§99

If §98 tried to rescue a sense of perfection divorced from an ideal (where an ideal has the sense of a fixed 'essence' of langauge), §99 tries to specify in what way there may be a 'perfect order' of sense without that sense having to be what Witty calls 'determinate'. It harkens back to previous discussions about boundaries (§68-§88) and exactness (§88 in particular), where Witty says that words need neither in order to 'work. Recall:

§88: "If I tell someone “Stay roughly here” - may this explanation not work perfectly?"

In particular, §99 tries to head-off the objection that an 'indeterminate' sense - one without a strict boundary, like 'stay roughly there', is not 'good enough' to have, as it were, its own measure of perfection. In terms of §98, one can say that 'stay roughly here' 'is in order as it is'. It needs no further specification to be 'perfect' ... but not ideal.

Because I struggle to understand philosophy.

§98

So, beyond the critique of the Tractatus that looms over this section (§89 onward), another unwavering thematic thread here is a critique of ideality. Witty's skepticism about the ideality and purity that certain views accord to language are on display all throughout the previous paragraphs, all generally invoked in a cynical rhetorical mood:

§97: "purest crystal"; §95: "purity" [of propositons]; §92: "essence"; §91: "final analysis" [of linguistic expressions], "complete exactness" [as a goal of investigation]; §89: Logic as "sublime", etc.

§98 takes up this theme explicitly, or rather, returns to §91, where Witty already voiced his dissatisfaction with ideas that analysis could lead to a state of "complete exactness" and finality. Here his skepticism is reiterated and affirmed: "we are not striving after an ideal". Yet despite all this, he wants to affirm a certain notion of perfection: "every sentence in our language ‘is in order as it is’. ... So there must be perfect order even in the vaguest sentence."

So the question here is: what is the index or measure of Witty's renovated understanding perfection? One thing is clear: it does not have to do with perfection with respect to some a fixed/given/essence of language. One wants to say - although Witty does not yet at this point - that a proposition is instead perfect with respect to its use - and that uses are unfixed, not given/not grounded in 'essences'. Recall §87: "The signpost is in order a if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose." More to say about this 'positive' sense of perfection in the next paragraph.

§93-§97

I'm sure it's been mentioned (I know @Banno has), but the next few sections cannot be understood outside of the context of a self-critqiue of the Tractatus. It's this which helps understand the full import of §93 and §94, which otherwise come across - indeed, came across to me on first reading - as a rather thin effort to do nothing more than shift the rhetoric and poetics associated with propositions from 'remarkable' to 'ordinary'.

Yet while this effort to shift the language takes up most of the written real estate, the key term which explains what motivates Witty to argue for this shift is that of is that of 'uniqueness' (also found in §95, §96 and §97): the proposition as 'unique', as doing something that nothing else in the world does. Specifically - as that which allows language to be correlative of the world (§96: "Thought, language, now appear to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world.").

It's precisely in the Tractatus that the proposition has exactly this 'unique' role attributed to it by Witty, in which the proposition 'pictures' reality by sharing the same 'logical form': this being the proposition's 'unique' characteristic which makes it 'remarkable' (hence the summary of Tractatus, not yet named in §96: "These concepts: proposition, language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent to each.")

Compare, Tractatus:

2.026: There must be objects, if the world is to have unalterable form.
2.0271: Objects are what is unalterable and subsistent; their configuration is what is unchanging and unstable.
2.15: The fact that the elements of a picture are related to one another in a determinate way represents that things are related to one another in the same way.
2.1514: the pictorial relationship consists of the correlations of the picture's elements with things.
2.1515: These correlations are, as it were, the feelers with which the picture touches reality.

As such the nincompoop who, in §93 and §94, remarks upon the 'remarkableness' of propositions is of course Witty himself. Of course this becomes absolutely clear in §97 where the Tractatus is mentioned by name, with the language even mirroring, and hence subverting, a passage that Witty himself cites 5.5563).

One of the really interesting things that happens in these PI sections is then to realize just how explosive the 'relativization' of the simple and the complex undertaken in the sections before (§48-§7xx) are to the Tractatus, which instead treats their relation as 'absolute', or, as Witty says in §97: "The order... which the world and thinking must have in common ... must be utterly simple. It is prior to all experience". Lots more to say about all these, but will stop for space's sake. Will only remark that the distinction between 'concepts' and 'super-concepts' at the end of §97 is lovely, and @Bannos reading of §95 is exactly what'd I'd mention, so I simply refer to that.

Quick personal note: to say that an exhaustive analysis of grammar would not yield a 'final account' of propositions, of language, etc, amounts also to saying that grammatical errors - what Witty calls language on holiday - can also never be eliminated once and for all. One might call these grammatical errors - as I am want to do - transcendental, in the vein of Kant's ineliminable transcendental illusions of Reason. No coincidence that Witty refers to the misunderstandings he speaks of as 'chimeras' (§94) and also 'illusions' (§96). This in keeping with his early remark in §36 about 'spirits':

§36: "Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit."

§92

§92 deals, somewhat, with the metaphorics associated with the misunderstanding detailed in §91, contrasting 'depth' and 'surface', and associating the desire for reaching a final, exahustive, understanding with the desire to uncover a hidden 'depth'. Key here, I think, is the idea that the depth is fixed, unshifting - or as Witty says: "given once for all, and independently of any future experience."

In contrast, one imagines, the 'surface' - what grammatical investigation really deals with - is not given and fixed, but shifting, open to change. Note that this means that the following correlation is not correct:

logic (grammar) : fact :: depth : surface

Grammar itself already lies on the 'surface'. In any case, the attempt to fix, either in advance or 'after' an exhaustive investigation (they amount to the same), 'what a proposition is' or 'what language is' (Platonic questions, both), is an error.

§91

§91 aims to head off a possible misunderstanding that §89 and §90 might foster: the idea that the 'understanding' gained by grammatical investigation might ever 'come to an end' - as though an exhaustive grammatical investigation might disabuse us our misunderstandings once and for all. Witty doesn't come right out and say it, but the obvious implication is that this is not at all the case.

One should relate this to the discussion of simples and complexes in the previous section: there, to recall, Witty notes that what counts as a simple and what counts as a complex is never absolute but always relative to a particular use of language: one can never exhaustively build-up the complexity of language from some given units/simples of language. If this is so, then no grammatical investigation - such as Witty's - would similarly be able to exhaustively 'analyse' language once and for all: the analysis itself would be parasitic upon the use.

§90

§90 continues to trade on the distinction between facts and logic introduced in §89, and firmly situates Witty's 'grammatical' investigations on the side of logic: "Our inquiry is therefore a grammatical one. And this inquiry sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away". Based on the remarks here we can expand the analogy I wrote for §89:

Logic : Understanding : 'Possibilities' of phenomena : Grammar : kinds of statement

::

Empirical : New Facts : Phenomena

I need to catch up to and for @Banno:

§89

§89 marks the beginning of a whole new line of discussion which deals with what Witty calls 'philosophy', and some of its methods, in this particular case, logic. The remarks from here on out can be thought of as something like 'applications' of the big discussions of simples and complexes and so on that have come before.

The crucial distinction that §89 institutes is that between logic, 'essences', and foundations on the one hand, and 'facts' and 'the empirical' on the other. This distinction will be crucial to Witty's understanding of philosophy's role and significance. What seems important to Witty is that in the realm of logic, no new facts can be learnt, at least, not in the way that one learns that, say, this fruit is round. Instead of new facts, a logical investigation, or an investigation into 'essences' reveals a new 'understanding'. So:

Logic : Understanding :: Empirical : New Facts

Might be posting quite a few passages from Cavell in the next few weeks;

On pain and words:

"Utterances [of pain] are expressions of it: "I know I'm in pain", "It's getting worse", "It's throbbing", are as much expressions of pain as "I'm in pain" is. Pain gets into the words, as hope or comfort get into words of hope or comfort (they wouldn't be such words otherwise). Or words are part of its suppression, or of distraction from it. They need not be to distract me from my pain, in which case the words may race, as if to get out of range; but to distract you from it (as in Chekhov); there is nothing anyone can do about it, and it might deprive me of your company if you knew; and anyway I don't know any words for it. Here my words don't reach all the way to my pain".

On speaking and politics:

"To speak for oneself politically is to speak for the others with whom you consent to association, and it is to consent to be spoken for by them — not as a parent speaks for you, i.e., instead of you, but as someone in mutuality speaks for you, i.e., speaks your mind. Who these others are, for whom you speak and by whom you are spoken for, is not known a priori, though it is in practice generally treated as given. To speak for yourself then means risking the rebuff — on some occasion, perhaps once for all — of those for whom you claimed to be speaking; and it means risking having to rebuff — on some occasion, perhaps once for all — those who claimed to be speaking for you. There are directions other than the political in which you will have to find your own voice — in religion, in friendship, in parenthood, in love, in art — and to find your own work; and the political is likely to be heartbreaking or dangerous. So are the others.

But in the political, the impotence of your voice shows up quickest; it is of importance to others to stifle it; and it is easiest to hope there, since others are in any case included in it, that it will not be missed if it is stifled, i.e., that you will not miss it. But once you recognize a community as yours, then it does speak for you until you say it doesn't, i.e., until you show that you do. A fortunate community is one in which the issue is least costly to raise; and only necessary to raise on brief, widely spaced, and agreed upon occasions; and, when raised, offers a state of affairs you can speak for, i.e., allows you to reaffirm the polis".

On strength:

"It is like trying to throw a feather; for some things, breath is better than strength; stronger".

And 'objective' comes from the latin objectivus, which was used in the exact opposite way in which it is used now, because Kant fucked things up for everyone:

"The word “objectivity” has a somersault history. Its cognates in European languages derive from the Latin adverbial or adjectival form obiectivus/obiective, introduced by fourteenth-century scholastic philosophers such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. (The substantive form does not emerge until much later, around the turn of the nineteenth century.) From the very beginning, it was always paired with subiectivus/subiective, but the terms originally meant almost precisely the opposite of what they mean today. “Objective” referred to things as they are presented to consciousness, whereas “subjective” referred to things in themselves.

...Even eighteenth-century dictionaries still preserved echoes of this medieval usage, which rings so bizarrely in modern ears: “Hence a thing is said to exist OBJECTIVELY, objective, when it exists no otherwise than in being known; or in being an Object of the Mind.”" (Daston and Galison, Objectivity).

In what way do you think QM puts an independent reality radically to question? And independent from what? — Benkei

I was thinking how to reply to this but I think Rovelli's presentation here is better than what I'd be able to come up with:

"If different observers give different accounts of the same sequence of events, then each quantum mechanical description has to be understood as relative to a particular observer. Thus, a quantum mechanical description of a certain system (state and/or values of physical quantities) cannot be taken as an “absolute” (observer independent) description of reality, but rather as a formalization, or codification, of properties of a system relative to a given observer. Quantum mechanics can therefore be viewed as a theory about the states of systems and values of physical quantities relative to other systems.

A quantum description of the state of a system S exists only if some system O (considered as an observer) is actually “describing” S, or, more precisely, has interacted with S. The quantum state of a system is always a state of that system with respect to a certain other system. More precisely: when we say that a physical quantity takes the value v, we should always (explicitly or implicitly) qualify this statement as: the physical quantity takes the value v with respect to the so and so observer.

Therefore, I suggest that in quantum mechanics “state” as well as “value of a variable” – or “outcome of a measurement–” are relational notions in the same sense in which velocity is relational in classical mechanics. We say “the object S has velocity v” meaning “with respect to a reference object O”. Similarly, I maintain that “the system is in such a quantum state” or “q = 1” are always to be understood “with respect to the reference O.” In quantum mechanics all physical variables are relational, as is velocity". (source)

[Quick note, by this point in the paper Rovelli has already set out very clearly that an 'observer' is nothing more than a 'physical object having a definate state of motion', and may well be something as benign as a table lamp. I mention this to head off any waffling idiot who equivocates on 'observer' to mean 'consciousness' or any such trash].

Heartened by the responses here.

Stanley Cavell - The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy

Yes, and an observation in a quantum process is a record by an instrument. Your 'point' is to equivocate on this and worm some horseshit in about 'theory' which Wheeler deliberately avows to be a 'separate story'.

No shit, but that's nothing but a contingent fact that has nothing to do with the process of 'registration' itself; you may as well say, if there were no microscopes guided by our theories of optics, there'd be no bacteria - but then, you're no longer taking about quantum phenomenon, but broader questions of epistemology. No doubt your whole sthick is to confuse and muddle the two under the cover of the general confusion about QM, but that's entirely your own fuck up.

Oh look an Einstein quote, right on fucking cue. Another rhetorical (non)-argument-by-allusion. Next stop, bookshop stocklists.

An observation", in this context, is a data-point, one piece of information that is interpreted in the light of theory — Wayfarer

If by 'this context' you mean Wheeler, there is no point, not a single mention - quote it, I fucking dare you - at which Wheeler even remotely refers observation to 'a piece of information interpreted in the light of theory (it's this qualification, which I've italicized, which is an utter fib on your part). Every single one of Wheeler's examples deals with registration by scientific instruments which interact with - and thus 'participate' with - the quantum phenomenon in question:

"The observing device in the here and now... has an irretrievable consequence for what one has the right to say about a photon that was given out long before there was any life in the universe" ; And repeated again two pages later: "Registering equipment operating in the here and now has an undeniable part in brining about that which appears to have happened"; And early on: "Bohr emphasized that ... we are dealing with two different experiments... the one with the half-silvered mirror removed ... [and] the one with the half-silvered mirror in place"; Elsewhere and most significantly: "A phenomenon is not yet a phenomenon until it has been brought to a close by an irreversible act of amplification such as the blackening of a grain of silver bromide emulsion or the triggering of a photo detector";

At every point is 'observation' linked to, and articulated in terms of, the physical set-up of the scientific apparatus in place. At no point is the wider body of 'theory' as set out by a community of scientists invoked necessary to bring about a quantum phenomenon: the phenomenon is 'brought to a close' by the interaction with the instruments: it goes no further, and certainly requires no 'consciousness' to swoop in from out of nowhere to make it an observation. And all this to say nothing about your attempt to insulate Wheeler's unequivocal statement about consciousness by once again skewing, with zero warrant, the statement to refer to 'what happens inside an individual observer's mind': no, it refers quite unambitiously, before your twisted attempt at blatant sophistry, to consciousnesses having a role in the 'quantum phenomenon' tout court - Wheeler is about as clear and blunt as can possibly be on this point:

"Does the record [of an act of registration] subsequently enter into the 'consciousness' of some person, animal, or computer? Is that the first step in translating the measurement into "meaning" [note how the measurement is deliberately and distinctly separated from meaning, unlike your sophistic attempt to run the two together - SX] - meaning regarded as "the joint product of all the evidence that is available to those who communicate"? Then that is a separate part of the story, important but not to be confused with 'quantum phenomenon'" - a deliberate confusion which you bathe in from head to toe.

Which one's the ad hom? Pointing out a basic logical fallacy? Noting that you consistently and maliciously skew Bhor's meaning so as to impute to him a position he never held? Pointing out that you always shy away from discussions of the science and recourse to trivialities like coats of arms and out-of-context quotes? All of the above?

I respond to you the way I do because your posts on this topic are frequently scientifically dishonest, conceptually loose, and full to the brim with (non-)argument-by-allusion. The two instances of double-speak I pointed out are emblematic of all your posts on this topic.

QM was 'shocking' because it undermined what Bohr described as the 'Victorian' commitment to the possibility of absolute objectivity, which all boils down to 'mind-independence'. — Wayfarer

Tertium non datur. Bohr at least was not so juvenile as to think that the latter conclusion ("all boils down to 'mind-independence") at all follows from his declaration of 'shock'. Your usual mis/nonreading claptrap. Not even your - as usual, unconxteualized - citations mean what you want them to.

So it could serve as a rhetorical crutch for charlatans to muddy the waters when utterly incapable of having a discussion grounded in the science, clearly. DiD YoU KnOw BoHr HaD a YiNg YaNg SyMboL oN HiS CoAt Of ArMs MuSt Be SiGnIfiCaNt.

So Heisenberg's response to that is a modest one: 'What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.' — Wayfarer

Which is fine and dandy, except your position is as far removed from Heisenberg's as can be: you're not arguing from some position of epistemological humility: you're arguing that consciousness (or subjectivity or intentionality or mind ... concepts which, because you have no coherent way of sharply defining, are all collapsed into each other in one big, useless mess) is inherent to quantum processes as such.

Frankly, I don't even think you have a coherent idea of what you want to argue - the epistolomological or ontological claim - each very different, each with utterly different implications - so long as you can somehow work whatever fuzzy notion of subjectivity/intentionality/consciousness/mind (again, amalgamated into a indistinct blob of concepts) into the science in some way or another. Which is why you can mangle quotes from Wheeler, Heisenberg, Einstein, Bhor or whoever, and why you're completely incapable of answering the questions posed by fdrake in any way than invoking completely irrelevant rhetorical questions like 'WhY ArEnT YoU ShOcKed?'.

My issue with these statements is that it takes too restrictive a view of what 'observation' entails. — Wayfarer

...yet another exhibition of Wayfarer's attempt to assasinate language for his equivocal woo: as if the attempt to unduly restrict 'observation' to nothing but humans is not among the most severve 'restrictions' one could arbitrarily place on interpretations on QM. Newspeak for the pseudoscientific cause: war is peace, inclusivity is 'too restrictive'. And that's to say nothing of this arrogrant reverse-speak where the height of hubris is passed off, bewilderingly, as 'humility':

Acknowledging the centrality of the human is actually a gesture of humility. — Wayfarer

Hot garbage.

Well, this is a dedicated space for this kind of discussion for one ... and also discussions on facebook are trash as a matter of definition. A waste of time for anyone involved.

Philosophy reaches so many different conclusions because each philosopher proceeds from different questions. The questions of Plato are not the questions of Kant, and the questions of Nietzsche are not the questions of Russell. And it's the questions which determine the shape and outcome of the inquiry: this is why every great philosopher doesn't just expand on what came before, but always inaugurates whole new lines of research that were previously unengaged. Philosophy is a creative endeavour par excellence, and what is created are less 'answers' than new fields of problems - new ways of looking at the world. This is not a bug - a 'spanner' - but a feature, and one worth celebrating, not lamenting.

Well the thread doesn’t seemed to have moved too far forward so hopefully I’ll be able to catch up now that I’m back from my being away. Gonna post something I half wrote up previously and just completed:

§1-§88, Summary

Before moving on, I want to do a quick structural summary of what’s been covered so far between §1-§88. In it’s broadest sense, this large section can itself be broken up into two parts: §1-§45, and §45-§88. To put it all very roughly, §1-§45 covers issues of what I would call differentials, while §45-§88 covers issues of roles. The two ‘parts' compliment each other, with the second section on roles ‘answering’ certain questions opened up by the first section on differentials.

Anyway, what do I mean by all this? This: that what I’m calling the first part (§1-§45) deals with issues of words (the ’same’ words) that may mean many different things in different circumstances. This is what makes them ‘differentials’, the most obvious being ostensive words like ‘this’ or ‘that’, which are about as general as you can get when it comes to words with differential meaning. A big focus here is on types of words: the fact that words differ not only by ‘degree’, but by kind, if I may put it that way.

Part of the motive here is to get us to understand the heterogeneity of language, of the very many different kinds of words and of all the different things we do with them. This is turn is done in order to show just how deeply connected - unthinkable without understanding how - language is with our lives: that a word has 'this’ meaning meaning rather than ‘that’ meaning is deeply bound up with the role that word plays in the context of our actions, of our concrete lived situation(s) at the time at which we employ that word (what Witty calls ‘language-games’, which really should be called something like, the ‘life-games' instead in order to emphasise just how big a part ‘non-linguistic’ elements play in it).

The second most important thing that the focus on kinds does is to get us to attend to the errors which arise when we mix up kinds of words: when we take different kinds of words to be the same, and all the issues and false which result from our not paying enough attention to kinds of words.

-

What I’m calling the ‘second section’ on roles (§45-§88), tries to bring this out even further and develop some implications of the first section. Basically, the idea is something like this: if there really is such a rich heterogeneity to language so that the same words can mean different things, how is it possible that language has any ‘structure’ as all? Why it is not just one big chaotic mess where the meaning of words swap and change all the time? How is it that we can understand each other at all?

Part of Witty’s answer here is through recourse to roles. Language may be rich in many and various kinds of words, but what helps us navigate this bristling field of word-kinds are the roles these various kinds of words play. The most important of these roles are those which are paradigmatic (examples): paradigmatic words (or even paradigmatic things) serve as points of orientation, which ‘fix’ (temporarily) our way of proceeding with language. For once we have examples in place, and we agree that such and such are examples of such and such, (such agreement is always open to reassessment), we can begin to develop shared language-games.

One important issue that this all serves to bring out (for me anyway), is the relation between necessity and arbitrariness: in some sense, the ‘fixing’ of an example is purely contingent: that a meter is ‘this’ long and not ‘that’ long could very easily be otherwise. On the other hand, given a certain use, such fixing is also absolutely necessary: the fixing of our paradigms is driven or motivated by the use to which they are put. One might even invoke here the way in which evolution among species occurs by way of 'random-walks’ though an evolutionary landscape, before settling on ‘local minima’ determined by developmental constraints: such is the case also with words and meanings, with Witty’s ‘forms-of-life’ occupying an analogous conceptual position to ‘environments’ in evolution.

The biggest import of all of this for Wittgenstein is that, if we recognise that such fixing of paradigms is ultimately governed by our life-contexts, then this renders all attempts at ‘analysis’ - in the sense of breaking-apart meanings into simples out of which complexes are built’ - utterly useless. Meaning is not ‘vertically’ structured, which elemental bases on the bottom and complex meanings on top; rather meaning is always ‘horizontally’ structured: the meaning of things is always appropriate to their use in a certain life-context, and attempts to break meaning down into pieces out of which they are constituted is always doomed to failure. Meaning is always irreducibly ‘synthetic’. Hence the very important closing of §: "The signpost is in order a if, under normal circumstances, it fulfil its purpose.”

The next few sections will attempt to ‘apply’ these insights to what Wittgenstein calls ‘philosophy’.

Oh Gosh darn it lol. I've been up 20 hours, leave me alone.

It's one of my favourite books, but it took me a long, long time to really get a hold of it's import. Part of the 'problem', if you can call it that, is that it's a foundational book for understanding Agamben's larger project, but then you have to have a feel for that to really place the book in its proper context.

On the other hand, it's an absolutely bewtiching book that sparkles on every page, regardless of all that. It's full of little gems like that small etymology of the Absolute above, and even if it takes you a while to get a fuller picture - as it did me - you will learn alot, and come away edified, even on first reading.

Today's lesson on the Absolute:

"The verb to solve, from which the term "absolute" derives, can be broken down into se-luo. In the Indo-European languages, the reflexive group *se indicates what is proper (suus)-· both that which belongs to a group, in the sense of con-suetudo, suesco (Gr. ethos, "custom, habit," Ger. Sitte), and that which remains in itself, separated, as in solus, sed, secedo. The verb to solve thus indicates the operation of dissolving (luo) that leads (or leads back) something to its own *se, to suus as to solus, dissolving it - absolving it - of every tie or alterity.

The preposition ab, which expresses distancing, movement from, reinforces this idea of a process, a voyage that takes off, separates from something and moves, or returns toward something. To think the Absolute signifies, thus, to think that which, through a process of "absolution," has been led back to its ownmost property, to itself, to its own solitude, as to its own custom. For this reason, the Absolute always implies a voyage, an abandonment of the originary place, an alienation and a being-outside. If the Absolute is the supreme idea of philosophy, then philosophy is truly, in the words of Novalis, nostalgia (Heimweh): that is, the ''desire to be at home everywhere" (Trieb uberall zu Hause zu sein), to recognize oneself in being-other. Philosophy is not initially at home, it is not originally in possession of itself, and thus it must return to itself" (Agamben, Language and Death).

Now all anything one has to do is add another grand sounding word to it and et voilà! You have philosophical garble.

Gosh no. Apparently some doctorates think that we are pig-chimp hybrids so they clearly are under-qualified for holding opinions about this kind of thing.

There are heaps and heaps and heaps and heaps of female thinkers, if you do some cursory research. That they are not well known to the general public, is another question.

Nah, 'tis a bunch of bollocks and is lucky to not have been deleted straight-out.

Why not read Wheeler himself rather than derivative sources:

https://what-buddha-said.net/library/pdfs/wheeler_law_without_law.pdf

The basic idea behind the participatory universe idea is simply that what 'participates' with the universe is itself - which includes the equipment used to make a measurement (which belongs to the universe...). From the paper: "Registering equipment operating in the here and now has an undeniable part in bringing about that which appears to have happened". An 'observer' is a piece of apparatus, that's it. This, incidentally, was Bohr's position, which Wheeler understood very well.

(cf. Wheeler's comments on Bohr concept of the 'phenomenon, in the cited paper': "a phenomenon is not yet a phenomenon until it is brought to a close by an irreversible act of amplification such as the blackening of a grain of silver bromide emulsion or the triggering of a photodetector". Incidentally, this was also the point of difference between Einstein and Bohr: Einstein refused to believe the act of measurement qua equipmental intervention - or 'participation', in Wheeler's overblown vocabulary - could determine the results of a measurement, while Bohr figured this was the only consistent way to explain the results).

Had also John Horgan misattributed such a view to Wheeler? — boundless

Because pop-science writers are generally trash.

Speaking of Wheeler, it's always fun to remember his unequivocal stance for all those who like to misinterpret him on this point, that: "Consciousness' has nothing whatsoever to do with the quantum process" (Wheeler, “Law Without Law”).

A fun quote to roll out for those mystic bullshitters who like to illegitimately invoke Wheeler from time to time to add a bit of scientific prestige to their scat.

Yeah fuck this bitch. If those four men did nothing but exist-while-turbaned, and she was so ignorant as to have them kicked off a flight over her unfounded fear, fuck her. As reported, the whole situation is functionally indistinguishable from a straight-forward act of racism.

I need to get over a dislike of conversational writing. I am used to reading Hegel and Kant so my writing could be due to who I read. Perhaps I could overcome this by reading easier philosophers. — Joseph Walsh

No, don't lower your standards of reading so you can write better! The trick is to write about these very tough philosophers and what they say in a way that's clear and comprehensible: that's when you know you understand them - when you can 'translate' their terms into ones you have mastery over. Read the hard philosophers - make them easy(ier).

Write how you would speak to a room. The room is full of your friends who are mildly interested in what you have to say.

I may or may not be chillin' on a rooftop in Fez at Sunset getting through my reading right now.

I am your reading daddy.

Nooo stop being lazy! Reading discipline is important!