We'll see. Presumably the federal grand jury and Smith see the law somewhat differently, or they would not have bothered indicting him.

They are his documents. — NOS4A2

Enacted November 4, 1978,[4] the PRA changed the legal ownership of the President's official records from private to public ... The Presidential Records Act was enacted in 1978 after President Richard Nixon sought to destroy records relating to his presidential tenure upon his resignation in 1974. The law superseded the policy in effect during Nixon’s tenure that a president’s records were considered private property, making clear that presidential records are owned by the public. — wiki

I'm not sure whether any of the documents in question count as presidential records, rather than some other type of government document, but it seems that if they are, then they are not his, as a matter of law.

I don't believe he was indicted for stealing documents, but for retaining them, hiding them, and lying about having them.

there’s nothing added by saying they have a character of this kind or that, which could only be attributed to that which exists anyway. — Mww

Do you want to take another swing at this? It sounds like you said predicating F of x says nothing about x because you can only predicate F of x if x exists. That's nonsensical. Of course x has to exist, but predicating is still predicating. --- I wasn't really thinking about predication, but now I just don't know what you mean.

How would we know the thing is only partially revealed? — Mww

Now that's a funny thing. You may choose to phrase it more carefully than I will, but the overall shape of that Kantian position is that something is revealed to us but something at the same time is concealed, namely how the thing is in itself rather than for us.

(Loads more, but I don't want to take on all of Kant all at once!)

It looks to me like you are trying to carve nature where there are no joints. — wonderer1

The boundary between an organism and its environment is surely salient though, and an organism works hard to preserve that boundary.

A house, by comparison, does not work to ensure its inside remains separated from its outside.

I'm pretty sure I remember an interview in which Hodding Carter suggested that classification is often abused. I think the example he gave was the Carter administration withdrawing support from maybe El Salvador (?) but not until they had secured a deal with Israel to fill the gap. And that deal was classified, not because America would be at risk were the details known, but because it would be embarrassing to the administration which was claiming to have a foreign policy focused on human rights. Carter suggested that every administration he was familiar with had classified documents they would merely be embarrassed to have made public.

That said, Jack Smith and his team included enough detail in the indictment to make it clear that there was genuinely sensitive information involved here, that this was not just a sort of "legal technicality" -- something like, sure these documents were pointlessly classified (by your own administration) and don't contain anything genuinely secret, but we don't like you so we're prosecuting you anyway. Not the situation, as far as we can tell.

And if I understand correctly, the Espionage Act predates our modern system of classification, and so applies even to unclassified documents if they contain sensitive material related to national security. Classification would function here primarily as an indicator that a document contains such material, but classification per se is not necessary. There are documents you would be prohibited from sharing even if they had been declassified. Is that your understanding?

That's fine. It's not what I wanted to talk about anyway. But leaving the example aside, which was meant to function almost as an analogy, the point remains: in saying that there are somethings that appear to us, or that give rise to impressions on our sensorium, whatever, we are saying something about those things, that they have this character of revealing or being revealed, and showing themselves to us is a potential or capacity of such things.

To imagine something is to imagine it revealed to you, or as it would be if it were, or to imagine it somewhat revealed and still somewhat concealed.

You can say that an object's concealment from us can be recast as a limitation of ours, that we cannot see through walls, say, and leave it that. But what of the object that is revealed to us, at least partially? Is it illuminated only by the light of our minds? Or does it participate in our perception of it, by showing itself in such a way that we can perceive it?

Does he? It's as simple as him saying "this is mine" and all the rules about handling and disclosure are out the window? I find that implausible, but if you have a cite, I'm ready to be educated.

It was my impression that some of these documents are considered property of the United States government, hence the issue being their "retention" and the requests from the archivist being for him to "return" them. You ask someone to return a thing when they have it but it's not theirs.

I wonder what jury selection is going to look like, in Florida of all places. Jury nullification is surely a serious concern for the prosecutors.

his personal records

It's just not the case that all the documents at issue are his personal records.

I'll have more time to look at your response tonight. A couple quick notes:

Can you explain why the payoff tables you've come up with are unsatisfactory to you? — Pierre-Normand

The fundamental problem is that your stake changes depending on which outcome you bet on. I know when I first looked at this five years ago, I ran into problems determining the true odds: you'd get an event that's 1:2 paying off like it was 1:3. Sleeping Beauty doesn't even out when you bias the coin.

But I'll look at it again.

The coin toss result determines the Tuesday awakening, while the Monday awakening is independent of it. — Pierre-Normand

I think the Halfer position is roughly that there are only two outcomes: a single interview conducted in one sitting, and a double interview spread out over two sittings. Those outcomes are equivalent to the two possible outcomes of the coin toss. (If you have an even-numbered population to work with, you can just do away with the coin altogether.)

What is the Thirder equivalent? If there are three outcomes, they cannot be equivalent to the two outcomes of the coin toss.

To get back to two, you have to add in [heads & Tuesday], and then split by sequence, like Halfers -- only now it's heads = awake-asleep, tails = awake-awake -- or by day, as you do here, heads = asleep, tails = awake, for Tuesday only.

That sounds plausible, but it's not what we want. Heads is not equivalent to asleep because you're awakened on Monday. More importantly, awake is not equivalent to tails.

We don't even have to get into issues about days and indexicals to have problems. (I like "first interview" and "second interview", but it doesn't matter here.)

You’re hinting at a limitation regarding the object (it doesn’t cooperate hence doesn’t appear) but I would rather think the limitation is in us, in that our physiology limits what can appear to us, re: only a specific range of wavelengths of light for visual appearances, etc., and also limits the effect that which can appear, has. — Mww

Let's stick with that example for a moment. What difference would our physiology make if objects didn't absorb and reflect and radiate certain wavelengths of light? If there weren't light for objects to do this with? Are you suggesting that color perception in us is an entirely "internal" matter, having nothing to do with the objects we perceive as colored? Nothing to do with light?

So there is no self, and there is no world. These are modelling constructs. What there is instead is a running habit of discrimination where we are continually dividing our phenomenal existence along those lines. — apokrisis

So the "owner" of the model is constructed by the model's very functioning -- it's not some pre-existing thing that then adds to itself a model by which it distinguishes itself from its environment. The running model is that distinction, and without it -- or at death -- there is no self to "have" such a model.

And we can call this a "holistic" approach to -- I guess "experience" as a big vague catchall? Or maybe just "life"? Something like this goes on anywhere an organism maintains its organization as a going concern, yes? It's just that not all organisms develop the additional capacity to "monitor" (non-homuncularly) this constructed self to some degree.

It all sounds broadly Heideggerian to me. ;-)

athletes who transitioned long after puberty, in some cases just a year or so before competing — Judaka

Has happened, sure, but I was genuinely surprised when I looked at Wikipedia how many associations have really gotten in the weeds with this issue, and a lot of them no longer allow this, even if they did in the past. Nothing is universal across all sports in all nations, but it appears to me that in mid-2023, there are in most cases considerable hoops for a trans woman to jump through before she can compete in women's sports. Having gone through puberty as a male is in itself permanently disqualifying for a surprising number of sports.

The FBI, the DOJ, are some of the most corrupt institutions ever created. — NOS4A2

Two questions, in all seriousness:

(1) Is your low opinion of the FBI and the DOJ independent of their performance in matters related to Trump? If you already had good reason to distrust them, or to distrust them with respect to certain sorts of issues, and if matters related to Trump presented such issues, then indeed you might infer that their actions with regard to Trump are suspicious. Is that your view, and if so what were your separate reasons for considering the FBI and the DOJ so corrupt?

(2) Many people would decline to give much weight to the accusations of someone's political opponents -- in Trump's case, Democrats, certain Republicans. That's understandable. But as I understand it, you consider the FBI, the DOJ, and the mainstream media also to be, at least in effect, Trump's political opponents, and thus similarly untrustworthy. Some people consider these institutions neutral, and thus trustworthy sources of truth. -- Within obvious limits! Institutions are big, have a lot of moving parts and involve a lot of different agendas, so we're not talking about perfection here, just overall, in-the-long-run sort of truth. --- Organizations like Reuters, the Associated Press, they seem to many people, me among them, to be by and large nonpartisan, impartial sources, if imperfect. But not to you, so what source of bad news about Trump would you trust? And, as with my first question, do you have independent reasons for finding that source trustworthy, and if so what?

There is a wrinkle here: sometimes people find bad news more trustworthy if its source is unexpected -- for a politician, for instance, if his long-time allies are the ones bringing the bad news, that might carry particular weight, not because they're neutral but because they were known not to be. In this case, however, only a small fraction of Republicans are likely to care what someone like Bill Barr says, because by saying it, he simply becomes an opponent of former President Trump and thus untrustworthy, however high their opinion of Bill Barr may have been before. It's just possible that there will come a time when a great number (and eventually nearly all) of Trump's high-profile allies and defenders lose faith -- as I recall, it took many months for Republicans in Congress to turn on Nixon after the Watergate hearings -- but since that's somewhat unlikely, my second question is hoping for a source you consider neutral and thus trustworthy, independent of any issues related to Trump.

Since you're still a committed Thirder, here's what bothers me:

(1) When a coin is tossed it has only two proper outcomes. (No leaners, no edges, and the usual ceteris paribus.) SB, upon being awakened, finds herself in one of three possible situations. But that doesn't work. A coin toss cannot, by itself, engender three distinct situations for her to be in. For instance, "for all she knows," this is her second tails interview; but there is no way to go from the coin toss directly to the second tails interview. Not without passing through the first interview. So SB's intuition that three things can happen to her requires there to be some other determinant of her situation; what is that other factor?

(2) The setup confounds wagering arguments. That won't matter much to a lot of people, but it's uncomfortable. Annoying. Ramsey used Dutch book arguments from the beginning, and despite their limitations they can be clarifying. Each time I've tried to construct a sane payoff table I've failed. I've wondered lately if there might be a conditional wager that comes out rational, but I can work up enough hope of success to bother. Partial beliefs, within suitable limits, ought to be expressible as wagers, but not in this case, and that blows.

probably would've been if people weren't afraid to speak against this movement — Judaka

Before crowning some trans activists as secret monarchs of the world, it might be worth glancing over Wikipedia's article about the issue in sports. Things have happened you may disagree with, other things you agree with, but it should be pretty clear that sports associations have not universally rolled over when someone is mean to them on Twitter. It's complicated. The rules rule-makers are coming up with are complicated, and many associations are on their second or third attempt at this point. Of course trans activists have some influence, but that doesn't mean everyone is just following their orders or something.

Things-in-themselves can be inferred the possibility of sensations in general a priori. The thing as it appears, and from which sensation is given, makes the non-existence of that particular thing-in-itself impossible, re:

“…. For, otherwise, we should require to affirm the existence of an appearance, without something that appears—which would be absurd….”

Transcendental analysis of the conditions for human knowledge doesn’t care about ontology; all that is represented exists necessarily, all we will ever know empirically is given from representations, therefore all empirical knowledge presupposes extant things. — Mww

But there's something else, and it's right there in your quote. (Is that Kant?)

What we know about the somethings the existence of which we infer from the possibility of experience, is that they are the sorts of things that can appear, and, in particular, can appear to us. That deduction works both ways: Kant had the idea that we can treat the objects of perception and knowledge as conforming to us, rather than us conforming our minds to them, and that's fine, but it also means that those objects must cooperate, must be capable of cooperating, of appearing to us, of revealing themselves to us or being revealed to us. Not as they are "in themselves", of course, but we know better than to expect that; but if things appear for us, then they must be things that can do that, and do.

There is moment here, of elevating epistemology to first philosophy, and leaving ontology as, at most, the matter of what is only formally posited by the theory of knowledge. I'm not convinced that works out. Look at what is posited. It is not the empty place-holder it was supposed to be, but is rich with its own structure of revealing and concealing, without which the formal description of knowledge hangs in the air.

law does not, cannot, precipitate any human act whatsoever; which is why all our jails are wholly overcrowded, i.e., the requiring law which the prisoners supposedly broke is not, cannot, be determinative of human action...but the convicting judge thinks the law determines him, and, that it must necessarily determine, by its stolid requirement, the other fellow too... — quintillus

You don't need Sartre for this. Compare:

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. — Thoreau

It was not my intention to misrepresent your views.

Have a nice day.

Self starts where the world leaves off, and vice versa. — apokrisis

That's convincing as it stands, certainly, but could you say something about D'Amasio? I've only just started the book, but the summary is that not everything has a mind, and not every mind has a self, that "self" is a particular sort of process found in some minds but not others. He's talking about self-consciousness, the kind of self you can be aware of and introspect, I believe. Jibes with your general approach or heading in some other direction?

Here's one more ridiculous comparison to clarify the difference between Where am I? and What am I? (if it's even relevant to Sleeping Beauty): the Chomsky-Foucault debate. Chomsky wants to know how we got here and what we can do about it, and all he needs is reason, plenty of careful analysis. Foucault, steeped in the hermeneutics of suspicion, doesn't believe there is a neutral faculty of reason which could deploy a battery of neutral concepts like "justice" as if they were not compromised, even tainted, by history and capital. Chomsky's concern is that we don't understand where we are and how we got here, Foucault's that we don't understand what we are and what we're doing.

For example, if one were to ask the average person to express their credences regarding the outcome of a two horse race that they know absolutely nothing about, they will simply say "I don't know who will win" and refrain from assigning any odds, equal or otherwise. They will also tend to accept bets in which they have knowledge that the physical probabilities are 50/50 over bets that they are totally ignorant about. — sime

Two Envelopes seems to encourage abuse of the principle of indifference in exactly this way. Maybe it's just something like this: rationality requires treating "It's one or the other but I've literally no idea which" as an uninformative 50:50 prior only when there's the real possibility of acquiring new information upon which to update that prior. I'd rather just say, no, don't do that, "I don't know" doesn't mean "It's 50:50", but there are a great many usages in which the prior is quickly swamped by actual information, and the PoI is a harmless formality. --- In Two Envelopes, you know there will never be any new data, so that harmless prior metastasizes.

Y'all know the math much better than I, so maybe I'm speaking out of turn.

trying to move away from the idea that one's credence in the state H is entirely determined by the specification of the ways in which one can come to be in that state — Pierre-Normand

Even the word "state" feels too coarse for Sleeping Beauty, since it could denote the situation a robust well-defined subject finds themselves in, or it could denote the very identity of that subject. --- At least, that's how the two main camps look to me. One wonders, where am I? how did I get here? One wonders, what am I? what has made me into this?

As you say, it's all about individuation. Lacking a fixed point of individuation, you can push the lever however you like but you won't actually move anything.

The thirder's position is indeed a ratio of possible words, but there is scant evidence to support the idea that credences are accurately represented by taking ratios over possible worlds. — sime

Elsewhere Lewis is pretty careful about what he calls de se modality -- epistemic questions are not just about possible worlds but irreducibly about your epistemic counterpart's status in a given possible world.

That's in the neighborhood of what I've been musing about anyway.

Yeah there's some similarity to Bostrum's thing. In Stanford terms, you could say that thirders are identifying the self with the role they are playing at the moment, and it's a matter of chance that they are playing one role at a given moment rather than another.

Self and repetition are linked in Nietzsche's puzzling doctrine that truly to will something is to will its eternal recurrence. The Good Place is also oddly sleeping-beauty adjacent:

The Monty Hall "problem" has an answer: it's just an illustration of a tempting but fallacious way of reasoning about probability. Two Envelopes rises to the level of paradox because a clearly and provably wrong answer can be arrived at by reasoning, the flaw in which is so difficult to determine that there is no professional consensus on what the flaw is.

I'm not sure SB is the same sort of thing: which is the natural, obvious, tempting mistake and which the correction? If you haven't been around these sorts of puzzles, maybe "a fair coin is 50-50, period" is the obvious answer, and SB is one of the only scenarios bizarre enough to undermine that confidence; if you've been around these sorts of puzzles, carving the space into quarters and conditioning to get one third might be the obvious thing to do, but that's to be tricked into misreading the source of randomness here. Because the analysis of the 1200-sophomore study I posted is so straightforward, but getting standard SB to align with it is so difficult, I have even wondered if SB doesn't undermine the whole idea of "subjective probability". A more optimistic take would be that SB is unsolvable, and shows you what background assumptions are necessary for probabilistic reasoning to work -- memory, continuity of self, objective verification, something in here.

But as this debate has gone on long enough and I don't think I have the energy to continue it much more, I'm happy to just say that both 1/2 and 1/3 are correct answers to distinct but equally valid interpretations of the question. — Michael

I'm still mulling it over despite myself, but I think there's something to this.

Rather than getting back into the nitty-gritty, I'm thinking about the stuff I posted a while back, the possible self slices and all that.

It could be the two natural positions represent slightly different attitudes toward the self.

Halfers define participants as ending up having one interview, or ending up with two. It's a cumulative view of the self: I am my life story, and the story draws a connected arc passing through circumstances; what matters most is that storyline, and situations are only things I (robust, impervious) encounter along the way.

Thirders define participants by what they're experiencing at the moment, and seem less confident that what matters most is the unique historical self for whom this is merely an incident in their story; thirders seem to feel that the situation in part defines them, they are just the someone this is happening too -- anything could happen to anyone or not happen to them, and that's who you are at that moment.

It's hard to state each side clearly, but you could also say, roughly, that for a halfer the question is only: what happened? how did the coin land? For thirders, the question is: who am I? what's happening to me right now that defines who I am? (This is pretty clear in @JeffJo's thirder analysis, posted here on the forum and also here on a site dedicated to the sleeping beauty problem, in which the whole point is that participants don't know which sort of participant they are, and recognize that roles could be shuffled amongst them.)

The who am I? question doesn't really seem to be on the halfer radar at all, thus my suggesting that halfers view the self as more robust in the face of circumstances.

Maybe one more analogy: thirders might be more likely to buy the results Zimbardo claimed for the Stanford Prison Experiment. --- That's more than a bridge too far for me, but might be the clearest way to put the distinction.

It is obvious that we don't know with absolute certainty that objects persist when unobserved, but all the evidence of human experience, including observation of animal behavior, suggests that they do persist. — Janus

What evidence would that be? We don't observe what we don't observe, so ...

As far as I can tell this is not something we believe on evidence at all, but an assumption. Hume describes it so.

In a Bayesian frame of mind, you might say the furniture out in the living room is part of my model of the world, and when I'm not observing it, that part of the model is essentially frozen, not being updated because there is no relevant information upon which to base an update. No new observations. That's not much like believing, based on the evidence, that it's still there as I left it, and a lot more like just assuming that it is.

But I'm sure what you mean is that if I were now to go and check, everything would still be as my model says it is, and it's the experience over time we should trust. Thus:

Really all we mean by "persist" is that they are perceptually invariant over varying degrees of time, depending on the object — Janus

"Perceptually invariant" is a curious phrase, meaning something like "below our level of discrimination". We joke about watching paint dry or watching grass grow. You could, of course, do these things, and you would find that there is rather little in the world that never changes, even things that change too slowly for us to notice or care.

But of course invariance is, in some important ways, not a matter of observation exactly. I have an identity not just because I change slowly from day to day. So do many things. Or at least we're inclined to think so, so these identifications have at least the force of custom, and in some cases maybe that's all they have. (The identities of countries, firms, and so on.) If those identities are established by observation, it's by observation of the custom, not any object.

So if the couch has changed too little for me to notice or care since I last saw it an hour ago, I'm allowed to pretend it's the same and call it the same. Is that the metaphysics you had in mind?

they show perceptual commonality for almost all people and even some animals. — Janus

Of course this is not quite what you mean, but that we infer similar perceptions upon seeing similar behavior. Not saying that's a bad inference, but it's an inference, not an observation. We also know there is considerable variation in how things are perceived, even among humans. Beyond that, more variation: for instance, it turns out humans are relatively rare in not seeing the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, and a great many animals do. Flowers look quite different to most insects, for instance.

None of which is going to bother you because a flower, for you, is, in the final analysis just a whatever-it-is; all you need for the point is that sentient creatures all behave as if there's something there. And so it is with infants: there's research suggesting that infants develop an expectation of object permanence before the expectation of object identity. (When something goes behind a screen, the infant is satisfied if something comes out, even if it's not the same thing.)

But the theory you're defending is not that I hold, based on the evidence, that there's still a lot of somethings out in the living room, but the same chair, couch, and tables that were there when I last was. We need a lot more specificity than your fallback metaphysics of something-or-others.

Do you not think things exist when not being observed? — Janus

Is it a matter of opinion?

Hume agonizes over this; he can find no good reason to think objects persist, and yet he finds that he does believe so. It's a sort of prejudice; nature, he suggests, has taken the decision out of his hands, as a matter too important to leave to stumbling human reason.

that is the common, you might even say default, attitude to things. — Janus

Just so.

If this is all true, what are we to make of it? What do we do with this, as philosophers?

You could say belief in objects is a sort of quirk of human psychology, unsupported by reason, and that the only intellectually honest, and rational, position to hold is some sort of idealism.

That was an option for Hume, who had the example of Berkeley before him, and of course we have our choice of idealisms.

I think there may be an alternative, and thought we might begin to see the shape of it if we looked closely at the interplay of thought, object, existence, and absence in one of the things people typically say in these discussions, namely

I can imagine a rock existing without there being any conscious observer of it. — Janus

I admit, I was ignoring the chitchat about Kant you followed that with, because I find just this simple innocent claim terribly interesting.

But you're right, the discussion's gone nowhere.

I didn't mean to say that I can imagine, as in visualize — Janus

I understand that.

I can imagine that objects have attributes that cannot be observed, and that are not dependent on being observed. — Janus

Where we began was existence:

I can't imagine a particular rock without imagining it in terms of perceptible attributes, but I can imagine that a rock could exist without anyone perceiving it. — Janus

So your intention was to say that the existence of the rock is an attribute of it that is not dependent on being observed.

(Around here was where I mentioned Hume's suggestion that we seem only to think things as existing, which leaves open a question about whether existence is merely, as it were, an element of how we conceive things.)

Your idea then was never really to talk about unobserved objects, except incidentally, but to know which parts of our conception of an object we observe are down to us, and which aren't. And the existence of the object is not down to us, you say, so it's one of the properties we can still safely attribute to unobserved objects.

The most I would say is that whatever that existence is, it reliably gives rise to the spatiotemporal in-common perception of individuated objects. — Janus

But now here you have this free-floating attribute, existence, that isn't an attribute of anything, because the only sort of thing it can be an attribute of is apparently too contaminated by our conceptions.

Even a phrase like "whatever that existence is" doesn't work, because it's got a demonstrative in it. What existence are you referring to? You must be pointing at it, and you point at it just by saying it gives rise to all the conceptions you count as only for us. So we're right back where we started. You're still in a very roundabout way just saying "rock" while denying that you are.

My point is still that you're trying to bracket the "observedness" of the object, while depending on it completely to say anything at all, which means you haven't really bracketed it at all.

I'm talking about the unobserved aspect of rocks — Janus

Ah. That's rather different.

This all began with you defending the mind-independence of objects by saying that you could readily imagine an object that's unobserved. I questioned whether you could actually do that, and still do.

As a step toward an object being unobserved, we did at least pretend to pass through stripping an object of whatever observation "adds" to it; if that's even coherent, it ought to be part of the answer for what something not observed at all is like. It's just that even in "un-observing" something we've observed, all we can do is play with exactly the same categories as when we observe it, only we pretend not to be applying them -- or at least not some of them. We leave the spatial location of the something untouched, for instance, and it remains individuated just as it was when we observed it, and so on.

And the case is even worse with something not only not being observed at the moment, but never observed, perhaps impossible to observe.

There is no need for things, that's the point Descartes made. All that is required is that we have similar perceptions — Metaphysician Undercover

I think that just kicks the can down the road. I don't know why talk about "us" and the similarity of "our perceptions" should be countenanced when talk of other things is not.

Same for the treatment of convention you build on top of this:

And, if someone tried to argue that the earth was actually spinning instead, this person was wrong, or incorrect, as not obeying the convention. — Metaphysician Undercover

That makes conventions sound every bit as solid and consistent as any rock or table.

Except you seem to have forgotten that we were talking about unobserved rocks.

If you want to describe such a thing as having a "propensity" to produce rock conceptions, or an unrealized potential to, then you're still just saying it's a rock, using new words. And that means you still have to justify categorizing something unobserved. (Besides. if it's unobserved, you don't know anything about its propensities or potentials either.)

So why do you call this something-or-other you're conceiving "unobserved rocks"?
— Srap Tasmaner

It refers to whatever it is, apart from the human, that gives rise to observed rocks. — Janus

But why choose the word "rocks" if you're not attributing to it any rock properties? Why not "balloons" or "elegies"?

Is it like this: You start with rocks as observed and conceptualized by us, then peel off our conceptualizations leaving only a something that, on the occasion this something was observed, gave rise to our rock-conceiving, and then for the last step you just subtract the observation itself, leaving only the something that, were it observed, we would say was rocks.

The thing is, without observation, how do you know what conception it would give rise to in us and critters like us? How do you know it would be rocks? And if you don't know it would, why say there's a something we would call rocks if we observed it?

The whole procedure feels somehow disingenuous. (I don't mean this as a point about your character, you understand.) We're still talking about rocks, but we're embarrassed about it, so we kinda half-heartedly pretend we're not. "Something that when we observe it gives rise to the conception rock" -- we already have a word for that, and it's "rock". (Or "Stein", whatever.)

Roughly, I'm not convinced you've made any progress toward removing us from your conceptions.

So there is no real truth or falsity (in the sense of correspondence) with respect to distance, only conventional ways of acting and speaking, norms. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hmmm.

Given how we talk about distance, you're either using words the conventional way when you compare the distance from the earth to the sun and the distance from the earth to the moon, or you're not. Saying the former is "bigger", not the latter, is how we use the word "bigger". So there is a piece of a sort of "true by convention" account here.

Now you've granted that nature supports and enables our conceptualizations, and in this case using the word in the normal way is choosing that word instead of "smaller" only if the sun is further from here than the moon. The norm for usage of the word "bigger" requires something like this, else no one could understand and follow the norm.

(Quine tried to convince us many decades ago that trying to separate the empirical and the conventional elements of a statement was a fool's game.)

For "bigger" to be meaningful at all, there must be things (I'm speaking loosely and generally here) that are stably different sizes. If nature supports us coming up with a bigger / smaller pair of concepts, it's because they can be consistently applied to things that are what we choose to call "bigger" and "smaller" when compared to each other.

Do we disagree?

And this is how all concepts and ideas are — Metaphysician Undercover

How about a (I hope) non-mathematical example: stars and planets, for instance, are both celestial bodies, and they behave similarly as massive objects (gravitation and all that), but they are structurally quite different, have quite different life stories, and so on. Given how astronomers define these terms, their application to a given celestial object is correct or incorrect. (The "evening star" is in fact a planet, etc.)

We are not, under most circumstances, compelled by nature to distinguish stars from planets, but the distinction is there to be captured in our terminology, should we choose to. Nature supports making this distinction, enables it. For comparison, the "morning star" and the "evening star" turn out to be the same object. Nature supports both using two names, since the times of day Venus rises are distinguishable, and using just the one, picking out a unique body in our solar system.

The assumption that there is an existential distance which can be measured is the false and misleading assumption. The better assumption would be that the distance is produced, or created by the measurement. — Metaphysician Undercover

(1) Measurements that have not been done have not been done.
(2) Distances are created not discovered.

Certainly yes, if you start from (2), you can derive (1). But (1) is a tautology, so you can get it from anything.

The question is whether the truism (1) provides any support for (2).

The truth of this is demonstrated by the fact that different measuring techniques will produce a different measurement (as indicated by jorndoe's post), and each will be a valid measurement by the principles of the technique. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is an actual argument for your position, so you need to spell it out. How do various techniques for determining a distance differ, what principles are involved, and how are they valid with respect only to their own principles not each other?

Looking back, I see that you take this variation as evidence:

The distance between here and the moon is indeterminate until it's measured. This means that there is no fixed value. The variance in the numbers you [ i.e., @jorndoe ] gave are evidence of this. — Metaphysician Undercover

The other side would like various techniques to give the same answer, or, in the case of estimates, roughly the same answer -- which means: the same, but only to a certain degree.

(Funny, @Wayfarer used to make exactly the opposite argument, that because the content of a statement can be translated from one language to another -- as we might convert from imperial to metric, say -- this content must be somehow transcendent or whatever.)

the kind of existence they have is unimaginable to us, we can only imagine that they do not have the kind of existence they have as perceived phenomena, so it is an apophatic kind of imagining — Janus

Not obvious how you would even justify the "they" here...

So the upshot is that when you conceive of these unobserved rocks, you conceive of something unobserved which you can only say is not like what we usually think of as "rocks", not even in the sense of existing as we think rocks do.

So why do you call this something-or-other you're conceiving "unobserved rocks"?

in fact it is more difficult to imagine that they cease to exist when not being perceived — Janus

Something like this then: when I imagine a rock existing unobserved, I imagine a rock and then conceptually remove things like color and other perceptible attributes, until I can only say that right there, where we would observe rocks if we were observing, there is something about which we can say nothing, except that it's still there when we're not looking.

When I imagine, for example, a planet in a far distant galaxy I just have an image of a planet. However, in this case I am visualizing a planet, which means I am relying on perceptible attributes in order to do that. — Janus

I think it's stronger than that: I think you're imagining it as you or at least a creature a lot like you would see it, the attributes perceptible by us and those like us, and so on. When you visualize this, you visualize it from a certain vantage-point, yes? You can't visualize at all without picking the spot where the eye of the observer is situated.

Now if you do that but then add, "Only there's no observer at that spot," I think that just misrepresents the conception, which clearly has <person> as an element, only just off-screen.

And this is different to thinking that there could be a planet in a distant galaxy that has never been or ever will be seen by humans or any other percipient entities. — Janus

This is a thing we can say, but it remains to be seen what we mean by this. I think the conception here is still of the sort of thing we or critters like us might experience, it just happens that none of us do. And that means it's still all tangled up with us, and what is a possible experience for us. Which is fine, right? What else is there to talk about? We can pass by what isn't a possible experience for us, but we should at least be clear that we're still always in the picture in one sense or another. --- That's much vaguer than I'd like, but I'm just about done for the night. Saying what those senses are and aren't is exactly what we're about here.

I can visualize an empty room, for example — Janus

Good! If you hadn't said this, I was going to ask what your model for conceiving absence is, so you beat me to it. This bag used to have apples in it, now it doesn't, that sort of thing.

Think it'll work for conceiving unobserved rocks?

So, perhaps a better way of saying it would be 'I can, without contradiction or inconsistency, think that rocks exist when no one is looking at them'. — Janus

Yeah, but I'm not sure we can just switch from visualizing to something vague like "conceiving" and declare the problem solved. I think it was Hume who noted that to conceive of something is to conceive of it existing -- which cuts both ways: on the one hand, there's no "and existing" step, which either means existence is not a real predicate (which Hume says in almost so many words), or it means it's already baked in, i.e., it's at the very least part of how we think things. Maybe it even means that words like "existing" are names for our habits of thought more than anything else. (Hume, again, will end up saying almost exactly this, and he finds the idea horrifying.)

All that's about the rock's existence, I guess. I don't know if Hume's exactly right but I think he's on the trail of something, as he usually is. There's some connection between thinking and the object of thought's existence, and the various isms offer an account of what that connection is.

So you're thinking rocks, and thinking them existing, whether that's another step or not, and you're also thinking no one observing these rocks. Various ways to do this, I guess: you could conceive persons (or technological proxies for them, cameras and stuff, whatever), and they just happen not to observe some particular rocks, and the rocks continue peacefully existing undisturbed by not being noticed. Or you could strengthen this scenario: rather than just happening not to observe these rocks, though they could, you could make it impossible, make some particular rocks unobservable, even with technology. Simplest way to do that is conceive rocks in the distant past before what we take to be people had evolved. The only strengthening left would be to imagine there just aren't any persons, anywhere in the universe, and never will be. --- That's something more or less like the whole range.

Pointless though, right? I mean, to conceive the absence of persons to observe, you have to conceive them so you know what to keep out of your desired conception. You may claim to be able to conceive a universe without people, but you'll only get to what you call that conception by conceiving people and conceiving them absent. I don't see any way around that.

Does it matter? The idea is that the content of this conception is still person-free, even if your own mind isn't. But it's not blindingly obvious anymore what "conception" means; it's clear that even to define the pure person-free conception, you not only need the person conception as well, you need them to be constellated in a particular way.

I'll stop now noting that how these conceptions are related is particularly interesting because it runs through absence. Not perfectly obvious how dealing with that is going to work, but it makes a fitting third to go along with thought and existence.

Sure. I'm not really disagreeing with you. --- I'm just noting that our minds only work the way they work. But you're a better Kantian than I, so I'm not telling you anything.

I would give some thought, though, to exactly how this rock-imagining stuff works. Go slow. Is it like a regular picture of a rock but with a caption that says, "No on is looking at this"? There's something interesting here, don't rush past it.

The distance between here and the moon is indeterminate until it's measured. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is this another way of saying that it's not measured until it's measured? Or does "indeterminate" carry some meaning here unrelated to measurement?

But this does not imply that the value existed before the measurement. Prior to measurement there was just an assumption. — Metaphysician Undercover

With respect to the distance "itself", as it were, it is indeterminate before measurement; with respect to those who will measure, but haven't yet, there is an assumption that the distance is measurable, that it can be determined. Is this a way of saying that scientists, unless they are foolish indeed, ought to agree that values they have not determined are values they have not yet determined? Or is there more to this assumption?

if the measurement of the distance between here and the moon fixes the distance, this does not imply that the distance existed before the act of measurement. — Metaphysician Undercover

If by "distance" you mean a value, the result of a measurement, indeed it won't exist until it exists. Or do you mean that the spatial separation of the earth from the moon doesn't exist until someone thinks it does? Something must underwrite the assumption that "it" can be measured; its existence of that "it" to be measured would do nicely.