-off at the heart of decision theory: the hard incompatibility between unexploitable Game Theory Optimal (GTO) play and dynamic counterplay. By formalizing how a dual-mode AI can be systematically baited through adversarial spoofing, I demonstrate that any system departing from static equilibrium to exploit weak play necessarily incurs a temporal vulnerability. While not directly addressed in the primary text, this result carries profound indirect implications for existing bounded-vulnerability systems (such as poker engine exploitability caps), proving that safety-bounded deviations both severely restrict genuine creative expression and remain technically vulnerable to higher-order deception. Furthermore, this opens a compelling conceptual question for machine ethics and model alignment: what happens when we substitute game-theoretic terms like unexploitability and exploitative creative play with normative concepts such as harm minimization and goodness creation? In doing so, the essay points toward a fundamental, systemic limit on designing autonomous agents that must navigate competing architectural demands.

This draft forms the introductory section of a larger work exploring the limits of scientific explanation and its implications for moral philosophy. This draft addresses the "hard problem" of consciousness, proposing that the debate surrounding subjective experience represents a pseudoproblem born of epistemic misuse. By examining the physical isolation of consciousness through the metaphor of an unobservable perception "tube," the argument distinguishes between two fundamental inquiries: why consciousness is private (a boundary explained by physical architecture) and what exists within another's experience (a question structurally cut off from verification). Rather than treating an unopenable subjective state as a mere void, this paper resolves the problem of qualia by redefining it as nothingness with potential. Rejecting the abstract concept of a pure void as irrelevant to reality, the argument posits that all empirical nothingness intrinsically holds unknown potential. Equating an unopenable subjective state with this physical nothingness, the paper demonstrates that attempting to scientifically measure another's qualia is as futile as demandingly re-checking empty space or counting an infinite regress of pre-Big Bang flashes. While foundational concepts in this draft unwittingly draw upon established philosophical thought experiments—such as Thomas Nagel’s subjective bat, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s "beetle in the box," or hypothetical neural links aimed at intersubjective observation—this work intentionally introduces crucial refinements to these analogies. Crucially, this work moves beyond Wittgenstein’s claim that unobservable inner states merely drop out of public language games. Instead, it advances an emphatic ontological argument: attempting to introduce qualia into an empirical framework is akin to forcing an erroneous equation into an otherwise precise mathematical system. Just as a false equation cannot coexist within a true mathematical framework, if science is true and accurately speaks of reality, then qualia must by definition be false—the theoretical equivalent of speaking about nothing. Consequently, speaking of qualia—much like asserting the existence of other minds or an afterlife—cannot be sustained by scientific verification, but can only be framed in religious terms as an unprovable leap of faith.