kale — praxis

Looks good, I love roasted kale with olive oil and salt.

designing tRPGs — 180 Proof

DnD, Shadowrun...?

I got into 5e back in college; during the pandemic I played some virtually on roll20 but it sort of fizzled out.

listening to music
- mostly re-reading
discussing philosophy (on & offline) — 180 Proof

Listening to music, writing

Reading, of course. — Pantagruel

Discussing philosophy online and in real life

Listening to music — Jack Cummins

I assumed reading, writing, music and philosophy to be a given around here :smirk:

You are arguing that people will never come to a conclusion as to what the objective side of a "good life" is, just like you are arguing over my forced game argument now. Thus it points to more evidence that people can never know "the good life" or if they have it. — schopenhauer1

Your argument simply needs to meet the threshold of "there is doubt". — schopenhauer1

Yeah, my argument rests on the absurdity of someone having a good life when they don't recognize it as such. The very possibility of doubting the goodness of life ipso facto demonstrates that life is not intrinsically good; only those with the privilege of understanding the good life can have a good life, and the rest are shit out of luck. It is as the Buddha said in the Dhammapada:

Just as one upon the summit of a mountain be-holds the groundlings, even so when the wise man casts away heedlessness by heedfulness and ascends the high tower of wisdom, this sorrowless sage beholds the sorrowing and foolish multitude.

[...]

Heedful among the heedless, wide awake among the sleepy, the wise man advances like a swift horse leaving behind a weak nag.

[...]

As upon a heap of rubbish in the roadside ditch blooms a lotus, fragrant and pleasing, even so, on the rubbish heap of blind wordlings the disciple of the Supremely Enlightened One shines resplendent in wisdom.

The irony is that the "good life" is characterized by the deep understanding that life is not good.

Is it that anti-realism applies to ethics and aesthetics because we seek to make the world as we say, while realism applies to ontology and epistemology because we seek to make what we say fit the world? — Banno

Very interesting, thanks.

American Extremist: The Psychology of Political Extremism, Josh Neal.

Well, I'm an idiot, that guy's a white supremacist :vomit:

I couldn't finish The Tunnel when I first tried. — Manuel

Neither could I, it went a bit over my head and felt like a chore to get through. I'll try again some other time.

You can have people subjectively feel good they were born, but were still "forced" into an often harmful, inescapable game of life which was an injustice. — schopenhauer1

Indeed, though one objection, and I mean no offense, but wrapping a word in quotes makes it suspiciously imprecise. Either someone is forced to live by having been born, or they aren't; "forced" is questionably ambiguous, IMO.

Whether she is in pain is a fact, how much the pain hurts is subjective. — DingoJones

For what reason can it not be said how much the pain hurts, as a matter of fact?

There is a long history of debate about what qualifies as a good life, but what I have not seen much of is a meta-analysis of the debate itself; we debate a lot about what a good life is, but we don't think as much about what it means to have this debate, or what the debate itself indicates about life.

That there is so much disagreement, confusion and mystery surrounding what it means to have a good life, that any steps to clarify it require a great deal of effort, that one usually has to be taught how to live a good life, all of these things seem to demonstrate that a good life is not common and is by no means given, but more importantly, that life is something that has to be fixed in a certain way for it to good.

There is the question about what makes a life good. But there is a deeper question, which asks what the value of having to ask this question is - i.e. is it a good thing that we have to ask the question about what makes a life good?

The first references facts, part of which is what “boyfriend” means by definition. The second references opinion, not facts. — DingoJones

So yeah, it's as @schopenhauer1 alluded to earlier, if the value of something is entirely subjective, then there won't be any sense in which we can say as a matter of fact what the value of this thing is, if we're expected to provide something beyond subjective states.

But anyway, if having a good life is an opinion, it would seem that someone would have to hold that opinion, e.g. Stacey has to believe she has a good life in order to have a good life. It would be objectively true that Stacey has a good life, if and only if she subjectively believes that she has a good life (and nothing else). Just like for it to be objectively true that someone is in pain, they would actually need to feel pain. Having a good life would come down to whether or not someone thought their life was good.

The question I would ask then is, if a good life is based on opinion, then what factors influence this? How does one come to determine whether they consider their life to be good? My hunch is that this will involve things that are common factors across people. Things like: not feeling a lot of pain, accomplishing one's goals, having meaningful relationships, etc etc. Which I think gives some credence to the view that one might be mistaken in their opinion.

By opinion, did you mean an expression, like something that cannot be true or false? As in, Stacey saying she has a good life is not a real proposition but just a vocalization of her current satisfaction with life? Because that just does not seem correct at all, as evidence by the fact that we often make decisions based on the assumption that it is not just an utterance but has some degree of truth, like when we euthanize old dogs. We euthanize them because we judge it to be the case that their lives are very bad.

C - Therefore, it is not absurd for a member to hold the position that such behavior is acceptable. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

It might not be absurd for someone to hold a socially-conditioned belief (i.e. we can make sense of why they believe what they believe), but it does not make the belief correct (e.g. it would not have been absurd for an Aztec to believe that without human sacrifice, the rain-god Tlaloc would curse the next harvest; but that does not mean it is right).

Is that correct? — DingoJones

Yes. Just as Stacey must believe that Paul is her boyfriend in order for Paul to be her boyfriend, Stacey must believe that she has a good life in order for her to have a good life. That is my claim.

Well I asked for your case for recognition of life being good required for a good life and you responded with your Stacey scenarios which I pointed out doesnt really support that recognition of life being good being required for a good life. — DingoJones

Yeah, I wasn't able to follow your objection, can you clarify it?

No, they'll figure out some reason to be against it.

I think it would all depend on who's asking them to take it. — James Riley

:up:

We could have all the good things that the hunter-gatherers had without any of the bad that they had to suffer with.

Could we not have clean air, clean water, highly complex and extensive biodiversity, "wilderness", open space, etc? Can't we have our cake and eat it too? — James Riley

An interesting question, something I have also wondered a lot about too :up:

Fundamentally, I believe it is an issue with technology, and not just this or that technology, but the overall technological drive to maximize efficiency - technique. A technologically-advanced society is a programmed society. It seems naive to me to think that humans can "control" technology; the most we can do is slow it down. At least as long as we continue to use it, which by this time seems pretty much guaranteed.

For all the things we seemed to have gained, there seems to be less attention paid to what we have lost, since we shrugged off the H&G mode of life. Indeed there seems to be quite a lot of fundamental things that we have lost, thanks to the luxury trap of civilization. Most of us have lost our ability to take care of ourselves without a complex social bureaucracy; most of us think freedom consists in being unique instead of being self-sufficient; most of us are completely at the whim of large corporations and militarized governments with powerful technologies which no person is capable of resisting alone; most of us are fed propaganda every single day and don't really own their thoughts; most of us live pointless lives working jobs that serve only to further cement the technological mode of life; most of us are completely disconnected from the natural world and only know about it through television or the occasional visit to a park; most of us are so addicted to our technological dope that it seems inconceivable to go back to a way of life that does not have it.

In the original 2000 Deus Ex video game, one of the final plot choices is to take out some kind of central global communications node, which doing so plunges the world into a technological Dark Age, but a Renaissance for human freedom. An interesting idea which has been raised by others as well.

I wanted to start with quite a controversial argument I imagine which is to suggest that the discovery of agriculture is one of civilisation’s biggest mistakes. — David S

This is not as controversial as you might think. Against the Grain has already been mentioned, fantastic book. After the Ice is another which explicitly makes detailed accounts of how the concept of private property arose in conjunction with exclusive agricultural ways of life. There are other works out there as well that question the common narrative of the agricultural revolution.

There was no "Agricultural Revolution", in the sense that suddenly humans discovered they could plant seeds and harvest crops; this was known for many centuries before the first city-states arose in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. What changed was the shift from using agriculture as a supplement to using it (as well as husbandry) exclusively.

Castle to Castle, Céline.
The Murder of Professor Schlick: the Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle, David Edmonds.

But many people might still say what the villain did was wrong, whereas the life game is not. How so? It is almost if not exactly the same in terms of amount of choices allotted (play the game, or die of depredation, suicide, and poverty. — schopenhauer1

I am preaching to the choir here, but procreation is taken to be a sacred activity. Having children is taken to be one of the most critical and sublime moments of a person's entire life. Bringing more people into the game is part of playing the game, because there isn't any point in playing it if you're the last one to do so.

Build a better tomorrow...think of the children!...don't ever stop or slow down...you might start thinking...wondering...hmm why are we doing this?...oh shit back to work...

In order for your two statements to be analogous the “happy life” of the second statement would have to be referencing objective components/qualifiers of a happy life. As soon as you do that it completely undermines your point because then Staceys subjective opinion about her lifes happiness isnt determinate of Staceys happy life. — DingoJones

Not sure I follow, my point was that both Stacey having a boyfriend and having a good life depend on objective and subjective components.

It seems fairly obvious that a good life doesnt entail recognition of it, especially when one accepts life can be objectively bad or good.
Whats your case for a good life requiring belief that that life is good? — DingoJones

I started off with the assumption that it seemed obvious that it does entail this recognition, though it seems not everyone agrees.

Consider the proposition: "Stacey has a boyfriend named Paul." It would seem that, in order for Stacey to have a boyfriend named Paul, two things would need to be case: there exists a man with the name Paul, and there exists a belief in Stacey that this same man is her boyfriend. If either one of these is false, Stacey does not have a boyfriend.

With that example in mind, consider the proposition: "Stacey has a good life." If there does not exist in Stacey a belief that she has a good life, then she does not have a good life. See the diagram I posted above.

In general, it seems reasonable to say that a good life is a species of things that require for its existence both objective and subjective components, and furthermore that one of the subjective components is the belief that this thing exists.

Anyway, the point is simple, you haven't shown why "the good life", or whatever, is a matter of belief and not emotion. Cause if it's not about belief but about emotion, then your whole idea is a category error or however you philosophically inclined people call it. — hairy belly

Okay, so you disagree with the initial premise. I never argued for it, that's fair. I did not include the possibility that utterances about life might be expressive rather than descriptive. If having a good life is not dependent on believing that one has a good life, then my argument fails, no question about it. But that's obvious. It is odd that it took you this long to make that point.

Probably not poetry, but lyrical nonetheless and one of the most profound pieces I have ever read.

There is no disgust with life, no despair, no sense of the nothingness of things, of the worthlessness of remedies, of the loneliness of man; no hatred of the world and of oneself; that can last so long: although these attitudes of mind are completely reasonable, and their opposites unreasonable. But despite all this, after a little while; with a gentle change in the temper of the body; little by little; and often in a flash, for minuscule reasons scarcely possible to notice; the taste for life revives, and this or that fresh hope springs up, and human things take on their former visage, and show they are not unworthy of some care; not so much to the intellect, as indeed, so to speak, to the senses of the spirit. And that is enough to make a person, aware and convinced as he may be of the truth, as well as in spite of reason, both persevere in life, and go along with it as others do: for those very senses (one might say), and not the intellect, are what rules over us . . . . And life is a thing of such small consequence, that man, as regards himself, ought not to be very anxious either to keep it or to discard it. Therefore, without pondering the matter too deeply; with each trivial reason that presents itself, for grasping the former alternative rather than the latter, he ought not to refuse to do so." — Giacomo Leopardi

Sorry, I don't mean to be flippant or rude, but I don't understand your objection. What do you find problematic about the idea that, while we can't have a complete conception of a good life, we can have a partial representations of it, but that because we fail to have a complete representation, we never attain a good life?

You wrote that what a good life is will forever remain a mystery. So when you say that "A good life is worth living; conversely, a bad life is not worth living." you're uttering nonsense, in the sense that you do not know what you are talking about. — hairy belly

I don't think that's a charitable interpretation of my argument. I said a complete representation of a good life will forever remain a mystery. This does not preclude the possibility of knowing partial representations of it, such as, that a good life is worth living.

Of course, then you only attack the first part, but it's only logical that if having a good life is impossible, because we can't know what a good life is, then, conversely, having a bad life is impossible too, because we can't know what a bad life is. — hairy belly

Again I don't think that's charitable and I sense you have not understood my argument. When a bad life is conceived as that which is not a good life, then if a good life is impossible, all lives are ipso facto bad lives.

Meaningful/meaningless is a better pair of terms when it comes to justifying life. — hairy belly

Well, I would say that meaning in life is necessary for having a good life, but it's not obvious to me that it's sufficient. Meaning would belong in the subjective category, and according to the diagram above, there would also need to be objective features present to make a life a good life.

You're free to disagree with this, but I think it would absurd to if you thought about it more.

I don't know if that is the case. From my perspective, believing that one has a good life is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of having a good life; necessary in that without it, the good life is impossible, but not sufficient, in that simply believing that one has a good life does not mean one actually has one.

But the same cannot be said of a bad life. Since it is not sufficient to believe that one has a good life to have a good life, it must be possible to believe that one has a good life, but in fact have a bad life. But since it is necessary that one believes that one has a good life in order to have a good life, if they fail to have this belief - for instance, if they believe they have a bad life - then they do not have a good life.

See this diagram I sketched:

Nonsensical in what way?

That consequentialism can entail treating people as means rather than ends, and that this is absolutely valid in some situations, demonstrates the impossibility of formulating a coherent moral theory for actual life. In a world that is not already morally disqualified, there would not be a need to make these sort of sacrifices, a "second-best", a "better-but-not-good".

It may be the case that consequentialism is true, but it would be better if it were not.

it must therefore follow that there is no such thing as life not worth living. — Hanover

I think this would entail absurd conclusions. Firstly some degree of subjective satisfaction with ones' life does seem to be essential to having a good life worth living, I can't imagine being tortured for your whole life would really be worth going through. There would need to be some sort of redemption.

What does it matter if most people would equate the good life with liking life, if we have good reasons to think that the good life is more than just subjective enjoyment? We all know Nozick's experience machine, Brave New World...just because people think they have a good life doesn't mean they actually do.

You could apply that skeptical regress to just about anything. That because I don't know absolutely 100% without-a-doubt that something is the case should not stop me from acting on a belief that it is, as long as I have a pretty good reason to believe that it is the case. But when there is a long history of disagreement over something - with lots of different viewpoints that often contradict each other, so that it is not at all apparent as to what it is we are even disagreeing about, or that it is even within our means to know anything about this thing that is being argued about - that is when the uncertainty becomes relevant.

I don't think there has ever been a single coherent idea of what a good life is. There are partial representations of a good life - pleasure, virtue, accomplishment, etc - but there has never been and there never will be a complete idea of what a good life is. My view here is that, because we cannot ever know what the good life is, we cannot ever have it.

Can't someone just say that whatever a person thinks is a good life, is a good life for that person? They will say the evidence for their justification is their own sense of self-satisfaction with life. — schopenhauer1

I guess they could utter that, but I would expect there to be various contradictions and absurdities in the proposition itself, if it were to be analyzed. Just like if I say that whatever I think is true, is true (even though it might not actually be true).

Another line of reasoning:

1. It is necessary but not sufficient to have a justified true belief that one has a good life in order to have a good life, i.e. the justified true belief that one has a good life is a necessary aspect of actually having a good life, for a good life that is unrecognized as a good life is absurd.
2. There is no complete conception of what a good life is, but only partial representations of what may be considered a good life, and such a complete conception will probably never be known, i.e. a complete conception of what a good life is will forever remain a mystery.
3. Therefore, it is not possible to have a justified true belief that one has a good life.
4. Therefore, it is not possible to have a good life.
5. One should not procreate if one's children will not have good lives.
6. Therefore, one should not procreate.

I have already read past the first book of the Transcendental Analytic, though the consolidation of my notes is lagging a bit.

Transcendental Logic. First Division

Transcendental Analytic

1.

The goal of the Analytic is to study the principles underpinning pure understanding; to accomplish this, the concepts contained in the Analytic must be pure (and not empirical), belong to thought (and not sensibility), elementary (and not deduced), and belong to a complete table of pure concepts. This completeness can only come from an idea of the understanding as a self-sufficient united system, whose parts cannot be added or removed.

The Analytic is divided into two books: the first covers the concepts of pure understanding, while the second covers the principles of pure understanding.

Book I

2. Analytic of Conceptions

This will not be focused on the analysis of some class of concepts, but on the faculty of understanding itself, which alone gives the possibility of a priori conceptions.

Chapter I. Of the Transcendental Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Conceptions of the Understanding

3. Introductory

When we think about the faculty of cognition, we usually do so in a haphazard and unsystematic way; doing so cannot lead to any certainty of judgement thereof, because it does not give any sense of unity or necessity to the conceptions thought, and is dependent on chance. Transcendental philosophy has the advantage that its concepts are pure and unified, and therefore connected by a single idea, which gives us a rule to follow during our investigations.

Section I.

4. Of the Logical Use of the Understanding in general

The understanding is non-sensuous (independent of sensation), and because of this it must not contain any intuitions, since it is in our nature for intuitions to be sensuous. And because there are only two modes of cognition (intuitions and conceptions), the understanding must cogitate through conceptions, that is to say, it is discursive [0], and not intuitive.

Since intuitions are sensuous, they require affection by an object, and so also on the receptivity of the sensibility to impressions. Conceptions, on the other hand, require that different representations be arranged under one common representation (the act of which is called a function), and so also on the spontaneity of thought.

The understanding uses concepts only in order to judge [1] by means of them. Since only intuitions relate immediately to an object, conceptions relate to them mediately (indirectly) as representations of a representation of an object. Judgements are therefore functions of unity, in that many possible representations are joined under one. As the faculty of judgement, the understanding is a faculty of thought (since thought is the cognition by conceptions), and conceptions are predicates of possible judgements. As such, all of the functions of the understanding can be found through the functions of thought, since the understanding just is the faculty of judgement, this being the faculty of thought.

Section II.

5. Of the Logical Function of the Understanding in Judgements

The function of thought in every judgement, when abstracted from all content, has four heads, each of which can be of three moments:

• Quality of judgements
  - Universal
  - Particular
  - Singular
• Quality
  - Affirmative
  - Negative
  - Infinite
• Relation
  - Categorical
  - Hypothetical
  - Disjunctive
• Modality
  - Problematical
  - Assertorical
  - Apodeictical

The following observations will be made to avoid any unnecessary confusion [2]:

1. Singular judgements are not the same as general judgements, so they can be considered to be entirely different from universal judgements.
2. In transcendental logic, infinite judgements are not the same as affirmative judgements, though this is the case in general logic.
3. All judgements are either categorical, hypothetical or disjunctive.
4. The modality of a judgement is peculiar in that it provides no additional content (since this is exhausted by quantity, quality and relation), but is only concerned with the copula (“is”). Problematical judgements may be false, yet still facilitate our cogitation of truth. Problematical judgements concern possibility (objective validity), assertorical judgements concern actuality (objective reality), and apodeictical judgements concern necessity. The mind judges things in this order.

Section III.

6. Of the Pure Conceptions of the Understanding, or Categories.

While general logic abstracts from all content (and expects it to be provided elsewhere in order for it to transform it into conceptions), transcendental logic contains the a priori manifold of intuition, which is used as the matter for pure concepts. Since space and time are the condition of sensibility, they affect how objects are conceived in thought, since these concepts are void without any sensible content, and no concept pertaining to its content can arise before the content is given.

Once this sensibility is delivered to the mind, however, the process called synthesis occurs, in which different representations are examined and joined together into a single cognition. Synthesis in general is merely the operation of the imagination, which is indispensable as a function of thought, yet nevertheless usually not well-understood. The understanding reduces the product of the synthesis to conceptions, from which we attain a proper cognition.

The duty of transcendental logic is to reduce to conceptions, not representations, but the pure synthesis of representations. The diversity of the manifold of pure intuition is first given, then the imagination synthesizes it, before pure conceptions are applied by the understanding to give this synthesis unity, and therefore transform it into a cognition [3].

The pure conceptions of the understanding are the functions which gives unity to both the representations in a judgement, and the synthesis of representations in an intuition. These conceptions, through analytic unity, give rise to the logical forms of judgement, but they also introduce transcendental content through the application of the synthetic unity of the intuitive manifold [8]. Thus there are exactly the same number of pure concepts as there are logical forms, to which they correspond, and are given the name categories. They are:

• Of Quantity
  - Unity
  - Plurality
  - Totality
• Of Quality
  - Reality
  - Negation
  - Limitation
• Of Relation
  - Of Inherence and Subsistence (substantia et accidens)
  - Of Causality and Dependence (cause and effect)
  - Of Community (reciprocity between the agent and patient)
• Of Modality
  - Possibility - Impossibility
  - Existence - Non-existence
  - Necessity - Contingence

It is through these, and only these, pure conceptions that the manifold of intuition is made conceivable - that is to say, thought as an object of intuition. While Aristotle tried to make a catalogue of his own, he went about it unsystematically, and the result was not only uncertain to be correct, but actually indeed contained elements that should not have been included. In comparison, this catalogue has been arrived at by abiding by a rule [4], and so the result is guaranteed to be correct and complete. These pure conceptions themselves have deduced conceptions (called predicables), however these are not included in the present work, as it would distract from its overall purpose, however they would belong in a complete transcendental philosophy.

7.

Here are some observations related to the pure conceptions:

I. The table of categories can be divided into two classes: the first of which relates to objects of intuition (deemed mathematical), the second to the existence of these objects in relation to each other and/or to the understanding (deemed dynamical). Only the latter has correlates [5].

II. There are always three members of each of the four classes. The third is always a product of the combination of the second and first members; but this third member is not a deduced category because of this, since a particular function is required for the first and second members to produce the third.

III. [6]

8.

Ancient transcendental philosophy contained a fifth categorical division, the members of which were the one, the true, and the good (unity, truth, perfection). This would augment the number of categories, which cannot be, because there is a one-to-one relation between a category and a logical function of thought. These supposed-categories are really just surreptitious names for the categories of quantity (unity, plurality and totality) when viewed as general laws of consistency of cognition. In every cognition of an object there is a unity of the manifold (qualitative unity); the truth (objective reality) of a cognition can be indicated by the number of true deductions that are sourced from it (qualitative plurality); and finally when this plurality is fully in accordance with the conceptual unity, it is perfect (qualitative completeness) [7].

Questions/Thoughts

0. By "discursive", I take Kant to mean the process in which the understanding organizes objects by concepts according to their marks.
1. By "judgement", I take Kant to mean basically the mental process of deciding if something is the case.
2. This part was fairly dense to get through, and I felt it was not as important to focus on, so I brushed over some of the parts I found confusing.
3. I don't really understand what the difference is between the synthesis of the imagination (conjoining intuitions) and the operation of the understanding (putting this synthesis under a concept to give it unity). This part was a bit dense for me.
4. It is unclear to me what this rule exactly is.
5. What does Kant mean by "correlate"?
6. Kant's discussion about community and disjunctive judgements is dense, but I recall in Allison's book a good deconstruction of the argument, so I will defer the summary of it to there.
7. I found this section to be incredible dense in areas, though I think I grasp the general idea.

I want something that presents all the ideas in a neutral way, with pros and cons for each metaphysical view, like a debate. — Eugen

One of the better introductions I have read about philosophy of mind was written by E. J. Lowe.

I really do not recommend you purchase any of these sorts of books though. Introductions/anthologies to anything are typically redundant, superficial and incomplete. They serve the purpose of providing a general map of the territory and giving the reader the opportunity to dip their toes in. You can get exactly this for effectively no extra material cost by reading articles on websites like SEP.

The unfortunate reality is that you really do need to take the time to study individual works if you want to get a grip on anything, at least anything with depth. You will choose a line of thought and follow it for as long as you find it worthwhile, kind of like wearing a pair of shoes until you wear them out. Then it's on to the next pair.

The book is wild, loving it.

Neuromancer, William Gibson

@schopenhauer1 any thoughts to add?

I don't care if a particular philosophy comes from a drunk guy on a toilet seat, if it's sound it's sound. — RAW

Care to put a little more effort and explain why exactly Efilism is "cringe", both of you? — RAW

There are better presentations of the same ideas. Gary's funny sometimes in his lack of self-awareness, though.

The actual arguments themselves are straightforward and uncomplicated, and I mostly agree with them. I suppose I could probably raise some objection, but it's a pain to disentangle the actual arguments from the mental illness. I have better things to do.

It's pretty cringe, like any YouTube-based philosophy.

:up:

The ambiguity of what either one is, is part of the argument (points 2 & 3). We can say some things about what a good life is (that it is worth living). We can also say that a good life is a unity of certain things, and that this unity is not found in a bad life. The fact that we cannot come to a consensus as to what that unity amounts to is the main thrust of the argument.

I might add an additional premise: a bad life is whatever is not a good life; the set containing the attributes of a good life is finite, while the set containing the attributes of a bad life may be described as the difference, or defined negatively (that which is not in the set of the attributes of a good life).

But regardless, your objection fails to refute point 5.