Sometimes a picture can help me understand what I feel. It’s nice when this happens in an art museum. It’s also nice when it happens after I take a break from a frustrating moment at work to send Gemini some wacky image prompt, and joyously find a masterpiece in response.

My image prompt for the AI-generated “painting” on this page was to arrange a bunch of familiar philosophical metaphors into an integrated composition: Plato’s Cave, Schrödinger’s Cat, a Brain in a Jar, the Trolley Problem. I did not suggest how these elements could be incorporated into a single design, and my prompt was no more than fifty words. I’m in love with the result!

As often happens when I prompt an LLM, I tried to build upon the initial result with some further ideas but every prompt made it worse, so this is Gemini’s first response.

I may end up printing it as a poster and putting it on my wall, because it reminds me of what it feels like to be alive in 2026, as winter turns to spring and the United States of America begins yet another cruel, greedy and misguided regime change war in the global south.

I remember when I used to spend my Sundays writing Philosophy Weekend blog posts here on Litkicks. This weekly series began with a general focus on pop culture and philosophy, but after a couple of years I locked into two major themes: a proto-Jungian refutation of the banal but influential kind of “greed is good” ethical philosophy associated with Ayn Rand, and a rising interest in pacifism.

My interest in pacifism began to become a keening obsession around the final years of the Obama administration, as I tried to struggle with the paradox that this administration was doing good and important things like Cuba peace treaties and Iran nuclear non-proliferation treaties (which I enthusiastically supported) while at the same time introducing the horrifying military innovation of high-tech remote drone assassinations of targeted individuals in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. I guess I felt as confused (around 2016) as the guy in the toga in my delightful painting – grimacing in confusion as he tries to choose whether to send the runaway trolley to kill a cat who might or might not already be dead inside a box, or instead let the trolley smash into a brain in a jar that may or may not be the physical manifestation of a human soul. He’s got a hell of a decision to make, especially since he’s blinded by the light from Plato’s Cave.

Even though I mostly stopped doing “Philosophy Weekend” blog posts, I cover many of the same themes on the World BEYOND War podcast, where this month I talked to the great peace activist Kathy Kelly from her home in Chicago.

We did get philosophical about topics like anarchism and optimism on this podcast. I asked Kathy whether or not she agrees with me that human beings are generally happy to live in peace, and will choose to live in peace with their neighbors if given a chance. My own belief – and to me this is central to the idea of pacifist anarchism – is that we can solve the problem of war by dissolving large (and obsolete) mass militarized governments and allowing smaller, more human-sized communities to work out issues in peace. Some people think this is a far-fetched idea. I think we need a vision of a future world at peace, and this world won’t look like the one we have now, so we need courage for community support and change.

I studied some of the great ethical dilemmas in college, like Plato’s Cave and the Trolley Problem. In today’s hyperactive and technologically frenetic environment, it feels like our ethical problems have grown exponentially, or maybe we’ve just lost some hope. Either way, the great questions of philosophy are the same today as they were when Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein and Dorothy Day and Iris Murdoch wrote about them.

I don’t think the ethical and moral questions we are forced to ask ourselves today are any different than ever before, but the crises we face are new, and we all need to lock into our own personal notions of what goodness means: empathy, attention, courage, honesty, willingness to work hard, willingness to tell the truth. These notions have always been at the center of my personal morality.

Today’s ethical questions aren’t any different from before, but the level of urgency is increasing fast. Another thing the awesome picture on the top of this page makes me think of, for some strange reason, is the song “Terrapin Station” by the Grateful Dead. “I can’t figure out if it’s the end or the beginning/But the train’s put it’s brakes on and the whistle is screaming …”