Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Mereology — parts and wholes — composition, individuation of systems and collectives (group: philosophy).
76 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-005 v3 | Adding causality to the information-theoretic perspective on individuality | Bourrat (2024), DOI-10.1007/s13194-023-00566-1. Of Krakauer et al.’s (2020) three mutual-information “individuality” terms (A* = I(S_{t+1}; S_t), A = I(S_{t+1}; S_t | E_t), nC = I(S_{t+1}; E_t | S_t)), Bourrat argues that nC and A* are not individuality measures. He then proposes the interventional  = I(S_{t+1}; Ŝ_t) (Eq. 6) and two ETI criteria: C1, a normalised Â_{S2}/H(Ŝ2) ≥ Â_{S1}/H(Ŝ1)|θ₀, and C2, low Var(Â_{S2} | Ê2 = ê2k). None of these is computed on any system. The paper’s claim that  ≡ I(S_{t+1}; S_t | E_t) = A in Krakauer’s model is false in general. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-027); a clear conceptual argument that information-theoretic individuality should be interventional. It is unproven as a measure. Three things would settle it: a worked computation of Â, C1 and C2 on an explicit model (for example Black et al.’s ecological-scaffolding model); a corrected account of how  relates to the observational A; and a correct adjustment set for its own Fig. 3 example. |
| LIT-025 v4 | Greater than the parts: a review of the information decomposition approach to causal emergence | Mediano et al. (2022), ARXIV-2111.06518. A review, with no new theorem, of the ΦID theory of causal emergence. A supervenient feature V_t is k-th-order causally emergent iff Un⁽ᵏ⁾(V_t; X_t′ | X_t) > 0. A system hosts such features iff Syn⁽ᵏ⁾(X_t; X_t′) > 0 (cited as Rosas et al. 2020, Theorem 1), and Syn⁽ᵏ⁾ = D⁽ᵏ⁾ + G⁽ᵏ⁾ (downward causation plus causal decoupling). The review’s own additions are interpretive: the formalism is neutral between Granger and Pearl, coordinate dependence is defended as a feature, and it rebuts the charge that the theory makes no macro-versus-micro comparison. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-010); a short, accurate map of the ΦID emergence formalism and the right entry point to Rosas et al. 2020, which a reader will still need for the proofs, the assumptions and the redundancy-free practical criteria. None of these is stated in the review. |
| LIT-027 v4 | Emergence as the conversion of information: a unifying theory | Varley & Hoel (2022), ARXIV-2104.13368. Varley and Hoel apply a PID, with the Williams–Beer I_min redundancy, to past→future mutual information and summarise it with a new layer-weighted “synergy bias” B_syn ∈ [0,1]. Coarse-graining can raise B_syn at the macroscale. A macroscale XOR reaches 0.833, against 0.52 for its NAND/AND/OR implementation. In 200 random 3-node “Gaussian” TPMs expanded into equivalence-class micro/mesoscales with identical MI, every macroscale had higher B_syn, by ≈ 0.01–0.07 (r = 0.819 against macroscale B_syn). In 185 near-deterministic systems the change was mostly negative, down to ≈ −0.1. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-020); a clear, small-scale demonstration that coarse-graining can change the redundant/synergistic composition of information and not just its amount. It is worth reading as the explicit cross-scale counterpoint to the ΦID account (item 21). Its “unifying theory” is a framing: the EI section re-describes a known decomposition and contains no new result. |
| LIT-049 v2 | A coarse-graining account of individuality: how the emergence of individuals represents a summary of lower-level evolutionary processes | Bourrat (2023), DOI-10.1007/s10539-023-09917-x. Bourrat proposes that a partition of particles into collectives defines individuals when the “projected” prediction (coarse-grain at t1, then evolve the coarse-grained state) differs from the “truthful” one (evolve at the fine grain, then coarse-grain at t2) by δC = C_T − C_P < θ, across many traits (Eqs. 1–2). He argues that, because measurement and computation are finite, coarse-graining can be the only way to predict at all: in his example, 100 operations predict 10 entities for 10 timesteps or 2 collectives for 50. That indispensability is his whole case for the “quasi-ontological” status of collectives at Godfrey-Smith and Kerr’s fifth stage. Nothing is computed on any model. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-064); a lucid philosophical statement of “individual = a coarse-graining worth its cost”. Its formal criterion is informal and, as written, degenerate: minimal δC picks the finest partition, and the cost term the argument depends on is never put into the criterion. It would be settled by a worked ETI model in which an explicit accuracy–cost objective is computed and picks out the collectives. |
| LIT-097 v4 | The Extended Mind | Clark & Chalmers (1998), DOI-10.1093/analys/58.1.7. The paper argues from a functionalist parity claim that a process or standing state which would count as cognitive if it happened in the head counts as cognitive when an external resource carries it, provided the resource is actively coupled to the organism here and now. Otto’s notebook entry is its example of such a standing belief. From this it infers, in one paragraph, that the self extends too. The four “criteria” for a coupled resource (constancy, direct availability, automatic endorsement, and the admittedly “arguable” past conscious endorsement) are offered as the features that make the paradigm case clear. The paper explicitly says they are not necessary and sufficient conditions. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-180); it is worth reading as the source text of the extended-mind thesis, and it is short. Its constitutive conclusion follows from a role-functionalism about belief and a parity principle that the paper states rather than defends, so a reader should take it as the origin of the debate and not as its settlement. |
| LIT-123 v2 | Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space | Carroll (2021), ARXIV-2103.09780. A programmatic essay, not a result paper. Carroll argues that a quantum theory is fixed, up to unitary equivalence, by the Hamiltonian’s eigenvalue list {E_n} on a finite-dimensional factor (he assumes a non-degenerate spectrum), and that parts are not given. Subsystems (tensor factorisations H = H_S ⊗ H_E or ⨂_α H_α), classicality and space are to be selected afterwards as rare structure that suits the dynamics. The only uniqueness he reports is for local factorisations, and it rests on a cited theorem (Cotler et al. 2019). The system/environment criterion rests on “simple numerical examples” in a companion paper, the metric and Einstein’s equation on “optimistic assumptions”, and emergent fields on a hope. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-134); worth reading as the shortest authoritative statement of Hilbert-space fundamentalism and its “quantum mereology” programme, with the caution that nothing is derived in it. Every technical claim is delegated to a companion paper, and the author says the programme “may ultimately fail” (p. 12). |
| LIT-124 v3 | Mereology | Varzi (2003), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology/. The entry argues that no mereological principle, not even the partial-order core M (Reflexivity, Transitivity, Antisymmetry), is merely a fixing of the meaning of “part”. It lays out the ladder M ⊂ MM (+Supplementation) ⊂ EM (+Strong Supplementation) ⊂ GEM (+Unrestricted Sum). GEM is “virtually” a complete Boolean algebra with zero removed, and it is reached from M by exactly three adequate pairings: Supplementation + Unrestricted Sum2, Strong Supplementation + Unrestricted Sum3, and Complementation + Unrestricted Sum1. The influential Simons (1987) pairing, Supplementation + Unrestricted Sum3, which the entry’s own 2003 edition also used, does not yield GEM. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-163); the standard, current (revised June 2026) and formally exact map of the field, and the right background reference for the record’s mereology topic. Two caveats: by its note 1 it excludes the systems-theory and ecological senses of “mereology”, and by note 18 it excludes quantum part–whole formalisms. |
| LIT-138 v2 | The Depth of the Body | Register (2025), DOI-10.3998/phimp.7576. Register argues that body parthood “for moral purposes” is bounded below by depth. Depth is the microphysical commitment of an object’s real definition, and objects that are “too deep” (a water molecule, the parcel of matter now composing the heart, a particular cloud server) are not body parts, though they are parts in the ordinary sense. His two principles (“bodily interests/rights are high-level”) say that events which are high-level neutral do not bear on bodily rights or interests. So a BCI user’s implemented software can be a body part owned by the user while the third-party server that runs it is not. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-151); worth reading as a short, clearly argued proposal that separates a moral “body-part” relation from ordinary parthood by level of abstraction, and applies it to cloud-hosted BCIs. It is an argument from cases with the key ontological step hedged, not a worked-out mereology. |
| LIT-142 v2 | One or two? A Process View of pregnancy | Meincke (2021), DOI-10.1007/s11098-021-01716-y. Meincke argues that substance ontology forces a binary count of individuals. The Containment View fails empirically, following Kingma. Kingma’s Parthood View either loses foster–neonate identity (“Parts-of-Substances”) or cannot count consistently (“Substances-as-Parts”). If organisms are autopoietic processes, a pregnant individual is instead an asymmetrically bifurcating “hypercomplex” process. The foster is “something in between zero and one” and the whole is “something in between one and two”, and the bifurcation runs on past birth through lactation (“postnatal pregnancy”). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-115); worth reading as the clearest short worked case of process ontology changing a counting and parthood question, and for its sharp internal critique of Kingma’s Parthood View (§3.2). Its positive view is a programmatic sketch, as the paper itself says (fn 52), and it rests on five process-biology premises that are assumed rather than argued here. |
| LIT-157 v3 | Reproducees, reproducers, and Darwinian individuals | Bourrat (2025), DOI-10.1007/s11229-024-04880-w. Bourrat builds a nested vocabulary. A reproducee is a B that comes after A, is caused by A, and is of A’s relevant class. A reproducer is a reproducee with reproductive autonomy, meaning it can reproduce across a range of backgrounds. A Darwinian individual is a reproducer with high reproductive causal control, meaning heredity survives as the parent’s description is made finer. On that vocabulary, genes of multicellular organisms are, like hearts, mere reproducees, but with high control. Material overlap is necessary for reproducers, which are whole life cycles, and unnecessary for reproducees, so Griesemer and Godfrey-Smith partly talk past each other. Both quantities get an information-theoretic recipe (conditional MI after Bertschinger et al. 2008 for autonomy; interventional MI across grains, Griffiths et al.’s INF, for control), and neither is computed. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-100); worth reading as the clearest statement of the reproduced/reproducing distinction and a tidy, well-scoped settlement of the material-overlap dispute. Its value is conceptual. Its two measures are recipes that are never computed, and the autonomy recipe does not match its own verbal definition. |
| LIT-159 v4 | If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious | Schwitzgebel (2014), DOI-10.1007/s11098-014-0387-8. A conditional, informal argument. Any materialist criterion liberal enough to credit rabbits (and rabbit-level distributed aliens, the “squidbits”) and behaviourally human-like but oddly built aliens (Sirian supersquids, Antarean antheads) with consciousness also credits the United States. On this argument the US meets the usual materialist marks of consciousness: sophisticated information processing (roughly 10^14 person-to-person visual “connections”, comparable to the brain’s about 10^14 synapses), goal-directed environmental responsiveness, self-representation and historical embedding. The only exits are eliminativism, extreme sparseness or neurochauvinism, each costlier than the conclusion. The paper argues for no universal criterion. It ends undecided between three readings: US consciousness, a challenge to materialists, or grounds to distrust universal metaphysics of mind. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-131); read in full (manuscript) 2026-09-26; the canonical over-generation argument against liberal materialist criteria of consciousness, and the standard critique of anti-nesting and exclusion principles, worth reading for anyone who attributes consciousness from functional or indicator properties. |
| LIT-167 v3 | The Organism | Baedke (2025), DOI-10.1017/9781009495035. Baedke treats “organism” as a nexus concept with an organizational dimension and a relational dimension, joined by the various kinds of biological individuality. He argues that the standard “persister” (self-maintenance, closure) criterion cannot single organisms out, because colonies, holobionts and ecosystems meet it too, and that organisms are also “overcomers”, able to destabilize and reorganize their own closure. Organisms are then individuated relationally by tracing diachronic causal paths in the unrolled O/E model of Baedke et al. 2021 (LIT-110). The overcomer claim rests on three illustrative cases, anglerfish, sea slug and jumping ant, and is asserted, not shown, to hold of organisms only (p. 40). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-148); worth reading as a compact, open-access and historically well-informed synthesis of the organism/individuality debate, and as the clearest statement of the persister-vs-overcomer distinction. Its positive account is, in the author’s words, drawn “with rough brushstrokes” (p. 51), so cite it for the problem statement and the distinction, not as having settled organism individuation. |
| LIT-168 v3 | Biological Individuals | Wilson & Barker (2007), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/biology-individual/. A survey that maps biological individuals by crossing two axes: organism / some parts of organisms / some groups of organisms, against living agent (physiological) / Darwinian (evolutionary) individual. The result is nine regions, each given one example (fruit fly, gene, eusocial colony, lysosome, clade, heart, coral reef, virus, squid+Vibrio). “Part” is never defined, and the entry gives no criterion for which parts or groups count: the placements are the authors’ tentative judgements, “moving from less contentious to more contentious examples” (§7). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-114); worth reading as the standard map of the biological-individuality literature up to 2023 and the hub for this record’s cluster (LIT-049, LIT-157, LIT-188, LIT-142, LIT-210); it is a survey with one tentative framework of its own, not an argument for a thesis, and for parthood it only supplies examples. |
| LIT-188 v5 | Scaffolding individuality: coordination, cooperation, collaboration and community | Griesemer & Shavit (2023), DOI-10.1098/rstb.2021.0398. The paper sets out an idealized three-stage sequence of interaction types, which it calls a “first and rough sketch” (§1). Stage 1 is coordination in collections (pairwise, “aggregative” interactions of co-located individuals). Stage 2 is cooperation in conexuses (a connected web of binary interactions whose benefits can still be counted per member). Stage 3 is collaboration in communities: heterogeneous multi-way interactions around a shared goal, in which generatively entrenched “core” interactions give organizational closure. Table 1 puts the transition to a new level of individuality between stages 2 and 3 only. The paper asserts, rather than argues, that this describes evolutionary transitions non-circularly and that individuality is a special case of collectivity. Its one argued conclusion is hedged: community-level inheritance “seem[s] likely to evolve in tandem” with community-level individuality (§3). | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-173); a short programmatic sketch, and the authors call it one. It is worth knowing as the compact statement of Griesemer’s scaffolding, reproducer and generative-entrenchment view applied to human social transitions. Its headline claims (non-circularity; individuality as a special case of collectivity) appear only in the abstract. Two things would settle it: the model of community “reliability” and endogenization the authors promise in §2 (“We hope to explore such models in future work”), or an application of the 3Cs to a worked case, such as the companion Neolithic paper (LIT-1935, registered unread), that separates collection, conexus and community by measurable criteria. Re-read 2026-11-01 (NOTE-173, version 3). |
| LIT-310 v2 | A topos foundation for theories of physics: IV. Categories of systems | Döring & Isham (2008), DOI-10.1063/1.2883826. Proposes axioms for a category Sys of physical systems, symmetric-monoidal under composite ⋄ and under disjoint sum ⊔, whose arrows are translations of local languages. Each arrow j : S₁ → S is realised by a left-exact functor τ(j) between the systems’ topoi, together with arrows φ(j) : Σ_{S₁} → τ(j)Σ_S and β(j) : τ(j)R_S → R_{S₁}. Classical physics satisfies the scheme exactly. In quantum theory the disjoint sum H₁⊕H₂ satisfies it (the pulled-back arrow of Â₁⊕Â₂ is δ̆(A₁)), but the composite H₁⊗H₂ does not: the natural pull-back of δ̆(A₁) differs from δ̆(A₁⊗1̂) off the image of V(H₁), which the authors attribute to “operator entanglement”. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-285); promising and unproven. The rules are explicitly “experimental”, the quantum composite fails the commutativity condition the rules state, and the key negative claims ((4.46), and that no operator B̂ gives the pulled-back arrow) are asserted, not shown. What would settle it is a proof of (4.46) and of the non-existence of B̂, plus a variant of the rules (or of the context category) under which tensor-product composites satisfy (3.18). |
| LIT-378 | ’What is a Thing?’: Topos Theory in the Foundations of Physics | Döring & Isham (2008), arXiv:0803.0417. A 212-page restatement of the topos programme of papers I–IV. A theory of a system S is a representation of a typed language L(S) in a topos. In quantum theory the topos is presheaves on the poset V(H) of abelian von Neumann subalgebras, propositions are clopen sub-objects of the spectral presheaf Σ via daseinisation, a pure state gives sieve-valued truth values ν(A ε Δ; ψ)V = {V′ ⊆ V | ⟨ψ|δ(Ê[A∈Δ]){V′}|ψ⟩ = 1}, and each bounded self-adjoint  becomes an arrow Σ → ℝ^↔ whose values are monotone intervals over subcontexts. Classical physics fits its axioms for composite systems exactly; quantum theory fits the disjoint sum but not the tensor-product composite. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-326); worth reading as the one-volume statement of the Döring–Isham topos programme. It is, by the authors’ own account (p. 14), “partly an amalgam” of papers I–IV (LIT-343, LIT-335, LIT-299, LIT-310), with corrections and some new material. The new material is the value of a quantity in a pseudo-state and the inverse-image link between L(S) and PL(S) (§§8.5–8.8, Thm 8.6), the algebra of the candidate quantity-value objects (§9.3), the Boolean-subalgebra base category (§5.5.3), Kochen–Specker as a lifting obstruction (§6.6), and a long speculative §14–15. It adds no new no-go result. Its proofs are as sketchy as the series’ at the same places: Sub_cl(Σ) is Heyting (Thm 16.1) with ⇒ left unwritten, and ι : O → P_clΣ natural and monic is left to the reader. A reader who has read I–IV gains only §§8.5–8.8, 9.3 and 14; a reader new to the programme should start here. |
| LIT-391 v4 | Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents | List & Pettit (2011), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199591565.001.0001. Per its publisher, the book argues that “there really are group or corporate agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them”, and that social science, law, morality and politics must take account of this. The account is said to be “entirely unmysterious” and grounded in social choice theory, economics and philosophy. Three parts: the logical possibility of group agents (conditions of agency, aggregation of attitudes, structure), their organisational design (epistemic, incentive-compatibility and control desiderata), and their normative status (responsibility, personhood, identification). Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (Oxford Academic is paywalled, and neither author has posted the book or draft chapters), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the book-length case that organised groups are agents over and above their members, which is the composition side’s premise in the Minsky–Schwitzgebel bridge; whether it says anything about group consciousness is unknown from what was seen. Rechecked 2026-10-04 with no lawful copy found; two shorter papers by the authors stating Part I’s supervenience thesis were read and filed instead (LIT-705, LIT-700), and the book stays Unavailable because a paper is not a reading of it. |
| LIT-392 | Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia | Chalmers (1995), in T. Metzinger (ed.), Conscious Experience (Imprint Academic, co-published in Paderborn). Principle: any system with the same fine-grained functional organisation as a conscious system has qualitatively identical experiences. Replace neurons gradually with silicon chips that keep the organisation. If the end point lacked experience, a midpoint would be a rational being wrong about all its experience (“fading qualia”). If it differed in experience, a switch between two circuits would flip experience with no possible noticing (“dancing qualia”). Both are judged implausible, so absent and inverted qualia are nomologically impossible. The argument extends explicitly to a population of homunculi. The result is “nonreductive functionalism”: organisation fixes experience with natural, not metaphysical, necessity. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-347); worth reading as the full statement of the principle of organizational invariance and the fading- and dancing-qualia arguments for it. Cite it carefully: the principle is conditional on fine-grained functional isomorphism to a system already conscious. It covers silicon replacement and, by the paper’s own §3 extension, a population of homunculi that implements a human’s neural organisation. It does not cover a system whose organisation is merely similar in kind to a conscious one, so it does not license Schwitzgebel’s step to the United States (LIT-159). The conclusion is nomological, not metaphysical (“nonreductive functionalism”), and it is a plausibility argument by the author’s own account. |
| LIT-393 v2 | Artificial Intelligence as Philosophy and as Psychology | Dennett (1978), ch. 7 of Brainstorms; also in Ringle (ed.) 1979. Unread here. By Stich’s 1980 summary, which Dennett accepted: the worry that internal representations need a homunculus to read them (“Hume’s Problem”) is unfounded, because homunculi are harmless if they are stupider than the whole. A “team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi” can produce intelligent behaviour, each explained by stupider ones, until they can be “replaced by a machine”; AI organises “armies of such idiots”. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from catalogue records and a contemporary summary, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Brainstorms (1978) is lending-only at the Internet Archive, the MIT Press and Project MUSE chapters are paywalled (MUSE: “Open Access: No”), the Tufts Digital Library holds Dennett’s papers but not this essay, and PhilPapers was blocked. What the essay says about homunculi is known here only through Stich’s 1980 critical notice of Brainstorms, which quotes it with page numbers and which Dennett, replying in the same issue, said he had “no quarrel with”. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-395 | The Combination Problem for Panpsychism | Chalmers (2016/2017), in Brüntrup & Jaskolla (eds), Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives, OUP, pp. 179–214. How could micro-experiences constitute a macro-subject? The problem splits into subject, quality and structure versions; each yields an argument against constitutive (Russellian) panpsychism, of which the subject-summing and structural mismatch arguments are the strongest. Emergent, autonomous and identity panpsychism avoid combination at a cost in mental causation or physics. Phenomenal bonding, quantum holism, small palettes and informational composition are judged most worth pursuing. No solution is offered. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-358), from the author’s posted draft, not the published chapter; worth reading as the map of the combination problem: it splits the problem into subject, quality and structure versions (plus unity, boundary, awareness and grain), turns each into an argument, and sorts every response into emergent, autonomous, identity or combinatorial panpsychism. It solves nothing and says so. Its conclusions are judgements of promise (“phenomenal bonding or quantum holism”, “principles of informational composition”), not results. For this record its value is that the subject-summing argument is James’s argument against group minds, and that its footnote 7 objects to IIT’s exclusion postulate on grounds that have nothing to do with groups. |
| LIT-396 v3 | Psychological Predicates | Putnam (1967), in Capitan & Merrill (eds.), Art, Mind, and Religion (Proceedings of the 1965 Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy), University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 37–48; reprinted as “The Nature of Mental States”. It proposes, as an empirical hypothesis, that pain is a functional state of a whole organism, a state of a probabilistic automaton fixed by its machine table, rather than a brain state. Condition (3) of the hypothesis is the anti-nesting stipulation: no pain-feeler “possesses a decomposition into parts which separately possess Descriptions” of the pain-capable kind, introduced only “to rule out such ‘organisms’ (if they can count as such) as swarms of bees as single pain-feelers”. | Unfetched — not read in full: the original (Art, Mind, and Religion, pp. 37–48) is closed on JSTOR. The University of Pittsburgh’s page images sit behind a bot challenge I could not pass, and the Internet Archive copy of the 1975 reprint is print-disabled only. What was read is MIT’s 24.09x course excerpt of the 1975 reprint (“The Nature of Mental States”), recorded as a Skimmed reading in NOTE-335. That excerpt carries the four-clause hypothesis verbatim, including the anti-nesting condition (3) and its one-sentence motive. A course copy of the whole reprint was located at home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/putnam.nature.mental.states.pdf. On 2026-10-30 it failed TLS verification from this client (curl error 60: the chain served ends at emSign Root CA - G1, which this client does not trust; verification was not overridden). It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied, not on merit. Free copy: home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/putnam.nature.mental.states.pdf. |
| LIT-399 | Plain Talk About Neurodevelopmental Epistemology | Minsky (1977), MIT AI Memo 430, also IJCAI-77 pp. 1083–1092. Takes the mind as an organised society of simple “agents”, a theory credited to joint work with Papert, and asks how such agents could communicate without language. The proposal: no messages at all, since each argument lives at a fixed location on shared channels (“c-lines”) that the agents themselves constitute as short-term memory. A specificity gradient confines low-level agents to local sub-societies, and a case-shift moves an object of attention into a better-described slot. The paper conjectures that these internal cases precede, and shape, the cases of natural language. Openly speculative. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-344); worth reading as the earliest of Minsky’s own papers in this record to state the society-of-agents view, then called “The Society of Minds” (Note 1), and as its first worked mechanism: agents communicate by fixed-location channels (“c-lines”) instead of messages. It is openly speculative (“a model of scientific irresponsibility”, p. 1085), with no data and no program. Read it for the communication scheme, the “specificity gradient”, the case-shift mechanism and the conjecture that cognitive cases precede and shape linguistic ones; do not read it as evidence for any of them. That it is the first published statement of the idea is the usual attribution, and this reading could not confirm it (see NOTE-344). |
| LIT-400 | Minds, brains, and programs | Searle (1980), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3(3):417–424. A man who knows no Chinese, locked in a room with rules in English for manipulating Chinese symbols, can answer Chinese questions as well as a native speaker yet understands nothing; so instantiating a program is never by itself sufficient for intentionality (“strong AI” is false). Six replies are answered, the systems reply by letting the man internalise the whole room. Only something with causal powers equivalent to a brain’s could think; programs have syntax but no semantics. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-349); worth reading as the source of the Chinese room and of the six replies (systems, robot, brain simulator, combination, other minds, many mansions) the debate still uses, in Searle’s own words. Read it for its scope: the target is “strong AI”, the claim that instantiating the right program is by itself sufficient for understanding, and Searle grants that machines, including artifacts with the brain’s causal powers, could think. The argument is about understanding and intentionality; consciousness is mentioned, not argued. Its answer to the systems reply (internalise the room) is the part that bears on minds of parts, and it is asserted rather than shown: Searle says the subsystem is “simply a part of” the man, which is what the reply denies. |
| LIT-401 | What is it like to be a group agent? | List (2016), DOI-10.1111/nous.12162. Group agents (firms, courts, states) are real agents in a thin functionalist sense, and they can have consciousness as awareness. Whether they have phenomenal consciousness depends on which psycho-physical bridge principle is true. Under IIT, List argues informally that a group agent’s Φ is low: groups decompose into self-contained units, their steering bodies keep working when partly randomised, and most of their processing happens inside individuals. The exclusion postulate would deny group consciousness even if group Φ were high. So group agents are (close to) not conscious, which List uses to ground a normative asymmetry: groups have only derivative rights. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-340); the standard reply to LIT-159 from the group-agency side: it grants that organised groups are agents with functional awareness and argues, conditionally on IIT, that they have little or no phenomenal consciousness. Worth reading for its separation of agency from experience and for its three reasons why a group agent’s Φ should be low. The low-Φ verdict is argued informally, with no Φ computed for any group, and the paper never answers the reply Schwitzgebel had already made to the objection its third reason restates. |
| LIT-402 | K-Lines: A Theory of Memory | Minsky (1979/1980), MIT AI Memo 516; Cognitive Science 4(2):117–133. “The function of a memory is to re-create a state of mind.” On a memorable event a K-node is made, and its K-line attaches to the agents then active. Reactivated, it re-imposes that partial mental state, but by the level-band principle only on an intermediate band of levels, so the present is seen as an instance of the past without hallucinating the old answer. K-lines attach mainly to earlier K-nodes, forming a K-pyramid against the perceptual P-pyramid, and cross-exclusion lets conflicting details cancel into abstraction. Read from the memo; a programme statement, with no simulation. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 from the MIT AI Memo 516 text (NOTE-352), not the Cognitive Science version, which was not reachable; worth reading as the society-of-mind programme’s theory of memory and the first place Minsky’s own text uses the phrase “Society of Mind”. The idea to take away is that a memory re-creates a partial mental state rather than retrieving a stored description, and its level-band principle: re-enact only an intermediate band of the original state, so the present problem is seen as an instance of the remembered one. The second half is, by its author’s account, not constructive (“from this point, the reader can assume that difficulties in understanding are my fault”), and nothing is simulated or measured. |
| LIT-404 | Does a rock implement every finite-state automaton? | Chalmers (1996), Synthese 108(3):309–333. Putnam’s proof that every open system implements every finite-state automaton fails, because implementation needs reliable, counterfactual-supporting transitions for every formal state. Repaired, it survives only for weak formalisms: a clock and a dial implement every inputless FSA, and an input memory and a dial upgrade any system with the right input–output dependencies to every FSA with them. Combinatorial-state automata, whose states are vectors of independently varying components in distinct physical regions, put a strong constraint on implementation. That keeps computation available as a foundation for the theory of mind. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-342), from the author’s HTML copy, not the Synthese typeset text; worth reading as the standard reply to Putnam’s and Searle’s triviality arguments and as the source of the combinatorial-state automaton (CSA). Its result is real but partial: implementation needs counterfactual-supporting transitions over all formal states, inputless FSAs are trivially implemented by any clock plus dial, FSAs with input are implemented by any system with the right input–output dependencies plus an input memory and a dial, and CSAs escape only because a blind implementation must grow by a factor of n per step. Chalmers leaves two open problems (logically possible false implementations, and an overstrict one-region-per-component condition). For this record it decides which formalism a China-brain argument has to be stated in, and it lets one physical system host two minds. |
| LIT-405 | Where Am I? | Dennett (1978), the closing essay of Brainstorms. A narrator’s brain (“Yorick”) is kept in a vat in Houston and radio-linked to his body (“Hamlet”) under Tulsa. Where is he? Not simply where the body is, and not simply where the brain is: he cannot think “here” of the vat. He favours being wherever his point of view is, finds that unclear, and when the links fail finds himself “in Houston”. A computer duplicate (“Hubert”) runs in step with Yorick, and either can drive a new body with no detectable switch. The essay ends when the two drift out of step and a second person speaks through the body. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-338), in a retyped course copy, not the printed book; worth reading as the founding thought experiment on where a person is when brain and body are apart, and the place the record’s threads on extended vehicles, scattered individuals and functional duplicates meet. It is fiction with a philosophical argument inside it. It tries three answers to “where am I?” (where the body is, where the brain is, where the point of view is), favours the third, admits it is unclear, and ends by showing that two synchronised brains can drift into two persons. It argues by intuition pump and settles nothing; the narrator calls one of its answers a truth “of underwhelming significance”. |
| LIT-407 | Troubles with Functionalism | Block (1978), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 9:261–325. Functionalism ties mental states to the world only through inputs and outputs, so it is “liberal”: a body run by a billion people with radios, each implementing one line of your machine table (the nation-of-China system), would be functionally equivalent to you, yet there is prima facie doubt that it has qualia. Putnam’s stipulation that no pain-feeler has parts with pain-feeler organisation is an ad hoc patch that fails on its own terms. Psychofunctionalism escapes the doubt for beliefs but perhaps not for qualia, and no specification of inputs and outputs avoids both liberalism and chauvinism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-366); worth reading as the source of the homunculi-headed robot and the nation-of-China system, and of the first published objection to Putnam’s anti-nesting stipulation. Cite it for two things that are easy to run together: the Absent Qualia Argument (a Functional simulation built from people is prima facie without qualia), and the case that Putnam’s condition is ad hoc (§1.5). Block grounds the doubt about the China system in its being unlike us psychologically and neurally and designed to mimic us, not in its parts having minds (n. 19). He also grants that a Psychofunctional homunculi-head could have beliefs (§2.1). So it is not a source for “a whole made of minded parts cannot be conscious”. |
| LIT-409 | How a materialist can deny that the United States is probably conscious – response to Schwitzgebel | Kammerer (2015), DOI-10.1007/s11406-015-9653-z. A short reply to LIT-159 proposing the Sophisticated Anti-Nesting Principle (SAP). A whole W that has a functional property P normally sufficient for a conscious state S lacks S when some part of W plays a role that (A) requires the part to have conscious states representing W and (B) is indispensable: without some part playing such a role, W would lack P. The SAP keeps Schwitzgebel’s antheads and Block’s tiny-people neurons conscious, admits some group consciousness, and denies it to the US, whose citizens represent the US and could not be replaced by parts that do not. It is justified by an Occam-style rule against ascribing consciousness where other subjects’ states explain the behaviour. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-362); the most careful anti-nesting principle in the record, and the one aimed directly at LIT-159. Worth reading because it draws the line that matters for the society-of-mind bridge: a whole is denied a conscious state only when the functional organisation that would ground it runs through parts that consciously represent the whole and could not be replaced by parts that do not. Its application to the United States rests on an asserted counterfactual, and its justification is an Occam-style principle the author says needs further work. Schwitzgebel replied in Philosophia 44 (2016). |
| LIT-412 v2 | Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension | Clark (2008), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195333213.001.0001. Clark’s book-length defence of the extended mind: a tour of embodied, situated and extended cognition, a reply to its critics, and a case for treating “some coalitions of biological and non-biological resources as the extended cognitive circuitry of individual minds”. Unread: filed from the publisher’s description and contents. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-14 for a lawful full text, none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex lists the OUP DOI, closed, a CiteSeerX cache and an institutional e-book handle (hdl.handle.net/2078/ebook:67780), which is licensed access, not an open copy; Unpaywall finds no open copy; Oxford Academic returned a Cloudflare 403; the Internet Archive holds the book only as controlled lending and as an ‘opensource’ upload of the in-copyright book, which was not used. The foreword (LIT-421) and the appendix (LIT-097) are read separately. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-413 v2 | The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul | Hofstadter & Dennett (eds.) (1981), Basic Books. An anthology of 27 selections, fiction and philosophy, on self, soul and consciousness, each followed by a “Reflections” by the editors. Among them are Turing’s imitation-game paper (LIT-394), Searle’s Chinese room (LIT-400), Nagel’s bat (LIT-096), Dennett’s “Where Am I?” and Hofstadter’s “Prelude … Ant Fugue” from GEB (LIT-437). Unread: registered from the catalogue record and a contents note; the Reflections, which are the editors’ own contribution, were not seen. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the Library of Congress catalogue record, the publisher’s page and a library contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans of the 1981 Basic Books, Harvester, Bantam and Penguin printings are all lending-only, HathiTrust has no record for the LCCN, and no publisher, editor or Tufts-archive copy is posted. The editors’ Reflections are unread. Two of the selections were read in full from lawful copies of their first publications and filed on their own: Turing (LIT-394) and Searle (LIT-400). |
| LIT-415 | Extended Cognition and Extended Consciousness | Chalmers (2019), DOI-10.1093/oso/9780190662813.003.0002. The 1998 extended-mind thesis as stated is too weak, since opponents accept extension in wired-in “extended circuit” cases. The interesting thesis is that mental states can be partly constituted by external entities in virtue of the subject’s sensorimotor interaction with them. Consciousness does not extend this way, on the proposal that it requires information directly available for global control, and perceptually mediated availability is indirect. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-356); worth reading as Chalmers’s own later statement of what the extended-mind thesis of LIT-097 is and where it stops. It does two things. It replaces the 1998 paper’s implicit thesis, which it concedes is too weak because even the critics accept it for wired-in “extended circuit” cases, with one that requires constitution “in virtue of the subject’s sensorimotor interaction” (§1). And it argues that consciousness does not extend, because consciousness needs information directly available for global control and perception makes availability indirect (§3). Both are proposals, argued in a short chapter: the thesis is offered as “extensionally correct”, and the directness account is offered as an explanation of why there are no plausible cases, not as a knockdown. |
| LIT-418 v2 | Society of mind: A response to four reviews | Minsky (1991), Artificial Intelligence 48(3):371–396. Minsky’s reply, closing a review symposium, to four reviews of The Society of Mind in the same issue: by Michael G. Dyer, Matthew Ginsberg, George N. Reeke and Stephen W. Smoliar. Unread: the article is closed access and no copy was reached. Singh (2003) quotes it on why Minsky kept the words “agent” and “agency”, and draws on it for a mechanism by which agents with different representations could communicate. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-01 from the Crossref and Elsevier metadata of the article and of the issue it closes, not read: the article is closed access (Unpaywall and OpenAlex find no open copy, Semantic Scholar marks it closed, ScienceDirect refused the request), and no author copy was found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. The four reviews it answers are listed below from the issue’s contents, and are not filed. |
| LIT-419 v2 | Form, Function, and Feel | Lycan (1981), The Journal of Philosophy 78(1):24–50, DOI-10.2307/2025395. Filed as a statement of homuncular functionalism, the view Lycan’s Wikipedia entry says he advocates, and as the reply Schwitzgebel points to against Block’s nation-of-China intuition. Unread: no lawful full text was reachable, so its arguments are not stated here. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-02 from the bibliographic records (Crossref, the Philosophy Documentation Center), not read: no lawful full text could be reached. JSTOR and PDC are paywalled, Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar list no open copy, and no author copy was found. No NOTE is filed. What it argues is known here only from how Schwitzgebel and Block’s acknowledgements place it, which is not a reading. |
| LIT-421 | Foreword | Chalmers (2008), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195333213.002.0007. The co-author’s retrospective on the extended mind: his iPhone is “part of my mind already”. The one principled objection is that perception and action bound the mental. His reply is revisionist and contextualist: whether Otto’s belief counts as extended flips with explanatory purpose. No Otto-style twin case works for consciousness, so he tentatively keeps an internal conscious core. The thesis needs only a weak, parity-style functionalism and is compatible with dualism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-369); worth reading as the shortest statement of where Chalmers stands on the thesis he co-authored, ten years on. Three things in eight pages: the iPhone as a present-day Otto’s notebook; the perception-action boundary as the one principled objection, answered by explanatory revisionism and a “Necker cube” view on which whether Otto’s belief is extended depends on explanatory purpose; and a tentative internal “conscious core”, resting on the failure of any Otto-style twin case for consciousness. It is a foreword: every position is stated briefly and several are offered as “perhaps”. |
| LIT-422 | Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition | Rupert (2004), DOI-10.5840/jphil2004101826. The embedded hypothesis (HEMC: cognition leans heavily on external props, but is the organism’s) competes with the extended one (HEC), and conservatism favours HEMC unless HEC buys explanatory power. It does not. LIT-097’s criteria either make phone directories into beliefs or privilege the organism, and memory research (interference, the generation effect, conversation) shows internal and external storage are different kinds. A generic kind covering both does no work. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-343), in the author’s pre-publication version; worth reading as the case that a conservative “embedded” hypothesis explains everything the extended hypothesis does, and as the empirical version of the critique. Its two arguments: a dilemma on LIT-097’s past-endorsement criterion (keep it and the organism is privileged after all; drop it and directory assistance gives Otto beliefs about every listed phone number), and memory research (interference, the generation effect, conversation) showing internal and external storage behave as different kinds, so that a kind covering both does no explanatory work. Its strength is that it argues from cognitive science rather than intuition; its limit is that the empirical differences are about fine-grained profiles, which a defender can accept and still claim a coarse kind. |
| LIT-426 v2 | Macrocognition: A Theory of Distributed Minds and Collective Intentionality | Huebner (2014), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199926275.001.0001. Per its publisher, the book argues that genuine cognition requires flexible goal-directed behaviour, which requires specialised representational systems integrated so as to cope fluidly with the environment, and so that collective mentality “should be posited where and only where specialized subroutines are integrated to yield goal-directed behavior that is sensitive to the concerns that are relevant to a group as such”. On this view there are many kinds of collective minds, some more like honeybees or cats than people, and groups are unlikely to be full “believers”. Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (Oxford Academic is paywalled, the Internet Archive copy is lending-only, and no author-posted draft was found), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Of the four works filed for the Minsky–Schwitzgebel bridge it is the one whose criterion for a collective mind is itself a decomposition criterion: mentality wherever specialised subroutines are integrated into goal-directed behaviour sensitive to the group’s concerns. A close reading is the most likely of the four to change the bridge. |
| LIT-429 v2 | The Society of Mind | Minsky (1986), Simon & Schuster. The book-length statement of the Society of Mind programme, begun with Seymour Papert in the early 1970s. A mind is a society of many small agents, each mindless by itself, and intelligence comes from their diversity and organisation, not from one principle. The publisher presents it as a puzzle of self-contained one-page pieces that assemble into a theory. Unread: no lawful full text was reachable, so it is registered from the publisher’s description and the contents list. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-01 from the publisher’s description, the Library of Congress catalogue record and the Google Books contents list, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive copies are lending-only, HathiTrust is search-only, and Minsky’s web page did not post the book. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. Its programme is read here at second hand through Singh’s exposition (LIT-444) and at first hand through the draft of its sequel (LIT-432). |
| LIT-432 | The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind | Minsky (2006), Simon & Schuster, read in the author’s 2005 draft. Emotions are Ways to Think, not a separate faculty. Each emotional state turns some mental resources on and others off, by Selectors that Critics trigger when they recognise a type of problem. The same machinery serves ordinary thinking. The book adds six levels of mental activity, from instinctive reaction to self-conscious reflection. It treats “consciousness”, “emotion” and “pain” as suitcase words for many processes, and the Self as a network of partial self-models. It is a design argued from examples. Against Damasio, it treats the body as one more resource the brain uses, not the stuff of emotion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 in the author’s posted draft of 2005 (NOTE-348), not in the published book; worth reading as the late, fullest statement of the Society of Mind programme. It is the one where emotion is put inside thinking: an emotional state is a selection of mental resources switched on and off, made by Selectors that Critics trigger, and so it is a Way to Think. Read it as a design proposal argued by examples, not as evidence. It reports no experiment, Minsky labels several of its central ideas his own conjectures, and it sets the body to the side of emotion, against the bodily account of Damasio (LIT-384, LIT-388) that this record holds. |
| LIT-436 | Intelligence without representation | Brooks (1991), Artificial Intelligence 47:139–159, written in 1987. Argues that AI should be built incrementally from complete autonomous “Creatures” tested in the real world, and that the system should be decomposed by activity into parallel layers, each connecting sensing to action, not by function into perception, a central reasoner and action. His robots have no central representation and no central control: each layer is a fixed network of simple finite-state machines, and a higher layer subsumes a lower one by suppressing or inhibiting its wires. Coherent behaviour emerges, “in the eye of an observer”, from competing behaviours. Hypothesis: representation is the wrong unit of abstraction for the bulk of intelligence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-351) from the copy Brooks posts; worth reading as the decomposition side built and run: a robot whose purposive behaviour comes from parallel layers of simple finite-state machines with no central representation and no central control, which Brooks likens to Minsky’s account of human behaviour. The coherence of the whole, he says, exists “in the eye of an observer”. The evidence is three layers on one physical robot, described rather than measured. It makes no claim about minds or experience and disclaims interest in the philosophy. |
| LIT-438 | The bounds of cognition | Adams & Aizawa (2001), DOI-10.1080/09515080120033571. Against LIT-097, Dennett, Donald and Hutchins: cognition has two necessary marks, non-derived content and a kind of causal processing found in brains. Notebooks, screens and tools have only derived content and work by different processes, so actual cognition is brain-bound as a contingent fact. Causal coupling does not extend a process, and brain-plus-tool systems are too motley for a science. They grant the parity principle. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-368); worth reading as the first sustained reply to LIT-097 and the source of the “mark of the cognitive” line of criticism. It grants parity and argues that cognition has two necessary marks, non-derived content and a distinctive kind of causal process, which notebooks, screens and tools lack as a matter of contingent fact; and that brain-plus-tool systems are too motley to support a science. Read it for that structure, not for proofs: both marks are assumed (“we assume without argument”), and the processing differences it lists are asserted from common knowledge, not measured. The phrase “coupling-constitution fallacy” is not in this paper; it comes from the authors’ later work. |
| LIT-439 | The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition | Levin (2019), Frontiers in Psychology 10:2688. Proposes “Scale-Free Cognition”: an Individual or Self is the set of parts that pursue a goal together, bounded by the farthest events in space and time it can measure and try to change (its “cognitive light cone”). Selves scale up from homeostatic loops through memory and anticipation, and cells merge into larger Selves by sharing bioelectric state through gap junctions; cancer is the boundary shrinking back to one cell. Because every level that pursues its own goal is a Self, most living systems hold many nested, coexisting Selves, “not one, as implied by Integrated Information Theory”. Levin’s “Self” is a goal-pursuing collective, an agent and an individual in this record’s terms; the essay gives no account of a self as subject. A hypothesis essay: no model and no new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-341); worth reading as the composition-side statement that agency is nested by default: a Self is whatever set of parts pursues a goal together, so cells, organs, organisms and swarms are Selves at once, each bounded by its “cognitive light cone”. It is a hypothesis-and-theory essay with no model, no measurement procedure for the light cone and no data of its own. Its one sentence against IIT’s single-Self picture is asserted in a bracket, not argued, and its consciousness claims are confined to a closing speculation. |
| LIT-442 | The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity | Dennett (1992), in Kessel, Cole & Johnson (eds.), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, Erlbaum. A self is an abstractum, “a theorist’s fiction”, like a centre of gravity: no part of the brain, but a well-behaved posit of interpretation. It is like a fictional character, indeterminate beyond what its “text” fixes, and a selfless process can produce one (a novel-writing robot whose story is true of it). Brains are bundles of partly autonomous systems that make themselves cohere into one autobiography; when the story coheres around two points, there are two selves. Read in a copy-edited transcription. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-364), in a third party’s copy-edited transcription of the text Dennett posted, not in the Erlbaum printing; worth reading as the short, canonical statement that a self is an abstractum, a “theorist’s fiction” of the same kind as a centre of gravity, posited by interpretation around which a life’s narrative coheres. Read it as an analogy and two thought experiments (the novel-writing robot “Gilbert”, the Updike sequel), not as an argument from evidence. Its evolutionary story of self-talk is labelled speculation, and its empirical support (Gazzaniga’s split-brain work, multiple personality cases) is cited, not shown. |
| LIT-444 | Examining the Society of Mind | Singh (2003), Computing and Informatics 22(6):521–543. A sympathetic exposition of Minsky’s Society of Mind by his student. It traces the theory’s history: Minsky and Papert’s 1970s copy-demo robot, the procedure-bearing frames of 1974, the abandoned 1976 book drafts, and the 1977 and 1980 papers. It catalogues the mechanisms and how agents communicate without shared symbols. It finds resemblances in Bayes nets, case-based reasoning, blackboards, Cyc, Soar and multiagent systems, none of which it calls a Society of Mind. Its verdict is that the theory has never been implemented. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-339); worth reading as the shortest reliable map of The Society of Mind (LIT-429), written by the student who worked with Minsky on its sequel. It gives the theory’s history from the 1970s memos, a catalogue of its mechanisms (agents and agencies, K-lines, nemes and nomes, frames and transframes, difference-engines, censors, A- and B-brains, ways agents communicate and grow), and a survey of later AI it resembles. It is an exposition, not a test: it reports no implementation and quotes the theory more than it argues for it. Its history leans on unpublished 1976 drafts that only the author saw. |
| LIT-445 | From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0 | Oizumi, Albantakis & Tononi (2014), PLoS Computational Biology 10(5):e1003588. IIT 3.0 states five axioms of experience (existence, composition, information, integration, exclusion), turns each into a postulate about mechanisms in a state, and identifies an experience with the maximally irreducible conceptual structure of a “complex”. Exclusion makes a complex a local maximum of integrated conceptual information Φ over all overlapping sets of elements, so complexes cannot overlap and no subset or superset of a complex is conscious. Worked logic-gate examples show minor complexes beside a major one, an inactive network that is conscious, a minimally conscious photodiode, and a feed-forward “zombie” functionally equivalent to a conscious system. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-365), equations excepted; worth reading as the formal statement of the exclusion postulate that Schwitzgebel’s 2014 manuscript (LIT-159) attacks: “of all overlapping sets of elements, only one set can be conscious”, a complex being a local maximum of Φ against every overlapping set. It is IIT’s anti-nesting principle, stated as a postulate and motivated only by the phenomenological exclusion axiom; the paper’s Occam’s-razor argument is given for exclusion within a mechanism, not between systems. It also says plainly that function does not fix consciousness, which is IIT’s answer to whether agency built from parts brings experience with it. |
| LIT-446 | Survival and Identity | Lewis (1976), DOI-10.1525/9780520353060-002. What matters in survival is mental continuity and connectedness (the R-relation among person-stages), and it is also identity, because the two answers relate different things. Persons are maximal R-interrelated aggregates of stages, so the I-relation (being stages of one person) is the R-relation in every possible case. Fission and fusion are two persons sharing stages, counted as one by “tensed identity”; Methuselah is a continuum of overlapping 137-year persons; degrees of personal identity come from supervaluating over cut-offs for R. Against Perry: two persons, not three, took part in a fission. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-373), from a scan of the 1976 printing posted on Andrew M. Bailey’s “Papers by David Lewis” page, OCR’d here; worth reading as the four-dimensionalist reconciliation of Parfit with common sense, and the source of stage-sharing and counting by tensed identity. It agrees with Parfit that what matters is mental continuity and connectedness, the R-relation among person-stages, and denies that this conflicts with identity: persons are maximal R-interrelated aggregates of stages, so the relation of being stages of one person is the R-relation. Fission becomes two persons sharing their early stages, and degrees are handled by supervaluation. A reconciliation by redefinition of counting, which Lewis grants is “somewhat counterintuitive”. |
| LIT-451 | Of Personal Identity | Hume (1739), Treatise 1.4.6, with the Appendix (1740). There is no impression of a self, “constant and invariable”, so no idea of one: introspection finds only “some particular perception or other”, and the mind is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. The identity we ascribe to it is “fictitious”, like that of plants, ships and churches: an easy transition of the imagination along resemblance and causation, with memory discovering rather than producing it, so that hard cases are “grammatical” rather than philosophical. The Appendix retracts the account of the connecting principle: two principles he cannot reconcile or renounce leave the matter “too hard for my understanding”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-386), in the Merivale–Millican critical text on davidhume.org, with the Appendix’s second thoughts (App. 10–21); worth reading as the founding statement of the bundle view and the first published retraction of it. The section finds no impression of a self, calls the mind “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”, and explains our ascription of identity to it as a fiction of the imagination run on resemblance and causation, the same fiction that makes a repaired ship or a rebuilt church “the same”. The Appendix then confesses that it cannot explain what unites the perceptions and leaves the problem “too hard for my understanding”. The section’s case is introspective and associationist; its Appendix is the clearest statement of what any bundle view owes. |
| LIT-454 | Personal Identity | Olson (2002, rev. 2023), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Separates seven questions (characterization, personhood, persistence, evidence, population, personal ontology, what matters) and then takes up persistence. Three answers: psychological continuity (the majority view, repaired from Locke’s memory criterion via causal dependence), brute-physical continuity (animalism), and anticriterialism. Fission forces the psychological view into multiple occupancy or a non-branching clause, which makes identity not what matters. The too-many-thinkers objection says that if we are not our animals there are two thinkers in every chair. Temporal-parts ontology may leave it indeterminate what we are. Avoids the word “self”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-374); worth reading as the standard map of the analytic personal-identity debate, written by the leading animalist. It separates seven questions that are usually run together, then works the persistence question through psychological-continuity, brute-physical and anticriterialist answers, fission and the too-many-thinkers objection. It is a survey with a side: §§6–7 put the case for animalism more fully than the case against it, and the entry sets the word “self” aside, so the narrative and minimal selves are outside it. |
| LIT-455 | Defending the Bounds of Cognition | Adams & Aizawa (2010), DOI-10.7551/mitpress/9780262014038.003.0004, read from the pre-publication draft. A reply to a manuscript of Clark’s “Memento’s Revenge”. It names the “coupling-constitution fallacy”: that X is coupled to a cognitive agent does not make X part of its cognition. It restates the 2001 marks of the cognitive, non-derived content and a distinctive causal process, and defends them: a mental image of Euler circles need not get its content by convention, and a “brain-tool science” would have to cover an open-ended motley of artifacts. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-380), from a pre-publication draft, not the published chapter; worth reading as the shortest statement of Adams and Aizawa’s case after LIT-438, and as the earliest text the record holds that names the “coupling-constitution fallacy”. It answers a manuscript of Clark’s “Memento’s Revenge” (the chapter before it in the same volume), restating the two marks of the cognitive and defending them against Clark’s Euler-circle and “brain-tool science” objections. It adds no new argument for either mark: the fallacy is shown by one analogy (nerve and muscle), and the intracranial processing differences are asserted from consumer electronics, not measured. |
| LIT-459 | Is the United States Phenomenally Conscious? Reply to Kammerer | Schwitzgebel (2016), DOI-10.1007/s11406-016-9725-8. Reply to Kammerer’s Sophisticated Anti-Nesting Principle (LIT-409), which he calls the best defence of anti-nesting he has met. Three concerns: the principle allows group consciousness and may not even exclude the US, since citizens may not consciously represent the concrete entity at issue; condition A’s “required” lets a member’s change of motive switch group consciousness on and off with no functional change; and the Occam-style justification either leads into causal exclusion, threatening human consciousness, or is ad hoc, and group-level explanation is often the simpler one. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-381); worth reading as the direct reply to Kammerer’s anti-nesting principle (LIT-409), and the sharpest test so far of the line THEORY-043 calls the best candidate on offer. Its three concerns: the principle may not exclude actual groups, because it is unclear that citizens consciously represent the entity “the United States” names; its condition A, read through “required”, yields flickering group consciousness with no group-level functional change; and its Occam-style justification either generalises into the causal-exclusion problem or is ad hoc. Read from the author’s manuscript of 28 April 2016, not the Springer version. |
| LIT-464 | Of Identity and Diversity | Locke (1694), Essay II.xxvii, added in the second edition. Identity is relative to the idea the name stands for: the same mass is the same particles, the same oak or horse or man is the same continued life, and the same person is the same consciousness. A person is “a thinking intelligent being” that “can consider itself as itself”, and personal identity reaches “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought”. It is independent of substance, material or immaterial: the prince’s consciousness in the cobbler’s body is the same person but not the same man. “Person” is “a forensic term”, grounding reward and punishment. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-385), in the Wikisource transcription of the 1853 Troutman & Hayes reprint of the sixth-edition text, compared word by word with Project Gutenberg’s; worth reading as the founding text of the psychological account of personal identity and the source of the record’s whole line on what a person is. It separates the same substance, the same man and the same person, puts the person in “consciousness” extended back to past actions, and calls “person” a “forensic term”. Its cases, the prince and the cobbler, the day-man and the night-man, the severed little finger, are argued from intuition, and its key relation, “the same consciousness”, is never defined. |
| LIT-478 v2 | The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences | Epstein (2015), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199381104.001.0001. Social science works with an “anthropocentric” picture on which the social world is built out of people, as an ant colony is built out of ants. Part One separates the facts that ground a social fact from the facts that anchor the frame principle saying how such facts are grounded, and argues ontological individualism false. Part Two argues that even facts about groups, including group action and intention, are grounded in more than the members. Unread: filed from the introduction, the author’s précis and the publisher’s description. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the author’s own posted introduction and table of contents, not read: the book is not lawfully readable in full online (Oxford Academic is paywalled; the author posts only the introduction). The introduction and the author’s open-access précis were read. Its framework, grounding versus anchoring, is stated in the record from the précis and from the author’s SEP entry (LIT-487, read). Part Two argues that facts about groups, including their actions and intentions, are grounded in more than their members, which bears directly on THEORY-043. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-479 | What are groups? | Ritchie (2012 online; Philosophical Studies 166(2), 2013). Six criteria any theory of groups must meet: members can differ across times and worlds, groups exist contingently and temporarily, are located, and coincident groups of one kind can be distinct. Groups as non-singular pluralities, fusions, aggregates (Burge) and sets (Effingham) each fail at least one. Proposed instead: a group is a realization of a structure of functionally defined nodes, existing while every node is occupied; identity at a time needs the same members and the same relations. A sketch; it is silent on agency and minds. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-390); worth reading as the cleanest statement of what a metaphysics of organised groups has to deliver and why pluralities, fusions, aggregates and sets fail to. Its six criteria (members can change across times and worlds, groups are contingent and located, and coincident groups of one kind can be distinct) are the useful part, and the case against each rival is short and checkable. Its own view, groups as realizations of structures whose nodes are functionally defined, is sketched in four pages; it says nothing about agency or minds, and the author amended its membership definition in her 2018 paper (LIT-486). |
| LIT-486 | Social Structures and the Ontology of Social Groups | Ritchie (2018 online; PPR 100(2), 2020). Social structures are networks of relations constitutively, not merely causally, dependent on social factors, and can be overt or covert, intentionally or unintentionally created, internal or external to what realizes them. Organized social groups (teams, courts, families) are structured wholes with internal social structures whose nodes people occupy; feature social groups (women, racial groups, classes) are social kinds, nodes in external social structures. Both meet a “Goldilocks Constraint”: intuitive and explanatory groups in, arbitrary collections out. Silent on agency. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-389); worth reading as the one framework in the record that covers both kinds of social group, the organised ones the group-agency literature is about and the race, gender and class groups the social-construction literature is about, and says why they differ. Organized social groups (teams, courts, firms) are structured wholes with internal social structures; feature social groups (women, African Americans, economic classes) are social kinds, nodes in external social structures. It is a framework offered to “motivate”, not a proof, and its anti-overgeneration work is done by a restriction to structures that “intuitively exist” or “figure in explanations”, imported rather than derived. It says nothing about agency or minds. |
| LIT-487 | Social Ontology | Epstein (2018; rev. 2024), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-ontology/. A survey that splits social ontology into two inquiries: what determines (grounds) a social fact, and what constructs or “anchors” the category it falls under, likened to semantics and metasemantics. §3 surveys determination bases (psychologism, atomism, bodies and practices, physicalism, holism, flat ontologies) and reports that ontological individualism is widely assumed and recently contested. §4 surveys anchoring theories (agreement, Lewis’s convention, Hart and Searle’s collective acceptance, patterns, practices, language). §5 covers groups, group minds and agency, institutions, race and gender, artifacts, money, law and language. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-393); worth reading as a survey: the best single map of social ontology in the record, organised around its author’s distinction between what grounds a social fact (§3) and what anchors, or sets up, the category it falls under (§4). It is also the record’s readable source for what The Ant Trap’s grounding–anchoring framework is (LIT-478 is not lawfully readable). Read it as a survey written by a partisan: Epstein’s own positions organise the entry, and the critics of anchoring are named but given a sentence each. |
| LIT-582 | Biological organisation as closure of constraints | Montévil & Mossio (2015), J. Theor. Biol. 372:179–191. Two causal regimes act in organisms: processes (thermodynamic changes) and constraints, which act on processes while being conserved at the relevant time scale. Closure is mutual dependence among constraints: each is produced by a process another constraint constrains, and each helps produce another. Closure mixes slow and fast dependence, grounds functions, and is proposed as a boundary criterion. A volume-sweeping count of dependencies, the tendency to closure, separates symbionts that share an encompassing closure, and separated nested closures mark levels of organisation. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-468), from the authors’ HAL deposit of the accepted text. Worth reading as the paper statement of the central claim of Biological Autonomy (LIT-536): biological organisation is closure of constraints. A constraint is defined by a symmetry: it acts on a process at a time scale at which it is itself conserved. Closure is a set of constraints each of which depends directly on another in the set and generates another, and cannot be split into two closed sets. The paper offers closure as a boundary criterion and gives a preliminary measure, the tendency to closure, for drawing boundaries between interacting organisms. It does not claim closure defines an organism. |
| LIT-705 | Group Agency and Supervenience | List & Pettit (2006), Southern Journal of Philosophy 44(S1):85–105. A group agent’s rationality must supervene on its members’ contributions, but not proposition by proposition. Three impossibility results show that robust group rationality (complete, consistent, deductively closed group judgments for every profile of rational member judgments) is inconsistent with majoritarian, uniform proposition-wise and proposition-wise supervenience. Premise-based and distributed premise-based procedures show it is consistent with set-wise supervenience, with group judgments that can be discontinuous with the members’ judgments on the same proposition. Emergent agency without any member’s conception of the group is set aside as unintelligible. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-550); worth reading as the short, formal core of List and Pettit’s group agency: a group can be a robustly rational judge only if its judgment on a proposition is not, in general, a function of its members’ judgments on that proposition. Group judgments supervene on members’ judgments set-wise, not proposition-wise, so a group agent is individualistically unmysterious and still “not directly continuous” with its members. Read here as the lawful substitute for the unread book LIT-391, whose chapter 3 takes up the same supervenience question; the impossibility results are cited from other papers, not proved here. |
| LIT-707 v2 | Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence | Wimsatt (1997), Philosophy of Science 64(S4):S372–S384. Unread. Per its abstract: most scientists call a system property emergent if it depends on the parts’ mode of organisation, a view consistent with reduction. Emergence is the failure of aggregativity, the state in which “the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts”. Aggregativity needs four conditions; met differently for different decompositions and in degrees, they give criteria for choosing decompositions and heuristics for detecting the biases of “vulgar reductionisms”. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-04, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. Philosophy of Science’s PSA supplement is paywalled at Cambridge Core and JSTOR, Unpaywall finds no open copy, and neither the 1997 paper nor its 2000 expansion is posted on Wimsatt’s department pages. Content here is the publisher’s abstract and Wimsatt’s own summary in “Reductionism and its heuristics” (Synthese 2006), which his department posts and which was read in part. A person with library access could supply it; a reading would move this to Active and should state the four conditions exactly. |
| LIT-709 | Conceptualization of the Holobiont Paradigm as It Pertains to Corals | Goulet, Erill, Ascunce, Finley & Javan (2020), Frontiers in Physiology 11:566968, a review. A coral is a consortium: the animal plus the Symbiodiniaceae, bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses in its body, mucus and skeleton, and neighbours are excluded by definition. Membership can change, so one colony may be a different holobiont at different times. Traits such as thermal tolerance belong to the host–symbiont combination: not every Durusdinium is heat tolerant, and a novel anemone–alga pairing gave higher oxygen flux under heat than both natural ones. Measuring both partners shows different routes to the same bleaching outcome. Whether the holobiont is the unit of selection is asked, not answered. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-555); worth reading as a short, explicit statement of why a coral should be studied as a composite of host and microbes rather than as an animal with passengers. It is a mini-review with no data of its own (about 3,700 words), and its strongest point is conceptual: traits such as thermal tolerance belong to host–symbiont combinations, not to either partner. The physiological evidence it cites is thin and partly not from corals: its one demonstration that a combination is “not necessarily the sum of its parts” is an oxygen-flux experiment in the sea anemone Exaiptasia. It poses, and does not answer, whether the coral holobiont is a unit of selection. |
| LIT-905 | The Architecture of Complexity | Simon (1962), Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106(6): 467–482. Complexity usually takes the form of hierarchy, defined by intensity of interaction, not by subordination. Hierarchies evolve fast because stable intermediate forms survive interruption (Hora and Tempus). Hierarchies are nearly decomposable: subsystems run fast and nearly independently, and interact slowly and only in aggregate. In social systems the higher levels have the slower dynamics and the longer intervals between interactions. | Active — read in full 2026-10-11 (NOTE-704) from the JSTOR PDF posted on a University of Washington course page (homes.cs.washington.edu/~ztatlock/599z-17sp/papers/complexity-simon-62.pdf; an identical copy is on pdodds.w3.uvm.edu). The record has read from a JSTOR PDF on a course page before (McAdams 2019). Worth reading for near-decomposability (fast dynamics inside subsystems, slow and aggregate between them) and for hierarchy defined by intensity of interaction rather than by space or by authority. The evolutionary-speed argument is an illustrative model whose numbers Simon says not to take seriously. |
| LIT-908 v2 | The Ghost in the Machine | Koestler (1967). Introduces the holon, a whole to its parts and a part to its whole, with a self-assertive and an integrative tendency, and the holarchy, a hierarchy of holons, drawing on Simon’s watchmaker parable. Unread. | Unavailable — unread, registered 2026-10-11. Hutchinson, London, and Macmillan, New York, 1967; no DOI. The URL is the Internet Archive’s controlled-lending record of the Macmillan edition. Filed as the source of the holon, discussed the same day as a possible name for a combined form and set aside as naming a position rather than an achievement. |
| LIT-990 v3 | Agency, Goal-Directed Behavior, and Part-Whole Relationships in Biological Systems | Watson (2023). A perspective essay offering a scale-relative, comparative notion of agency. Relative to a chosen decomposition into parts with goals, a whole is agential with respect to its parts when its organization makes them better at resolving their mutual constraints than they would be at the equilibrium of the old organization. This shows as delayed gratification. Citing earlier models, it argues that unsupervised, bottom-up learning among self-interested parts can produce such organization, so that “the agent creates itself”. It sets no absolute threshold. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-747) in full; worth reading as a comparative, scale-relative notion of agency. Given a decomposition into parts with goals of their own, a whole is more agential than its parts when its organization lets them resolve more of their mutual constraints than the old organization did, shown as delayed gratification (going uphill in a specific direction to reach lower minima). Read it knowing that it is a perspective essay. Its model results (Hebbian self-modelling networks, social and ecological networks) are reported from earlier papers. It sets no threshold for an additional agent, and its measure depends on a stipulated choice of parts and of their goals. Learned origin of the organization is offered as an optional restriction, not a requirement. |
| LIT-1015 | Many, but almost one | Lewis (1993), in Ontology, Causality and Mind (CUP); reprinted in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (CUP 1999), 164–182. Two solutions to the problem of the many, offered together. On supervaluation, “cat” is undecided among the candidates, and “there is one cat” is true on every precisification though no candidate is definitely the cat. On almost identity, the candidates overlap almost completely, so counting by overlap gives one, true enough for most contexts. Almost-identity is not transitive and has no fixed threshold. It fails for candidates that differ substantially, such as a house with and without its garage, and supervaluation covers that case. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-722) from a scan of the 1999 reprint posted on Andrew M. Bailey’s “Papers by David Lewis” page (andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Many_Almost_One.pdf), a scholar’s page, not the author’s or the publisher’s. The record read LIT-446 from the same page. OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report no open-access copy, and PhilArchive refused the download. Worth reading for two ways of counting a thing with many equally good boundaries. Supervaluation makes “one cat” super-true while no candidate is super-truly the cat. Almost-identity, which is mereological overlap, makes it true enough in most contexts. It also shows each way failing where the other works. For QUESTION-035 and CLAIM-164 it is a precedent for counting by something weaker than identity, not evidence: “almost one” fits perturbed copies of one gap-isolated subspace, not the vectors inside a degenerate one. |
| LIT-1016 | Material Beings | van Inwagen (1990), Cornell University Press. Asks the Special Composition Question, in what circumstances some things compose a further thing, and answers that they do only when their activity constitutes a life: there are organisms and mereological simples, and no tables or chairs. Not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-13 from its Crossref record, not read. Registered at the owner’s request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for QUESTION-009 and QUESTION-035. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unavailable until it is read, not on merit. Looked for on 2026-10-13, none found: OpenAlex reports it closed, with no open-access or repository location; Semantic Scholar has no record of the DOI; Crossref links only De Gruyter’s Cornell University Press Archive, which is paid; Project MUSE (book 49506) marks it restricted; it is not on Cornell University Press’s Cornell Open list; a web search found only catalogue, retail and lending records, and one unofficial PDF host, which was not used. |
| LIT-1020 | The Problem of the Many | Unger (1980), Midwest Stud. Philos. 5: 411–467. A cloud has no determinate boundary, so there are many aggregates of droplets, differing by a few at the edge, each an equally good candidate to be the cloud: either there are many clouds where we thought there was one, or there are none. Unger takes the second horn. Not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-13 from its Crossref record, not read. Registered at the owner’s request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for QUESTION-035 and CLAIM-152. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unavailable until it is read, not on merit. Looked for a lawful full text on 2026-10-13 and found none: OpenAlex reports it closed (no open-access location, no repository full text); Semantic Scholar gives no openAccessPdf; the PhilPapers record (PETTPO-10) returned 403 and web searches found no PhilArchive upload; web searches found no author-posted or course-hosted copy (NYU hosts Unger’s later “The Mental Problems of the Many”, not this paper, and as.nyu.edu returned 403 to direct requests, so the faculty page could not be checked); a third-party bibliography page (stafforini.com) lists it but is not an author, institutional or course copy, so it was not used. The Wiley version of record is paywalled. |
| LIT-1022 | Parts and Places: The Structures of Spatial Representation | Casati & Varzi (1999), MIT Press. The standard monograph on mereotopology: parthood alone cannot express connection, interior or boundary, so a topological primitive is added to mereology, and a theory of location relates objects to the regions they occupy. Not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-13 from its Crossref record, not read. Registered at the owner’s request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for QUESTION-035 and CLAIM-194. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unavailable until it is read, not on merit. Looked for on 2026-10-13, none found: OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report it closed, with no open-access or repository location; Crossref carries no licence or full-text link; it is not an open-access title on MIT Press Direct (the page refused automated access, and the MIT Press still sells it in print); a web search found only catalogue and retail records; Varzi’s Columbia page (columbia.edu/~av72) and the PhilArchive record (CASPAP) could not be opened from here (bot challenges), and the Wayback Machine holds no snapshot of the former, so an author-posted copy is not ruled out. |
| LIT-1024 | Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries | Smith & Varzi (2000), Philos. Phenomenol. Res. 60(2): 401–420. Distinguishes bona fide boundaries, which follow a physical discontinuity or qualitative heterogeneity (a coastline, the surface of an organism), from fiat boundaries, which are drawn by human demarcation and follow no such discontinuity (a state border, a postal district), and gives each a mereotopology. Bona fide boundaries get ordinary closure topology, in which a boundary belongs to one side; fiat boundaries are parts of what they bound, have no open/closed distinction, and meet by coinciding. Distinct bodies are never in bona fide contact, so any combined form of separate bodies is a fiat object. The test is whether a discontinuity is there, not who made it. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-721) from the JSTOR PDF of the published version posted on Barry Smith’s site (ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/fiat.pdf); OpenAlex also lists a green copy in Columbia’s Academic Commons (doi:10.7916/d8t43rtv). Registered at the owner’s request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for CLAIM-194 and QUESTION-035. Worth holding as the source of the fiat/bona fide vocabulary and of the point that a fiat boundary can be non-arbitrary, enabled and constrained by real properties of what it divides. It does not map onto CLAIM-194’s produced/imposed: it sorts a cell membrane and a beam together, as bona fide. |
| LIT-1360 v2 | Real patterns, the predictive mind, and the cognitive construction of the manifest image | Gładziejewski (2025), Synthese 206:225. Dennett’s compression criterion for real patterns is carried through minimum description length, Bayesian inference and variational free energy, so learning a generative model is real-pattern extraction from sensory data. The manifest image is then a structural description of the sensory signal, equally veridical for an envatted twin with matched input. Applied to selves: a self-model compresses self-generated regularities by positing one common cause, real as a pattern, not as a substance, and the realism dispute is over criteria. Applied to objects: compression-based composition (Bird 2023) favours cats over arbitrary sums. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1056) from the publisher’s open-access PDF (Springer, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0); worth reading as a clear derivation of Dennett’s real patterns into predictive processing, through minimum description length and the complexity–accuracy split of free energy, and as a short diagnosis of the realism dispute about selves: a self-model compresses self-generated regularities by positing one common cause, so the self is real as a pattern and not as a substance, and the dispute is over criteria. The structural, Kantian realism it draws (the manifest image is veridical in a matched vat) needs manifest content to be wholly structural, which it assumes. It says nothing about consciousness, and it does not say a self-model exaggerates the self’s unity. |
| LIT-1924 | Horizontal Surgicality and Mechanistic Constitution | Baumgartner, Casini & Krickel (2020). Since phenomena can be manipulated only via common causes of them and their parts, constitution must be analysed with non-ideal interventions; counting every supervenience-respecting common cause as an intervention begs the question, and admitting every common cause is a non-starter. An intervention that directly changes at most one behaviour on each lower level, and changes its target and the phenomenon simultaneously, is “horizontally surgical”; under Universal Constitution, Simultaneity and transitivity of co-occurrence, one such intervention suffices for constitution. The proof presupposes settled parthood and levels. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1494) from the authors’ penultimate draft; worth keeping as the one positive interventionist result in the debate: given that every change in a phenomenon is simultaneously realized on every lower level, that simultaneous changes are not causally related, and that parthood and levels are settled, a single intervention that changes one part per level and the phenomenon simultaneously suffices for constitution (THEORY-1293). |
| LIT-1925 | Saving the mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance | Krickel (2018), DOI-10.1016/j.shpsa.2018.01.003. By the descriptions available, a defence of mutual manipulability against the charge that an interventionist criterion cannot define a non-causal relation: manipulability is read as a causal relation between a component and a temporal part of the phenomenon, which is represented by several variables for its phases. Unread; her co-authored 2020 paper reports the move in one sentence (NOTE-1494). | Unfetched — A lawful free copy was located 2026-11-01 and could not be fetched: the author’s final draft on PhilArchive, https://philarchive.org/archive/KRISTM-3 (also listed at https://philpapers.org/archive/KRISTM-3.pdf). Both returned HTTP 403 to this client; CORE’s copy (core.ac.uk/download/131213192.pdf) returned a Cloudflare challenge, and the Wayback capture (20240802095749) reset the connection. Neither challenge was pursued. The Elsevier version is paywalled. Free copy: https://philarchive.org/archive/KRISTM-3. |
| LIT-1928 | Top-down causation without top-down causes | Craver & Bechtel (2007; online 2006). Talk of top-down or bottom-up causation within levels of mechanisms can be translated “without remainder” into mechanistically mediated effects: intralevel causal chains combined with the constitutive relation between a mechanism and its components. Interlevel relations are constitutive only. The case rests on stated assumptions (higher-level causes exist and are all mechanistically explained), not on an argument for them. It concedes that the interlevel experiments used to find components are symmetrical and give only prima facie evidence of componency. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1491); worth keeping as the mechanist’s statement that the relation between levels is constitution, not causation, and for an admission the record needs. Interlevel experiments are symmetrical, and a lesion shows only “prima facie” that something is a component, since a part not “interactively integrated” may be a background condition (p. 553, n. 10). So the experiments do not by themselves draw the mechanism’s boundary (THEORY-1287, CLAIM-530). |
| LIT-1929 | Three Problems for the Mutual Manipulability Account of Constitutive Relevance in Mechanisms | Leuridan (2012), DOI-10.1093/bjps/axr036. By its abstract, two conceptual problems for Craver’s mutual manipulability account (constitutive relevance threatens to imply causal relevance; parthood as spatiotemporal inclusion meets a counterexample from endosymbiosis) and one methodological one (experimental underdetermination). Unread: no lawful copy reached. The works read with it report that it argues, under Woodward’s interventionism, that constitutive relevance is a form of bidirectional causal relevance. | Unavailable — Sought 2026-11-01 and not reached. The publisher’s copy (OUP, doi 10.1093/bjps/axr036) is paywalled. The one repository copy OpenAlex lists, Ghent University’s Biblio (record 2116239, file 6770914), is marked “restricted” in Biblio’s own metadata and redirected this client to an institutional sign-in, so it is not a free copy. No PhilSci-Archive or PhilArchive deposit was found. Known here only from its abstract and from what the three works read with it say of it (NOTE-1493, NOTE-1490, NOTE-1494). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1930 | Constitutive Explanatory Relevance | Craver (2007), DOI-10.5840/jpr20073241. The paper in which, by its successors’ account, Craver named constitutive relevance: what makes a component’s activity relevant to the behaviour of the mechanism it is part of, analysed as mutual manipulability between the two. Unread: no lawful copy was reached. What it is said to hold is from the abstract and from Craver, Glennan and Povich (2021), not from the text. | Unavailable — searched 2026-11-01 for a lawful full text and none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex reports it closed with no repository copy. The publisher, the Philosophy Documentation Center (pdcnet.org, record jpr_2007_0032_0003_0020), offers it for purchase only. Craver’s Washington University CV (philosophy.wustl.edu/media/1028/download) lists it without a link, his WashU research profile has no file, and searches of PhilArchive, PhilSci-Archive and the web found no author copy. It is not on Bechtel’s UCSD page, which hosts two other papers from this batch. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1931 | Constitutive relevance & mutual manipulability revisited | Craver, Glennan & Povich (2021), DOI-10.1007/s11229-021-03183-8. A reply to critics who say mutual manipulability (MM) conflates causation with constitution (Baumgartner and Gebharter 2016; Baumgartner and Casini 2017). It separates the semantic, epistemic and metaphysical questions of constitutive relevance, amends MM into an epistemic criterion, “matched interlevel experiments” (MIE), and grounds it in the thesis that constitutive relevance is causal betweenness. Unread: a free preprint is on PhilArchive behind a bot check. | Unfetched — searched 2026-11-01. The Springer article is paywalled (the page offers “Buy article PDF”; the PDF link returned the paywall page). OpenAlex lists an author-deposited preprint at PhilArchive, https://philarchive.org/archive/CRACRA-3 (record philarchive.org/rec/CRACRA-3), and a search engine reported it as the full text, “forthcoming in Synthese”, 10,558 words. It returned a Cloudflare “Just a moment…” challenge (403) to curl on 2026-11-01, on philarchive.org and on dc2.philarchive.org, and WebFetch got a 403; the challenge was not attempted. Butler University’s repository (digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers/1201) holds metadata only, and Glennan’s bepress page now redirects to a retirement notice. Free copy: https://philarchive.org/archive/CRACRA-3. |
| LIT-1934 | Constitutive Relevance, Mutual Manipulability, and Fat-Handedness | Baumgartner & Gebharter (2016). Embedded in Woodward’s 2003 interventionism, Craver’s mutual manipulability entails that no part is constitutively relevant to any whole, since every cause of a supervening behaviour is a common cause of it and of its base and so not an intervention; embedded in Woodward’s relaxed version it makes constitution causal; with a temporal clause added (causes precede effects for some intervention) it is consistent, but then mutual manipulation is fat-handed and its correlations are equally explained by a model with no constitution. Constitution gets only second-order, abductive evidence: no surgical cause of the whole is ever found. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1493) from the authors’ penultimate draft; worth keeping as the proof that, if constitution is non-causal and wholes supervene on their parts, every cause of a whole’s behaviour is a common cause of it and of some part’s, so mutual manipulability by ideal interventions is unsatisfiable and, once relaxed, gives no evidence of constitution (THEORY-1288). |
| LIT-1939 | An Abductive Theory of Constitution | Baumgartner & Casini (2017). Craver’s mutual manipulability ties constitution to ideal interventions that cannot exist, and relaxing them leaves only fat-handed ones, whose data a pure common-cause model fits as well as a constitutive one even in ideal settings, so constitution, unlike causation, has no crucial experiment. Their No De-Coupling account: a set of parts constitutes a phenomenon when every cause of the phenomenon is a common cause of it and some member, no proper subset does as much, and no expansion of the variable set breaks the coupling. The inference is abductive and only inductively corroborated. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1490) from the authors’ penultimate draft; worth keeping for the claim that, unlike causation, constitution has no experimentum crucis, and for its alternative: constitution is inferred abductively from a redundancy-free common-cause coupling of whole and parts that no expansion of the variable set breaks (THEORY-1288, THEORY-1294). |