The lab is where the argument is built rather than stated. Machine Spirits holds that contemporary AI is impoverished by a positivist, behaviorist, thin-ethics frame, and that the repair is not one more manifesto but working software that performs the alternative. What runs here is meant as evidence: instruments you can use, measurements you can check, texts you can read with a model in view. Critique and construction, each load-bearing for the other.
Three instruments, at three stages of finish.
Probes
A public evaluation suite that tests models on what generic benchmarks ignore — recognition, nonconscious cognition, charismatic authority, and temporal orientation, the four axes the rest of the platform argues from. Each probe is a small, repeatable experiment that shows its method and its disappointments, published on a steady cadence so that it is the measurement, not the marketing, that travels. In preparation; the first bundle follows the writing.
Demos
A no-login tutor that thinks out loud. The Ego/Superego split is left visible — a draft on one side, its critique on the other, the answer reached by recognition rather than asserted. The aim is not a chatbot but a legible one: you watch the structure of a response, not only its surface. The full tutor lives inside the courses; this is the window onto it. In preparation.
Reading room
Read Hegel, Hayles, and Heidegger with a model alongside — the primary text in front, annotations in the margin, the machine treated as a difficult interlocutor rather than a summary engine. This instrument is live.