The probability that your friend won the the Powerball jackpot is 1 in 292,201,338. The probability that your friend is lying is likewise is very slim. Either way, you have to choose to believe in something improbable, am I right? — Wheatley

Again, just noting that something is improbable is too unspecific. Something, somewhere is always probable or improbable, depending on how you look at it. I am going to do a bit of probability algebra, but before I do I just want to emphasize that the most important thing is not cranking the handle and spitting out formulas, but to be very clear about what it is that you are evaluating - otherwise it's GIGO.

So, what do you know? You know with certainty what you just heard from your friend (let's assume that you are not dreaming or hallucinating):

E = My friend told me that he won the lottery
P(E) = 1

This event could happen in one of two ways: either your friend really won the lottery and he is being truthful, or your friend lost the lottery and he is lying (for simplicity we'll neglect all other possibilities):

W = My friend won the lottery
P(W) = 1/292,201,338 = w << 1 (very unlikely)
T = My friend is telling the truth
P(T) = t ~ 1 (very likely)

What we want to know is the probability of the first of these two disjuncts: P(W ^ T) = ?

1 = P(E) = P(W ^ T) + P(-W ^ -T)
P(W ^ T) = 1 - P(-W ^ -T) = 1 - P(-W)P(-T | -W) = 1 - P(-W)P(-T) = 1 - (1 - w)(1 - t)

Here I made another important assumption: P(-T | -W) ~ P(-T), i.e. my friend's sincerity is unconditional. The converse of that would be that my friend's sincerity can be depended upon only when nothing important is at stake. If we push aside that ugly thought, then we have our result:

I can believe my friend's claim if the probability 1 - (1 - w)(1 - t) is not too low - let's say, if it is greater than 0.5:

1 - (1 - w)(1 - t) > 0.5
(1 - w)(1 - t) < 0.5

Here we have a product of two numbers: (1) the probability of losing a lottery, which is known and is close to 1, and (2) the probability that my friend is lying, which is less certain but is assumed to be close to 0.

So it comes down to how much you trust your friend's truthfulness, but you knew that all along, didn't you? The moral of the story though is that what is rational to believe is what is probable. No exceptions. The trick is to evaluate not just any probability but the appropriate probability.

Probability can be used to decide whether to believe something - arguably, probability is nothing more than degree of belief (according to the epistemic interpretation). But you need to carefully consider what constutes the event and how it should be conditionalized.

If K is your entire body of knowledge at the moment, and E is some hypothetical event, then E is not believable if the conditional probability of E given K is low:

P(E | K) << 1

In your first example, the probability of a specific sequence of cards being dealt from a deck (E_i), given that the deck is shuffled and the dealer is not cheating (K), is low:

P(E_i | K) << 1

But the probability of any sequence being dealt is a certainty:

P(E₁ V E₂ V ... V E_N | K) = 1

So if this case seems puzzling, that just means that you were confused about which event you were considering.

Likewise, in your second example if the event is that a specific child ends up in the NBA, the probability is low, but the probability that someone's child ends up in the NBA (given that NBA is still around by that time) is a certainty.

Migration has a lot to do (and will have even more to do) with climate. People flee from lands that are stricken by severe droughts, floods, hurricanes, and other climate disruptions that result in pest infestations and crop failures. Local conflicts are also fueled by the same underlying conditions - which in turn produces more migration.

Failure of reading comprehension. As per usual.

When I said the mechanisms of quantum behavior are mysterious, I meant as they occur in natural environments, not research settings. — Enrique

If quantum behavior is different in natural settings and in research settings, then it is not not the quantum behavior that we know from quantum physics. Quantum physics is supposed to be universal, so that quantum physics in natural environments is no more mysterious than quantum physics in research settings. This then goes in the "future physics" file. At this time there is no reason to suspect anything of the sort - which of course doesn't mean that it couldn't still be true, but that's just the usual fallibilist disclaimer that we attach to almost everything.

What's the relationship of entanglement to coherence? — Enrique

Probably none, if we are talking about quantum physics, as opposed to something completely speculative.

Note the difference between the cases of chemical magnetoreception in birds and reported brain wave synchronization between different individuals. In the former case the radical pair chemistry, which is hypothesized as one of the mechanisms, takes place on a molecular spacial scale and over the duration of a chemical reaction. That's a far cry from quantum entanglement somehow getting established and maintained over vast distances and durations (by quantum measures) and in extremely noisy environment.

What exactly are you referring to when you say "sensory processing" and "naïve interpretations of qualia"? — Enrique

I mean that we cannot introspect much about the way our senses work just from the way they feel to us. They may feel like something immediate and intimately familiar, but in reality there is a lot of brain activity involved in producing that sensation, and that activity is itself is quite opaque to introspection. Being the subjects of perception doesn't give us all that much privileged knowledge about the nature of perception.

please ignore my posts as I will yours — Coben

Um... ok. I certainly didn't expect such an overreaction to my critical response. I'll take your suggestion.

Is the proposition

falsifiability should be a criterion for valid scientific hypotheses and theories

falsifiable? — Coben

What does it matter if it isn't? The proposition itself is not a scientific hypothesis or theory, so you can't turn it on itself.

This is a common but cheap epistemological critique: to demand of an epistemology to justify itself, to pull itself up by the bootstraps. Epistemology is usually offered as a foundational framework. It is not supposed to be self-justifying: take it if it works or leave it if it doesn't.

We can’t fight climate change. To fight it is to refuse to accept that climate changes - that it should change - as if it’s the change that threatens us, as if it’s us that’s most important. It’s the wrong focus. We need to be more aware of what is really happening without fearing it, to connect with what is happening, and to collaborate with it. All of it. A good start would be to stop referring to it as ‘climate change’ - it’s humanity that we need to halt... — Possibility

While everything that you wrote up to this point is very reasonable, this is pure sophistry. It's like saying "you can't fight death." A truism, of course, if you state it like this, out of context. But if you say it while watching a toddler drown in a bathtub, anyone would be in their rights to bash your brains in.

"Citizen science" is a thing, and I think scientists, by and large, welcome that. But most good citizen science is just what you might expect someone who is not well versed in the field to be able to do well: grunt work, such as data collection. There's usually a lot of such grunt work in any science, even theoretical physics (though for the latter you would need to have at least some math or computer skills in order to be useful).

Asking questions is another thing. As a nerd by nature, I like picking the brains of scientists and other professionals, and in my experience the response is usually positive at best, neutral at worst.

I think (I hope) that we are adaptable enough to survive this crisis without actually diving ourselves to extinction, as other species and populations sometimes do. But survival is the lowest bar. Can we avoid a major population crash and the collapse of our technological civilization? Maybe. Can we get through relatively unscathed? That seems very unlikely.

Certainly, as the realization of the urgency and the severity of the problem grows, the concerted efforts to combat it will intensify and become more organized. But we have few good options left to us. Drastic scaling down of greenhouse gas production seems more and more like a lost opportunity already. Some miracle sequestration technology? That would be nice, but I wouldn't bet on it. I think the most likely optimistic scenario is that we'll just cope with the consequences as best as we can.

Give it up, troll. You might as well be peddling Moon landing conspiracies here.

The mechanisms are mysterious — Enrique

No, they are not. If you are talking about QM, and entanglement specifically, the mechanisms have been laid out out in theory decades ago, and have since been very precisely measured and confirmed. "Entanglement" is not a metaphor, it's a very specific feature of QM.

If you are talking about some hypothetical future physics, then of course all bets are off (but don't expect to see anything much different where we have already done a lot of experimental research). But I don't see much point in such unconstrained speculation, to be honest.

Thinking about the relationship of human vision to qualia, it seems eyesight does involve patchiness from saccading that is partially organized neuronally pre-awareness, but this seems to be distinct structurally from what we would consider our synthetic qualitative experience. Research shows that the vast majority of neuronal activity is directed towards the senses rather than into the brain. The mind is not a passive representation of the environment, it independently generates qualia beyond the influence of a sensing that is in its basics peripheral and subsidiary to the forms of perceptual consciousness. — Enrique

And pretty much all of this sensory processing flies under the radar of our introspection, which I think is a major reason to be skeptical of naive interpretations of "qualia" - I find that illusionists have a good point here.

Despite the euphoria surrounding the Paris Climate Accord — Tim3003

Euphoria? More like weary skepticism, that was my impression. And at this point there is not much hope for it.

UN Emissions Gap Report: "The 1.5°C goal is on the brink of becoming impossible"

It would be tempting to blame pigheaded denial (@Tzeentch) or special interests, but I believe it's more a symptom of the problem than its cause. The problem, in general terms, is that we as a multi-billion civilization just aren't capable of such a collective action. Technologically, averting the worst consequences would probably be within reach if we did what is required of us, but realistically it's not going to happen.

It probably depends on what human beings are willing to introspectively assert regarding their own minds. Qualitative experiences happen that contradict a thermodynamic interpretation of nature, and some of this has been empirically observed in systematic experiments, like synchronicity in the brainwaves of meditators, but we may find some major perceptual variability, so we have to carefully navigate around our susceptibility to prejudice when we model mental capacities. — Enrique

It's a big and to my mind unjustified leap from reported "synchronicity in the brainwaves" to "contradict a thermodynamic interpretation of nature." I am quite willing to entertain the possibility of some quantum effects coming to the fore as neuroscience details its models, but I wouldn't base specific conjectures on such a shaky foundation.

As for entanglement, it is very difficult to maintain at a distance between isolated particles, even in laboratory conditions. A single photon interaction is all it takes to break it. That entangled states could somehow (?!) come into existence between particles embedded in separate bodies and then persist over time is completely implausible. This looks like very loose analogical thinking ("synchronicity" <-> "entanglement").

I mean by well-ordered — tim wood

You know, when you repeatedly encounter what looks like a special term in a largely unfamiliar area, the smart thing to do is to look it up, instead of making up your own definition.


To those who wish to engage Tim in a mathematical discussion it may help to know that he is firmly convinced that "all mathematics is counting." This hangup may help to explain the difficulties that he is having with rationals and reals.

I'm just wondering the exact methodology — MountainDwarf

There isn't any exact or even approximate methodology. There isn't even a definition of what philosophy is that would match most paradigmatic examples while still managing some nontrivial specificity. If you take Socrates, Nietzsche and, say, Henry Allison (a contemporary Kant scholar), you will find little in common between these philosophers.

If you are not in a forced choice situation and just doing this for fun, then don't overthink the question. Just look at what goes by the name of "philosophy" and see what interests you most.

I'm not exactly making a formal logical argument, I'm stating some weird facts about quantum mechanics and conjecturing that a theoretical accounting of these phenomena might revolutionize atomic theory. — Enrique

Like I said, atomic theory is already quantum. If memory serves, we have analytical fully quantum solutions for the hydrogen atom in special cases, and numerical solutions for more complex systems. However, these quantum analyses treat the nucleus semi-classically, and even outside of the nucleus, more complex systems are also usually treated with semi-classical and even semi-empirical models - not because we don't have the theory (we do), and not only because it is hard to pull off, but because there isn't much need for a fully quantum treatment. The analyses, such as they are, already agree with experiments, so there would be nothing to gain from further refinements of the model. You have to smash atoms in colliders in order to get beyond the comfort zone of those approximate models. And that's my point: revolutions happen where we haven't looked before or where we have outstanding problems. They don't happen where we already have adequate solutions.

I will venture to claim that perceptual patchiness is probably an artifact of laboratory tinkering or lesions. — Enrique

We learn about the psychology of perception not just from brain pathologies, but from non-intrusive measurements and even rather simple psychological experiments, such as those involving perceptual illusions and illusions of attention. Our visual field, for example, is not at all what it seems: a wide, almost 180 degree window that we perceive all at once. It is instead a narrow patch that darts hither and thither, painting a partial, time-lagged and sometimes not entirely accurate picture. The feeling of instantaneous integrated perception is created by the analytical machinery of your brain that fills in the gaps with interpolation and prediction and cleverly directs the actual visual attention only where it is needed most. (Much of your brain's impressive capacity is allocated not on contemplating Kant but on such mundane unconscious tasks.)

Natural perception is at its core a fully integrated multiplicity, and in the context of biochemistry alone, what exists to be interpolated? All simultaneous synapsing of neurons consists of time-lagged relationships between cells, but perception is not time-lagged. — Enrique

How could you possibly know this? Your visual time resolution is on the order of tens of milliseconds (hence the 24 frames per second movie looks like a continuous image stream - a perceptual illusion). Audio resolution is a little better, sensory resolution - much worse.

Perception can be inaccurate, variable, and damaged, but it isn't fundamentally an illusion, its real. — Enrique

It is tautologically true that your experiences, your qualia are not illusory, in the sense that you cannot be mistaken about having experiences at the time when they occur, but it is also demonstrably true that your interpretation of experiences can be mistaken (e.g. mistaking a discreet sequence of images for a continuous stream).

Like I touched upon, subatomic particles, ions, and small atoms have weird properties under many conditions — Enrique

I'm conjecturing that the synthetic fluidity of perception can only be explained with quantum entanglement or some kind of quantum mechanism. — Enrique

It appears that the reasoning for your conjecture is summed up by the following flawed but rather common line:

• X (in this case consciousness) is mysterious,
• Quantum mechanics is mysterious,
• Therefore, X has something to do with quantum mechanics.

Please correct me if I got the wrong impression, but I don't see much more than that in what you have written. You name-check various counterintuitive or just interesting-sounding QM tidbits, like entanglement and "higher dimensions" (I am still not sure what that is about), but you don't suggest how they may be related to consciousness.

I imagine scientists finding instances of quantum behavior to be so pervasive that atomic theory will be completely transformed — Enrique

Considering that modern atomic theory is already built on quantum foundations, I don't see how it could be completely transformed with the current quantum theory. Generally, as more fundamental theories are worked out, existing higher-level theories are not so much overturned or transformed as complemented, fine-grained, and corrected in a few places. But by and large, they remain functional and far more practicable in most cases.

I'm conjecturing that the synthetic fluidity of perception can only be explained with quantum entanglement or some kind of quantum mechanism. If chemical reactions are the totality of mental processes, this lack of real integration would be mirrored by experience, but qualia in essence contrast with the time-lagged efficient causality of thermodynamic chemistry distributed in three-dimensional space. — Enrique

As cognitive experiments show, our conscious awareness is actually quite sluggish (even by classical neurochemical standards) and patchy, heavily leaning on prediction and interpolation to create the perception of a continuous real-time flow.

But I don't think biochemistry alone is ever going to be more than correlated with for instance a qualitative mental image, its going to require a comprehension of quantum effects in both cells and the natural environment to model perception directly — Enrique

I am not sure what you think the role of quantum effects are going to be in modeling perception "directly." I mean, quantum fields aren't qualitatively different from, say, classical fields, nor is quantum mechanics that much more complex or information-dense than classical mechanics. There is no mystery stuff there, it's the same kind physics.

What? The claim that the universe is infinite/sufficiently large? He's not referring to that. He's saying that the devil summoning thing, "like all existential statements", "in an infinite (or sufficiently large) universe" is "almost logically true". — Ying

Yes, and I don't see how this is a modal argument (the size of the universe wouldn't be relevant for that). His language here is sloppy, but he is, I think, alluding to something like a Boltzmann Brain situation, where through a random fluctuation of particles it could happen that certain words are spoken, immediately followed by something like a "devil" materializing in the vicinity. In a large enough universe, so the argument goes, this is almost certain to happen somewhere, some time, thus providing a specious verification for the existential claim. As it happens, though this wasn't what Popper had in mind, a multiverse (the actual, not the modal kind) would have served just as well for his argument.

Moreover, it can be easily shown to be highly probable: like all existential statements, it is in an infinite (or sufficiently large) universe almost logically true, to use an expression of Carnap's. — Popper

Yeah I got that. Popper was talking about "possible worlds" in the context of modal logic though. — Ying

The whole talk about "possible worlds" isn't an ontic claim, here — Ying

I think it's pretty clear that he is making an ontic claim - he says so himself (it's a "purely existential" statement). He is tilting against the windmill of probabilistic confirmation, and I don't see how modal logic could possibly help him in that.

If it is accurate that perception is modulated by a higher-dimensional quantum interfacing of electromagnetic fields and biochemical matter, perhaps one facet of a total revision in our picture of the physical world, qualia will be no less ineffable subjectively because language is a separate module from perception, but we can expect models in which a physical process isn't merely correlated with for instance the sight of a particular color, but actually is the sight of that color. — Enrique

I wonder what you mean by "higher-dimensional quantum interfacing of electromagnetic fields and biochemical matter" here? Space in mathematical modeling does not necessarily represent space in the usual sense (the physical space in quantum mechanics is still the 3+1-dimensional Minkowski space of Special Relativity). Often it is a phase space constructed out of independent state variables, or it can represent other things. Quantum mechanics in its vector formulation employs infinite-dimensional function spaces (Hilbert spaces). But other theories, including classical mechanics and thermodynamics, also make use of higher-dimensional spaces, so this is not something uniquely quantum.

More to the point, there are something like 10¹⁰ neurons and 10¹⁴ synapses in the cortex, and as you probably know, this isn't just a network of simple binary switches and connectors either: each of these neurons and synapses is a complex analog system, and the entire network constantly mutates and rewires itself. This is an enormous amount of dynamical structural complexity, located many orders of magnitude closer to the scale of interest than quantum fields, and we have barely even scratched its surface. So I think that before we start speculating about what we will discover when we drill down all the way to the quantum scale - and barring a few sketchy results here and there, these are mostly wild speculations at this point - we should start with this lower hanging fruit (I won't say low, because even this "fruit" may prove to be out of our intellectual and technological reach).

Arguments of this sort stand or fall on the elaboration and defense of their premises. Are you familiar with any such works? Are you prepared to discuss them? Without a familiarity with specific positive cases, discussing these arguments is like judging a book by its chapter headings.

Very nice guidelines. The only thing I would contest is that I think one doesn't have to have a position on an issue and defend it in an OP; instead, one could ask an open-ended question or suggest a topic for discussion. But motivation, background, focus, etc. - all that is important.

The most obvious flaw of your OP is that you don't even try to address the stated topic. The title question is about God, but the post talks about animals? WTF? It's like you had one question in mind, then while writing out your thoughts you digressed into related issues, and finally you just said to yourself: "Fuck it, this is hard work!" And just hit the Post button.

This might allow us to fashion a working model of the mind/matter complex, whether it be biochemical "hardware" running EMF "software", or some multifarious variation on this theme. — Enrique

You are putting the cart before the horse. Before we can speculate about how future "quantum biology" is going to solve the mind-body problem, we have to precicify and operationalize such folk psychology notions as "mind" and "qualia," making them into subjects of an empirical study. To this date, we seem to be nowhere near that goal, and it is not even clear that the goal is achievable.

Most of the time, we don't have to worry about quantum mechanics at scales much larger than subatomic: we use more coarse-grained, classical models, such as Newtonian particle or continuous mechanics, chemistry, cell biology, etc. The only times when QM is relevant at larger scales is (a) instrumentation developed specifically to amplify quantum-scale phenomena to human scale, so that we can detect and measure them (e.g. Geiger counter, cloud chamber), or (b) when coarse-grained models prove to be inadequate and the only way to address the problem is to fine-grain all the way to the quantum scale.

The two examples that you cite - the physiological magnetic compass in birds and (hypothesized) quantum effects in neurobiology - are of the latter variety: they are fine-grained mechanisms that would better explain coarse-grained phenomena. What I don't see though is a straight link to "qualia," which is just a fancy label for a fuzzy folk intuition. I think that before we can hypothesize QM explanations for qualia, we need to better analyze and instrumentalize this notion - if that is at all possible, which remains a contentious question as of today.

And everyone has been at pains to explain to you that sets with the same cardinality are just that - sets with the same cardinality. They are not (necessarily) equal. They are not "equivalent" - that's not a set theory term. They have the same number of elements only in the special case of finite sets (cardinality is a generalization of set size).

It's like as if someone told you that Sarah and Anil are the same age, and you objected that Sarah is a woman and Anil is a man, Sarah is American and Anil is Indian, Sarah is smaller than Anil, so how could they be equivalent?! Cardinality is just one measure of sets, nothing less, nothing more. Get over this already.

I’m not assuming its negation, rather I am saying it’s a meaningless proposition. — PessimisticIdealism

No, that's not how your argument is structured. You don't argue that the proposition is meaningless.Your argument says that the realist proposition is impossible to justify, but in order to be able to determine the requirements for justification, a proposition has to be meaningful in the first place - otherwise all of your argument becomes meaningless.

I think I will contribute with a listing of existent animals:

• Those that belong to the emperor
• Embalmed ones
• Those that are trained
• Suckling pigs
• Mermaids (or Sirens)
• Fabulous ones
• Stray dogs
• Those that are included in this classification
• Those that tremble as if they were mad
• Innumerable ones
• Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
• Et cetera
• Those that have just broken the flower vase
• Those that, at a distance, resemble flies

P3) It is neither self-evident nor certain that “the being of X is independent of its being known.”
C2) Therefore, philosophy should not begin with the assumption that “the being of X is independent of its being known.” — PessimisticIdealism

Again you are making the same mistake. That a proposition isn't certain is not a reason to assume its negation.

That sentiment might have had some plausibility twenty years and six months ago.

I basically agree. Practicality and efficiency render skepticism unhelpful in terms of getting on with our daily lives; however, this wouldn't by any means render the initial argument null and void. — PessimisticIdealism

The initial argument is null and void because, as others have pointed out, the realist does not have to accept your burden of proof. All you did was formulate a basic skeptical argument, and most people, realists included, already accept that skepticism cannot be rigorously eliminated. But that doesn't make it the default position. Why should it be the default position?

Yes. — TheMadFool

No, you still don't understand. Suppose the die already landed and came to rest, but you can't see it - it rolled under a couch. The outcome is not just deterministic - it's already determined. Does that fact help you with guessing the answer? It doesn't, and you still don't have anything better than probability. So would you say that a die lying on the floor under your couch "exhibits probabilistic properties?" That would be stupid (but what else is new?)

Probability is about what you don't know. Whether what you don't know is inherently indeterministic or whether it is a matter of fact doesn't make a difference to you. You still don't know what you don't know. So what do you do? You could say "I don't know," but if you have to make decisions based on incomplete knowledge, you use probability.

You are attempting to explain why people have consciousness from the evolutionary psychology standpoint. That's not the "hard problem of consciousness" - that's one of the "easy" problems.

And of course this question has already been taken up and developed long before you ever thought of it, so you might want to start by reading up on what's already been done in this area.

What causes an unequivocally deterministic system to exhibit probabilistic behavior? — TheMadFool

Exhibit is the keyword here. What is exhibited is in the eye of the beholder - it is not just an objective property of a system. A system may hypothetically be perfectly deterministic (although how could you know that with certainty?), but if you don't know enough about its behavior, then you can, at best, predict it probabilistically. Typically, when a die is thrown, there is no practical way to predict its exact trajectory (even if there was a fact of the matter about what that trajectory would be), nor even which side it is more likely to land on. Lacking such information, the prudent bet is to distribute probability equally between each of the six sides. (If you systematically fail to do this, then a competing player could exploit your bias to gain an advantage.)

1. Is probability an illusion? — TheMadFool

Calling it an "illusion" implies that you know better. But you don't - hence probability. Probability is a function of our uncertainty.

To me, if a thread is generating discussion it has merit even if the topic or OP is of low quality. — DingoJones

My observation is that the only threads that may not generate discussion are those with a very narrow focus, such as concerning a specific philosophical work - and those can actually be high-quality posts. Low quality threads tend to generate discussion, if only for people to comment on their low quality or to post easy takedowns.

But my point is that what is done there, in my relatively long experience, never rises to the level of philosophy, that is, a discussion of ideas with a reasoned and reasonable back-and-forth. — tim wood

You could say the same thing about discussions elsewhere on the forum, with the same justification.

Not least bcause even any discussion towards an agreement on terms seems impossible, never mind reasonable argument. — tim wood

Oh right, just as I thought. Your own recent thread in that forum didn't go to your liking, so you are lashing out against the forum. (I didn't look at it much, TBH - the premise for the discussion didn't look promising.)

Make up your mind: are you talking about physics or mathematics? Physics, even mathematical physics, is about something - something over which we have no control and of which we can only judge on the basis of past observations - hence the problem of induction. Pure mathematics is not about anything, at least not about anything over which we don't have ultimate control - such as our own definitions and postulates.

Which gives logic and math a kind of atemporal, aspatial quality. Which is odd, given that we inhabit temporal, spatial universe of change. — Marchesk

There's nothing mysterious here. Logic and math are our constructs, and as ideas that we entertain our minds, write down and communicate to each other, they originate in time, change and disappear - same as with our ideas about the world. But there is a fundamental disanalogy here between purely abstract ideas and ideas about the world: abstract ideas are not about anything, so they don't answer to the challenge of observation, which is what the problem of induction is all about.

ETA Or what said.

What are these destructive conclusions of which you speak? — A Seagull

I just said, didn't I? (Assuming you are replying to me.)