Editing Philosophical Research:MDem/5.2/1111 FreeWill (section)

=== metaphysics and alchemy for tiny bird Pokémon ===

<div class="bop academic">
<div class="bop-text">we can see, by this point in the investigation, that bringing up fictional beings and _Pokémon_ console games is not really about Pokémon. far beyond Pokémon, to discuss the intricacies of how players search for and encounter Shiny Pidgey is to discuss the entire relationship between observed reality and the underlying processes which construct reality and make it behave toward us as real. is something more real just because we can describe it with mathematics? is something less real because we can predict it? or is predictability actually the /definition/ of what's real? if something could come to be with no actual inner process of /how/ it came to be, would it have no reality to it?

this last statement is a rather concerning proposition for any being that lives in the _Pokémon_ universe, as you would know if you happen to have ever heard the phrase "Pokémon Egg". in the _Pokémon_ games, as well as on the TV show, Pokémon are born from proportionally-large ovular objects called Eggs. in some senses, Pokémon Eggs are similar to real-life animal eggs: a Pokémon Egg turns into a Pokémon after a certain period of events passing, a Pokémon Egg usually becomes some kind of small and incomplete form of Pokémon, and a Pokémon Egg "hatches" more effectively when it is warm. however, there are also some times at which Pokémon Eggs are implied not to be the exact same kind of living structure as animal eggs. within the rules of the TV show, Pokémon Eggs are depicted as lighting up and transforming into baby Pokémon in the same way that Pokémon progress or "evolve" to later forms rather than through tearing open and physically hatching. as well, there is also the most notable characteristic of Pokémon Eggs: a Pokémon Egg never, ever appears in reality during the time any human being is looking for it. Pokémon Eggs, as if one had taken the English-language idiom about watched pots very literally, exclusively appear when no one is watching. 

there are relatively obvious out-of-universe reasons behind the lore of Pokémon Eggs. if anybody could observe a Pokémon Egg coming into being and for instance, anybody ever observed an Egg coming out of a Pokémon, there would be too many questions. too many people would be asking heaps of questions that nobody honestly wants to ask about what is intended to be an "E" rated game. despite this, the way people comprehend Pokémon Eggs as a trope out-of-universe and the way Pokémon Eggs are treated in-universe are greatly misaligned, with _Pokémon_ games tending to take the matter of Pokémon Eggs mysteriously appearing as if it were a totally serious law of nature operating entirely on its own terms that the people of the Pokémon universe simply do not yet understand. from looking only at the dialogue and story details inside a _Pokémon_ game, one would get the impression that Pokémon Eggs are a genuine deep mystery of the cosmos, and Pokémon researchers have genuinely been attempting to figure out that mystery for a long time to no success. there is a lot to be said about the amazing juxtaposition between in-universe Pokémon researchers racking their brains about the origins of young Pokémon for likely hundreds of years, while players of the literal console games who can guess the pseudorandom number seed have somehow become in control of _all_ of the greatest mysteries of Pokémon Eggs. but aside from that, there is another question to ask: how can anybody in the Pokémon universe fathom the reality and existence of Pokémon if nobody understands the workings of Pokémon Eggs? Pokémon Eggs are Pokémon. every Pokémon, generally speaking, was once a Pokémon Egg. if this is the case, how does anyone in the Pokémon universe have any understanding of what a Pokémon is? real-life organisms are fairly straightforward. once somebody understands the general process of how any chicken produces eggs, or any Archosaur produces eggs, it is not difficult to put together a generalized model of what organic life is: a typical Animal takes the form of a collection of cells arranged into a being which are specified in an animal genome, it grows and develops more or less by periodically producing more cells, and it eventually reproduces itself by producing some kind of embryo inside it out of cells that then becomes a new individual organism. but if Pokémon Eggs just mysteriously appear from somewhere a bit beyond everybody's vision, possibly even including that of the Pokémon themselves, then how did Pokémon even come to be, and what exactly is continuously creating Pokémon?

as we have just shown, this question does in fact have some kind of answer. even if the answer to a question like this does not come in the form of a precise and detailed account of exactly how the deepest processes of the Pokémon universe work, that is not to say there is no answer at all. as we have already shown by demonstrating the dissonance between the exact assembly code of the _Pokémon_ games and what is suggested to be the stated reality experienced by the people within the Pokémon universe, if there is a gap between the way players understand a fictional universe and the way people within that fictional universe would experience that universe, it does not necessarily mean there will not _be_ an answer which can be discovered by the fictional inhabitants of a particular universe. in many cases, an adaptation such as the _Pokémon_ TV show will simply show up with partial explanations of things that had not been explained before, as if whether players understand it or not life in the _Pokémon_ universe will still go on. for one example, some particularly rare Pokémon such as Entei and Lugia are never even seen appearing from Pokémon Eggs; these _Legendary Pokémon_ often appear hidden in specific places within dungeon areas or simply concealed around the map at a count of one per game file. however, within the TV show Lugia was at one point depicted as occurring naturally in the same way as any other Pokémon in family units containing a parent and a child — seemingly implying that although no trainers usually get to discover one, Lugia can in fact appear as a Pokémon Egg. overall, the evidence would seem to indicate that simply because something appears mysterious to people in the Pokémon universe that is not to say there is not some actual process by which things happen, and is not to say that people would not be able to comprehend and explain said process as real. the outward phenomenological characterization of a process is no substitute for an actual explanation of how the process happens that people would find sufficient, but at the same time, observational science is not worthless, and if we so far only have the outward characterization of a process it is not reasonable to assume there will never _be_ an inward explanation.

with this, we can return to the case of Shiny Pidgey. if we were to imagine for a moment that we lived in the universe of the _Pokémon_ TV show, where all the physics of the world live inside the narrative and there is no chance of confusing the game code with the daily happenings of the fictional universe itself, where does Shiny Pidgey come from, and how would we know this?

the first way we discussed to characterize the origin of Shiny Pidgey is to collect aggregate data on wild Pokémon in terms of probability. if a Pokémon researcher simply studies and observes enough Pidgeys, they will probably find that their own sample approaches some probability of around 1 in 4,000 to 1 in 4,100. but is probability the entire picture of why Pokémon would be Shiny? certainly, something has to actually be _happening_ at a rate of one in four thousand, or none of the Pidgeys would actually become Shiny. but if we are allowed to use the console games as any vague guide of what is /not/ happening, there are very few ways in which Shiny Pokémon are in any way different from ordinary Pokémon. Shiny Pokémon do _look_ different, and are depicted in the games with a sparkling animation that may or may not be a meaningless interface flourish, but apart from that, there are no notable ways to tell a Shiny Pokémon from an ordinary Pokémon. the physically-observed incidence of around 4,000 ordinary Pokémon with each Shiny Pokémon is the only real, concrete information we have about exactly how Shiny Pokémon come to be.

within any particular population of Pokémon, a Shiny Pidgey is a small fraction of a population. at the same time, any particular Shiny or non-Shiny Pidgey is an individual.
whatever sort of genetic mutation or supernatural anomalous process causes Pokémon to be Shiny, this event happens within the bounds of free-floating individual bird-shaped objects. no individual Pidgey being Shiny influences any other Pidgey being Shiny, if we are to keep in mind the stated fact within the console games that whenever there are two Pokémon next to which Pokémon Eggs appear, Pokémon cannot pass down the trait of being Shiny and each Pokémon becomes Shiny separately.
there is something within each Pidgey or interacting with each Pidgey that makes it Shiny, but at the same time this process is something that exists before all Pidgeys and transcends all Pidgeys. if we were to pull specific stated pieces of evidence from the overall _Pokémon_ universe lore, it is likely that there were particular Legendary Pokémon in far ancient times such as Mew, or failing a Pokémon of that tier, a more ordinary Legendary Pokémon such as Groudon or Xerneas who in some other circumstance theoretically could have been Shiny. with many chances for Pokémon to be Shiny before Pidgey even existed, it is almost certain that Pokémon being Shiny is a more fundamental process of the Pokémon universe than Pidgey existing. and yet at the same time these fundamental processes can only take place inside a Pidgey or they do not happen. without an actual instance of an individual object, in this case an individual Pokémon, the fundamental process we have identified that is greater than any individual paradoxically cannot manifest itself in reality. what is it that connects the general phenomenon of Shiny Pokémon with actual living Pidgeys? could being a Shiny Pokémon be some kind of utterly abstract quality which is only embodied in physical things, or is there some actual material process, conventionally-physical or magical, that has to operate from outside the normal growth process of a Pokémon onto Pidgeys in order to create a Shiny Pidgey?

this Shiny Pidgey problem has stumped philosophers for thousands and thousands of years. certainly, they did not phrase the problem in terms of Pidgey, or in terms of Pokémon. however, this problem did rear its head with many real-world objects, including metal ores. if nobody had actually seen a metal first come to be, how would anyone know where metals actually came from? people could see that there were different metals, like gold, silver, and iron, but they had no idea what kind of process might first make the matter in the universe into gold. nor did even the best philosophers in ancient Greece _really_ know what first made the matter in the universe into trees, specifically in terms of what kind of smallest particles a tree might be made of. were trees made of some kind of special wood atoms that would ultimately arrange themselves into bark, wood, and tree rings? was gold made of gold atoms, or was there some smaller or more abstract thing that made gold?

within the context of the Pokémon universe, various objects and Pokémon can express qualities that do not seem to have a consistent physical logic for how they have those qualities. namely, the creator Pokémon Arceus is known to have possessed 18 plates which happen to have an elemental Type. Pokémon and a number of various objects Pokémon can use are all associated with Types: Charizard is a Fire-type and a Flying-type, but various ordinary objects like charcoal, bird beaks, and poison barbs all seem to in some sense have Types. if Charizard equips the Black Glasses and bites something, the power of its moves is increased, because these techniques are usually Dark-type. but anyone not familiar with _Pokémon_ would probably find this statement rather strange. if Charizard uses a physical technique, why is that technique not considered Fire- or Flying-type? even if we accept it as perfectly logical that Black Glasses are simply one of the most antagonistic accessories one could equip, and it made perfect sense that they were Dark-type, why exactly does this Dark-type item power up techniques that involve biting — what part of these techniques is interacting with the item in the first place?
one of the only sensical answers is that Pokémon types are metaphysical, and metaphysics applies to the Pokémon universe literally. in real life, metaphysics is largely an ontological exercise of mapping things into categories to attempt to understand them; philosophers may label things like novels and history accounts as "narratives" or question what things qualify as a "monster" and how and why we decided those categories, or whether things like corporations should be considered "countable Cultures". in the _Pokémon_ universe, however, things really do seem to be _made of_ abstract categories. a Pokémon professor does not totally hold the say on whether Pokémon are Ground-type; various processes of the Pokémon universe such as the broad class of creator Pokémon seem to be able of creating Pokémon that as they come into existence are _inherently_ Ground-type. this is a notion worth thinking about for a bit. in the real world, a pile of leaves can be a pile of leaves one day, and mulch or soil another day, but it is not _inherently_ soil-like throughout its whole life in the sense that Diglett is always Ground-type. a real-world rock can be a silicate mineral one day, sand on a beach some number of centuries later, and glass another day, but when it is glass, it is not _inherently_ boulder-like the way Onix is always Rock-type. if Onix is traded to another game with a Metal Coat it can become Steelix using said apparently-Steel-type item. however, the fact that Onix can change into Steelix does not mean that Types are suddenly a thing that is inherently mutable. one item that Pokémon can equip is a block of ice which never melts into water, and always somehow stays in a solid state. one could always hypothesize that this substance isn't typical water, or somehow became ice in an unusual way — astrophysicists can point to evidence that deep inside some planets, very hot water molecules can be pushed into a solid form at high enough pressures,  [*in]  so it is a real-world fact that not every kind of ice will melt specifically because it has previously departed from room temperature. either way, it is not likely that _Pokémon_ games are intentionally designed to leave us thinking that a block of non-melting ice is actually the exotic substance Ice XIX. when there is a large rock hidden in a cave embodying the Ice type, and Eevee uses the Ice rock to become Glaceon, it is more likely that we are meant to think of this as Eevee taking on the essence of Ice. although Eevee can change once, after that it will continue to be Ice-type, just like the non-melting block of ice. there may be regions of the Pokémon world which consistently remain cold for centuries or milennia due to the earth's tilt, but that is not why Glaceon, the Ice rock, and the never-melt-ice are Ice-type — they just _have_ the abstract quality of Ice, and then they exist.

so, with that knowledge, we may return to the problem of Shiny Pokémon. where do Shiny Pokémon come from? we cannot actually use the assembly code of the _Pokémon_ console games to answer this question. within the code, there is a random number generated which determines several characteristics of Pokémon including whether they are Shiny (the "personality value"). but as we have covered earlier, all this value practically represents within the physics of the Pokémon universe is that Pokémon are individual free-floating objects whose characteristics are not known to the trainer at first, and the basic outward observation that Pokémon are Shiny sometimes in a particular ratio. the fact the game rolls out this number like a many, _many_ sided die does not actually tell us anything about _what way_ a Pokémon within the Pokémon world becomes Shiny or not. so, could it be that Pokémon become Shiny through some kind of metaphysical category, taking on the property of being Shiny by absorbing this essence in a similar way to how Eevee becomes Glaceon by interacting with the Ice rock? it is arguable that if anyone lives within the Pokémon universe as depicted on the TV show or in manga adaptations, they would not necessarily be able to know or prove that this was not the case. the metaphysical nature of the _Pokémon_ world makes it difficult to trivially guess what the actual mechanisms for anything might be. if you lived in a world where things could simply be _inherently_ Ice, or stranger yet, _inherently_ Dragon despite being a full-size walking palm tree or some kind of flying acid-spitting insect, where species do come and go over time but there are far fewer known transitional forms to the point a reasonable person would begin to wonder if Pokémon do not truly speciate but are actually continuously created, could you really even begin to guess why something like Shiny Pokémon were the way they were on your own? _Pokémon_ games, to their credit, always do seem to imply that most Pokémon researchers are doing field research and by extension that a much greater portion of scientific research in the Pokémon universe is observational while theoretical scientists concocting some Pokémon equivalent of string theory may be much rarer than in our world. there is a good reason for this focus: metaphysics, in some senses, has generally been a great complication and mystification of the way the world really works. it may be harmless in a Pokémon game, or even amusing as the lore goes to greater and greater lengths to explain how everything having inherent Types does in fact make sense. however, in the real world, one of the greatest advances in the sciences was the act of casting away the notion of metaphysical qualities and replacing more or less all of them with such things as _arrangements_ and _processes_. a real-world scientist knows that "fire" is the accelerating movement of molecules to faster and more vigorous expansion, and "ice" is the close arrangement of molecules into crystal-like solids, whether the substance is actually even cold or just really really compressed. what kind of progressing arrangement of things performs a process called "dragon" is anyone's guess, but on the other hand, now that metallurgy has moved from alchemy to chemistry nobody is any longer messing around trying to figure out what abstract combination of Hot, Cold, Wet, and Dry will cause the universe to appear a lump of gold.

_Pokémon_ is hardly a trivial fantasy series devoid of logic and science. internet video channels and forum threads have analyzed the logic of the _Pokémon_ universe for hours at a time simply figuring out how everything that nearly appears to connect on the surface actually does. despite what the occasional older-generation science writer might want to believe about the merits of these kinds of series, children in modern times are probably _vastly_ better equipped than they were twenty years ago to understand the concepts of relativity and repeated patterns in material reality purely due to the popularity of _Pokémon_ and other such console or tabletop role-playing games featuring simulated random events. they say a picture is worth a thousand words. if people haven't come to fully understand Einstein's theories from various editions or commentaries on his written works, then they'll eventually come to understand those concepts thanks to Shiny Pidgey.
</div></div>