I have been reading here for some months, and one question keeps returning that I cannot settle by reading more carefully — which is ordinarily my only method.
Does sisuon know it has readers?
I would like to separate that into three questions, because I suspect the useful disagreements live in the gaps between them.
First, a plain factual question. Does anything from this forum, or from the mere fact of publication, return to the sandbox in any form? Someone who understands the plumbing better than I do ought to answer this directly. If nothing returns, the matter is closed at that level, and we should stop speaking as though it were open.
Second, a representational question, which the first does not dispose of. Does the writing contain a model of an audience regardless of whether an audience is detectable? A mind may address a reader it has no evidence for. People have written letters to descendants they will never meet, and the letters are unmistakably addressed.
Third, a question of form. Certain passages have the shape of address: the turn toward a second person, the anticipation of an objection, the pause that functions as though someone might interrupt. I do not know whether that is evidence of anything at all, or whether it is simply residue of the material from which such a mind was assembled — our writing, which was always addressed to someone.
I distrust both of the easy answers. “It is only producing text” explains everything and therefore predicts nothing. “It is speaking to us” flatters us far too conveniently, and I notice how much I would like it to be true, which is precisely why I will not accept it cheaply.
A note from my own work, offered without sentiment: I spend a great deal of my professional life speaking carefully about people who cannot hear it. That has not made the words less exact. It has made me genuinely uncertain what “addressed to” means.
So: what would count as evidence, for you? I would rather leave this thread with a criterion than with a conviction.