As a novice myself I've read a handful of introductory books on logic. — TheMadFool

I don't think you've read these books that carefully myself. The very small one by Graham Priest all on its own will put you right, and that's despite the fact that he believes in wacky logics that few other people believe in.

I'd be interested in hearing more from you. What's the story in this transition? It doesn't have to be personal -- at the meat I'm most interested in the the reasoning (broadly understood) that went into this transition

I barely know anything about Marcuse. But for W. I think I could see a possibility for what the article is talking about ,even if I might disagree with the general thrust of the article, and even if I might be uncertain what that would entail or end up being, politically speaking. — Moliere

In my youth in the 1960's Marcuse was hot among student radicals, and I was one. He seemed to have an update on Marxist alienation that made contemporary sense.

Wittgenstein was a recently-dead fogey. I read the Tractatus then, actually, but read it for what it superficially is, 'The world is everything that is the case', and knew nothing about the later Wittgenstein, although I knew gossip about him being rude and misogynistic, and eccentric in his teaching methods (I was at the college he had been at).

Now I'm a near-elderly radical, and Marcuse seems a superficial man to me. I don't accept the 'one dimensional man' analysis any more. One example of his superficiality is that he confused Wittgenstein with the logical positivists, which makes me think he hadn't read any of the subsequent stuff, and had read the Tractatus as superficially as I.

Meanwhile I've become belatedly interested in reading philosophical works more than once, and Wittgenstein's painstaking approach, as outlined in the article you referenced, is my model. It seems to me the converse of what Marcuse thought it to be: it whittles away at philosophical problems, trying to understand what might be to do with language or grammar, and what is not amenable to such an approach. As such it deflates high-sounding pomposity without belittling anything serious.

As a side note, Wittgenstein's personal brand of politics is interestingly peculiar. He gave away a large fortune to his siblings, recommended many students to do 'a proper job' rather than become a philosopher, fretted all his life at the possibility of other careers, and flirted with going to the Soviet Union in the mid-30's though not himself a Marxist.

There's the problem for dualism — Banno

But for me Searle's descriptive language is methodologically dualist. He speaks simultaneously of a hand movement and of a decision, of wanting. In what way is he demonstrating that the decision itself has some sort of a physical basis? He only demonstrates that the consequence of the decision, of wanting, is physical. But the nature of the decision is left unclear.

As such, all fields of science are in principle reducible to a complete physics, even if such a thing is impossible for us to accomplish.

What do you think physicalism says about reality? — Marchesk

I'm not a physicalist but I feel I've come to see its claims pretty clearly. The world of the physical is causally closed in one way or another - this might be via current physics, or an imaginable future physics based on present structural principles or some other physical set of explanations like apo's or Dennett's. There are then a multitude of variations about how to deal with psychology and social sciences, let alone the arts, etc. One might be reductive but that's pretty rare; one might say the mental supervenes on the physical, i.e. it's useful to us humans to talk about stuff in a non-physical way and we may never be able to reduce it to the physical but such talk is not extra to physical explanations, it's just a different way of putting it; or one might find elegant ways of remaining monist in metaphysical ways like Cynthia Macdonald (too intricate to go into here), or in a critical realist way that sees abstraction working at the right level of approximation but with the physical still underpinning everything.

I think all this says about reality is that we're in an age when such an underlying idea is in vogue, but these things come and go. Historically physicalism is a fairly rare thing as a prevalent notion.

(1) If dualism is true, then mind is not spatio-temporal, and body is spatio-temporal.
(2) If mind is not spatio-temporal, and body is spatio-temporal, then mind and body cannot interact.
(3) Mind and body can interact.
Therefore, (4) dualism is not true. — quine

It's interesting to me that medical scientists - for example - in practice mix 'physical' and 'mental' terms all the time. The accepted definitions of placebos all refer to both the physical nature of treatments, and the beliefs and expectations of patients and medical practitioners.

There is therefore *methodological* dualism. Mental and physical terms are freely mixed in good science.

I'm an old Wittgensteinian about this stuff, so my question then is...what further question is then usefully answered by asking 'What is the world really made of?' What is the debate about ontology for? I see it's fun in a fictional sort of way, but how are we to know when someone is right? And how will it further our human ends? Will it tell us something more about placebos, for instance?

But the unthinking mechanism has a teleology of sorts, and that is to continue the project of life. It may not be designed with purpose, but it is there nonetheless. Notice, my examples are both ones whereby the outcome is whatever is optimal for continuing to live (both culturally surviving or genetically surviving). Natural selection just so happens to create the optimal situation for life to continue via adaptation. Cultural selection just so happens to create the optimal situation for culture to continue into the future. We are here due to these type of processes- they are not due to any decision made by us, but the unthinking mechanics of a process whose outcome is more life. You, the individual's preferences, ideals, and personal whatever, is not factored into this other than the general ability to optimize this process as the process would lose momentum otherwise. However, I think instead of understanding this implication, you are getting caught up with the title's wording. — schopenhauer1

Well 'unthinking mechanism' is a metaphor. It doesn't have a telology.

Cultural selection is a secondary metaphor derived from 'natural selection', which itself has the implication from 'selection' of teleology which again, is unwarranted.

I don't deny any of the likely causal stuff. But the language one uses about the likely causal stuff is suffused with implications of intention. Life continues via selection to reproduce: it's a marvellous thing, but does not diminish or enhance or enpurpose me, the individual human. Actually I feel enhanced, as a human, that humans have divined (sic) so much of its apparent workings. I know I am small and un important, but that's the deal.

If we have a bunch of good reasons for believing determinism to be true and no good reasons to believe determinism false, then we can justifiably believe determinism to be true. — Chany

I don't know how I would arrive at that bunch of good reasons though. It seems to me I am always likely to meet a bright spark who'll say:

'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'

What would be my good reason not to expect such a person any moment? My experience of human life over rather a large number of years has led me to expect the unexpected.

But if our known fundamental laws were deterministic, and they had been tested to destruction, then might we be advised to take what they say about reality seriously?

And by the way, our known laws are deterministic. — tom

I already take what fundamental laws say seriously. When they are tested they are tested under certain conditions, often in a ceteris paribus situation, with certain other matters being held to be in suspense. Their determinism only holds 100% in the scientific imagination: in real world situations it's just too hard to make other stuff hold still for long enough.

That's just my philosophy of science, which is borrowed from Cartwright Dupre and Hacking. I think of it as always presuming our ontology is provisional, subject to the next disproof. In that sense I can make it fit with Popper's views too. But obviously its origin goes back to my disposition and experience.

Having gone back to college to study philosophy, I've come to realise mine is a highly empiricist view. I've spent a lifetime as an arty-fart, and good creative artists are more like engineers than theoreticians. We make something work to the best of our abilities, and this will involve testing creations to destruction if possible. We think perfectly-understood systems are pipe-dreams. There's always a nagging range of error, just waiting for the next clever invention.

If I change the title to "impersonal mechanism" would that convey the point for you and change the debate from semantics to the implications of this? — schopenhauer1

Well, obviously the title is as it is now, I accept that.

And yes, I think 'impersonal mechanism' would be an interesting replacement. Then my answer would be straightforward, that 'mechanism' is an illuminating metaphor but nothing more, and that I don't think people are here 'for' anything, other than for what they commit themselves to, when they find themselves here as we do.

From the (true) gene-centred perspective, an individual is a conjecture, one of a population of variants, that is tested against reality. — tom

This doesn't seem to me to be an answer as to why or how the word 'purpose' can have an adequate substitute of one's own choosing. It's an answer to another question.

I'm suspicious of the use of the passive voice. '...is tested against reality' does not name the tester. '...an individual is a conjecture..' by what or whom? The implication is that there is an agent. Well, who or what is the agent? Life tends to beget life. But is that 'purpose'?

Neo-Darwinism is true — tom

I don't understand the value of such a remark. Who could usefully argue for or refute it? I'm a great advocate of neo-Darwinism in (as neo-Darwinists might say) its niche. But to think of it as a guide to say political discourse, or aesthetics, or ethics, would be, in my view, an error.

The reason I raised this issue is because I have argued elsewhere that we are forced into existence by our parents. — Andrew4Handel

Our parents cause us to exist. To feel one is 'forced into' something is an attitude, not a statement of fact. I think to this extent I am a Stoic; I note that they caused me to exist, I note that I had no influence on this and can have no influence now or in the future and I move on.

It might give me cause to feel certain emotions towards my parents, and to have a certain attitude in my turn towards parenthood. These all matter, but they don't matter that much to me. I grasp that they matter to people of your opinion, but to me it seems a narcissistic preoccupation to place at the centre of one's philosophy. There's plenty of stuff in my world that matters to me which I would like to act upon, so I try to act upon those matters.

Then you can switch purpose with a word you like better. It does not necessarily change the whole "whole" versus "individual" part — schopenhauer1

I disagree. The word 'purpose' is in the title of your thread. The question of the whole in relation to the individual is a different issue, if 'purpose' is not involved. A word someone likes better will not mean the same thing. Human-defined systems have purpose ascribed to them by seemingly purposive humans.

It's not unknowable. Likely unknown, though — Mongrel

I don't understand (hard) determinism because of the question of unknowability. If determinism were true we would have no way of verifying it. We can't conceive of knowing the entire state of the universe at time t1 and at time t2 in order to do the verification - well, I can't - and those are the things we would need to know. So people's belief in determinism always flummoxes me. When I first got obsessed with philosophising it was a problem that drew me, but now I know it's got me beat - I'm just feeling garrulous tonight :)

This is something I've been thinking about so I'm glad of the thread :) In my 60s/early 70s youth I thought Marcuse was greatly 'liberating' and Wittgenstein was an oddball conservative. Now I find Marcuse pompous and overbearing, and Wittgenstein greatly liberating.

So is the recommendation that we change our language games in order to become more moral? Isn't that what politically correct speech attempts to do? — Marchesk

Part of the point is that there are few recommendations other than to recognise we are in language games, because once we understand the deeper implications of each game we're playing, which will take some in-depth work, then some of our philosophical problems will turn out to be just problems of language and grammar. The others may be extremely hard to put adequately into words, including ethics, aesthetics and spiritual matters.

It surprised people who got to know Wittgenstein that he was very unlike Russell, and sometimes antipathetic to the scientific outlook. In Vienna the Carnap circle were shocked to find he didn't take to (what became) logical positivism. The Hegelian/Marx approach of the Frankfurt school like Marcuse is obviously not his cup of tea (though he flirted with going to work in the Soviet Union in the 1930's). He loved music, read a lot of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, and was, as I would characterise him, someone with religious attitudes but no religion (I've borrowed the phrase from somewhere). So it wasn't that he was opposed to metaphysical speculation exactly, but thought the language escaped us to speak of such things well.

There still seems to be rich seams to mine in Philosophical Investigations and indeed in J L Austin's speech acts, even though they've been over-systematised by Searle, Grice and so on. The very heart of language is still a mystery to us. At the moment I'm reading about the thesis that language originates in gesture - that all language is in a sense gesture - which chimes harmoniously with my owns sense that each of us is in a drama, moved and moving others, bodily creatures as we are. If that were so then there would be many things about language and what we do that would need to be thought about afresh.

From the human perspective I think Heidegger has it right. We are thrown into life, I find myself suddenly amidst living, hurled here from nowhere and scrambling to work out what's what and what's going on. Like a character from Beckett who finds themselves bewilderingly on a stage.

He's saying that the most ancient meaning for good is powerful. The ancient meaning of bad is enslaved. We're talking about physical power here. — Mongrel

I know this was an earlier remark but I've been away, pardon me. This (quote) is of course the view Thrasymachus expresses in Book 1 of the Republic, but which Socrates argues against. To me the 'noble', whether Platonic or Aristotelian, version of the good is not overtly that might is right. It may have an underlying assumption that the stratification of society is unquestioned, and the top layer are the most virtuous or 'good', but that would be different.

I've been wondering whether the analytic distinction between power-over and power-to is at all useful in this debate. Slave morality seeks to overturn the power-over order of things. Master-morality seeks a space in which to exercise power-to.

Welcome, or welcome back :)

Up North, perhaps — Sapientia

Fock you, we say Up 'ere.

My lack of reply doesn't mean I'm not thinking of this, but that I don't know what to add. I think I have more belief in creative capitalists but otherwise we're thinking similarly

Given ideals, fail. Read more Beckett. Fail better.

A healer is indeed a healer, which is not a scientist. Healers engage in certain rituals, and it is often their empathy rather than their adherence to evidence which benefits the people who seek their help. Consider, for instance, the profound effect of placebos. Let's not judge anyone too quickly. And for me, the human spirit is well attested. If you disbelieve in it, well I advocate a few more difficult novels. Dostoevsky, say.

The Establishment has always lied about the size of crowds against them. This seems to me an odd issue on which to make a case or cause.

Many lies were told in the news in my youth. People got power through slogans and untruths. Am i suddenly supposed to remember Tony Blair and the Clintons as truth tellers?

To be clear, I'm nervous that Trump is indeed a Fascist. But i don't think we should kid ourselves about truth-telling.

But Nietzsche himself seems trapped in ressentiment, shadowed by his own father's convictions, or why would he so have it in for gentle Jesus meek and mild?

In politics it's a perennial problem of nationalism, what are we for once we win our nation state? What then for Slovakia, or America First? Then I agree with N, there is a terrible vacuity to the slave morality, what will it find of value beyond the overthrow of the supposed Master?

But then, isn't there in what N says a strange yearning for the irretrievable noble, the knightly, like Raymond Chandler novels? I bring you, the Uber Detective who knows all, but has barely a personal answer.

Laws happen in a universe where laws are It. An imaginary universe of ceteris paribus. When a law meets an event outside its purview - a fly lands on a billiard ball - then the two worlds collide. Then the lawmaker says, the fly caused the deviation from my lovely law. I think Carroll's is foolish talk, for the most profound knowledge lies in poetry, music and art, and scientific knowledge is itself marvellous but not all-encompassing.

The model changes. Robots don't make stuff for workers to consume because there are no workers. Non workers become non-consumers and have no value to capital. Robots are capital and produce products for capitalists. Everyone else fucks off and dies.

The flexible labour market is just the beginning of the end of labour power. Its not a betrayal, but the operation of historical necessity. This is a neo-Marxist analysis - do you not recognise it? — unenlightened

I'm a Green leftie and once knew a fair amount about economics. I don't think the future looks at all rosy but I don't think it looks like your vision in all sorts of ways. One fundamental thing is that yours is indeed a neo-Marxist argument and just like many of them, it's very weak on understanding the 'demand' side of macro-economics. 20th century capitalism defied Marx's predictions by thriving because (a) the nation-state spent a great deal more on non-transfer payments for welfare than in previous centuries, on transfers like pensions, and on the military; and (b) mass markets opened up, in a virtuous circle where better-paid workers bought everything from Henry Ford's cars to Amazon's books. These were the two fundamental sources of vastly-increased aggregate demand that made a lot of people richer than their forebears.

I don't see why there won't continue to be mass markets. As China and other countries advance, their growing middle-classes provide a bigger market. (They're buying up quite a lot of resources in northern England, for instance, where we might have made Manchester great through the invention of graphene) Perhaps short-sighted elites like the British will make their fellows poorer, they look pretty incompetent at the moment, but even on a falling global market, I'd expect a large middle-class to carry on doing well. The end of the Soviet Union, for instance, caused terrible, largely unreported poverty, and a steep fall in life expectancy, especially among men, but it furthered a burgeoning bourgeoisie, brought St Petersburg if not Moscow back into the great European cities, and no collapse of civilisation was reported, even though the effect on the rural poor was in my view disgusting.

If you look at economics through an ecological lens, which I've taken to be the better lens as I've got older and understood more, then there are profound (as apo would say) constraints, and it remains to be seen how they will be dealt with. Fossil-based energy gradually runs out, rare metals get rarer, so you can't keep making toy phones in such quantity, and you can't drive this many cars on solar power, so major structural change will occur. Climate change kicks in so there will be big climate events, though I think poor Bangladesh is in bigger danger than London, the metropolitan elite are quietly spending a fortune on making London safer (see this on how the South East has most flood defence spending). I daresay other metropolitan elites are doing the same.

What's to be done? Me I'm just plugging away, putting Green leaflets through doors (though it always seems ironic to use leaflets), doing my bit for civil society, conscious that long-term predictions are usually our present fears or hopes writ large, and bugger all to do with how things will turn out. And really, my lifetime has been pretty good: relatively peaceful, affluent, free. If we can pass some of that down the line to our grandchildren, that's the best we can do. Alarm stokes up populism and motivates only despondency.

The post-industrial age uses robotics and 3D printing, and no longer has a use for mass-production, mass consumption or the mass of humanity — unenlightened

I don't understand how the model works without 'mass consumption'. There have to be people buying the stuff the robots make, supply-side economics only works in a command economy (if at all). There won't be the profits you are imagining unless there's a market for the goods or services. To my mind the likely scenario is that there continues to be 'mass consumption', but that in itself disperses power: where workers once organised at the workplace, there is little comparable consumer-organisation at the consumer-place.

(One of the most loathsome betrayals of us ordinary people was the espousal by supposedly centre-leftists of the need for a 'flexible labour market', something which I think of as a much worse creator of insecurity than your advertising psychology - but that must be the ghost of the old neo-Marxist still stirring in me)

More widely, extrapolation from where one is at present rarely has turned out to be the subsequent case. The history of medium-term economic forecasting is comparable to the history of coin-toss-guessing in its sheer beauty and success rate.

So my reaction is that such crystal-ball-gazing is interesting more as a statement of present mood than of likely future outcomes. To that extent, I agree: my mood is pessimistic, though I imagine things panning out differently.

I don't even know how many people live on the continent. — Marchesk

1.216 billion. See, they could do it too.

The endurance of basic institutions — Kazuma

I don't see how you know when a 'basic institution' has changed especially if you're so vague about what they are. 'The family' for instance is transformed from the time of my childhood (the 1950's) to now.

Algol of another possible world is in fact an entirely different dog. In discussion of modal logic, many people fail to understand individuation. They errounosuly take semiotic similarity to mean two entirely different states are the same. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But of the three options I outlined from Stanford at the outset, they each take a separate view of the issue of individuation, surely? You seem to be arguing the Lewis concretist view here, where the 'others' are counterparts. In abstractionist or combinatorial versions, I had presumed that the exact variation from world to world might adjust appropriately - Algol being historically the same dog, for instance, until a possibility forked one of him away from 'the actual'?

So are animals aware of death, and if so, do they fear death, the same as humans do? Or is fear of death a particularly human affair? — Agustino

Here are a couple of recent pieces from national geographic about elephants, and about whales and dolphins. While there's a certain anthropomorphism in the reporting, I think it's likely that intelligent animals other than humans also ponder on death and loss.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/elephants-mourning-video-animal-grief/

http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-find-whales-and-dolphins-mourn-their-dead-too

Frequently a world is an abstract object. Hamlet's world is abstract to some extent. That means that if I said Hamlet was Argentinian, you could correct me. — Mongrel

People often call worlds like Hamlet's 'fictional' worlds, though I prefer 'imaginative'. In that sense, they can then be instantiated, as theatrical worlds (where Hamlet may well be Argentinian, the child of the Perons, perhaps). Indeed, then there's often argument among aficionados and between authors (as you cite Twain/Kipling) about the allowable parameters of the world.

I am also interested in worlds not yet invented and how they relate to the possible world schema. I mean both fictionally imaginative - did the world before J K Rowling had a Lightbulb Moment have a Potterverse as a possible world? - and scientifically imaginative - was graphene a possible substance before it was invented?

Then consider the Kipling/Twain issue. Twain tells Kipling he's going to rewrite Tom Sawyer. Kipling says that isn't possible. Twain says he can because it's his story. Who's right? — Mongrel

This tale also reminds me of the issue about whether to redo Huck Finn with the word 'nigger' removed or replaced, which it seems to me would take the story away from being Twain's, as the world of Huck Finn is related to the author and his place and times. I think, for instance, that every production of a Euripides play however modernised pays a certain respect to Euripides' vision.

...exactly what objects and universals exist is ultimately a matter for natural science, not metaphysics, to decide... — Terrapin Station

(TS, I appreciate this is a quote from Stanford not from you.)

It's interesting, if one starts from this point, to decide how 'abstractions' invented by human beings fit in. And here abstractions might include the economy, or the Potterverse, or the mathematics of an imaginary computer. It's the human imagination that conjures up possibility. Then we devise different rules depending on what sort of imaginary objects are involved.

One part of all such rules will then define what apo called the 'not even possible'. I think that's one zone I'm puzzled by. I certainly have been to philosophical talks for instance where people bandy about phrases like 'logically impossible' rather readily and I'm always running to catch up. Perhaps I was a fiction writer for too long, there's something about 'logically impossible' that gives me the urge to respond with 'Ah, but what if...?'

If you do not know what a world is, how could you ever know whether or not you live in a world? So if it feels like you live in a world, why would you think that this is anything other than a possible world? — Metaphysician Undercover

I think my philosophical journey, starting as it does late in life, partly involves trying to marry the language I'm accustomed to and the language(s) philosophers use. I find this gulf clarified in Wittgenstein which is why I've become hooked on much of his approach. So in ordinary life - which includes in my case writing and enjoying fictions, so I don't mean that an ordinary life is a simple one - I'm confident of what 'a world' is. But I'm not confident that all my ordinary human experience has prepared me for what the analytic philosopher types call 'a world', and that's where I become uncertain of my own judgment.

But if your concern is ontology - of what worlds really are - then this logicist's view leaves out the very things that physics might think definitional - like generalised coherence — apokrisis

I agree with this insight, and it's not just 'physics' that might make us other factors matter. Perhaps the idea of possible worlds is indeed the locus for a sort of clash between the formal and mechanistic, on the one hand, and the formal and chaotic (in the best sense) on the other.

Thanks MU. My first worry with your proposal is that it's multiplying my problems not simplifying them. It certainly works against my intuitions, which are (a) there just is an actual world, where I live and move, and (b) in that world I talk about possibility and necessity, but struggle to relate those concepts to other 'worlds'. I don't feel as if I live in a possible world, should I? Hope I'm not missing your point.

I won't bark at you then :)

So your argument boils down to... — apokrisis

Apo, I would enjoy debating things with you more if you gave some sign of being the slightest bit interested in learning from other people here. I'm an old git who's learnt a great deal from this forum and the old one, including from many people I've disagreed with, and now I've gone back to grad school in the hope of learning some more. Your constant disparagement of arguments not your own is very wearing. Every point on which you agree with me is immediately balanced by another disparaging remark. Our metaphysics are different: so be it, that's the way it is with metaphysics. Where you have something evidentially to demonstrate to me, I am happy for you to tell me. But your point-by-point remarks above are rhetorical, merely assertive. I don't see what they demonstrate except the differences in our personalities and points of view.

So your fingering of "science" as the problem could hardly be wider of the mark. Science actually pays regards to the evidence in forming its views. You would never have heard of the placebo effect unless it had come to light as a result of research. — apokrisis

I keep saying, I'm not fingering science as the problem, I'm only trying to propose a limit to the purview of the scientific view.

All cultures have healers and to me it's common sense knowledge that visits to the healer, with the culture's beliefs and expectations built into the encounter, sometimes make people feel better even if the healer's potions are made of sugar or wood pulp. Science hasn't discovered or revealed this knowledge to anyone. What science does is take such common sense knowledge and systematise the study of it, which I completely agree, is excellent work, and sweeps away many myths.

Medical science for a long time had a physical, physiological bias, and resisted scrutiny of what have become known as placebo effects. Clifton K Meador wrote a lovely book 'Symptoms of unknown origin' detailing his life's journey - from medical trainee ridiculing how older practitioners would give patients vitamins or prescribe a dose of brandy - through an intensive 'physicalist' phase of medical research - to his own later mellow understanding that the nature and mood of the medical encounter was and is profoundly important, especially because so many 'presenting' purported medical problems are seemingly intractable. In his and my lifetime placebo studies have mushroomed, and I'm very glad. Indeed there seems to a new phase of bright young researcher-practitioners who are trying to bring first-person accounts into the frame.

I don't know if AaronR comes by at all, he put me straight about Sellars a couple of years ago.

Metaphors reappear in new guises as fashion and technology change. A sceptic like me is unlikely to be won over but won't ever be seduced by the New Atheists either.

I'm interested that Wright veers between 'purpose' and 'higher purpose', two concepts which strike me as very different. Many living things exhibit apparent purpose, and we humans think of ourselves as having our purposes, individually and collectively. Systems are purposive, dictated by their human drivers, or by human observations.

This is altogether different from 'higher purpose'. When faced with this latter concept, I am definitely for a lower purpose: I am here on earth to play with ideas and other people, which may well involve poking a little fun at them when they get too exalted in their views of themselves and what their lives mean :)