Why it is a question
The owner asked at U6 for “Rasmus Jaksland’s thoughts”. A6 §5B, from Jaksland’s 2024 paper (LIT-1673): “Newtonian mechanics is approximately correct across many macroscopic regimes even though quantum mechanics is more fundamental. But does this mean that a Newtonian ontology of independently existing individuals can be approximately correct?” Two answers:
- Metaphysical approximation is possible. “A fundamentally relational world can exhibit sufficiently stable, autonomous structures that treating them as independently individuated entities becomes a good approximation.”
- Some principles resist it. “If independent existence is absent fundamentally, then perhaps no amount of dynamical decoupling makes it literally present.”
A6 reports Jaksland as reading Barad on the second side, for the absence of fundamental subject–object and word–world separations, and as leaving open whether such features do resist approximation. A6 put the stake as a pair the record has not separated: “Operational separability” and “Ontological independence”. “Perhaps the first can approach unity continuously while the second remains fundamentally absent. Or perhaps independent individuality is itself a legitimate emergent ontological property rather than a merely convenient fiction.”
A9 §11 kept it as the objection to the exchange’s own synthesis, and added a caution the question must keep: “Degrees of autonomy do not straightforwardly imply degrees of existence.”
Why it bears on the record
CLAIM-157’s criterion is graded: a block is one system when its coupling gap beats an Occam factor, and near-decomposability is a matter of degree. CLAIM-405 holds that the verdict is objective once its criterion is fixed. Neither says whether a large gap makes the block approximately independent, or only makes it approximately separable for the target. CLAIM-477 holds individuals partly constituted by constraints in every domain, and so owes an answer to how a relationally constituted individual can still be treated as independent where the record treats it so.
What would count as an answer
An account of approximation for ontological claims, as there is one for theories, with a case: a feature of a relational description that a limit (of decoupling, of scale, of time) sends to an independent individual’s description, and either an argument that the limit’s description is approximately true of the system, or one that some feature survives every such limit. A reading of Jaksland would say whether he offers either.
Note of 2026-10-27 (later): Jaksland read
Jaksland 2024 is read (NOTE-1230; THEORY-1086). Three things change how the question should be read.
- On individuals Jaksland leans yes. “Whether a metaphysics of individualism holds could similarly be regarded as a question of all or nothing … Regardless, it seems immediately more agreeable to regard this as something that can obtain through approximation. Circumstances can be such that a fundamentally relational metaphysics can appear to be one of individuals (if they are separable enough)” (p. 376). The features he leaves open are the subject–object and word–world dualisms and representationalism. This question asks about individuals, the case he finds easier; A6 of the exchange had put the split correctly.
- A third answer. Besides “approximation is possible” and “some features resist it”, Jaksland argues that the independence of the lifeworld from fundamental metaphysics is real but contingent: it rests on the size of Planck’s constant, and with a larger one it “would have been lost in both directions” (p. 374).
- No account of approximation is given. The paper offers the Newtonian analogy and a no-miracles argument, and no account of what it is for an ontological feature to be approximately present. The question’s “What would count as an answer” stands as written.
“Separable enough” is CLAIM-157’s object: its gap criterion measures, for a target, how separable a block is. Neither the paper nor the claim says whether separable enough is approximately independent.
Note of 2026-10-27 (evening): the readings of the U15–U23 works
Di Biagio and Rovelli 2021 (NOTE-1226; THEORY-1075) give a worked case of approximate absoluteness, for facts and not individuals. It has a grade (ε), a limit (ε → 0, with the third system cut off from the environment) and a stated error. The authors decline to make the approximation ontology: “How stable does a fact need to be before it is real? And with respect to what systems does it have to be stable?” (p. 7). They add a point this question lacks: the approximation is itself relative to a system. “Separable enough”, in CLAIM-157’s terms, would then mean separable enough for a stated third system. They argue this and do not prove it.