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.
Metaphysics — what exists and what it is to exist — causation, emergence and levels, laws, time — as a philosophical question (group: philosophy).
196 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-021 v3 | From the origin of life to pandemics: emergent phenomena in complex systems | Artime & De Domenico (2022), ARXIV-2205.11595. An editorial review with no new result. Its one formal item (§4, Eq. 4.1: x(t+1) = f[x(t)], x(0) = x₀) sorts phenomena three ways. Non-emergent: local rules plus initial conditions let you deduce the “expected” high-level pattern. Weakly emergent: they let you deduce an “unexpected” one by computation. Strongly emergent: no deduction is possible even in principle. “Unexpected” is never defined. The rest is a cross-domain survey (§3), a 16-paper map of the theme issue (§5), and an outlook (§6). | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-007); worth reading as the table of contents and framing of the Phil. Trans. A theme issue that holds LIT-025 and LIT-027 (§5), and as a quick survey of emergence examples. Do not cite it for a definition of emergence, because its “mathematical” definition leaves the deciding criterion (“unexpected”) informal. |
| 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-037 v3 | The Open Systems View | Cuffaro & Hartmann (2021), ARXIV-2112.11095. The paper argues philosophically, not formally, that the quantum theory of open systems “GT” is more fundamental than standard closed-system quantum theory “ST”. GT treats states as density operators that evolve, in general, non-unitarily, and it admits not-completely-positive maps. The ontic and epistemic cases each win only on a second, interpretation- or practice-laden criterion: OntFund-2 and EpFund-2. On the first, formal criteria (OntFund-1, EpFund-1) the two frameworks tie, and the authors say so because Stinespring dilation and dropping the Lindblad terms translate in both directions (§4.1, §4.2.1). Explanatory fundamentality is granted only deflationarily (ExFund-1), and the authors recommend dropping the notion (§4.2.2). The step from there to “the open systems view is fundamental tout court” (§4.3) rests on the special sciences and on “there are no other options”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-077); worth reading as the clearest statement of the “open systems view” and of the distinction between a view, a framework, a theory and a model (§2, §4.1, §5.2). Read it knowing that its fundamentality verdict is carried by interpretive premises (OntFund-2, EpFund-2) and a deflationary step, not by any formal asymmetry between the frameworks. |
| LIT-045 v5 | Structural Realism | Ladyman (2007), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/. The entry presents structural realism (Worrall 1989) as the attempt to keep both the no-miracles argument and the lesson of theory change. What is retained, and what we are entitled to believe, is structure, understood by ontic structuralists as modal structure. It sorts the view into an epistemic form, which falls to the Newman/Demopoulos–Friedman triviality result when stated as a Ramsey sentence (§3.2), and an ontic form with seven distinguishable theses, from eliminativism about individuals to “objects are constructs” (§4). The ontic form is motivated by quantum non-individuality and entanglement, gauge symmetry and the hole argument. The entry closes with seven objections, each answered in the author’s own voice (§5). | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-038); the standard map of the structural-realism literature, written by the founder of OSR. Read §2 for the theory-change argument, §3.2 for the Newman problem and §4’s seven OSR theses. Treat §5’s rebuttals as the author’s position, not as the field’s settled view. |
| LIT-062 v3 | On the reality of the quantum state | Pusey et al. (2011), ARXIV-1111.3328. Take pure states |ψ0⟩, |ψ1⟩ with |⟨ψ0|ψ1⟩| = cos θ. Assume (a) a model assigns each preparation a distribution µ_i(λ) over physical states, (b) n independent preparations yield the product distribution µ_{x1}(λ1)⋯µ_{xn}(λn), and (c) outcome probabilities depend only on (λ1, …, λn). If the model’s predictions are within ε of quantum theory, then D(µ0, µ1) ≥ 1 − 2ε^{1/n} for any n with 2^{1/n} − 1 ≤ tan(θ/2) (Eq. 7, App. B). At ε = 0 the distributions for distinct pure states cannot overlap on a set of non-zero measure, so Harrigan–Spekkens ψ-epistemic models are ruled out. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-030); the founding ψ-ontology theorem. It is short, fully proved (App. A–B), and still the reference that every later ψ-epistemic/ψ-ontic argument, including LIT-007 §I.C and LIT-090, positions itself against. Read it with its assumption (b)–(c) in view, since that is where every response pushes. |
| LIT-090 v3 | Could wavefunctions simultaneously represent knowledge and reality? | Hance et al. (2021), ARXIV-2101.06436. The paper argues, informally and without formal results, that Harrigan–Spekkens’ ψ-ontic/ψ-epistemic are contradictories only by stipulation. On the informal senses, “represents reality” and “represents knowledge”, a wavefunction can be both. It offers a weaker sufficient condition for “epistemic” (Eq. 6: for some ψ, A, S, the response function A(S|λ) is not equal to the Born probability p^ψ_A(S) throughout Λψ), which non-overlapping models can meet. It concludes that PBR “shows that wavefunctions cannot overlap on state space, but it says nothing about whether they are epistemic in the broader sense”, so it “does not rule out all epistemic models” (§V). | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-072); a short, clear statement that ψ-epistemic in the Harrigan–Spekkens sense is narrower than “epistemic”, worth reading for §III–V as a terminological caution when citing PBR. Its positive criterion (Eq. 6) is weak, since it amounts to predictive incompleteness of ψ. Its Appendix A contains claims that the record’s own readings contradict. |
| LIT-096 | What Is It Like to Be a Bat? | Nagel (1974), DOI-10.2307/2183914. An organism has conscious states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism. That subjective character belongs to a type of point of view, and it is left out by every functional, intentional or causal analysis, since each is compatible with its absence. Reduction elsewhere moves away from a point of view toward the objective; here that move leads away from the thing being explained. So physicalism may be true, but we have no conception of how it could be. Nagel proposes an “objective phenomenology” that would describe experience to beings who cannot have it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-089); the source of the “something it is like” criterion of consciousness that the record’s AI-consciousness work (LIT-056) adopts as its target, and of the argument that no functional analysis can settle whether that criterion is met. |
| 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-100 v2 | Quantum States for Primitive Ontologists: A Case Study | Belot (2011), DOI-10.1007/s13194-011-0024-8. Inside primitive-ontology Bohmian mechanics, Belot compares four readings of the quantum state: a field on configuration space, a multi-field on 3-space, a law, and a history of velocity dispositions of the particle system. Every reading except the multi-field carries a hard open question: why the world looks 3-dimensional, whether laws can be time-indexed, and whether dispositions lose content. The last is shown by the particle in a box, where every energy eigenstate φn = sin(πnx) induces the same at-rest disposition. The orthodox should prefer the multi-field reading; Belot, on van Fraassen’s view of interpretation, prefers to keep the others alive. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-110); worth reading. It is short, it originated the dispositionalist reading, and the particle-in-a-box counterexample and the analysis of the costs of ψ-as-law are still the points the later literature (LIT-204, LIT-200, LIT-164) cites. |
| LIT-102 v2 | Pregeometry, Formal Language and Constructivist Foundations of Physics | Arsiwalla et al. (2023), ARXIV-2311.03973. A programmatic essay with no construction, theorem or model of its own. It argues that inferential justification in a materialist ontology regresses without end (§3), that a “coherentist” constructivism escapes the regress, and that Wheeler’s pregeometry is therefore best read as “structureless structure”: the types and compositional rules of a computational language such as homotopy type theory (§§4, 6). Every construction of space from such rules that it points to is in the authors’ own earlier papers ([13, 17, 18]) or is promised as “a forthcoming publication” (fn. 1, p. 3). | Rejected — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-182); not worth a reader’s time as an argument for its thesis. The step from the regress problem to formal languages is asserted, not argued, and its one physics claim (that “widespread consensus” holds spacetime to be fundamentally discrete, p. 5) is overstated. A reader wanting pregeometry is better served by the sources it cites: Meschini, Lehto & Piilonen’s “Geometry, pregeometry and beyond” ([63]) for the history, and Döring & Isham’s topos programme ([36–40]) for a worked formal-language approach. |
| LIT-103 v3 | Closing the Cartesian Bureau de Change | Frankish (2025), DOI-10.1177/10597123251359198. An illusionist’s commentary on Veit’s A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness. Frankish places Veit’s function-first, evolutionary programme in a “post-Cartesian” (qualia-eliminativist) paradigm. He then argues that two things drag it back towards Cartesianism: Veit keeps the words “qualia” and “phenomenal”, and he writes as if hedonic valence motivates action “in virtue of its feel”. The second implies “a tiny one-dimensional Cartesian bureau de change” that leaves the hard problem “as hard as ever”. Because the two paradigms are “incommensurable” (p. 20), Frankish urges Veit to commit to a thoroughly functionalist account. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-143); worth reading as a five-page statement of the illusionist case against residual “feel” talk in evolutionary accounts of valence, and best read together with Veit’s reply (LIT-105), which answers it point by point. It argues rather than demonstrates: the central premise, that anything causally efficacious is functionally definable and so cannot be irreducibly subjective, is asserted in one paragraph (p. 18). |
| LIT-104 v4 | Philosophy of Mathematics from Descartes to Kant | Carson (2026), DOI-10.1017/9781108982405. The early-modern debate over whether metaphysics can be demonstrated with geometric certainty turned on how Euclidean demonstration secures certainty, and the Element traces the answers from Descartes through Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, Lambert and Mendelssohn to Kant. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found the Element is not open access (Cambridge Core shows “Get access” with purchase temporarily unavailable; Crossref gives only the standard Cambridge licence). Print publication 2026-08-31. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-105 v3 | On the Evolution, Science, and Metaphysics of Consciousness | Veit (2025), DOI-10.1177/10597123251413204. Veit’s reply to five commentaries on A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness (2023). Its main new content is the metaphysics the book left to one paragraph. He says hedonic “feel” is identical with a valence system: “a common currency of sharing evaluative information across multiple control systems”. The currency metaphor, he says, is “not Cartesian but cybernetic” (p. 10). He keeps the word “qualia”, arguing that Cartesians have no “definitional rights” (p. 9), and he insists the pathological complexity thesis (PCT) is compatible with any metaphysics, dualism and panpsychism included (p. 9). Against his other critics, he defends a bottom-up evolutionary method that uses human data (de Weerd); a naturalism that is neither autopoietic nor biopsychist (Sachs); evaluation-first over prediction-first, consciousness as an adaptation, and graded, partial unity (Suzuki); and the link to welfare science (Chincarini). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-187); worth reading as the only extended statement of the metaphysics behind the pathological complexity thesis, and as the direct answer to Frankish (LIT-103). The reply to Frankish is the substantive part. The replies to de Weerd and Suzuki mostly restate the book’s positions against objections quoted only in part, so read them alongside the commentaries. |
| LIT-107 v3 | Quasi-set theory: a formal approach to a quantum ontology of properties | Holik et al. (2021), DOI-10.1007/s11229-022-03884-8. The paper argues, with no new theorem, that the Lombardi–da Costa ontology of properties for quantum mechanics can be stated in Krause’s quasi-set theory Q. On that ontology a system is a bundle of I-type-properties (instances of universal type-properties, represented by the algebra of observables) with no principle of individuality. For each property instance, the indiscernible instances form a qset U([Π]). An atomic bundle is any qset x with qc(x ∩ U) = 1 for each U; the Axiom of Choice in Q guarantees one exists. The bundle’s kind is Q(B) = {x ∈ P(Q) | R(x)}, whose members are all indiscernible. N particles are a subqset N(B) ⊂ Q(B) with qc = N, a definite number with no labels (§6, pp. 19–22). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-127); worth reading as a short, clear bridge between the modal-Hamiltonian “ontology of properties” (Lombardi et al.) and quasi-set theory (French & Krause 2006). The new formal content is about two pages (§6). Most of §5 restates Q’s axioms, and the printed proofs contain errors. It is a useful statement of the position, not a result. |
| LIT-109 v2 | Dispositions without Conditionals | Vetter (2014), DOI-10.1093/mind/fzu032. Proposes, and explicitly does not claim to have shown superior, a “possibility conception” of dispositions — a disposition is individuated by its manifestation alone (“a disposition to M, full stop”) and its modality is possibility, graded for terms like ‘fragile’ as manifestation in a sufficient proportion of maximally varied cases (centred worlds), and plain possibility for terms like ‘breakable’; the defence rests on the semantics of ‘-able’ adjectives and a COCA survey (226 relevant uses of ‘disposed to’, none ascribing a philosophers’ disposition to an inanimate object). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-125); worth reading as the founding statement of the possibility conception of dispositions (developed in Vetter’s Potentiality, OUP 2015); it is an agenda-setting proposal whose comparative case against the conditional conception is deferred to other work, and the reader should hold it to that. |
| LIT-112 v2 | What motivates mental fictionalism? | Drayson (2025), DOI-10.1080/09515089.2025.2577403. Drayson argues that Toon’s two motivations for mental fictionalism both fail. The negative argument needs “committed to internal, intentional, causal states ⇒ committed to the representational theory of mind” (her Premise 2), which is false because non-representational functionalism (Lewis, Putnam, Loar) supplies such states. And Toon’s positive argument, that pretence lets us genuinely assert that a person is in an overall state S that causes their behaviour, gives him a reason to identify S with the belief and so to be a realist rather than a fictionalist. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-117); worth reading as a short, well-aimed critique that locates exactly where the case for mental fictionalism (Toon 2023) depends on equating realism about propositional attitudes with the representational theory of mind; it is a commentary on one book and argues against a motivation, not against fictionalism’s coherence. |
| LIT-113 v3 | Duality and ontology | Le Bihan & Read (2018), DOI-10.1111/phc3.12555. A survey that sorts realist responses to dualities along two axes. The first is which of the naively interpreted dual worlds count as candidates for actuality: all of them (underdetermination), one (discrimination) or none (nihilism), each with or without the common-core world. That gives options (1)–(6), with the common-core approach being (1), (3) and (5). The second axis is what replaces the common core: an overarching theory, or “pluralism”, on which all dual structures are co-instantiated as parts of one world. Its verdicts are conditional: no option breaks the underdetermination without a further metaphysical principle, such as the PII, for which the authors see no independent support. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-152); worth reading as the shortest clear map of the realist options for interpreting dualities. It is a nontechnical survey, not an argument for any option. Its original contributions (the discrimination/common-core overlap, a defence of discrimination for AdS/CFT, and pluralism) are presented as options, not established. |
| LIT-114 v2 | Philosophy of Statistical Mechanics | Frigg & Werndl (2023), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/statphys-statmech/. The entry argues that statistical mechanics has no canonical formalism but three umbrellas — Boltzmannian SM, the Boltzmann Equation and Gibbsian SM — and that every live account of the approach to equilibrium (ergodic, typicality, Mentaculus, long-run residence time, coarse-graining, interventionist, epistemic) survives Loschmidt’s and Zermelo’s objections only by giving up strict irreversibility or adding something outside the isolated dynamics; it closes on the unresolved “schism” that physicists compute in GSM while philosophers explain in BSM. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-103); worth reading as the current authoritative map of the foundations of SM, with the caveat that it is written by two partisans who present their own long-run residence time account (§4.7) and their “BSM fundamental, GSM effective” view (§6.7) alongside the rivals. |
| LIT-121 v2 | The Meaning of the Wave Function: In Search of the Ontology of Quantum Mechanics | Gao (2016), ARXIV-1611.02738. Gao argues first that ψ is real. His case uses protective measurements, which yield ⟨A⟩ on a single system with certainty, in three versions (ch. 4): one in the ontological-models framework using preparation non-contextuality, two he says need no auxiliary assumption, and one that uses a new criterion of reality. He then argues that ψ describes random discontinuous motion (RDM) of N point particles in 3-space: |ψ|² is the density with which each particle is present at each instant, and ψ is a single-case propensity. The main support is that the charge density |ψ|²Q, which protective measurement shows to exist, has no self-interaction (chs. 6–7). If the Born probabilities come from RDM, collapse is real. Gao proposes an energy-conserving, Planck-time-discrete collapse model: Pᵢ(t+t_P) = Pᵢ(t) + (ΔE/E_P)[δ_{EsEi} − Pᵢ(t)], giving τ_c ≈ ħE_P/(ΔE)² (ch. 8). Combined with relativity, it requires a detectable preferred Lorentz frame (ch. 9). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-140); worth reading as the fullest single statement of the protective-measurement argument for ψ-reality and of the RDM ontology. Its chapters 2, 3, 7.1 and 8.5 are also a well-referenced critical survey of ψ-epistemic, nomological, configuration-space-realist, Penrose and CSL views. Its central premises are contested (see Limitations), its collapse model is unconfirmed, and chapters 8–9 are openly speculative. |
| LIT-122 v2 | The Representation of Time and Change in Mechanics | Belot (2005), DOI-10.1016/B978-044451560-5/50005-1. For theories with ideal existence, uniqueness and a dynamical time-translation group, time is three intertwined ℝ-actions (on spacetime, on the symplectic space of solutions, and on the isomorphic space of initial data), and change is a slicing-indexed family of functions on those spaces. Singular dynamics, gauge freedom and time-dependence each damage this picture in a repairable way. Spatially compact vacuum GR breaks it, because the reduced Hamiltonian vanishes (h ≡ 0) and there is only one canonical isomorphism between the reduced spaces. That is the problem of time. It is not an artefact of the 3+1 split, it does not show change to be illusory, and it is absent from asymptotically flat GR and from artificially generally covariant theories. A parameterized “geometric time”, such as CMC, restores change and, in the CMC case, a time-dependent Hamiltonian flow. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-118); worth reading as the careful technical-philosophical statement of what the problem of time is and is not in classical GR. It is long and assumes graduate differential geometry, and it offers a diagnosis, not a solution. Its quantum-gravity motivations date from 2005 and are not updated here. |
| 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-130 v2 | Personal Identity and Ethics | Dufner (2025), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-ethics/. A survey, arguing no thesis of its own, of how three contested questions bear on ethics: which account of persistence is true (unique psychological continuity, Shoemaker and Parfit; or biological continuity and animalism, Olson and DeGrazia), whether identity or the psychological relations (continuity and/or connectedness) is what matters (Parfit’s fission case), and whether metaphysics constrains ethics or the reverse. It traces these through prudential concern, responsibility, abortion (Marquis), death and brain-death criteria, dementia and advance directives (Dworkin vs Jaworska on Margo), and the separateness of persons (Rawls, Parfit, Nozick, Taurek, Sidgwick, Brink). Its main recurring finding is that the relation that fixes persistence and the relation that matters ethically keep coming apart. It concludes that all three questions remain open. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-166); worth reading as the current, compact reference map from theories of persistence to applied ethics; it is a survey that takes no side, so it is a route to the primary sources (Parfit 1984, Olson 1997, McMahan 2002, Schechtman 1996, Korsgaard 1989) rather than a source of claims. |
| LIT-136 v2 | The Informational Nature of Personal Identity | Floridi (2011), DOI-10.1007/s11023-011-9259-6. Floridi deflates the diachronic question of personal identity, holding that sameness is always relative to a purpose-fixed level of abstraction and that metaphysical versions of the question “do not deserve to be taken seriously” (p. 554). He puts the synchronic question first: what binds a self’s information into a unity. His answer is an admittedly “figurative” 3C model in which the self is the last of three successive encapsulations, corporeal (bonded by chemical bonds), cognitive (bonded by mutual information) and conscious (bonded by semantics, and so dependent on a community). He then reads ICTs as “egopoietic” technologies because they act on all three membranes. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-130); worth reading as the programmatic statement of Floridi’s informational, level-of-abstraction approach to the self and its link to his information ethics; its central model is a self-described figure, not an argued theory, and the individuation-first thesis is asserted in a few lines. |
| 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-141 v3 | Emergence: from physics to biology, sociology, and computer science | McKenzie (2025), ARXIV-2508.08548. Sole-authored survey by a condensed-matter physicist. It takes novelty (a property the parts lack) as the defining mark of emergence and sets it against twelve other characteristics in §2. The six “objective” ones are discontinuities, order, modification of parts, universality, diversity and mesoscale modularity. The six “subjective” ones are self-organisation, unpredictability, irreducibility, contextuality/downward causation, complexity and intra-stratum closure. Case studies from the Ising model to Schelling segregation and LLMs show that each can come apart from novelty: novelty without discontinuity (Kondo, Fermi liquids, spin ice), without unpredictability (BKT, spin ice), and with reduction (Butterfield). §22 sides with weak emergence and argues that strong-emergence claims from molecular structure are weak. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-124); worth reading as a hub reference and example catalogue on emergence from physics outward, with unusually concrete case studies and a sceptical physicist’s §15 on molecular structure. It is a survey and a position, not a proof. Its definitional framework is stipulated and its logical relations between characteristics are left open by its own account (§24). |
| 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-144 v3 | Causal Exclusion and Downward Counterfactuals | Pernu (2015), DOI-10.1007/s10670-015-9781-7. The counterfactual theory of causation can answer the causal exclusion problem without being committed to downward causation, provided the semantics of counterfactuals is handled carefully. The exclusion problem itself, however, comes in several distinct forms. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and no full text could be obtained (Springer paywalled on both hosts; OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar list it closed; not among the articles of Pernu’s open 2013 dissertation in HELDA, though its §5.2 covers the counterfactual response at an earlier stage; PhilPapers, ResearchGate and Academia.edu refused). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-147 v3 | Mental causation via neuroprosthetics? A critical analysis | Pernu (2018), DOI-10.1007/s11229-018-1713-z. The interventionist/difference-making case for nonreductive mental causation from BCIs (List & Menzies 2009; Menzies 2015; Woodward 2008a,b, 2017) misplaces multiple realisation. What the ensemble recordings show is that one cortical-level variable N (the ensemble’s average firing) is realised by many single-neuron patterns N1, N2. Each intention M corresponds to one value of N. So the counterfactual contrast “∼M □→ ∼B true, ∼N □→ ∼B false” fails, and neuroprosthetics supports mental causation only by identifying M with N, not nonreductive physicalism. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-091); Worth reading as a short, precise diagnosis of a specific equivocation in the interventionist BCI argument (multiple realisation at the wrong level). Its scope is limited to difference-making with a proportionality constraint (fn 1), and its identity conclusion rests on a simplified picture of neural decoding that it asserts rather than argues. |
| LIT-150 v3 | What is emergence, after all? | Rizi (2025), ARXIV-2507.04951. A perspective, not an argument with results. Rizi proposes that emergence is present when a many-to-one coarse-graining F (Eq. 1, N′ < N) keeps the macro description predictive after most micro detail is discarded. He says the onset of emergence is located by order parameters, diverging susceptibility and correlation length, and RG fixed points, and that dualities show macro behaviour is not dictated by micro “stuff”. Herd immunity on networks (percolation, the S–R interface density ρ_SR) is offered as a social case. The paper then asserts that science needs only weak emergence, and that invoking strong emergence “steps outside the scope of scientific method”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-153); worth reading as a compact, well-referenced statement of the physicist’s weak-emergence view and a reading list into it (Carroll & Parola, Hoel, Rosas, Witten, De Haro & Butterfield, Dennett). Its framework is stated, not developed: no distortion measure is given for F, and “predictive” is never quantified. |
| LIT-151 v2 | Stating Structural Realism: Mathematics-First Approaches to Physics and Metaphysics | Wallace (2021), DOI-10.1111/phpe.12172. Wallace argues that reading a physical theory “math-first”, as mathematical models plus representation rather than as sentences aiming at truth, already makes scientific realism structural. Math-first theoretical equivalence and reduction (as instantiation) are coarse-grained enough to dissolve the standard underdetermination and theory-change objections. On this footing epistemic and ontic structural realism differ only in whether metaphysics itself is language-first or math-first. On math-first OSR, objects are whatever the best “predicate precisification” of a theory quantifies over, real patterns are defined through instantiation plus best precisification, and ontology is scale-relative. At every non-fundamental level the two versions coincide. The paper is explicitly a statement of the position, not a defence of it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-142); worth reading as the sharpest statement of what structural realism could mean once theories are taken math-first. It gives precise definitions of math-first ESR/OSR and of real patterns, its diagnosis of why priority-thesis OSR drifted is useful, and it is candid about the undeveloped notion of mathematical equivalence it relies on. |
| LIT-152 v2 | A defence of informational structural realism | Floridi (2007), DOI-10.1007/s11229-007-9163-z. Floridi argues informally in four steps. (1) ESR and (non-eliminativist) OSR are compatible once indexed to levels of abstraction. ESR’s minimal commitment to knowable relations holds at a first-order LoA. At a reflective (“transcendental”) second-order LoA, a second Ockham principle licenses taking the relata to be structural objects. (2) The relata-need-relations regress is blocked by Eddington’s “package hypothesis”: not all relata are logically prior to relations. (3) Structural objects are informational objects, clusters of data understood as concrete “differentiae de re”, made scalable by the object-oriented-programming model. (4) Together these give “informational structural realism”, on which “the ultimate nature of reality is informational” (p. 32). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-099); worth reading as the source statement of informational structural realism, which the literature cites and builds on (Karpenko LIT-215, Bynum, Beni, Long, Wheeler). Read §§2.4, 3 and 5 for the position and §6.9 for what “informational” does and does not mean. The LoA reconciliation is a proposal, not a result. |
| LIT-154 v3 | Criteria of Identity and Structuralist Ontology | Leitgeb & Ladyman (2007), DOI-10.1093/philmat/nkm039. Graph theory counts unlabelled graphs whose nodes, or whose isomorphic connected components, cannot be told apart even by an irreflexive relation. Examples are the edgeless two-node graph G′ and any graph with two or more isolated nodes (11 of the 156 unlabelled 6-node graphs). Mathematicians treat these as determinately distinct objects, so the authors conclude that the identity or difference of places in a structure is given by the structure itself, with identity counted among its relations, and not by any criterion of identity. The argument appeals to mathematical practice; it is not a proof. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-133); worth reading as the short, standard counterexample to weak-discernibility versions of the PII for mathematical structuralism. It is widely cited, and its graph cases are simple enough to check by hand. Its physics coda is explicitly left open. |
| LIT-156 v4 | An Emerging Dilemma for Reciprocal Causation | Hazelwood (2023), DOI-10.1017/psa.2023.124. Hazelwood defines RC as “the process of natural selection is both a cause and effect of processes such as niche construction” and EC as “natural selection is an emergent causal process”. He argues they are incompatible. Emergence here is Wilson’s synchronic dependence plus autonomy, cashed out as Pence’s composition. If EC holds, niche construction partly composes selection, so the two fail Woodward’s independent-fixability condition and cannot stand in a causal relation. If EC fails, selection is either non-causal (statisticalism) or individual-level, which is incoherent because relative fitness needs a population (Millstein, Sober). EES proponents should drop RC but can keep niche construction as a genuine cause of the evolutionary product. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-137); worth reading as a tight, well-sourced argument that brings the reciprocal-causation debate into the composition, exclusion and interventionism literature. Its force depends on accepting a process/product split for selection and a compositional reading of realization, both argued briefly and flagged as contestable. |
| 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-164 v3 | Wave-Function Realism and the Scope of Physical Causal Closure | Poltorak (2026), https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/30720/. A closure principle has two tacit parameters, its domain and its completeness relation (causal, dynamical or explanatory). Wave-function realism falsifies spatiotemporal-domain closure (STC) but is compatible with fundamental-physical closure (FPC), so there is no “trans-domain causal breach”. The physicalist is left with a dilemma: STC is too narrow, and FPC needs an independent criterion of physicality plus a dynamical-to-causal bridge. The paper tests this across primitive-ontology, spacetime-state, multi-field, Everettian, nomological and dispositional readings. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-112); worth reading as the clearest statement of what quantum ontology does and does not do to causal-closure arguments. Its conclusions are modest, and it concedes that its main target is a picture rather than a published argument. Unrefereed. |
| LIT-170 v2 | Unitary inequivalence as a problem for structural realism | French (2010), DOI-10.1016/j.shpsb.2011.09.001. French answers Howard’s objection that QFT’s unitarily inequivalent representations leave the structural realist with non-isomorphic, competing structures. He offers two routes. The first is to adopt cut-off “conventional” QFT with Wallace, on which the inequivalence is an artefact or harmless. The second is to follow Ruetsche’s Swiss Army Knife and treat the algebra as a modal structure spanning all representations. On that reading spontaneous symmetry breaking preserves the symmetry across the degenerate vacua, and the DHR analysis derives quantum statistics from the algebra. Adding Baker’s criterion, on which a symmetry mapping between representations suffices for intertranslatability, removes the assumption behind the objection, and French ends with a third option that combines the two routes. Every step is an informal argument layered on others’ technical results; the paper proves nothing itself. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-162); worth reading as a leading ontic structural realist’s worked response to the strongest physics-based objection to OSR beyond finite-dimensional QM, and for its clear staging of the Wallace–Fraser and algebraic versus Hilbert-space debates. A reader should cite the 2012 journal version; this note reads the 2010 draft. |
| LIT-173 v2 | From ontic structural realism to metaphysical coherentism | Morganti (2018), DOI-10.1007/s13194-018-0233-5. Morganti argues from a survey rather than proving anything. Strong, moderate and contextualist OSR each fail as metaphysics: particle kinds have intrinsic features no group-theoretic analysis reduces, and the argument from permutation invariance is inconclusive. What OSR gets right about symmetry, entanglement and particle kinds is better captured by “metaphysical coherentism”: object-like entities (in one domain) stand in symmetric partial ontological dependence on one another. Cycles of such dependence can be kept irreflexive, and so explanatorily non-trivial, by relaxing transitivity (quasi-transitivity) or by making only partial dependence symmetric. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-095); worth reading as the clearest statement of a dependence-based, object-friendly alternative to relation-first OSR, and a hub for the grounding, holism and OSR literatures; its physics applications are programmatic, and he says so himself (pp. 18–19). |
| LIT-176 v2 | Events and the Ontology of Quantum Mechanics | Dorato (2015), ARXIV-1503.01140. Dorato argues, without formal results, that events are the metaphysical category best suited to quantum mechanics. An event reading fits GRW flashes, GRW matter density and Bohmian worldlines, and also the antirealist views of ψ held by Bohr, Rovelli, Haag and Pashby. Because it is the same across interpretations, he calls it “interpretation-independent” (p. 12). Where ψ needs a realist reading, it should be read as intrinsic dispositions of events. Esfeld et al.’s view has the opposite structure: bare matter points plus a single holistic power of the universal configuration. Dorato argues that view is unintelligible, and that it must change its ontology when it passes from the universal wave function to the effective one (pp. 13–15). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-105); worth reading as a short, clear statement of event-primitivism for primitive-ontology theories, and of intrinsic (not holistic) dispositions against Esfeld et al. It is programmatic. By Dorato’s own account (p. 15) the relation between events and powers is left for future work, and without that the event reading does little work beyond relabelling. |
| LIT-177 v2 | The Relational Interpretation of Quantum Physics | Rovelli (2021), ARXIV-2109.09170. Rovelli restates RQM as an ontology of sparse relative facts, which arise in interactions and are labelled by the interacting systems. Its one technical rule is that an amplitude W(b,a) gives the probability P = |W|² only when a and b are relative to the same system. That rule removes the clash between P_collapse = Σᵢ|W(c,bᵢ)|²|W(bᵢ,a)|² and P_unitary = |ΣᵢW(c,bᵢ)W(bᵢ,a)|² (eqs. 2–4). Decoherence makes some facts approximately label-independent (“stable”). ψ is a relative-state bookkeeping device, like a Hamilton–Jacobi function S. The price, which Rovelli states, is giving up “strong realism”: values are not held at all times, may be held at different times for different systems, and there is no coherent global view and no quantum state of the universe. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-174); worth reading as the author’s own compact, current statement of RQM, and a good anchor citation for relational and perspectival readings. It is expository, not argumentative. It does not engage the inter-observer consistency objections in any depth, and the main technical rule is postulated, not derived. |
| LIT-184 v2 | Effective Ontic Structural Realism | Ladyman & Lorenzetti (2023), DOI-10.1086/729061. Ladyman and Lorenzetti argue that three recent “effective realisms” lack a metaphysics that makes them realist rather than constructive-empiricist, and that the Ladyman–Ross OSR package supplies one: realism about modal structure, “to be is to be a real pattern”, and scale-relative ontology. The three are Fraser & Vickers (and Egg) on non-relativistic QM, Williams and Fraser on QFT, and Robertson & Wilson on “theoretical relicts”. Scale relativity also dissolves Saatsi’s inconsistency objection, so Newtonian gravitational forces and GR gravitation “both exist at different scales”. Egg’s 2019 anthropocentrism objection is answered by grounding measurement in decoherence. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-129); worth reading as a short, clear map tying the effective-realism literature to OSR’s modal-structure and real-patterns ontology; its arguments are programmatic, and each step leans on Ladyman & Ross (2007) rather than new argument. |
| LIT-185 v3 | Integrated information theory: the good, the bad and the misunderstood | Barrett et al. (2026), ARXIV-2604.11482. A position paper with no new formal result. It argues four things. IIT’s algorithm is undefined whenever any spatial, temporal or state graining of a system is non-Markovian (Barrett & Mediano 2019), and so gives no output for brains; it cannot handle unbounded continuous state variables; and it has never been computed on any real system. PCI and other “approximations” of Φ are proxies, capturing at most two of the six axioms. The theory would need recasting in continuous fields (the EM field) to fit the standard model. Against critics, the authors hold that IIT can be read with a multi-dimensional measure of global state (mean Φ, variance of cause-effect-structure quantities, structural complexity), on which Aaronson’s inactive expander grid is only minimally conscious, and that IIT’s implied “tiling” panpsychism is no worse than any rival metaphysics. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-122); worth reading as the most compact current statement of IIT’s formal ill-definedness and its proxy-versus-approximation problem, from sympathetic insiders; its defences (panpsychism, expander grids) rest on the authors’ proposed reinterpretation rather than on IIT 4.0 as stated. |
| LIT-187 v3 | On the Philosophy of Unsupervised Learning | Watson (2023), DOI-10.1007/s13347-023-00635-6. Watson argues that clustering, abstraction and generative modelling each come with an epistemic thesis (EC, EA, EG — we identify natural kinds, essential properties and unrealized possibilities via such algorithms or something like them), which he accepts. Each also comes with an ontological thesis (OC, OA, OG — these just are what the algorithms ought to find under ideal conditions), which he rejects because nothing guarantees they are effectively computable. He adds a pragmatic, context-relative view of natural kinds, and closes with the claim that unsupervised outputs are neither “objective” nor vacuous. They should be validated by error-statistical means: resampling stability, generalization of clusters to held-out data, out-of-sample likelihood, and train-on-synthetic scores. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-172); worth reading as the most systematic philosophical treatment of unsupervised learning as a family, and as the target of Søgaard’s reply. Its headline claims (“perhaps the most fundamental branch of all AI”) are argued more thinly than its E/O structure. |
| LIT-192 v2 | What’s at stake in the debate over naturalizing teleology? An overlooked metatheoretical debate | Nahas & Sachs (2023), DOI-10.1007/s11229-023-04147-w. The paper argues that “naturalizing teleology” serves at least two relatively autonomous projects with different success criteria. One is scientific: whether an organism-centred account improves biology, which requires operationalisable models that may trade truth for usefulness. The other is philosophical: whether organismal teleology reshapes the liberal-versus-scientific naturalism debate about mind in nature, which requires truth but no operationalisation. It applies the distinction to one recurring dispute, the demarcation of teleological systems from dissipative structures. In the scientific context, models “cannot and need not” demarcate (§4.1: Cusimano & Sterner; McShea & Babcock). In the philosophical context, preferences between accounts turn on unstated commitments (§4.2: García-Valdecasas’s Aristotelian case for Deacon over the Organizational Approach). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-094); worth reading as a compact map of organism-centred teleology (the Organizational Approach, Deacon, Walsh, McShea) and for one reusable move, asking which problem an account of goal-directedness is meant to solve. Its positive pluralism is only suggested (“tempting to suggest”, §5), and it is shown on a single dispute. |
| LIT-194 v3 | Religion and Science | De Cruz (2017), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-science/. A survey, not an argument. It reports that the scholarly field rejects the conflict model the public holds, and it finds Barbour’s four-way taxonomy (conflict, independence, dialogue, integration) influential but neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Its survey of five traditions shows the relation varies with creed and colonial history, and it describes the field fragmenting into claim-by-claim “science engaged theology”. Its metaphysical content is concentrated in §1.2 (methodological vs ontological naturalism) and §3.1 (divine action under deterministic, chaotic and quantum physics; primary vs secondary causation; chance and providence). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-107); worth reading as the standard orientation to the science–religion literature and as a map of the divine-action and naturalism debates; it is a survey, so its claims are only as strong as the works it cites, and it is written from within the (largely Christian) field it describes. |
| LIT-196 v3 | Ontological Priority: The Conceptual Basis of Non-eliminative, Ontic Structural Realism | Chakravartty (2011), DOI-10.1007/978-94-007-2579-9_10. Non-eliminative OSR needs relations to be prior to their relata in the determination of their identity. Chakravartty argues that every available account of objects (substance, bundle theory, bundles of dispositionally individuated properties) leaves identity-fixing intrinsic features, and that stripping all of them away is just eliminativism. So OSR faces an exclusive disjunction: eliminativism, or a role for the intrinsic in identity. The graph-theory analogy and the physics cases (entanglement, spacetime points) do not escape the dilemma. The argument is conceptual throughout, and it explicitly leaves eliminative OSR untouched. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-149); worth reading as the clearest statement of the dilemma facing relation-priority versions of OSR. Its §10.3 explication of “ontological priority” as a dependence claim is reused widely, and it names its own soft spot: the intrinsic/extrinsic asymmetry argument in §10.5. |
| LIT-199 v3 | The Philosophy and Physics of Duality | De Haro & Butterfield (2025), ARXIV-2508.01616. The book gives a formal Schema: a duality is an isomorphism between the “model roots” (state space, quantities, dynamics) of two models of a common-core bare theory, with values and dynamics matching. It pairs this with an interpretative condition: duals are physically equivalent iff (A) they are duals and (B) i1 = i2∘d. On that basis it argues four things. First, there are no genuine cases of in-principle underdetermination in the examples, and a cautious realist can commit to the common core. Second, dualities do not favour structural realism. Third, duality is formally incompatible with ontological emergence, except “beside” it (AdS/CFT’s RG direction), via effective dualities, or epistemically. Fourth, quasi-dualities motivate a “geometric view” on which models are charts on a successor theory’s moduli space. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-178); worth reading as the reference treatment of dualities in philosophy of physics. It supplies definitions (the Schema, §3.1, and physical equivalence, §12.1.2, p. 402) and a common vocabulary (internal/external interpretation, common core, quasi-duality) that the rest of the record’s duality works either use or argue against. Its physics examples are admittedly partly conjectural (AdS/CFT, Montonen–Olive and M-theory are unproven), and its realism is a stated position, not a derivation. |
| LIT-200 v2 | Wave-functionalism | Allori (2021), DOI-10.1007/s11229-021-03332-z. Allori proposes that the wave function be defined by three roles — empirical, nomological and explanatory. On this view it is an ingredient that “partially realizes” the law, not a law and not a material field. So its time-dependence and non-uniqueness (a phase shift, a density matrix) are harmless, it counts as non-epistemic and ontic, and it can take part in constructive explanation. Each of these is argued informally, and the escape from PBR is by relabelling the ontic/epistemic distinction, not by engaging the theorem. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-154); a distinct and clearly placed option in the ψ-as-law family (LIT-204 §4.2). It is unproven until “part of the law” and “non-representational yet ontic” are given content that separates the view from Humean nomologism, and until it answers the “too cheap” objection it invites. |
| LIT-204 v2 | Realism about the Wave Function | Chen (2018), ARXIV-1810.07010. A survey that sorts realist readings of the non-relativistic universal wave function into four ontological readings (a field on 3N-dimensional space, a multi-field on 3-space, properties of systems as in spacetime state realism, a Hilbert-space vector), two nomological ones (strong: time-independent and simple like the classical Hamiltonian; weak: a Humean best-system variable) and Maudlin’s sui generis option. It tabulates their compatibility with BM, GRW0/m/f and S0/Sm and with high- versus low-dimensional fundamental space (Table 1, 10 of 56 cells ”?”), and declares no winner. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-175); worth reading as the compact map of the realist options and the hub for the wave-function cluster (LIT-200, LIT-100, LIT-164, LIT-121, LIT-176), with the caution that Table 1 is asserted, not derived, and is uneven in places. |
| LIT-211 v3 | What Lives? A meta-analysis of diverse opinions on the definition of life | Bender et al. (2025), ARXIV-2505.15849. Three LLMs (Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o, Llama 3.3 70B), each run 3 times on both orderings of every pair, rated 68 hand-solicited definitions of life on a −1 to 1 “correlation” rubric. The averaged matrix, cut by complete-linkage clustering at an elbow, gives 8 clusters, 45/68 of them (66%) in “Cognitive Autonomy” (n=24) and “Dissipative Self-Organizing Systems” (n=21). The clusters are weak: the repo’s own saved statistics give an overall silhouette of 0.079, and cross-model agreement is an unadjusted Rand index of 71–79% against a chance level of about 62–74%. The headline that life is “a continuous semantic landscape” is not tested against any alternative. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-109); worth reading as a dataset: 68 signed, three-sentence definitions of life from named researchers, with a manual thematic coding (Table 1). Its computational conclusions are weakly supported and are better read as illustrations than as findings. |
| LIT-215 v2 | Defending Informational Structural Realism: The View of Alternatives | Karpenko (2025), DOI-10.5840/eps202562230. Karpenko argues against V.E. Terekhovich’s non-eliminative OSR, which holds that entities and structures exist but “objects do not exist”. He extends Floridi’s informational structural realism with one thesis: empirically equivalent but structurally different models (wave/particle/field descriptions, superstring dualities, AdS/CFT holography, equivalent programs in digital physics) have equal ontological standing. Since nothing stands “behind” them with a privileged configuration, the descriptions, i.e. information, are themselves fundamental, and theoretical objects exist as ontological primitives. There is no formal argument, and the physics is presented by assertion, with several errors. | Rejected — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-096); not worth a reader’s time on this topic. It misreports its source (Floridi, LIT-152) on the points it builds on, and it states contested or wrong physics as established. Its one novel move, reading dualities as equal-status alternatives rather than underdetermination, is asserted, not argued, and is done properly in the duality literature (LIT-113, LIT-199). |
| LIT-216 v2 | The Weirdness of the World | Schwitzgebel (2024), DOI-10.1515/9780691239309. The book’s thesis is that every viable theory of how consciousness fits into the cosmos, and of the cosmos’s basic structure, is both “bizarre” (contrary to common sense) and “dubious” (not rationally compelling). So “something that seems almost too crazy to believe must be true” (p. 4), and credence should be spread across the bizarre options. Examples of those options are that the United States is conscious (if materialism is true), that we are sims or Boltzmann brains (a 0.1–1% credence), that space is transcendentally ideal, that almost every act causes almost every future event, and that there is no fact about snail consciousness. Its only positive empirical results are three self-experiments against solipsism (for example, 17 of 19 decisive chess games lost, p < .001). Everything else is informal argument. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-188); Worth reading as the one place Schwitzgebel’s separately published arguments are joined into a single case: US consciousness, crazyism, 1% skepticism, Kant meets cyberpunk, the garden snail, and the Full Rights Dilemma for AI. Chapter 3, the Universal Bizarreness and Dubiety argument, is the load-bearing contribution. Its individual chapters are informal arguments, and the manuscript that can be reached is not the published text. The published book reorders the chapters, moves the objections appendix to the end and updates the AI chapter. |
| LIT-217 v3 | Science, Metaphysics and Structural Realism | Ladyman (2001), DOI-10.21825/philosophica.82261. Ladyman argues that structural realism should be metaphysically, not epistemically, revisionary. He gives three grounds. Quantum statistics leaves the individuality of particles underdetermined: permutation invariance gives 3 two-particle states, not 4, so probabilities are 1/3 rather than 1/4 (p. 62). Entangled states give non-supervenient relations that refute Humean supervenience (pp. 71–73). The hole argument blocks point-based substantivalism (pp. 68–69). He proposes that science describes “the modal structure of the phenomena” (p. 73), with modal realism supplying the no-miracles intuition. The paper ends non-eliminatively: “the phenomena have structure but they are not structure” (p. 74). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-192); Worth reading as the earliest freely available statement of ontic structural realism by its originator. It argues the Humean-supervenience and quantum-individuality points more fully than the SEP survey (LIT-045). It also shows that the 2001 view was a modest one, realism about modal structure with no eliminativism, before Every Thing Must Go. Its positive proposal takes two paragraphs (pp. 73–74) and is programmatic. |
| LIT-218 v2 | Ontic Structural Realism and Economics | Ross (2008), DOI-10.1086/594518. Ross argues that OSR, usually motivated only by fundamental physics, is also the right ontology for a mature special science, economics. The progress of economic theory from Jevons through Hicks–Allen (1934), Samuelson (1947), Debreu (1959) and Arrow (1965) consists in steadily removing psychological, individual-level hypotheses. Its basic objects are optimisation problems, above all games, which are “mathematical structures … whose relata are distinguished as such by the mathematical representations … just like quarks and bosons” (§3). So OSR, joined with an assumption that science is unified, gets consilient support from outside physics. Individuals, in physics and in economics, are “book-keeping devices”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-189); Worth reading as Ross’s own short statement of what OSR says outside physics. It argues that individuals are bookkeeping heuristics while “tables and rocks” and people still exist, and that consilience across the sciences, not physics alone, can support OSR. Its history of economics is a sketch, and its central claims are asserted from the formalism rather than argued against a worked alternative. Cite the 2008 Philosophy of Science version. This note reads the 2006 preprint. |
| LIT-219 v2 | Patterns All the Way Up: Prolegomena to a Future Naturalized Metaphysics | Ladyman (2026), DOI-10.7551/mitpress/15550.003.0006. Ladyman restates the Ladyman–Ross metaphysics as fifteen theses drawn from scientific practice. The existence criterion is “to be is to be a real pattern”, a pattern that “indispensibly figures in projectible generalisations” (p. 2). Realism is realism about natural modal structure, which is “absolute” in formal mode but “domain and scale-dependent” in material mode (thesis 4). There is no single hierarchy of levels and no assumed fundamental level (theses 10–11, fn. 9). Ontology is effective and scale-relative (thesis 12). Scientific real patterns are lossy compressions, unlike the Game of Life’s; the ideal gas laws use 3 degrees of freedom for ~10²³ (thesis 14). He quotes ETMG’s Principle of Naturalistic Closure verbatim and calls it “problematic” because it refers to fundamental physics (p. 8). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-191); Worth reading as the most recent and most compact statement of rainforest realism by one of its two authors, and the one that explicitly revises Every Thing Must Go. It weakens the PNC, denies that “relational structure is fundamental” was meant as fundamentalism, and recasts real patterns modally and statistically as well as information-theoretically. Its fifteen theses are asserted and illustrated, not argued. It presupposes the book’s definitions, which it does not restate. |
| LIT-220 v2 | Real Patterns | Dennett (1991), DOI-10.2307/2027085. A pattern is real in some data “if there is a description of the data that is more efficient than the bit map, whether or not anyone can concoct it” (p. 34). This is Chaitin’s incompressibility definition of randomness turned around (p. 32). Dennett uses the criterion, with the Game of Life’s gliders and eaters as the stepping stone (pp. 37–42), to defend “mild realism” about beliefs. Folk psychology tracks a real, noisy pattern of enormous predictive leverage. Two rival interpretations can be “different, but equally real, patterns” with no deeper fact to settle between them (p. 49). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-190); Worth reading as the source of the real-patterns criterion that rainforest realism generalises into a theory of existence, and as the paper whose exact definition the later literature modifies. It has a lossless-compression criterion, observer-relativity through “perspectives”, and trade-offs between noise and simplicity. Its target is beliefs, not ontology in general. Dennett explicitly declines the label question (“I think that the view itself is clearer than either of the labels”, p. 51). |
| LIT-222 v2 | No categorial support for radical ontic structural realism | Lam & Wüthrich (2015), DOI-10.1093/bjps/axt053. Lam and Wüthrich argue that category theory gives radical OSR no support. Identifying objects with identity arrows is relabelling (§3). Generalized elements X → A exist in every category, so elements are not eliminated (§4). Categories without products also lose set-style relations, “throwing out the relations with the relata” (§4). Morphisms relate C-objects, not the elements that stand for physical relata, and they “only distinguish isomorphism classes of structures” (§5). Bain’s GR and TQFT cases eliminate at most spacetime points, not relata tout court (§§6–7). They conclude that category theory “offers little if any comfort to ROSR” (abstract) and favour “balanced” OSR. The Yoneda lemma is not named, although §§4–5 state two of its consequences. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-194); Worth reading as the most careful direct refutation of Bain (yo2). Its main points (generalized elements, morphisms relate C-objects, determination only up to isomorphism, sections are not maximal ideals) are correct and are exactly what the Yoneda reading needs. It has a few category-theoretic slips of its own: Hilb said to lack products, a mis-definition of topos, and the claim that non-commutative algebras have no maximal ideals. |
| LIT-223 v2 | Category-theoretic structure and radical ontic structural realism | Bain (2013), DOI-10.1007/s11229-011-9896-6. Bain argues that the “relations without relata” objection to radical OSR depends on defining structure set-theoretically, where a relation is a subset of X × X. If a structure is instead “an object in a category”, its elements (arrows 1 → A) are “not essential”, because category-theoretic objects need not be structured sets. His examples are sheaves of Einstein algebras for GR with asymptotic boundary conditions, which may lack global sections (§3), and nCob and Hilb (§4). He concludes that ROSR “avoids the charge that it rests on an incoherent claim” (p. 1634). The paper never mentions the Yoneda lemma, representable functors or universal properties by name. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-193); Worth reading as the short, canonical statement of the category-theoretic defence of radical OSR, which the later literature (yo3; Lal & Teh; Eva 2016) responds to. Read it with yo3. Its central inference is overstated, and its GR section contains technical errors that yo3 documents. |
| LIT-244 v2 | Natural Kinds (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) | Bird & Tobin (2008; rev. 2022), SEP. Whether scientific kinds are natural breaks into four questions (are the classifications natural, are they into kinds, what the kinds are, and do they have essences). Shared properties, inductive support and a role in laws are each necessary but not sufficient for kindhood. The entry maps positions from conventionalism to essentialist strong realism, reports pluralist, cluster, epistemology-first and eliminativist turns, and doubts that Kripke–Putnam semantics delivers more than partial essences. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-769) in full; worth reading as the map of the natural-kinds debate: four metaphysical questions, six candidate criteria of which shared properties, inductive support and a role in laws are each necessary but not sufficient, cluster, pluralist and epistemology-first accounts, Hacking’s interactive kinds, and the Kripke–Putnam semantics with the doubts about getting essences from it. Read it knowing that it is a survey that argues for little, that the 2022 revision was read rather than the Spring 2024 archive the owner cites, and that it never mentions information or compression, so the link to sufficient statistics under which it was filed is the owner’s. |
| LIT-291 v2 | Compatibilism | McKenna & Coates (2004), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/. The entry sorts compatibilism by which incompatibilist premise it denies: that free will requires the ability to do otherwise, that determinism precludes it, or that free will requires ultimate sourcehood. It argues that every “mesh” compatibilism has the same weak point: its sufficient conditions (hierarchies, reasons-responsive mechanisms, values) can be installed by manipulation, so each must either show what is wrong with manipulation cases or accept them. Its §4.2.1 is the fullest statement of Frankfurt 1971 in this batch. It covers first- and second-order desires, the will as the “effective first-order desire” that moves one “all the way to action” (1971, p. 84, Watson-1982 reprint pagination), the therapist’s mere second-order desire versus a second-order volition (pp. 84–5), the unwilling and willing addicts, and “One acts of her own free will if and only if her action issues from the will she wants.” The current revision has dropped the wanton/person distinction. The 2004–2015 revisions had it (“passive bystanders to their wills”, 1971, p. 89) and have to be read for it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-270); worth reading as the most complete reachable second-hand statement of Frankfurt’s 1971 apparatus and of the two structural objections (higher-order alienation per Watson 1975; manipulation), with Frankfurt’s own bullet-biting quotation on manipulation (2002, p. 27). For wantons and persons, read the 2004–2015 revisions (e.g. the Fall 2019 archive edition). Its account of Frankfurt’s later replies (supplement §A) dates from 2009, omits “satisfaction” (1992), and dates wholeheartedness to 1994. |
| LIT-293 v2 | I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right | Frankfurt (2004), https://tannerlectures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/frankfurt_2005.pdf. Frankfurt grounds practical reason and normativity in the will rather than in reason. Reflexive self-division makes higher-order attitudes possible (pp. 170–171). Identification, a largely default “willing acceptance” (p. 173), turns a desire from “a problem” into a reason (p. 175). Free will is “volitional unanimity” between the governing desire and higher-order volitions (p. 177), and caring is wanting to go on wanting (p. 180). Final ends and their normative authority come from love, “strictly volitional” (p. 196): its involuntary, wholehearted “volitional necessities” are “irresistible, but … not coercive” (p. 197) and are “the only legitimate authority” for our normative convictions (p. 201). The 1971 wanton/person taxonomy is gestured at in a single phrase and its apparatus is not restated. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-264); worth reading as the only openly available statement by Frankfurt himself of his mature view (identification, volitional unanimity, caring, love, volitional necessity); read it knowing that it is a lecture with no self-citation and no engagement with critics (Watson is never named, the regress is not discussed), and that it does not restate the 1971 apparatus, which must still be sourced second-hand. |
| LIT-294 v2 | Moral Responsibility and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities | Robb (2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/alternative-possibilities/. PAP (“a person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise”) has no decisive positive argument: it is not self-evident, and the moral arguments from fairness, OIC and the W-defense cover blame at most. Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) are the strongest attack, because the factor that makes the act inevitable plays no role in producing it. The entry lays out three defences of PAP: - general-ability readings (PAP-general); - “flickers of freedom”, which Fischer answers with the robustness requirement; - the Kane/Widerker/Ginet dilemma, answered by Fischer’s causal-irrelevance reply on the first horn and by Pereboom’s buffer case, Hunt’s blockage and Mele & Robb 1998 on the second. Robb reports “not much consensus” (§5). He treats the fall of PAP as re-energising compatibilism, with Frankfurt’s 1971 identification view and Fischer & Ravizza’s guidance control as the two replacement accounts. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-269); worth reading as the standard, even-handed map of the PAP debate and the best available stand-in for Frankfurt 1969. It gives the recipe, both of Frankfurt’s own cases, and the main defences and replies, with precise citations. It is a stand-in for the argument’s reception, not for the 1969 text, which it quotes only through Fischer’s retelling, and it links FSCs to the hierarchical theory in a single paragraph (§5.1). |
| LIT-295 v2 | What Happens When Someone Acts? | Velleman (1992), DOI-10.1093/mind/101.403.461. Velleman argues that the “standard story” of action (desire + belief cause an intention, which causes movement) leaves the agent out. It fails even when every causal link is normal: his example is an intention to end a friendship, formed and executed without him (p. 104). Frankfurt’s hierarchical remedy cannot fix it either. Any mental item picked out without presupposing the agent’s participation (a second-order desire, a Watsonian value, a “decisive commitment”) is one the agent can be alienated from. Any item defined so as to guarantee participation begs the question of agent-causation (pp. 112–116). His alternative is to look for what is functionally identical to the agent, not what the agent identifies with. That can only be a motive always behind and never merely in front of critical reflection: the desire to act in accordance with reasons. Its reinforcing force is the agent’s contribution (pp. 117–122). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-265); worth reading as the canonical statement of the “disappearing agent” objection to the causal theory of action and as the sharpest short critique of Frankfurt’s hierarchy as a reduction of agent-causation. Its positive proposal is a sketch whose content Velleman revises in the same book: he later says the motive is not a de dicto desire for reasons, and relabels “full-blooded action” as action vs. activity. |
| LIT-296 v2 | Personal Autonomy | Buss & Westlund (2002), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personal-autonomy/. The entry sorts accounts of self-government into four families: “coherentist” (hierarchical desires, Frankfurt; evaluative judgments, Watson; plans, Bratman; caring; character), reasons-responsive, responsiveness-to-reasoning (Christman, Mele) and incompatibilist, with relational conditions as a compatible add-on. It then argues (§3) that none of them, alone or combined, gives the minimal conditions of autonomy. Coherence is not sufficient, because the endorsement itself can be manipulated. It is not necessary either: a weak-willed agent, or someone acting against her plans, still governs herself. And any attempt to ground identification in some attitude restarts the regress. The only attitude no agent can be alienated from, the desire to be self-governing, cannot be the criterion, because it is present even in failures. The 1971 hierarchy gets one sentence, and Frankfurt’s later replies (decisive commitment, then “satisfaction”) get one footnote. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-267); worth reading as a compact, opinionated map of why hierarchical (and every other) account of self-government falls short of minimal autonomy, especially the §3 regress and weakness-of-will arguments; it is not a substitute for Frankfurt 1971, whose apparatus (second-order volitions, wantons, persons, freedom of will vs. action) it never states, and it does not report Watson’s objection to Frankfurt at all. |
| LIT-301 v3 | Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized | Ladyman et al. (2007), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199276196.001.0001. Argues for a naturalized metaphysics constrained by physics, defending ontic structural realism and a ‘rainforest realism’ of real patterns (building on Dennett 1991) with no self-subsistent individuals (per standard description). | Unavailable — seeded 2026-09-29 from metadata and published descriptions, not read: registered because the owner’s prior-art novelty map cites it. A close reading was attempted on 2026-09-29 and no legitimate full text could be reached; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-303 v3 | Types and Ontology | Sommers (1963), DOI-10.2307/2183167. Develops a theory of categories via the span of predicates over things, arguing that predicability relations must form a tree (hierarchy) and using category mistakes to diagnose type boundaries (per standard description; abstract not retrieved). | Unavailable — seeded 2026-09-29 from metadata and published descriptions, not read: registered because the owner’s prior-art novelty map cites it. A close reading was attempted on 2026-09-29 and no legitimate full text could be reached; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-315 v2 | Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds? | Worrall (1989), DOI-10.1111/j.1746-8361.1989.tb00933.x. Worrall argues that the only position that honours both the no-miracles argument and the historical fact of radical theoretical change is Poincaré’s “structural or syntactic realism”. What survives theory change and explains predictive success is mathematical structure: equations carried over unchanged (Fresnel’s reflection/refraction amplitude ratios, reinterpreted as electric-vector amplitudes in Maxwell’s theory) or recovered as limiting cases under the correspondence principle (Newton from Einstein). The underlying ontology (elastic ether versus electromagnetic field) is not what survives. The support is one worked case and a general appeal to the correspondence principle. There are no formal definitions, and the paper says itself that “much clarificatory work needs to be done”, above all on what it is for one theory’s structure to approximate another’s (p. 121). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-297); worth reading as the short, clearly argued source that revived epistemic structural realism and supplies its canonical Fresnel→Maxwell case. It argues informally from one example, leaves “structure” and “structural approximation” undefined, and is epistemic, not ontic. For the ontic position, and for any invariance-based reading of “structure”, it must be read with Ladyman 1998 and after. |
| LIT-320 v3 | Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals | Rodriguez-Pereyra (2002), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199243778.001.0001. Frames the problem of universals as a truthmaker problem and defends resemblance nominalism — things have properties in virtue of resembling one another — answering Goodman’s imperfect-community and companionship objections (per standard description; chapter titles confirmed in Crossref). | Unavailable — seeded 2026-09-29 from metadata and published descriptions, not read: registered because the owner’s prior-art novelty map cites it. A close reading was attempted on 2026-09-29 and no legitimate full text could be reached; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-336 v3 | Universals and Scientific Realism (Vol. I: Nominalism and Realism; Vol. II: A Theory of Universals) | Armstrong (1978), https://archive.org/details/universalsscient0000arms. Vol. I argues against the varieties of nominalism (including resemblance nominalism) and against transcendent universals; Vol. II develops a theory of immanent universals whose identity is settled a posteriori by science (per standard description). | Unavailable — seeded 2026-09-29 from metadata and published descriptions, not read: registered because the owner’s prior-art novelty map cites it. A close reading was attempted on 2026-09-29 and no legitimate full text could be reached; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-342 v3 | What is Structural Realism? | Ladyman (1998), DOI-10.1016/S0039-3681(98)80129-5. Distinguishes epistemic from metaphysical (ontic) structural realism and argues that structural realism should be a revision of ontology, not only of what we can know, drawing on quantum physics (per standard description; abstract not retrieved). | Unavailable — seeded 2026-09-29 from metadata and published descriptions, not read: registered because the owner’s prior-art novelty map cites it. A close reading was attempted on 2026-09-29 and no legitimate full text could be reached; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-350 v3 | Categories and De Interpretatione (Clarendon Aristotle Series, trans. and notes J. L. Ackrill) | Aristotle & (translator) (1963), DOI-10.1093/actrade/9780198720867.book.1. Aristotle’s Categories, whose ch. 10 classifies four kinds of opposites (relatives, contraries, privation/possession, affirmation/negation), and De Interpretatione, whose ch. 7 distinguishes contrary from contradictory statements; here in Ackrill’s standard translation with commentary (per standard description). | Unavailable — seeded 2026-09-29 from metadata and published descriptions, not read: registered because the owner’s prior-art novelty map cites it. A close reading was attempted on 2026-09-29 and no legitimate full text could be reached; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-387 v3 | Feelings Are the Source of Consciousness | Damasio & Damasio (2023), Neural Computation 35(3):277–286. A “view” piece. Consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as belonging to an organism, and a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings provides it. Those feelings were the first phenomena of consciousness in evolution. They arise from a two-way interaction between the interoceptive nervous system and the viscera and their chemistry, so they are hybrid, at once neural and bodily, which the authors offer as a solution to the mind-body problem. Unread: placed from the abstract. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-01 at the owner’s request; the full text exists as a free (bronze) PDF on MIT Press, but the site refused every automated request with a bot challenge (HTTP 403), and no repository, PubMed Central or preprint copy exists, so it is placed from the abstract only and no NOTE is filed. It is not the “Damasio & Damasio 2023” that NOTE-120 reports as a critic of plant sentience: that is a different work, an Animal Sentience commentary. Free copy: doi:10.1162/neco_a_01521 (MIT Press’s free bronze PDF). |
| 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-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-397 | Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness | Dennett (1996), Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(1):4–6, a reply to Chalmers’s “Facing Up”. The easy/hard split is “a major misdirector of attention, an illusion-generator”. A vitalist could pose the same “hard problem” of life, and a neuroscientist who set perception aside as hard would have misdescribed vision. Chalmers’s reason why consciousness is different repeats the claim. Subtract every function from one’s own consciousness and nothing is left but a conviction. Positing experience as fundamental, like mass and charge, needs independent evidence, which is not given (“cutism”). | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-346); worth reading as the three-page statement of the deflationary reply to the hard problem, and as the source of the vitalism, “Crock” and “cutism” analogies. Its one argued point is a challenge, not a refutation: Chalmers owes independent evidence for experience as a fundamental property, the way physics has for mass and charge, and without it the posit does no explanatory work. Its central premise, that once every function is subtracted from one’s own consciousness “there is nothing left”, is asserted from the author’s introspective catalogue. |
| LIT-398 v2 | True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works | Dennett (1981; revised 1987, read in Mind Design II, 1997). Belief is “a perfectly objective phenomenon” that can be discerned only by one who adopts the intentional strategy. To be a true believer is to be a system “whose behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable” by it. The choice of stance is free, but its success is objective: Laplacean Martians who skipped it would miss real patterns. Thermostat and person differ only by degree. Why the strategy works is answered easily by evolution, and not yet at all by mechanism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-353), in the revised text reprinted in Mind Design II (1997), not the 1981 printing; worth reading as Dennett’s statement that belief is objective although only visible through a strategy: anything whose behaviour is “reliably and voluminously predictable” by the intentional strategy is a believer “in the fullest sense of the word”. It turns the 1971 paper’s observer-relativity (LIT-440) into “the facts about the success or failure of the stance … are perfectly objective”, introduces the Martian thought experiment and the intentional “real patterns” later worked out in LIT-220, and runs the thermostat-to-person continuum (“no magic moment”). Its criterion admits any system on which the strategy pays, groups included, but the essay never applies it to a group. |
| 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-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-406 | Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness | Chalmers (1995), Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3):200–219. The “easy” problems of consciousness (discrimination, integration, report, access, attention, control, wakefulness) are problems of explaining functions, and a mechanism that performs a function explains it. The hard problem is that after every such function is explained, “why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?” stays open, so reductive methods cannot answer it. Experience should be taken as fundamental, linked to the physical by psychophysical laws. Two nonbasic candidates are offered, structural coherence (the structure of experience mirrors the structure of awareness) and organizational invariance (fine-grained functional isomorphs have the same experiences), with a speculative double-aspect theory of information as the basic law. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-336); worth reading as the source of the easy/hard distinction, and short. Cite it for three separable things: the hard problem as the claim that explaining every function near experience leaves “why is this accompanied by experience?” open (§§2–3); the outline of a nonreductive theory built from two nonbasic principles, structural coherence and organizational invariance (§7); and the double-aspect theory of information, which the author calls “more of an idea than a theory” (§8). The organizational-invariance argument here is a one-page sketch; the full version is LIT-392. |
| 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-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-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-423 v2 | I Am a Strange Loop | Hofstadter (2007), Basic Books. Per its publisher, an “I” is “a strange loop where the brain’s symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down”, and the book asks whether that “I” is real or “merely a convenient fiction”, and how selves “can exist in the minds of others”. Its 26 contents entries run from souls and the causal potency of patterns, through Gödel’s “quintessential strange loop” and downward causality, to “How we live in each other”, “Consciousness = thinking” and zombies and dualism. Unread: registered from the description and the catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-01 from the publisher’s description and the Library of Congress catalogue record with its contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans are lending-only, and no publisher or author copy is posted. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-425 | The Meta-Problem of Consciousness | Chalmers (2018), Journal of Consciousness Studies 25(9–10):6–61. The meta-problem is to explain, in terms that do not mention consciousness, why we judge that consciousness poses a hard problem. It is an “easy” problem with an empirical programme. Of thirteen candidate mechanisms, the most promising is an introspective model that attributes primitive relations of awareness to primitive qualities, with a sense of acquaintance. A realist theory should explain how its basis of consciousness produces these judgments, which IIT and biological theories struggle to do. Debunking arguments for illusionism can be blocked, but a residual sense of coincidence remains. Only strong illusionism dissolves the hard problem, and it is false because people feel pain. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-354); worth reading as the statement of the meta-problem, explaining in topic-neutral terms why we judge that consciousness poses a hard problem, and as a survey of thirteen candidate mechanisms. Cite it for four things: the meta-problem as an “easy” problem with a research programme; the meta-problem challenge to theories of consciousness, which tells against IIT and biological theories; the analysis of debunking and coincidence arguments for illusionism; and the argument that only strong illusionism dissolves the hard problem, with a Moorean rejection of strong illusionism. Its own preferred solution is offered as “closer to a fleshed-out explanandum” than an explanation. |
| LIT-430 v2 | The Intentional Stance | Dennett (1987), MIT Press. Per its publisher, the “first full-scale presentation of a theory of intentionality” Dennett had been developing for almost twenty years: we understand each other by adopting a stance, “a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality” of whatever we predict. Six chapters reprint papers of the 1980s, each followed by a new “Reflections” essay; the first and the last three chapters are new. Chapter 2 is True Believers (LIT-398). Unread: registered from the description and a catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and a library catalogue’s contents note, not read: no lawful full text of the book could be reached. The Internet Archive scans are lending-only (access-restricted, printdisabled), the MIT Press page and loc.gov were blocked, and the Tufts Digital Library holds earlier versions of several chapters as papers but not the book. Its chapter 2 is True Believers (LIT-398), read in full in its 1997 reprint, which is the revised book text. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-431 | Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain | Dennett & Kinsbourne (1992), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15(2):183–201, with open peer commentary. There is no place in the brain where “it all comes together” for consciousness. Discriminations are made once, locally, and revised in parallel “drafts”, none canonical. The brain represents temporal order by content, not by the timing of its own vehicles, as a dated letter does. Colour phi, the cutaneous rabbit and Libet’s timing results stop looking anomalous. Whether a revision was pre-experiential (Stalinesque) or post-experiential (Orwellian) has no answer at that scale. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-367), the target article only; worth reading as the shortest complete statement of the Multiple Drafts model and of the case against “Cartesian materialism”, worked out on four timing phenomena (colour phi, the cutaneous rabbit, Libet’s backward referral and his delayed intention). Its sound core is the distinction between the time a content is represented and the time it represents. Its strong claim, that the Orwellian/Stalinesque distinction “need have no answer” below a few hundred milliseconds, is an argument from indistinguishability, not a demonstration. The open peer commentary (pp. 201–247) was not read. |
| LIT-433 | Quining Qualia | Dennett (1988), in Marcel & Bisiach (eds.), Consciousness in Contemporary Science, OUP, pp. 42–77. Qualia as tradition has them are ineffable, intrinsic, private and directly apprehensible, and fifteen intuition pumps argue that nothing has all four. Two neurosurgical routes to an apparent colour inversion, one changing qualia and one only memory-linked reactions, feel the same from the inside. So the subject cannot know his own qualia better than an outside tester can. What is real is practical ineffability and idiosyncrasy: we refer to information-rich public properties through our own detectors of them. Hence “there simply are no qualia at all”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-357); worth reading as the founding statement of qualia eliminativism and the source of the post-Cartesian side in the record’s consciousness readings. It argues by fifteen intuition pumps, not by proof, and says so. Its lasting results are two: the alternative-neurosurgery and Chase-and-Sanborn cases, which show that neither the subject nor the physiologist can separate a change in qualia from a change in reactions to them; and a positive account of practical ineffability and privacy as idiosyncratic, information-rich property detection. Its conclusion, “there simply are no qualia at all”, is a tactical choice of words by the author’s own endnote 2, not a stronger thesis than that. |
| LIT-434 v2 | Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness | Dennett (2016), Journal of Consciousness Studies 23(11–12):65–72, in the issue built around Frankish’s target article “Illusionism as a theory of consciousness”. By its search-engine abstract, it uses a parallel with stage magic to argue that illusionism should be treated as the front runner, a conservative theory to be developed in detail. Unread: registered from bibliographic records only. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from bibliographic records, not read: no readable full text could be reached. Ingenta Connect (the publisher’s host) and ResearchGate returned HTTP 403, PhilPapers and Semantic Scholar refused automated access (403 and 429), the Tufts Digital Library holds no copy, and the Wayback Machine was unreachable from here, so the archived copy of Dennett’s Tufts page could not be tried. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-441 v2 | The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory | Chalmers (1996), Oxford University Press. Per its introduction, the book argues that consciousness cannot be reductively explained and that materialism is false, and then moves toward a nonreductive theory with fundamental psychophysical laws. Its contents run from supervenience and explanation through the irreducibility argument, naturalistic dualism and the paradox of phenomenal judgment, to coherence principles, absent, fading and dancing qualia, and information. It ends with a defence of strong AI and a no-collapse reading of quantum mechanics. Unread: registered from the author’s posted contents, introduction and jacket copy. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the author’s posted table of contents, introduction and jacket copy, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The author posts only those three, not draft chapters. Its two central arguments for this record are readable in their paper versions, LIT-406 (the hard problem and naturalistic dualism) and LIT-392 (chapter 7’s organizational invariance). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| 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-443 v2 | Consciousness Explained | Dennett (1991), Little, Brown. Per its publisher, a “full-scale exploration of human consciousness” that “refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence”. Its fourteen contents entries run from “How are hallucinations possible?” and “A method for phenomenology”, through “Multiple drafts versus the Cartesian Theater” and “The architecture of the human mind”, to “Qualia disqualified” and “The reality of selves”. Unread: registered from the description and the catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the catalogue record with its contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans are lending-only (access-restricted, printdisabled), no publisher or author copy is posted, and the Tufts Digital Library holds Dennett’s papers but not the book or draft chapters of it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| 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-447 | Personal Identity | Parfit (1971), DOI-10.2307/2184309. Against two beliefs, that every question about personal identity must have an answer and that important questions turn on it. In Wiggins’s division case, each half-brain recipient stands in the relation that would be survival if there were only one, so “how could a double success be a failure?”. What matters is psychological continuity and connectedness, which can branch and come in degrees, while identity is one-one and all-or-nothing. Q-memory and q-intention show the relations need not presuppose identity. Speaking of past and future selves by degree of connectedness, the principle of self-interest has no independent force. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-378), in a JSTOR copy of the published article posted on a University of Athens course page; worth reading as the paper that separated what matters in survival from identity, and the short original of Part III of Reasons and Persons. Its division case makes “I survive as neither” absurd and “I survive as both” incompatible with identity, so it concludes that what matters is psychological continuity and connectedness, which can branch and come in degrees, while identity cannot. It supplies q-memory, the non-branching criterion, and the vocabulary of successive selves. Its first conclusion is argued; its claim that connectedness matters more than continuity is left, in its own words, needing “more arguments than I have space to give”. |
| LIT-448 v2 | The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology | Olson (1997), Oxford University Press. The book-length case for animalism. Per its abstract, “our identity over time involves no psychological facts”: psychological accounts “lead to grave metaphysical problems”, the arguments for them are inconclusive, and since we are animals we have “the purely biological identity conditions of animals”. Its chapters run from psychology and personal identity through persistence, the case against the psychological approach, whether I was ever a fetus and whether people are animals, to the biological approach and alternatives. Unread: registered from the abstract and the contents. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s abstract, the Library of Congress record and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Oxford Academic is subscription-only, the Internet Archive copy is lending-only, and no author copy is posted. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| 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-456 | Reply to Professor Stich | Dennett (1980), Philosophical Books 21(2):73–76, replying to Stich’s critical notice of Brainstorms, “Headaches” (pp. 65–73). Accepts Stich’s summary. On rationality: the norm is grounded only minimally in evolution, and full rationality is an idealisation, so personhood rests on a concept we “only imperfectly achieve”. On pain: there are no pains in a mature psychology’s ontology, yet people feel pain; between biting the bullet, reform and common sense (pain is like holes, voices and haircuts), the choice is “a matter of policy”. Philosophy supplies the medicine for the puzzles, science the rest. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-371); worth reading as Dennett’s shortest statement of two positions he kept: the intentional stance grounds belief in an idealisation of rationality, so persons are believers by a standard “we already know we only imperfectly achieve”; and pain is not a good theoretical entity, yet people feel pain, a choice among biting the bullet, reform and common sense that is “in some measure a matter of policy”. It is also the text behind LIT-393’s account of the homunculus essay, which it confirms: Stich’s quotations stand as LIT-393 gives them, and Dennett’s acceptance of Stich’s summary is a blanket one. |
| LIT-458 | Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness | Frankish (2016), Journal of Consciousness Studies 23(11–12):11–39, the target article of the issue later published as Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness (2017). Names “illusionism”: phenomenal properties are not instantiated, and the task is the “illusion problem” of explaining why experiences seem to have them. Strong illusionism (no phenomenal properties at all, only “quasi-phenomenal” physical ones introspection misrepresents) is separated from weak illusionism (real phenomenal properties that merely seem ineffable, intrinsic, private), which it argues collapses into the strong form or into radical realism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-384); worth reading as the founding statement of illusionism under that name, and the target article that Dennett’s “Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness” (LIT-434) answers. It names the “illusion problem”, draws the strong/weak illusionism line with “quasi-phenomenal” properties, and argues from conservatism, anomalousness and the debunking argument that strong illusionism should be the research programme. It states a programme, not a theory: by its own account it “will not propose a detailed illusionist theory” (p. 1 of the eprint), and its positive arguments are abductive and openly so. |
| 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-461 | Consciousness interpreted: an interpretation of Dennett’s view of consciousness | Taylor (2024), DOI-10.1080/09515089.2024.2433526. Interprets Dennett’s theory of consciousness as realism about a real pattern. Consciousness is a real pattern in the brain’s content-bearing states (drafts), and a user-illusion: a pattern so coarse that describing the brain through it is metaphor. On that reading multiple drafts and global workspace theory are compatible, qualia eliminativism is peripheral, the Orwellian and Stalinesque readings of masking are equally good descriptions, and first-person reports are fallible as literal descriptions of the brain but authoritative as unwitting fictions. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-379); worth reading as the short, charitable reconstruction of Dennett’s theory of consciousness that ties it to “Real Patterns” (LIT-220): consciousness is a real pattern in the brain’s content-bearing states (drafts), of the coarse, metaphorical kind Dennett calls a user-illusion. It reconciles six claims, including multiple drafts with global workspace theory and fallibility with “dictatorial” authority. It is an interpretation offered as consistent, not as correct or as Dennett’s own, and its key step on metacontrast masking is a plausibility argument. |
| LIT-462 | The Self and the Future | Williams (1970), DOI-10.2307/2183946. One experiment, told twice. A and B enter a machine that exchanges their memories and characters, and choose selfishly which emerging person gets $100,000 and which torture: the outcomes make “changing bodies” the natural description. Told as a series of things that will happen to me (amnesia, changed character, another’s “memories”, then torture), fear stays rational at every step, and the step that completes the swap changes only what happens to someone else. Undecidability and convention make the clash worse, not better. If forced to choose selfishly, pass the pain to the other body, and call it a “risk”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-387), in a JSTOR copy of the published article posted on a University of Vermont course page; worth reading as the strongest case that first-person concern tracks the body, and the paper that made the reduplication-free body swap a problem for the psychological view. It tells one body-exchange experiment twice. Told third-personally, with choices before and reactions after, it says A and B swap bodies. Told first-personally, as a series of things that will happen to me before I am tortured, it says I am the one tortured. It argues that neither indeterminacy nor convention can resolve the clash, and ends with a “rather shaky” preference for the bodily answer, as a “risk”. An argument from what fear is rational, not a theory. |
| 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-466 | Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being | Shanahan (2025), arXiv:2503.16348. Asks whether consciousness talk can be stretched to disembodied, 2024-vintage LLM agents. Their time would be discrete and discontinuous, a string of unlike beads. Their “I” has two palatable referents, the model across conversations and a self confined to one conversation that “flickers into being with each user interaction”, and we may slip between them. Such selves can be edited, copied and merged, and smeared across branching simulacra. Every candidate site dissolves, which Shanahan reads as Buddhist emptiness, and turns back on human selfhood. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-376) in arXiv v3 (July 2025), the only text there is; worth reading as the one paper here that argues directly about what an LLM’s self is, rather than whether it has one. Its answer: two conceptions are in play, a self sited in the model and “fleeting, flickering” selves sited in single conversations, and we may slip between them; every candidate site “dissolves upon close examination”, and Shanahan takes that to the Buddhist conclusion that there is no inherent self, here or in us. It is avowedly “poetic”, not literal, and its examples are invented usages, not data. |
| LIT-467 v3 | Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity | Metzinger (2003), MIT Press. Per its publisher, “no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves”, and the phenomenal self is “the content of a ‘transparent self-model’”. A representationalist and functional analysis of the conscious first-person perspective, with conceptual “tools”, constraints on consciousness and neurophenomenological case studies (agnosia, neglect, blindsight, hallucination), asking whether being someone can be analysed at subpersonal levels. Unread: registered from the description and the contents; the theory is read in LIT-450. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text of the book could be reached. The MIT Press Direct edition is not open access and no author copy is posted. Its theory is read in Metzinger’s own short statement, “Self models” (LIT-450, read in full), and more fully in his “Précis: Being No One” (PSYCHE 11(5), 2005; LIT-568, read in full 2026-10-03), the read substitute for the book, which sets out six of its ten constraints and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation. Retried 2026-11-01: OpenAlex still reports it closed with no open location; it is not in the Internet Archive’s MIT Press open-access collection, which holds Metzinger’s 2024 book (LIT-1943); MIT Press Direct returned a Cloudflare challenge; no author copy found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-468 v2 | The Constitution of Selves | Schechtman (1996), Cornell University Press. Separates the reidentification question (is this the same person?) from the characterization question (which actions, experiences and traits are this person’s own?), and argues against analytic philosophy’s attention to the first at the expense of the second. Chapters 1–3 take up reidentification; chapters 4–6 give the narrative self-constitution view, on which, as Strawson quotes it, a person “creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative”. The source of the term “characterization question” in the SEP map. Unread: registered from the description and the contents. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, the Library of Congress record and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Cornell/De Gruyter eBook is sold, not open, and the Internet Archive copy is for print-disabled users only. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-469 v3 | Reasons and Persons | Parfit (1984), Clarendon Press; DOI-10.1093/019824908X.001.0001 is the 1986 reprint online. Four loosely connected parts, per the author’s abstract: self-defeating theories of rationality and morality; what one person can rationally want at different times, and attitudes to time; personal identity, where “most of us … have certain beliefs about this subject that are false, but hard to give up”; and obligations to future generations, with the non-identity problem and the Repugnant Conclusion. By the chapter abstracts, Part III defends a reductionist view on which identity is not what matters and draws consequences for self-interest and distributive justice. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, its chapter abstracts and the table of contents; the book is in copyright and no lawful full text was reachable (the Internet Archive copies are lending-only and were not opened), so it is unread and no NOTE is filed. By its publisher’s account, Part III argues that most of us hold false beliefs about personal identity, that psychological continuity and connectedness, not identity, is what matters, and that this should change our attitudes to our own future, to rationality and to morality. The record already leans on it at second hand: Birch’s Relation R, Velleman’s reading of Frankfurt and the identity-and-ethics survey all cite it. |
| LIT-470 v2 | Foundations for a Social Ontology | Thomasson (2003), ProtoSociology 18–19:269–290. Per its abstract: the social world poses a metaphysical puzzle (how facts and objects created by human intentionality can be real) and an epistemological one (how such products can include objective facts for the social sciences to discover). Searle’s account in The Construction of Social Reality is too narrow to solve either; rules for constructing social reality that parallel rules for make-believe give a more comprehensive ontology, but talk of social reality is not pretence. Unread: filed from the abstract. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s abstract; no lawful full text was reachable (the Philosophy Documentation Center sells it at $20, PhilPapers returned 403, and the Academia.edu copy sits behind a bot check), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. By its abstract it argues that Searle’s account of social facts is too narrow and that rules modelled on the rules of make-believe give a fuller social ontology; how, is not recorded here. |
| LIT-475 v2 | The Social Construction of What? | Hacking (1999), Harvard University Press. A book on social-construction claims whose title asks what they are claims about. By its chapter titles: why ask what; too many metaphors; the natural sciences; madness; kind-making; weapons research; rocks; the end of Captain Cook. Unread: filed from bibliographic records and the table of contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the Crossref records for the book and its chapters and the Open Library records of its editions; no lawful full text was reachable (Harvard University Press and JSTOR pages did not load, the e-book is licensed through JSTOR, and there is no author-posted draft), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Its title asks of social-construction claims what they are claims about; what its answer is, beyond its chapter titles, is not recorded here. |
| 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-480 | Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be? | Haslanger (2000), Noûs 34(1):31–55. Distinguishes conceptual, descriptive and analytical answers to “what is gender/race?” and takes the analytical one: define the terms for what a feminist antiracist theory needs. S is a woman iff S is regularly observed or imagined to have bodily features presumed to indicate a female’s reproductive role, this marks S in the dominant ideology for subordinate positions, and that plays a role in S’s subordination; men and racialized groups are defined in parallel, ethnicity and gender in general as the non-hierarchical genus. Stipulative by design; no evidence offered. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-394); worth reading as the founding statement of ameliorative (“analytical”) social ontology and of gender and race as hierarchical social positions. It is short and explicit about its method: it defines woman, man and racialized group for the purposes of a feminist and antiracist theory, says so, and accepts the consequences (non-oppressed females are not women in its sense, and the goal is a world with none). Read it for the three-way distinction between conceptual, descriptive and analytical projects and for the definitional schema (marked by assumed bodily features, positioned by a dominant ideology, subordinated or privileged as a result), not for evidence: its “matters of established fact” about race are asserted without citation, and its definitions are stipulated, not discovered. |
| LIT-482 | Social ontology: Some basic principles | Searle (2006), DOI-10.1177/1463499606061731. Institutional reality is built from three primitives: collective intentionality, the assignment of function, and constitutive rules of the form “X counts as Y in C”. The Y status is held only by collective acceptance, and it carries deontic powers, which are desire-independent reasons for action. Institutional facts need language because they exist only as represented. Two revisions of the 1995 book: status indicators (after De Soto), and “free-standing Y terms” (after Barry Smith), such as corporations and money without currency. In those cases there is no X, and “We accept (S has power (S does A))”, a formula from later in the book, is ranked as the more general form. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-388), in its parallel English printing in Papers: Revista de Sociologia 80 (2006), pp. 51–71, not in the Anthropological Theory typesetting the DOI names; worth reading as Searle’s own short restatement of The Construction of Social Reality (LIT-485), and as the place where he concedes that “X counts as Y in C” is not the general form. Status functions imposed by collective acceptance carry deontic powers, and deontic powers are desire-independent reasons for action. Read it for the structure, not for an argument about collective intentionality: that is taken as a primitive and referred to his 1990 paper (LIT-490), not defended here. |
| LIT-484 | Qu’est-ce qu’un fait social ? | Durkheim (1894; book 1895), ch. I of Les Règles de la méthode sociologique. A social fact is “toute manière de faire, fixée ou non, susceptible d’exercer sur l’individu une contrainte extérieure”, or equivalently one general in a society while existing independently of its individual manifestations. Such facts are neither organic nor individual-psychic, so their substrate is society. They are general because collective, not collective because general: “il est dans chaque partie parce qu’il est dans le tout”. Ways of being (morphology) are consolidated ways of doing. A definition argued from examples, not proved. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-391); worth reading as the founding definition of a social fact, and as a short text later social ontology still cites (Ritchie 2018 does, for the group as more than a sum). Fifteen pages define the object of sociology by two marks, exteriority to individual consciousness and external constraint, with diffusion plus independent existence as an equivalent second test. It is a definition, not an argument: Durkheim calls it “un simple résumé des données immédiates de lobservation” (n. 3), and its two load-bearing steps (that what is neither organic nor individual-psychic must have society as its substrate, and that constraint is present even where nobody feels it) are asserted from examples. Read for the vocabulary and the part-whole thesis (“il est dans chaque partie parce qu’il est dans le tout”), not for a proof. |
| LIT-485 v2 | The Construction of Social Reality | Searle (1995), Free Press, New York (xiii + 241 pp.). The founding book of Searle’s social ontology. Per its catalogue description, it argues that some facts are independent of human observers and some require human agreement. Its chapters move from the building blocks of social reality and the creation of institutional facts through language and a general theory of institutional facts, to a defence of external realism and the correspondence theory of truth. Unread: filed from the catalogue record and contents; the record reads the theory in Searle’s 2006 restatement. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from catalogue records and a library scan of the table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (the book is in print with Free Press / Simon & Schuster, the Internet Archive copies are either lending-only or unauthorised uploads, and Searle posted no draft), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. The record reads the theory through Searle’s own 2006 restatement (LIT-482, read in full), which is the entry to start from. |
| 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-491 v2 | Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories | Ásta (2018), OUP. Per its publisher, a theory of social categories built on the question “what is it for a feature of an individual to be socially meaningful?”; its main idea is that “social categories are conferred upon people”, and its “conferralist” framework is applied to sex, gender, race, disability and other categories, and to their tendency to oppress. 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 (the book is not open access, Oxford Academic is paywalled, and the author’s site posts replies and related essays but no chapters or drafts), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the book-length statement of conferralism, the main rival to Haslanger’s account of social categories (LIT-480); what it argues beyond the description is not recorded here. |
| LIT-516 | Time, Structure and Fluctuations | Prigogine (1977), Nobel Lecture, reprinted in Science 201:777 (1978). Near equilibrium the second-order excess entropy δ²S is a Lyapounov function, so fluctuations die out, and in the “strictly” linear regime the steady state minimizes entropy production. Far from equilibrium the sign of the excess entropy production ΣδJδX is no longer fixed. Given autocatalytic steps (necessary, not sufficient) the thermodynamic branch can go unstable, and fluctuations are amplified into “dissipative structures”: Bénard convection, the Brusselator’s limit cycle and “Turing bifurcation”. A closing programme derives irreversibility from a non-unitary transformation of the Liouville dynamics. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-424); worth reading as Prigogine’s own short statement of the dissipative-structure programme, and as the place where its scope limits are stated in his words. A dissipative structure is a state beyond an instability of the “thermodynamic branch”, “a giant fluctuation stabilized by exchanges of energy with the outside world”. The minimum-entropy-production theorem is valid only in the “strictly” linear regime with constant phenomenological coefficients. Far from equilibrium the only general criterion offered is a sufficient one for stability (non-negative excess entropy production). Its §§6–7 programme of a non-unitary “entropy operator” is a sketch whose demonstrated link to macroscopic thermodynamics is, by its own account, “at least in the linear region”. |
| LIT-529 v2 | Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter | Deacon (2011), W. W. Norton. An account of how life, mind and purpose (“ententional” phenomena) emerged from physics, built on constraint and absence rather than on added stuff. Its contents run from absence, homunculi and teleonomy through emergence and constraint to a hierarchy of dynamics (homeodynamics, morphodynamics, teleodynamics), a minimal self-producing system (autogenesis), and then work, information, significance, evolution, self, sentience and consciousness. Unread: registered from the publisher’s description and the contents; the text was not reached. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and a library contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scan of the Norton printing is lending-only, and no author-posted draft was found. The companion chapter the record already cites, Deacon & Cashman (2013), “Teleology versus mechanism in biology: beyond self-organization”, is identified below but was not reachable either and is not filed. |
| LIT-534 v2 | Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature | Prigogine & Stengers (1984), Bantam; based on their La nouvelle alliance. A book for general readers that sets the science of complexity and irreversibility against classical dynamics. By its contents: the rise and limits of Newtonian science and its philosophical reception (Diderot, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, Whitehead); thermodynamics from Carnot to Boltzmann’s order principle; linear and far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, bifurcations and order through fluctuations; and the rediscovery of time in physics. Unread: filed from catalogue records only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from library catalogue records and a partial contents note; no lawful full text was reachable (the book is in copyright, the Internet Archive scans of the Bantam and Flamingo printings are lending-only, HathiTrust is search-only), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the popular and philosophical statement of the programme whose technical core is the Nobel lecture (LIT-516); what it argues, beyond its contents, is not recorded here. |
| LIT-536 v4 | Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry | Moreno & Mossio (2015), Springer, History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences 12. The book argues that biology should revolve around autonomy, not only natural selection: organisms are organized systems that self-produce and self-maintain as integrated wholes, set their own goals and norms, and promote the conditions of their existence through interaction with their environment. Chapters treat constraints and organisational closure, emergence and inter-level causation, teleology and function, agency, evolution, organisms and levels of autonomy, and cognition. Only the Introduction is read (NOTE-1437): there the authors make closure of constraints the core of biological organisation, say it differs fundamentally from the self-organisation of dissipative structures, and announce that it grounds teleology, normativity and function; the chapters that argue this are unread. | Unfetched — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list. The book is not open access at Springer. Its only free copy, the authors’ HAL deposit (hal-01151449, hal.science/hal-01151449/document, CC BY-NC 4.0, deposited 13 May 2015), is not the whole book, as this note earlier said: it holds the front matter (Hooker’s Foreword and the contents), the Introduction (pp. xix–xxxiv), the references and the index, and no chapter. The Introduction was read in full on 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1437, Skimmed, because only the Introduction was read). For chapters 1–8 no fuller lawful copy was found: on 2026-10-30 OpenAlex listed the HAL deposit as the book’s only open copy, and the publisher’s chapters are paywalled. HAL also served its anti-bot page to a direct fetch on 2026-10-02 and again on 2026-10-30; the deposit was read from a copy retrieved earlier the same day. It stays Unfetched for the chapters. |
| LIT-539 | Explanatory Models for Psychiatric Illness | Kendler (2008), American Journal of Psychiatry 165(6):695–702. Psychiatry should explain by mechanisms, not laws. Psychiatric causes act at many levels, within and outside the person, and are non-aggregative and loop-ridden, as an alcohol-dependence sketch shows (gene–environment interaction, tolerance feedback, niche selection, aversive cultural transmission). So “hard reductionism” and “hard emergentism” both fail, but locally decomposable subsystems can still be studied and then reassembled. After Marr, biology will implement psychological functions, not replace them. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-432), from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central; filed as the readable substitute for Kendler’s 2005 “Toward a Philosophical Structure for Psychiatry” (LIT-552), which has no lawful open copy. It opens by citing the 2005 paper for its premise that etiological models must be pluralistic, and develops two of the 2005 abstract’s propositions at length: piecemeal integration becomes “decomposition and reassembly” of multilevel mechanisms, and the mind–brain question becomes Marr-style implementation, in which “biology will implement but not replace psychology”. It does not restate the 2005 paper’s arguments against dualism and epiphenomenalism, so it stands in for the pluralism, not for the whole of the earlier paper. |
| LIT-552 v2 | Toward a Philosophical Structure for Psychiatry | Kendler (2005), American Journal of Psychiatry 162(3):433–440. Eight propositions for a philosophical frame for psychiatry, per the abstract: psychiatry is grounded in first-person experience; Cartesian substance dualism and epiphenomenalism are false; brain→mind and mind→brain causation are both real; psychiatric disorders are etiologically complex, with no more “spirochete-like” discoveries to come; explanatory pluralism beats monism, especially biological reductionism; and the goal is “patchy reductionism” and “piecemeal integration”. Unread: registered from its PubMed abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from its PubMed abstract and Crossref, not read. Not open access: Unpaywall lists no open copy, Europe PMC and PubMed Central hold no full text, and psychiatryonline.org answered both the full-text page and the PDF with HTTP 403 and a Cloudflare “Just a moment” challenge, which I did not try to get past. A web search finds it only on a document-sharing site, which is not an author or institutional deposit. A reader with American Journal of Psychiatry access can read it lawfully; a reading would move this to Active. Its readable substitute is Kendler’s “Explanatory models for psychiatric illness” (Am J Psychiatry 165(6):695–702, 2008), filed and read in full as LIT-539. That paper cites this one for its pluralist premise and develops its piecemeal integration and its mind–brain propositions, but not its arguments against dualism and epiphenomenalism. A later open paper, “The dappled nature of causes of psychiatric illness” (Mol Psychiatry 17(4):377–388, 2012, PMC3312951), was not read or filed. |
| LIT-560 | Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will? | Ryan & Deci (2006), Journal of Personality 74(6):1557–1586. SDT’s defence of autonomy as a psychological construct. Philosophers (phenomenologists from Pfänder and Ricoeur; hierarchical accounts from Frankfurt and Dworkin) agree that autonomy is self-endorsement, not independence. On that definition, the critiques fail: behaviourists and Bandura define autonomy as independence from the environment; reductive neuroscience mistakes levels of explanation; nonconscious priming shows autonomy can be compromised, not that it is illusory; too many options is not self-determination; and autonomy matters across cultures. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-441), from the authors’ own deposit of the published article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the place where SDT states its concept of autonomy against both philosophy and psychology. Autonomy is “regulation by the self”, its opposite “heteronomy”, regulation “without self-endorsement” (abstract). It is “a matter of degree” (p. 1562), compatible with dependence and with having one option, and lies “not in being independent causes but in exercising their capacity to reflectively endorse or reject prompted actions” (p. 1573). It answers Skinner, Bandura, Pinker, Bargh, Wegner, Schwartz and Iyengar. Its engagement with Frankfurt is thin: two citations of the 1971 paper inside one paragraph on hierarchical accounts, with the analytic detail taken from Dworkin. |
| LIT-568 | Précis: Being No One | Metzinger (2005), PSYCHE 11(5), the author’s précis of Being No One. Minimal consciousness is a global world-model in a window of presence that cannot be recognised as a model (globality, presentationality, transparency). A phenomenal self is a transparent self-model: “no such things as selves exist in the world”. Transparency comes in degrees, and the self-model’s opaque partition is what lets humans doubt their own self-representation. The unity of consciousness is a single global functional cluster. A first-person perspective is a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, and iterating it yields introspective and social intelligence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-460), as the read substitute for Being No One (LIT-467), which it summarises in Metzinger’s own words. Worth reading as the most complete short statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT): more of the machinery than “Self models” (LIT-450), in particular the six constraints, the degrees of transparency, and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation (PMIR). Phenomenal selfhood is a transparent self-model, “a function realized by a lack of information”; “no such things as selves exist in the world”. The unity of a conscious world is a global functional cluster bound by “highest-order binding”. It states the theory and its predictions; the evidence is cited, not shown, and the neural sections say how little is known. |
| 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-587 | The Normative Constitution of Agency | Korsgaard (2014), in Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman (OUP), pp. 190–214. Two conceptions of agency are set side by side: natural (action is movement caused by the right mental state) and normatively constituted (action is movement backed by a unified agent, whose unity is achieved by following norms). Following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives gives action “the form of self-determined efficacy”. Choosing maxims under that form constitutes one’s practical identity. Self-consciousness of one’s own attitudes sets the task of unification. Unity of agency “is an achievement, not a given”, so people can literally act together. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-455), in the author’s posted manuscript, not the typeset chapter. Worth reading as the read substitute for Self-Constitution (2009, LIT-597), which it summarises and extends, and as Korsgaard’s direct engagement with Bratman. Agency is “normatively constituted”: an action is a movement “backed by the agent as a whole”, and that unity is achieved by following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives, which give action “the form of self-determined efficacy”. The content of the maxims we choose under that form constitutes our “practical identities”. So “we make ourselves into agents”, and unity of agency, individual or collective, “is an achievement, not a given”. Argued, not proved; the account of reason as unification is said to be “lifted” from her other work. |
| LIT-603 v2 | The Emperor’s New Markov Blankets | Bruineberg, Dołęga, Dewhurst & Baltieri (2020 preprint; BBS 45:e183, 2022). Markov blankets entered variational inference as Pearl’s conditional-independence shields, tools on a scientist’s map. In the free-energy literature since Friston 2013 they became boundaries in the world between agent and environment: “Friston blankets”. The two are different constructs; Friston blankets need extra assumptions (a chosen internal node, sensorimotor labels, steady state, sparse coupling) that the formalism does not supply. Using them for metaphysical conclusions (“inference within a model”) requires metaphysical premises; used instrumentally (“inference with a model”) they are innocent but philosophically idle. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-447), but in its December 2020 PhilSci-Archive version; the Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article of 2021–2022 is, by the authors’ own note, “heavily rewritten” and could not be read lawfully beyond its abstract. Worth reading as the critique that names the problem: “Pearl blankets”, the conditional-independence tool of graphical models, are conflated with “Friston blankets”, a realist construct meant to be the boundary between an agent and its world. The second cannot be read off the mathematics of the first, and its use to settle questions about life and mind needs metaphysical premises of its own. It re-runs the primordial-soup simulation of LIT-526 and shows how the blanket found there depends on modelling choices. |
| LIT-630 | The Mind as the Software of the Brain | Block (1995), in Smith & Osherson (eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd ed., vol. 3, Thinking, MIT Press, ch. 11, pp. 377–425. The computer model explains intelligence by decomposing it into ever stupider processors that bottom out in primitive processors, the only devices for which behaviourism is true. The brain is a syntactic engine driving a semantic engine, by an isomorphism between symbol transitions and rational relations among meanings, which must hold counterfactually, so a wall is not every computer. Intentionality comes from the language of thought plus functional role semantics. Stich’s syntactic theory falls to the “Reductionist Cruncher”, and the systems reply answers Searle, though Block doubts the Chinese system is phenomenally conscious. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-490); worth reading as Block’s textbook statement of what “the mind is the software of the brain” means: intelligence explained by functional decomposition into primitive processors, the brain as a syntactic engine driving a semantic engine, intentionality explained by the language of thought plus functional role semantics, and the defence of that picture against Dennett’s objections, Stich’s syntactic theory (by the “Reductionist Cruncher”) and Searle’s Chinese room. It is a survey for an introductory volume, so its arguments are compressed, but it states clearly two things the record uses: intelligence is future-oriented and intentionality past-oriented, and the computer model may give intentionality without phenomenal consciousness. |
| LIT-632 | Comparing the Major Theories of Consciousness | Block (2009), in Gazzaniga (ed.), The Cognitive Neurosciences, 4th ed., MIT Press, ch. 77, pp. 1111–1122. Compares the three theories neuroscientists take most seriously: higher-order thought, the global workspace and the biological theory. Only the biological theory fully acknowledges the explanatory gap; the others replace it with a puzzle their own theory creates. Concept dualism stops the gap becoming dualism. The ambitious higher-order theory also fails on stipulation, mismatch and infants. Integrated information is criticised as a theory of intelligence. The biological theory is the least friendly to machine consciousness. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-505); worth reading as Block’s comparison of the higher-order thought, global workspace and biological theories by one test: does the theory recognise the explanatory gap? The ambitious higher-order theory and the workspace theory turn the gap into a puzzle of their own making, so only the biological theory “fully acknowledges” it; concept dualism keeps that from becoming dualism. Also the source of the “biological theory” that Chalmers’s meta-problem paper cites as “Block 2009”, and a short argument that the biological theory is less friendly to machine consciousness than its rivals. |
| LIT-634 | Inverted Earth | Block (1990), Philosophical Perspectives 4:53–79. Inverted Earth has complementary colours and inverted colour words, so a visitor with colour-inverting lenses notices nothing. After long residence, or for a twin raised there with a molecule-for-molecule identical brain, the intentional content of the experience of the sky inverts (it is about yellow) and so does its functional role in a long-arm description, while qualitative content stays the same. So qualitative content is not a functional state and the intentional/qualitative distinction stands. Public colour terms like “looks red” express intentional, not qualitative, content. A brain-internal functional theory of qualia would escape, but nobody has said what it is. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-504); worth reading as the source of the Inverted Earth argument: a subject moved, unaware, to a planet of complementary colours and inverted colour words keeps the same qualitative content while, over time, the intentional content and the (long-arm) functional role of the experience invert. That is the converse of the inverted spectrum, and it needs no internal switch, so the subject’s testimony is undisturbed and brain supervenience is on the qualia realist’s side. It refutes functionalism about qualia only in its long-arm form; Block concedes a short-arm functional theory of qualia would sink it, and answers that only with a burden of proof. |
| LIT-635 | Mental Paint | Block (2003), in Hahn & Ramberg (eds.), Reflections and Replies, MIT Press, pp. 165–200. Phenomenal character outruns representational content. Internalist representationism must find a functional difference for every phenomenal one, and Erisa, raised where colours keep changing, has vivid colour differences with no abiding functional ones. Against externalist representationism: a swampman has phenomenal character and no content; attention is not awareness, so transparency fails as a claim about awareness; on Inverted Earth what stays the same is mental paint; and normal variation in colour vision means, if representationism is true, that a standard chip cannot look its shade to both men and women. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-511); worth reading as Block’s fullest case against representationism about phenomenal character (“phenomenism” against “representationism”). It separates mental paint (phenomenal properties that represent) from mental oil (phenomenal properties that do not), argues against internalist representationism with Erisa, raised among colours that keep changing, and against externalist representationism with Inverted Earth, long-term memory, and an empirical “shifted spectra” argument from normal variation in cone sensitivity and in where people place unique green. Several of its arguments are offered as pressure, not proof, and Block says so. |
| LIT-639 | The Harder Problem of Consciousness | Block (2002), The Journal of Philosophy 99(8):391–425. For anyone who is both a naturalist (physicalism is the default) and a phenomenal realist (consciousness is real and not defined by function), a merely superficial functional isomorph of us with a different physical basis, “Commander Data”, poses a harder problem than the hard one. We have no conception of evidence that could show whether he is conscious, so physicalism is the default yet inaccessible, and it is the subjective default that he is not conscious though the question is open. Disjunctive or functional bases would save naturalism but could never be known. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-501); worth reading as the argument that whether a functional duplicate of us made of different stuff is conscious is not just unknown but “meta-inaccessible”: we have no conception of evidence that would settle it. For a naturalist who is also a phenomenal realist, physicalism is the default and yet whether such a being is conscious cannot bear on it. The paper also dissolves one form of the hard problem by treating subjective and objective as properties of concepts, not of properties. It lays out the tension and argues for no way out. |
| LIT-641 | What Psychological States are Not | Block & Fodor (1972), The Philosophical Review 81(2):159–181. Behaviourism and type physicalism set type-identity conditions on psychological states that are too concrete, and the decisive arguments against them are empirical. The functional state identity theory (FSIT), on which each psychological state is a machine-table state of the organism’s unique best description as a probabilistic automaton, fails too. It cannot model dispositions that are never occurrent, simultaneous states, or a productive and structured set of states, and it individuates too finely. Inverted or absent qualia are a prima facie objection to any functional definition. Psychological states look like computational states, not machine-table states, and type identity is fixed by the laws the states fall under. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-491); worth reading as the first sustained case against machine-state functionalism, and as the place where the inverted- and absent-qualia objection is first set down as an objection to functional definitions of mental states. Its central result is narrower than “functionalism is false”: psychological states cannot be put one-to-one with the machine-table states of a probabilistic automaton (§III, arguments 1, 2, 4, 5, 6), though they may correspond to computational states. Only the qualia argument (3) threatens functionalism in the broad sense, and the authors treat it as prima facie. |
| LIT-642 | Psychologism and Behaviorism | Block (1981), The Philosophical Review 90(1):5–43. Psychologism, the doctrine that whether behaviour is intelligent depends on the information processing that produces it, is true. A machine that stores all sensible conversations of a test’s length and looks up its replies has the capacity to respond sensibly to any sequence of inputs, so it satisfies the strongest behaviourist conception of intelligence, yet all its intelligence is its programmers’. The standard objections to behaviourism (Chisholm–Geach, the perfect actor, paralytics) defeat behaviourist necessary conditions but not sufficient ones; this machine defeats the sufficient condition. Psychologism is not chauvinism: it excludes one kind of processing without requiring ours. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-506); worth reading as the source of the “Blockhead”: a machine that stores every sensible hour-long conversation and so has the capacity to pass any Turing test of that length, yet “has the intelligence of a toaster”. The argument refutes behaviourist sufficient conditions for intelligence, including a capacity version that survives the standard objections, and establishes psychologism: whether behaviour is intelligent depends partly on the processing that produces it. It does not say which processing is required, only that it needs some “richness”, and the closing case against simulators of physics, neurons or psychology is admitted to be a sketch. |
| LIT-685 v3 | Freedom Within Reason | Wolf (1990), Oxford University Press. Unread seed. The book-length Reason View: free will is “the freedom to be good, or the freedom to do the right thing for the right reasons” (publisher’s abstract). It sets up the dilemma of autonomy, argues that the Real Self View (Hume, Frankfurt, Watson, Taylor) and the Autonomy View both fail, states the Reason View, defends its notion of ability against determinism, and asks what the True and the Good must be for the view to hold. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 as a seed, from Crossref’s book and chapter records (whose abstracts are each chapter’s opening paragraph), the SEP entry the record holds and an MIT lecture handout, not read. No lawful full text was found: the book is paywalled at Oxford Academic, Unpaywall lists no open copy (oa_status closed), and no author or repository deposit turned up. A person with Oxford Academic or library access can supply it (Oxford University Press, 1990, 153 pp., DOI 10.1093/oso/9780195056167.001.0001); chapter 4, “The Reason View” (pp. 67–93), and chapter 2, “The Real Self View” (pp. 23–45), are the parts to read first. |
| LIT-688 v3 | Asymmetrical Freedom | Wolf (1980), The Journal of Philosophy 77(3):151–166. Unread. By the SEP’s report it is the origin of the Reason View’s asymmetry: an agent who acts in accord with the True and the Good is praiseworthy even if psychologically determined so that she could not have done otherwise, but one who acts against it is blameworthy only if she could have done otherwise. Blame therefore needs regulative control and praise needs only guidance control, and Wolf answers the threat from determinism by denying that physical determination entails psychological determination. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Crossref, the record’s own second-hand readings and the SEP entry it already holds, not read. No lawful full text was found. The article is paywalled at JSTOR (stable 2025667) and the Philosophy Documentation Center, and JSTOR’s free Early Journal Content stops long before 1980. Unpaywall lists no open copy (oa_status closed). The author’s UNC faculty page posts no papers. PhilPapers (WOLAF) answered with a bot challenge, so I stopped there. The PDFs a web search turns up are a JSTOR download re-posted on an unrelated Squarespace site, a syllabus-collection upload on Weebly, and Scribd and Course Hero uploads; none is the author’s, a publisher’s or an institutional repository’s, so none was opened. A person with JSTOR or PDCnet access can supply the 16-page PDF (Journal of Philosophy 77(3), pp. 151–166, DOI 10.2307/2025667); a reading of it would move this to Active and is the text the asymmetry THEORY candidate needs. |
| LIT-692 | Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person | Frankfurt (1971), The Journal of Philosophy 68(1):5–20. What is essential to a person is the structure of the will. A person’s will is the effective first-order desire, the one that moves him “all the way to action” (p. 8). A second-order volition is wanting a desire to be one’s will; persons have them, and wantons, who “do not care” about their wills, do not (pp. 10–11). Forming one is identifying with one desire and withdrawing from another (p. 13). Freedom of the will is having the will one wants, “securing the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions” (p. 15), and a decisive identification “resounds” through all higher orders (p. 16). Moral responsibility needs neither a free will nor alternatives: the willing addict acts “of his own free will” (pp. 18–20). | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-545); worth reading as the source of the hierarchical account of the will, which the record has so far held only second-hand: first- and second-order desires, the will as the effective desire, second-order volitions, wantons and persons, freedom of the will as having the will one wants, decisive identification that “resounds” through higher orders, and a responsibility that needs neither a free will nor alternatives. Read it knowing that it is short and programmatic, that identification is stated, not analysed, and that it already contains both the decisive commitment (p. 16) and the acceptance of an addict made by another (n. 10), which the record’s surveys date later. |
| LIT-694 | Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility | Frankfurt (1969), The Journal of Philosophy 66(23):829–839. The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), “a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise”, is false. Coercion excuses only when the agent acts because of it (§§II– III). Black, ready to make Jones4 act as he wants and never needing to, shows that circumstances can make an action unavoidable without playing any role in bringing it about (§IV); such a fact “does not help in any way to understand” the action and cannot excuse it (§V). PAP should be replaced by: not responsible “if he did it only because he could not have done otherwise”, which “does not appear to conflict” with compatibilism (pp. 838–839). | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-546); worth reading as the origin of Frankfurt-style cases and the shortest first-hand statement of the argument against the principle of alternate possibilities: a fact that makes an action unavoidable but plays no role in bringing it about cannot excuse, so PAP should give way to “a person is not morally responsible for what he has done if he did it only because he could not have done otherwise” (p. 838). Read it knowing that its case is schematic (Black, Jones4 and “a certain action”; the voting and shooting versions in the record’s surveys are later retellings), that its prior sign is in a footnote, and that it leaves “could have done otherwise” and “morally responsible” unanalysed on purpose (n. 1). |
| LIT-700 | Three kinds of collective attitudes | List (2014), Erkenntnis 79(S9):1601–1622. Collective attitudes come in three kinds. Aggregate attitudes summarise members’ attitudes by a rule or a market, supervene proposition-wise and need not be rational. Common attitudes are held by all members with common awareness, matter for coordination, and inherit consistency from their unanimity. Corporate attitudes belong to a group agent, guide its action, supervene holistically on members’ contributions and must be rational. The kinds are almost logically independent, and fears and hopes divide the same way as beliefs and desires. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-554); worth reading as the disambiguation the collective-attitudes literature needs: aggregate attitudes (summaries, supervening proposition by proposition), common attitudes (unanimous and commonly known, supervening on a slightly enriched base) and corporate attitudes (a group agent’s, supervening holistically and not straightforwardly reducible). The three are almost logically independent. A review by its own description, with no new theorem; its value for this record is that it names fears and hopes among the attitudes the split applies to, which gives the collective-emotion debate a vocabulary. |
| 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-713 | Causation and Manipulability | Woodward, “Causation and Manipulability”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2001; revised 2023). Causes are handles for manipulation: X causes Y iff some intervention on X, an exogenous change meeting conditions M1–M4 relative to Y, would change Y. The account is non-reductive but not viciously circular, needs no human agent, and distinguishes total, direct and contributing causes by combining interventions. Invariance and levels are not treated here. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-585): in full, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s own open page (2023 revision). Worth reading as Woodward’s compact statement of the interventionist account: X causes Y when an intervention on X, a surgical exogenous change defined by conditions M1–M4, would change Y. It answers the circularity and anthropocentrism objections and separates total, direct and contributing causes. Limits: it is a survey, and this version does not treat invariance, proportionality or levels of causation; for those the book (LIT-723, unread) is needed. |
| LIT-722 | Nonreductive Physicalism and the Limits of the Exclusion Principle | List & Menzies (2009), Journal of Philosophy 106:475–502. On a difference-making account of causation, Kim’s exclusion principle is false. A revised principle (a property and its realizer never both cause the same effect) holds or fails system by system. The higher-level property is the cause, and excludes its realizer, exactly when the relation is realization-insensitive: the effect would still follow under nearby alternative realizations. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-560): in full, from the authors’ accepted manuscript on List’s LSE page. Worth reading for a test of when a higher-level property is a cause in its own right. On a difference-making account, a higher-level property excludes its own realizer as the cause exactly when the effect would still follow had the property been realized differently (realization-insensitivity). Whether that holds is a fact about each causal system, not an a priori truth. Pernu (LIT-147) argues the neuroprosthetic example cannot carry it. |
| LIT-723 v2 | Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation | Woodward (2003; Crossref print date 2004), Oxford University Press. A non-reductive, non-circular account of causation and explanation built on interventions; relationships that are stable under interventions are invariant, and invariance rather than lawhood explains causal explanation in the special sciences (per the publisher’s abstract). Unread: the account of intervention is read in his SEP entry LIT-713; chapter 6 on invariance is not. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached (the Oxford Academic page returned HTTP 403, and it is a subscription product). Its interventionist account is read first-hand in Woodward’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry “Causation and Manipulability” (LIT-713). The entry does not treat invariance, so chapter 6, “Invariance” (pp. 239–314), is the part the owner’s essay needs and has not read. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-895 v2 | Moderate structural realism about space-time | Esfeld & Lam (2008), DOI-10.1007/s11229-006-9076-2, Synthese 160. Moderate structural realism accepts that relations require relata. It denies that the relata need intrinsic properties beyond their relations. Objects and relations are mutually dependent, with no priority either way, and relations supply identity conditions wherever intrinsic properties would. Where nothing discerns the relata (entangled quantum systems of one kind, points of a symmetric space-time), it takes numerical diversity as primitive, and denies that this is a thisness. In general relativity the relata are space-time points, not bare manifold points. They get a “structural identity” from the metric, or from a section of the orthonormal frame bundle. The hole argument counts against epistemic structural realism, and the question of what space-time relations relate counts against the radical version. The case is interpretive fit, not entailment. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-695); worth reading as the founding statement of the no-priority, non-eliminative structural realism that Chakravartty’s dilemma targets and that the owner’s individuation thesis was placed beside. It says exactly what that position does with relata no relation discerns: entangled quantum systems of one kind and space-time points in symmetric space-times get a primitive numerical diversity, which the authors deny is a thisness or any kind of identity (pp. 33–34). The GR sections show that the tensor and fibre-bundle formulations fit the view, not that they require it. The one concrete construction of a point’s “structural identity” they cite works only for space-times without symmetries, and it breaks the covariance the view rests on. |
| LIT-900 v2 | The Method of Levels of Abstraction | Floridi (2008), DOI-10.1007/s11023-008-9113-7. Floridi gives up ontological levelism (levels in the system itself) and keeps an epistemological one, the method of levels of abstraction. An observable is an interpreted typed variable; an LoA is a finite non-empty set of observables; a moderated LoA adds a behaviour predicate; a gradient of abstractions (GoA) is a family of moderated LoAs with mutually inverse relations Rᵢ,ⱼ under which pⱼ ⇒ P_Rᵢ,ⱼ(pᵢ). Fixing the LoA fixes which questions can be asked and answered, and commits a theory to types (the LoA) and tokens (the model). The method is shown on Kant’s antinomies, and set apart from Marr’s, Pylyshyn’s and Dennett’s levels (which, it says, conceal their ontological commitment by privileging explanation), from Davidson’s conceptual schemes, from relativism and from naive realism. It proves nothing about GoAs; its value is the vocabulary. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-700); worth reading as the source statement of the method of levels of abstraction that Floridi’s papers on agency, informational structural realism (LIT-152) and personal identity (LIT-136) all assume. Read §2 for the definitions, §2.7 for what an LoA commits a theory to, and §4.1 for the distinction between levels of abstraction, of organisation and of explanation. It is a method with definitions, not a result: no theorem is proved about GoAs, the one formal claim (disjoint and nested GoAs are interconvertible) does not go through under the paper’s own definition of nestedness, and the guard against relativism (§4.3) is one paragraph that ranks LoAs only relative to a purpose. |
| 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-1269 | Intuitions about personal identity: An empirical study | Nichols & Bruno (2010), Philosophical Psychology 23:293–312. Survey studies of University of Arizona introductory philosophy students on Williams’s (1970) personal-identity cases. A replication of Blok et al.’s brain-transplant vignette finds the person judged “still Jim” when memories survive and not when they are erased, in first- and third-person versions alike. A stripped-down version of Williams’s Pain case (a brain infection treated by a procedure that eliminates “distinctive mental states”) gets 68% (N = 50) saying “you will feel the pain” of later injections, and 72% (N = 54) in the third person, with no difference between the two. An open-ended abstract question draws psychological answers from over 70% (N = 53), and over 80% (N = 54) deny that a future person with none of their memories could be them. Given both and told they conflict, 64% (N = 45, p = 0.053) side with memory. The authors read the psychological intuitions as the more robust, and so as support for a psychological criterion “insofar as” intuitions should guide the theory. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-996) in full, from the published PDF linked from the first author’s own publications page; worth reading as the first survey test of Williams’s two tellings of the body-exchange case and of his two explanations of why they diverge. Undergraduates mostly say a brain-transplant patient whose memories are erased is no longer the same person, and mostly say that a patient whose distinctive mental states are wiped will still feel the pain of later injections; neither result moves with first- against third-person telling. Asked abstractly, about 70% name psychological factors and more than 80% deny that someone without any of their memories could be them; made to choose, 64% side with memory (p = 0.053). Read it as evidence about how a concept of personal persistence responds to framing in one student population, not about what persistence is: the authors make the bearing conditional on intuitions informing the theory, test only necessity of psychology, and leave unseparated whether the Pain vignette asks about identity or about bare sentience. |
| LIT-1284 | Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function | Chalmers and McQueen (2021, in Gao ed., Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics, OUP 2022), arXiv:2105.02314. Develops the thesis that consciousness collapses the wave function by taking consciousness to be super-resistant to superposition, measuring it with integrated information theory, and giving it a continuous-collapse dynamics. Simple versions are falsified by the quantum Zeno effect; more complex ones are in principle testable with quantum computers. On a property-dualist reading a consciousness-to-physics law gives consciousness a causal role, and the authors argue that collapse is the causal-closure gap that philosophers’ closure arguments assume is absent. | Active — read in part 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1012); worth reading as the most developed consciousness-collapse proposal and as the source that frames quantum collapse as the gap in causal closure that a property-dualist consciousness could fill: consciousness (phenomenal Q-shape in integrated information theory) is super-resistant to superposition and drives a continuous-collapse dynamics, simple versions are falsified by the quantum Zeno effect, and more complex versions are in principle testable with quantum computers. |
| LIT-1308 | Folk concepts of person and identity: A response to Nichols and Bruno | Berniūnas & Dranseika (2016), Philosophical Psychology 29:96–122, from the abstract only. A reply to Nichols & Bruno (2010). The authors argue that in transformation cases the folk do not use one concept of personal identity but separate concepts of “person”, “identity” and “individual”, so that identity can be ascribed to a post-transformation individual no longer categorized as a person. They report new survey evidence that the folk do not treat psychological continuity as necessary either for being categorized as a person or for identity over time, reading identity judgements off the use of proper names, as Nichols & Bruno did. They doubt current designs can tell qualitative from numerical identity judgements, and conclude for scepticism about folk intuitions in theorizing about personal identity. Samples, vignettes and effect sizes are not known here. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-21 from the abstract only; no lawful full text was reached on 2026-10-21, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Where the reader looked: OpenAlex and Unpaywall (both “closed”, no repository copy); Semantic Scholar (openAccessPdf “CLOSED”); Europe PMC (no record); tandfonline.com (403 to this client, and paywalled); PhilPapers and PhilArchive (record BERFCO, 403 to this client, so whether PhilArchive holds an archived copy is unsettled); PhilPeople profiles of both authors (403); the second author’s personal site, www.dranseika.lt, linked from his Jagiellonian University (INCET) staff page (the publications page lists the paper with no link to a copy); the INCET staff page itself (no copy); the Lituanistika database record (content/101037: abstract and keywords, no file); web and Google Scholar searches for a PDF, a preprint or an accepted manuscript in the Vilnius University repository (none found; Scholar returned no version of the paper itself). ResearchGate was not relied on. A failure of access for PhilArchive, which should be rechecked from a client it does not refuse, and of availability elsewhere. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1343 v2 | Brains in a vat | Putnam (1981). Argues that the hypothesis that we are, and always have been, brains in a vat is self-refuting: if reference needs a causal connection to what is referred to, an envatted brain’s words “brain” and “vat” do not refer to brains and vats, so it cannot truly think that it is a brain in a vat. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on access. The book is in copyright and not open access (Unpaywall and OpenAlex: closed). Cambridge Core offers the chapter only behind “Get access”. The Internet Archive’s lending library holds the book (reasontruthhisto0000putn, access-restricted, borrowable with an account), which this client cannot borrow. PhilPapers returned 403. Two other Internet Archive items of the whole book sit in its user-upload “opensource” collection with no sign of the publisher’s permission, and were not used. The summary is the chapter’s standard reading, unchecked. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-21, “Experience and interpretation”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1346 v2 | Three arguments against metaphysical structuralism in consciousness research | Negro (2025), Synthese 206:8. Distinguishes methodological, epistemological and metaphysical structuralism in consciousness science, and three senses in which consciousness may be structural: an experience has an internal structure, is in a structure, or is the structure. Against the third, which metaphysical structuralism needs (Lyre 2022 is the quoted target), it gives three valid arguments: Relational Mary, who knows all of orange’s relations and still learns what orange is like; the novel experience argument, that the view makes every new experience change all the others; and the lonely experience argument, that a one-experience system is conceivable and even nomologically possible. Methodological and epistemological structuralism need only the first two senses and are left standing. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1054) from the publisher’s open-access PDF (Springer, CC BY 4.0); worth reading as the clearest map of what phenomenal structuralism can and cannot claim: three structuralisms (methodological, epistemological, metaphysical) and three senses of “structural” (having, being in, and being a structure), with the argument that the field’s methods and evidence need only the first two senses. Its three arguments against the metaphysical thesis (Relational Mary, novel experience, lonely experience) are valid, but each rests on an intuition or a conceivability premise that a committed structuralist denies, and its charge that making judgement constitutive amounts to eliminativism is one paragraph long. |
| LIT-1348 v2 | Two geometrical arguments against similarity structuralism | Aldé (2026), Synthese 207:204. Similarity structuralism holds that phenomenal character is fully determined by similarity relations, so by the geometry of a similarity space. Two arguments that this fails for colour. The unique hues objection: exactly four hues are experienced as unmixed and all others as combinations of two, but no geometric property of CIELAB, or likely of better uniform spaces or of the colours they omit, distinguishes them. The opposing dimensions objection: the black–white axis is a single gradient, while axes through grey are two half-gradients, and no adequate geometric feature marks the difference. Structuralism cannot discount the introspective evidence without discounting the introspected similarity it is built on. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1055) from the publisher’s open-access PDF (Springer, CC BY 4.0); worth reading as the objection to similarity structuralism that does not rest on intuition: it takes accepted facts of colour science, that exactly four hues look unmixed and every other hue a mixture of two, and that the black–white axis is a single gradient where the axes through grey are opponent pairs, and argues that no adequate feature of the colour similarity space’s geometry marks either. Its decisive premise is argued by inspecting CIELAB and extrapolating to better models, not by an analysis, and its target is similarity structuralism about colour only. |
| 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-1633 v2 | Mr. Russell’s “Causal Theory of Perception” | Newman (1928). Against Russell’s claim that we know only the structure of the external world: any collection of the right cardinality can be given relations with any structure we please, so knowing only structure is knowing only cardinality, unless the relations are specified as more than abstract relations. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the article is closed on Unpaywall and OpenAlex (Mind, Oxford University Press), with no repository copy. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1635 v2 | Relational Quantum Mechanics | Rovelli (1996), arXiv quant-ph/9609002. The notion behind the measurement problem is the observer-independent state, as absolute simultaneity was behind the unease with the Lorentz transformations. A measuring system O and an external P who treats S+O unitarily give different and equally correct accounts of one measurement, so a value is a value relative to a system, any physical system can be the observer, and quantum mechanics, taken as complete, describes the information (correlation) systems have about one another. The relation between two views is itself relative to a third system, and there is no description in toto. Systems are not relational: each is characterized by its set of yes/no questions and an information capacity. Two information postulates and a third, superposition postulate are offered as a partial reconstruction of the formalism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1227), in arXiv v2; worth reading as the founding statement of RQM: the two-description analysis of one measurement, values relative to any physical system, no deducible relation between views and no description in toto, and an information reconstruction it calls “not fully successful”. It keeps systems prior to their relational values, as an assumption: each is characterized by its question set W(S) and capacity N, and the decomposition may vary. It has no ontology of events; that is later. |
| LIT-1647 v2 | Agential Realism—A Relation Ontology Interpretation of Quantum Physics | Barad (2022). A compact later statement of agential realism as an interpretation of quantum physics, in which relata exist only within and through their constitutive relations. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the chapter is closed on Unpaywall (Oxford Handbooks Online), with no open copy listed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1648 v2 | Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information | Simondon (1958; English 2020). Individuation is to be explained before individuals: from a metastable preindividual field charged with potentials, an individual forms by transduction, a structuring that propagates step by step, each structured region the condition for the next, as in crystallization. An individual is a partial resolution of the field and keeps a charge of preindividual reality, so individuation can continue. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the translation has no DOI to look up on Unpaywall, OpenAlex’s title search was out of its daily budget for this client, and the publisher sells it; no open copy is known. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. Retried 2026-10-31 for the works Bencherki et al. 2024 lean on: no open edition on the University of Minnesota’s Manifold, no excerpt on the publisher’s page, nothing on the Internet Archive. |
| LIT-1653 v2 | Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter | Barad (2003). The short statement of agential realism: phenomena, not independent objects, are the primary ontological units; relata do not precede the intra-actions through which they become determinate; apparatuses are open-ended material-discursive practices that enact agential cuts, making some boundaries and properties determinate within a phenomenon and excluding others. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: Unpaywall reports the publisher’s copy as closed, and OpenAlex lists no open copy and no repository full text. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. Its two most-cited passages (pp. 814 and 815) are read at second hand in NOTE-1230 and NOTE-1220. |
| LIT-1657 v2 | Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning | Barad (2007). The full development of agential realism from Bohr’s philosophy-physics: the inseparability of object and agencies of observation read as ontological, not epistemic; phenomena as the primary units; apparatuses as boundary-making practices that are themselves phenomena; agential separability as exteriority within phenomena; and ethico-onto-epistem-ology, on which practices of knowing are part of the world’s becoming and carry responsibility for the cuts they enact. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the book is closed on Unpaywall (Duke University Press), with no open copy listed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1672 v2 | Barad, Bohr, and quantum mechanics | Faye & Jaksland (2021). Barad’s Bohr is more ontological than Bohr, who took phenomena as experimental arrangements with their outcomes; Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics does not entail Barad’s relational holism; and agential realism leaves the measurement problem unsolved, since persisting entanglement of apparatus and object does not explain one determinate outcome. Quantum mechanics does not force agential realism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1220); worth reading as the assessment of agential realism from philosophy of physics: Barad’s Bohr is not Bohr’s (phenomena epistemic, Bohr an entity realist, the dualisms presupposed), quantum mechanics does not entail agential realism (Bohmian mechanics; relational quantum mechanics keeps systems prior to interactions), and agential realism has no answer to the measurement problem as it stands. |
| LIT-1673 v2 | Naturalized, Fundamental, and Feminist Metaphysics All at Once: The Case of Barad’s Agential Realism | Jaksland (2024), DOI-10.1017/hyp.2023.114, Hypatia 39. Barad holds agential realism to be naturalized metaphysics justified by quantum mechanics and applied once, to the one reality, and rejects reading it as analogy or as a template other domains instantiate. Its extension to the lifeworld then needs ontological features that admit no approximation (the subject–object and word–world dualisms, representationalism). Whether any exist is left open; individualism is the plausibly approximable case, and the independence of social theorizing from fundamental metaphysics is at least contingent, on the size of Planck’s constant. | Active — read in full 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1230); worth reading as the only statement of the argument Barad’s unrestricted scope needs, that some ontological features admit no approximation, and as the clearest account of the conception of agential realism Barad holds (naturalized, applied once) against the two she rejects (analogy, template). Its own answer to its question is that it is open, with individualism the plausibly approximable case and the dualisms the hard one. |
| LIT-1788 | Surviving Death, Again | Johnston (2023). Records “a change in view” from Surviving Death (2010). There he argued that the Christian hope of resurrection fails and offered a this-worldly surrogate, “living on in the onward rush of humankind”, built on the idea that we are higher-order things whose deepest future-directed attitudes fix which future embodiments are ours. Now, because reductionist accounts of personal identity breed “fellow travelers” (personites and the like) with moral status and conflicting interests, he holds that we are essentially embodied wills whose present bodies are not essential, so re-embodiment after death is possible. Defines subserving, implementing and interdependence as non-reductive relations between mental and neural events. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1257) from the published version, open under CC BY-NC-ND at TheoLogica; worth reading as Johnston’s own retraction of the account of survival in Surviving Death (LIT-1759, Unavailable), read in its place. It now holds that we are essentially embodied wills, which drops the self-making view on which the earlier “onward rush of humankind” rested. The paper’s own subject is the metaphysics of survival, not altruism. |
| LIT-1849 | Real patterns and indispensability | Suñé and Martínez (2019; Synthese 198, 2021, 4315–4330). Unread, and no abstract was available, so nothing is said here of its content beyond its title, which pairs Dennett’s real patterns with indispensability. Expected to supply, for THEORY-036, a published treatment of whether a real-patterns criterion needs an indispensability clause beyond compressibility, the clause Ladyman adds. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-30, not read. A lawful green copy is on PhilSci-Archive: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/16190 (the PDF at philsci-archive.pitt.edu/16190/1/Real%20patterns%20and%20indispensability.pdf, per Semantic Scholar). On 2026-10-30 the record page 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). No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied, not on merit. Free copy: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/16190. |
| LIT-1867 | Source Incompatibilism and Its Alternatives | Timpe (2007), American Philosophical Quarterly 44(2), 143–155. The received taxonomy splits incompatibilists into leeway (alternative possibilities matter most) and source (ultimacy matters most). No leeway incompatibilist can rest on mere alternatives, which raise the luck objection, so every acceptable incompatibilism appeals to ultimacy. And ultimacy requires that the agent not be causally determined by anything outside her, which entails more than one open future and so some alternative possibility, however weak. So the best source incompatibilism is “wide”, holding a weak alternative-possibilities condition entailed by ultimacy, and the taxonomy should be rejected. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1459) in full, from the author’s upload of the published pages (https://kevin-timpe.publicplatform.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2018/12/source.pdf), an author’s upload under ADR-064. Worth reading as the argument that the best source incompatibilism is “wide”: ultimacy requires indeterminism, indeterminism leaves some alternative, so an alternative-possibilities condition is entailed by the ultimacy condition, and the dichotomy between leeway and source incompatibilism should be dropped. Read it knowing that the entailed alternatives may be non-robust and do no explanatory work, and that it quotes Pereboom’s book (LIT-1006, unread) at three places only. |
| LIT-1868 | The Frankfurt Cases: The Moral of the Stories | Fischer (2010), Philosophical Review 119(3). The moral of the Frankfurt cases is that if causal determinism rules out moral responsibility, it is not in virtue of eliminating alternative possibilities. Against the Dilemma Defense: on the indeterministic horn, buffer cases (Hunt, Pereboom) remove every robust alternative; on the deterministic horn, assume determinism without assuming it removes alternatives, and determinism plus Black’s counterfactual device together remove them, so Black does not “drop out”, and the argument runs unchanged even granting that determinism removes alternatives. Widerker’s requirement that the case satisfy IRR is rejected. Fischer allows that determinism may still undermine responsibility by another route, such as sourcehood. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1457) in full, from the published PDF on andrewmbailey.com (https://andrewmbailey.com/jmf/Frankfurt_Cases_Moral_of_the_Stories.pdf), which the owner ruled a lawful copy on 2026-10-30. Worth reading as Fischer’s reply to the Dilemma Defense: a deterministic Frankfurt case in which determinism and Black’s device together, and neither alone, rule out alternatives, giving the conclusion that if determinism rules out responsibility it is not by eliminating alternative possibilities. Read it knowing that Fischer concedes causal determination may still matter, for instance by removing “sourcehood”, and that Pereboom’s buffer cases and Widerker’s dilemma are reported, not argued in full. |
| LIT-1869 | Nature’s Queer Performativity | Barad (2012), Kvinder, Køn & Forskning 1–2:25–53, the authorized version of an essay first printed in Qui Parle (2011). It argues that identity, causality, space and time are performed, not given, in nature as well as culture. Lightning, stingray receptor cells, the dinoflagellate Pfiesteria and atoms are offered as “queer critters” whose behaviour a classical ontology of separate, determinate things cannot account for. Her agential realism replaces things with phenomena: an intra-action enacts an agential cut, “a ‘local’ resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy”, which yields agential separability, not absolute separation. The ethical upshot: there are no acts “against nature”, only acts of nature, and accountability is for the cuts that are made. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1458), from the journal’s own PDF of the article (CC BY-NC) on tidsskrift.dk (tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/download/28067/24695/65067), text extracted with pdftotext. This is the version Barad calls authorized; an earlier Qui Parle printing (2011) is, by her note 15, not the version she submitted. Worth reading as the record’s first text of Barad’s own: it states the agential cut in her words, as a local resolution, enacted by an intra-action within a phenomenon, of an inherent ontological indeterminacy, against the Cartesian cut as an inherent distinction. It is an essay, not an argument from data: its physics is the Bohr model and the which-path and quantum-eraser experiments as she reads them, and its other cases come from Kirby and Schrader. |
| LIT-1900 | L’individuation psychique et collective: À la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité | Simondon (1989), the psychic and collective half of the 1958 thesis on individuation. As read here at second hand (LIT-1911, LIT-1901): information is the meaning that arises when an individuation resolves a disparity between two domains; affectivity and emotion mark a subject’s encounter with the pre-individual charge it has not exhausted, which it resolves by joining a collective, the transindividual. Unread. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-31, not read. The book is in copyright and sold by its publisher, and no lawful free copy is known. Open Library lists the 1989 and 2007 Aubier printings with no e-book. An Internet Archive search for creator Simondon found only other works (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, and a school text). OpenAlex was out of its daily budget for this client. Its second half is quoted at length, in translation, by Iliadis (LIT-1911) and by Bencherki (LIT-1901). The whole thesis is translated in LIT-1648, also Unavailable. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1904 | The Lesser Existences: Étienne Souriau, an Aesthetics for the Virtual | Lapoujade (2017; English 2021). As usually described, a reading of Étienne Souriau’s philosophy of the plural modes of existence, centred on “lesser existences”: beings whose existence is incomplete or precarious and must be made more real. Unread: registered from metadata. What it says here is as the parent paper reports it. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. OpenAlex reports it closed. The University of Minnesota Press’s open Manifold editions (manifold.umn.edu, all 202 projects listed through its API) do not include it. JSTOR and Project MUSE serve it to subscribers. The Internet Archive holds no copy, and a web search found no open copy. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1905 | Of Microperception and Micropolitics: An Interview with Brian Massumi, 15 August 2008 | Massumi, interviewed by Joel McKim, Inflexions 3 (2009); reprinted as ch. 2 of Politics of Affect (2015). Affect, after Spinoza and Deleuze, is an ability to affect and be affected that “governs a transition, where a body passes from one state of capacitation to a diminished or augmented state of capacitation”, and the transition is felt. Massumi offers this as “a proposition”, not “a general definition that you can apply”. Microperceptual shocks prime bodies differentially (“affective attunement”); affect “is not a content that can be transported from one event to another”; micropolitics modulates a situation’s unacted-out potential. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1488), from the journal’s own open copy at inflexions.org, HTML and PDF (20 pp.). This is the interview that Massumi’s Politics of Affect (LIT-1907) reprints as its second chapter, and it carries, word for word, the definition of affect that Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) quote from that book. Worth reading as the shortest statement of Massumi’s account of affect, microperception and micropolitics. |
| LIT-1906 | Process as the Becoming of Temporal Trajectory | Hernes (2016), a six-page handbook chapter. Process is the becoming of temporal trajectory: events connect with other events as they occur and so define a trajectory that orients what follows. Unread: registered from metadata. Its claims here are as the parent paper reports them. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. OpenAlex reports it closed. SAGE Knowledge serves it to subscribers. The CBS Research Portal record holds no file. The Internet Archive holds no copy, and a web search for an author’s or course copy found none. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1907 | Politics of Affect | Massumi (2015), Polity. Six interviews (2002–2014) on affect and politics. Affect is the capacity to affect and be affected, a felt transition in a body’s capacities; the book builds on it “differential affective attunement”, “collective individuation”, “micropolitics” and “ontopower”. Unread beyond the publisher’s sample; its ch. 2 is read in its first printing, LIT-1905. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31, not read: no lawful full text was found. Polity gives it no DOI, and no open copy turned up in OpenAlex or web search. The publisher’s reading sample (content.e-bookshelf.de, 27 pp.: preface, contributors, sources, and the opening of ch. 1) was read. Chapter 2, where the parent’s quotations sit, first appeared as an open interview in Inflexions 3 (2009), filed and read as LIT-1905. |
| LIT-1908 | Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance | Manning (2012/2013), Duke University Press. A philosophy of individuation after Simondon, Whitehead and James, developed through movement, art practice and autistic perception: bodies are “always more than one”, never complete individuals, but phases of ongoing individuation in relation. Unread: registered from metadata and the standard citation. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31, not read: no lawful full text was found. Duke’s copy (10.1215/9780822395829) and its De Gruyter and JSTOR copies are closed; OpenAlex reports no open location, and Project MUSE lists it as not open access. A “free download” page in web results was spam and was not used. |
| LIT-1909 | Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts | Massumi (2011), MIT Press. A process philosophy of the event, after Whitehead and James, applied to the arts: experience as occurrent, the “semblance” as the felt abstract dimension of an event, and “activist philosophy” as thought that starts in the midst of what is happening. Unread: registered from metadata and the standard citation. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31, not read: no lawful full text was found. The MIT Press Direct copy (10.7551/mitpress/7681.001.0001) is closed, and OpenAlex reports no open location. A whole-book PDF on Monoskop was not used, since an upload of a whole in-copyright book does not count (ADR-064). |
| LIT-1910 | The Principle of Unrest: Activist Philosophy in the Expanded Field | Massumi (2017), Open Humanities Press, open access. Three pieces: an interview with Krystian Woznicki on movement and capitalism (ch. 1), a filmed interview with Adrian Heathfield (ch. 2), and an essay on collective expression (ch. 3). Movement is qualitative transformation in relation; capitalism is an ontopower that captures “bare activity”; there is always “an excess of activity over action”. Micropolitics aims at “a maximally inclusive co-patterning of contrasting tendencies, co-habiting the field in a way that facilitates each fully realizing itself” (p. 64), which Massumi calls aesthetic. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1486), from the publisher’s open-access PDF (Open Humanities Press, CC BY-SA 4.0). The passages Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) lean on were read in context and their quotation checked; most of the book was not read. A book of three long interviews and essays on movement, capitalism, micropolitics and SenseLab practice. |
| LIT-1911 | Informational Ontology: The Meaning of Gilbert Simondon’s Concept of Individuation | Iliadis (2013), communication +1. Reads Simondon as “the first true philosopher of information” and places him as an extension of cybernetics rather than its opponent. Information, for Simondon, is not a signal passed along a channel but the resolution of a disparity between two domains in a metastable system; transduction is the operation that produces “a new informational structure, one that resolves a disparity between fields”. An exegesis built on quotations from L’individuation psychique et collective, with no argument that could fail. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1485), from the journal’s open-access PDF at openpublishing.library.umass.edu (CC BY-SA 4.0). A short exegesis, not an argument with tests: worth keeping as the source of the “informational ontology” reading of Simondon that Bencherki and Iliadis (LIT-1922) and Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) build on. |
| LIT-1913 | On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change | Tsoukas & Chia (2002). Change should be treated as the normal condition of organizations, not an exception to stability. After Bergson and James, change is ontologically prior to organization. It is “the reweaving of actors’ webs of beliefs and habits of action to accommodate new experiences obtained through interactions”, driven by the radial structure of categories and by human reflexivity. Organization is a secondary accomplishment in two senses: an attempt to order the flux of action, and a pattern that emerges from it. The paper is agent-centred: its becoming is carried by human actors. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1489), from the version of record (a scan with OCR) posted on the first author’s own site, htsoukas.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/tsoukas-chia-2002.pdf. Worth reading as the standard statement of “organizational becoming” in organization studies: change is ontologically prior to organization, and organization is a secondary accomplishment of it. A conceptual paper; its evidence is other people’s ethnographies, reread. |
| LIT-1916 | A Process Theory of Organization | Hernes (2014), Oxford University Press. A process theory of organization for “a world on the move”, after Whitehead, pragmatism and phenomenology. Organizing is made of events connected through time and given meaning by articulation. Agency belongs to events, not to actors set in advance. Unread: registered from metadata and the table of contents. Its claims here are as the parent paper reports them. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref and OUP’s metadata, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. OpenAlex reports it closed. Oxford Academic serves it to subscribers. The CBS Research Portal record holds no file. The Internet Archive holds no copy. A PhilPapers record (HERAPT-4) served a Cloudflare check, which was not passed, and nothing shows that it holds more than metadata. A library’s table-of-contents scan (toc.uni.li/FLMF043296.pdf) was read for the chapter structure. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1918 | Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation | Massumi (2002), Duke University Press. Essays on movement, affect and sensation, built on “The Autonomy of Affect” (ch. 1), arguing that cultural theory must start from the body in movement and from affect as intensity rather than from positioned subjects and signification. Unread: registered from metadata and the standard citation. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31, not read: no lawful full text was found. Duke’s copy (10.1215/9780822383574) and its De Gruyter and JSTOR copies are closed, and OpenAlex reports no open location; the 2021 twentieth-anniversary edition (10.1215/9781478021971) is closed too. Only chapter 1, “The Autonomy of Affect”, sits on a course page, and a single chapter does not count (ADR-053); that essay is filed as LIT-1919. The passage the parent paper quotes (pp. 218–219) is not in that chapter. |
| LIT-1919 | The Autonomy of Affect | Massumi (1995), Cultural Critique 31:83–109. The essay that launched the “affective turn” in cultural theory, standardly cited for the claim that affect, as unqualified intensity, is distinct from emotion, which is intensity owned and qualified, and that affect is “autonomous” of meaning and signification. Unread: this summary follows the standard citation and should be checked against the text. | Unfetched — registered 2026-10-31, not read. A copy of the published article (the JSTOR scan of Cultural Critique 31, pp. 83–109) sits on a faculty site, http://www.davidbardschwarz.com/pdf/massumi.pdf, a lawful copy under ADR-064. A reprint as chapter 1 of Parables for the Virtual sits on a University of Tartu course page, https://sisu.ut.ee/wp-content/uploads/sites/172/massumi._the_autonomy_of_affect-1.pdf. On 2026-10-31 this session’s permission system refused the download of both, and the refusal was not worked around. JSTOR (10.2307/1354446) is closed; OpenAlex reports no open copy. A browser and a minute should reach the first address. |
| LIT-1920 | Communication et information: Cours et conférences | Simondon (2010), posthumous courses and lectures on communication and information. Bencherki & Iliadis (LIT-1922) cite it for communication as “the process of information’s circulation through the very systems whose reordering it provokes”. Unread. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-31, not read. A posthumous collection of courses and lectures, in copyright and sold by its publisher; no lawful free copy is known. Open Library lists the 2010 Transparence edition with no e-book. An Internet Archive search for creator Simondon did not find it. OpenAlex was out of its daily budget for this client. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1921 | From Modern to Postmodern Organizational Analysis | Chia (1995). What divides postmodern from modern organizational analysis is a style of thinking, not an epoch or a paradigm. Modernist thought rests on a “strong” ontology of being, of discrete states, static attributes and sequential events. Postmodern thought rests on a “weak” ontology of becoming, so it studies “local assemblages of ‘organizings’” rather than organizations, individuals and structures. Read from the abstract only. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref, not read beyond its abstract: no lawful full text could be reached. OpenAlex reports it closed. SAGE serves it to subscribers. The University of Glasgow’s Enlighten record (eprints.gla.ac.uk/162488) says “Full text not currently available” and gives the abstract, which was read. The Internet Archive holds no copy, and a web search for an author’s or course copy found none. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1933 | Why there isn’t inter-level causation in mechanisms | Romero (2015), DOI-10.1007/s11229-015-0718-0. By the descriptions available, it argues that mutual manipulability, Woodward’s interventionism and the denial of inter-level causation look like an inconsistent triad, and dissolves it by treating interventions on a mechanism’s levels as fat-handed: inter-level relations are explained without inter-level causation. Unread; Baumgartner & Casini and Baumgartner, Casini & Krickel cite it for the result that interventions on phenomena are necessarily fat-handed. | Unfetched — A lawful free copy was located 2026-11-01 and could not be fetched: the author’s accepted version on PhilSci-Archive, https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12956/1/fr_interlevelmechanisms_final.pdf. The server’s certificate chain ends in a root this client does not trust (TLS “unable to get local issuer certificate”), a second fetcher got HTTP 503, the Wayback capture (20240603160454) reset the connection, and CORE’s copy (core.ac.uk/download/157867512.pdf) returned a Cloudflare challenge, which was not pursued. The Springer version is paywalled. Free copy: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12956/1/fr_interlevelmechanisms_final.pdf. |
| LIT-1963 | Attention as the Source of a Free Will | Jennings (2026), forthcoming in Synthese. Attention is prioritization of mental processing by a subject, and the subject is a collection of fixed, formed and fluid interests with the power to constrain those interests. That power is contextually emergent: the collection’s parts are necessary but not sufficient, and a boundary from its context, the skull, meninges and brain stem, is what lets macro-level patterns constrain micro-level ones. Phase-amplitude coupling is offered as its signature and ephaptic coupling as evidence against weak emergence. Attention breaks stalemates between equally weighted interests and so forms new interests, which the paper offers in place of Kane’s indeterminism as the source of a free will, placing itself “in between libertarianism and compatibilism”. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1508), from the manuscript of 2026-10-29 the owner supplied; worth reading as a worked attempt to make attention the mechanism of a will without a homunculus, and for its one original move, a boundary between an emergent phenomenon and its context as what keeps contextual emergence from collapsing into supervenience. Read it knowing that its neural evidence (phase-amplitude coupling, ephaptic coupling) is consistent with the weakly emergent models it rejects, and that its step from a non-reducible subject to free will is asserted. |
| LIT-1993 v2 | Emergence in Context: A Treatise in Twenty-First Century Natural Philosophy | Bishop et al. (2022), doi:10.1093/oso/9780192849786.001.0001. Registered unread as a source of Jennings 2026. The book-length account of contextual emergence, with Bishop and Atmanspacher 2006 (LIT-1987). Jennings quotes it for the constraint Bénard cells place on their fluid parcels (“these cells constrain or shape the states of motion accessible to fluid parcels”, p. 41, at LIT-1963 p. 20). The reading THEORY-1314 needs, to say whether Jennings’s boundary condition and causal reading go beyond its source. | Unavailable — looked for 2026-11-03, not read. No lawful free copy was found: OpenAlex (no email sent, ADR-008) and Unpaywall (noreply@anthropic.com) mark the OUP book closed, with no open-access edition; the PhilPapers record links only to library access; booksellers sell it. The authors’ view is read at second hand only in Bishop’s SEP entry on chaos (NOTE-1535, THEORY-1333), which cites it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |