Oooooooooh, this is all very interesting discussion! Let me elaborate a bit on why I posted that passage (beyond trying to not-subtly probe for interest in my draft): There is an inherent problem in "Qualia" discussions; proponents of seeing "qualia" as a problem define it as an unsolvable problem. The methods they use to keep the problem "hard" vary and adapt to ensure that it stays "hard." It is the quintessential that-about-which-one-cannot-speak, and yet they want nothing more than to speak about it.
If we don't like *just *banging our heads against the wall, we can zoom out, and ask why we talk about things as subjective vs objective, or talk about them in other ways that lead some people to reify / hypostatize qualia. And when we ask why we talk that way, we come up with some sort of answer about how we each "see" things differently. Sometimes we want to talk about THAT (how you or I or someone else experiences things), whereas other times we want to talk about whatever we think it is that leads to those different experiences. That seems to be what Other Eric is getting at. Building off of Jon's quote, Jochan seems to be mathing at something similar. The patterns-in-the-world that people are responding to can overlap, and that overlap can come to be more complete over time. "Subjective" refers to something about what-I-am-responding-to, where as "objective" refers to something about thing itself. Speaking in the roughest of terms, the "or" collection of all those subjectivities is the "intersubjective", while the "and" overlap of all those subjectivities is the "objective". This matches Glen's interpretation that we are not talking about inherently-private experience, but rather about the uniqueness of a particular person's experience - with that uniqueness expressed formally via the presented math. Glen further asks (if I understand him) which aspect of the math connect to empirically-investigatable phenomenon, because if the math doesn't connect (bind?) to real world happenings, then we cannot test it to see if it provides insight about the things we are interested in. Presumably those tests would involve looking at how people are responding to aspects of the world (their world-view) and how those responses change as people shift from one context to another (converging or diverging). However 1) none of this will satisfy the hard-core qualia people, because any suggestion that the problem might not be *inherently *"hard" *forever*, is taken as evidence you don't understand the problem, and 2) that logic only works if we are talking about things in the world, about which people might have different (literal and metaphorical) points of view. If anything under discussion is 100% guaranteed, inherently, only experienceable by one person, then we can't work towards the type of convergence that Other Eric, Jon and Jochan, and I am pretty sure Glen, are talking about. When Nick says pain is a way of acting in the world, he is arguing that there is something - out there - that we are *metaphorically *feeling when we feel pain. Just as I can feel the smoothness of my glass coffee cup, and the wetness of the liquid within it, if "pain" is happening, I can "feel" it. The pain isn't "in the head", it is in the world. It is a happening that can be observed by others. There certainly *are *things that happen in our heads that can relate to the pain, but they do so by taking on the same role they have when I feel the smoothness of the glass, whatever *that *role is. If the pain is out there in the world, then everything being discussed works just fine. But if my pain can only be viewed by me, and your pain can only be viewed by you, by definition, then we can't work towards intersubjectivity or objectivity about it. It is Wittgenstein's "beetle in a box." ----------- If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the *one* case so irresponsibly? Now someone tells me that *he* knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at *his* beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a *something:* for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. ------------ However, if our psychological terms refer to designatable aspects of the world (at whatever level of complexity they may exist), then the beetle in the box dilemma is avoided. It is NOT from only my own case that I know what the word "pain" means. I learned the word "pain" in a social context, when my own behavior and the behavior of others was highlighted, following various injuries. (Alan Costall writes about how Wittgenstein's experiences as a school teacher - watching kids learn words - greatly affected his later philosophy.) While it is true that the thing-in-the-box has no place in the language-game, it is also true that the psychological terms *have *uses, and as such we can conclude that the psychological terms do not refer to some sort of inherently mysterious thing-in-the-box. The subjective is *just *my point of view on what is happening, and so Jochan's math should apply to my experience of the glass coffee cup just as well as it applies to my experience of the coffee shop at St Johns, my experience of Santa Fe as a whole, my experience of "justice", or even my experience of my, or another person's pain. Hopefully that was coherent... Best, Eric On Mon, Oct 5, 2026 at 2:46 PM Steve Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > > .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / > ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://bit.ly/virtualfriam > to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ >
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