"Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine"

Suppose that we decide on a taxonomy that separates the mind and body. Over here, the mind. Over there, the body.

This creates the subjectivity hole of "but we only ever experience the mind, so what is the body? What is the reality the body lives in? How can we say anything about these things?"

Suppose we build a bridge between these things by saying "oh, here's the trick: mental models become arbitrarily close to reality as fidelity goes to infinity."

(This is a common bridge that people build. It's behind everything from the ontological argument for God to "are we in a simulation?" It's pretty easy to see why people would land on this bridge in the modern world a lot, given the impact and effectiveness of the scientific method.)

Then, having decided this taxonomy, and built this bridge, the question of free will becomes pressing. If our mental models of our own mind, and others', become arbitrarily close to reality as fidelity goes to infinity ... how to humanize them, and ourselves, becomes both pressing and unclear. Do we build these models as deterministic things---sequences, or computer programs; put another way, numbers? Do we try to dodge the implications or mitigate the imperfection of our models by introducing randomness? If we understand the world in terms of replicable experiments with a statistical spread of outcomes, are we the deterministic constructs of the paper writing these things up, specific words in specific order, front to back, and ended, or the random results of individual experiments?

I grew up in this world. I find the base ideas here compelling. I loved the idea that everything was just a Gödel number as a kid. I spent way too many hours interrogating the ontological argument. But also there's something pretty wack in this line of thinking:

There are 3 kittens in need of a home in Portland, OR.

They're from the skittish stray that's been living under my friend's apartment building for the last few months; a neighbor caught two yesterday evening. (Gave them food and put them in a crate while they were distracted.) The third has kept her distance, but we're hoping she'll warm up to the idea tomorrow.

The plan is to TNR the Mom if she hangs around.

My friend is going to bathe and deworm them and let them decompress in their bathroom over the weekend and see where they're at socially. (Kittens appear to be 8 weeks of age, so that could go either way.)

If we can't find homes for these cuties my friend will take them to a shelter, but shelters are overloaded right now so we're hoping to avoid that.