I would much appreciate it if we kept discussing it, as I am interested in your take from a Kantian perspective. — Bob Ross

Cool. Socratic dialectics? Robert’s Rules? Jousting?

Cards on the table kinda thing, I must say, if we’re discussing analytic idealism from a Kantian perspective, I’m not sufficiently versed in the one to juxtaposition to the other. So maybe you should start with a brief synopsis of what analytic idealism is. Or, just start anywhere you like.
———-

Kantian idealism has almost no following on this forum….. — Wayfarer

What’s that ol’ adage? If it was easy everybody’d be doing it?

Hello Tom Storm,

How do you feel about Kastrup's most extraordinary claim, that humans and all conscious creatures are dissociated alters of mind-at-large?

I think that it is a good hypothesis for explaining the soft problem of decomposition, but I don’t think there is enough evidence to support it completely yet.

I think it connects well with the dream analogy that most idealists use: the other dream characters are conscious as well.

I initially thought that the need for a mind-at-large made Kastrup similar to Berkeley,

Subjective idealism is similary to objective idealism, but they have differences. Also, I am starting to consider Berkeley to be neither really a subjective or objective idealist but, rather, the original ancestor of them both: he seems to have incompletely and somewhat incorrectly worked out metaphysics, but he did us all a favor by starting the convo about idealism. So I think Kastrup accepts and rejects different aspects of Berkeley’s idealism (especially the subjective idealist parts).

Mind-at-large is critical to Kastrup's position. I wonder how we can arrive at a reasonable belief that this entity is all there is and that we are all expressions of it?

The idea is that we can’t explain reality completely with reductive physicalism, so we should try with mind (which is the only other thing we have empirical evidence of) and see if it accounts for reality better. Kastrup argues, long story short, that it does account for reality and better than reductive physicalism. In metaphysics, there is no certainty about the positions: it is more about increasing explanatory power while decreasing complexity.

Bob

In fairness, I do not know whether or not he does. — creativesoul

The quote I provided summarises his view - which is why I provided it. I know it seems incredible, but there it is. It is the view that David Chalmer's 'hard problem' argument was set against.

What’s that ol’ adage? If it was easy everybody’d be doing it? — Mww

Ain't that the truth :lol:

Hello Mww,

Cards on the table kinda thing, I must say, if we’re discussing analytic idealism from a Kantian perspective, I’m not sufficiently versed in the one to juxtaposition to the other. So maybe you should start with a brief synopsis of what analytic idealism is. Or, just start anywhere you like.

Sure thing. To put it briefly:

Analytic Idealism is the idea that reality is a mind-at-large (i.e., a universal mind) and that is the brute fact of reality (i.e., is metaphysically necessary). We, as ‘minds’, are disassociated alters of that universal mind, such that we are ‘cut off’ from experiencing everything at once. The ‘physical’, in the colloquial sense of the term (viz., tangible, solid objects within conscious experience), is an extrinsic representation of the mental; just like Schopenhauer’s epistemic dualism, so Analytic Idealism posits that one can come to know the world from two sides: the representations (which is the physical stuff) and the mental events which are being represented. In terms of ourselves as alters, since we are merely disassociated from the rest of the mind, when we die we re-integrate with the universal mind (kind of like how you realize that your mind was responsible for the whole vivid dream after awakening although you wrongly associated your identity with a particular character when it was occurring). For Kastrup, the thing-in-itself, like Schopenhauer, is the universal mind.

Can you give a brief elaboration of Kantianism as well?

Please navigate the discussion as you please.

Bob

Well, his response to Mary's room doesn't support that explanation/characterization. It's similar to my own thinking, or at least seems to dovetail nicely with it...

Dennett claims that if we grant the premiss that Mary knew everything there was to know about seeing color, then the conclusion that she would gain new knowledge upon being allowed to see color does not follow.

Knowing everything about seeing color includes seeing color. So either she did not know everything about seeing color and she gained new knowledge upon first seeing color, or she knew everything there was to know about seeing color, and hence could gain no new knowledge upon being allowed to see color, for she already knew everything there was to know...

This doesn’t negate the fact that one can explain the whole by reduction to its parts and the relationship between those parts in their proper arrangement. — Bob Ross

This is only part of it. You are leaving out important information that cannot be gained simply by looking at an arrangement of parts. An engine does work. That work depends on parts but is not in any of the parts or combination of parts. The whole cannot be explained without an explanation of what the engine does, how it functions as a whole within another whole, a car for example.

It is not simply of analysis into parts but of parts as dynamic systems within larger dynamic systems. A dynamic system is more than just an arrangement of parts.

if one is fundamentally claiming that the mind is a part (or group of parts) of a physical body which emerges due to the specific relationship between those parts, then they are thereby claiming that the mind is reducible to the body. — Bob Ross

I am claiming that there are no disembodied minds. We find bodies that seem to be without mind, but no mind without bodies. The physical is ineliminable.

quote="Bob Ross;811549"]The purpose is irrelevant for all intents and purposes here.[/quote]

You do not know what an engine is or even what its parts are if you do not know its function and purpose.

A tornado is explained by the reduction of it to its parts (e.g., wind, dust, etc.). — Bob Ross

An actual tornado is not an assemblage parts. Wind does not combine with dust, etc. The forces that create the tornado create the wind and raise the dust.

Physicalism is arguing that it can explain (in terms of the how it works) a mind in terms of the physical biological brain. — Bob Ross

Physicalism as I understand it, does not argue that it can explain mind in physical terms simply because it cannot yet. What is at issue is methodological rather than ontological. Because we do not have access to disembodied minds we must look to the embodied minds of living being. That is the only place we find mind.

Either a)there are physical things that we are aware of within experience or b) there are no physical things without experience.

a) states that there are physical things and that we are aware of these things within experience. If, however, you accept b) then it is not simply that we are aware of these things in experience but that they would not be without experience.

It is a soft problem, though, because it is reconcilable in the view; whereas the hard problem of consciousness is a hard problem because physicalism is provably unable to solve it even theoretically. — Bob Ross

If there is fundamentally only mind then the physical has to be explained in terms of mind. It there is fundamentally only the physical then the mental has to be explained in terms of the physical. If one cannot be solved in terms of the other this cuts both ways.

And once again, it has not been proven that physicalism is unable to solve it even theoretically. You are convinced it can't. You should leave it there.

I am not claiming that we have evidence of minds existing that have no bodies except for the universal mind. With the universal mind, we do have introspective experience of this. — Bob Ross

I have no introspective experience of a universal mind. Private experience cannot stand as public, shareable evidence. In your mind is the idea of universal mind. That idea in your mind is only evidence that your embodied mind can entertain the notion of a non-embodied mind .

Your mind, as the producer of the dream, did not have a body in it. — Bob Ross

My mind that produced the dream is an embodied mind. Whatever I dream, whether a body is present in it or not, it is the dream of an embodied mind.





.

I am claiming that there are no disembodied minds. — Fooloso4

However, the rational intellect is capable of grasping purely abstract ideas, and even using them to construct novel inventions, such as computers.

The tree appears to you, and as such is part of the phenomenal realm. The tree - in and of itself - is the noumenal. — creativesoul

The phenomena we experience are views of things, not the things themselves; we never experience whole objects, rather we think them, which collectively generates the notion of a realm of discrete objects.

Is it a matter of opinion?

Hume agonizes over this; he can find no good reason to think objects persist, and yet he finds that he does believe so. It's a sort of prejudice; nature, he suggests, has taken the decision out of his hands, as a matter too important to leave to stumbling human reason. — Srap Tasmaner

As I say to CS above, we never experience whole objects, and yet the objects are always there to be viewed from various perspectives, to be touched, to be tapped or rubbed in order to see what sound manifests, to be measured, weighed, cleaned, smashed or destroyed.

So, it seems impossible to think that objects don't persist, and some more than others, obviously. So, I don't follow Hume in thinking that we have no reason to believe that objects persist. What makes the case even stronger is observing the behavior of the animals most familiar to us that shows that they also see the same things in the same locations as we do.

But the metaphysical explanation for the existence of these commonly perceived objects is another matter. We really have no idea what they are in themselves. You might argue that QM comes closest to informing us as to their actual nature, but QM too is still not showing us anything beyond human observation and judgement.

So, I would say that objects persist, whatever the metaphysical explanation for that might be; whether they are real material or energetic structures or ideas in a universal mind, I would still say that they persist, because we have no reason to think they do not and every reason to think they do. That is how I understand Kant's notion of noumena, as being whatever gives rise to our experience of persistent objects, something which intellectual honesty and modesty demands that we acknowledge is not known, or even knowable.

Dennett claims that if we grant the premiss that Mary knew everything there was to know about seeing color — creativesoul

Isn't the claim that Mary knows all the physical facts about seeing color?

I'm not entirely sure what the precise wording is. It matters though. Seems to me that Mary's room aims at the wrong target.

I'm not entirely sure what the precise wording is. It matters though. Seems to me that Mary's room aims at the wrong target. — creativesoul

The precise wording matters. The whole point is that Mary knows all the physical facts about seeing, and then learns something new when she actually sees color for the first time.

Need a link...

If knowing all the physical facts includes knowing the meaning of all the terms that refer to different ranges in the visible spectrum, then it is impossible to know all the physical facts about seeing color without seeing color. Without seeing color there is no way for Mary to know which part of the spectrum "red" refers to.

reality is a mind-at-large (i.e., a universal mind) and that is the brute fact (metaphysically necessary) of reality — Bob Ross

You’re on record as admitting a Schopenhauer-ian bent. He was the champion of the PSR, yet brute facts negate the PSR. It must be that being “metaphysically necessary” is sufficient reason, or the PSR doesn’t apply here. But why should it be necessary that reality be a universal mind, or manifest from such a thing?

Kastrup argues, long story short, that it does account for reality and better than reductive physicalism. — Bob Ross

Probably only if you accept the somewhat outlandish idea that there is a mind-at-large which we are all 'offshoots' of. I'm not sure this is a better account or in any way demonstrable. But I like his ambition.

At what point might Kastrup's answer to materialism be a case of 'mind-at-large of the gaps'?

As I see it, Kastrup does two jobs. 1) He undermines accounts of physicalism (but probably not all accounts) and 2) he posits an alternative account or 'reality'. He rather relies upon the frailties of the former in order to justify his version of latter. I think the first job is easier than the second.

I am not sure how to simplify it down further! — Bob Ross

OK. No problem. Thanks anyway.

Probably only if you accept the somewhat outlandish idea that there is a mind-at-large which we are all 'offshoots' of. — Tom Storm

Such ideas are not remote in principle from various formulations of panentheism or the kinds of cosmo-psychism found in Advaita Vedanta and is also not too far removed from the idea of the Intellect (nous) in neoplatonic philosophy.

Also interesting to note Erwin Schrodinger's interpretation of Indian philosophy, which appear in various of his philosophical essays and are summarized by Michel Bitbol in this essay. Some excerpts therefrom:

He declares that the basic doctrine of the Upanishads, namely what he calls the doctrine of Identity, or the thesis that allegedly separated minds are identical with one another, and that our mind is identical with the absolute basis of the world as a whole, is the only credible solution to the apparent conflict between the experienced unity of consciousness and the belief that it is dispersed in many living bodies.

“It is by observing and thinking this way that one may suddenly experience the truth of the fundamental idea of Vedânta. It is impossible that this unity of knowledge, of feeling and of choice that you consider as YOURS was born a few years ago from nothingness. Actually, this knowledge, this feeling and this choice are, in their essence, eternal, immutable and numerically ONE in all men and in all living beings (...). The life that you are living presently is not only a fragment of the whole existence; it is in a certain sense, the WHOLE” *

From his reading of the Advaita Vedânta, and from the basic experience he associated with it, Schrödinger inferred that the basic illusion, in our naive and scientific view of the world, is that of multiplicity. Multiplicity of minds in the living bodies, and multiplicity of things in the material world. About the first type of multiplicity, Schrödinger wrote : “what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of aspects of one thing, produced by deception (the Indian Mâyâ)”. “The doctrine of identity can claim that it is clinched by the empirical fact that consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us even experienced more than one consciousness, but there is no trace of circumstantial evidence of this even happening anywhere in the world” — Michel Bitbol

As I've explained, I don't find it necessary to posit a mind-at-large while still defending an idealist view. The risk with positing such an entity is the reification or objectification of it, but it never exists as an object, it is always only 'that which knows'.

So, it seems impossible to think that objects don't persist, and some more than others, obviously. So, I don't follow Hume in thinking that we have no reason to believe that objects persist. What makes the case even stronger is observing the behavior of the animals most familiar to us that shows that they also see the same things in the same locations as we do. — Janus

We have quite a lot in common with animals, even if we may not know what it's like to be a bat. Also notice this observation from one of our learned contributors:

Berkeley's subjective idealism was already "analytic" in the sense that he postulated that observation and conception is tautologically equivalent to existence. Many philosophers misunderstand this principle.

For example, they take the principle to imply that unobserved items disappear from existence. But this doesn't follow from the principle, for according to the principle it isn't false that unobserved objects exist, but nonsensical. — sime

I think the stumbling block you're dealing with is the idea that unobserved ceases to exist, like what G E Moore said, when he asked if the train wheels ceased to exist when the passengers were boarded. That is not what Berkeley's idealism is claiming.

That is not what Berkeley's idealism is claiming. — Wayfarer

Berkeley has the mind of God to hold everything in place. Ditto Kastrup with mind-at-large. Kastrup devoted quite some time on this in one of his lectures - the role of great mind and object permanence is precisely the matter I am hoping to hear more about. Kastrup actually says something like the reason his car is there in his garage when he is in bed at night is mind-at-large.

Such ideas are not remote in principle from various formulations of panentheism or the kinds of cosmo-psychism found in Advaita Vedanta and is also not too far removed from the idea of the Intellect (nous) in neoplatonic philosophy. — Wayfarer

Yes, I think that's very interesting.

Berkeley has the mind of God to hold everything in place — Tom Storm

Yes, well what ‘everything’ do you have in mind when you say that?

Object permanence. My limited understanding of Berkeley is that things 'exist' when no one is looking because God is looking.

Yes, I do see the point. Kind of a placeholder for when nobody’s around, as the limerick says. But I don't think you need to introduce a spooky mind-at-large. I tried to articulate a neo-Buddhist approach to it like this.

All of the vast amounts of data being nowadays collected about the universe by our incredibly powerful space telescopes and particle colliders is still synthesised and converted into conceptual information by scientists. And that conceptual activity remains conditioned by, and subject to, our sensory and intellectual capabilities — determined by the kinds of beings we are, and interpreted according to the attitudes and theories we hold. And we’re never outside of that web of conceptual activities — at least, not as long as we’re conscious beings. That is the sense in which the Universe exists ‘in the mind’ — not as a figment of someone’s imagination, but as a combination or synthesis of perception, conception and theory in the human mind (which is more than your mind or mine, although these are instances of it). That synthesis constitutes our experience-of-the-world. It is not an hallucination or figment of the imagination, but the mind constitutes the imaginative matrix within which all of this exists.

What we need to grasp is that all we know of existence — whether of the rock, or the screen you're looking at, or the Universe at large — is a function of our world-making intelligence, the activity of the hominid forebrain which sets us apart from other species. That’s what ‘empirical reality’ consists of. After all, the definition of ‘empirical’ is ‘based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience.’ So, asking of the Universe ‘How does it exist outside our observation or experience of it?’ is an unanswerable question (reflected by that quoted passage from Sime above).

So there is no need to posit a ‘supermind’ to account for it, because there’s nothing to account for. Put another way: the Universe doesn’t exist outside consciousness, but neither does it not exist, so there is no need to posit any agency to explain its supposedly ‘continued’ existence.

Hence the apparently paradoxical statement attributed to the Buddha - 'By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "non-existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one.' ¹ And that is because, in the Buddhist teaching, 'self-and-world' are co-arising, existing in dependent origination, due to the principles of conditioned origination.

Whereas, the 'polarity of existence and non-existence' shines through almost everything said about it in this thread. (I will acknowledge that it is a very subtle point to grasp.)

Yes, I think that's very interesting too but conceptually very complex.

What we need to grasp is that all we know of existence — whether of the rock, or the screen you're looking at, or the Universe at large — is a function of our world-making intelligence, the activity of the hominid forebrain which sets us apart from other species. That’s what ‘empirical reality’ consists of. After all, the definition of ‘empirical’ is ‘based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience.’ So, asking of the Universe ‘How does it exist outside our observation or experience of it?’ is an unanswerable question. — Wayfarer

I think that's a helpful summary and I don't think I can do better as a provisional overview.

That synthesis constitutes our experience-of-the-world. It is not an hallucination or figment of the imagination, but the mind constitutes the imaginative matrix within which all of this exists. — Wayfarer

Almost a Kantian position.

Pretty darned close. I first learned about Kant in a 1955 book, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, T R V Murti, which draws many comparisons between Kant and the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) philosophy of Buddhism.

We, as ‘minds’, are disassociated alters of that universal mind, such that we are ‘cut off’ from experiencing everything at once. — Bob Ross

Right. I mentioned not too long ago that, in us, thoughts are singular and successive, presupposing the condition of time, so it is reasonable we do not experience everything at once.

The ‘physical’, in the colloquial sense of the term (viz., tangible, solid objects within conscious experience), is an extrinsic representation of the mental — Bob Ross

So physical with respect to the conscious experience…..of humans.
Physical for humans is representation of the mental…..of the universal mind?
So for humans a representation of a representation?
The representation of the physical as conscious experience belongs to us as humans, but does the representation the universal mind gives to us as the physical, imply a conscious experience for that to which the universal mind belongs?
In conjunction with the above, wherein reality….our reality….is the brute fact of the universal mind, implies our reality just is the manifold of representations of universal mind without regard for the conscious experience of that to which such universal mind belongs.

Fine, I guess. We prescribe representations to ourselves without knowing how they come about, so no difference in kind prescribing them to something else we couldn’t know anything about. I suppose, from a Kantian perspective, which is what you’re asking for, we have no warrant whatsoever, to speculate metaphysically on that which is not completely within ourselves.

Analytic Idealism posits that one can come to know the world from two sides: the representations (which is the physical stuff) and the mental events which are being represented. — Bob Ross

I’m having trouble here. The representation is never the physical stuff, and the mental is sometimes what is represented. How is yours not backwards? Actually, it is backwards, so the real question becomes….how do you justify the backwardness, without merely saying it isn’t?

Why is it not that coming to know the world from two sides isn’t two kinds of knowledge? I agree there are two kinds of knowledge, re: a priori as representations of mental events, and a posteriori as representation of physical stuff, but only the latter is coming to know the world.

I’d be happier if it was the case coming to know the world from two conditions, which would be physical stuff and mental events, but not so much that each is a kind of knowledge all by itself without influence from the other. Two sides just seems to invoke excessive separation.

For Kastrup, the thing-in-itself, like Schopenhauer, is the universal mind. — Bob Ross

For S it is the will, I thought, but either way…same-o, same-o. Only way this theory works at all, to assign to a concept that which didn’t formally belong to it, is to redefine it. Which effectively makes it a different philosophy.

What we need to grasp is that all we know of existence — whether of the rock, or the screen you're looking at, or the Universe at large — is a function of our world-making intelligence, the activity of the hominid forebrain which sets us apart from other species. — Wayfarer

I completely agree with your post, and what you've said, but I would like to add something here. The principal thing which sets us, as human beings, off from other species, in the way that we perceive "the Universe at large", is the use of logic. This is what supports Aristotle's definition of "man" as rational animal. But even the extremely rapid development of the modern logical processes, initiated by Aristotle, has created a sub-variation definable distinction within the species, between ancient "man", and modern day "human being".

Here is my theory on the development of the use of logic in the human mind. The use of logic is a feature of language which is completely distinct from language as used for communication. This is the 'dual personality' of language which Wittgenstein approached with his inquiry into "private language". I like to look at this dual personality as a division between oral language and written language. And, I think the two can be seen historically to have developed initially in separate ways, and separate directions.

Spoken symbols had the use of communication, written symbols had the personal use of being a memory aid. These two evolved initially in separate directions. In ancient times though, it became evident that spoken word could be memorized through the use of verse, and verses were passed down through generations. This was a specific type of communication which required memorizing. At this time, written symbols were already employed personally for memory of things like numbers and maps. Then it became evident that representing spoken words with written symbols, as a memory aid for the verse repetition, was very effective, and this led to the formerly very personal memory device being translatable from one person to another. That combining of spoken and written language produced the explosion of human reasoning power.

This is what supports Aristotle's definition of "man" as rational animal. — Metaphysician Undercover

Agree. I also think that rationality is often deprecated by modern philosophy, due to the animosity towards the idea of innate abilities on the part of empiricism, and also because it seems politically incorrect to say that humans are different to animals.

In the ancient world sacred lore was indeed committed to memory, and the feats of memory that were accomplished seems amazing to us now. The entire corpus of the Vedas and all the early Buddhist texts were preserved orally for centuries before being committed to writing. (There is still a term in Islam, ‘hafiz’, for those who have memorised the entire Koran, which seems an astounding feat.)

Aristotle's definition of "man" as rational animal. — Metaphysician Undercover

Actually, he says "zoon politikon" (political animal), yet given his monumental Organon, Aristotle tends to get tagged with that "rational animal" (which I think actually comes from Plato). Anyway, our uniquely distinguishing feature as a species, I think, is that, despite mostly being delusional, we are collaborative knowledge-producers. :fire:

Hello Foolos4,

This is only part of it. You are leaving out important information that cannot be gained simply by looking at an arrangement of parts. An engine does work. That work depends on parts but is not in any of the parts or combination of parts. The whole cannot be explained without an explanation of what the engine does, how it functions as a whole within another whole, a car for example.

I think we will have to just agree to disagree at this point, as I don’t see how to further the discussion without circling back around.

I am claiming that there are no disembodied minds. We find bodies that seem to be without mind, but no mind without bodies. The physical is ineliminable.

This is partially true. I can get on board with the idea that our minds do not exist without bodies because our bodies are extrinsic representation of our minds. So of course we should expect to a dead body to still have an alive mind, but this doesn’t mean that the mind is reducible to the brain.

An actual tornado is not an assemblage parts. Wind does not combine with dust, etc. The forces that create the tornado create the wind and raise the dust.

You are just, at best, pushing the question deeper and it doesn’t negate my point. When you understand the forces, wind, dust, etc. you thereby explain the weakly emergent property of a tornado. You can add whatever other parts you would like.

What is at issue is methodological rather than ontological. Because we do not have access to disembodied minds we must look to the embodied minds of living being. That is the only place we find mind.

I am not completely in disagreement with you: I think we should do more research on minds. But that research isn’t going to afford us an explanation of what mind is (as I have already stated and provided a proof for).

”Either a)there are physical things that we are aware of within experience or b) there are no physical things without experience. “

a) states that there are physical things and that we are aware of these things within experience. If, however, you accept b) then it is not simply that we are aware of these things in experience but that they would not be without experience.

Firstly, “Either or” entails a dilemma, and A and B are not a dilemma (as I mentioned earlier).

Secondly, A in your quote and A in your elaboration are not the same claim: the former simply posits that there are physical things within experience while the latter claims that there are also physical things outside of our experience that we experience within our experience. Those are two different claims.

If that is what you are getting at, then I deny A and accept B (and it would be a dilemma).

If one cannot be solved in terms of the other this cuts both ways.

As I already explained, there is a symmetry breaker.

And once again, it has not been proven that physicalism is unable to solve it even theoretically. You are convinced it can't. You should leave it there.

I provided an argument and you didn’t really counter it. Instead, you just keep claiming that I am wrong and am presuming it. If you think I am wrong, then counter the argument (I outlined it in a previous post).

I have no introspective experience of a universal mind. Private experience cannot stand as public, shareable evidence. In your mind is the idea of universal mind. That idea in your mind is only evidence that your embodied mind can entertain the notion of a non-embodied mind .

It’s introspective evidence. So if you haven’t experienced a dream in your life (which I highly doubt), then, yes, you shouldn’t be convinced by it.

My mind that produced the dream is an embodied mind.

If you are a physicalist, then yes.

Whatever I dream, whether a body is present in it or not, it is the dream of an embodied mind.

If by “embodied” you just mean that your mind corresponds to a physical body, then I agree. If you mean, on the contrary, that your mind is your body then I disagree with that ontological claim.

Bob

Hello Alkis Piskas,

OK. No problem. Thanks anyway.

I apologize Alkis! If you would like, then perhaps asking me questions about it might help further the conversation. I will do my best to adequately respond!

Bob