Calling people desperate, it seems to me, is a sign of desperation. — darthbarracuda

You mean exasperation.

You keep using this word "romantic" as a cop-out. — darthbarracuda

No, I'm describing the cop out. But you are never going to address this confused dualism of yours no matter how often I point back to its familiar cultural basis.

It's been amusing as always.

. The therapist that helps the patient form his goals sits in the position of power with the patient. He does what he thinks the patient needs, but it's the therapist's conception of how you ought to be behaving, feeling etc. are constituted in the goals the patient forms. I think it is a form of brain washing. The symptoms are treated but not their causes. — Cavacava

That's nonsense. But you are free to make up what you like.

In regards to you on Freud, more ad hominems. His work is still being studied, with plenty of professional work being generated based on his theories. — Cavacava

More vague and uninformed comment. But you believe what you like.

What are you saying. That CBT is different from Positive Psychology, or different as I have described it, unsure from what you said. They sound the same to me. Martin Seligman's is a big in both areas. — Cavacava

You misdescribe CBT in relation to PTSD in that it sounds like you are thinking of desensitisation or exposure therapy. And the idea of "accepting the therapist's goals" is expressedly not how positive psychology works.

Freud was a neurologist and psychologist and he is still being studied by neurologists and psychologists. He didn't romanticize psychology, that's your spin. — Cavacava

He was a coke head and a charlatan. And I've studied what he wrote - even the early neurological speculation he abandoned. So if you want to talk about omega and psi neurons, or this mysteriously oozing Q fluid that needs its psychic discharge, we could go there, have a laugh.

Yet a scientific ethics does not necessarily satisfy what we perceive to be moral. — darthbarracuda

But that's just you pushing your personal wheelbarrow again and claiming it to be the everyman view.

Tell a person whom you're helping that you're helping them because they can go on and make more entropy, and not because they're a person who is valuable because they can suffer, and they might just shake you off and tell you to buzz off. — darthbarracuda

There's no point replying to nonsense like this. It is just a sign of desperation on your part.

Yet surely these ends do not match with what we want — darthbarracuda

You are getting it half right in accepting that there is a thermodynamic framework at play. But I've already said that then itself creates our "free" choice about what we then do about things once we have that accurate picture.

We could go with the flow or instead swim against the tide. That's the choice.

And the choice becomes rational to the degree it is both possible and has some agreed goal.

Is the goal to make DC blissfully happy? Is the goal to remove the very possibility of psychic suffering? You might very well say so. I don't feel particularly moved to agree.

These behaviors are not wrong because of some entropic principle. They're wrong because we find them wrong, and then apparently some of us try to ignore this and shoehorn science in. — darthbarracuda

You keep talking about this "we". I realise you mean the many like yourself brought up on a steady cultural diet of vague romantic notions.

Query: what if the universe was malignant to us? What if, no matter what we did, we could never manage to escape its malevolent grasp? Would it still be "good"? — darthbarracuda

That is an adequate answer to your own strange question. But it is irrelevant to anything I've been saying.

And yet it is intuitive that we should give non-human animals the benefit of the doubt despite this being a presumption. It's not necessarily rational, it is ethical. — darthbarracuda

It is rational to give the benefit of the doubt when faced with uncertainty. But there is far less uncertainty about things like grades of sentience than you pretend.

So what we have here is only your weakly informed "intuitions" (ie: prejudices) against readily available scientific knowledge.

No, I'm talking about the ability to suffer, however that manifests. Sentience is just a placeholder. — darthbarracuda

Why doesn't it surprise me that you not only abstract the object but even its properties? Your approach is Platonic and dualistic in classic romantic unbounded fashion.

What are your thoughts on this? — Blue Sky

Integration and differentiation are both part of the same game. So it is completely natural that everything is all part of the one ecosystem, and yet ecosystems also tend towards complex richness - a hierarchy of divisions.

To talk about "interference" is to think about this unbiologically. If there were no competition or boundary drawing, there could be no co-operation that acts across those boundaries.

Prey needs predators to keep their numbers in check. Otherwise growth is unregulated. the prey consumes its environment, the whole system collapses of starvation.

You don't seem to understand the way that positive psychology is different from how you describe CBT.

The whole point is empowering individuals to figure it out for themselves after discovering how much of what they are doing has been unthinking - an internalisation of social or familial tropes.

And as for Freud, the whole bloody point about him was how he romanticised psychology. That is why he was such a big cultural hit. He regurgitated the mythology people wanted to hear.

And then I trace cultural attitudes to Romanticism's history (as the reaction to the Enlightenment) because it is a subject I have studied and understand.

If you want to dispute my interpretations, you are welcome to have a go. But you might have to be prepared to do some background reading by the looks of it.

I watched an ABC documentary last night on suicide prevention amongst tradesmen in Australia. — Wayfarer

There is no doubt there is a problem. And yet ethnologists find high levels of happiness in villagers living very basic lives in large parts of the world.

So it is a question that has to be studied systematically if you want to draw strong conclusions.

Are the tradies unhappy because they are no longer craftsmen but simply hammer hands of various description? Are they unhappy because masculinity itself is now problematic for tradesmen?

DC and Schop would have us believe the tradies are unhappy because they have discovered life is an existential charade with no true meaning. But I would doubt that. I would inquire first after their particular social circumstances and its distance from the kind of "village scale life" that is the most natural psychic state of being arguably.

The problem is, that nature is now valorised - 'being natural ' is now another form of faux spirituality. — Wayfarer

Yes and no. I don't see nature as being "spiritual" in some traditional ontological sense. That is a Romantic notion of nature - one in which humans and their messy social lives is exactly what is missing. The Romantic just wants the fluffy kittens and the starkly beautiful mountain ranges. Humanity is the ugly bit.

But in terms of an emotional connection, I think "nature" is what makes existence meaningful. And it is that messy nature - that mix of competition and co-operation, that cycle of life and death - which is then what I would feel like celebrating. The best cities are like the best countryside - organic.

And furthermore even within the developed economies, where we are supposed to enjoy the benefits of that progress, there is widespread dissillusionment and unhappiness, as evidenced by rates of suicide, mental illness and substance abuse. — Wayfarer

You say widespread, but have you measured it?

I'm not disagreeing that there is much that seems far from optimal. But also, it is easy to exaggerate what the majority actually feel.

Also there may be other things going on. The easier you make life for people, the more numerous become the many tiny things that might now get noticed as sources of annoyance, anxiety, etc.

When life is lived in more brute survival mode, you would either have the straightforward alternatives of an unhappy starving belly, or a satisfied full one after the kill.

But as modern developed life removes all the basic sources of unpredictability, the tiny stuff now becomes the focus in all its trivial, unresolvable, multiplicity.

If you have OCD about a neat house, there are just any number of crooked hanging pictures or mismatched cushions you can obsess about. If you fear strangers or spiders, you have the luxury of indulging such existence-irrelevant phobias to an irrational extreme.

So how much of the problems that the pessimists and anti-natalists complain about are problems that exist because all the bigger, simpler, problems have been removed from their lives?

You have to understand the psychology of why people might feel the way they do rather than just take their explanations - life sucks - at face value.

Thus the actual point of ethical importance is agential well-being. — darthbarracuda

Sorry but that is precisely the kind of presumption that I would be willing to question. I wouldn't use it as a starting point.

So what I would say is that flourishing and well-being are widely felt to be important as the basis for any ethical system. It reflects what would seem to be inescapably our own self-interest.

But I would then step back from the phenomenological justification to inquire about the natural basis. Why would humans have evolved (both biologically and culturally) to feel this way? And that is where we can see that it makes sense thermodynamically. Life exists as negentropy, or little pockets of organisation, so as to assist the Cosmos in its general entropic flow.

So stepping back to the bigger physical picture - as best we so far understand it through the systematic inquiry of science - we can see that human ethical systems do have a naturalistic logic. They are rational in terms of the rationality of the Cosmos.

You just want to start with "how it feels to me". I am interested in the hypothesis that "how it feels" is always going to be naturally rational. And the hypothesis is holding up pretty good.

As I say, many might be puzzled by climate denial, rampant consumerism, neo-liberalism, gated communities, McDonalds. These seem unnatural and unethical behaviours - according to PC romantic notions that are widespread.

Yet a shift in the entropic basis of the species now can make those behaviours "ethical" and natural. If we endorse the desires of fossil fuels, the things we might object to are in fact morally right.

And if we still feel they are wrong (which I tend to) then we have to dig into just why. And that is where the alternative of a slow burn sustainable entropification can be considered. We can now argue objectively why this is a better moral paradigm.

So my approach to ethical systems presumes nothing except that the Cosmos is rational. Nature has an over-arching self-organising logic. And that then presents us with the choice of either living within that logic or acting counter to it. And in fact, we can't act counter to it in any fundamental sense. But that still gives us a range of choices about the level of "harmony" we opt for.

And again I stress the empirical nature of all this. After making the broadest of presumptions - existence makes its own sense - it then becomes a matter of discovering what the fundamental nature of nature actually is.

Science has the advantage it is an open-ended process of learning. So we can get as close to the truth of things as we feel it matters. The answers one might have given 300 years ago would be much less informed than the ones we can give today.

But again, how we focus on welfare is more of a practical and applied ethical issue than a purely normative ethical issue. For you need to have normative ethics before you can even start applying them. — darthbarracuda

As I have argued, I would always seek to begin with the fewest presumptions about what might be the case. So the guiding norm would be the expectation that the Cosmos is rational. Nature lies there waiting to be discovered. Morality grows out of nature and so it would be questionable to hold to any ethical systems that go against nature. That would be - by definition - irrational and unsustainable (from a personal phenomenological point of view).

Well, in my opinion (which I've said before), you shouldn't. Goodness is such a queer property that it would be quite difficult to actually find goodness "out there". Hence why I'm an anti-realist: our mental states define and encompass all that is moral. — darthbarracuda

Your "out there" is my immanent nature. And your phenomenological "in here" is my hearing you assert transcendent dualism. You treat the mind as if it could exist without a body, without a world.

Sorry, but we should've all moved beyond this kind of atavistic belief.

Ants, admittedly, are probably more of a fluke than anything. But the fact that they scratched off the paint means that, potentially, they are able to recognize what is "normal" in their colonies, and recognize that there are "others" - the recognition of the "other" requires a separation between the other and the self.

Denying this possibility is speciesism, or the disregard of others' rights just because you doubt they have sentience (since it's neither proven nor disproven that they have sentience). It is an unethical leap of faith. — darthbarracuda

As I say, I have no problem with self~other distinction being as basic as it gets in the definition of life. Cell membranes can do it. Gut digestion and immune systems can do it.

And science shows that social wasps can discriminate the faces of nest mates so as to organise their interactions according to complexly hierarchical ranking.

So science continues to surprise our preconceptions about "sentience".

But that cuts both ways. We can't just cherry-pick the findings that support our preconceptions while not listening to the others that question them.

So I am very surprised by this ant finding - even if I already have no trouble believing other recent findings regarding arthropod cognition.

However the evidence that only humans have articulate speech, and thus only humans can evolve culturally encoded habits of "self-conscious introspective awareness", is just as scientific.

You are trying to talk about "sentience" as some generic property - a mind stuff abstracted from the world. This, as I say, is a Romantic hang-over - a dualistic belief in the mental as causally something apart from the world.

Now we all know that there is a Hard Problem when it comes to connecting mind and body. But how much of that problem is due simply to its ontological framing - a belief in the kind of materiality that arose out of a Newtonian model of physical causality? The advantage of a semiotic understanding of physical causality is that it offers now a causal bridge to span the gap.

So my approach is based on naturalising explanations - turning dualistic notions like "sentience" into measurable hypotheses.

The problem I have is that I am unable to see how anything more than an illusion of freedom could result from a semiotic process; if it is understood as entirely materially based. — John

First, Peircean semiotics takes spontaneity as fundamental. So it already rejects a deterministic ontology even at the cosmological level. In this fashion, it foresaw the shocks of quantum mechanics and complexity theory. It starts with a probabilistic worldview in which chance is inherent.

So there is the raw material - a built-in spontaneity. And then complex systems arise by the regulation of this spontaneity. A complex system can bend chance to its will, harness material accidents so that they achieved desired outcomes.

A Newtonian view of material existence of course makes all spontaneity a paradox. But Newtonianism just describes the Universe as it is in a highly dissipated state - within a degree or two of its final heat death. In talking about life, we are talking about existence that is 300 degrees C hotter, sitting in that heat sink which is 300 degrees C cooler. So there is a huge gradient to exploit - given also the solar radiation arriving at a temperature of about 5000 degrees.

Chance is thus taken for granted. And life sits in the middle of a flow of chance - solar radiation bouncing its way quantumly towards cosmic background radiation. So all life has to do is organise that chance using semiotic machinery.

This is physically what happens. Life is based on respiratory chains - complex proteins that take the energy off an excited election in seven or so steps by setting up a chain of quantum tunelling events. The chain is a sequence of sub-units set apart by precise distances that organises the milking of the electron's energy as a series of discrete and habitual "accidents".

So the underlying quantum behaviour is pure probability. But proteins are coded structures that then give cosmic accidents no choice but to bounce down life's carefully arranged flight of stairs.

So self-determination can be explained now in terms of the biophysics where it first arises. Biology has made contact with the quantum ground of being - via semiotic explanation.

Of course, it is then all "materially based". But it is nothing like materiality as would be traditionally conceived - the Newtonian description of a basically dead and dissipated cosmos. It is materiality regulated by symbol systems.

There is actually some evidence on this front: — mcdoodle

Yep. I googled and found that. So what is your assessment of its credibility?

The researchers do look credible and their university is reputable. But the paper is published in a rubbish journal and has attracted zero comment. This is a red flag given the result should have really made waves.

For instance, it should have got a reaction like the finding that wasps can learn to recognise the faces of nest mates - http://www.nature.com/news/wasps-clock-faces-like-humans-1.9533

And also the authors make some rather weird comments such as " It is logical that ants try to clean themselves if they see such a strange marking on their head".

It hardly seems logical that such a behaviour could have evolved given when in history has any ant ever before seen itself? Ants don't live in a world of mirrors.

Also, even if the finding holds up, there is other evidence that would argue that the behaviour is not the result of an integrated state of consciousness - the ant brain being too small to support that - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weve-been-looking-at-ant-intelligence-the-wrong-way/

But the experiment as described seems robustly designed. It builds on other work from the same authors. So if it can be replicated, I'm sure it will create a stir.

It is the sort of result I can't believe can be true. Or if it is, it must have a simpler explanation. Yet even that simpler explanation - as with all recent work on arthropod cognition - is going to be surprising.

And surprising because we do project a mechanistic/robotic notion of how brains should work on to neurology. But we are only starting to get to grips with brains in terms of organic or semiotic theories of "computation".

We underestimate insects because we think of them as mindless automatons.

Yet also, like DC, we also underestimate the gap that a new level of semiosis - articulate language - then opens up between humans and all other animals.

So if this ant finding holds up, I would say it makes the mirror test an even less credible test of "self consciousness" than it already was.

I think where we are going to disagree is in regard to the meaning of autonomy....

...Kant had the right idea, although I don't entirely agree with his method of thinking. He separates reality into the empirical, which is rigidly determined by causality, and the noumenal, which is not. The noumenal leaves room for Kant to believe in God, freedom and immortality. — John

Naturalism says something pretty similar and also exactly opposite based on Peircean semiotics.

So in the semiotic view, autonomy results from the separation of material cause and symbolic cause - the modelling or sign relation. Life is self-determining because it can use remembered/encoded constraints to regulate material/energetic processes.

But this is freedom constructed from "inside" the material flow - arising immanently - and not sourced from without. So it leaves no room for souls, gods, immortality or freedom in some transcendent sense.

So naturalism has an empirical model of what it is talking about - one that can be concretely tested and measured.

Autonomy in the real world is all about turning the accidental - the world's material degrees of freedom - into a useful habit.

But to say that what science discovers is what is moral is the naturalistic fallacy. — darthbarracuda

Good job I don't say that then.

Getting back to what I did say, why should I treat any notion of the good as something transcendentally abstracted from existence? So naturalism can't be a fallacy in that light. Any rational definition of the good can only make sense within the context of that which exists.

You ought to recognise this from the argument you wanted to make about the irreality of nothingness.

??? It's known that ants have sometimes reacted in such a way as to warrant the consideration of them having at least a rudimentary sense of self, when they scrape off the paint on their heads. — darthbarracuda

After looking in the mirror? References please.

1) We should work socially (like some Star Trek fashion..at least moderate environmentalist) to preserve nature/the planet, specifically to do away with the dependency on fossil fuels so that humans can exist farther into the future so that they can... — schopenhauer1

My point is that there is a choice - both choices natural in themselves.

So we could create a lifestyle that is predicated on the exponential liberation of fossil fuel. And that's fine in itself. It is not unnatural. Just a rather "live fast, die young" collective strategy.

Or we could seek to construct a lifestyle that is sustainable - one based on renewable energy. That is a conservative and homeostatic ambition - although one that could still be high growth depending on the realities of what we can achieve technologically.

And then more than that, I am saying there are reasons why fossil fuels are winning and not renewables. It is inevitable - usually - that the more urgent desire rules. But hey, we're supersmart humans. So maybe we do have a choice in the matter after all. So let's get talking about that in ways which are realistic.

it might also be true that it needs more "willpower" by the nations/actors involved — schopenhauer1

That's the trouble. Its like allowing McDonalds to exist and hoping a nation exercises its willpower. As soon as you frame the collective problem in this classically romantic fashion - one in which "individual will" is at the centre of everything - then the battle is already lost. A faulty philosophy is going to be the reason you fail.

THAT needs justification other than circular reasoning. — schopenhauer1

Its hierarchical reasoning, not circular reasoning. There's no point fussing about the details if the general structure is not right. And life on earth being a thermodynamic equation - a proton gradient - that balance is the one 7 billion homo sapiens most urgently need to attend to.

You know Maslow's hierarchy of needs right? That is hardly circular is it? More triangular. :)

Flourishing, happiness, tranquility and the like are so vague as to be useless unless expanded on in detail. — schopenhauer1

Did you ever check out positive psychology? What they mean in practice is hardly a secret. Although no-one is going to promise you that you can have it all. That's what Romaticism promises you - and why your life consequently feels like shit because you are so far from what is being promised.

Where does this crazy idea of its "perfection or nothing" come from? Mostly from being conned by a modern individualist and consumerist culture.

Pessimist philosophy in that context is then learnt helplessness - seeking escape from the game as if there is no other alternative.

Yet it is just a game. The rules can be rewritten.

Well up to a point, the ultimate limits being that it still has to be a thermodynamic game. Even suicide only recycles the parts, advances the dissipation, a little ahead of time. There are no perpetual motion machines in this existence.

If lab rats are being used to cure cancer, and this is only way to do it, then I'll support the effort. — darthbarracuda

So it IS justified that they suffer for our benefit? We should shut them in horrible little cages, give them a disease and also drugs, just to see what happens? Or even just give them enough of the drug to discover for a start what is the lethal dose?

This seems confusingly at odds with what you have been saying.

It's when we start talking about hunting animals for fun, eating the flesh of a dead animal for enjoyment, and ignoring the plight of predation and the infirm of the animal world, that I start to have problems with your and others' worldview. It's inconsistent. — darthbarracuda

It is hardly inconsistent that I would weigh up the trade-offs of curing cancer in the same way as anything else. But it is inconsistent that you seem to think inflicting suffering in the name of cancer research is OK for some reason that does not apply to the other cases you cite.

It's not clear how science should be the ultimate guide to morality. — darthbarracuda

My position is that nature constitutes existence. Science is our best inquiry into the character of that existence. Morality should be based on a proper understand of nature as morality is about our actions in the world.

So science doesn't tell you the answer in some way that is different to what we already would do in exercising rationality. It just is the method of inquiry which provides the picture of what is the case regarding the world, the context of our behavioural actions.

...ants behave as though they can recognize themselves in the mirror, — darthbarracuda

OMG. Here we go again! You must be punking me. Congrats.

Not having the stomach to dissect animals isn't the issue here: the issue is dissecting the animals in the first place when there's no good reason to. — darthbarracuda

Well you keep making the presumption about me being the blithe vivisectionist. I'm quite willing to draw my own lines in life.

But my point is that doing so is a complicated ethical business. And right at the beginning I highlighted at least two key issues - human cognition and social proximity - that you left out in your simplistic OP.

And the issue matters to me as you are representing attitudes which claim the status of rational argument but are essentially wishful romantic absolutism.

You're rather frothing at the mouth there, Schop. I'll wait until you've had a chance to calm down.

No, it's not anthropomorphic nonsense. — darthbarracuda

You are welcome to present the scientific evidence then. As I say, I've seen what you are talking about first hand and talked to the researchers who live with the colonies.

To quote Voltaire, then, if animals cannot feel or have no sentience - then why are their bodies structured and their behaviors so as if they do feel and have sentience? — darthbarracuda

It is probably pointless repeating myself here but I am the last to claim animals lack experience or phenomenology. Jumping spiders are one of my favourite cases.

But my argument is that we then have to define sentience or consciousness in ways that aren't anthropomorphic. We have to talk about the neuroscientific reality rather than just projecting some image of consciousness we have developed onto animals universally.

Having studied the comparative neurology of critters like jumping spiders and avians, I think I am well placed to do just that.

Put yourself in the shoes of a lab mouse. Do you really think it would be alright for the scientists to experiment on you just because they think you're not actually "there"? — darthbarracuda

Well yeah. One of the reasons for not actually doing that kind of research myself was that in the end I could not stomach it. After cutting up bodies for biology, shocking rats and frogs for psychology, and then discovering what really goes on in neuroscience animal laboratories, it became too much to continue going down that line.

But that was the 70s. The ethics is not perfect these days, but they have been hugely cleaned up. In terms of these kinds of issues, I have seen immense and continuing change on all fronts.

However it has been achieved on a rational basis, one capable of understanding the notion of reasonable trade-offs.

You however argue in terms of absolutes. And when the evidence is not there, you invent it - like these forlorn suicidal penguins deciding to die by trekking inlands rather than just stepping off the beach into the waiting jaws of the local orca pack.

Do you think there is a problem or not in regards to animal suffering? How am I wasting time by pointing out what I see to be problems? Essentially your positions comes down to "I don't quite agree with what OP is saying, therefore he is wasting is time." — darthbarracuda

In fact I care a lot about animal suffering and ecology generally. The difference is that I don't have to invent the facts that would support a simple-minded absolutism. I've studied the science and that informs my ethical position.

Each person believes the candidate to be the best, despite having differing reasons, and these differing reasons don't concern them so long as the candidate is elected. — darthbarracuda

I still don't follow you. But doesn't simply mentioning Trump and Clinton create a problem here?

The problem is that if people see themselves in terms of the world they will inevitably come to deny their own freedom and responsibility; their selfhood, This may already be seen in the way the scienitfc image of the human as being just another species leads to an inability to see humans as anything other than completely determined by nature, genetics and/or culture. — John

I disagree. I know science gets the blame for Scientism, but science is perfectly capable of understanding organisms as organisms. And a capacity for creativity and autonomy fits quite happily into the organic perspective. This is why biologists think computer scientists are a little nuts when they talk about artificial this and that.

So yes, there is definitely the widespread notion that reality is a machine, deterministic in its detail and meaningless as a whole. But this is a caricature of the relevant science, not a view that the science supports.

My question then is to whose advantage is it that a mechanical disposition has become wired in to much of modern culture? And how does that wrong view coexist so happily with what should seem its exact opposite - the Romantic view of life?

My argument is that scientists (in the relevant fields) don't really believe that nature is "just a simple machine". The scientist would instead be the first to stress the intimate interconnectedness of individuals and their cultures, human social systems and planetary ecologies.

But a belief that the world is just a bunch of mindless material to be exploited, coupled to the belief that the individual mind has transcendent importance, goes together as the moral justification for the way our politics and economies have become structured.

Even though the two things seem to be speaking in opposite ways, in both privileging the most self-centred possible view of life, they both act to remove social and cultural constraints on individual action. And thus - even in their conflict - they co-exist and thrive.

So you can't oppose Scientism with Romanticism. They are both riding the same wave of entropification.

Only Naturalism can see this is the case and so perhaps do something about it. But what hope is there in a world where people can pass off forlorn suicidal penguins as empirical evidence of something? That romanticism is just the flipside of thinking of penguins as disposable flesh automata.

I'm watching Westworld. Consider the co-dependency of these memes there. The machine that comes alive - has a soul. Scientism and Romanticism need each other as thesis and antithesis. Meanwhile the extravagant desires of fossil fuel slip past unnoticed. Whichever way you think you go - mechanistic exploitation or maximal individual autonomy - you are endorsing the one grander entropic scheme as in practice they amount to the same thing.

Individualism wants to shed all constraints - social and ecological - and so finds itself plugged directly into fundamental thermodynamics, the most general and mindless constraint that can't be avoided.

There is video evidence of penguins looking back at their clan as if they are looking back in forlorn. They know exactly what they're doing. — darthbarracuda

Anthropomorphic nonsense. And dangerous for the reasons I've outlined.

Absolutely not. It was the Enlightenment after all that produced the Cartesian view of animals as simply "machines" that has persisted for centuries. — darthbarracuda

I think Descartes produced that Cartesian view as part of sustaining the transcendental self of theism.

Science certainly promotes popular notions about reality being a mechanism. But scientists - especially if they biologists - know that the reality is in fact organic. So bodies are not simply machines, but complexly/semiotically machines, and thus not really machines at all.

You're operating under the assumption that what we can fix is all we ought to fix. This limits the content of our theories. — darthbarracuda

I'm seeking to limit theorising to what is rational. Your OP claimed to want rational thinking. I have shown how your views are actually informed by the irrationalism, the dualism, the transcendence, the absolutism, that are all the hallmarks of Romanticism.

We can't even talk about the fixing until we have a proper understanding of the thing we might claim to be broken in some fashion.

And you seem content with diminishing this perceived rift between the self and the rest of the world as if it's not important at all, thus shifting the focus of ethics from people as they perceive themselves as people to some abstract universal concept of entropy. — darthbarracuda

My point is that Romanticism gets in the very way of the problems that it might want to solve. If folk see themselves apart from the world, then they are not going to act in ways that could improve things.

If you spend all your time worrying about the pain lions inflict on zebra, you are never going to contribute in useful fashion to the real moral consequences of collective human behaviour for both lions and zebra.

Well, I mean I am a consequentialist. I would prefer if you were vegetarian and antinatalist for good reasons, but what matters ultimately is how your actions are affected by your views regardless of their justification. — darthbarracuda

You lost me there. How can the justification not be basic?

One of the points of abolishing speciesism is becoming an active role in the ecosystem - i.e. intervening and eliminating predation, helping diseased animals, etc. — darthbarracuda

Eliminating predation? What by euthanasing all predators? Teaching spiders to be vegan? What are you even talking about?

Penguins actually have been recorded to kill themselves. If they cannot find a mate, they walk into the ice desert of Antarctica and die. — darthbarracuda

Occam's razor says it is rational to seek the least complicated explanation of natural phenomena. I happened to be in Antarctica with penguin researchers a few years ago. And in fact a little group of penguins waddled right past the base heading in the wrong direction. They didn't look unhappy, just determined. The researchers said they get lost like that all the time as they seek out new living space. We headed them off and pointed them back where they came. But the researchers said most likely they would resume their trek after we had gone.

It's nature at work. If penguins never wandered, they'd never find new places to live.

So to mitigate the suffering of non-human animals because they lack socially constructed propositional language is, as I see it, dogmatic and narrow-minded. — darthbarracuda

Or the rational answer.

The conflict here is between the Enlightenment and the Romantic point of view.

The Enlightenment was about recognising humans as natural creations with a natural logic. We could consider the basis of human flourishing and create the social, political and ethical institutions to foster that. And recognising the continuity between humans and other animals was a big part of the new thinking.

So it is Enlightenment values that have steadily changed our treatment of animals (and races, and sexes, and the infirm/mentally ill/infantile) to reflect what we actually know about their capacity to suffer. That is what rationality looks like - consistent decisions based on accurate information.

Unfortunately you appear to be backing Romanticism instead. Every individual is a special creation. Absolute rights apply because something "is a mind" or "has a soul" in black and white fashion. Romanticism rejects shades of grey. A papercut is as bad as the Holocaust. Any flicker of suffering at all becomes a reason to say life in any form simply should not exist.

Romanticism is the ontology of choice for facists for good reason. Absolutism justifies irrationality in absolute fashion. That is why politically correct thinking - enlightened attitudes born out of rational realism - becomes something far more dangerous and unreasoning in the hands of those with romantically absolute habits of thought.

Morality need not be possible to attain for it to be so. — darthbarracuda

Again this just betrays the monotonic absolutism which gives you the answers you want to hear.

Back in the real world, complexity is the result of complexly (hierarchically) organised states of constraint. So there is never a single target to be shot for. Instead, we seek to organise our world so that it is separated into its more general constraints and its more particular constraints. So generally we might not want to cause suffering. But then many particular circumstances can rationally justify that.

Rational morality is all about having this well-integrated variety in our behavioural responses. We act in a way that is a negotiated balance of all the circumstances, both general and particular. That is why it takes quite a lot of time, training and effort to produce morally mature humans. Functional humans have to find complex decision-making to be second nature.

This is the reason for being impatient with simplistic romantic thinking. It is patently unadapted to the real world where moral action actually matters.

How so? Singer actually argues that if we adopted vegetarianism or something like this, we could solve a lot of the world's hunger problems. — darthbarracuda

Sure, we could all eat powered seaweed and the planet might then support 20 billion people. But rather than one dimensional thinking like this, it would be more moral to recognise the huge complexity of the ecological disaster we are so busy manufacturing.

And that starts with understanding the fact that fossil fuels have been dictating human moral behaviour for the past 300 years in ways we only dimly perceive. There is a reason why climate deniers thrive.

So there is no point discussing morality in an abstracted absolutist fashion - especially in terms of what we would all hope for, but already believe could never be achieved.

We have real problems in the world which we need to solve. Your romanticism becomes Nero fiddling while Rome burns in that context. Veganism or anti-natalism is dangerously distracting - immoral behaviour - to the degree it degrades contemporary moral debate.

Applying holistic habits of thermodynamics to acute problems in morality obscures the identity of morality. — darthbarracuda

As I say, it is quite the opposite. Your promotion of fluffy irrealism is a dangerous distraction when there is a real debate that needs to be had.

In exaggerating the agency of the sentient individual, you are playing right into the hands of fossil fuel's desire for entropification. Removing social and cultural constraints on biologically-wired desires is exactly why rampant entropification is winning despite our own human long term interests.

Yes, and I am advocating a moral non-naturalism. Nature is not inherently good, in fact many times it comes across as entirely indifferent or perhaps even sinister. — darthbarracuda

Who was talking about "good" in some abstract absolutist sense?

Again you betray your Romantic ontology in worrying about what might "inhere" in material reality as if it might exist "elsewhere" in Platonically ideal fashion. If you understood Naturalism, you would see this couldn't even be the issue.

You point to the indifference of Nature - even its sinister character - as a way to sustain the standard mind/body dualism of Romanticism. You have to "other" the world in a way that justifies your absolute privileging of the self - the individual and his mind, his soul, his inalienable being.

But absolutism of this kinds works both ways - which is what historically makes it so philosophically dangerous.

In removing all moral determination from "the world" - and society and culture are the principle target there - the Romantic reserves all moral determination for "the self". So it suddenly becomes all right if you are a vegan or anti-natalist "like me". You don't actually need a reason. You get an automatic high five as a kindred spirit. Morality becomes reduced to a personal preference - the preferences the Romantic knows to be true because of the certitude of his feelings about these things.

You are asserting that propositional mental content is required for self-consciousness, or any sort of experience at all for that matter, — darthbarracuda

No. On the basis of the science, I say that animals of course have experiences and can suffer (or enjoy). But also that it is clear that self-consciousness is a socially-evolved linguistic habit. So only humans can worry about things in an abstract fashion, viewing their own existence through a culturally-constructed lens.

Furthermore, humans are not the only ones with language - look at birds, dolphins, whales, primates, etc. — darthbarracuda

Humans are the only ones with articulate language, as I say. The difference is in the capacity for grammatical structure and hence actually "rational" or abstracted trains of thought.

In any case, it is clear from the behavior of animals that many, if not most, fear death, which is why suicide is almost unheard of outside of human civilization. — darthbarracuda

Nonsense. Animals don't contemplate suicide because they are not equipped for that kind of (socially constructed) kind of thinking about the fact of their own existence.

They don't "fear death", even if of course they are biologically wired to act in ways that promote their own survival.

It is clear that animals react to painful stimuli in similar ways that we do. It is clear they nurture their young and care about the pack. And until we have good evidence that animals aren't conscious in some sense (evidence is leaning the other way), it would be wise to act as if they do have consciousness. — darthbarracuda

Again, I am the first to say animals are aware. But it is a plugged into the moment or extrospective awareness. Humans have grammatical speech and so a new level of abstract symbolic thought.

The super rich ignore the super poor right outside their doorstep. — darthbarracuda

That's not so hard if they live in a gated community with security and are tightly connected to a super rich view of life in which the poor only have themselves to blame for their poverty.

So I would hardly condone what you describe, but it is not a good example of why proximity is a relevant fact.

It's only natural to care for one's family — darthbarracuda

You got it. And from there, your extended family, your neighbours, your town, your nation. Or however else your social existence is in fact hierarchically organised in terms of co-dependent interactions.

It is not a bad thing. It would be irrational not to be most interested in those with whom there is the most common interests. Its normal social organisation.

Bottom line here is that appeals to proximity or emotional support groups (like nationalism) is tribalism, a worn-out doctrine that can and should be replaced by a cosmopolitanism. — darthbarracuda

That's my point. The loss of social cohesion is one of modern society's moral problems. Once people start caring more about highly abstracted wrongs than the wrongs they can see right under their nose, then things get out of kilter.

Cosmopolitanism presents no issue here as the proximity principle does not stop you have some generic views about humanity as a whole. Given that we are 7 billion people now crowded onto one small planet, cosmopolitanism is indeed a clear necessity.

Yet still, it matters that we live in structured fashion - that's what morality is all about. And it is the nature of that structure which I am addressing.

I'm not really sure what you're saying here, but from what I can tell you are associating comfort with morality. — darthbarracuda

No need to jump ahead to any goals. I'm just talking about the fact that there are discontinuities that mark the continuity of the moral landscape.

I take the naturalistic view and so "it is all one cosmos". But then there is also a clear structure - an emergent hierarchical organisation, a self-balancing complexity - that is also part of this naturalness. And it would thus be only natural for that ontology to inform any moral reasoning.

We know what is natural. The debate then is whether to remain consistent with that or to strike off in a different direction because it is "reasonable" ... then supplying a good reason for deviating from nature.

Speciesism cannot be held up without leading to a slippery slope. — darthbarracuda

But only humans have articulate speech and so a capacity to master the habits of thought that we would associate with being self-conscious. For instance, we can fear our death. We can even fear the death of those animals particularly dear to us. So in reality there is a discontinuity there that would make a difference.

And then there is also a proximity argument. You may not like it, but it seems quite rational to be most concerned with everything that is closest to us. If a plane crashes in a foreign land, it is natural to care most about any tourists from our home country. And this is because it is only sensible to care the most about what we most directly can affect (or be affected by). It is irrational to just have a free-floating abstract empathy, regardless of differences in proximity.

So your starting point is a presumption of a world without gradations. And yet gradations exist. Any rational ethics would take account of the fact we are actually people embedded in a complex world, not souls living in moral Platonia.

So where is this justified that we should/can "shoot" at flourishing? — schopenhauer1

How is it not justified exactly? You are arguing the minority position here.

Instrumentality is the absurd feeling that can be experienced from apprehension of the constant need to put forth energy to pursue goals and actions in waking life. — schopenhauer1

It's only absurd to you because you choose to frame it that way using antiquated notions about scientific determinism and cosmic meaninglessness.

You make a pipe dream out of this "flourishing" rather than see the instrumentality that is inherent in all actions, situations, decisions, motivations. — schopenhauer1

You say it is a pipe dream. I've yet to see your evidence.

And you don't seem to appreciate the monotonic nature of your argument that makes it invalid as any kind of theory. In claiming to explain everything, it can't in fact explain anything.

So start again and explain to me what a life would be like if lived in a non-instrumental fashion? Let's see if that sounds appealing as a counterfactual option.

Yep, otherwise we are just talking past each other. — schopenhauer1

Well I can only really talk about your instrumentalism in a fashion that fits my point of view. And the interesting idea to me is how the modern fossil fuel burning phase of humanity is having to construct its own heat sink in terms of "pointless activity".

So life in a general naturalistic sense is all about the negentropy that arises to dissipate entropic gradients - the organisation that forms to liberate energy stores. But life normally is stuck with a rate of burn defined by environmental accidents - like the actual amount of sunshine hitting the Earth and being available for re-radiation at a lowered temperature having done organic work. Life normally has to find its equilbrium balance with the daily solar flux.

Humanity, through its technological development, stumbled on the entropic bonanza of coal and oil - fossilised geo-distilled plankton. And that took the lid off human development. There was suddenly enough fuel to do anything.

The problem then was finding something to do with this fuel. Humanity had to evolve a mentality to match - one adapted to a new energy environment. And humanity also needed a heat sink - some activity that could dispose of all this potential work in terms of, ultimately, waste heat. So a reason for action had to be invented to complete the cycle. Humans had to invent the outcome that would allow fossil fuel to be burnt in exponential fashion in a way that "made sense".

A lot of this "making sense" of the fossil fuel bonanza has happened in normal biological fashion - a population explosion in which we are headed towards 10 billion people by mid-century.

But then you can argue that a lot about the modern fossil fuel based mentality is "instrumental" in being fundamentally pointless activity. This seems right because we can see that psychological flourishing does not seem high on the entropic agenda. Instead, life is driven by a blind consumption imperative - an over-riding need to generate as much waste as possible because more ordinary rates of fossil fuel burn aren't enough to satisfy its entropic imperative.

So Rolex watches, and Instagram, and McDonalds, are all symptoms of the need to create heat sinks beyond what nature makes readily available. Humans have to consume products in ways that keep cranking up the global rate of burn. Our part of the bargain is using our creativity to invent these pointless - from the point of view of psychological flourishing - activities. And it would be this aspect of modern existence that I would call "instrumental" - in as far as you can clearly define your neologism in a way I might respond to it.

But then this thermodynamic view of nature does not really justify pessimism or anti-natalism or other recent incarnations of Existentialism and Romanticism.

There still remains the possibility of psychological flourishing. There is a goal at the heart of human activity that we can still shoot at.

And then there is the question of exactly how much of the apparently wasteful side of modern consumerism is merely heat sink creation for the sake of heat sink creation. Clearly there is a worryingly large amount. But once you look at everything we expend resources on - which includes public health, universal education, national security (including natural hazard defences) - then quite a lot goes to propping up the various levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It is useful activity, rather than useless activity, in terms of a standard model of psychological flourishing.

So an actual examination of the human condition will certainly say there is a fundamental problem which humanity faces. We are being rather mindlessly driven by the entropic imperative of fossil fuel, and we already know that is going to end unhappily.

But that nuanced story - in which the future is an open question, given we are so involved in how it works out - is a far cry from the monotone droning of pessimism and anti-natalism.

The Otaku/gamers version of Romanticism lacks any entropic/organic realism and so its criticisms of modern life have no penetration. It is just a pathetic bleat from the sidelines. It says "I wish I wasn't here" without having any philosopical means to analyse why it is where it is, and where else it might more fruitfully be.

I am asking you to define the neologism that I am using — schopenhauer1

You want me to define a term you invented....

I'd first like to see you define instrumentality in your own words, — schopenhauer1

But it already has a philosophical definition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

You might need to coin a different word. What's Greek for "pointlessly eating free time"?

all structural parts of life — darthbarracuda

Along with being born, having fun, being royally entertained.

We are back to your one-side view of existence as usual. Are you trying to prove that one can indeed see black without ever seeing white? ;)

any action that eats up free time — schopenhauer1

God forbid that we might narrow our definitions to the point where they would make a meaningful commitment to anything. How could we simply presume our conclusions if we had to start doing that?

I doubt this. Surely we can feel pain without feeling pleasure. Surely we don't need black to see white. We just see white. — darthbarracuda

Wrong.

I thought you were all about pragmatism. — darthbarracuda

That's why I say there is nothing wrong with modal logic per se. But you don't try to do heart surgery with a hammer and chisel.

Right, cause the majority can't at all be wrong, or because the majority wins by sheer might. — darthbarracuda

You are forgetting that it is the preferences of others that you are judging. And your excuse for advocating anti-natalist genocide is that the common herd are all self-deluding fools who don't realise how unhappy they ought to be.

The technical term for that is projection.

It is actually THE natural state.. upkeep/survival and entertainment for big-brained social animals. — schopenhauer1

You might not have noticed it, but entertainment is an industry. And being reduced to being a consumer of a product - a packaged experience - is where much of modern life loses its meaning.

What is more realistic is that society developed initially to support our needs to survive, but later began to develop as a means of keeping ourselves entertained. — darthbarracuda

So modern society exists primarily for mass entertainment.

Are you for real?

Done unbiased it shows how humans have developed civilization as a hodgepodge method of postponing/procrastinating death. — darthbarracuda

Let's not be ridiculous.

Oh, it exists sure, but we're not focused on the World, are we? We're focused on the inhabitants of the World! The basic focus of ethics! People! Not the relations they have to the environment or how they are part of the great cosmic plan of entropification. — darthbarracuda

What level of natural selection do you want to talk about then? Merely the cultural? Not the social or the ecological?

You're making this impossibly difficult. Pain exists where people exist. If people do not exist, then pain does not exist. — darthbarracuda

Is there a reason you skipped my actual point? Pain can only exist in counterfactuality to its phenomenological "other" - pleasure. So if the existence of pain is your big ethical concern, then that is the counterfactual that is actually relevant.

It's not me who launched into the great red herring of literal non-existence. I just reminded you of the rational basis for any counterfactual state of existence - the one which naturally relies on the further notion of striking a balance.

We're not just talking about things that already exist, we're talking about potential existants. — darthbarracuda

Yet you state that the red plate, along with your sibling, is literally non-existent. And it sounds like you want to talk about potentiality as though it "exists" now.

So yes, this kind of logical talk is very familiar. It works well for reasoning about states of affairs. It is very pragmatic.

But it is all at sea when it comes to addressing deep metaphysical questions.

Just because the lack of pain would be good for us, doesn't mean the lack of pain would be good for potential, unborn people. — darthbarracuda

Well, it would seem to remove what is in your eyes a major constraint on their existing. What would they say if you indeed allowed them to exist having created such living conditions? Thank-you?

It's actually pretty rare for people to wish they have never been born even in this imperfect world. So it seem presumptuous of you to talk for the unborn billions.

That was meant to convey that LIKE being a on a desert island where we are solely focused on upkeep/entertainment- — schopenhauer1

Where is your evidence that anyone living on a desert island would think about their existence in this fashion? In what sense are you describing a natural state of being for humans?

...SOCIAL reality that we actually DO live in, is the same except DUE to the social nature of it and more complex environmental/historical situatedness of it, we may THINK that it is otherwise. — schopenhauer1

You can't scale up from an unnatural state to explain the natural state. Complexity is different (as the slogan goes).

You make a strongman because you think I deny that we are social animals. I do not deny this at all. — schopenhauer1

That would be more convincing if you just hadn't begun by presuming the opposite - that society is a bunch of people who for some reason wandered off their desert islands, with their abundant food supplies, to go live collectively and dependently in the name of a little light entertainment and big city distraction.

And you're trying to reduce transparent phenomenological experiences to a foreign anthropological structure. As if recognizing the sustaining force of our existence doesn't make it less (or perhaps more?) absurd. — darthbarracuda

But anthropology has no trouble explaining the phenomenology. It is obvious that modern folk live such insulated lives that they develop a magnified fear of the real world. Every papercut becomes the Holocaust because life has lost its normal calibration.

If you grow up dressed in silk, even the manufacturer's tag may seem like an unbearable annoyance.

So this kind of complaining about the unendurability of life is simply a symptom of something you need to fix. It has none of the grandeur of a fundamental philosophical problem or even a Shakespearian tragedy. It is just simply a practical issue - how can we design modern society better in a way that might be more natural to what makes the human animal most content?

Because phenomenologically that is the case, and that is where ethics resides. — darthbarracuda

You have to make up your mind whether the world exists then. If it does, then there may be something beyond your person-al phenomenology. :-}

Suppressing the potential for tortured lives only benefits those who exist. — darthbarracuda

And?

Unless you are going beyond phenomenology to claim ontic idealism or dualism, there is no reason to treat pain as some disembodied quality whose existence can be weighed in Platonic fashion.

And then we have the non-identity problem, and the related issue of lives that are inherently shitty - i.e. if they weren't shitty, they wouldn't be the same life. — darthbarracuda

How many different abuses of logic can you conjure up just to maintain an argument that doesn't work?

Well, sure, but we're talking about an individual china plate, just as we are talking about the advantages a potential, single person can have in non-existence. Does non-existence benefit anyone? I answer in the negative.

Everything else is gibberish, sorry. — darthbarracuda

You've got your conclusion. So all you need is any old rubbish that seems to allow you to get to it.

I've pointed out to the contextuality needed to make your statement true. You agree - even going so far as to say the specific context is you and me agreeing verbally about the absence of some currently experienced particular.

If you aren't then willing to deal with the consequences of the acknowledged contextuality of the statement, that's your problem.

If we were to prune everything down to one person sitting in a deserted island with enough food to stay alive...

...Life is just an expanded version of this scenario.. — schopenhauer1

And yet of no evolved creature could this scenario ring less true. Humans are socially and even culturally-constructed beings. We are only complete as functional members of functioning groups. So you are basing an argument on an utter fantasy.

I don't see how this is necessarily of cosmic importance. — darthbarracuda

I'm talking about the logic we would apply to anything. And you already agree we are talking about "possible worlds" don't you?

I've said this before, the ethics I work with is not necessarily of cosmic importance, rather, it's of person-al importance. — darthbarracuda

Again, your dualism in this regard is only possible if you reject the holism of natural philosophy.

So yes. You continually claim this kind of atomistic freedom. It appears to validate your logic. I'm just pointing out its deep flaws. It is the reason why you just accept that there is the world, and there is the self.

Well, sorry, you've just ignored the whole point of my post. — darthbarracuda

I've pointed to the flawed logic upon which you have argued your whole point. That's different.

So non-existence initially seems like it might be advantageous to the tortured child - yet clearly if this child does not exist, then there are no advantages to be found. — darthbarracuda

I dunno. Suppressing the potential for tortured lives by addressing their contextual causes seems a lot more logical to me. Doing something about that is what would be actually logical wouldn't you say?

If a red chinaplate does not exist, what color is it? It's an inane and irrational question: the plate isn't even able to even have a color to begin with in virtue of it not existing. — darthbarracuda

But red china plates can and do exist. So there is both the general possibility and the literal actuality.

What is irrational is to try to base your "logical" position on such nonsense as "this red china plate that does not exist".

Surely you can appreciate the inherent and necessary contextuality of that claim - what it would take to make it a "true statement"?

Alternatively, we can say that non-existence is characterized as the differences between possible worlds. — darthbarracuda

Exactly. And I'm pointing to the fundamental flaw in such modal reasoning.

It takes for granted that things which exist could also not exist in free fashion. And yet if existence is holistic and contextual, then that is a faulty presumption. It can be only relatively true at best that events or objects can be treated as independent variables.

This matters at the cosmic level. Could you have change except within the context of stasis (or stasis except within the context of change)?

And likewise, anything important one might pick out about the life of a person is going to be similarly contextual. You couldn't have joy without pain, etc?

So you can't talk about the possibility of you having a sibling in any plausible fashion unless it is in fact plausible that such a sibling might exist. And you say such a sibling doesn't exist - but how can you be so sure? Did you check in the basement where your parents have had him locked up all these years?

So sure, modal logic is good for reasoning as often the world is atomistically disjoint to a high degree of approximation. It is close enough to a collection of independent events fixed by a history for us to just argue in that fashion. You could have had a brother. But you don't.

I'm just pointing out that this is not a secure basis for the kind of grandly general argument you want to mount here.

If a bad thing happens, then the avoidance or resolution of this bad must result in a good outcome. But this is entirely irrational. It is the exact same reasoning behind the valuing of recovery - if I recover from cancer, recovery must be a good in itself, right?! — darthbarracuda

It is of course entirely rational. Bad and good encode a counterfactuality that makes it possible for there to be definitely something. Things can be one way because it is a real possibility they could be the other way.

I realise you find this problematic because it means life being bad means life can be good. But tough. You just have an illogical approach to this issue.

Therefore, many of our actions seem to involve a faulty image of non-existence and a need for a good outcome. — darthbarracuda

Alternatively, the very notion of "literal non-existence" is illogical, unintelligible, given that something does exist.

So you are arguing it is a problem in a personal sense. The "you" that exists already brings with it the choices that counterfactually define that existence (such as a good life vs a bad life, a happy moment vs a sad moment).

But the same goes for existence as a whole.

Something surely exists (our Universe at least). And that makes non-existence a non-sensical thing to be taking seriously. It is not a valid counter-factual. It is not an actual possibility. We can only have the relative absence of something or other.

So this notion of "literal non-existence" has to be given up. It is an impossibility. Metaphysics in particular has to start somewhere else if it is to be an exercise in intelligible argument.