So you're looking for like a regex search procedure of legal documents to get the data out? Statements like that. I don't know how you'd learn the ontology without assuming some of the structure from the regex calls or data selection criteria.

You'll need to come up with really clever operationalisation and get a lot of data from loads of legal systems and people in them to say anything relevant at all. It's definitely more of a survey design, data collection and model problem than a "throw a neural network at it and it'll be fine" problem.

So let's postpone the is ought gap for a second; studying moral sentiment will not tell you what is moral or immoral, it will tell you what people think is moral or immoral. If you want to make data out of it, you should make something like a questionnaire that poses various permissibility/impermissibility questions and elicits demographic data from the recipients.

If you actually want to study legal systems, you're not going to get much of an improvement from automated approaches over qualitative and historical comparative methodologies. At best you will be summarising trends in legal documents and rulings.

You've also got a two level problem, where people are nested within legal systems but have individual level variability. That's a hierarchical modelling problem.

If we take time to be on a number line how many points of time are there between 1976 and 2019? Infinite, unless you want to invoke Planck time? — TheMadFool

Wrong way to think about it. If you assume the time interval is an interval of real numbers, the measure (length) of any point is 0, but the measure of the whole interval which is the uncountable union of all points in the interval is just the usual length of the interval.

If you assume time is discrete, then the interval length is an integer number of multiples of the plank time (rounded up or down to 1 plank time).

Either way it's a finite time.

Well, in the context of this particular discussion, I think that the argument begs the question i.e. it assumes what it sets out to prove. — Wayfarer

This was in response to (1), are you denying that there was a moving asteroid prior to the existence of humans? This seems consistent with your response to @frank:

There are many possible answers. One answer is, that if you're not a philosophical materialist, then you don't accept that material reality possesses intrinsic reality. — Wayfarer

I can respond to the rest of your post when I understand if you're actually coming out and saying that there were no moving asteroids prior to the existence of humans.

But it is the mind that provides the perspective of extension, duration, and scale upon which and within which all such empirical claims are grounded. — Wayfarer

Ok. Tell me where this argument goes wrong.

(1) A moving asteroid existed before humans. (premise)
(2) Its movement requires a residing space to move through. (premise)
(3) Space existed before humans. (from 1,2)
(4) Humans need to exist for there to be an a-priori concept of space. (premise)
(5) The space which existed before humans is not our a-priori concept of space. (from 3,4)

Substitute in transcendental apperception for 'a priori concept' if you want, the argument goes the same. This kind of argument is supposed to be senseless or unthinkable without performative contradiction, but it's actually very easy to understand and is consistent with its own articulation. IE, even when there is an a-priori structure of experience, we can still articulate other structures using that understanding.

Then develop that theme of space:

(6) The space which existed before humans did was not markedly changed by our coming to be.

and you wind up in a nature indifferent to us. Indifferent in the sense that our a-priori structures of experience are not determinative of the character of nature, nor do they 'ground' the structure of nature. What they do do though is ground our experiences (perceptions, sensory manifold, sensibility, whatever) of nature. This isn't hard.

By referring to the time 'before human minds existed', we're simply trying to posit a universe in which there is no such mind. — Wayfarer

And you're positing that there's a universe in which it makes sense to say things like "stuff didn't have location or size before the existence of humans"! You say:

But it is the mind that provides the perspective of extension, duration, and scale upon which and within which all such empirical claims are grounded.

which makes things like "the universe is about 14 billion years old" or "the Earth has rotated around the sun for most of its existence" literally false, as the space within them must have been the product of a human mind rather than the space concept which we understand space through.

You can't make extension, space and time merely perspectival while simultaneously saying you're fine with their empirical reality; because dinosaurs. Stuff existed before us, our concepts of stuff did not.

You don’t see a fundamental hubris in M’s argument? — Wayfarer

No, not at all, I see a profound openness in his gesture, it recognises the "subjective pole" of our concepts without reducing being to thought. Much better than anthropomorphic just so stories.

Dreams occur in a state of awareness with little to no sensorimotor constraints and diminished frontal cortex activation. Neuro-imaging data which contrasts lucid dreamers with non-lucid dreamers while sleeping is suggestive of higher frontal cortex activation in lucid dreamers. Lucid dreamers feel agency in dreams, non-lucid dreamers do not.

While waking, however, frontal lobe damage has to be really severe to totally remove the person's agency.

Together what this suggests is that the lack of agency in dreams is attributable precisely to the interaction I noted; a state of awareness which has no sensorimotor constraints and diminished frontal cortex activation.

Something to take away here is that the neural architecture which supports our sense of self and cognitive agency is actually doing a lot of stuff, and volitional control is but one of many distinct (but overlapping and correlated) functions it exhibits.

Edit: (whitespace remover is screwing up the formatting)

Clearly this is a meditation on the role of trace and singularity in photography!

*sobers up* I mean. uh... Yeah I like it it's eerie.

As I read your post and then all the follow ups, I kept thinking about it from the other direction - the process you're describing is how the little girl learns the meaning of "function." — T Clark

I imagine it's actually both ways at once, if you consider it retrospectively like this, rather than how stuff means stuff at the moment (and retrojections to that moment, like "she wouldn't be able to explicate the meaning of "function" despite using a phrase containing it").

Using the same principle on a person x born 1976 and died 2019 can we say that x is immortal given that x had to experience an infinite number of time intervals? — TheMadFool

No. The union of all the points in that interval still lasts 43 years.

Notice the 'able to think'. I rest my case. — Wayfarer

If one calls ‘the correlationist circle’ the argument according to which one cannot think the in-itself without entering into a vicious circle, thereby immediately contradicting oneself...

You're blindly following exactly what Meillassoux is criticising. Though, exactly the same thing happened the last time we talked about it.

Edit: I should be clear, though. Rehearsing exactly the argument that he's criticising is as if it is a refutation is the thing which makes me not wish to go through this again with you. If you actually engaged with the argument and came out a correlationist anyway (as some old poster TGW did last time the forum had a speculative realist vs transcendental idealist moment) I'd have a lot more patience.

The fossil is a red herring. You don't need dinosaurs to refer in speech to a world without any consciousness. The average myth starts with a primordial thoughtlessness. — frank

I agree with this. The science angle is to leverage the empirically realist and 'non-intervention in science' intuitions that correlationists like to have.

↪fdrake I think the subject is just off camera in dinosaur world. — frank

I really like what this is gesturing in the direction of. But I don't actually know how to articulate it. Can you help me?

The dinosaur argument undermines it? — frank

I find it a persuasive undermining. I think the force of it might be summarised as; if we only have access to the correlation between thought and being, how are we demonstrably able to think (conceptualise, more precisely) being before thought emerged?

Would he approve of Chalmers? I was thinking of him rather than religion. — frank

I don't think Meillassoux' research interests overlap with Chalmers, or even approaches in analytical philosophy of mind. He's mostly situated among the various 'realist' reactions against the dominance of post-Kantian idealisms (see some of @Joshs posts in this thread for various signifiers that such an idealism is in play) in various contexts. The arche-fossil is a kind of master argument that attempts to implode such idealisms from within their correlations of thought and being that human beings are invariably situated entirely within.

Edit: at @Fooloso4's request, a relevant quote:

“Scientific truth is no longer what conforms to an in-itself supposedly indifferent to the way in which it is given to the subject, but rather what is susceptible of being given as shared by a scientific community.

Such considerations reveal the extent to which the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant seems to be that of correlation. By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. We will henceforth call correlationism any current of thought which maintains the unsurpassable character of the correlation so defined. ”

Consequently, it becomes possible to say that every philosophy which disavows naïve realism has become a variant of correlationism.

Let us examine more closely the meaning of such a philosopheme: ‘correlation, correlationism’.

Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another. Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object ‘in itself’, in isolation from its relation to the subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that would not always-already be related to an object. If one calls ‘the correlationist circle’ the argument according to which one cannot think the in-itself without entering into a vicious circle, thereby immediately contradicting oneself, one could call ‘the correlationist two-step’ this other type of reasoning to which philosophers have become so well accustomed – the kind of reasoning which one encounters so frequently in contemporary works and which insists that: (begin quote)

"it would be naïve to think of the subject and the object as two separately subsisting entities whose relation is only subsequently added to them. On the contrary, the relation is in some sense primary: the world is only world insofar as it appears to me as world, and the self is only self insofar as it is face to face with the world, that for whom the world discloses itself […]"

I was just reading a bit about this. Sounds interesting. From the little I read about the book, and not the book itself, would it be correct to say that he denies Parmenides' claim that thinking and being are the same? Does finitude have to do with the limits of knowledge? — Fooloso4

The thinking and being are the same thing is kinda undermined by it. The thrust of the arche-fossil argument (in the first section of the book) strongly undermines this claim, at least in how I use it and remember it. I've been through it with @Wayfarer a couple of times and wrote non-technical summaries of it in places - which you can find in my post history if you can be bothered looking. Most recent time was in a quantum mechanics thread.

Though, I think I've seen people who side with Meillassoux for the arche-fossil argument and emphasise the 'negative' character of nature (or the Real) rather than its constituting role in our emergence; though I don't know any of the details of any approach like this. There's probably also a way of maintaining a sophisticated equation of the two without being a correlationist - maybe there's a Spinozist argument that could be made, since the attributes of thought and extension don't causally interact but mirror each other.

So saying "anterior" emphasizes that a world without consciousness isn't continuous with our world? But saying "before consciousness" implies continuity, doesn't it? — frank

In the guy's argument, the nature of the change between one and the other plays less of a role than noticing that at some point, there was no consciousness, then at a later point, there is.

Edit: personally I think the 'continuum' or studying how one changed into the other is actually the more interesting question. But we still have a lot of ground clearing to do so that people can even think philosophically in these terms about these issues!

Oh, you're right. He's using "anterior" to mean temporally behind or before. That's screwed up. — frank

Guy's French. I imagine the translator used anterior to reference the tense thing. Passe antérieur is sort of like a "before before" conjugation, like "as soon as he finished (past), he left (past, but before the thing which was already declared as before)". It really fits the 'before history' theme he is playing with.

↪fdrake But I don't think you're being consistent with him. He's using "anterior" to mean after. You're using to mean before. Correct? — frank

No. He's explicitly talking about dinosaurs and stuff.

Anterior means 'in front of'. I think you mean posterior 'behind'. — frank

I'm using anterior to be consistent with the vocabulary in Meillassoux' argument on the topic in After Finitude:

Empirical science is today capable of producing statements about events anterior to the advent of life as well as consciousness...

How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life – posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world? Or, to put it more precisely: how are we to think the meaning of a discourse which construes the relation to the world – that of thinking and/or living – as a fact inscribed in a temporality within which this relation is just one event among others, inscribed in an order of succession in which it is merely a stage, rather than an origin? How is science able to think such statements, and in what sense can we eventually ascribe truth to them? — After Finitude

I think anterior works, because nature emerges first. "Events posterior to the emergence of humans" would be "events after the emergence of humans", "events anterior to the emergence of humans" would be "events before the emergence of humans".

There are no transcendental subjects. What there is is a transcendental in-between, between the subjective and the objective. This is the space, the only space of experience and nature.This is not a transcendental in the Kantian sense of a beyond nature, but of nature as itself beyond itself in transforming itself valuatively moment to moment. — Joshs

Ok. I don't really care what you call it. There is a 'transcendental in-between', has it always been there? Or is it a uniquely human feature? If it's a uniquely human feature, it must not have always been there. Then something must be anterior to it... So nature is anterior to it. And this is easy to understand; dinosaurs, carbon dating, evolution... etc. The 'shadow of the ape' is also a call to think of humans as organically coming out of nature.

If you want a jargony gloss on this, the transcendental subject (in-between, Dasein, whatever) is a contingent event, and we gotta think this contingency without framing it in terms of the transcendental subject - since it wasn't there at the time, after all.

There is no indifferent nature. Apart from the necessity of a human to interpretively construct a valuative understanding of nature, The world in itself is contingent not in an empirical sense of a causal chain of history — Joshs

Without realizing it, by carving nature at its joints via beginning from objective causality, you only end up ever talking about the a priori structure of experience — Joshs

Can there be nature without humans? When someone says "the universe has existed for about 14 billion years", is what they say literally true?

psychological subjects — Joshs

I think this misinterprets my point. I'm trying to lead you to the conclusion that even transcendental subjects must emerge from an indifferent nature. An invitation to think of nature as anterior to the a priori structure of experience. Then there's the next point, which is that we're riddled through with nature, then there's the final point; that we can still use the a priori structure of experience to know stuff about nature as it is, not a purely symbolic nature which is simply our concept of it. We know molecular interactions happened before humans, we unfolded out of something. Now we have to have an approach which can grapple with these kinds of questions on their own terms.

One of the most frustrating things about the 'link it to the a priori structure of experience' machine is that you only end up ever talking about the a priori structure of experience, rather than the thing you're talking about. As I put it in another thread, we can actually weaponise the a priori structure of experience to 'carve nature at its joints.

Do you think human history contains 'contingent history'?

Sorry for the late response. I noticed in a recent post you made reference to Badiou. If his approach to history is one you are comfortable with, then perhaps we are discussing a distinction between a structural marxist dialectical teleological understanding of history and what has been referred to as a radical geneological or historicist one. — Joshs

These methodologies and their respective ontological commitments concern human history, no? Giving a central role to class struggle in natural history really only makes sense if the destiny of nature is just to produce communism, which honestly I don't want to argue about.

Your Nietzsche quote nicely describes a lot of things humans do, too.

"This emphasis on contingency may appear to suggest that change is inexplicable. Yet, radical historicists often describe and explain change; they just do so without appealing to overarching principles. Change occurs contingently as, for example, people reinterpret, modify, or transform an inherited tradition in response to novel circumstances or other dilemmas." (Mark Bevir, What is Geneology) — Joshs

And geneological methods trace the evolution of concepts.

You may make the argument that the history of concepts of nature is the history of nature, but I still have to wonder about that time when there was no thought. You're making the same methodological slip as before, the concept of the thing is not the thing, only now you're talking about it as if human history contains natural history, rather than as if human experiential temporality acted before the evolution of humans.

The paper is called "Heterogeneity in Psychiatric diagnostic classification". — Mark Dennis

I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water. The main highlight of the paper isn't that psychiatry is rubbish, it's that narrow minded focus linking the diagnosis of a disorder to effective treatment strategies for any individual in a reductive way makes it more difficult to recognise effective intervention strategies on the individual level. The diagnosis can hinder more than help, and will hinder more if the clinician thinks of the diagnosis as their only concern in prescribing treatment strategy.

It highlights that while the associations between the diagnosis of the disorder and effective intervention on that basis is weak, we nevertheless can leverage understanding of symptomatology to tailor intervention strategy using self reports (and observational data aggregates thereof), which are still at the individual level.

It also highlights that clinicians often do it this way anyway:

Drug prescriptions are rarely made on the basis of a broad diagnosis, but instead according to the specific symptom presentation of the client (Taylor, 2016). Si-milarly, more specialised psychological therapy delivered by a clinical psychologist, for example, is guided by nuanced clinical formulation.Even psychiatrists may use a‘diagnostic formulation to further expand upon the broad diagnostic category offered

Basically the clinical take home message is that making decisions based solely on diagnosis (strictly; diagnostic category, like schizophrenia or major depression) is a crap shoot, as the individual level variability of the patients drives which treatment strategies are effective for them. Almost none of the relationship between their symptoms, their reports and effective treatment is contained in labelling them with their diagnosis! In other words, painting treatment in broad strokes doesn't work, and we don't need to anyway.

Psychotherapy already ideally tailors itself this way, as does the adaptive refinement of medication type and dose in the chronic case.

In broad terms, this is another consequence of the changing focus in science from reductive explanation strategies (this disease this treatment) to systems based contextualised ones when the considered system is complex (like mind-brain-body-development-culture...). As Gelman puts it (paraphrased): "what we really only ever observe in observational studies are high order interactions. And their variability is just as interesting as their mean."

You quoted yourself there.

"The primordial Real in which a (pre-Oedipal) human subject is born is differentiated from the real which a subject integrated into the symbolic order experiences. In the former, the real is the continuous, "whole" reality without categories and the differential function of language. Following the mirror stage, however, and the eventual entrance of the imaginary and the symbolic (the split of the subject between the conscious imaginary and the unconscious symbolic), the real may only be experienced as traumatic gaps in the symbolic order. An example of this are traumatic events such as natural disasters, which effectively break down the signification of everyday life and cause a rupture of something alien and unrecognizable, without the usual grammar of the symbolic that conditions how to make meaning of something and how to proceed." — Baden

I'm a bit familiar with Lacan's real through Zizek's appropriation of it, and Badiou's obvious inspiration from it in his term "evental subjects". I agree with you that it is characterised as an 'absolute negation of identity', but all that ensures is an unpredictable formation of a new pattern in response to the event. No one imagines this as leaving zombies behind, devoid of consciousness and identity, it gets imagined as a process of identity transformation as the real can never be 'internalised' in the symbolic order. It isn't so surprising that the easiest examples of this are traumas that force someone to learn to deal with profound loss; it remakes their personality through the torsion around what was annihilated. But what if you annihilate destructive tendencies? On a more meta level; how can we attribute emotional valence to a tear in the symbolic order which produces the attribution of novel emotional valences?

Per Badiou, what if the event is an event of love? And you're called to the truth of your inter-relation with another rather than the destruction of your hometown or death of everyone you know. This rings just as true and just as loudly as profound loss; and it is still a profound loss, a change which was never articulable pre-event, and post-event the intimate connection with the pre-evental subject is severed, as if one's personality undertakes a paradigm shift or iterates from one conceptual scheme to another incommensurable one; as if one beetle in the box is substituted with another, it is felt but makes its presence known only through shadows in language.

To quote a song "I can't say that knowing you changed me for the better, but I can say that it changed me for good."

No.

But this I dispute. This is the path we have been pursuing, and it can only lead to more of the same. Thought cannot produce the new, because it is reflective. I'll try a personal anecdote. — unenlightened

Thought alone can't, but it was never thought alone to begin with! Reflection isn't some isolated medium, as it can appear from the image of the armchair in our minds, it's part of every effective psychological/psychoanalytic/cultural intervention. I wonder how we would integrate our feelings with this new society, or void of one, if not relying upon our reasoning to do justice to the new concern for humanity (or for humanity + its environmental context) you wish to cultivate.

Well that is not at all the implication I want you to draw. The social and symbolic is already real and cannot be suspended. — unenlightened

I agree with that, but I think you're being a hypocrite a bit in the thread. I suppose a more polite way to put it is that you're suffering from a methodological oversight. You're trying to frame reason as a ritual among others, which it is, but it's also a ritual of domain non-specific criticism. This holds even when reason is treated as part of an embedded continuum with the our emotive and sensory (and linguistic) faculties; however they behave, it's the social mediation of it all that matters. Moreover, then, this capability to transform our rituals is already built into our rituals, when viewing custom from such a zoomed out perspective that it also contains practices of reason.

In essence, what allows you to revolt against reason is criticism, reason in a different form. To be sure, I agree with the targets of your suspicion; our current instrumental reason is too heavily tied to unsustainable yield maximisation and not enough tied to longterm welfare. We definitely have sacrificed humanity on an altar of our own construction, but to tear it down we'll need to think critically! To build something new we'll need to think critically.

Heidegger rolling in the flowers type thing? Speculative again, but depends how condensed the joy of transgression is into the fear of punishment. I'd tend to say the prohibitive is constitutive. Primally and developmentally, fear is dominant re the macrosocial (society) level with (ideally) a balancing love at the microsocial (family) level. So, applying socio-linguistic (ritual) origami to nascent awareness gives you a recognizably human consciousness, the price of which is psychological boundaries that may be practically impenetrable. Transgression can be joyful but as pleasures are behaviourally conditioning, the telos of that path veers towards ostracization / incarceration / self-destruction, and that presents a huge mental barrier for Joe Average. But, sure, the potential is likely there. — Baden

Behavioural limitations associated with norms or personal habits or personalities don't necessarily make us avoid trauma, the limitations can keep the trauma bottled in, giving it structure. Someone who has gone from narcissist to narcissist in their relationship history and has that as their norm need not be so afraid of symbolic transgression perturbing their behaviour. The personality that forms in wake of an encounter with the real is not necessarily diminished one, it could bloom.

Though I can imagine a fitting response which uses the 'counts as' the other way, so that an exemplar of a 3 variable word can change the standards it embodies through the use of the word, but the overall weight of the original standard tends to damp innovation; all word use of that type carries with it the standard as a norm of use; sort of like writing in English reinforces the shape of letters and the syntax more than the specific words used to phrase things. So you can exploit the reciprocity in reverse while attending to the different rates of change (standard with respect to word change((misuse/creativity)) is low, word with respect to standard change ((new domains of application, strong analogies, technical use...)) is high).

I think it's a good account for a static library of terms, but I don't think it gets at novelty very much. All words come from somewhere, and the component criteria of relevance that go into their meaning probably also fall out as patterns of use. In this regard, the standards that subtend the words are probably also in flux like the words, but are relatively stable compared to them.

Once you can take the standards for granted, I think the account in the OP makes a lot of sense, but in that regard (as stated) it's quite ahistorical.

You don't even need a smooth function in order to convey this idea: really, what it comes down to is variable substitution: expressing one quantity in terms of another. This works even for ragged and discontinuous relationships. However, to return to my reservations about this thought as a justification for what is, I think, a physical and/or metaphysical thesis, the same abstract manipulation can be applied in ways that are less physically meaningful and certainly don't warrant a parallel conclusion. For example, in the famous predator-prey example, instead of looking at populations of wolves and hares, we could look at the population of wolves and the amount of manure excreted by hares, which of course is closely related to the population of hares. Does this mean that we can therefor dispense with hares in this system? Well, we could for the sake of modeling the population of wolves (or the amount of shit, if that is what we are interested in), but surely our ability to do so doesn't indicate that hares lack substance! — SophistiCat

You actually have to be very careful with how you transform variables to preserve their meaning. You could surject the real line onto {0,1} and lose so much that the new scale is no longer a clock, it's an indicator of a discrete property. In order to preserve trends, for example, the variable transformation should be sufficiently smooth for the problem tackled and definitely monotonic. The smoothness varies, if one requires to estimate the second derivative of a function from a curve you should only transform using functions which have at least a differentiable second derivative.

The take home message here is that the ability to use any smooth bijection of time equivalently to time is actually rather odd in these terms; most variable substitutions which preserve the interpretable relationship between the variables and the model definitely don't have this property.

Well, there is this position, to which I am somewhat sympathetic, that the abstract (mathematical) entities that we find to be indispensable in explaining (modeling) the world thereby exist. Of course, as you point out, time may not even be all that indispensable, or even if some time was necessary, there is no one definite form of it that we are forced to adopt. But then the latter problem is basically what Einstein's relativity tackles, where time is quite substantive, even if it is very much a reference- and coordinate-dependent entity. — SophistiCat

I don't think relativity tackles the problem, really. To be sure, it makes time immanent, which is a good step. It makes space, motion, time and mass have reciprocal relationships and intricate interdependence. But it makes it immanent by fleshing out couplings between time and space and motion and mass in an abstract 4 dimensional vector space of which time is an independent direction of variation. You can still do the same trick with a smooth bijection to get another 'time' and make, say, the time direction a function of the oscillation between hyperfine states of a hydrogen atom (as we do to operationalise it now), or through any other physical process of unfolding.

I would like to have my cake and eat it too, and say that time is relational in a deeper sense, but that it still makes sense to think of it as an independent direction of variation in the relativity sense. Less Wrong has an interesting thought experiment on the matter:

But what would it mean for 10 million "years" to pass, if motion everywhere had been suspended?

Does it make sense to say that the global rate of motion could slow down, or speed up, over the whole universe at once—so that all the particles arrive at the same final configuration, in twice as much time, or half as much time? You couldn't measure it with any clock, because the ticking of the clock would slow down too.

Do not say, "I could not detect it; therefore, who knows, it might happen every day."

Say rather, "I could not detect it, nor could anyone detect it even in principle, nor would any physical relation be affected except this one thing called 'the global rate of motion'. Therefore, I wonder what the phrase 'global rate of motion' really means."

This 'global rate of motion' being seen as pregnant in the above understand of general relativity is just what I would like to problematise. I think this is consistent with general relativity, as to think of the universe as having a 'global time coordinate' or 'global rate of change' forgets that time is one of the directions of variation of the universe; it's already baked in.

When we imagine the universe unfolding over time, we fix our frame of reference to the mind's eye independent of it all, and this is good as we have freedom of choice to define how we measure one process with another - and what processes we use for such measurement - but it hides that such an independent direction of variation must still be pregnant in the processes which make up the universe rather than exterior to them all.

That we could externalise time in a manner 'exterior to them all' is more about our imagination than about the ontic status of time as transcendent/immanent with respect to the universe's processes, time is already something interior; so it must have something to do with the plurality of processes which unfold.

One clue that time is relational capacity of systems would be that in the absence of a suitable relationship of coupling or correlation, no unfolding would be observable, and to my knowledge this is just what we see:

One clue comes from theoretical insights arrived at by Don Page and William Wootters in the 1980s. Page, now at the University of Alberta, and Wootters, now at Williams, discovered that an entangled system that is globally static can contain a subsystem that appears to evolve from the point of view of an observer within it. Called a “history state,” the system consists of a subsystem entangled with what you might call a clock. The state of the subsystem differs depending on whether the clock is in a state where its hour hand points to one, two, three and so on. “But the whole state of system-plus-clock doesn’t change in time,” Swingle explained. “There is no time. It’s just the state — it doesn’t ever change.” In other words, time doesn’t exist globally, but an effective notion of time emerges for the subsystem.

A team of Italian researchers experimentally demonstrated this phenomenon in 2013. In summarizing their work, the group wrote: “We show how a static, entangled state of two photons can be seen as evolving by an observer that uses one of the two photons as a clock to gauge the time-evolution of the other photon. However, an external observer can show that the global entangled state does not evolve.”

Other theoretical work has led to similar conclusions. Geometric patterns, such as the amplituhedron, that describe the outcomes of particle interactions also suggest that reality emerges from something timeless and purely mathematical. It’s still unclear, however, just how the amplituhedron and holography relate to each other.

The bottom line, in Swingle’s words, is that “somehow, you can emerge time from timeless degrees of freedom using entanglement.”

So the relational character of time is something that comes out of general relativity conceptually and quantum experiments demonstrably. I would like to say something like this is poetically suggested by basic calculus too:

$\frac{df}{df}=1=\frac{dg}{dg}$

the evolution of the function is indiscernible when you measure that evolution through its own unfolding.

"Reflection used well"? Is this not the sea of norms swimming through itself? — unenlightened

There must be ways of thinking and acting which attend to the nature of what they are concerned with.

We have sensorimotor constraints that embed us in the world in ways we cannot change with ritual or custom, only mitigate their effects through it. You cannot always restore someone who cannot walk to walking, but you can make disabled access ramps. Perhaps in the same way, you cannot contradict the reality of things, you can only place contradictions in the map; perhaps those contradictions can attend to tensions in the territory, however, like between the needs of the wheelchair user and the accessibility of shops.

I think it is we who shrink back; we are the islands - or think we are, and the ritual confers stability of identity 'I love marmite', or 'I hate marmite'. I am married, or I am single. A convict is created by the rituals of a justice system, but if I become convicted or if I become married, it is as though a marmite lover became a marmite hater. — unenlightened

A change of subjectivity like that is something like a choice of clothing, but one cannot choose one's size in all respects. One cannot always choose what does not fit, there are limitations which act to constrain what identities or subjectivities a person can come to adopt, and these limitations express the irremovable reality of the person.

Habituation requires a substrate. Our bodies are built for habituation.

Edit: @Baden perhaps such a real need not just be a trauma, maybe it can also be a source of joy, empowerment and discovery.

Which systems are not created by human observers? — Wayfarer

Plenty. Most of them, in fact. Most of nature does not resemble a city. You will probably equivocate here on the concept, but the concept is not the thing. Taking an empirically realist stance towards scientific objects means those which are discovered do indeed exist, regardless of how they impress upon our understanding (IE, how we express their nature in concepts), it is still a fact that they exist. There really are molecular interactions, chemical interactions, quantum interactions, that our eyes do not grace. This does not make them less real.

You make it sound as if Lovecraft's Azathoth is real, dreaming reality, let us hope he does not wake and destroy us all.

(Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271. Linde is one of the originators of 'inflation theory' of the Big Bang.) — Wayfarer

You quote that a lot, but you never emphasise that it describes an ontic (real) conception of time immanently rather than an ontological (ideal) conception of time transcendentally. Observers are even characterised as "interacting systems" and one system coupling to another creates a relational time through their reciprocity, no human 'observer' involved at all.

This not radical enough. Meaning is the world one is embedded in; everything is marmite. — unenlightened

I'm not sure I agree with this. There are 'extra-meaningful' things operative all the time, the things we settle on as 'having meaning' in a conversation like this ultimately come from some meaning-individuating exercise of reflection, which has its own biases; it seeks and represents meanings, it generalises and stereotypes, it substitutes easy solutions for hard problems. We are bodies that build up heuristics, we swim through a sea of norms in our expectations (futurity/anticipatory response), reflection used well marks out parts of the map that emerges from the practices reflected upon. But it cannot record every detail.

Perhaps that little cough that won't go away will suddenly kill you. Maybe you discover one morning that you don't feel love for your partner. Life has a way of interrupting meaning and changing it in its wake.

We typically make little islands of marmite in the sea of marmite that we can go to for reference, sufficiently stable transmissible habits, like our uses of words, or the characters in our myths. They are still malleable, but try to shrink back to the shape tradition affords them.

↪fdrake You don't think it's possible that thoughts of revenge could be human nature inviting you to un-civilize yourself? Instead of re-civilizing? — Etzsche

The desire for revenge is probably something that will always be with us, but considering how socially mediated the expression of that desire is, I would be surprised if that was the case. In the aggregate, things which are in our nature; we have no control over. The need to poo isn't like the need to kill your wife for cheating.