Here’s a conversation I had on the platform formerly known as Twitter recently that may elucidate and clarify some aspects of my worldview.

Felix the Mage:
“RNG + eternity” is an answer to all questions

Me:
RNG as in random number generator? I’m not sure anything is actually random, though the metaphysical meaning behind quantum-random events is non-mechanistic. I’m not sure the modularized, indirect, and possibly deterministic randomness of an RNG suffices for a ToE, though

Felix the Mage:
The bell theorem excludes hidden variables, making the baseline of reality truly random… iirc
what we see are just statistical patterns emerging from our highly structured part of chaos

Me:
Doesn’t Bell’s inequality only exclude hidden variables in the context of quantum entanglement? Or at least it only does in the sense that it proves causality is non-local. This doesn’t seem to exclude metaphysical “causes”/meaning behind randomness in general, especially since Bell’s inequality applies to scientific observation/modeling, which pertains exclusively to mechanism, and what I’m proposing transcends mechanism.

Felix the Mage:
what are you proposing?

what is your point of view?

Me:
In a nutshell, life/the universe is so much more than the physical and what we can scientifically model. It’s sublime, boundlessly mysterious, ultimately ineffable, and unimaginably rich in meaning in every conceivable sense.

Felix the Mage:
In other words, you still hold on to idea of human-like deity creating and caring about the world, else you find your life meaningless… and while I understand that sentiment, I found it impossible to attain.

Me:
I never said my deity was human-like 🙂 And I wouldn’t stake the meaningfulness of my life on how much the deity cares, because his/her policy seems to be “anything goes.” If God cared, life wouldn’t suck so much.

Felix the Mage:
> It’s sublime, boundlessly mysterious, ultimately ineffable, and unimaginably rich in meaning in every conceivable sense
That it is. And yet – it is still physical and scientific. The reality, in fact, is richer, more meaningful, more mysterious and more wonderful than any metaphysics could even conceive.

Me:
Yes, this is true, except that assuming it’s all categorically physical and scientific is an unnecessary limitation and severely constricts its wondrousness (though you can do some mental acrobatics that seem to mitigate some of that loss wondrousness).

Felix the Mage:
There is no need for mental acrobatics. Maybe I just use “physical” too broadly. Maybe I should use “real” instead. Non-dual. I just don’t see any separation between physical and “meta”-physical. It is a one undivided whole.

[backing up a little..]
Felix the Mage:
what do you mean by “metaphysical” here?

Me:
Hard to pin down. I guess I’m using it in the traditional sense of being beneath or beyond physics or the physical. Also, I mean something transcendental, spiritual, divine, conscious, maybe the collective consciousness. And it has to do with free will/choice/creativity, which I see as being fundamentally non-mechanistic/non-deterministic, yet not relying on absolute, meaningless randomness either.

Felix the Mage:
yeah, for all of this, you have to ask “where did that come from”… my answer is that it evolved (as all things we observe evolve) by random trial and error…

Me:
I think it probably evolved through a combination of conscious, intelligent/informed intention and trial and error, and even the trials could have been intelligently chosen rather than random, or a manifestation of pure freedom.

Felix the Mage:
and the conscious, intelligent/informed intention, being complex, always existed and didn’t evolve from simpler elements? So you basically believe in theist god?

Me:
I believe that all that exists in the universe is ultimately life/consciousness. You can call it God, self, consciousness, the collective consciousness, the unity of all beings, the plurality of all beings, or whatever. I’m not sure I believe in a “theist” God, I’m not religious

Felix the Mage:
both life and consciousness are highly complex phenomena. Everywhere we look, we see complex phenomena evolve from simple ones. You can’t go much simpler than RNG, while RNG is sufficient to generate both life and consciousness. Now show me some mental gymnastics 😉

[jumping back up to my explanation of what I mean by “metaphysical”..]
Felix the Mage:
as you can see in the world all around you, this randomness generates copious amounts of meaning

Me:
I can see the copious amounts of meaning, but I can’t see that it all comes from meaningless randomness, that’s an assumption.

Felix the Mage:
It is the simplest explanation and we see complex systems evolving from simple ones by random mutation/generation literally everywhere. This is just an extrapolation. No supernatural elements needed.

Me:
But this begs the question: We don’t know that those “random” mutations are truly meaninglessly random to the core. As for the need for supernatural elements, the reasons for my metaphysical view aren’t as simple/overt as scientific deduction

Felix the Mage:
Well, the thing is, over the aeons of eternity, many beings like gods were generated. By the same token – everything you can imagine, all that is possible to experience, could be generated. If you call this meaningless, be my guest, but it creates all meaning.

Me:
This could be more or less right. I tentatively think that every conceivable possibility and reality is manifest “somewhere.” A generator that generates *everything* isn’t necessarily random, but, from this perspective, which reality or situations you find yourself in could be considered random.

Me:
(Though in truth you find yourself in all situations everywhere, it’s just each of your individuations isn’t aware of being all your other individuations)

Felix the Mage:
If you assume anything other than “random” you make it more complicated than “random” =)

Felix the Mage:
yes =) (also, thanks man, this was the best talk on this god-forsaken app in ages 😉 )

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A few notes:
1. I say a little more about the false dichotomy of totally meaningless randomness versus totally deterministic causality (regarding reality being necessarily a combination of those two elements if not wholly deterministic), as well as refute several other common issues people have with the notion of free will, in my ‘notes on free will’ post: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/notes-on-free-will/
2. To elaborate on my comment regarding Bell’s theorem not applying to non-mechanistic causes, the idea is that the universe is to a large degree, perhaps fundamentally, non-mechanistic, but it appears mechanistic due to the behavioral consistency/order of fundamentally unpredictable things on a purely aggregate/statistical scale, such as the huge scale of our own observations, as we ourselves are absolutely huge, our bodies containing trillions of cells and each cell containing trillions of atoms, and the mathematical modeling of physics by its very nature is totally unable to assimilate any kind of non-mechanistic meaning, which is precisely why scientists resort to such ideology as quantum events comprising “absolute,” presumably meaningless “randomness.”
3. I realize, though I didn’t take the time to point it out in the discussion, that Felix’s comment that reality is totally scientific is nonsensical because science is merely a human endeavor to understand reality, so saying reality is “scientific” is pretty much akin to claiming that reality is literally composed of the scientific method, which is obviously absurd.
This mistake is actually very telling, because it reveals the scientism of our times, under which we confuse the scientific and empirical nature of our assimilation of the world, and the limited body of facts we’ve thus far acquired through science, with the fundamental nature of reality.
And not to mention that that claim of his, despite his later backpedaling to include all of metaphysics and everything imaginable under “physics,” still comprises an unnecessary limitation on his part of what reality can possibly consist of. It implies that every aspect of reality is by nature (a) physically/empirically observable and (b) mathematically modellable.
4. Regarding my statement that If God cared, life wouldn’t suck so much, the truth is that I do notice a large amount of divine intervention in the form of uncanny synchronicity to prevent certain things from occurring. So I guess God is active, but just not playing by the rules I would find easy or convenient. Apparently, God leaves it up to me to save myself. =/

Sabine Hossenfelder, a fairly popular science communicator, says on Twitter, “I understand that some people believe in God, but I don’t understand how they manage to do that.”

Here’s my response, though pretty much all of it can be found in other words spread out in other essays in this blog.

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To start with, it’d probably better for you to say why you think it’s irrational or otherwise wrong to believe in God so that I can refute it. I guess I’m saying that open-mindedness is or should be the default.

I think it’s okay to believe in God because I don’t rely on physicalist first principles in my ontology. I think doing so is tragically narrow-minded and limiting.

Nor do I think it’s necessary or wise to limit what you believe in to what you can imagine a possible mechanism for. The universe is mysterious, you don’t have to understand how something works to know it exists (we don’t even understand how magnetism, or anything else for that matter, works on the most fundamental level; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8 – Feynman on how magnets work), and it’s scientistic to assume that everything that exists is necessarily mechanistic in nature.

I also don’t think it’s necessary to dismiss any idea that’s unfalsifiable. There is meaning and metaphysical truth to saying “God exists” or “God doesn’t exist,” and there are observable consequences to that truth state. Scientific ideas may need to be falsifiable, but science isn’t the only legitimate means of knowing anything. It relies on hard empirical evidence, and there are more indirect, if indefinite, ways of inferring truths or probable truths. Only believing things that are provable/proven is too easy (their analysis being straightforward and relatively deterministic, almost algorithmic in nature) and fear based. (The desire for social status is a fundamental drive of humans, so academics would fear believing in anything that they can’t defend on academic bases because they’d be looked down upon. And there are other reasons we may fear the possibility of being wrong.) Making educated guesses based on personal experience, others’ experiences, heuristics, intuition, abstract/intangible perception, and whatever other bases puts more of our inherent mental faculties to work.

Another thing that tends to turn people off of the idea of God is Abrahamic religion. Their God is clearly depraved and anthropomorphic, as well as being self-contradictory (being all-loving yet vengeful, judgmental, warmongering, genocidal, etc.), to say nothing of the patent ridiculousness of the religion as a whole that’s tied with that God. The spiritualist God is much more sensible and beautiful, but it’s not what people think of when they think of “God” because of the stronghold religion has on society.

So, those are the reasons I think it’s not necessarily bad to believe in God. Now for the reasons I do believe in God.

I spent many years as an agnostic, until I came across Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. Neale was at a very low point in his life, and out of frustration he wrote a “letter to God” asking questions like, “Why wasn’t my life working?”, “What would it take to get it to work?”, “Why could I not find happiness in relationships?”, “Was the experience of adequate money going to elude me forever?”, and “What had I done to deserve a life of such continuing struggle?”. He had prepared to toss the pen aside, when somehow his hand remained poised over the paper, then the pen began to move on its own. He decided to go with it, having no idea what he was about to write, and he wrote, “Do you really want an answer to all these questions, or are you just venting?”. That was the beginning of his conversation with God. God’s input eventually evolved into more of a “voiceless voice” in his mind. (God says He/She communicates with people all the time, especially via the imagination, and He/She only uses words when all else fails, because words are the most dynamic and hence the most easily misunderstood form of communication.)

Why was I so sold on this book/on the idea that it really was God he was talking to? Well, I’m really good at seeing all of the subtle flaws and shortcomings of people, maybe particularly in their writings, on a few levels: on the conceptual level, on the level of their actual motivations and intentions, on the level of grammar and whether they choose the best possible word for the job, etc.; and in the parts in the books where God speaks, it’s all absolutely flawless (in contrast to the parts where Neale speaks, which are more human). I’ve literally never encountered any text or speech so flawless in my life.

And I know that, obviously, someone who’s purporting to channel God is going try to sound as perfect as possible, but this is a matter of subtle things, unconscious motivation, cognitive perfection, and talent and grace at using language that you can’t do just by wanting to. It’s just like how an intelligent person can play dumb, but a dumb person can’t play intelligent, at least not to a discerning audience.

Furthermore, I perceived the “energy” behind the text–as in the messages it contains and the style in which it’s written, or maybe even something actually spiritual that’s inextricably connected to the text–as being absolutely, 100% pure. It was so pure and neutral that it was almost unworldly. (I guess it’s problematic to say that it’s totally neutral, because arguably if it were then he wouldn’t have had a reason to say anything, but it was neutral of biases or all but the most sublime desires/energies or whatever.)

Another thing that has made me think God likely exists is personal psychic experiences. I’m not talking about “religious experiences” or talking to God, but just witnessing my thoughts being shared with others, sometimes overtly enough to be beyond any reasonable doubt. The specific manner of some of this sharing, the way our minds are apparently connected, seems to indicate a level of unity or non-separation between beings, at least between beings that are close to each other in some way. So, I reasoned, if our beings are “locally” connected to each other, there are probably more and more universal/higher and higher levels of this unity, up to and including the ultimate level, a unification of all beings, which could reasonably be called “God.”

On August 13, a viral and divisive poll was made on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisatomic5/status/1690904441967575040

Many intellectuals took the red side; some were dismayed or even disillusioned with humanity because so many people chose “the wrong color,” blue.

Arguments for red’s side seemed to range from “If everybody picked red, everybody would live” to “Red is the correct choice according to game theory” to “It’s not worth risking my life to save those who were too stupid to save themselves.”

To me, the obvious choice was blue. I wrote up a tweet thread explaining my position, and, me being the genius that I am, it elegantly captured the essence of the “blue” phenomenon while exposing the fundamental weaknesses of “red’s” various rationales. Here’s the contents of the thread:

Here’s my thread on why picking blue is right and picking red is wrong (or at least less right).

I’m not convinced that picking blue is in any way an imperfect decision. You know that a lot of people will pick blue (for whatever reasons), and you don’t want them to die (whether their decisions were imperfect or not), so you (altruistically) pick blue at your own risk to help increase the chances of saving everyone. Is that imperfect? No, it’s conscientiously inclusive. What about all the people who picked blue that you’re trying to save? Did they pick it imperfectly? Not necessarily, most of them probably picked it for the exact same reason you did, which we’ve just established wasn’t imperfect! So, even if you argue that it’s imperfect to try to save people who are too imperfect to save themselves (which is obviously debatable; everyone’s imperfect in some way after all, and tolerance/acceptance/forgiveness/grace and and accommodation are virtuous things and make for a better society), it doesn’t apply because they weren’t imperfect to begin with! In fact, they’re more perfect than the red pillers because they’re less selfish.

It’s true that this logic implies the whole “problem” of many people picking blue is circular/self-created, but so what? It still makes perfect sense from the *individual’s* standpoint, as argued above, and it’s only individuals who are making the decision! And the whole ouroboric phenomenon is a beautiful expression of human compassion AND mutual trust, particularly trust in each other’s compassion!

As for the arguments for red I haven’t already covered, it doesn’t matter that it’s not the correct choice according to game theory, as that’s only because most game theory models assume all agents are 100% selfish. And there’s no reason to bring game theory into it anyway. The logistics of the game and the consequences of choosing are immanently obvious. The only questions are ones of the nature of the average human mind (i.e., what are the chances >50% of people will vote blue?). It’s kind of like playing the stock market in that respect, in that everyone who’s playing (or at least, everyone who would consider voting blue) is betting on what everyone else who’s playing would likely do.

The other argument I tend to see is that “if everybody voted red, everybody would live,” but that’s wholly irrelevant because most people know damn well that many people won’t pick red. (You could argue that this means the people who picked blue are mistaken, and it’s not worth saving people who mistakenly wouldn’t save themselves, but that’s not true either as I’ve already shown why they’re not mistaken. Not everybody picked red because people know that some people will pick blue because they know that some people will pick blue because they know that some people will pick blue, etc. etc. It simply is what it is. (See the earlier comment regarding the beauty of the ouroboros).

For whatever it’s worth.

Never practice hatred or retribution/vengeance (see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2017/02/05/is-hatred-ever-truly-justified/), but protect people from those who might harm them. Maybe it’s good to do this by incarcerating criminals, I’m unsure about that, but I know there should be *some* consequence of hurting people, the least being to make the perpetrator aware of what they’ve done.

The problem with incarceration is that it socially separates wrongdoers from everyone else, so the fundamental ills of society (which produced the wrongdoers in the first place) can’t work themselves out via karmic interaction. The other problem, of course, is that it’s cruel. The benefit of incarceration is that it allows us to be safe by protecting people from the would-be actions of criminals. It also allows for civilization, as without law enforcement you can’t have laws, and without laws you can’t have civilization, at least not given the current moral condition of humanity. Perhaps law enforcement could be enacted by means of punishment other than incarceration in practice, perhaps not. Either way, those means would also be cruel.

Whether we should have civilization or not is an open question in itself. See things like essays on the academically popular opinion that the advent of agriculture was our biggest mistake, the Unabomber manifesto, etc.

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Expressing anger is okay and even good, as it “discharges disharmony,” but do so without spite or the intention to harm (physically or emotionally). See https://meaningfulponderings.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/anger-is-a-healer-from-the-new-revelations-by-neale-donald-walsch/. I always say an excellent demonstration of anger without spite attached is in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf says to Bilbo Baggins, “I am not trying to rob you!”, which can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKaw5SjeHx0.

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No victimless action should be considered immoral. This rules out a lot of religious dogma, puritanism and general sexophobia, homophobia, other instances of confusing personal disgust for immorality (such regarding consensual sex between siblings using a contraceptive, sex with willing animals, or sex with dead bodies), etc.

This doesn’t necessarily mean there should be no laws against victimless crimes, though. For example, driving is one of the leading causes of death in the US, and is the leading cause of death for people under a certain age. Driving, at least the way it’s currently done, is an objectively insane thing to do, but we’re all brainwashed by culture into doing it routinely, causing much remorse to the loved ones of tens of thousands of deadly auto accidents a year in the US alone, many times the amount of people who died on 9/11, so, if people aren’t smart enough to put their seatbelts on on their own, maybe it’s okay to legally mandate it for their own good?

Another important example is illicit drug use. I think some illicit drugs are relatively harmless and mind-expanding, i.e., psychedelics, and that preventing their use hinders individuals and society at large from growing, healing, learning and breaking our shackles, but other drugs can be more problematic and even life-destroying and in some cases can even erode society/the economy, such as what happened with the Chinese opiate crisis. So, is it ethical to create laws banning their use? I think it’s arguable. One counterpoint is that it was the illegalization of certain drugs in the first place that caused them to become so concentrated and hence so dangerous, but that may be a moot point now because there’s no going back either way.

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Do whatever causes the most well-being for everyone involved. What’s ultimately best for you is what’s ultimately best for everyone else, due to the unified nature of all beings. Knowing what’s ultimately best for you, though, isn’t necessarily easy. You have to dig deeper than the ego.

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Practice stating your social boundaries and the consequences of violating them without fighting. State the consequences with neutral, rather than emotionally loaded or blaming, wordage.

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Cultivate unconditional love and compassion for anyone and everyone. “To love someone is to know that you love them; not to love someone is not to know that you love them.” —My ex-g/f Lisa

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IMHO, trying to enforce fairness is a fool’s errand. Life is inherently unfair in myriad dimensions, on both the genetic and environmental fronts, and there’s little you can do to change that. Equality is good, and so are some forms of equity, or relative equity, such as social welfare systems, but trying to enforce equity across the board is like trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

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Giving people freedom to be who they are and do what they do is very important (not only legally but also in social situations, such as between friends and family members), but apparently so is preventing people from harming each other. Where should we strike the balance? I’m not sure, but I know the balance should include the freedom of artistic and verbal expression.

The related concept of autonomy and choosing what happens to your own body is also important (however, this shouldn’t be construed as an argument for pro-choice ethics; see https://myriachromat.wordpress/2017/02/11/why-im-not-pro-choice-even-as-a-non-religious-democrat/).

One hot-topic example of where this should be applied is vaccines, which are more harmful than we’re led to believe (see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2019/09/14/whats-the-matter-with-vaccines/, and https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/jake-tapper-sold-soul-pharma-rfk-jr/), and either way are extremely bodily/physiologically intrusive.

Another example is circumcision of infants, which is clearly in violation of the individual’s right to choose whether to have a vital part of their sexual organs removed.

Another hot-topic example is mask mandates in the Covid era. On one hand, it seems perhaps a bit authoritarian to require people to wear masks, much to the acrimony of people of a certain political orientation, but on the other hand studies show that they do indeed reduce the spread of the virus, and the virus can be deadly, so people’s lives are clearly on the line. Also, mask mandates aren’t any more fundamentally oppressive than laws or store policies that you have to wear pants, shoes or a shirt, so the extreme reaction of some people against mask mandates seems a bit silly. And, to be honest, my personal feeling is to f*ck anti-maskers and their autonomy for being so selfish and/or denying known fact regarding the effectiveness of wearing masks.

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Our children aren’t our property. We’re merely their caretakers, meant to (unconditionally) love and nurture them until they’re old enough to take care of ourselves. Children should be given as much freedom as possible (helicopter parenting has been proven to be harmful in various ways), and we should allow them to develop and become who they are independently of our opinions, judgments, and aspirations for them, especially those vicarious ones that want them to live the lives we never did.

Children are fully people, and they should be regarded and respected as such, rather than having their needs, feelings, expressions and boundaries dismissed and overlooked, as is the case all too often. Being constantly disregarded tends to have a demoralizing effect on them.

Spanking children is immoral, it’s literally a physical attack on them (and not to mention that it’s usually done out of conditional love/spite), and it’s correlated with antisocial behavior, mental health struggles, and IQs five points lower on average, even four years later. And research shows that it doesn’t even improve behavior in the long run, it actually makes it worse, while only improving it in the short term. It’s illegal in 59 countries, and at least one of those countries, Sweden, is ranked among the best societies in the world to live in, so apparently they get along just fine there and parents find other ways to discipline their children.

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IMO, a 100% moral person would give most of his income away to charity, due to the extreme, unjust imbalance of wealth in society and the world at large and other causes of immense or widespread suffering that can be assuaged with money. But it’s perhaps too much to ask of people that they be 100% moral. Everybody is at least a little bit evil, including myself.

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Being moral means being compassionate and decent toward all sentient life, not just humans. In general, we’re incredibly anthropocentric/speciesist in our regard for others. For example, testing cosmetic products on animals, for example, is highly immoral, since we don’t need to wear cosmetic products, and either way there are other possible ways of testing them, they’re just more expensive. Testing food ingredients on animals is also immoral because we could (and should) simply eat more-natural foods. Testing medicines on animals is more debatable, at least if one subscribes to utilitarianism, because medicines have the potential to help thousands or millions of people, but even in that case, as with all the other kinds of testing on animals, it’s telling that we chose to test on animals rather than on humans, especially given that we’re the ones who will be consuming the products. On the other hand, one could argue that animals are less sentient than we are and therefore they don’t suffer as much, so utilitarianly we should test on them instead of on humans. I don’t know if that’s true, but clearly animals can experience extreme levels of suffering either way, and it’s disturbing.

An even bigger issue than animal testing is, of course, factory farming. It’s horrendous, and it’s clear to me that the only moral/ethical choice is veganism, but we’re so brainwashed as a society that we dismiss or ignore the rampant suffering we’re causing to other animals. It’s easy to do this because the nature of the supply chain allows us to be completely isolated from the means by which our consumables are produced. It doesn’t help that, infuriatingly, it’s illegal to film factory farming conditions in some jurisdictions. And this is to say nothing of the fact that meat production is one of the biggest causes of global warming and consumption of resources like clean water that we’ll eventually run out of. And it wouldn’t even be so popular if market forces were allowed to work on their own rather than meat being government-subsidized! How evil!

For a more involved discussion of veganism, see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2023/05/02/vegans-are-right-youre-wrong/.

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Regarding utilitarianism, it may be a tempting basis for morality or ethics, as morality is naturally utilitarian to some degree just based the obvious fact that, e.g., ten people being happy is better than one person being happy, and ten people suffering is worse than one person suffering, etc., but I think it’s problematic, and not even for the usually argued reasons. Most of the arguments I’ve seen against utilitarianism seem to revolve around situations in which a course of action ostensibly brings the most happiness or well-being to the most people, while you’re led to judge the action as a net negative due to its not really bringing the most well-being to the most people for more nuanced reasons, and, obviously, an optimal application of utilitarianism would take into account well-being on all levels.

My reason for not subscribing to utilitarianism is that I think there’s an important distinction between actively interfering with events involving other people and remaining neutral, a distinction that isn’t easily accounted for and perhaps even has mystical factors to it. E.g., in the classic trolley problem, I’m unsure if I would and should redirect the trolley to the track with fewer people stuck on it. That would make me personally responsible for their death, at least on an emotional level if not also in some spiritual way.

One could argue that it’s selfish to worry about personal responsibility in the face of doing something in aid of the greater good, but I think in some ultimate sense everybody is the center of their own universe, and everything that develops in their universe ultimately flows from their actions or otherwise through them. This isn’t to imply that we should be selfish or even unsacrificing in all ways at all times, but I think maybe it does in this particular context.

Furthermore, it may be that everything that happens naturally tends toward ideal situations on the deepest possible level of consideration (far deeper than what we’re able to apprehend in normal daily life), due to the reality being a continually evolving collective manifestation, so interfering with external events could cause less optimal results. One could argue that your own actions are just another part of reality’s continual unfolding and could contribute to optimal results just as well as all other confluent factors, but maybe it’s different since you’re less directly involved in the situation and you may be going out on a limb. Also, I feel that I tend to get better results when I don’t interfere with others’ decisions even in matters that directly affect me, for whatever reason, but then that’s probably just because I’m too cerebral, unemotional, complicated or neurotic for The Flow to properly utilize me.