Eric —
I am hoping not to be just “stirring the mud” here:
I’ve been reflecting on variations of Kauffman’s /Adjacent
Possible/while thinking about
A) my own experience;
B) how I believe the world is structured — ontology; and
C) how LLMs and I co-model all of this, as a manifold in my diffgeo
construction.
One distinction that has been useful to me is:
*possible*— constrained by the world/rules
*plausible*— constrained by a situated modeler
*probable*— constrained by a situated model made explicit enough to
support weighting
Your suggestion that these might be understood as “different registers
for talking about constrained futurity” feels helpful to my own maunderings.
Another way I’ve been thinking about it is:
*Possibility maps the manifold. Plausibility supplies a perspective
on it. Probability weights paths through it.*
That seems to produce an interesting symmetry with your
objective/subjective distinction:
* *Objective*: parseable without specifying the observer.
* *Subjective*: observer/model must be supplied.
* *Possible*: admissible under shared constraints.
* *Plausible*: admissible and coherent from a particular model-position.
* *Probable*: plausibility made sufficiently explicit to permit
comparative weighting.
Or, compressed:
*The possible is what the constraints permit; the plausible is what
a situated intelligence can make coherent; the probable is what that
situated intelligence is prepared to weight. Objectivity enters not
by abolishing perspective, but by making the dependencies of
perspective sufficiently explicit that other perspectives can
transform between them.*
This also reflects back for me to the parallax-versus-plurality
conversation with Glen: *plurality is not noise*. Two people can agree
on the possible while disagreeing on the plausible because they occupy
different informational or experiential positions. They can even assign
different probabilities without either being irrational, if their
priors, evidence, or models differ.
Perhaps, then, one virtue is simply not collapsing these registers
prematurely: preserving the manifold of the possible, allowing multiple
situated plausibilities, and seeking enough shared structure to compare
or update probabilities without erasing the perspectives that generated
them.
- Steve
On 10/5/26 11:56 am, Santafe wrote:
I will clip to the focal sentence (acknowledging all that was clipped):
> Claude was not happy about the theorem proofs that Gemini created.
> And Jon also mentioned that they are not waterproof. So I asked
Claude
> and Gemini if they could write a new proof. They could. I asked
them
> if we could use gauge theory to explain subjective experience -
gauge
> invariance to describe objectivity, and symmetry breaking for
> subjectivity.
I think there was a time when I had enthusiasm for using these
mathematical-physics metaphors. Something has apparently happened.
I probably said, a while ago (so if you feel like it, forgive the
repetition), that since I don’t know what philosophers mean by
objective and subjective, I could take the more defensive posture of
being a linguistic semanticist, which to me seems like a more
pragmatist standing-point anyway, leaving many further mistakes for
the future rather than making them all at once.
I could take “objective” and “subjective” to be two speech registers,
in an ordinary lexical/grammatical-semantics sense. A sentence in an
“objective” register is one that I can parse to a meaning (in the
everyday sense; not in some formal logic that everyday speech doesn’t
use and that would need to be invented) without needing as input who
said it. A sentence in a “subjective” register is one that cannot be
parsed to a meaning without reference to some speaker (in whatever
representation; maybe more or less explicit), which must thus be supplied.
_Why_ we use those registers, why we have been handed them down from
past speakers innumerable, and how our experienced lives reward or
discourage the adoption of such registers, looks to me like a question
that can to some degree (as good a degree as anything in semantics) be
separated or factored from the classification of the locutions.
Eric
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