literally the only point made in the entire post — Isaac

But you didn't make any point at all. I wish you would.

Lack of social distancing is the superspreader, and that's regardless of any variant of COVID or any other communicable disease.
College campuses are social gatherings, students are there to socialize, and it's this lack of social distancing aspect that the university is addressing.

"Virtually every case of the Omicron variant to date has been found in fully vaccinated students, a portion of whom had also received a booster shot,"

That's a misleading quote.
All students at Cornell are supposed to be fully vaccinated, otherwise they aren't supposed to be there.
Breakthrough cases are always to be expected with the proportions depending on 1) social distancing 2) virulence of the variant.

The main problem is the lack of social distancing. Vaccines can only help to a statistical extent and even then, only for non-idiots.

I actually find the brain performing imaging much harder to wrap my head around than it performing reason. — Kenosha Kid

I used to visualize thinking as a two step process of low-level quantum combinations and selection from complex mental structures which is then followed at times by slow linear mature reasoning.

The numerous shallow processes of imaging have been more accessible for instrumental research. Yet the puzzle seems to be how the brain manages the physics and chemistry of the structures for perceptual functional presentation to arise. This seems like a transcendental problem of fitting unlike pieces together to make a whole.

I don't know what you think constitutes "context" in this situation [...] no doubt it would make sense to check along the path you took which would include, but not be limited to, the area of the streetlights — Ciceronianus

Admittedly I am confused. Context can be a very big place. In my post I suggested three approaches, one dogmatic which applies to all situations regardless of context, and two which accepted or even manipulated a hypothetical but not necessarily relevant factor in the environment. You seem to say that Dewey would prefer the third, scientific solution, and not the initial formal mechanical attempt. Am I missing something here?

I agree with Dewey on many things, and one of them is regarding what he called "the philosophical fallacy"--the tendency of philosophers to neglect context by seeking to impose general rules upon the world. — Ciceronianus

This is only an argument against classical dogmatism as opposed to a scientific approach arising from experience. If I lost my car keys after dark Dewey would suggest that I should search in context under the streetlights because it is more efficacious. Unfortunately, the odds of success depend on the spacing of the streetlights. Science does not follow either Hercule Poirot's advice to retrace my steps from the pub nor the pragmatist's to look only where I can see. Science builds portable lights to scan at ground level which lengthen and put in motion the shadows of all lost objects along the path.

— But here's an important thing... those "phantom things" are not what we see, taste and touch; they are what our seeing, tasting and touching, at least in part, consists in — Banno
I don't see a problem with that. It appears to be consistent with indirect realism, so inside the bounds of science. :up: — frank

That smooths over the discussion at the expense of putting off sober exploration of significant philosophical issues.

Most science is concerned with the mechanics and dynamics of what can be seen, for the purpose of description, prediction, and manipulation of the external world. There is no philosophy at present that covers that activity, and it is an activity. The closest we have are vague second-hand archaic Heraclitean aphorisms.

When scientists speak folk science they resort to a peculiar form of indirect realism, as you say. The peculiarity is that it is neither of the classical forms of realism, it is neither flat one-level Aristotelian nor two-level Platonist. Scientific realism is strictly pluralist with each science in its very own fly bottle.

If you can't see what a flower really is in the first place, why bother checking — Ciceronianus

That's not how it works. If you don't already know what that object really is then you can only see an unidentified object in its place. This is the case with UFO's. It isn't possible for any object to help you out by telling you what it is, whether that be the particular flower in your vase, some random rose on the bush, or all the rose bushes.

If you don't have the concept beforehand then you can't know. To have that concept you must have already learned the abstract dictionary idea of rose with its associated word rose correctly, then you can make an educated guess that your object is a rose flower.

The word is in one abstract world, roses are in another, only the rose in your vase is a material object in space. Which one exists? They all do and they are all external to you.

But then we know objects themselves don't have colours nor sounds, etc. — Manuel

Why would we as philosophers care what some scientists think?

"Naive realism" (a/k/a direct realism) — Ciceronianus

I suggest that in spite of the a/k/a the two terms are not equivalent. Naive refers to what we see and experience without any philosophy at all. Direct realism is a specific philosophical technical term for formal philosophy that asserts the reality of what we see and experience among other things that are less naively obvious. The formal version is broader, as it also claims existence for things that are neither seen nor experienced, like numbers for instance.

there are some people who dispute the idea of "wavefunction collapse" at all — the affirmation of strife

When the river freezes the flow disappears by magic.

even the friend of Wigner's friend who observes a person looking at Schrödingers cat, can always say that it is him or her that causes collapse, no matter what the guy observing the cat directly, or the guy that observes this guy feels or thinks. Only in a theory with non-local hidden variables, the situation can be interpreted as a real, physical collapse, independent of observers. So let's hope they are discovered. — Cryptic

Isn't that equivalent to trying to explain away the physically central subjective role of all possible observation? I.e., the observer is not at the center of the Universe but the Universe is always centered on any possible observer? Perhaps that is why C is a constant, if O then c?

Can human things be described by having a cause that is neither nature nor nurture? — TiredThinker

By cause, do you mean the relative effectiveness of nature as heredity as against nurture as experience and learning being influential on the development of human behavior?

Who are traits inherited from, if not other people? Where are traits acquired from, if not the environment? Those sound like similarities to me - am I missing something? — onomatomanic

I think so. Genetic inheritance is in the genes but even inherited wealth and status are in one's family. That's about half of us given at birth according to wiki. The environment is complicated by geographic and cultural factors. It's much easier to gain the traits to become rich in a rich country than in a poor one.

So is there a third way to become wealthy, besides inheriting and acquiring? — onomatomanic

You have changed the question from a personal trait to possession of a third kind. Wealth comes from other people. That brings in the environment, both physical and social.

modular space-time — Kenosha Kid

Cool.
"This concept embodies the standard tenets of quantum theory and implements in a precise way a notion of relative locality. The usual string backgrounds (non-compact space-time along with some toroidally compactified spatial directions) are obtained from modular space-time"
and
"the principle of relative locality, a proposed generalization of the principle of relativity in which different observers see different notions of spacetimes."

is it fuzzy all the way down? — tim wood
Exactly. It all seems uncertain to me. — Wheatley

In one of the more abstract courses in college math, the prof presented much material in rapid succession with many of the proofs peppered with "it is intuitively obvious that blahblah". After class I admitted that those steps were not intuitively obvious to me and I asked for guidance. He said that those proofs were intuitively obvious to any mathematician and I would see that after a few more math courses.

The picture of intuition I have already presented is the one to be found in some Plato (perhaps the Meno and Theaetetus). According to the SEP, is also the median position to be found in modern philosophy as
S has the intuition that p if and only if S is disposed to believe p
This emphasizes the psychological disposition component of personal belief applicable to epistemology. The advantage is that my nasty reference to many scientific instrumental worlds can be ignored for the sake of argument.

There is a bug in your reply.

I take it that you agree with me (and Plato) that the assessment of any sort of knowledge based on psychological intuition has to be dead wrong?

Edit: Since most people in the Western hemisphere are asleep at this hour, I'll dissolve another take from the OP

Objection to 2: Science often makes discoveries that are counter-intuitive. In fact, history shows us that scientific breakthroughs are made by challenging traditional assumptions and intuitions. — Wheatley

This is not wrong, it's just nonsense. As I already pointed out, intuitions are private psychological hunches based on what each of us has already learned. Public scientific discoveries are almost always counterintuitive, otherwise they would have been known to the ancients' intuitions.

Science is counterintuitive because the world that scientific instruments measure is different from our inborn naive intuitions of what the world we imagine ought to be. The fault is with our subjective psychological intuitions and not with objective scientific instruments. The scientific world is totally hidden from the naive conceptions of un-instrumented primitives like us.

Philosophers like to point out different ways of acquiring knowledge. There's deductive reasoning, empirical knowledge, and intuition. Mathematicians (as an example) acquire knowledge using deductive reasoning. Scientists gain empirical knowledge by gathering data. And philosophers gather wisdom from their intuition. — Wheatley

Intuition is a subjective personal source for suggesting possible beliefs which is far from being a source of any kind of knowledge. Intuitions are deeply psychological, exactly the sort of thing rational philosophy should be distancing itself from.

Intuitions are guesses but not raw guesses. For example, mathematical or artistic intuition starts with loading one's mind with everything already known on some narrow topic. Then subconsciously, which means without rational deliberation, testing many combinations of possibilities, even while sleeping, which pop into the conscious mind suddenly with a best fit guess to a problem. The result can remembered and further developed rationally.

The philosophical or mathematical method starts with one of these private guesses made into a public hypothesis. Public hypotheses are tested by other people to assess usefulness. This sort of public knowledge can remain as a best explanation until something better or more complete comes along.

And wasn't during this time the belief in Greece that all numbers were rational broken by the observations that not all geometric magnitudes can be expressed by rational numbers? — ssu

Apparently so. Plato was considered the leading Pythagorean as well as Eleatic of his time. His mathematical preoccupation at times obscures the main discussion making either difficult to separate and follow. Part II of the Parmenides is presented as an exemplary complete lesson in a version of binary logic. Our job is to adjust the premises to fit the conclusions.

Mathematics, due to the nature of deductive proof, has the good fortune to be able to build on all of its past achievements. Cultural advances in our education allow ancient specialized research topics to now read as childish or foolish.

Plato repeatedly honored the young mathematician Theaetetus who supposedly came up with the solution to the problem of incompatibility of geometric continuous lengths and rational representation. This work is presented as Book X of Euclid's Elements. But I am even more impressed by Plato's achievement in the Timaeus of constructing ontological elements by raising the dimensions of bound geometric objects from two to three. It has even been suggested that a complete rigorous proof for Platonic solids was the purpose of Euclid's Elements.

:up:

In the beginning there is existence. Existence is not a property of anything, it simply is, eternally. It is what is. Existence has properties. — EnPassant

If existence is eternal then what do you mean by beginning? If existence simply is then what could its properties be? Without time, how can existence evolve into anything else?

Plato's metaphysics are not a closed logical system like modern maths are. Goedel has nothing to say about open and modifiable systems.

Most philosophers and that includes Socrates, Plato, et al were, my hunch is, uncomfortable with the Heraclitean position because it has sophist written all over it. After all, to a philosopher veritas numquam perit (truth never expires or, positively rendered, truth is eternal). Given this view of truth is non-negotiable to a philosopher, Parmenides, for the reason that he subscribed to eternalism, was viewed as toeing the official line and thus favored. — TheMadFool

Your hunch is supported by Plato's Theaetetus, where the alleged Protagorean subjectivist theory of sense-perception is accused of secret alliance with Heraclitean universal flux. Since the same theory is reiterated in the Timaeus, it becomes obvious to readers of both books that this unseemly subjectivist theory is Plato's own, uncomfortably adopted, whether borrowed or invented.

Doesn't our experience with recognizing kinds, types, and universals in the realm of particulars count as 'psychologically useful' correlates? — Paine

Like other academic endeavors, philosophy has a pure theoretical side. You may disagree with this sharp divide, but to me metaphysics should only be interested in building and examining models. Each and every ancient philosopher in our historical surveys had a unique metaphysical outlook. It is this variety that I try to capture.

I don't think you can support that mental constructs of pure philosophy are useful in any way to a person. They are like the layout and elements of an architectural drawing. They exist to provide a range of potentialities for applied philosophy. But if you just mean applied philosophy, then some ad hoc rules of wisdom do suggest useful mindsets or courses of action, like for example not eating beans, or the golden mean, or golden rule.

Recognizing material objects is a fact of sensation. But kinds, types, universals, particulars are made up for their own sake. They're the sort of stuff only we can talk about. Forms, like those others, only have meaning to some but not all philosophers. Psychology lives in each and every and person, and even in cats.

Your description seems to suggest that the problems of Parmenides have all been surpassed by means of some complete explanation. Some of the effort in the dialogue is troubled by the consequences of complete explanations. Are 'we' beyond that now? — Paine

Unlike most science, good philosophy doesn't obsolete but its usefulness is limited to the metaphysical venue where it belongs. Parmenides was a very great philosopher who linked a simple metaphysics to a simple metaphysically loaded logic and then implied aggressively a matching (false) ontology. The One 'is or is not'. Plato expanded that not only to 'if not A then B', but also to 'if not green then not-green'. These were important steps in Western culture. All of them are valid given their premises, whatever those may be.

So do I. Parmenides and Plato are too dense a topic and I don't expand and slow down the exposition enough. For example, to

the Forms are not an invention. It's just recognition of the way we think, correct? — frank

, the direct Platonic answer is "No, not correct".

We think with our own private psychological conceptions of common cultural ideas. It isn't possible to have thoughts or conversations without using socially common ideas as these present themselves to suit specific occasions in our lives.

Ideas are cultural collections that are handed down to us. Ideas are catalogued in public dictionaries and encyclopedias. We don't personally invent any of them. We just learn them as children, or in schools, or through reading.

Plato arbitrarily takes these ideas and creates a class of mathematical or logical objects from them, called Ideas or Forms. Forms are only used to build Plato's abstract metaphysical models, and have no psychologically useful correlates.

Zeno says plurality is flawed because it means we have things that are like and unlike at the same time. — frank

Zeno's plurality is flawed because he applies the deductive binary logic of the Way of Truth to the changing world of opinion without warrant. For a discrete Form, gradual change is impossible because change must involve repeated becoming and perishing of each object in time which a Form does not possess. Opinions which do change therefore must be indeterminate in every way, and must lack identity altogether.

Parmenides' One is a perfectly uniform closed (bounded, limited) sphere, an object that can be said to either exist or not exist because it has Identity. The alternative, raised by Melissus, is that the One is unbounded and open. (Analogously, think of a circular standing wave, or an electron that extends infinitely in the electron field.) Opinion is open, continuous, formless, and indefinite, where binary logic cannot apply. Therefore everything Zeno says has to say must be flawed.

Incidentally, whatever is mythical and mysterious is also vague, indefinite and unknowable, which makes it intriguing for speculative thought. Once it is bounded with attributes, it becomes less interesting.

Really, the Forms are not an invention. It's just recognition of the way we think, correct? — frank

I think of it the other way around. Let's suppose that the Forms do not come from heaven but are a cultural heritage catalogued in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Now Ideas would take on much more meaningful reality for us. However, doing away with God's contribution would destroy the soul of Plato's Socratic philosophy which is absolute God-given morality.

I think this dialogue is about challenging the concept of the Forms — frank

That's true, but without logical clarification that challenge is incomprehensible. Parmenides only has one Form. Then that Form is kicked around quite confusingly from logic to proposition to ontology to the Absolute. Plato's middle period Forms are many little ones yet the unexplained Good mimics the great One. If this expansion doesn't work for Plato then why not?

Recall that for Parmenides, it doesn't really make sense to say a thing is not, because if X is not, then how were you just talking about it? — frank

Yes, for this One, not-One cannot even be thought of. As in looking at the Universe subjectively, from within there is nothing else, there is no outside.

Plato's view is an objective view from the outside. There are many Forms and there are some opposites to talk about. In fact, for any single 'one', others, whether opposites or not are unavoidable.

It's like: the mind always breaks the world into halves: light, dark, near, far, etc. These halves are dependent on one another for meaning.
It's a theory of meaning, sort of: meaning arises from oppositions. But when we think of the meaning of Unity, and note that it's dependent on the idea of Plurality, a second, transcendent unity appears — frank

Plato's Parmenides character is not Parmenides. Uncovering the foibles of the primitive logic of opposites and pluralities and how this evolved from Parmenides to Plato is what reading Plato's Parmenides is mostly about. The proof of this is in the 'unreadable' and controversial lesson of the second half of Plato's dialogue. The IEP and SEP are the best intro for starters.
The absolutes of cosmology and cosmogony are elsewhere.

"Ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing". — Parmenides
Since ex nihilo nihil fit, Parmenides rejected becoming; after all becoming implies an initial stage of nonbeing which in Parmenides universe is either nothing ... — TheMadFool

So he did. Parmenides (and Plato) divided the 'World' of the philosopher into (I) what can be known with certainty and (II) what is mere opinion. (Part I) Certain knowledge can only be formal according to and following Parmenides' deductive logic. For formalism only, what is is, and what isn't be cannot possibly be or be thought of, because premises and deductive logic says so with certainty. If the number 1 is then it is, otherwise nothing can be said because anything else goes. Green is green, not-green is either unspeakable (Parmenides) or everything else in the rest of the formal world (Plato).

There are a number of theories about what Parmenides actually believed — frank

There are a number of views to be sure due to the lack of clarity of the original text. Some is just poor writing skills in expressing an abstract subject matter (I sympathize with that). But the philosophical details were also too complicated to be clearly laid out this early by possibly the originator of formal logic. What there is is enough for Parmenides to have become the father of formal philosophy.

Parmenides' philosophy starts with Truth, the basis and proof for certainty of genuine knowledge. Of course, Truth is not a goddess but a singular value of evaluation. It is One or its Form of One. This Form cannot be in motion, change, come-to-be, perish, or lack uniformity.

Darwin is a translation of Hegel into empirical language — Joshs

You think so?

What is the relation between the two? — Shawn

The overwhelming majority of professional philosophers today do not hold that there is a significant difference between metaphysics and epistemology, and teach the subjects to that belief. Therefore on an amateur and student forum one should not expect discussions of metaphysics as first philosophy, as prior to epistemology and logic, to happen. That would require too much independent deep thought.

Metaphysics as understood before Aristotle, sufficiently documented in pre-Aristotelian literature, is almost completely unappreciated except as archaeological curiosity. Shamefully, it is written off by current dogmatic academic analytic 20th Century practice.

Edit: ooops, The first sentence is a brainfart. It's metaphysics and ontology that are melded and used interchangeably. Then epistemology is what it is.

Does reality require an observer?
... an observer is not external to reality. We are intrinsic to it. We are one facet of reality that happens to register itself. So when the question is rehashed as “does reality require reality” the question becomes a bit pointless. — Benj96

From a third-person observer perspective, it is true that other observers are part of reality and blend right into reality. But that is not what you are asking. The issue is whether the first-person observer matters as separate from what is being observed as reality. That is crucially important whether including or not including the observer itself as part of reality.

One reason for this is that while there are many third-person observers, there can be only one absolute 'I'. Only I can have my exact perceptions, beliefs, knowledge and values. Reality is unique to my 'I'. From a subjective perspective, when I sleep the world pauses, and when I die the world ends.

More importantly, the physical world is also absolutely centered on the observer, whether that be a person or any instrument, and the world looks different to each and every observation.

I guess what I’m really asking is is there any objective discernible difference between the state of observing and the state of being observed. Are they entirely interchangeable. Is the rest of the universe simultaneously observing us just as we observe it? — Benj96

The observer, being unique, sets the rules of observation. Be that the time, the place, the 'objects', the perspective, the methodology, the ontology of the logic used, and some arbitrary theoretical filter such as philosophical outlook.

Does reality require an observer? — Benj96
With respect to Kant's phenomena, yes but in re noumena, I don't know. — TheMadFool

Well that's the thing. If we have to consult someone's philosophy to say what reality is then we are in trouble. Why wouldn't we all just know what it is if it is?

Perhaps reality either is, or is not, or even neither or both. If each of these is unsatisfactory to some people then we all must be wrong. There appears to be a plurality of possible answers that we can't funnel into to just one.

Perhaps reality is just a name, a placeholder, not for the world itself if there is such a thing, but for our intersection with our personal world or with one of the many social and scientific worlds. After all, famine wars epidemics death are surely real to other people if not us at the moment.

By "symbols" I am thinking of those things within an art work that draw us in and with which we make an emotional connection. ... Is there a general philosophical concept that successfully describes why symbolic things have emotional meaning to an audience as opposed to the creator? — TheVeryIdea

Philosophy is a rational enterprise that has, following Plato, been divorced from creative arts. The notion that art is technical imitation persists and much vulgar critique is still based on perfection of depiction. A lifelike cute puppy will always sell.

Symbolic things are not philosophical but social and cultural. Art that rides the memes, even better creates one will be judged as great. The artist who works on expressing personal psychological meaning starts out alone. Should the expression turn out to evoke emotional meaning from the viewer/audience then it is successful. Prediction ought to depend on knowing the inclinations of one's intended audience. Why are Michelangelo's Pieta and the Mona Lisa vastly popular while the artistically much greater Slaves at the Uffizi Gallery less so?

This unstoppable character of light, lies at the bottom of SR (and GR, for that matter, which is nothing more than accelerated SR). In a sense you could say that interaction by light is instantaneous, as there is no time passage for light. So in a sense, all thing happen at the same time. Luckily there is space to prevent this.

Note that I use entropic time as the ingredient of this vision. A value can be assigned to it, it's entropic time quantified.

So in this light, can time (so not our subjective experience of it) be assigned to God? It depends. If he is part of this universe, then obviously yes. If they are outside of it? Maybe. It could be that there is a higher dimensional realm, of which our universe is an intersection. While time out there continues, the time at the big bang could have been fluctuating, giving rise to the big bang at their time-like command. — GraveItty

My hazy intuitions warn me that you somehow both recognize and confound various times here and there. Plato seems to read as speaking of three types of motion: translation, rotation, and flux which I think of as any sort of change over time. But Plato also thought that time and change are interchangeable,

Modern entropy is the slime that the slug that is the universe leaves in its trail. Statistically it is a steady increase (like the tons of plastic bottles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,) but locally there are greater outbursts depending on the strength of local flux (from rivers of pollutants). But time itself does nothing in modern physics any more than space does except to keep each other inflated. Therefore it seems to me that entropy is independent of physical time.

As important as the divided line is, it is not the whole of Plato's metaphysics. It is part of political dialogue, both in the public sense and with regard to the politics of the soul. — Fooloso4

Reading Plato is like a quantum mechanical view of the physical world. What we see is an interaction between the reader and the text. Who we are and what we look for is half the interpretation of a (somewhat wrongly) presumed authoritatively objective source. Would-be politicians might read the Republic and the Laws, theologians seek God and the eternal in the Timaeus.

But Forms and particulars are only hypothetical constructs that are literally nonsense unless shown to be logically related as parts of a greater edifice. Sure, the Line is just the scaffolding but without it everything collapses whether that be ontology, ethics, politics, psychology, and even God.

Even given that this is your topic I admire your courage to take up something this deep.

Metaphysical issues are strewn about throughout the Dialogues, seemingly after the fact as revisions of the initial publication perhaps to forestall facile reading and criticism (from within the Academy by people who thought they had better ideas). Everything must be read and remembered (haha) or else one must have an index of where relevant suggestions are hidden. To our great fortune, we have online search engines and easy access to professional explorations with bibliographies. With the aid of these, even we can take a stab at some of Plato's deepest thought.

The key to Plato's metaphysics is the Line. One must take seriously all four levels of division which are at a finer resolution than the two that are usually focused on by Aristotelian readings Plato. Four is minimal to allow sufficient intermediate steps required to get from the lowest level to the highest and back again, or as people would have it, the other way around.

It is hard to discover any description of the lowest level other than what Plato says dismissively, but this is the physical world, the one physics studied and studies, (see Kant's noumena). Participation connects this unknowable world to the real absolute Forms to momentarily produce ''objects' as appearances, (see Kant's phenomena). Since this is not logically possible then how can it be? That's the puzzle. Mathematicals can tell us about the Forms or some Forms, and about the physical world, but can they tell us what the connection is and how it might work?

Greater and smaller are relative terms when describing particular things, not the Forms themselves. Simmias is greater than Socrates and smaller than Phaedo, but Greatness itself is not greater or smaller. — Fooloso4

The Forms are not relative but absolute, Greatness and Smallness. Something greater has more Greatness and less Smallness, that's how Plato's relatives work. The conversion is flawed, as Plato knew, because Forms are point objects outside of space and time while relatives are along a common line. To work, an origin or standard for comparison would also be required. In the passage, Simmias is measured against two competing standards; at different times he is great and small. But if we lined all three up then Simmias would be both great and small at the same time.

Socrates also says that the Forms are an hypothesis — Fooloso4

And so they are. Forms cannot be deduced from any source nor can they be directly observed which leaves only scientific hypotheses by the way of divine inspiration which happen to be the 'likeliest' and therefore should not be doubted. This may seem farfetched until we recognize that modern theoretical science works the same way.

Socrates likens the Forms to originals or paradigms, and things of the world to images or copies. This raises several problems about the relation between Forms and particulars, the methexis problem. Socrates is well aware of the problem and admits that he cannot give an account of how particulars participate in Forms. — Fooloso4

A two-tier metaphysics can't work because it is static and too dissimilar to be directly related. The relationship top-down one-many lacks both motivation and mechanism therefore nothing can happen, nothing can be caused. Plato's particulars can be neither static (Aristotle) nor in flux (Heracliteans) but exist momentarily (Bradley).

See also my discussion of the city at war in my discussion of Timaeus. The static Forms cannot account for a world that is active, a world in which there is chance and indeterminacy. — Fooloso4

Agreed. Forms as simples cannot be causative in the world.

We can try this one:

... each of the abstract qualities exists and that other things which participate in these get their names from them, then Socrates asked: “Now if you assent to this, do you not, when you say that Simmias is greater than Socrates and smaller than Phaedo, say that there is in Simmias greatness and smallness?” — [Phaedo,102b]

This is a crucial problem in the Forms. If the opposites (complements or contraries?) 'greater than' and 'smaller than' are relative terms then everything and everyone participates in each of Greatness and Smallness to some degree. But to what degree? Only in context can this be determined, otherwise these terms and all other Forms are in danger of collapsing.

[Edit] What makes such problems especially challenging is that it is wise to assume that Plato's conception of participation to explain particulars and predication is fundamentally sound. This way, the quest becomes more formal in search of gaps and logical flaws in his model.

When I cut a pie in half then I have a determinate dyad of slices of the whole pie. No problem.
When I divide a cloud then I have two clouds.
When I split an idea then I have nothing.

Unfortunately, Plato's logic could be renamed early logical or pre-logical argument. Neither the great Sophists nor Plato had sufficient grasp of the logical argumentation they were practicing and teaching. When we read Plato's Dialogues this is good thing to keep in mind before convicting the Sophists (who were the real logicians and rhetoricians of their time) or old Plato of being illogical.