[FRIAM] Mysticism: still effing the ineffable?

[glen]

This might be worth hashing out. Or maybe I'm just posting it in lieu of journaling. I apologize for the length.

Intersubjectivity: I guess there are 2 ways to think of this: [ex|im]plicit. When 2 subjects' "internals" are aligned, we could measure their interaction. Let's just say we have non-invasive insight into their internals and are, therefore, confident the internals are actually aligned. Take 4 subjects, one pair are aligned with lots of interactions (e.g. room mates or spouses or whatever) versus the other pair being aligned without any interaction (maybe identical twins, separated in their teens or whatever).

When we use the term "intersubjective reality", are we talking about the former or the latter? Both?

If the latter, your definition is confusing to me w.r.t. "language and shared narratives" unless you might consider gen→phen & evo-devo stuff as language and narrative. (Which is fine by me, but not very standard.)

If the former, then help me distinguish it from "participatory reality".

Participatory: I like the idea of a *lazy* determination ... that whatever one's dis-integrated behaviors/thoughts might actually be, coherence obtains only when they're "evaluated" in the stew of others' effects/actions out there in the stigmergic world.

But we see this in both objects like an Exquisite Corpse and interpretants (ala Peirce). The recent discussion of people working for money versus other more integrative benefits is a great example. One's self only coheres after/during evaluation in the stew of the participatory world. And that seems to fit the definition of "intersubjective".

Formal - precision, prediction, repeatability: The words I use above allude to the idea that the world is an evaluator. I imagine it tightly analogous to something like an eval loop and/or batch compilation and execution of code. The eval loop is more synchronous interactive with an implicit/shared context versus compilation-execution is more asynch and distal with explicit context. The former is like having conversations at a cocktail party and the latter is like a work meeting where each CPU gets some tasks and goes away to do them.

While it's true that we more tech savvy people think this kind of evaluation is more precise, predict[ive|able], repeatable, etc. Imagine how a normie might perceive it ...  a bit like prompting a (stochastic) LLM. Those prompts/programs are also *formal*. But their precision (e.g. declarative programming) and prediction/repeatability (e.g. which pRNG distribution it's using - or the chaotic/iterative algorithm it's running) aren't as naive as we might imagine. Precision, prediction, repetition are all contextualized by the stigmergic stew ... just like intersubjectivity and participatory are.

I think I'm trying to make the argument that intersubjectivity and participatory are the same thing and the only informal things are metaphysical/horizon things that can be practically dealt with by proxy, using observable stand-ins for the informal parts.


On 6/27/25 3:53 PM, steve smith wrote:
> I find "intersubjective" particularly useful and "participatory" particularly compelling and agree that the more these are *formalized* the more useful/compelling they might become, but I don't see their subjectivity and contingency collapsing into the same kind of ontic/objectivity that Scientific Realism is grounded in?
> 


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