# The last unicorn and the first dragon
How can we know what is and is not possible?
> When the first breath of winter
> Through the flowers is icing
> And you look to the north
> And a pale moon is rising
> And it seems like all is dying,
> And will leave the world to mourn
> In the distance hear the laughter
> Of the last unicorn
>
> — America, "The Last Unicorn"
"Communism will never work."
How do we know this? How _can_ we know this? How do we know anything? How do we know our way of knowing things is reliable? How do we know what is possible? How do we know _how we know_ what is possible, or if we have the _right way_ of knowing what is possible?
In order to answer this, we first need to talk about dragons.
Everyone knows that dragons do not exist. Everyone also thinks they know _how_ and _why_ they know dragons do not exist. Yet, it is dreadfully easy for the human mind to become convinced that something exists based on limited and fragmentary evidence. In Carl Sagan's book _Demon-Haunted World_, Sagan details a thought experiment in which he proposes there is a real dragon hidden in his garage. If you attempt to see her, she is invisible. If you attempt to look for footprints, she floats in the air. If you actively search for fire, you will never find it currently in the process of burning, as much as people may show up carrying burnt objects as supposed traces. If the dragon is real, she always exists somewhere just outside of our ability to detect her. Every test fails to turn up any convincing evidence with which you could _prove_ the existence of dragons, yet you may find it difficult to _disprove_ their existence to people who are willing to go to the ends of the earth to search for them. At a certain point you may be tempted to give up entirely and tell everyone still looking for the dragon that if there is no evidence _for_ the dragon, there is not currently any claim that there can _be_ a dragon, and the burden of proof is on them to come up with evidence that they even have a meaningful truth claim. [*DHW10]
Yet, if you are unconvinced by the current evidence for dragons, this does not mean in and of itself that you have complete knowledge of reality and that there _are_ no dragons. Imagine for a moment that instead of living on earth, you live on the planet Pern. The people of this planet are notoriously medieval and unlikely to possess garages, but in some cases their settlements may possess a tool shed. At any moment, it could theoretically be the case that you could open up the tool shed and find a large lizard-like creature capable of breathing fire. Nobody would claim these dragons are invisible, but they do happen to be capable of zipping across space in short periods of time, meaning that even a shed somebody already checked a couple of seconds ago could currently contain a dragon. How could you know in this case whether a shed somebody claims contains a dragon actually contains a dragon, or a shed that somebody claims does _not_ contain a dragon does not? In either case you could check the shed and your prediction could be in error. If dragons exist but you check the shed only after the dragon has gone somewhere else, you would not find the dragon, yet the dragon would still exist. To have any idea whether Pern was home to real live dragons, you would need to be well versed in _epistemology_, the philosophical study of how people form knowledge and models of truth, as well as _epistemic possibility_, our individualized mental model of what we believe to be real and factual that constitutes one of its objects of study.
What if all Pern's history manuscripts speak of dragons, and how dragons have fought off deadly space fungus raining from the sky multiple times throughout history, but you choose to believe neither the dragons nor the fungus exist purely because you have never seen them personally? You would be in for a nasty surprise on the day a red light appeared in the sky and the planet actually did become cloaked in falling space fungus — and dragons. However, it is still possible that if you lived in most places on Pern, you could go your entire life without seeing a dragon. In _Dragonflight_, peasants and dragonriders live in entirely separate areas on Pern. Anyone who works with dragons would find the existence of dragons obvious and the historical accounts of their deeds entirely believable, but to any other group of people, the existence of dragons would not be so self-evident.
The task of a Communist theorist is not unlike the task of Pern's dragonmen. Marxist theorists preside over large bodies of historical and theoretical knowledge, as well as greater bodies of accepted science and philosophy. They know of many well-substantiated historical events containing understandable social processes. They know these events are as possible to occur again on earth as a dragon egg or Threadfall on Pern. Yet they often find themselves struggling to explain to ordinary people how known historical events and explainable phenomena are possible. The different surrounding environments and understandings people come from seem to muddle people's possibility for understanding. The average person, it seems, would love to turn Communist revolution into a fleeting myth as ill-understood as dragons or unicorns. Worse, many people would like to turn _demographically-based_ movements centered around such things as the history of racism into the stuff of myths. The entire project of progressive ideologies threatens every day to slip into the realm of myth, legend, and fantasy. To argue for the simplest progressive point, let alone for a proletarian civilization, becomes like the plight of a mythical creature leaping out of the shadows and trying to prove to everyone it is real.
If we want everyone to begin thinking scientifically and to properly understand the concept of possibility, we had better begin thinking as if we were the last unicorn.
## The last unicorn, or the last legend?
As much as it may sound strange to us now, people in medieval Europe used to believe in unicorns.
The existential status of unicorns was roughly comparable to today's concept of _cryptids_. Occasional traces were found that seemed to support the existence of a strange undiscovered creature with a spiral horn. From there, folklore only blossomed out in all directions to speculate about the abilities of these creatures. Were they magic? Did they only appear to virgins? Were they as lethal as they were enchanted? Were they pure and innocent? Did they fit traditional European notions of beauty, or was the _real_ unicorn a baggy two-horned boulder of a beast found in Africa? As many accounts as there were of unicorns, people did not necessarily have any solid consensus on _what_ they were. Some descriptions sounded like rhinoceroses while others recalled antelopes, and yet others seemed like little more than somebody's dream of a perfected, more Platonically-ideal horse.
As time went on and nobody successfully discovered an animal most could agree was the unicorn of legend, people ultimately stopped looking for unicorns. Though the narwhal was eventually discovered and named, people came to accept that unicorns _as such_ were generally only "found" in fiction. (Of course, the story in China was somewhat different. If one was instead searching the world for a qilin, Chinese sailors would ultimately capture an animal that was deemed so impeccably similar to it to forever gain its name.) [*g]
From the point of view of science, this would not seem like much of a mystery. It is usually a decent rule of thumb that if there is no good evidence for something, the burden of proof lies on the person proposing it, who is then responsible for explaining where and how it could possibly be found. Some seemingly unbelievable things _are_ discovered — if Einstein does not want to accept entanglement, but a scientist proposes a good explanation for how it can be found, some consequence of entanglement will be tested in an experiment, and he will simply have to accept that quantum mechanics really does involve "spooky action at a distance". Yet, some things that have been proposed are never discovered. Some scientists thought light would need to move through a luminiferous ether instead of being able to move straight through a vacuum, but this ether was never discovered. Science moves along smoothly when the luminiferous ether hypothesis can simply be discarded if it is never well substantiated by tests against material reality.
Yet, if we could not test our conceptions of reality against the material world, and we were only able to comprehend the world from inside the sphere of stories and texts, we might find the disappearance of unicorns more puzzling. Why is it that when we line up all the world's folklore, unicorns simply seem to drop off after a certain point? Did people make a subjective stylistic choice to stop talking about unicorns? Did unicorns _go extinct_? What if the explanation for this change in the world's folklore was actually that unicorns _used to_ live on earth but now they no longer do?
The fantasy story _The Last Unicorn_ begins with this question. An unnamed unicorn, at times implied to be too beautiful and transcendent for a name, wonders if she is the very last unicorn on earth. The story goes on to explore themes of what a fantasy or fairy tale creature generally is, suggesting that they are the things that exist beyond human beings' ordinary material perception, always fleeing out of reach because they are too extraordinary for us to see. Humans in the story, each of them much too ordinary, fail to perceive a unicorn standing in front of them as anything more than an ordinary horse. Ultimately, however, the story takes place in a setting where magic is a part of reality, and ordinary human perception has also been mistaken about unicorns' extinction. Unicorns, all far too beautiful and powerful to be contained, burst out of their prison in order to continue living for centuries and centuries, although to human beings they likely remain every bit as remote and unseen as when they had disappeared. [*cdl]
We all know society extends outside the realm of fictional books and folklore anthologies and that we are each able to test our knowledge against material reality... or do we? The concept of an author or some other individual getting stuck in the realm of book creation unable to see beyond the horizon of written and spoken texts may not be as far from reality as we would like to think. Every population and localized social group possesses particular horizons of knowledge. People in one town may know about something, but people in another town may not. People in one town may believe something is possible while people in another town may not. Within the scope of each particular town possessing its own particular model of reality, one could easily line up all the books or visual works best representing people's popular perceptions of the world, and create a representation of that town's model of reality purely inside the sphere of written books. One person may go through day-to-day life within the reality represented inside _Leviathan_, _The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil_, and _The Brothers Karamazov_. Another person may live their daily life in the reality represented in _The State and Revolution_, _Demon-Haunted World_, and _Ultraman_ (1966). In our own particular way, each of us views the world from inside our own version of _The Last Unicorn_. Some people's line of books makes it mysterious where the unicorns went. Some people's line of books makes it hardly worth asking. Some people's line of books will devote a lot of space to investigating _why_ the unicorns went. Other people's line of books will question _why_ such a deep underlying causal process of this kind even needs to exist to explain the world we observe.
Some people may be tempted to refer to this phenomenon of differing mental realities as a part of "culture", but for this particular chapter, we will simply consider it a form of _epistemic possibility_. Some people's collection of knowledge and mental models suggests a thing is possible, while other people's collection of knowledge and models suggests the same thing is not possible.
This is the major difference between science and the everyday workings of human perception through which all of us interact with the world. Science is singular, but knowledge itself has an unfortunately plural character. It is easy to say how the _whole of humanity_ knows there are most likely no unicorns through the combination of separate investigations to form a single body of knowledge, but it is not as easy to say whether or how some particular everyday Alice or Bob knows that. Alice or Bob might very well _not_ know that.
On the flip side, what if Alice or Bob _improperly_ knows that something is not possible? If a hypothetical person lived on Pern and did not think dragons were possible, or lived in the world of _The Last Unicorn_ and was not open to the possibility of unicorns, they would have an incorrect calculation of epistemic possibility. What was epistemically possible or impossible inside their mental projection of reality would not match what was possible or impossible in the material reality manifest in front of them that they would interact with and inhabit.
In a world of magic, how could somebody have any idea what really was and was not possible? Any two different fantasy books can decide that different things are possible and impossible. _Harry Potter_ may insist that according to all accumulated wizard knowledge it is impossible to bring people back from the dead. Series like _Adventure Time_ may allow characters to snatch somebody right back out of the underworld. Some fantasy stories such as _Wings of Fire_ allow the entire rules of reality to be rewritten through a single spell. How would a particular character living in any of these hypothetical universes have any idea how to know what was and was not possible?
This is approximately the situation we find ourselves in when we want to investigate the truth of ideologies. Some people are the Pernese peasants that do not believe in dragons, while other people are the earthly aristocrats who are still looking for unicorns, and we often do not know which situation we are in.
## What is reality, and how do we know?
redditor complains that pushing through limit to new power level doesn't make sense
well naturally. dragon ball is intentionally absurd.
but it raises a very interesting question - how do the characters of dragon ball know what things in their universe are and aren't real?
in this kind of cartoon there can be instances where what outwardly appears to be an important mechanic is revealed to be a meaningless parlor trick that somebody made up to mess with people. a fictional world does not even need to invoke the presence or absence of magic for something its inhabitants thought was real to not actually be real.
Digital games for computers or consoles are another case where the boundary between mythical and mundane can blur to the point of making the distinction between reality and legend unclear. Within the lore of the _Pokémon_ series, myths tell of rare beings hidden in remote corners of the world in numbers of few or one. Legendary Pokémon such as Articuno and Regirock are described in the tone of folklore in media such as the Pokémon TV series, but gain a certain kind of tangible existence when they are coded into the handheld games as something players can discover hidden behind real-world digital puzzles. At the same time, young players in the early days of _Pokémon_ were quick to invent many rumored Pokémon _supposedly_ hiding in the games which had no such tangible existence. "Beepin", "Doomsday", and "Charcolt" were all works of fiction shared among children, yet they were absolutely not attested within the collected fictional canon of the Pokémon TV series or the Pokémon games. What distinguishes a scenario where archeologists in the Pokémon universe have not yet located Regirock from a scenario where no one has discovered Doomsday? If Pokémon such as Mew exist that very nearly no human on earth has seen, then how would anyone living in that universe distinguish the reality of Mew from the reality of Doomsday? Could it be that within the rules of the Pokémon universe all rumored Pokémon are real, and thus all Pokémon that children think exist in the game but have never been on the show are technically part of the Pokémon universe?
How would Goku know that there are actually power levels?
How would a Pokémon professor know which Pokémon are and aren't soon to be added to the Pokédex?
How would the unicorn known as Lady Amalthea be sure that she does not somehow partially or falsely exist in a form of unreality?
To answer this question, we can begin back at unicorns. In _The Last Unicorn_, a particular kind of unicorn exists — we can arbitrarily call this the "silver unicorn" or the "forest unicorn" based on its appearance and where it is usually found. In the first generation of _Pokémon_ — also referred to by the game titles _Red/Green_ or their fictional region of "Kanto" — the fast-moving fire horse Rapidash may be considered its own kind of unicorn. [*rgg] It is notable that although a kind of mythical horse or "unicorn" exists in each setting, Rapidash does not exist in the world of _The Last Unicorn_ and the forest unicorn does not exist in _Pokémon_. This might at first seem like a self-evident fact we can assume based on the nature of fiction. A fictional world gains tangible existence in some medium such as the pages of a book or the code of a computer game on the basis of a writer's _fiat_ statement of what will and will not be in that logically-constructed world. Peter Beagle's novel contains forest unicorns because Beagle said so. _Pokémon Red/Green_ contains Rapidash because a team of developers sat down and decided which Pokémon designs would be in the game and what abilities they would have. However, we have seen that this is not the only angle from which to look at the structure of fiction; after fiction is created, fictional media continue to exist and contain coherent rules such that each rule exists primarily in internal reference to all the others. Once a _Pokémon_ game ships or we receive _The Last Unicorn_ in either the form of a book or animated film, we must reckon with the fact that Rapidash is observed in _Pokémon_ and Rapidash is not observed in _The Last Unicorn_. As much as Peter S. Beagle directly decided that there would be forest unicorns in _The Last Unicorn_, he had no direct influence on whether forest unicorns would separately happen to appear in _Pokémon_. The two works of fiction each come to their own coherent internal sets of rules separately, and this means that the authors of the works are not necessarily relevant to all questions of how or why the particular sets of internal rules in each work fit together.
If a Pokémon trainer wants to know that Rapidash is real, they only need to take out the Pokédex, which has the ability to identify any known Pokémon standing in front of it, or perhaps a camera, as featured in one of _Pokémon_'s spinoffs. A camera is a great way to prove Rapidash is real philosophically, because a camera must interact with material objects that physically reflect light. Of course, any particular photograph is easy to fake as soon as someone can draw a material cardboard standee of a fire horse. Still, there are many other tools a Pokémon trainer can use to prove the same point. As soon as a trainer throws a Poké Ball and this spherical device makes contact with a Pokémon, the trainer can tell the Pokémon is another material object. The identity of the material object may turn out to be harder to prove, but if the Pokémon is successfully caught and carried in the ball most other trainers would not doubt that it is some kind of real Pokémon. It does happen to be the case that in the _Pokémon_ series some Pokémon such as Ditto and Zorua pose as other Pokémon, but by the time a Pokémon is in a ball and ready to release from that ball to present to other trainers, other trainers will at least be able to tell that it is probably _either_ a real Rapidash, a real Ditto, or a real Zorua. It also happens to be the case that there are simple methods for telling whether a Pokémon is one of these impostor Pokémon, making it possible to narrow down that a Pokémon is _some real Pokémon that is definitely not Ditto or Zorua_. Beyond this, all tests to verify the identity of Rapidash will rest on the body of information that has been claimed about it. Trainers can attempt to test the claim that Rapidash is a Fire-type by checking for resistance to Grass-type moves, or to test claims of how fast it can run. If every interaction with Rapidash seems to match all the known information about Rapidash, a trainer can be confident that Rapidash has been found. However, if someone wished to check for the existence of Rapidash in the world of _The Last Unicorn_, none of these tests would be possible. Putting aside that some of the science-fiction technology and specific game mechanics seen in _Pokémon_ would not apply, nobody could capture a Rapidash into a horse stable or a makeshift Poké Ball made of some large tree nut, nor test "grass-related" magic against it if Rapidash does not first exist. every test to check for the existence or identity of Rapidash requires some other known material object to interact with Rapidash.
This is to say, one possible definition of whether an object is real within a particular hypothetical reality is whether that object is available for at least one other material object already known to be real in that world to interact with. This definition is neatly applicable across both fictional worlds and our own material world. In the real world an object can be identified as real if it is available to interact with other material objects including solid matter or photons. Rapidash is not real in our world _per se_ because nobody has the capacity to perform a real-life test that shows Fire-type beings resist Grass-types — a living Fire-type being simply does not exist. Toy versions of Rapidash with no physically-inherent Fire type are real. A Pokémon game cartridge is real. As well, the behavior of any particular part of a Pokémon game is real within the boundaries of the Pokémon game cartridge, due to the tangible existence of the game cartridge. The game cartridge can be philosophically marked off as the boundary of its own reality, but there is nothing mysterious or mystical about this as much as it merely being a matter of definitions. A work of fiction is nothing more than an arrangement of existing material things in the middle of our own world, yet our common-sense intuition is that it outwardly appears like its own new world, so based on this appearance it is acceptable to _define_ the work of fiction as a new reality in order to study the interactions of the internal parts inside that particular isolated system of interlocking rules and concepts.
Having covered the matter of how a Pokémon trainer knows a Pokémon is real, we can return to the forest unicorns in _The Last Unicorn_. If most human beings, and presumably most especially-ordinary animals, cannot perceive the last unicorn as a unicorn, how can the last unicorn know she is real? As shown above, it is not difficult to prove the existence of an object as a material object, but it can be more difficult to prove the _identity_ of that object as distinct from other kinds of objects. In the story, the last unicorn typically appears as an ordinary horse. The last unicorn will in any case appear as a real object which can interact with other objects, but how can she know that she really is a unicorn and is not in fact an ordinary horse? If we attempted to improperly apply the rules of our own world to this story, we might wonder how light could reflect off a horse-like object and not reveal the ethereal qualities of the unicorn if they are in fact part of reality. If reality keeps interacting with the unicorn and behaving as if it interacted with a horse, are the distinctions between unicorn and horse actually significant to anything that happens in reality, or can we treat them like the fine details happening inside protons and proceed to study the scale of Newtonian physics as if a reality which happened to contain no extra detail at such scales would be exactly the same? Within the world of _The Last Unicorn_, this question is fortunately moot, because unicorns are capable of their own unique interactions with reality. The last unicorn shows that she is capable of commanding magic, notably bringing a wounded and dying man back to life. This means that no matter what they may look like, the forest unicorns actually do possess unique behavior which functions as a "test" for showing that a unicorn _per se_ is real and can interact with reality.
As for a _Dragon Ball_ character trying to confirm the existence of power levels, this case is unexpectedly complicated. A being climbing in power level is not a single material object, but a _process_. One cannot simply pick up an object called "power level" and show it is connected to reality by one's hand. The mere fact two characters like Goku and Yamcha can both experience the same phenomenon of "power level" and there is not a unique phenomenon of "Goku's power level" as one could speak of "Goku's staff" or "Bulma's vehicle" should already suggest to us that the manner in which power levels exist is very different from the manner in which rocks or trees exist. To have a power level suggests a particular character changing over time, or at least continuously existing at a particular power level in a way the same character could theoretically also _not_ if things had played out differently. Rather than existing in space as a consistent material object, "power level" is something that _happens_ in a particular interval of time through the _interaction_ of consistent material objects. Perhaps "power level" happens all the time as a character consistently has a given power level, but this is very different from the way in which it is impossible to imagine a rock or a pile of wood having the capacity to ever _stop happening_. What would such a thing mean? Would an entire boulder simply disappear from reality only on Thursday only to later reappear on Friday? Physical arrangements of atoms do not typically "stop and start", while processes do this all the time. The process of a library being open can happen on Thursday but not on Saturday. A living tree can stop growing in the winter and start again in the spring. In the same sense, it is also likely the case that there are moments at which _Dragon Ball_ characters do not meaningfully have a power level — it might or might not be ridiculous to speak of any character having a power level at the moment they are born when they have no way of demonstrating it, or even if it is not and there exists some character who was born able to knock a house down, a character certainly does not have a power level before they even exist. In the first place, a _Dragon Ball_ character must catch the process of "power level" in the course of that process happening in order to properly collide with that process and confirm it as real by the interactive definition of reality. Beyond this, it is necessary to have a correct model of the outward manifestations of the process to have any idea when it is being observed. In early episodes of _Dragon Ball_, Goku fails to understand the concepts of biological sex and gender identity. Due to the complexities of gender expression, it is arguable that gender is actually an ongoing process that must constantly _happen_, but Goku has no understanding of the concept of gender and becomes confused how outward manifestations of gender indicate the hidden inner process of being male or female. If Goku wants to confirm the existence of gender, he needs to have at least some idea what it looks like. Similarly, if Goku wants to confirm the existence of power levels, he needs to have an idea what power levels look like.
In order to confirm that power levels exist, we need to be able to externally interact with the process, but we also need a working definition of what the process is and how it manifests. This is no trivial thing. Goku could set up two stacks of bricks and see if one person is more capable of breaking the bricks, but this might not be a sufficient test. It could be that two people could have the same overall power level but one of them could be exceptionally good at breaking bricks. We could think of a more difficult test, like asking someone to break through an entire stone wall. It is shown in the series that even characters with a noticeable level of skill find this seemingly impossible, while Goku is one of the few that possesses the power to do it. This would seem to be a decent demonstration that we have observed power levels happening. Goku and Yamcha have each been able to interact with their surrounding reality, but they have interacted with it in different ways, such that one of them has exerted enough force to break the wall and one of them has not. This still leaves a lot of open questions. Even if we have successfully observed power levels, what _are_ they? Is it possible that our definitions are wrong and when Goku broke the wall we did not observe both characters undergoing the process of "power level" but simply observed the reality or absence of the Kamehameha technique? Real-world science makes these kinds of mistakes all the time. There are many cases of scientists proposing a model, that model becoming seemingly confirmed, and the same model later turning out to be not entirely accurate. Models of the atom are one example — the Bohr model was mostly able to explain the behavior of electrons and categorize elements into the rows and columns of the periodic table, but it did not offer a close-up view of atoms capable of explaining the actual quantum processes going on to produce the outward patterns of chemistry. Quantum physicists had to show up with models of electron wavefunctions and ways to test these models in order to create the most accurate understandings we have of the shape of hydrogen and helium atoms.
Perhaps we should move on to the more important question: what does it mean for power level to _change_? When Goku makes the change from one apparent power level to another apparent power level, what has he actually done? Could it be that the previous power level was an underestimate, or alternatively, that nobody has ever bothered to take a measurement in between two times of interest in which they could have observed their power level steadily climbing with ordinary training? Do we have to assume that power level spontaneously jumps at the moment of finding a new limit and that the previous limit is truly broken? This was the basic question posed by the reddit thread: if somebody was at power level 100 but performed a power level 200 feat, does that mean they were always at power level 200, or did that person at some point make the jump from power level 100 to power level 200?
If power level spontaneously jumps, then the actual process of spontaneous jumping cannot be tested before or after, because neither the before state nor the after state will necessarily offer any insight into the process of change between states. A spontaneous change to a system is inherently self-contained inside the collection of parts that make up that system. This is not to say that a spontaneous change is not directly observable. _Spontaneous_ only means that the system operates based on its own set of parts, and does not itself imply that the process happens suddenly or quickly to the point we could not hope to see it. In chemistry, many spontaneous processes can instead happen rather slowly. A spontaneous chemical reaction can be described as one that is _in line with entropy_ — energetically, it is more difficult to stop the chemical reaction from happening on its own than it would be for the chemical reaction to spontaneously happen. When iron and oxygen gas come into contact, they form iron oxide — rust — and free energy is released, yet the reaction does not necessarily take place in a rapid period of hours or days. By another definition, the formation of iron oxide is spontaneous on the basis of the iron and oxygen gas belonging to a single overall system which requires no external input of energy to interact with itself internally and become iron oxide. The reaction is energetically favorable, so it is able to happen in its own particular local scope without any outside help. With spontaneous chemical reactions, chemical substances are really just vast repetitions of the same basic chemical structures, so we can observe the spontaneous process incrementally passing through all the repeated molecules in the substance with an apparatus that takes advantage of this quantifiable, scalar character of chemical solutions such as a calorimeter. With the right experimental setup, we might be able to observe the temperature of particular parts of a container changing over time as an iron object or a particular measurement of powdered iron is steadily transformed into iron oxide. Not every spontaneous process in the material world functions this way, given that some systems of collected parts are more complicated and less repetitive than chemistry. If we wish to talk about spontaneous change inside a living thing such as a person, it may not come in neat incremental repetitions, although it will still follow the basic requirement of two or more parts of the same isolated system interacting together without the immediate help of their surroundings.
With the definition of "power level" as a continuous process of many moving parts and "change in power level" as a process of _spontaneously changing_ that existing process, we can begin to formulate a concept of how to identify a spontaneous change in power level. There are still small complications to this in that the inner activities of a human being or conscious self-aware person often appear opaque from the outside and may seem to evade description. A series such as _Dragon Ball_ may well attempt to cast a moment of a character pulling through a difficult situation as perceptually and emotionally "transcendent". Even so, this clearly does not mean that _no process happened_. Our inability to describe or understand something does not mean that thing did not happen or does not exist, nor even that said thing has no internal explanation. In the case of _Dragon Ball_ characters spontaneously changing in power level, it would likely distract from our central question to attempt to read very deeply into the process's inner workings. What exact interacting parts make up a Saiyan becoming greater — fortitude, determination, a big plate of roasted wolf a city dweller would never eat — are probably not important. The question we really want to know the answer to is simply whether the process can occur and what it looks like, as well as how it can be externally identified. For this purpose, as with the case of Goku and Yamcha attempting to break the wall, even a low-quality model of the process may be enough to get us to a simple answer of whether it exists.
Knowing that demonstration itself is the key to probing and identifying our vaguely-defined black-box process, we have already established that one way to demonstrate power levels is for Goku to perform a technique going beyond what is normally observed as physical. Many characters can only perform actions such as punching, kicking, ducking away, or running, but Goku has the ability to perform _ki_ moves that others are not capable of. Goku is first shown performing a smaller version of the Kamehameha before he is able to then perform a more intense version that breaks down the wall. Each time he performs this technique, it involves some kind of unseen internal process. However, the internal characteristics of this process clearly change between the two times he attempts to use the technique. Furthermore, because this technique is difficult, there are no intermediate points between these two instances where the process of performing the technique could have changed incrementally. Each time Goku attempts to perform a difficult technique he must _spontaneously_ improve the process in order to show progress in each instance. This shows that if the ability to perform the Kamehameha is a decent proxy for the _existence_ of power levels, observing change in the process of performing the technique is a decent demonstration for _spontaneous change_ in power level. It is still more or less true that this definition of the existence of changing processes in reality follows the overall interactive definition of the existence of objects in reality; the only real difference is that the need to observe objects in motion and over time makes the task of studying processes more difficult and complex.
Now that we have a firm grasp on how we can know what is real regardless of what will actually turn out to be the specific content of the reality we inhabit, how do we _predict_ what things will and will not be real? If we live in the universe of _Dragonriders of Pern_, it is one thing to have a solid definition that dragons are real on Pern because dragons can interact with material reality to burn space fungus, but it is quite another thing to be standing in an interstellar spaceship and successfully predict that dragons will _one day_ be discovered on Pern performing the process of burning space fungus. Here we must return to the problem of epistemic possibility and the potential gaps between our plural bodies of knowledge and reality.
## Plural realities and plural factual corpora
In the realm of fiction and literary analysis, it is simple enough to define the bounded reality of one work: despite all works of fiction being transmitted as material objects within our own reality obeying the rules of such media as books and video disks, we can define the set of rules depicted inside each individual work as particular hypothetical realities. It is simple enough to explain why Rapidash is not considered real within the defined reality of _The Last Unicorn_ and the last unicorn is not considered real within the defined reality of _Pokémon_. But what if we wanted to explain the ontological status of forest unicorns being real within their own reality _relative to the reality of Pokémon_? This requires us to establish a notion of fictional _discontinuous realities_. How could we describe and test for the existence of plural realities?
Instead of _Pokémon_, perhaps we should consider the parallel monster-centered Japanese series _Digimon_. Within the rules of this series, monsters that appear on virtual pet devices inhabit a parallel realm known as the Digital World. The child characters of _Digimon_ in turn visit this realm, and in some shows have to address the threat of Digimon that have broken out of the Digital World and appeared in their own human realm, usually referred to as the "Real World". This raises an interesting question: is the Digital World considered real or is it not considered real? Human beings having labeled their own world the Real World does not immediately imply the Digital World is not real as much as that human beings _do not have the knowledge_ that it is real, and that they have created these labels because from their limited experience they only have enough knowledge to say for certain that their own world is real. By the interactive definition of reality, Digimon can step out of the Digital World into the Real World, and thus according to the rules of the Real World are definitely considered real. Yet Digimon consist of the same basic substance as all other objects in the Digital World — "data" — which must mean that the rest of the Digital World has the same properties of technically being able to interact with the Real World. This would mean that by the interactive definition the entire Digital World should be considered real. But in that case, why do all the characters think of the Digital World as a separate realm? If the Digital World is directly connected to the Real World, how is it that they are considered separate worlds?
If we dig somewhat into the lore of Digimon and the stories that are given to explain each digital creature in official compendia, we will see that Digimon are generated directly from information that exists in the Real World. Myths, legends, recipe books, photographs, and any other fact, concept, or set of rules that can be digitized is reborn into the parallel Digital World as environments or Digimon. The Digital World, is, in a sense, _superstructural_ to the Real World — whenever anything is created or happens in the Real World, the outward description of that event is eventually appended into the Digital World. The Digital World cannot truly separate itself from the Real World, but at the same time, the process of generating the Digital World appears to generate a new _form_ of reality and existence that did not previously exist. The Real World and the Digital World may share a reality, but the Digital World represents a new distinct set of rules and behaviors within that same overall reality — a new scale of fictional physics governing a new set of materials. [*s]
Within the rules of _Digimon_, the Digital World is not discontinuous with the Real World, and in fact is rather continuous. Yet at the same time, viewers of the series also generally know that a Pokémon such as Pikachu or Rapidash does not exist in either the Real World or the Digital World. The basic concept of the Digital World does create bizarre possibilities if, for instance, any child within the universe of Digimon were ever to draw a perfectly-accurate Rapidash — would this drawing eventually find its way into the Digital World as "Rapidashmon"? However, beyond these unusual questions of undefined gaps in the defined possibilities of media series, it is almost always the case that Pokémon do not appear in _Digimon_ and Digimon do not appear in _Pokémon_; in all official _Digimon_ media up to this point, Pokémon are never born into the Digital World. But does this necessarily mean that the process of a Pokémon trainer being able to test for the reality of Rapidash and verify that it is a Fire-type _is not real_ with respect to the _Digimon_ universe? We know that the reality of Pokémon with respect to Digimon is not similar to the reality of Digimon with respect to human beings, but this does not in itself lead us any further.
Other forms of media may aid in leading us to the final answer to this question. In media such as television advertising, the rules of fictional universes are often blurred to include characters or concepts from many fictional universes that are normally separate. Fans may voice problems with this due to the "sloppy writing" exercised in fitting different sets of rules together. However, as good or bad as the actual writing quality of the commercials may be, what is undeniable is that they still operate on _some_ set of fictional rules as if they constituted a fictional universe. The mere ability for some set of writers in the world to arbitrarily weave together different fictional realities into a new combined reality would suggest that in the end they are not actually mutually exclusive. The existence of crossover works such as _Super Smash Bros._, as well, confirms that the separation between different fictional realities can be completely broken as long as some writer exists who is willing to repeat the process of constructing a single fictional reality all over again. This is to say that at least in one sense, Pokémon that are established as real within the rules of _Pokémon_ cannot be discarded within the rules of Digimon, nor can Digimon be discarded within the rules of _Pokémon_. As soon as there happened to exist a _Super Smash Bros._ game featuring both Pikachu and Agumon, it would become a moot question whether Pikachu and Agumon can interact — even if someone may feel it "does not make sense" for Pokémon to be able to fight Digimon, we can all see it on the screen. This in turn makes it arguable that even in the absence of any crossovers Pokémon and Digimon in fact occupy plural discontinuous realities. The existence of Digimon in the reality of _Digimon_ does not bar the existence of Pokémon in the reality of _Pokémon_. When Rapidash exists in the reality of _Pokémon_, it does not bar the existence of Unimon in the reality of _Digimon_.
After all this talk of the fictional ontology of cartoon kaiju, the question that may come up is, _why does this any of this actually matter?_ Why is it that a Marxist organizer needs to know about the reality of Goku's transformations and the reality of Digimon? The answer is that these examples are a way to probe the overall relationship between raw material reality, human knowledge, socially-mediated understandings, real-world action, and policy. If we want to understand why people behave in certain ways and why they have certain ideologies or understandings as well as how to change these behaviors or understandings, there are many difficult and complex concepts we need to get through to lay out the basic structure of human sociality, one of these being _plurality_. It turns out to be surprisingly important that we discuss the reality of Digimon.
As we can see from crossover video games, the initially discontinuous realities of Pokémon and Digimon are not truly separate. Although they are each separately created initially, the boundaries between two fictional realities are ultimately arbitrary. How can both of these things be the case? If two fictional realities have the capacity to merge, why are they initially separate, and if two fictional realities are initially separate, why do they have the capacity to merge? Answering this requires us to finally step back to the real-life arrangement of people and geographies that creates each fictional world. Each media series, in general, is created by a particular socially-linked graph of people such as a "studio" or "developer". These socially-linked graphs of people are typically assumed to be discontinuous, outside particular events of collaboration. Each discontinuous graph of creators is neatly locked away into a capitalist business territory which is able to track its incoming interactions of sales and its outgoing interactions of hiring and expenses in order to individually track its own growth or shrinkage. Each discontinuous graph-territory separately throws together a new arbitrary set of fictional rules. The rules are separate when the people are separate and the rules stop being separate when people from each discontinuous graph form a new link in order to temporarily act as one larger combined social graph.
A loose analogy can be drawn between the fictional process of piles of information becoming reborn in the Digital World as Digimon and the real-world process of studios of people assembling piles of information that become mass-produced into products and form the basis of fictional worlds. However, there is a great difference between the idealized process of creating superstructure portrayed in _Digimon_ and the real-world process of creating superstructure in the form of popular art products. In _Digimon_, every chunk of information seeps out to the _same_ Digital World. One corpus of myths ascends to become Garurumon and one corpus of cake pictures or recipes ascends to become Shortmon, and these two Digimon inhabit the same continuous realm along with all other Digimon created from all other sources of information. In capitalism, the superstructural "world" of all fictional rules is fundamentally broken up into many discontinuous islands; it is the domain of Pikachu standing in one totally separate cosmos depicted on one piece of paper or screen and Agumon standing on another, entirely unaware that they each exist.
This phenomenon, when applied solely to fictional universes, may seem uninteresting and benign. What does it matter if one superstructural reality contains Rapidash but not Unimon, and one superstructural reality contains Unimon but not Rapidash? It matters a lot more when we realize that the same process applies to _all knowledge_ and _all predictions_ of the real world. Recall the basic assumptions of _The Last Unicorn_: one author pursuing a hypothetical operates from a body of knowledge where unicorn sightings are the only truth about unicorns, one scientist believes unicorns will never be found, and one long-gone medieval aristocrat genuinely believes they are possible. Whenever anyone makes a prediction about reality, it is as if that person makes that prediction while standing in their own unique reality containing a unique set of real things and possibilities. For some people, it is a "known fact" that a god is real, or that humans possess life energy. For some people, it is a "known fact" that transgender people are impossible and a "known fact" that crime is always an act of malice and never an attempt to rebuild a dissolving social graph in the face of the actions of other social graphs. For some people it is a "known fact" that all prejudice lies inside individuals and filling every slot in society with minority subpopulations can end all racism, transphobia, and other prejudices. For some people it is possible that human beings will stop having capitalism by simply smashing all governments and governing bodies. For some people it is possible that human beings will stop having governments specifically because all their functions will have been taken over by unrestricted global capitalism.
For now, it is not relevant whether any of the above claims are _true_. What we should be concerned with before anything else is the question of _how we can know_ the truth or falsity of any of them. If every single human being regards other human beings from within a potentially separate superstructural universe, how can we ever get anyone to accept that anyone else's truth claim is true? "Science" is not always a suitable answer. Some people refuse to accept even the most rigorous experimental science result because within the particular superstructural universe they stand in, it is always possible that scientists are outright maliciously lying. Every single claim or fact we attempt to communicate is always modified by another person's internal universe of epistemic possibilities and impossibilities. "Lived experience" — a complex concept of each human being's unique internal consciousness and history — is another common answer, but this is also inadequate. No matter how hard we try to communicate Lived Experience, its contents and implications will once again be truncated into the shape of what other people already believe to be possible and impossible. We will not be keen on disputing this fact of human perception when someone tries to tell us that entertaining the possibility of transgender people is an intrusion on their personal human rights and Lived Experience, and we find it epistemically impossible they could have said such a thing in sincerity.
To do science in any meaningful way which provides widely-acceptable answers to truth claims or changes anybody's mind is impossible without philosophy. We first of all know that a badly-designed experiment does not meaningfully modify a scientist's concept of the possibility of each hypothesis. Yet, to design a good experiment requires sound reasoning on what the logical consequence of every proposed possibility would produce in interaction with existing models of reality. If a mathematician applies equations to each other incorrectly, or a physicist comprehends processes through the wrong fundamental concepts, scientists will not produce a maximally effective experiment capable of giving information about reality at the best possible precision and the best possible certainty. In one sense, most of the real work of science is done in the realm of philosophy, and the goal of experiment design is to leave as little as possible up to the experiment. While experiments can give us information about what processes in our universe are verifiable and real, it is philosophy that guides us to select the next experiment, and philosophy that constitutes the real groundwork of any "scientific worldview".
When we recognize that the basis of all science and of every method of determining truth is _philosophy_, we can see a worrying conclusion approaching. Is every form of philosophy not just another body of statements? Any two bodies of statements held by the human mind potentially turn into discontinuous bodies of knowledge. Any two discontinuous bodies of knowledge potentially filter the reception of each other's statements to the point they will never be accepted in the other body of knowledge. How is it possible for anyone to listen to anyone else and learn something when it is so easy for the other person to simply say "that's impossible"?
The answer lies in realizing that the world is never truly contained in our minds. As much as our minds are simultaneously imperfect and our only way of comprehending reality, our minds are not the _physical medium_ of reality. Every one of us can come up with a separate mental model of reality, and yet material reality itself will operate based on its _own_ separate "mental model". In the realm of fiction, authors have separated models of fictional realities into _Watsonian_ and _Doylian_ explanations. A Watsonian explanation proceeds from within the superstructural world created by a fictional work, like the above analyses of investigating the reality of Rapidash or forest unicorns. A Doylian explanation proceeds from within the real-world process of the author creating the work, like the observation that forest unicorns are selected as subject matter by Peter S. Beagle. When we consider the problem of mental models of reality, we would be wise to consider the division between _Amalthean_ and _Beagelian_ explanations of society. In an Amalthean explanation of the world, unicorns are possible because everyone in a superstructural reality can interact with the traces of unicorns. In a Beagelian explanation, Peter S. Beagle decides that unicorns are possible within the superstructural world he constructed in his mind.
## Process processes processes processes process
If there are considerable similarities between every process of constructing discontinuous superstructural realities from bodies of knowledge, whether these superstructural realities are works of fiction, the knowledge of individual human beings, philosophies, or ideologies, then why is it so difficult for "real" non-fictional bodies of knowledge to understand and cooperate with each other compared with fictional ones? The universes of _Pokémon_ and _Digimon_ can be constructed out of wildly different rules, yet it seems to border on trivial for corporations to mobilize their resources to create a crossover game where Pikachu and Agumon exist in the same constructed reality under a shared set of rules compared to the prospect of getting center-Liberals to work together with Communists. What accounts for this difference? We cannot name "material reality" as the limiting factor, given the way some people subscribing to some ideologies distrust science and shun most attempts to properly test their individual knowledge against material reality. From the point of view of a scientific philosophy, the personal knowledge and chosen ideology of an individual can be highly arbitrary. What is the difference between this and the arbitrary nature of the rules of separate works of fiction?
One of the first answers a Marxist might be tempted to blurt out is "the bourgeoisie!" This is not incorrect. As much as two corporations may nominally be "in competition", it is fair to say they both have a much greater interest in defeating the proletariat than they have in defeating each other — if two groups of owners defeat the proletariat, they can always go back to controlling their own separate disconnected spheres of society afterward. Unfortunately, this answer is incomplete. Although the bourgeoisie are capable of uniting in some cases, they are also cursed with the problem of being human beings in possession of human minds. As such, there are many instances when two groups of owners have two noticeably different ideologies and outright refuse to work together lest the "wrong" group of bourgeoisie try to control the proletariat or try to control _them_. This is most often observed with Tory-leaning owners doing their best to attempt to secede from a surrounding society of center-Liberal owners, although in a few cases it may take the form of uniquely Existentialist or Gramscian owners making use of their power in society to attempt to make a point. In unusual edge cases, one may run into _Trotskyist_ bourgeoisie who are convinced that they will contribute to the groundwork of an upcoming Leninist movement by selling books, but do not really want to work alongside Existentialists or Gramscians. Far from the simplified picture traditionally presented in Marxist writings, the bourgeoisie can actually be very divided. The general problem of people being divided into different ideologies extends across both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
We have already established that one of the greatest differences between superstructural realities is _possibility_. For fiction, one of the defining boundaries between fictional worlds is which concepts are deemed to be possible in the usual operation of the fictional world and which are not — are Pikachu and Rapidash possible, or are Agumon and Unimon possible? The same is approximately true for knowledge — are unicorns possible or impossible, is a god possible or impossible, and is the emergence of all species by biological evolution possible or impossible? Philosophies can be defined based on possiblities: in Existentialism it is considered possible that the division between individuals is the source of freedom, while other philosophies like Confucianism might not explictly consider or interact with this possiblity. Finally, politically-relevant ideologies can be defined based on possibilities. In Marxism it is considered possible that the proletariat will emerge out of Liberalism and create a workers' state, while in Liberalism this is mostly considered impossible, and the perpetual continuation of Liberalism for centuries and centuries without any sort of catastrophic world-ending problems nor terrible incidental effects on global race relations is considered possible.
Within real-world movements, the possibilities people believe in often form a barrier to different groups working together. If Gramscians believe that spending time going around getting everyone to vote for the center-Liberal party has the possibility to make things easier for Marxists, but mainstream Marxist-Leninists who do not subscribe to the Gramscian version of Marxism do not believe this is possible, these two groups of Marxists will not join together on the same efforts. Because each kind of organizing effort takes time and energy, if two separate groups of Marxists hold entirely separate sets of possibilities it can mean they exhibit entirely separate behavior patterns and take on each of their efforts at half strength. This observation may tempt ideological groupings such as center-Liberals to insist that it is trivial to say what behavior pattern both groups of Marxists _should_ immediately adopt, but this is a great oversimplification of the problems of creating movements — if two groups of Marxists, or two groups of anybody, were to both decide on the same possibilities and behaviors but also to unanimously decide on the same pattern of behaviors _incorrectly_, this would waste the time and energy of both groups of people. As many center- and right-Liberals are not aware, it is critical for Marxist movements to have a correct model of reality and its possibilities. The desire of Marxists to find something that is true over everything being false is what ultimately leads Marxism to take the risk of committing to a particular set of behaviors in the hope that at least one group of people will be right instead of everyone heading in the wrong direction at once and nobody having the capability to turn the others around and avert it.
It is one thing to observe real-world movements and see that different movements do not accept that each other's propositions are possible or do not want to test them. Marxism thinks Liberalism is dubious and Liberalism thinks Marxism is impossible. But by this point we can also see that we have the capacity to ask: why is this? Why do we have to live in a world where Liberalism thinks Marxism is impossible? Why do we not live in a reality where it is simultaneously possible for people to be center-Liberals and also believe in the possibility of Communist revolution? Certainly there would be interesting consequences to living in a such a world — would Liberals live in perpetual anxiety of whether they are good enough at what they do to not be overtaken by Communists, or perhaps in perpetual fatigue that Communists are not quite ready? Yet at the same time, this is far from impossible to imagine if our minds are truly open to every hypothetical reality. What about a reality where each different version of Marxism believed all the others were equally possible? In a world where Trotskyists believed that constructing Stalin Thought was possible, there might never have been a Trotskyite conspiracy, and instead there could perhaps have been an effort to construct Trotskyism as a separate civilization, or efforts by Trotskyists to aid in the construction of Stalin Thought and Maoism so that no socialism on earth would be isolated.
When we examine different divisions of Marxism such as the division between mainstream Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism, we can actually begin to see why it is that ideologies must believe in different possiblities. If a particular division of Marxism suddenly decided to believe a different set of things was possible, it would become substantially transformed as an ideology, such that everything about it would change. The behavior of the people in the movement would change. The overall shape of the party or alliance of parties would change. The entire set of boundaries between different versions of Marxism might change into a new array of Marxisms, or become blurred into a single continuous version of Marxism. Marxists might well be pleased with this result — ever since the initial emergence of Marxism, every version of Marxism has _wanted_ to believe that they are all part of a single process and working toward a single goal while they only disagree in method. But Marxism is something of an exception among ideologies. In general, many ideologies are terrified at the prospect of becoming part of other ideologies or becoming blurred into other ideologies. An Anarchist does not want to become part of Liberalism or Marxism, a right-Liberal does not want to become part of progressive Existentialism, and neither a Liberal nor an Existentialist wants to become a citizen of a gigantic Trotskyist world government. In turn, the members of each ideology cluster together with people who believe in a similar set of possibilities that leads to a similar set of outwardly-expressed behaviors and a particular shared structural shape. The existence of particular possibilities inside an ideology's discontinuous superstructural reality mediates the real-world shape of the ideology and the real-world spatial boundaries between it and other ideological factions.
Said another way, to be a deliberate part of Liberalism is to inhabit both a particular discontinuous superstructural reality belonging to one's particular side of Liberalism and in association with this to inhabit a potentially discontinuous social graph arranged into a particular political and behavioral silhouette unlike the behavioral shapes of other separate ideological graphs. Liberalism does not care if you belong to the proletariat or the bourgeoisie as long as it can slot you into one big autonomous blob shaped like Liberalism, which is sometimes one blob and sometimes two hostile competing blobs.
Once we begin to step out of the Amalthean interpretation of each ideology in which the things an ideology takes to be true are expected to turn out to be true unless contradicted by material reality, and into the Beagelian interpretation of all ideologies, in which all political ideologies are assumed to be false until they agree with either material reality or each other, it becomes far clearer how to comprehend the differences between ideologies and the prospect for people or factions who currently believe in one ideology to change to another ideology.
Let us return for a moment to _Dragon Ball_ and Goku. We have established that when Goku performs a technique within the fictional reality of _Dragon Ball_, he always goes through some particular process to perform that technique, this process containing any number of internal moving parts. Goku can perform a technique with these internal moving parts operating one way at one moment, but then perform it again with the internal moving parts operating another way in order to perform the technique more effectively. The technique is a process in motion that cannot be pinned down like a particular static object can, and yet, the _process_ can still change to a new process. In calculus, equations can be lined up in terms of their integrals and derivatives. A parabola with the equation `x^2` changes at the rate of `2x`, but it undergoes a _change in its change_ at the rate of `2` — the _second derivative_ of the function, representing the acceleration of a series of positions, or the _jerk_ or _jolt_ of a series of velocities changing at a particular series of accelerations. This is the kind of change that occurs when an ideology changes. It is a "second-derivative" change in which _change changes_.
When we ask ourselves how ideologies can comprehend other ideologies, what we are really asking is: how can ideologies comprehend change changing? Every ideology is a process of continuous change, like an object moving at a velocity that is unaware of the concept of acceleration. Yet when we take an example of change as simple as Goku performing a technique, literally speaking, he might already have to accelerate forward to gain the right amount of force. When Goku spontaneously improves at his technique, the quantity that applies can only be described as jolt. Likewise, if a factional behavior-shape is to change, we run into questions about the policies behind the policies of those policies, or the behavior behind the behavior of the behavior. Every time something about reality changes, even if it is a change in a change, there are always questions of _how the change in the change changed_.
Let us imagine hypothetically that Goku has run up against a difficult adversary and one of his allies thinks he would never be able to break through to a new power level. They urge him to give up and turn back.
But to this Goku can say, "Why not? It's happened before!"
Even if this is a new circumstance and it seems nothing like the previous times Goku broke through to a new power level, it does not mean he cannot solve how to break through to a new power level again. Goku's allies who think the previous times were one-off contingent events are not aware that each time he has broken through to a new power level there was a process to the process — a policy to the policy and a behavior to the behavior. Each time Goku solved the process to the process and the change changed, there was also some particular understanding, on some intuitive level, of a greater process for solving the process of the process. This is essentially the point at which Goku accidentally discovers historical materialism. Even if the events of his journey are only a form of personal or local history, he is still in a sense understanding the patterns of that history in order to fully make use of its lessons.
## A chicken-and-egg problem is the easiest kind
in addressing philosophical problems such as what would happen if Trotskyism changed large parts of its internal field of epistemic possibilities until it might no longer be Trotskyism, we might be reminded of the old problem of the _ship of Theseus_. if we replace every plank in a ship, is it still the same ship, or does it ever become an entirely new ship? is the form or the content of the ship more important in determining the identity of the ship?
however, now that we have been through the concept of higher-derivative changes and the process-of-the-process, it should be clear that the real insight is in asking if the question of the ship of Theseus _is even meaningful or important_. if we were to take the problem somewhat literally, the ship would be a historical or legendary artifact associated with particular events and which continues to exist in a particular time and place. yet, we just learned that in one sense of the word, many past events are not truly "historical". in the 2020s _history_ is almost always taken to strictly refer to a stack of miscellaneous past events which occurred in chronological order with no particular logic and for no particular reason. however, it is far from unheard of to look back on past events and conclude that there _was_ a material cause of the event and that this material cause could be repeated again to produce similar events. according to most historians, this phenomenon of repeatability is entirely outside the scope of _history_, and we are all required to call it something else. nonetheless, it very much does happen. when an iron object has rusted yesterday, an iron object can turn to rust again. when a person is born yesterday, a person can be born again. when a town is founded somewhere yesterday, a town can be founded again. when a fantasy book is published yesterday, a similar fantasy book can be published again. when a monarchy becomes a republic yesterday, a monarchy can become a republic again. and when workers assemble into a workers' state yesterday, workers can assemble into a workers' state again.
historical materialism may well be misnamed, but whatever it should really be called, it is a highly powerful philosophy. it is truly surprising how many old philosophical thought experiments fall apart when one instead considers them as questions of historical materialism. the ship of Theseus loses its meaning, as does the chicken and the egg.
consider the ship of Theseus. in the end, the ship of Theseus is nothing more than an object — an arrangement of either old or new planks into the shape of a ship. if we separate this object from the rest of the world and look only at the personal history of the inanimate object, it could also be seen as the personal history of each of the planks and how all the individual planks rearranged in and out of the ship. which of these framings we find the most useful, the ship or the planks, is a matter of perspective. perhaps we find the framing of the ship more useful than the framing of the planks. if so, various planks moved in and out of the ship, but it is definitely still the same ship, because we have defined our goal as studying the history of the vessel as it exists to carry things or to exhibit the outward style of Theseus' ship. even if the ship is only a replica of the original ship, it is still "a" Theseus' ship, in the same sense that plaster casts of a dinosaur fossil or a set of tracks are still "a" stone skeleton or "a" set of tracks. the cast of the dinosaur does not become less significant in terms of the historical event of a dinosaur fossilizing, especially when the "original" fossilized bones were likely made of rock and were hardly the original bones themselves. in the same sense, "a" Theseus' ship can still count as a historical artifact as long as it is an accurate replica.
but, perhaps this is not the point of Theseus' ship and the point of the thought experiment is mainly to be a metaphor. perhaps we always should have been focusing on situations such as if we replace all the planks of Trotskyism whether it is still Trotskyism. here there are two possible answers, but both of them depend on the "behavior of the behavior" exhibited by ideological factions. the first answer is that Trotskyism is always Trotskyism as long as it contains the same set of people it did before, but whatever behavior those people produce based on their internal interactions and horizons of epistemic possibility is now forever considered Trotskyism; if no other Marxist grouping behaves the same way as the new Trotskyism, this new behavior will be considered uniquely Trotskyist even if it was never considered Trotskyist before. the second answer is that Trotskyism is only Trotskyism when it exhibits certain kinds of behavior, and whenever "Trotskyists" exhibit the wrong kind of behavior they are now a new grouping of Marxism — which is probably considered anathema to "the real Leninists" still part of Trotskyism. the individual people within the movement are not necessarily important to this distinction compared with the movement's outward shape and behavior; unlike the planks of Theseus' ship, replacing all the individual people in the movement should make no difference to either definition. although these two answers may seem different, they are both facets of the same way of seeing the problem — the "plaster cast" perspective in which the function of the ship or shape of the dinosaur is seen as the substance of the original past event and it is the substance of the event which is retold for future generations. the caveat is that this functional perspective has opened up an entirely _new_ Theseus' ship question in which we are now asking if two visibly different outward forms or behaviors can belong to the same entity.
back in part 1, we established that behavior-based compositions such as pie recipes are in fact one of the most meaningful bases for distinctions between entities. but this creates a serious problem: entities change their inner behaviors all the time, even to the point of threatening to transform into or split apart into what should be totally-unrelated new entities. the problem that truly moots the question of Theseus' ship is that distinctions between entities are often artificial and arbitrary, while the breaking-down of entities and borders between entities can often be more meaningful than the entities themselves. when Trotskyists are arguing over whether the old Trotskyists or the new Trotskyists are the real Trotskyists, what really matters is the pile of planks and their process of transformation into two separate ships.
before properly thinking this problem through, one might be inclined to wonder why entities transforming into new outward shapes is such a big issue. we recognized the replica ship as a new form of the same ship, and the plaster cast as a new form of the same dinosaur, did we not? this is when it is useful to bring up the old problem of _the chicken and the egg_.
if we want to know whether the first chicken came before the first egg, the first question we ought to ask is, is a chicken egg technically a chicken? the intuitive answer to this is that yes, a chicken egg _is_ a chicken as long as it contains a viable embryo that can be expected to hatch into a small chicken; the chicken egg belongs to the species of chickens. however, if a chicken egg is a chicken, then every chicken that has ever existed must have once been an egg. a "chicken" and a "chicken egg" are logically the same entity at different points in time, meaning that we are ultimately talking about many repetitions of _one_ entity rather than two entities. if the historical timeline of every chicken on earth is any kind of mystery, then it is a mystery of when the endless repetition of similar egg-chicken entities started. here the question changes into, what kind of egg-chicken entity counts as an egg-chicken entity? do we have to go back to the first domestic chicken, or the first wild chicken? do we have to go back to the very first proto-chicken which was once an egg-chicken entity? we began at the question of chickens and eggs, and we have ended up at the still-unsolved scientific question of what constitutes a new species relative to a parent species. the original question has become wholly unimportant, yet once again given rise to a much more interesting question. as well, the original question is easily dismissed with the answer that whatever egg-chicken entity is considered the first egg-chicken entity, it most likely hatched in a population of Theropod dinosaurs, which laid egg-dinosaur entities well before they ever began to look like birds.
when we define entities based on their function and behavior, many such philosophical questions based on the strict definition of history start to seem nonsensical. it does not deprive the world of wonder to realize that living things have repeatable life cycles, which become able to produce many new forms of life over long periods of time, or that we reconstruct ancient events into replicas, through which we are able to comprehend events that without such skill and dedication we would never have been able to witness. and yet, the understanding of historical events as potentially having come from understandable processes gives us a much broader and more simultaneous view of everything that has happened or will happen. everything that "has" happened was once an observable process happening in the present, yet many observable processes in the present have explanations and repeat themselves. if this repetition is not considered part of _history_, so be it, but it is still the case that history is nothing more than a stack of events which while they were in the present were possible to understand and study. perhaps historical materialism has never studied _history_ at all, and has instead always studied the repeatable events of the present as they happened in previous present moments that no longer exist. if so, it may also be fair to say that _history_ as it is popularly understood is nothing more than a mystification of what an event really is. if _history_ is a stack of contingent and unexplainable events, then there may in fact be no such thing.
the need to argue about whether there is any such thing as _history_ may seem absurd, but in the 2020s the phenomenon of _arguments over history_ in general has become quite common. at this point it should be no mystery why: if people process every single event in the world from inside individualized mental models, often operating fully inside the Amalthean sphere of understanding ideologies and societies specifically through their own perspective, this means that every human being potentially has a different mental model detailing how their own timeline of past events played out; far from the past ever representing a single objectively-observed timeline of miscellaneous events, everyone collectively experiences a vast shattered plurality of greatly differing pasts.
to take one example that is comparatively harmless in the face of other cases, some people may believe in young-earth creationism. for this particular branch of Christianity, animal species are said to have been created separately, with the separate origins occurring at some point that is "obvious" to the individual proposing the model. individual answers on which animals belong to the same "kind" may vary by person, with some people proposing that lions and cats were originally the same Kind and others proposing that they were always different Kinds. in any event, most young-earth creationists seem to consistently hold that dinosaurs and birds are different Kinds, such that it is not epistemically possible that the first egg-dinosaur entity ultimately led to the first egg-chicken entity. this is one possible ideology within which the thought experiment of the chicken and the egg might actually appear to make sense. at the same time, it presents a drastically different timeline of arbitrary miscellaneous past events than in other ideologies. on this timeline, Noah saved the world's animals from a flood somewhere around 2400 BC, every species of animal went through a huge and concerningly-recent genetic bottleneck, God had some definite reason for allowing the existence of the Confederate States of America, and there is probably a simple yes or no answer to whether or not Trotsky went to hell for instigating the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy.
to take another example, some people believe in the Trotskyist version of history. this timeline first becomes distinct in approximately 1900, at the beginning of the Bolshevik party. circa 1906, Lenin wrote down the original version of Leninism, which included such concepts as the countries of North America joining together into a Pan-American state. around 1925-1926, Stalin convinced everyone of the wrong version of Leninism, potentially setting the Second World up for catastrophe. between 1926 and 1936, Trotsky rounded up the original Bolsheviks who had been around to hear the original correct version of Leninism and did everything he could to break the control of Stalin and his followers so that the Soviet Union could potentially return to the original Leninism. in 1936, the Soviet Union unfairly charged the original Bolsheviks with crimes and put them on trial as an example. in 1940, Stalin's government nominated an assassin in Mexico to take out Trotsky for no good reason, although he ultimately did not understand what he had done and died with good intentions. it is notable that this account of events contains several factual errors. [*te] at the same time, this particular timeline is only harmful under some circumstances, and is not harmful to everyone. within the population of the United States, it may almost appear helpful in its capacity to win people to Marxism who do not have the ability to empathize with the Soviet Union or Stalin's government, and wish they had a different unaffiliated figure to associate themselves with. however, one of the greatest unexpected harms of this timeline may actually be to _Trotskyists_ and their own prized historical figures: if people in other Marxist movements see Trotskyists lying about the series of events that happened in the Soviet Union, they may feel like Trotskyists are especially untrustworthy and have earned their popular reputation as criminals or as historical theorists who _deserved_ to be assassinated. Trotskyists coming out with an honest admission of what their theorists actually did might go a long way toward getting rid of the seemingly "cruel" attitudes toward their existence they receive from other Marxisms.
finally, the right-Liberal and Tory bloc in the United States has produced some uniquely harmful visions of history. some people defend a version of the past where the Confederate States of America was a "lost cause" with its own unique set of values. other people merely try to erase the significance and effects of movements for African-American rights to claim that every time a new one appears it was fabricated yesterday and such a thing has never been heard of before. some people try to oversimplify events such as clashes between the Black Panther Party and White police into such descriptions as "terrorist attacks" or "the rise of a mafia", without even thinking to properly accuse their leader Malcom X of Communism. in some versions of the timeline misinterpretations of the Black Panthers may reverberate into interpretations of every single identity politics movement, such that "the Black mafia" later gave rise to "the Mexican immigrant mafia" and "the transgender mafia". when exactly the origins of this inherent criminality began may vary by person, but many people "know" that it has stained every single progressive or social-democratic movement no matter how non-Communist or Communist, and as such they cannot trust anyone affiliated with any of them. there was also a certain period when people actively claimed that an attack by Toryism on the building that houses the United States Congress was mostly carried out by "AnTifa" (roughly synonymous with the Black-LGBT-Latino mafia, but in any event popularly taken to be _a_ mafia). [*at] however, on this timeline Trotsky is innocent, just like on the Trotskyist timeline.
a Beagelian interpretation of United States Toryism would want to know why exactly Tories have decided that United States identity politics is criminal for filling up the country with street protests, but after deliberately wrecking the workings of Soviet civilization itself and assassinating government officials the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy is not. what somebody terms "a mafia" can clearly be wildly subjective to the point of being meaningless, but independent of that term, the Trotskyite conspiracy violated many laws and they organized or encouraged many diffuse resistances to the Soviet Union itself to attempt to effect their aims. what makes this acceptable to an ideological faction which does not even approve of Leninism? what makes it epistemically possible that the Trotskyite conspiracy was justified to commit crimes and was doing the right thing? what makes it epistemically impossible that identity politics movements are not out to destroy the United States? "reality" and "scientific investigation" are not the answers, because if they were, nobody would be Tories and everybody would be talking about the complex challenges of two clashing forms of Marxism trying to figure out the truth and build the Soviet Union into the one correct Leninism. here the answers mostly lie in raw divisions of people into social graphs. the Trotskyite conspiracy is attributed with innocence on the timeline because of the social links drawn to them partly from within Toryism. progressive movements are attributed with guilt on the timeline because they associate and cluster away from Toryism leaving a wide gap of social discontinuity. discontinuous social graphs lead up to discontinuous superstructural realities, and separate historical timelines.
the sheer toxicity of Tory historical timelines demands that we do something to bring people to understandings of the past which, if not perfectly accurate, are at least not as hateful. how could we do this? is it enough to simply go around informing people about accurate versions of history? the mental filter people exercise on external reality through Amalthean interpretations of the world seems to trivially thwart such a universal, factual understanding. as well, it would seem that the shape of social graphs and which individuals are connected to each other has some of the greatest effects on what people believe and what these Amalthean interpretations even look like. is there some way we could attempt to operate on the raw structure of social graphs instead of on ideas in order to somehow put people who are currently conservatives or reactionaries into the correct graphs?
the task of changing graph structure in order to fix superstructural realities will by no means be easy. however, it does move closer to our reach if we are willing to entertain historical materialism.
in _My Little Pony: Make Your Mark_, there is a special in which ponies are celebrating an old Equestrian holiday first depicted in _Friendship is Magic_. in the _Friendship is Magic_ episode "Hearth's Warming Eve", this holiday was shown to commemorate a historical event in which the three regional tribes of Equestria weathered a great storm and ultimately unified together into a single kingdom. in _Make Your Mark_, this holiday is depicted as completely devoid of historical substance, and the plot of the episode revolves around ponies having more or less completely forgotten why they do any of their current traditions. this plot takes place in the setting established by the film _My Little Pony: A New Generation_, which tells the story of characters growing up in an Equestria that once again broke apart into three hostile tribes. the inspiration of these stories is clear. "Winter Wishday" attempts to tell a narrative of how when ponies forget about history due to their prejudices and desire to be divided they end up acting in silly ways that they would not if they had decided to remember history. in doing this, it is in line with typical messaging from Existentialists, Gramscians, and modern-day center-Liberals.
all of these ideologies would like to believe that remembering history and educating people about history is enough to combat prejudice. but is this really true? if history is nothing more than an arbitrary assortment of chronological events, there should be no way to predict what events will be added to history next, and we should not expect that any of the events in history will be repeated. to some extent it becomes dubious why we should even _read_ history. if we read history in an attempt to learn anything about how the world works currently, will we not end up with a misleading view of how things currently work in the present and the future? if somebody read history they might get such silly notions as that the United States could have a Communist revolution, or that countries can progress through their own internal interacting elements without external United States interference. if history can give us such incorrect notions as these, how could we ever trust history to inform us about how to have movements for human rights or break people's prejudices?
the answer is simple: _history has meaning because of historical materialism_. the point of reading history is that it _does_ inform us about the present and the future. by studying history we can gain insight into the repeated processes that occur in the present, because even in a world where change changes, many of these repeated processes were still similar in the past. if history is at all helpful in teaching us how to directly break prejudices, it will be because this is a repeated process that keeps appearing in societies, and each time it appears we gain insight into how to do it better. to assert that there is any particular way to cause people to not be racist is to assert the possibility of a predictive theory of society and a materialist theory of history. if anything else is the case, every assertion by Existentialists and Gramscians that they know said method is pure arrogance. as well, if it is the case that reality is entirely unpredictable, it should be impossible to reject the claim that organizing for Bolshevism could simply _contingently happen_ to be a successful way to cause people to not be racist despite what everyone currently says. of course, if reality is unpredictable, it should also be impossible to reject the claim that Trotskyism will eventually turn out to be true. if reality is unpredictable, then almost anything can happen.
## The physics of possibilities
we all know that not just anything can happen. beyond our individual horizons of what is epistemically possible and impossible, we know that the reality around us must have its own limits. there must be some point at which outside our own personal will and abilities things are just naturally impossible.
we know at the very least that we will not wake up to find that 50-foot-tall trees made of pure silver have sprouted from the earth, and that our neighbor's dog will not turn out to be the universe's first Fire-type being. but where is the cutoff between absurd events like these and more believable events like the British Isles becoming the world's first Trotskyist workers' state? how likely or unlikely is this? what would put natural limits on the possibility of a political ideology? what would make the contents of a political ideology probable or improbable?
here we should return to the simple observation that _reality is not contained in our minds_, and _reality operates on a specific set of rules_. much like imagined fictional realities have specific sets of rules, and the superstructural versions of reality we construct in our heads have specific rules, the single material reality we exist in has another set of rules. we do not always know what the rules of material reality are. sometimes science is simply unable to probe particular sets of rules. sometimes individuals simply do not have knowledge of them. this does not mean that some set of specific rules does not exist. we have shown how within the fictional rules of _Dragon Ball_, there is some unknown set of rules for successfully performing each technique, even if Goku is not aware of what those rules actually are, and only intuitively stumbles onto a correct model of them. similarly, anything that is possible in our reality has a particular set of rules for under what conditions it can happen and how it will happen. in many cases we call these sets of rules _physics_.
at small scales of the universe, such as the quantum scale and the atomic scale, it is simple to describe what happens as particular kinds of physics. quantum-mechanical equations describe the rules for how photons behave. the atomic physics of nuclei and coarsely-viewed photons describe the rules for the behavior of chemical elements. chemistry can be argued to be a kind of applied physics, and describes the rules for how substances react to form different substances made of larger or smaller molecules. at the scale of cells, Newtonian physics begins to apply, and many interactions that happen within the world become describable as identifiable objects undergoing simple processes such as tension or acceleration. the study of physics is sometimes complicated by the fact that different scales of physics can operate on the same set of objects at once. a lamp is a large object subject to Newtonian physics, but the lamp can emit photons which are subject to quantum physics. a pie is made of relatively large objects subject to Newtonian physics, but once it is put into the oven it becomes subject to chemistry, as well as the tiny, difficult-to-detect exchanges of heat between solid or gaseous atoms as photons. at all moments quantum-mechanical interactions also hold together the nuclei of all the atoms in the pie, although these are so consistent we usually do not worry about them.
as any particular individual looks outward toward reality and interacts with simple objects such as rocks, trees, lamps and pies, it seems easy enough to correct our inner superstructural set of rules through carefully-constructed methods of observation and experimentation to the point that even our Amalthean interpretation of reality is accurate to what we really observe and predict in the majority of instances. in a scientific ideology the difference between our Amalthean and Beagelian interpretations narrows to the point that we only need to explicitly seek Beagelian interpretations when our experimental results diverge from our predictions and we need to understand the difference between our mental model of a physical process and reality.
of course, we hit major problems in this process as soon as we look outward toward the rest of reality and detect _people_. the existence of a single human being in reality begins to mess with our seemingly tight process of understanding the rules and possibilities of every material object through its physical behaviors. what _are_ the rules of how human beings function? do any of us know or understand them? we all think we know what a human being is, but for all we know, all this knowledge could be arbitrary incorrect constructions within our individual superstructural realities. maybe human beings are capable of rewriting their own rules, and different groups of human beings function under different rules. this would certainly _appear_ to be the case when we look at phenomena like different versions of Marxism creating parties of different shapes. what if every single individual is capable of producing new sets of rules for how human beings function?
we know this is most likely not the case because in a world of physics, everything always has limits. there are always going to be limits on what any particular human being can ever decide to do. for one, a human being can never truly decide to do something which is physically impossible. in real life, no one can make the decision that reality will now include the ability for them to fire _ki_ moves through walls exactly like Goku and then go enact this. no human being can decide to sprout wings and go live on the surface of the sun. no matter how individual and free we are, we are never capable of using our mere will to make reality capable of things that are not possible in real-world physics. from this it follows that there is a horizon of how many possible sets of rules applying to human beings that any human being can produce; if a set of rules applying to human beings is not possible to discover through the interactive definition of reality, then it cannot be discovered. there is a limited number of possible sets of rules describing human beings, even if it is a gigantic number, or a kind of countable and comparable infinite set as with the set of all integers. beyond this overall array of possible rules describing human beings no individual would be capable of inventing an additional one — if there were a countably infinite set of human beings that went on and on until we chose to stop counting it, and every single human being discovered one of the possible sets of rules describing human beings, there would eventually come a point when there was an individual human being who could not discover a new set of rules. this might take an unfathomable number of human beings to actually reach, numbering well into the thousand-billions, but it would have to come eventually. all human beings belong to some particular unseen natural definition of what constitutes a human being. it does not matter what the true definition of the human species is, given that if we got into this we might end up in a long discussion about whether Neanderthals and other ancient people of the genus _Homo_ are technically human beings. we can hardly even say for sure what constitutes the first chicken, let alone the first human being. nonetheless, there are still characteristics shared by all human beings. these basic characteristics should be expected to repeat themselves across any and all human beings. the mere repetition of these basic patterns, including such things as speech, thought, and empathy, shapes the set of all possible rules describing human beings whether the effect of any particular basic pattern is to add to or subtract from this corpus of possible rules. perhaps 100,000 sets of rules are added to the corpus by empathy as it opens up the possibility for 100,000 new ways of being. the consequence of this is that there are some sets of rules the addition of empathy _does not_ add to the corpus, and the inability to add these other hypothetical rules acts as a limit on how many sets of rules can ultimately be discovered. possibilities never have the capability to destroy the concept of impossibility because each and every possibility invisibly adds impossibilities through its inability to add them as possibilities. as long as this is the case, the capability of individual human beings will never exceed the basic set of possibilities describing all human beings as much as draw from that set of possibilities.
perhaps an Existentialist will think there is an error in this reasoning because it seems too metaphysical. surely if a population of human beings is described by a certain total corpus of possibilities, that corpus can be broken through the birth of a new human being? the possibilities within a population of human beings must be ergodically produced from the material characteristics of individual human beings stacking up into the characteristics of an overall population. certainly if chickens can break the creationist credo that dinosaurs can only "bring forth" the same dinosaurs, the addition of new individuals to any population must change the characteristics of the overall population? the problem with this reasoning is that it is ultimately very essentializing as to the characteristics of individuals. to say that the uniqueness of an individual is defined by the moment of that individual's birth is to very nearly say that the uniqueness of an individual is defined by an individual's genes. if this were true, an individual would need to be born as some kind of _X-men_ mutant with materially different physical or mental characteristics in order to create new possibilities. this view of individuality begins to pose great problems for any study of demographic identities and human rights, because even if the truly unique differences between individuals are not literally genetic, they still separate individuals through the potential creation of new strains of humanity which do not possess the same species traits — and if two strains of humanity do not possess the same species traits, the question can then arise if one strain is objectively better or objectively worse for existence in material reality. the way Existentialist definitions of individuality spawn social darwinism is not at all obvious, given that they attempt to avoid operating on any particular definable demographic or essence, but becomes more obvious when one understands the actual definition of biological evolution as fundamentally operating not on easily-definable species but on the distinctions between individuals and the separate repeated emergence of one particular distinction between individuals. Existentialists like to believe that focusing on individuals has removed them from questions of historical materialism and the analysis of populations, but in reality, it has only left them with their own questionable version of historical materialism which urges us to ask such questions as whether someone is inherently better equipped to change the world by being left-handed, autistic, transgender, or Latino. if a population has somehow never heard of being left-handed, and a left-handed person shows up in that population, has that person really showed up with a _new_ form of being that is not merely part of the overall corpus of possibilities describing all human beings? it is arguable that if any other population has heard of being left-handed this is not a new discovery, and is merely a repetition of a discovery already made in other regions. the varying superstructural models of reality between each population can certainly present complexities for studying various aspects of social life when it comes to topics other than this, but in the case of possibilities for all humanity, what is relevant is the full set of human possibilities across all populations. it should not be worth disputing that if we want to understand all the world's populations and create theories relevant across all the world's populations, we should not approach populations from the point of view of a single population that has not heard of the possibilities of other populations, if we do not wish to create a model of human populations that inherently privileges and sanctifies bigotry.
does reality include _people_? of course. people are material and interact with reality, so material reality must include them.
border between entities
particle composition of entities
anything can happen???
classical physics makes use of such equations as `F = ma` and solves these equations for their exact value at a given point in time.
quantum physics takes similar equations and replaces the precise values with a wavefunction of many possible values instead of one.
it is usually assumed that at any particular instant every macroscopic object like a bicycle or a tennis ball will be at some specific position in space moving to a new position at some particular velocity.
it is not easy to observe quantum objects doing this, and from what we know currently, might be impossible.
wavefunction as possibility space around photon or blob or photons
when two wavefunctions collide the space of possibilities increases
imagine rolling a 6-sided die. each die has six possible outcomes until it interacts with the table, and we do not know what outcome will appear if the die is not observed. however, when we roll the die and it collides with the table, it lands on a particular face. in a sense, the collision of the die and the table is what makes it possible to observe the die in a particular state, much like with fundamental particles.
now imagine rolling two 6-sided dice. each die can be observed at a particular outcome, but if we want to characterize every possibility for what faces will appear on the _pair_ of dice, the number of total possibilities is now much greater. if it is important which number appears on which die, the number of possibilities is `6 × 6`, or 36. if it is unimportant which die produced which number, the number of possibilities is `6 + (6! / 4!(2!))`, or 21.
the combination factorial, for the combinations which do not rely on unique objects and only on the content of the objects, is essentially the same operation as drawing a two-dimensional grid where each of the cells is a combination from one array of possibilities on one axis to the other array of possibilities on the other axis. if combining 1 and 2 is not the same operation as combining 2 and 1, every possibility extends outward to every other possibility to create a square grid. if combining 1 and 2 is the same operation as combining 2 and 1, half the grid can be eliminated to produce a triangle of connections, and this area of cells can be calculated with the combination factorial `n C 2` which was expanded above. in some cases such as dice, the combination factorial is not quite complete because the same possibility can be combined twice, so the number of possibilities on one die should be added to capture the full number of combinations. in other cases such as a room full of helium, combining the same molecule twice would not produce new molecules, so the space of combinations for an item plus the same item is irrelevant.
we can see that although very few real objects are as straightforward as dice, the notion of which new possibilities emerge in the combination of two specific things is rather prosaic. when two things combine, there is some particular limited possibility space that emerges. it is of course true that more than two things can combine at once, but the combination factorial is quite prepared for this — all we need to do is expand our grid of possible combinations to further dimensions, going from a square grid to a cubic grid or to an increasingly complex archipelago of archipelagoes of multiplied grids. (this is the basic reason for the `r!` term in the denominator.) in general, each thing contains many possibilities, but when we combine those arrays of possibilities, redundant outcomes appear and our resulting scenario represented by the grid once again has a limited array of possibilities, even if it may be a vast one. the scenario of one die roll has a particular shape — its wavefunction — and when one die scenario combines with another die scenario, this can only produce another limited shape. we like to think of events as intangible and fleeting and difficult to describe, but in reality, events have shapes much like everyday physical objects have shapes, and even when two events are combined, there are some shapes they will never resemble, versus some shapes they will definitely resemble.
at the quantum scale, the difference between events having shapes and objects having shapes verges on unimportant. the substances of the quantum scale are so simple and the events so finite and "boring" that it becomes a mostly philosophical question whether the position of a photon is an event or the wavefunction of a photon is an object. two wavefunctions can bump into each other. two events involving photons can intersect to produce a new scenario. what is the difference? at the scale of atoms, or the scale of macroscopic objects, we would not necessarily know or care.
yet, what almost everyone does not realize is that this process does not entirely stop when we leave the quantum scale. the distinction between objects and events can become blurry even at giant scales. is a Communist party an _object_ or an _event_? arguably, it can be seen as a kind of event — whenever a group of people as small as 100 begins discussing questions of how to join into a social structure, each person may think of 6 possibilities that could each unfold outward from that person as an event, and as different possible events combine ergodically into unforeseen structures this space of possibilities may only increase beyond what any particular individual person could think of, but ultimately all 100 people will have to consolidate onto only one of a vast number of possible events. even when the group of people chooses one event, it still unfolds as an event.
there may be a temptation for some members of the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition to try to dismiss all of this and claim that the study of possibilities and events is nothing more than Marxists embracing the constructed Idea that human beings should behave like photons and dice. but this is no localized social construct. it occurs in every single group of people to ever exist. a book club is a combination of individual events into a larger event. a sports match is a combination of at least two individual events into a larger event. a Liberal election is a combination of many small events we call "votes" into one large event. it is impossible to simply walk away from Communist parties and political factions and successfully walk away from the combination of scenarios into larger events, because _the combination of events is everywhere_. events will continue combining and forming structures or larger events whether we want them to or not, and they will combine in particular possibility spaces and shapes of possibilities whether we want them to or not.
this is one of the few things that despite the limits of individual knowledge we can know for certain: there _is_ a physics of events outside our personal will and knowledge, it creates particular limited patterns even if some of those limited patterns have not been observed before, and we can be better prepared to face the rest of the world the more that we study it. if we do not understand the way events combine into new possibilities, we do not understand society. we will hardly be able to function as individuals in the society of tomorrow, which will only batter each of us with possibilities we were not prepared to survive.
within the world of dragon ball, goku having broken through to a new power level is an observable fact
even if somebody in another region was not there to see it and does not believe it happened, anyone standing in the vicinity could vouch that the event still took place, and that everyone can observe its consequences.
goku went through a spontaneous jump to a new internal state. he became stronger and gained the capacity for new abilities. and he never went back.
what is the difference between the way people regard mythical action shows and the way they regard Communist revolution?
why is it so easy for people to accept that within the rules of _Dragon Ball_ Goku can jump to a new power level, and celebrate this as an accomplishment of a determined hero that represents a kind of progress in his personal journey, as well as that other characters can each repeat this process, while within the rules of real life people dismiss Communist revolution as an anomalous event that nobody should expect to occur in the United States or Canada even though it has happened in other countries several times before? it is true that anyone can look at the set of rules in _Dragon Ball_ and decide this set of rules is too silly and they do not want to accept them; fiction requires the suspension of disbelief, and people are always free to decide that a particular set of rules is not "believable". but a great many people do not interpret _Dragon Ball_ this way, and appear to more or less accept that its set of rules makes coherent sense. wholly rejecting the series' rules and completely failing to see its appeal is hardly the mainstream interpretation of _Dragon Ball_, while many people instead appear to be on some level of acceptance of the notion that _Dragon Ball_ contains heroes, the heroes are not secretly villains, and when the heroes go through spontaneous change to become greater it is a kind of personal progress.
part of this can be attributed to a resistance to dialectical-materialist thinking. many people have a resistance to the concept of self-contained systems made of interacting parts that act together to respond to their environment. they often want to entirely ignore the existence of these self-contained systems especially when the parts of the system are human beings, such as in households, corporations, and country populations — although in some cases this urge will also extend to scales like the earth's physical processes ergodically producing climate, or the interacting individuals of animal populations slowly separating into visibly different species. the one exception nearly everyone makes to this is to unexpectedly understand the case of an individual human being spontaneously changing. nobody is capable of seriously standing up and arguing that the interacting parts of a human being can never come together to make decisions to change their collective course such as leaving a job, ending a relationship, or quitting smoking, because we are all able to observe this phenomenon happening every day from our own isolated vantage points as individual humans. we observe individuals changing their minds and making surprising decisions all the time, to the point that it is easy to forget that an "individual" human being is actually a complicated combination of many parts. a human body consists of several organ systems, but beyond that, every human being goes through moments of experiencing many contradictory impulses to do multiple different things. some of these impulses appear to be rational and to emerge from different parts of our brains. some impulses come directly from our viscera, like hunger or stomach upset affecting a person's mood. a few impulses can come from circulating hormones, most notably adrenaline and its ability to shut down various body systems to face situations of tension. at some times impulses from specific parts of the body such as pain or the need to sleep will overcome the influence of every other part and decide the person's only possible action. a human being's decisions necessarily come from the combined inputs of _every part of the body_, as well as _every part of every body part_. but most people greatly simplify this process in their minds and merely accept that it happens without really asking how.
another part of the problem is uncovered once we have identified the nature of individual people as complex self-contained systems. if Goku is really a complex system of multiple parts, even if they sometimes oppose each other, all of those parts are more or less working together as part of a single whole. but the same cannot necessarily be said for country populations. country populations may be divided into discrete subpopulations that refuse to work together as part of a single proletariat, or even a single united bourgeoisie. for a simple example, one chunk of workers may decide to become Stalin followers and one chunk of workers may decide to become Trotskyites. the Trotskyites may greatly distrust the Stalin followers and not want to work with them as part of a single "body" as much as two separate plural "bodies" competing for mutually-exclusive existence. as compared with Goku pulling together all the parts of his body to achieve something, the real-world proletariat may look a bit more like Goku and Bulma arguing over the four-star dragon ball and failing to work together.
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[cr. 2024-08-03T10:09:26Z]
in some cases, plural bodies of knowledge are potentially a good thing - generation of new hypotheses
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"truth is what corresponds to reality" is fairly accurate
specifically, truth is discovered when a model accurately describes reality and supports making good decisions
in this sense, "Communism doesn't work" is nearly the same statement as "Communism is not true"
this is a much clearer statement than the original, immediately suggesting a way to find a better model
until we properly test our model against reality, that model is epistemically possible, but we may find out in the dialectic with reality that a particular model of a process is not true
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## What is possible?
epistemic possibility is a similar concept to knowledge being a justified true belief
it expresses, essentially, whether something is possible within a mental model
few people find it epistemically possible that opening a particular garage will uncover a live dragon
everything they know so far excludes this being one of the possibilities of what is inside the garage
but depending on whether they have ever visited the garage, people may have different guesses of what could be inside it
one person may guess there is a bike inside the garage, while another who has visited the garage once may say there is no bike inside but there is a lawnmower inside.
it may be that by now the lawnmower has actually been moved to a shed, and the person who has visited the garage is actually wrong. however, this person had a mental model which was closer to reality because it was tested against reality in the past.
different ideologies label the epistemic possibility of events differently, usually in connection with whether the events have ever been verified in reality but sometimes in total disconnection
for a Trotskyist it is epistemically possible that a country or group of countries will create the world's first Trotskyist workers' state
for a mainstream Marxist-Leninist this is /not/ epistemically possible — they will likely have several points of evidence of why it appears this will never happen
a Tory may hold that it is epistemically possible for every single transgender person to one day "deconvert" if taught enough correct facts
a progressive is likely to hold this as epistemically impossible for a high percentage of transgender people
we think it is possible to throw arbitrary people together who "don't yet want to be a Communist" but epistemic possibilities often get in the way
for many people, it is /epistemically impossible/ that Bolshevism is not tyranny or that a Communist movement can make the United States a better place. if these things are true there may as well be a dragon in the garage.
thankfully incorrect models can ultimately be corrected
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Tapers, Petscop - marvin and the closed or open door
some people say it is symbolizing perspective on whether you can see the door
i thought it was a slightly more complicated metaphor of how things can seem impossible but you just have to do what is currently impossible and make it possible
in either interpretation you can compare it to the notion of social discontinuity and how notions of truth become discontinuous if groups of people are and they won't get along or come to a consensus on what model they will use
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we have the saying that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism
here's a new saying:
there is a higher likelihood for humanity to see the world's first Trotskyist workers' state than there is for humans to build cities on another planet.
if either of these things ever happens in the future — and it is fair to say that neither of them is impossible when compared with the other — the emergence of the first Trotskyist workers' state would happen in an earlier decade than it would take for the emergence of humans' first extraterrestrial city.
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## epistemic possibility and wavefunction collapse
imagine rolling a 20-sided die, also referred to as a "D20". if the D20 is sitting on your table but is not in use, it has 20 different possibilities, not counting additional edge cases where a die or coin somehow does not land on a valid face as defined by a standard set of game rules. materially, it is possible the die is sitting on some particular face with some particular face displayed to the rest of the room, but regarding the rules of a particular game, the die is not locked to any particular result until you put it into some kind of die cup and roll it, _interacting_ with the die to narrow it to a particular outcome. when the D20 is sitting alone on the table, it has 20 outcomes; when it is picked up and rolled it has one outcome we declare as having "happened" as some kind of "past event" within the bounds of our tabletop game.
now imagine working a "Sudoku" puzzle. the point of this puzzle is to take a symmetrical grid and make sure every row and column of the grid as well as every square sector contains the numbers 1-9. for any individual cell within a line or sector of the grid, there is some particular array of possibilities for what number could occupy that cell — each cell is a lot like the D20 sitting alone on the table, only in this case, the dice gradually end up with fewer and fewer sides until they have become single-sided objects more like mahjongg tiles or half-dominoes. instead of having to roll any of these "dice" independently to determine their outcome, they were determined by the current array of outcomes of every other object around them. the computer game _Minesweeper_ is similar. for every cell on the minefield, there is a particular array of outcomes based on all the possible distances that cell could be from a mine. digging on each cell reveals more information about the surrounding cells and takes away more uncertain possibilities — this is represented on-screen as how many total mines are inside a particular cluster of cells, although what really changed was the "die" of possible distances every cell could be from a mine. whenever a cell is clicked, the player effectively "rolls the die" to receive one of these possible outcomes, from a map of distances to a live mine that ends the game.
whenever an object is in a situation like a D20 on a table, a cell in an un-filled Sudoku column, or a cell on a Minesweeper board, this object can be said to be in a _superposition_ of possible outcomes. a mathematical description of this _superposition_ is called a _wavefunction_, and the moment of reducing one of these "D20s" or _superpositions_ to a single outcome is called a _wavefunction collapse_.
imagine we walk up to a closed garage
in the world we live in we do not actually know if dragons exist or not
the question is in a kind of _superposition_ of two possible answers. it could be that there is a dragon inside. it could be that there is not a dragon inside. both seem to be true in a shallow sense of outward appearances by virtue of being possibilities for what will be materially true.
this is the nature of wavefunctions as a predictive model of difficult-to-observe processes. the wavefunction is not necessarily the material reality itself, but more a mathematical model of the _image_ of material reality which presents itself to our senses. when a process in nature is not yet decided, our senses are presented not with a static result of the uncompleted process — as this singular and straightforward altered section of reality would be impossible to observe before the process is complete — but instead simply with all the different possibilities that could come out of the process that we can be immediately aware of from looking at its outside edge.
in a figurative and analogous sense, it is almost as if the wavefunction process has an _event horizon_. the true array of possibilities which exists inside the process may be fewer or more than we predict from the outside, but it cannot actually escape the event horizon such that we can see it. we can only observe the possible contents of the unfinished process based on what information is presented to us at the event horizon.
why is a wavefunction for an everyday ordinary process so similar to a black hole?
this has to do with the connection between wavefunctions and interaction. if we imagine two distinct chunks of reality such as tropical island A and tropical island B, A cannot know what exists on B unless a dialectical process begins between the two and there is an interaction created. if a bird from island B flies over island A, the bird from island B acts as a _measurement_ of what is on the island, providing the information that birds exist there. it is notable that without a material interaction which changes reality, the islands are incapable of observing each other. every time a bottle or bird drifts over to island A, the composition of island A is materially changed through adding the new object. every time the sun beats down on the island it has received certain indirect information about the sun and become changed by its interaction with the sun. every time a single packet of light bounces off a palm tree and lands anywhere else the material world changes. we cannot observe a sunset on the ocean without the sun changing, the ocean changing, and the packets of light changing, all before any of these things reach a human being. heat and light had to radiate off the sun, energy had to hit the ocean, and the energy had to ultimately change directions and slow down through many different processes such as refraction, reflection, and the ocean water absorbing heat that was once light.
if we put a cat in a box next to a vial of poison
it is not the actual cat that changes. it is the _image_ of the cat presented to our senses.
in some sense, the image of the cat is partially real inasmuch as it interacts with reality. if we hear an ambiguous "thud" come out of the box, the box interacted with and changed the air in the room in order to leak information, and the sound waves that came out of the box and constituted this information are material. yet, we do not know if the box made a sound because the cat fell over and died or because the living cat threw itself against the box. the wavefunction the box presents to the outside world still has two coexisting states until we get clearer information.
if the box were to leak more unambiguous information, such as an unusual smell, the first thing we would probably do is run out of the room in a panic and ask our local laboratory aides how much of the gas is lethal, and the second thing is to reasonably suspect the poison has been opened and the cat is dead. the aide might then reassure us that there was not enough poison to harm a human being and much more warning chemical than poison, but either way, we were forced to interact with the entire room holding the experiment based on the wavefunction image it presented to us rather than the literal material elements of the room. if we went into the room without a thorough knowledge of poisons, not only was the box presenting a wavefunction of alive and dead, but the room and the poison were presenting a wavefunction of lethal and non-lethal. in practically every case a system with unknown qualities can be probed to find out the missing information through interaction, but in this case, we would not necessarily want to use that method to find out.
what if we put a Trotskyist workers' state that has not yet existed in a "box" just as we did with the cat?
when we close the box we split the hypothetical workers' state into its outward image and its real internal processes. inside the box there is a particular series of elements interacting in a particular way to produce some sort of success or failure. outside the box, the only way to know what is happening inside is to analyze information that leaks out of the box in its interaction with the rest of the world, or to be very good at constructing models of how the elements may be functioning inside the box to produce any number of potential results.
here, a surprising possibility opens up: we can predict what is going to happen in the workers' state regardless of whether we put it in a box. it does not matter whatsoever whether we can directly observe an object or not, as long as we are able to obtain accurate information about that object period and create an accurate model of how it has functioned so far and may possibly function in the future.
if the workers' state is obscured by a box, we will always be stuck constructing a map of its outward wavefunction and hoping we have exhaustively catalogued every potential outcome that is also reasonable. but at the same time, that does not mean it is impossible to reach a point where our knowledge of the wavefunction will be complete enough we will be able to /prepare/ for whatever the real outcome is.
any kind of social structure which has never been built yet is obscured by a particular kind of "box", defined by potentiality and our inability to see the future. based on our observations of boxes, we know that the inability to see the future is actually possible to break down into smaller problems such as the inability to know the full characteristics of all the smaller elements that make up a system and how they will express themselves into the system when put together. when every individual person and every component structure such as a state business or ministry has some kind of outward wavefunction around it, how can we know how any of those already-mysterious smaller elements will combine together?
this is where Marxism gives us the tools to cut through the seemingly omnipresent confusion of living in a fuzzy and uncertain world of wavefunctions.
although every object in the material world can possess unique qualities, the world is also full of repeated patterns. different apple trees sprouted from the same apple may have different characteristics but they also have shared physical characteristics as apple trees. different people have different parents and birth regions but they have shared characteristics as human beings. different careers have different responsibilities but all workers have certain shared characteristics as workers. different kingdoms all have royal families and a kingdom territory. different duchies and earldoms all have nobility and noble territories. different competing businesses all have business territories.
Marxism is commonly presented to Liberal societies as being only about the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, ignoring the much richer and more vast field of analysis that actually exists. in fact, Marxism is capable of analyzing any emergent system composed of repeated elements in repeated patterns. it is true that every society which contains classes will see its overall pool of interactions dominated by the influence of those classes. at the same time, Marxism was never built on the claim that society only consists of classes — if it was, it would never be prepared to identify or analyze the classless society a Communist movement had just created, and its utility would dry up entirely minutes after this transition. this is not the case. should there come to be an era of communism on the horizon after the era of socialism, there will still be a Marxism. the tasks of this highly-advanced Marxism will be more complex than they were before, given the need to address a number of giant- and tiny-scale processes within society that went neglected in the time of classes, but the overall methods of dialectical materialism and predictive material modeling will still be able to handle these numerous new tasks — and may in fact handle them better than anything else.
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[cr. 2024-07-15T20:20:12Z]
black hole information paradox
where did the information go??
many people have come to falsely interpret this as black holes being _composed of information_, and the universe itself being composed of data or mathematics
this is not what was intended by the physicists. what it actually means to say that a black hole is composed of information is to say that the black hole is composed of an unknown material, but every shred of that material at every scale is so unknown that whether it may be a particle, string, or cubic volume of void stripped of all spacetime, it may as well have its own event horizon. just as we cannot see into the entire black hole as a single object, the true materials inside the black hole are so unknown we can only interact with them through the collisions of their outer edge with the rest of the world. just like the metaphor of islands exchanging birds to create the knowledge of birds, or photons colliding with palm trees to create the image of palm trees although the photons and palm trees are changed, the raw material of a black hole collides with the real world to output mathematical information. information about the material of a black hole creates an outline of a black hole, like a second imaginary event horizon copied to our scratch paper or computers. this information is then fed into mathematical equations to study the black hole. although it is technically true that the information about a black hole is only a model and not the underlying reality, this model was still formed through real-life observations of that reality, through the dialectical collision process that provides the basis for all measurements.
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in general the strange behavior of quantum-scale objects begins with our difficulty in observing a very small object with a tool that is many times too big
some of the problems of measurement are basically what we would expect if an object was very small. if there was a barely-visible spider on a slide and we only had a probe the size of a ballpoint pen, we would find it very difficult to observe much about the spider, especially if we do not wish to pin it down in one place. a live spider can exist in motion and has many details, but a probe that is too large could accidentally crush it in an attempt to get a clear picture, changing the state of the final observed spider from the living and moving spider in graphic ways.
like the parts of the spider and its natural movements, some quantum behaviors really need to be understood all functioning together below the scale of things we can easily measure
this is the aspect in which quantum mechanics is actually very similar to the social sciences
largely for reasons such as ethics, we do not directly attempt controlled experiments on human lives or social structures
as well, there is another aspect that some parts of human societies are too large to fit inside an ordinary controlled experiment. the problem of scale goes the other direction, yet it produces the same result that in order to observe the entire structure it must be conceptualized as a collection of pieces and behaviors operating together on its own scale, and the whole connected model of physical behaviors at this scale pieced together from indirect observations.
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[cr. 2024-04-09T06:43:10Z]
> the problem of scale goes the other direction, yet it produces the same result
resemblances between very large and very tiny scales because a lot of elements moving around in model
the huge number of elements generates similar kinds of ergodicity
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... the correct picture is starting to look something like that things smaller than the size of a fundamental particle are simply too small for us to see, so we don't easily see them. it sounds stupidly obvious when put like that, but unless you understand Hegel it takes a huge amount of explaining [...].
the real problem is Liberals can't conceive of separate interacting objects which are not all automatically unified under the same principles.
rather ironic when you show Liberals a workers' state and they demand it can't be made of one universal object and needs to be made of separate interacting objects.
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[*g] This animal is the giraffe, classified in genus _Giraffa_. In the Min languages of southeast China it is known by the name _gì-lìng-lĕ̤k_ or _kî-lîn-lo̍k_ (麒麟鹿), while in Japanese it is known as the _kirin_ (キリン).
[*cdl] A roughly similar concept is explored in Chris D'Lacey's _Last Dragon Chronicles_ — at one time on earth dragons exist, and one day they stop existing. This series goes deeper than _The Last Unicorn_ in that it proposes an entire alternate history and cosmology for the fictional earth to explain why there "had" to be dragons and the disappearance of dragons was material even as various aspects of the earth are magic.
[*rgg] Although its main ability of soaring across the ground at blazing speed more resembles a _qianlima_ (also known as a _senrima_ or _chollima_), Rapidash does visually sport a small horn.
[*s] superstructure: within early Marxist texts this has referred to one of a few different concepts, but all of them have generally fit under the category of being _emergent phenomena_ that appear only based on the existence of an underlying phenomenon. for instance, in _The German Ideology_, Marx points out that capitalism is created first and the content of capitalist laws only emerges as a consequence of capitalism, rather than Liberal capitalist legal theory ever truly designing the society. in this chapter, "superstructure" is being used in a specific sense to refer to the mental creation of theoretical models, popular understandings or folk knowledge, emotional or psychological impressions, and artistic recreations that people use to attempt to describe and make sense of everyday life or material reality. any method that human beings use to reconstruct reality which has clear imperfections yet is used frequently is here considered a tool for creating _superstructural realities_ that emerge from the _basic_ phenomena of social graphs and the physical reality that surrounds and gives rise to the human species.
[*te] individual factual errors in the Trotskyist account of history will be covered in further detail in other chapters.
[*at] the proper etymology of the term is "AntiFa" (anti-fascist), but the right-Liberal and Tory bloc almost always mispronounces it as "AnTifa".
[*p] there is a whole long discussion to get into here about the fact the image of a pipe in our minds or on a canvas that serves as our model of how real pipes work is not the actual material pipe that exists in the real world and the material pipe may always be a kind of thing-in-itself we can only come extremely close to accessing but can never access fully. this is a complicated can of worms so it will be covered in part 3 on Idealism vs Materialism and "concept Marxism" [*p2]
[*q] it is worth noting that this chapter is all about the application of mathematics associated with quantum physics to macroscopic objects — the reason this model resembles Einstein's interpretation of "the moon being there when you aren't looking at it" is that it is quite literally assigning wavefunctions to cats and moons. if we used these models for the contexts they were originally devised for, applying them would not be this simple and we would run into mysterious new effects like correlations between faraway points that appear to exceed the speed of light. thus, it is possible that the "superpositions" observed with macroscopic objects have entirely different behaviors than quantum-scale superpositions, although there may still be benefits when building a scientific framework to being able to apply the same kind of mathematical model to every scale and observe how the behavior of wavefunctions changes when shifting to different scales.
[*e] remark 25/10: this chapter is too wordy and tries to fit in too many separate concepts. it might be broken across two or three chapters in version 5.3.
[*DHW10] "The dragon in my garage". In _Demon-Haunted World_ chapter 10
[*E] "Epistemic possibility" (Huemer 2007). _Synthese, 156_, pp. 119–142. <doi.org/10.1007/s11229-005-4782-8>
=> ebb-magazine.com/essays/inside-the-last-days-of-the-cpgb-ml *p2. that possibly-ThirdWorldist Marxist magazine that tried to argue for Hegel and concepts - get original sources during part 3
;
== research.moraleconomy.au/entry/Philosophical_Research:MDem/5.2/1018_Last-Unicorn
:: cr. 2023-07-29T09:14:50Z ; 1690622090
:: ed.e 2025-10-19T07:59:45Z
:: t. Dice-and-Dragons
:: t. Last-Unicorn
:: t. 1090_possible
:: t. 1011_possible
:: t. v5-1_1015_Dice-and-Dragons
:: t. v5-1_1015_Last-Unicorn
:: t. v5-1_1018_Last-Unicorn
; v5.2 chapters/ The last unicorn and the first dragon: How can we know what is and is not possible?
; v5.2/ The last unicorn and the first dragon: Epistemic possibility
; << 1702364702 v5/ mdem reading list (incomplete)
; << 1690714027 v5/ possible revision main
