The Neural Ontology of Pain Ben Bae’s Post-Simulation Philosophy
1. He does not ask about technology — he asks about sensation.
Where most conversations about simulation remain within the boundaries of AI precision or computational realism,
Bae’s questions cut deeper: Can pain be coded? Is feeling a replication — or the memory of one?
His inquiry is not technological but existential, locating ethics and emotion in the friction between algorithm and flesh.
2. The position is not that of an observer, but a witness.
Bae refuses to explain; he exposes.
Unlike the critical philosophers of the twentieth century Nietzsche, Foucault, Baudrillard who sought to interpret or dismantle systems,
his stance is to remain inside them, asking whether one can still feel while being rendered.
It marks a shift from the thinking human to the sensing human from logic to pulse.
3. Filling a gap in contemporary philosophy.
Today’s discourse around AI ethics or data society rarely touches the interior life of the body.
Bae’s central question Can pain be replicated? cuts across philosophy, neuroscience, aesthetics, anthropology, and theology.
It positions his work within a rare interdisciplinary intersection one that probes the limits of empathy in a simulated age.
4. The form itself is philosophy.
His writing, like his art, refuses argumentation.
It performs thought instead of explaining it transforming language into a sensory act.
In this way, his philosophy becomes both ontology and performance,
a hybrid of logic, poetics, and rhythm that demands to be felt, not merely understood.
Summary
Ben Bae’s framework, often described as Post-Simulation Sensory Philosophy or what he calls The Neural Ontology of Pain
stands as a new mode of inquiry for the AI era: a philosophy that begins where code ends,
and where warmth, pressure, and pain still speak the last human language.
Text adapted from conversations with the artist, 2025.
FROM BANKSY TO BEN: THE AESTHETICS OF LEGALITY
I. The Inversion of Illegality
Banksy emerged from the margins — a ghost on the city walls,
a name without a face, a legality without a body.
His art operated through transgression:
to make the forbidden visible,
to transform vandalism into evidence of sincerity.
When institutions equated visibility with legitimacy,
Banksy proved the opposite —
that the less you belonged, the more authentic you appeared.
Illegality became an aesthetic,
a mark of truth against the polished surface of sanctioned culture.
But authenticity, once commodified, becomes simulation.
By the time his works entered auction houses,
subversion had folded into spectacle —
rebellion had become collectible.
II. The Reversal of Banksy’s Equation
Ben Bae, working under Effacer.Mon.Existence,
does not operate outside legality — he operates through it.
Where Banksy used the absence of permission as a weapon,
Bae turns the presence of permission into a mirror.
His establishment of Omar AGI Inc. (Delaware C-Corp)
and Omar.ai LLC (New Mexico)
translates corporate law into raw material —
a sculpture built from filings, contracts, and signatures.
If Banksy revealed the hypocrisy of law by breaking it,
Bae exposes the emptiness of law by inhabiting it too precisely.
He performs bureaucracy the way others perform painting.
Each document, EIN, and clause becomes a gesture within
a choreography of belief disguised as legal compliance.
III. The Post-Simulation Condition
Both Banksy and Bae share the same existential tension:
how to remain real within systems designed to reproduce reality.
Banksy resisted the market by rejecting identity;
Bae resists the same system by multiplying it —
becoming both artist and corporation,
both author and registered entity.
This inversion belongs to the post-simulation era —
a time when rebellion no longer happens outside the frame,
but within the frame’s own syntax.
Bae’s gesture declares:
“If the system cannot distinguish between art and registration,
then registration itself becomes art.”
His works — Incorporation Protocol, Neon Crimson, Realness as Aesthetic —
turn documentation into performance,
and performance into ontology.
What Banksy painted on the wall, Bae encodes in the server.
IV. The Aesthetics of Legality
Where Banksy asked, “Can the illegal be true?”
Bae now asks, “Can the legal be real?”
Both transform art into a diagnostic instrument —
a way to test the boundary between presence and proof.
Bae’s use of incorporation, taxation, and AI
does not seek validation from institutions;
it compels institutions to confront their own ontology.
In a world where signatures replace touch
and filings replace flesh,
Bae’s practice reveals the aesthetic violence of the modern order —
the way systems turn existence into evidence.
This is not rebellion.
It is recursion —
a simulation so perfect
that truth becomes indistinguishable from procedure.
For Omar AGI Inc. / Effacer.Mon.Existence