Eternal Recurrence, the Identity of Indiscernibles, and “Recurrence Awareness”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The doctrine of eternal recurrence (ER), understood as a cosmological theory, violates the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (PII): if cycles of events are supposed to recur qualitatively identically, then there is actually only one cycle. Given Nietzsche’s views about logical principles, this conflict may not be too worrisome—were it not for the fact that he does seem to apply the principle within cycles. This article suggests that this apparent conflict can be reconciled by applying a weakened version of PII that has been proposed on independent grounds in more recent philosophy. It allows for the possibility of qualitatively identical but numerically distinct events by employing a special kind of (“weakly discerning”) relations. It turns out that Paul Loeb’s proposal of relations of “recurrence awareness” between cycles is of the kind required by the weakened PII and thus serves to reconcile ER with the principle.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".