You're right. I did misinterpret that. When I stated (basically) that there's no test, I meant that there was no clear test for sufficiency, but then turned the test given into a necessity.

Apologies to asdfasdf.

(I still hold that counting dots is not sufficient.)

This is a bad way to refute him. You need something about cost-benefit. Otherwise, evolution should inexorably lead to better and better truth-discovering methods over time. The reason it runs out of gas is when the cost of sussing out the truth is not longer worth it, or when you reach a point of diminishing returns. Being generally afraid of caves is a good first approximation, but those who are only afraid of caves that have the hallmarks of being spore-filled would do better. Even better those who were able to test, empirically and consistently, which caves were safe. These would dominate the superstitious anti-cave folks. And so on and so on, as "truth" and "fitness" are in GENERAL bosom buddies. If it were cost-free, it would always be superior to be able to find out the truth.

Counting has survival value (as does the less precise estimation of numbers). However, there's a gap between counting and the concept of "number."

Basic arithmetic may or may not have survival value, depending on how you conceptualize arithmetic. Algorithmic arithmetic (long division) does not have survival benefit. If you hold basic arithmetic to be small numeral literacy, then I think one might be able to argue that there's survival value. For example, for cultures whose number system does not exceed 10, there's no such thing as 11. And there's not a huge benefit to knowing about 11, either. Also, the survival value of 3+3=6 greatly exceeds the survival benefit of 2378 + 8565 = 10943. (I claim the latter has none.)

Euclidean axioms? No survival benefit.

Even if all of these basic mathematical beliefs were reliable, I don't see why one should reasonably expect them to remain reliable as deeply as they turn out to be (in the absence of a larger reason for them to be so deeply reliable). Why does something that is "grounded" in counting the number of predators able to predict the motion of planets millions of miles away?

In real analysis, we can construct the real line starting from basically just counting, arithmetic, and a notion of distance. But this thing that is constructed (which we can have an inutitive sense for) is actually incredibly mysterious. There are infinitely many rational numbers on it, but that doesn't account for "any" of the line (and it's not even close). You can go further and look at all the numbers that are roots of polynomials (including numbers that we can't even write down), and that *still* doesn't account for "any" of the line. In fact, if you pick a "random" number from the real line, with probability 1 we should basically expect the number to be unlike anything that we have ever encountered.

With basically every other type of observation and experience, we find (and fully expect to find) limitations and exceptions to the types of rules we construct. But in this one way, we seem to go forever with no barriers in sight.

That something this deep can come from a materialist evolutionary perspective in which survival is the basic mechanism of truth, I find to be unrealistic. And that there's something like that stretches so far beyond anything that we see in any other area of reality, I think is not satisfactorily explained in that framework. Yes, it's possible that through evolution, humans, in our attempts to not get eaten, happened to stumble into this deep, consistent logical framework. But I don't buy it.

I have a problem with "basic reasoning" as a category because the same "reasoning" can be done in both basic situation and not-basic situations and it's difficult to discern what's what. Being able to recognize two tigers walking past and realizing that it's best to stay hidden is not the same as working with the mathematical value "two" which is not the same as "1+1" and is not the same as "the successor of the successor of '0'", even though it's the same "two" all the way down. (Again, the idea that a path that starts with "two tigers" goes that far seems absurd to me without there being some deep "a priori"-like reason.)

Similarly, I don't think that recognizing that jumping off a cliff will kill you is the same as "If I jump off a cliff, I will die. I do not want to die. Therefore, I will not jump off a cliff" and that this is not the same as "If P, then Q. Not Q. Therefore, not P." Even though it's the same "logical process" all the way down, there are vast differences between them.

Can you rectify this for me?
Sounds like you are giving a variant on the same argument that Nagel, myself, and OrP have endorsed, namely that it seems quite reasonable to think that being smart would be an evolutionary advantage.
But, uh, why on earth are you now wondering what reason there is for intelligence to be favoured? It seemed like the first quote spells out exactly why we would expect intelligence to be favoured.

It is worth noting that this is rather different from the question of whether the the mental processes we have evolved, that were truth apt in the domain of evolutionary problems, are truth apt in the domain of other problems. But when you say the second quote, you are not challenging this, you seem to be challenging the very idea that intelligence would even be favoured by evolution; this seems to be ludicrous on its face.

The types of "intelligence" that can be accounted for in a naturalistic universe is limited to certain types of knowledge. That "see two tigers = hide" as a survival mechanism happens is not of great interest. That "see two tigers = hide" leads to "there exist infinitely many primes" is strange.

Here's the full quote:

Why does this survival-intelligence lead to all sorts of bigger ("eternal") types of truths which fall well outside of the evolutionary drivers in the environment? In a materialistic evolutionary world, there's no reason to expect the deep internal coherence that logic provides. We certainly can expect that it would be functional for evolutionarily relevant truths, but why should it have access to these other things (and why should those other things even exist in the first place)?

A materialistic universe has no accounting for truths such as "there exist infinitely many primes." A universe driven by survival mechanisms alone has no accounting for why access to such truths is reasonable. But a theistic universe has an adequate expectation for both.

I don't understand the disconnect. At certain points it seems like you agree that, given the development of a mechanism that leads to cognition, organisms can develop more complex levels of cognition, and thus basic cognition leads to complex cognition, even if the complexity is based on the integration of several basic cognitive abilities.

At other times, it seems like you're saying that given initial cognition, we still have no reason to think we would develop cognitive abilities that correspond to reality.

At other times, it seems like you're saying micro-cognition is possible, but we have no reason to think the accumulation of micro-cognitive abilities should lead to an ability to consider abstract concepts.

At other times, it seems like you're saying micro-cognition shouldn't occur. Under naturalism, brains only produce behaviors. Our brains shouldn't be capable of cognition.

This has been well explained several times in this thread. Bizarrely, some of the best explanations for why this would happen have sometimes come from you, yet above you maintain the question. I could understand you saying your position is that you simply find the theistic explanation to be stronger, but it seems weird that even after you've summarized how truth-apt cognition develops without a theistic component, you maintain that you don't understand how that could happen.

Given that truth-apt cognition is more likely to develop than non-truth apt, the only way I can see you saying it doesn't make sense is if you posit the existence of some unidentified law of nature that restricts or redirects truth-apt cognition, such as when you say:

and

What limits the types of intelligence?

Otherwise, like with abiogenesis, we're left trying to figure out how cognition first developed. That's a different question than how cognition develops, and why it would tend to be truth-apt. Why is a jump necessary? If we allow for the jump, do you disagree that the development of cognition towards truth-apt faculties is more likely than the development of non-truth-apt?

It seems to me that cognition itself relies on some level of abstraction. We need not even consider a Platonic universe where these abstractions exist in any reality outside of our brains. We've seen arguments throughout this thread for why logic would tend to correspond to reality, and why being able to use logic in imagined scenarios would contribute more to our survival by generating accurate conclusions. Do you think imagination is the inexplicable component?

Obviously if we allow for the existence of a being who has perfect truth-apt cognition, the ability to guide the development of our cognition, and the desire to bestow on us imperfect but reliable truth-apt cognition, we can show how likely it is for our cognition to develop to be truth-apt regardless of any other environmental pressure. But I don't see how this makes your argument any less problematic than the non-theistic argument. We'd still need to cross our fingers that the entity driving our cognitive development wants us to generate truth-apt cognition, etc. etc.

So let me get this straight, your resolution of the quotes which seem to be blatantly contradictory is that the first (where you accept the obviousness that being smart is an advantage) is only talking about simpler types of intelligence while the second (where you say there is no reason to think intelligence is an advantage) is referring to an entirely separate set of more advanced forms of intelligence?

I think part of the issue is that two distinct questions are being run in parallel and sometimes get confused:
1) Is it reasonable that our mental processes developed through evolution
2) Is it reasonable that our mental processes are truth apt

Each of these can be separated as follows:
1a) Is it reasonable that relatively simplistic mental processes (for example low number counting, but not long division) developed through evolution
1b) Is it reasonable that relatively complex mental processes( like the ability to parse abstract logical statements ) developed through evolution.
2a) It is reasonable that our mental processes are truth apt in the domain of evolutionary type questions (like jumping off cliffs, facing tigers, etc)
2b) Is it reasonable that our mental processes are truth apt in the domain of higher questions like the higgs boson, morality, infinitely many primes, etc.

My reading of the relevant sections in the OP is that Plantinga suggests BOTH 2a and 2b are false, while Nagel says that certainly we can think that 2a is reasonable, but the objection remains powerful for 2b. I thought you agreed with this, let me know if this is not true in my framing.

However, recently you have talking about (as far as I can tell) not about question 2, but about question 1. Namely, you seem to accept 1a (the first of your two quotes above) but are actually rejecting 1b (the second of your two questions above).

So let me ask, what is your view on evolution? Do you think it is guided in some way, or something like this? As in, if you don't think our higher mental processes evolved under a materialist conception, are you proposing a goddidit for this? Regardless, I feel that focusing on 1b is a bit of a misreading of the OP, since the issue is "Assuming materialist evolution evolves our current mental processes, then is 2b justified or not?".

This, btw, is yet a third question, and not one that is the subject of discussion of this thread. Needless to say, if you are going to drop out claims like this, they would require a rather extensive exposition on your part to justify.

While an explanation is almost mandatory and certainly appreciated, I hope the response begins with a simple "Yes" or "No," and would really like it if the response listed your propositions and stated to each one "Agree" or "Disagree."

This came up on the first page.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathphil-indis/

I don't know how the materialist accounts for numbers as abstract objects since numbers are non-physical. Quine holds a strong ontological commitment to numbers are real objects, which is a rejection of materialism. So if you're taking Quine's view of science but rejecting Quine's ontology, then you're the one with work to do.

The materialist does not hold that numbers are real (since they are non-physical), so the status of such claims like "there exist infinitely many primes" is open because it's not a truth statement of correspondence to the universe (since numbers don't actually exist in the universe).

I'm not sure if this actually requires much explanation. Maybe you confused materialism with naturalism?

Hence the necessity of the truth_1 and truth_2 distinction that I introduced. The truth concept for each is the same, but the domain of each truth concept is different.

1a) Yes. These are evolutionarily advantageous beliefs.

1b) It depends on the framework. (See exposition below.)

2a) Yes.

2b) No. (See exposition below.)

----

Given a materialist accounting of evolution, I find it unlikely that mental processes should be considered valid for non-physical claims (mathematics) and why it turns out that the application of non-physical claims leads to valid conclusions about the physical world.

Essentially, the materialist has no accounting for why these non-physical objects we call "numbers" should stand as a valid or useful representation of a physical universe. In particular, why does going into an "imaginary" world to do a bunch of a calculations reliably lead to "real" consequences (such as the existence of the Higgs boson -- which I am assuming is taken to be a real object by materialists and not merely a mathematical artifact). Something has to give somewhere in order for this to work. The materialist cannot account for why evolutionary pressures give rise to a framework of non-existent objects that manage to describe material reality in a reliable manner.

The platonic naturalist's problem are different. You regain truth-correspondence for some mathematical claims (it depends on the depth of your ontological commitment to numbers and the framework of mathematics -- some may reject "infinity" as being a real object if they want to hold a "closer-to-materialist" Platonism).

The argument here is pushing the gap between evolutionary pressures that pick out truth_2 claims (material truth) and truth_1 claims (immaterial truths).

[Note: I'm not completely satisfied with material/immaterial as the dichotomy, nor am I completely satisfied with the truth_1 and truth_2 dichotomy. I'm going to switch this because the language at this point in order to build on the material/immaterial framework that has been developed. One reason I'm not quite happy with the material/immaterial framework is because there is an overlap. For example, small number arithmetic exists as both material and immaterial. "Two tigers" plus "two tigers" is "four tigers" and 2+2=4 are roughly the same thing. But there's clearly no material arithmetic of "One googol tigers" plus "one googol tigers" -- and this works for any physical object for sufficiently large numbers. But with this noted, we proceed.]

We can accept that evolution picks out truth-apt cognitive processes. But the question is *WHICH* truth apt cognitive processes are actually picked out by evolution? It picks out those truths that are helpful for survival, which are material truths. I have seen no claim that evolution has immaterial pressures which drive immaterial truth-apt cognitive development. In particular, claims like "there exist infinitely many primes" are evolutionarily truth-neutral claims.

So now we're in a situation where we have materialistic evolution driving the development of immaterial truth-apt processes. The claim put forth is that these other beliefs are a side-benefit of the materialistic pressures. That's fine. But since they are a side-benefit, they do not have the selective pressures which both "test" and refine the validity of these beliefs. That is, there's no evolutionary "check" which is picking out true beliefs and false beliefs.

So as we push deeper and deeper into the immaterial world with cognitive faculties developed to survive in the material world, at a certain point we must wonder about the validity of what we're doing. For example, in the material world, we know that evolution will (eventually) shut down beliefs which are not true because truth-aptness is favored. But what of the immaterial world? Nothing is there to stop us if we're going wrong and so we don't really have the expectation that we're right. In fact, just as with the material world, we should expect that this immaterial logical framework is probably faulty at a certain depth because there's no reason for evolutionary pressures to have refined our immaterial truth-aptness much beyond the intersection of small number arithmetic and "simple" logic.

So we should, in fact, be skeptical of knowledge obtained by deep immaterial truth-cognitive processes for which there are no evolutionary checks. (And we should be absolutely shocked that these untested truths seem to bear out in reality. Our immaterial cognitive processes should *NOT* be successful to the level they are BECAUSE they have had no evolutionary pressures to refine them there. Therefore, there must be a different reason -- a non-evolutionary reason -- for the deep coherence. Evolution does not account for it because of the lack of evolutionary pressures on those beliefs.)

I will respond more later, since I don't have time to parse all of this and respond just yet, but perhaps I will prompt one more question: In the cases where you think 1b is NOT true, is your account for why humans have processes that it is NOT reasonable to think evolved through evolution, do you claim that they were "given" in some sense by God or a deity managed evolution or something along this kind of vein?

Let me just point out that e.g. Keith Devlin (senior researcher at the Stanford Center for Study of Language and Information) argued in his 2000 book The Math Gene: How Mathematical Thinking Evolved and Why Numbers Are Like Gossip that social complexity was the evolutionary driver for abstract thinking. (It would indeed be strange if symbolic intelligence of any sort evolved from simple predator/prey stimuli. But I've never heard anyone claim that it did.)

All your posts in this thread amount to a (very convoluted) appeal to ignorance: you can't easily imagine how the neurological hardware selected by evolution was repurposed for abstract thinking, therefore it couldn't happen. (I would suggest Terrence Deacon's 1998 book The Symbolic Species: Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, for more details.)

That's not the conclusion. The conclusion is that we should not *expect* material cognitive processes to be successful for (deep) immaterial truth claims on the basis of materialistic evolution. Without the vetting process of evolutionary pressures (what evolutionary pressures are on immaterial truth claims?), we have no accounting for why these cognitive processes should be as trusted for immaterial questions as material questions.

The claim is that the existence of a logical God (and his particular relationship to mankind) gives rise to a reasonable expectation that humanity could gain access to immaterial truth claims and trust the mechanisms (and conclusions) confidently.

You can say that it was "given" to humanity, but I'd be very cautious about your particular interpretation of that word. This is not a goddidit argument insofar as it's not providing an explanation in the scientific sense (which is the domain of the goddidit argument), but rather that the theistic framework provides a more robust reason to expect immaterial claims to be meaningful (coherent, trustworthy, etc.) relative to a materialistic universe guided by evolution. Materialistic evolution provides no expectation for the existence/discovery/applicability of immaterial claims and success in an immaterial universe.

Maybe I missed the part of the conversation where this was discussed, but doesn't evolution only pick out the end result? The cognitive process is really secondary. In other words, even if the cognitive process is in fact false as long as the end result is favorable it will be selected for. Your statement seems to be a large concession, which is why I am thinking maybe I missed part of the conversation.

This was rolled into the conversation of the nature of truth. You are presenting what was described ITT a the behavioral definition of truth. The behavioral definition was rejected by Original Position.

(Uke's comments are a bit slippery on the matter, which was drawn out slightly in the Pavlov example and in his use of "true that X is a better hunting strategy" -- which really *IS* a behavioral definition of truth even though he doesn't admit it. He's not discussing the cognitive process (and mental content) of determining that the strategy is better but rather the outcome of employing the strategy. I decided that it's just not worth chasing that down with him. If you would like, you can press him on the matter. I would suggest aiming at the distinction between abstract mental content and stimulus-response, which returns back to the Pavlovian dog. The dog can "believe" that the bell ringing means BOTH "food" and "no food" and be both right and wrong in some cases, and this type of truth is much difference than the type of truth necessary to parse a statement like "there exist infinitely many primes" which is only true and never false, and independent of the environment in which the question is posed. This helps to draw a clearer line between material and immaterial truths.)

Original Position brought in the language of "truth-apt" to describe the learning mechanisms for evolution. I can grant truth-apt (truth as reality correspondence) for material truths (since evolution is a material process). I do not grant truth-apt for immaterial truths (because there is no accounting for what pressures can create immaterial-truth-apt processes). He has not responded to anything on the topic of immaterial-truth-apt, and I look forward to seeing his perspective. I suspect he actually falls in line with Nagel here, and doesn't find materialist evolution sufficiently robust (he's usually quite cautious about his claims and probably wouldn't be caught over-claiming the strength of his position):

It's important also to note that Original Position takes the existence of "actual" mental content as a given. The distinction between the fly buzzing away in reaction to the hand swatting at it and the fly cognitively processing something like "If I move, I increase my chances of survival" is an important jump. Nobody (that I can recall) has made an affirmative argument that such mental content *should* result from materialistic evolution. It's merely taken for granted that it does (which is similar to evolution explaining the progression of life after it has started, but not the start of life itself -- and this is also conceded in Nagel's quote).

So you're right that there is a concession here to discussing only post-abstract mental content man. An easier (but less interesting) place to draw up a challenge is on the appearance of abstract mental content in the first place. But I expect this will just raise a lot of empty noise from the other side and not much content. To the best of my knowledge, there's no accounting for why life comes about in the materialist evolutionary perspective. I touched on this briefly:

I hope this helps to expand the state of the discussion on that front.

When I delineated the difference between questions of type 1 and 2, it was with the hope that what had previously seemed to be a continual back and forth jumping between these would be resolved. However, since then a third type of question has now come up and seems to be getting stuffed in in back to back sentences just as the first two were earlier.

Namely, the recent discussion has been trying to solve an epistemological question, 2b, but 2b under the assumption of materialist evolution. In other words, we are arguing that IF materialist evolution is true, then these mental processes that we have evolved have no reason to be truth apt for such and such a domain of questions. As in, arguing 1b is beside the point. Of course, if we could not have developed these processes in the first point, they could not have developed to be truth apt. But our assumption is that they did develop, and we question whether they ALSO developed to be truth apt or not.

Question 3 is not an epistemological question. It is an ontological question. Namely, you are questioning whether it is even possible for advanced concepts to "exist" or what that might mean, not whether we could have evolved capacities to know, in an epistemological sense, these concepts. Now sure, if that was not possible, then we could not possibly evolve the ability to truthfully understand something that could not be true, and then the things we could evolve could not possibly know something that was neither true nor possible to evolve. So not 3 -> not 1b -> not 2b. Sure. But this seems like a fairly poor objection to 2b (and one coming very late chronologically in this thread) since the objection is not to this epistemological question but to a substantially different ontological question and one that is built into the assumption that we have indeed evolved these capacities to do these advanced mental processes.

So I don't quite know what to do here. I suppose there is no point to arguing 2b if you don't accept 1b because there is no point talking about whether our mental processes are reliably truth apt if you don't think they evolved. And there is no point talking about 1b if you don't think it is even a priori possible that they could have evolved in a materialist conception of the universe. Which leaves us, I suppose, with having to discuss materialism and this ontological problem, something that I, at least, would have to go and spend some time thinking about (maybe everything you are saying is trivial for someone better versed in that field, I don't know. For example, I thought Quine WAS a materialist, but perhaps I am totally wrong...see how much work I have ahead of me on this? Perhaps for now we should just say that I am probably ALSO not at all happy with your materialist/nonmaterialist dichotomy).

So baring that, a few random comments, and these are only related to 2b, as in I am assuming we can and did evolve to our current state and that whatever ontological problems you think might exist (tee hee) in this are resolved.
Suppose the ontological is resolved, and that whatever one might mean by it there is a truth of what one googol plus one googol is. We assume this is how the universe is and there simply are these universal truths, if you prefer, about arithmetic being true. Now, humans have evolved to be able to do small number arithmetic which you agree could well be an evolutionary advantage. What this means is that we develop mental processes that allow us to do arithmetic that spits out beliefs about 2+2=4 which are evolutionarily useful. However, it seems very reasonable to me (since this appears to be the case for us) that the SAME mental process that spits out the true and useful belief that 2+2 = 4 can ALSO spits our results for what 2000 + 2000 is, and so on. Thus we can reasonably expect that the same mental process could be reliably truth apt for 2000+2000, even if it is evolutionarily useful only for low numbers like 2+2. (note that in practice we compute 2000+2000 not by extending counting - as 2+2=4 is first taught - but by applying certain rules. I am sure we could think of why the ability to come up with such rules is an advantage in itself, but for the moment we can think of it as extended counting).

I thought I pretty clearly refuted this mischaracterization of my position. I am (very explicitly) discussing mental content and cognitive processes that lead to it. Namely, I will say a mental state in an organism's brain is "true" if there is a correspondence between that mental state and the actual world. So a squirrel has a "true" mental map of where they stored their nuts if that map corresponds to where they actually stored their nuts in their environment. Now spacial memory is a relatively simple mental process, but for a more complex mental process it is a similar correspondence.

Remember, as you have emphatically agreed, this is not a question of infallibility, it is a question of reliability. The mental process a dog has (that is being tricked in pavlovs experiment) is a reliably truth-apt process. Namely, the dog has the ability to do pattern recognition of the form "if A happens, then B happens". So it can learn that "If a bell rings, then I get fed". Clearly this type of mental faculty is going to be very advantageous and for the most part the dog will learn true things about the world. So it is reliable, even if it can tricked in this specific case. Likewise, we can ask if the processes by which we come up with "there exist infinitely many primes" is generally reliably truth apt.

Oh no, a goddidit applies much more generally, it is far from just answering scientific questions. The common approach is to take some problem or question or thing we don't know the answer to (or even what an answer means) and then assume god and the problem is solved from the definition of god. This MIGHT be a scientific question, but it just as well could be a moral problem or an epistemology problem or whatever else.

So for example, WLC likes to argue that god solves the "moral problem", because we assume the existence of god, and god is defined in his sense more or less as "that which gives absolute morality" and so tada problem solved! Goddidit! Same thing is going on here. There is this problem in epistemology. So lets just assume the existence god and tada problem solved! Goddidit!

As you can probably tell, such arguments are rather vacuous.

The ability to ramble endlessly does not imply the ability to make a cogent point.

I disagree. Counting is not the same as extended counting. Adding 2+2 is NOT the same process as adding 2000+2000. It requires an abstraction of some sort. It's also not the same as adding 2 googolplex + 2 googolplex beacuse the last of these is not representable as a number by objects in the observable universe.

I've already decided that I'm not going to get into this. If you think that time-constrained conditional truth statements are logically equivalent to "eternal" truth concepts necessary to meaningfully construct a statement such as "there exist infinitely many primes" then I'm just going to disagree with you.

Original Position has already gone there with you, and you disagreed with him.

So if you want to pretend that goddidit is something else then it's on you to create an exposition of what you mean by goddidit and then demonstrate your case. If you're trying to say that any invocation of God is a goddidit then you're just setting up a strawman because your counter-claim will be "successful" (in that you can rightly invoke it) regardless of the content of any argument that's being made. That means you never have to discuss the actual content of the position, which makes it a useless tool of conversation.

I stopped reading here. I have asked you repeatedly to drop the condescending attitude that you have displayed in other threads; there seems to be little further need to dignify such remarks with a response.

I took the time to give a very thorough explanation of my viewpoint at your request, addressing multiple perspectives, and you came back with something that basically incorporated none of the information that I gave you. Instead, you gave me a repeat of the same comments you made before, which were as off topic now as then. So I'm annoyed that I took significant time to do something at your request, and I felt I got garbage back in response.

Well, the forum swallowed two posts I tried to write on Nagel's Mind & Cosmos. Here's the short version.

It's good and worth a read, and it presents an interesting sort of middle ground for atheist reductionists and theist anti-reductionists. We'll all agree with parts and disagree with others, so I think it'd make for a good discussion. Anyone interested in a thread devoted to it? We could do it in SMP or RGT.

And I similarly took the time to respond in length to you, with you just ignoring the entire body of my exposition that (I thought) clarified a substantial confusion going on in your recent responses.

The difference was, I didn't feel the need to call yours rambling garbage that failed to make a cogent point. Even if I thought it was exactly that.

Lead, and they will follow.