--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/2025-05-08.txt	Thu May 22 16:42:36 2025 +0100
@@ -0,0 +1,63 @@
+[HST spent too long trying to get the astonishing fact of language
+ evolution on the table as something which deserves a place in GA]
+
+The inscrutability of the size of Universe is another thing that
+defies comprehension.
+
+If it's just chance that we happen to have come to be in a corner of
+that Universe where recursive compositional expressive mechanisms are
+possible the unlikelihood isn't an argument against it being the case.
+
+Suppose I were to say to a high-school class we agree to have
+recursively-specifiable syntactic and semantic language, and have a
+brain that produces and consumes its product, and yes, it's unlikely
+in the extreme, but so-be-it.
+
+Is there anything to conclude from that.
+
+Imagine the course we're teaching, and a typology of unlikelihoods,
+smallness and small-enough-ness.  Very^4 unlikely that we'll gasp for
+breath because the oxygen has all left the room.  Do we have to have a
+view on whether there's a universe almost like ours where the same
+UUID _does_ get minted for two different objects?  
+
+What are we doing?  We want to...  MacIntyre says we need 'real'
+language to reflect on/assess our beliefs and desires.  Evolved
+corners of the universe that have the requisite properties that [this
+process] can be enjoined are astonishingly unlikely, but we are
+evidently in one.
+
+What more do we need, in order to have intentionality.
+
+[HST] MacIntyre grants (persistent of) categorisations
+[BCS] Sufficient, or Necessary?  [HST] I'll take that as a homework assignment
+
+[BCS] Suppose we have a minimal 'higher' animal: persistent individuals and
+categorisation.  Do you have anything yet that reeks of the religious?
+My intuition is 'no'.  The critter has to stand up on its hind legs
+and _wonder_, in order for there to be... in order for its finitude,
+one might say, to lead it to [HST ask Why?][ref. _Child's Christmas in
+Wales]
+
+MacIntyre on Davidson? Counterfactuals are crucial to practical
+reasoning.  BCS says I could imagine a counterfactual toting rational
+argumenter, who still lacks this openness to God and to wonder.
+
+And until an AI system can wonder, I won't be particularly
+interested/concerned, it will still be a mere machine.
+
+Haugeland distinguishes the impossible from the possible but not
+actual from the actual.
+
+"A blue proton" gets you in to trouble.
+
+With respect of our project, and the opening salvos of GA, there is a
+need to characterise the territory that we want to open up, and
+something has to be very open to not reduce to boring behaviourism.
+
+The speaker has to be gripped by a certain openness, a certain
+possibility, will this cake rise whatever.  How to open the space
+enough for wonder to be genuinely gripping, seems important.
+
+We want people to want to read this after the first page or two, even
+if they can't say exactly why.

--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/2025-05-22.txt	Thu May 22 16:42:36 2025 +0100
@@ -0,0 +1,97 @@
+The unlikelihood of being able to ask these questions.
+The fraction that is solid is tiny.  The right size solid is to a
+... of measure zero, and then left arising there is another tiny
+factor.
+
+That doesn't pose a metaphysical problem for the project, because we
+are those things, isn't it amazing that that 1/10^40 chance came good.
+
+What we are left with we see two ways of trying to understand, the
+romantic idealisation of science, that it will produce a causal,
+bumpint-and-shoving picture on the one hand, the conceptions of the
+religious sensibilities on the other.  If you take the deliverables of
+science seriously, none of the foundations of that romantic 19th
+century view are tenable.
+
+It is more unlikely than our mind can grasp.  Measurement?
+
+That there are limitations on what we can in fact understand _in
+principle_ is itself very hard to get our heads around.
+
+[HST primary-school vs. post-grad physics (it's OK to teach Newton to
+kids even though it's false) and religion (it's not OK to teach
+Christianity to kids)]
+
+At the beginning of the GA text it says that contemporary science
+actually runs rough-shod over the presumptions of primary-school
+science, but there was a question as to whether the non-effectiveness
+stuff just leads to a 'classical' embodiment view or goes further into
+the territory I _claim_ for it, getting much closer to religious
+sensibility territory.  I'm going to just state that this stuff is
+domesticating the territory of r_s: this is all still pre-amble.
+
+What can we say if we step back and consider the world and our place
+in it in the light of the new [e.g. non-effectiveness?] scientific
+understanding, 
+
+Try to articulate the ontological and epistemolical theses and frame
+them in such a way that they end up with "this may not be God, but
+it's close enough"...
+
+Wondering whether we should just try to do that, just rewrite the
+paper, more clearly and more relaxedly, and just say that.
+
+That does mean starting with a blank sheet of paper.
+
+What stands between me and doing that, where are the lacunae?
+
+Suppose I start with the unlikelihood, and try to build forward from
+there.
+
+[pause - HST: how does that get to e.g. non-effectiveness/deiexis/embodiment?]
+
+Maybe part 1 is just the sheer unlikelihood
+
+Part 2 is what, though, can we say about the world
+And then, as best we understand it, 1st off differential equations have
+turned out to be the framework that can best carry the expressions of
+the regularities [that we encounter in the world], and in particular
+something like quantum-field-theoretic vortexes...
+
+There's also the question that given that each of us is a patch of that
+[?] universe, what is it to know or understand anything, then the
+Object book is relevant, registration and that story, the reification
+of objects, registration in general.
+
+And then there's this thing, which I think is the most urgent for me
+to say compellingly and compactly, which is that if for example I
+register something as an object, or I register [what did Strawson call
+it, the instantiation of fields, "it's raining", "it's sunny here
+now", the instantiation not of properties but of qualities].  But let
+me talk objects.
+
+There's this point which is fundamental to everything, that if I
+register an object as an object, what I'm registering is not really
+just the object, what I'm registering is a patch of the ineffable,
+which I register _as_ an object, and I say "this is an apple", but
+that [ has not done justice to the patch -- my _view_ is not
+restricted to its appleness, but my attention, that to which I'm
+attentionally directed, is what I'm registering as an apple.  I
+continue to look beyond, to look beyond, to be aware of the finitude
+of the registration.]
+
+The apple, as it were, is not the-patch-registered-as-an-apple.  The
+apple _is_ a full inenffable patch in all its glory---that which I have
+registered as an apple.  That to which I'm directed---the object of my
+attention transcends its exemplification of all apple properties,
+there's more to it than its just being an apple.  And not just more to
+it in the sense that there's more to all apples than their appleness
+or what follows from their being apples, but more about this
+particular apple than words can express.  It's kind of as if one is
+standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean at night and there's motion,
+barely detectable motion, and I say "there's a ship moving slowly down
+the channel" and you look too and say "yeah, I see".  Both of us are
+attentive to, attend to, that which we're supposing is a moving ship.
+
+
+