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You can’t CURE a headache by banging your head, but you CAN make it all go away…

I am writing this post on my lapcom for the first time in quite a while*, but I couldn’t honestly say why I’m doing it.  I just decided yesterday afternoon that I wanted to bring my lapcom with me when I left the office, and since I have it with me, it would be a minor shame not to use it to write today’s post.  As far as I can tell, there’s nothing more to it than that.  I certainly don’t care much anymore.

I continued to feel pretty rotten all day yesterday, and I became quite stressed out and frustrated, even snapping at a coworker with whom I normally get along very well—actually, it was somewhat more than “snapping”, and it was not justified—before repeatedly banging my head on my desk.

This, of course, did not help my residual migraine discomfort, which was partly responsible for my horrible mood.

It also hurt my neck.  I wasn’t surprised by this fact, though, since I’ve done this before, alas.  Indeed, I can tell you this tiny bit of potentially useful information:  banging one’s head on one’s desk is uncomfortable and somewhat injurious (I’ve been known to raise visible lumps on my forehead in addition to causing neck pain), while banging your head on a sheetrock wall is not as bad.  However, banging your head on a concrete wall is quite unpleasant.

And I really don’t recommend hitting your head on the top of a door (or “hatch”) in an aircraft carrier, but that was purely accidental, born of overenthusiasm**.  I’ll just add, for emphasis, that an aircraft carrier does not notice that you hit it; it does not give in any measurable way***, only your head and body do.

By the way, head-butting a human is comparatively laughable.  But mind their teeth; you can get cuts from them that are prone to bad infections because of the nasty bacteria that often live in the human mouth.

Anyway, all this nonsense is just to emphasize that I am not doing well.  I feel physically quite uncomfortable, from my head to my tail as it were, and down into my legs, too.  And my mood is worse than the rest of me****.

Some of this may be related to the weather.  The heat and humidity down here are utterly oppressive, and they make it all but impossible to exercise outdoors (such as by walking) unless one is committed to possibly dying or becoming quite ill in the process.  I am not entirely averse to dying in that process, and I contemplate trying to walk from the office to the house almost every day.  But I’m not committed to it yet, so it’ll have to wait.  It would be just too pathetic to start it and not carry through.

It’s also been very sunny lately, which just adds sunburn (which I have from Sunday) to the mix, but that doesn’t bother me as much; for unclear reasons, I don’t get as uncomfortable from sunburns as most people seem to get.  This is probably not a good thing, especially when you have an inherent fish-belly complexion like I have.  It might also have contributed to my migraine.

I’m coming to hate nearly everything about Florida.  Of course, it’s the state where my youngest was born (and where my kids still live), so it will always have that going for it, and that’s hard to overpower.  But even my kids unfortunately didn’t have the greatest scholastic experiences in Florida—which is no surprise, since Florida is known to have subpar educational system overall (though it has definite bright spots at the university level).  Just look at who our governors have been and are, let alone our legislators.  If Tallahassee were wiped off the map by an asteroid impact, the average IQ of the state would rise by 10 points, at least.

The trouble is, it’s entirely possible that I would hate things wherever I happened to be, because really, it’s myself I hate.  And yes, I know about the self being nonpermanent and really an illusion and not a consistent thing from moment to moment let alone from day to day or from one part of the brain to another.  That’s true but trivial, and it doesn’t change the fact that I hate myself, whatever you want to call my self.

And while the self does change from moment to moment, it still has way more in common with its past and future states than it has with, say, the state of a different person, or with a dog or cat, or with a slug or with a tree or with a fucking rock.  There is a four-dimensional continuity of structure and identity to what I call my self, as there is with all of you, unless I am greatly mistaken.

Okay, sorry for that little diatribe, if that’s the correct word (“diatribe” I mean, not “sorry”).  I’m just frustrated with and angry at more or less everything.  Which, of course, implies that I am the problem, since I am the common factor in all the things that frustrate me.

Unfortunately, I cannot swap me out for some other person, and I don’t think I would if I could.  I’ve often wanted to be like certain other people in certain aspects, but I’ve never actually wanted to be another person.  In fact, I think the very concept is vacuous; I could explain why that’s so, but it may well be obvious already.

Anyway, I’m sorry.  You should all probably just stop bothering with me, to be honest.  I am only going to bore you at best and more likely cause you pain of one kind or another.  It’s what I do.  I’m not a good person by nature, though I try to act as if I am when I have the energy to do so.  But my energy is lagging and seeming to get worse all the time.

Honestly, I wish I could just sleep until I feel truly rested, or forever, whichever comes first.  Of course, the universe is not set up in such a way as to make the first thing necessarily achievable, but at least I know I can achieve the second.  It just takes commitment—or time, I suppose.

All right, that’s enough of that.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Actually, of course, this is the only time I have ever written this post, and it is the only time that I will write this post.  I apologize for the somewhat misleading language, but I suspect you know what meant.

**I’m not likely to experience that again.

***Yes, yes, physics shows that it does indeed movie a little.  I suppose I could do some math to try to figure out just how much, but it won’t be much more impressive than how far the Earth movies in the other direction when you jump straight up in the air.

****Those of you who saw the movie version of The Silence of the Lambs might recall that “the rest of me” in an anagram for Hester Mofet.

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Migraines, after-effects, lesser evils, and greater goods

I’m a bit wiped out this morning, so I may only write briefly.  For those of you who may not know it, I developed a migraine headache yesterday.  It started with the surprisingly rapid onset of a “classic” migraine aura, which is to say a deficit in one’s visual field, marked by apparent, weirdly twinkling, almost rainbow-like lights.  It is not as lovely to see as one might suspect if one has not had it.  This first time it happened to me, way back in my early teens (while I was caddying), I worried maybe my retina had become detached.  Weirdly, this concern did not lead me to panic, nor to seek help, nor even to stop in the middle of that golf round‒work is work, after all.

The classic migraine, which is what this migraine with twinkling lights is called, seems to begin with a rapid, spreading depolarization of cells in the brain cortex, particularly (in this case) in the occipital lobe (thus the visual aura, because that is the region of the vision centers of the brain).  It spreads from there, and as part of its spread it seems to lead to vascular swelling and pressure in the meninges, which causes some of the pain.

The science has probably improved since the last time I studied it, so some of this description may be inaccurate.

In any case, as soon as I realized what was happening, I took steps to head things off.  Although I had taken a naproxen that morning, I popped three ibuprofen right away.  After a few minutes, as the aura progressed, I added two acetaminophen (extra strength) as well.  This was probably not ideal for my body‒kidneys, liver, and to a lesser extent, stomach come to mind‒but I didn’t really hesitate, because I have experience with migraines, and not just with treating them.  I also made sure to drink lots of water.

Anyway, I did get some dull pain (as well as just dull dullness) centering loosely on the left side of my head, but the Motrin™ and Tylenol® seemed to have done their work well, since I took them so quickly.  I did have pain, but it was not nearly as severe as it usually is, though I took one more ibuprofen a bit later when it seemed to be increasing.

With migraines, though, the pain is more an effect than a primary part of the process.  In a way‒and only in a way‒a migraine is a bit like a slow-moving seizure.  As such, it tends to cause quite a lot of fatigue in one’s central nervous system, and I certainly felt that yesterday and continue to feel the after-effects today.  For instance, I am making many more typos than I usually make right now.

I do seem to have slept slightly more than usual last night.  Tiring one’s nervous system by internally, directly causing the hyperactive discharge of whole populations of neurons seems to lead to slightly deeper sleep, no doubt because for the nervous system, it is something of an emergency and it must be cleaned up.  Trust me when I say, while the slightly longer sleep is nice as far as it goes, it is not worth it.

Even though I was able to prevent the worst of my migraine pain, the other effects were still quite palpable and unpleasant, and their after-effects remain.  They aren’t good.

This is not to say there aren’t many, many worse things in the world, and certainly when one has only two choices, one should choose the least bad of the two.  For instance, I would choose many migraines over a kidney stone.  The lesser of two evils is, mathematically, the greater of two goods.

If this fact is confusing‒I don’t know why it should be, but apparently it is, and that confusion has been consequential on large scales‒think of the old grade-school level number line, centered at zero.  If you have two negative numbers, such as negative two and negative twelve, you can certainly say that they are both negative.  But that’s a function of where you put the origin (where the zero is), which you can shift and put anywhere else, given the infinity of the number line and its inherent symmetry.

But even if you move the origin 100 places to the left, so that you now have 98 and 88 instead of -2 and -12, the distance between the two numbers, and their mutual relationship based on that, is unchanged.  One of the numbers is still less negative than the other.  And if that number measures the usefulness or the desirability of something, and if one has only the two choices, then one should pick the less negative one, which is by mathematical definition the more positive one.

A billion is less negative than a million.  And negative a million is less negative than negative a billion.

I’m not sure how I got from migraines to here, but that’s okay.  I’m sure it will make at least some sense during the edit.

Anyway, I hope that my mental fog will clear a bit today.  It would be nice to be able to sleep better without requiring general neurological, pathological exhaustion.  But then again, many things would be nice that are simply not so.  By which I mean they aren’t real, that they don’t exist, that they aren’t the case, not “many things would be nice that are simply not nice”, which wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

If wishes were horses, we’d all be drowning in horse shit.  And then we’d probably wish for it to go away, which would just produce more horse shit.  Alas.

I hope you all have a good day.

[PS:  I tried to do a brief audio recording on the way to the office from the train, while walking, because a thought had occurred to me and an occurrence had gotten me thinking, and I also wanted to “experiment” to see how well I’d be able to compensate for the noise of traffic and (to a lesser extent) wind.  It was unfortunately something of a disaster, and to correct it all would have required many hours of audio manipulation that may be beyond my skill.  So I just deleted it.  But I thought I would at least mention it.]

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I feel like posting this because I dread the immediate future

Getting the “aura” for one of my “classic” migraines now. It came on FAST (in minutes) and is BIG, obscuring most of the right side of my vision.  I am not looking forward to this.

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Don’t regress if it’s just going to make you mean

Well, here we are again, starting another frikking work week.  It seems like only seven or eight days ago that we did this last time.  I don’t think there’s any more good that can be said about this occasion than on any of the previous occasions.  In some ways it is worse, for it merely continues the fruitless, pointless process it entails, without any clear increase in wisdom or knowledge or well-being.

There’s certainly been no gain in happiness‒for me, personally, or for the world at large.  Though probably there are some individuals who are better off this week than they were last week, by any criteria one might reasonably choose.  Gaussian curves tend to have outliers, after all; that’s the nature of the normal distribution.

Of course, there are negative outliers as well, down at the other end of the curve.  I feel for them.  Hopefully, their place in the lower percentiles is a fluke, a local, transient variation not produced by any particular process but merely by statistical fluctuations.  If so, they will almost certainly experience regression toward the mean next week:  when an exceptional occurrence in an iterated or longer term process is followed, almost always, by more average outcomes in whichever direction brings it toward the mean* of the curve.

That’s good.  It would be a shame if there were some process making it such that some individuals were persistently prone to be in the lower tail of the curve.

Of course, though I used the subjunctive just now, it’s not really a contrafactual situation; there really are plenty of people whose situation is such that each week for them tends to be worse in general than the weeks of the vast majority of other people.

This is almost certainly not by their own conscious choice.  It’s not easy to imagine a realistic situation in which someone deliberately chooses to be consistently worse off than most of their fellows.  Unconscious or subconscious urges, on the other hand, can lead to such things (presumably), as can bad habits that have taken hold.

Don’t look down on people who are stuck in bad habits that are clearly doing them harm.  The nervous system is built around habits, and does not change them lightly.  They are how people are able to do most of the things that they do.

If you had to decide de novo, without the grace of habits, what to do on any given occasion or in any given situation, odds are good that you would exhaust yourself rapidly, and you would screw things up at least as often as not.  There are good reasons why “System 1” takes care of most situations for most people**.

“System 2” requires much more time and effort and literal energy than “System 1” does.  And the brain already uses about 20% of a typical human’s calories.  So there, you see:  data centers have always been very energy-intensive, and they always will be.  There are good, sound thermodynamic and information theoretic reasons for this.

Okay, well, anyway, this has been a bizarre digression or series thereof.  It’s weird, and probably not terribly interesting to most people.  Such is the stuff of my thoughts; I can’t, in good conscience, recommend it to anyone.

Speaking of the stuff of my thoughts, I did a brief-ish audio recording yesterday afternoon, which I posted quite a bit later in the day.  I don’t know if it’s interesting or even coherent; I did not edit it for content, just sound quality and pause length.  You can listen to it if you want (obviously) and feel free to give me feedback on whether or not it is coherent.

Meanwhile, I hope that each and every one of you reading this feels better than I do right now.  If I could know that, I think it would make me feel slightly better.

*By mean, I mean (ha) the arithmetic mean, or what might be called the average in common parlance:  you add up the values of every “entry” and then divide by the number of entries.  This is not to be confused with the median, which is the value halfway from the worst to the best (or whatever) of a given particular listed and ordered data set.  It’s an important distinction, because confusing the two leads to some fairly common mental errors.  For instance, while by mathematical definition it is impossible for more than half of all comers to be above the median, it is entirely possible, if atypical, for more than half of people to be above average.  This just requires those who are below average to be significantly more below the average than the others are above it.  For instance, if you gave a test to 100 people, and 90 of them scored 50%, while 10 of them scored 0%, the mean would be 45, and so most people would be above the mean.

**There may be some evidence that people with ASD, for instance, tend to use System 2 far more often for far more things than neurotypicals do.  This may be part of why autistic people, even level 1 ones (which I am not, apparently, at least according to my official diagnosis), are so often just mentally exhausted, even by things that “ought” to be straightforward.

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Yet another pointless discursion

Well, as I warned you would probably happen, here I am, writing a blog post on Saturday (August 15th, 2026 AD/CE), because I am going to work today.  I feel barely awake, to be honest. Nevertheless, as I said, here I am, smartphone in hands, thumbing out the words to yet another pointless discursion, one which I have headlined “Yet another pointless discursion”.  Go ahead, see for yourself.

I’m really pretty foggy and groggy right now, so I don’t know how good or interesting this is going to be.  I mean, I guess I could say that every day, of course, but it feels more acute at this moment.  It’s a bit weird to have a strong, sharp feeling of not knowing something, and of not being able to know it.  It feels like some sort of epistemological contortionism.  Which is itself a rather strange notion.

Of course, I don’t know what to write about today, or rather, “I don’t know about what to write”.  I feel that fact quite acutely at this moment, as well.  Still, it’s a work day, and one on which I am indeed going to work, so I guess I should fulfill my duty as I perceive it.

It’s not as though it would make any significant impact if I didn’t write anything, though.  I know of only a handful of people who consistently read and “like” my work.  Even those who don’t specifically “like” it but do come to read it number only in the few dozen.

But the readership here is pretty much the only regular social interaction in which I engage nowadays, if you don’t count work-related stuff.  At work, though, I think that I am probably quite unpleasant, because I am quite uncomfortable a lot of the time, and so my personality is negatively affected.

I’m not snappish and irritable at baseline, not as far as I can remember.  But for many years now, I have been quite grumpy and ornery.  I still try not to be rude if I can avoid it.  But I think I fail in that endeavor far more than I used to do.

And really, while it’s good not to be rude, ceteris paribus, my energy for such things is often less than optimal.  That dearth* also seems to affect my sensitivity to sensory annoyances, especially general noise and lateness and such like.

My tinnitus doesn’t help, either.  Right now it’s blaring at what feels like maybe 90 or 100 decibels in my right ear.  My left ear has a much milder amount, often zero, but the very disparity leaves me constantly a bit off balance.  Anyway, it’s quite annoying, but it doesn’t distract from my other discomforts, it merely layers itself atop or amidst them, like some kind of sensorineural seven layer dip or something.

There’s such a thing as seven layer dip, isn’t there?  I thought there was.  I could swear I had it at some family get together in the distant past or something.

Anyway, I’m very tired and very uncomfortable, and I’m just bobbing around here like a discarded plastic bottle that once contained one of those “experimental” sodas that never caught on, floating in the brackish, contaminated wastewater canal that is what’s left of my life.  I’m so tired and I am so uncomfortable.

I really want to get out of all this, to rest or at least to escape or even just to cease.  I am doing no good, as far as I can tell, and if I am doing no good for anyone, even myself‒at least not enough to outweigh the natural harm brought about by my very existence‒then why am I doing anything?

I feel rotten‒not morally so, but literally, as if my body were decaying in a more than metaphorical sense, yet still I am conscious and able to experience the sensations of that decay.  It’s not a good thing (duh!).  I wouldn’t say it’s hellish in any usual sense; it’s not as if it were so much discomfort that all I can do is scream.  In some ways‒admittedly, very few‒that might be better, because at least if I were in howl-worthy agony, I would not feel the compulsion to bother to try to force myself to be productive in any way.

Which one is worse, a Prometheus-style agony, where one is immobile and tortured regularly in such a way that one can do naught else but shriek, or a Sisyphean type of situation, where one strains and struggles to carry out some pointless task constantly, but one is at least able to act in that task?

Oh, who cares?  It doesn’t matter, and the answer is probably not precisely the same for any two people ever in the world.  I hope you all have a good weekend.  I guess I’ll probably be back on Monday.  I don’t think I’ll do audio today.  I’m too tired. 

*Does anyone else here remember Dearth Nadir, the Muppet Show’s spoof of Darth Vader, clearly played by Gonzo because his nose was unmistakable?

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I’m too worn out to make up a decent headline

I’m going to try to make this a shortish blog post today, because honestly, I’m pretty worn out (see above).  I haven’t brought it up that much this week, but it’s been a very bad time for pain‒in the sense of being good for pain, bad for those experiencing the pain.  Well, it’s been bad for the one experiencing it here, anyway.

I’m not aware of anyone else actually experiencing my pain, though there are those around me this week who have sympathized, since my pain has been rather obvious.  I’ve spent an unusual amount of time (even for me) lying on the floor, or trying to thump on my legs and sides until they stop hurting as much, or trying to do various exercises, from lunges to squats to steps and so on to try to improve my back, sides, hips, etc., all during the workday.

These interventions have been less than perfectly effective, alas, though the exercise is probably good in and of itself, ceteris paribus.  My pain might have been worse if I had done differently, which seems plausible, but it might even have been better.  I doubt it, of course, but if I had not doubted it in that way, it would have been absurdly masochistic for me to try these various exercises to see if they helped.

My thumb bases have also been particularly sore, which was at least part of my motivation to try my little audio posts.  I have to say, the audio stuff appears to have increased my “readership” slightly, though the before and after numbers are both so small that it’s difficult to draw too many inferences.  Still, they haven’t diminished anything, so far.

I don’t know if I’ll do an audio post today or not.  I’m really wiped.  But in any case, I should work tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, so if I don’t do one today, maybe I’ll do one then.

Mind you, psychology has shown that semi-random, intermittent rewards tend to garner greater capture (of an audience, of gamblers, of addicts, whatever) than any steady amounts of reward…again, ceteris paribus.  This does not appear to be one of the lamentably numerous findings in psychology that have failed to replicate over the years; it seems fairly robust.  Certainly it is working for the casinos and for the various lotteries.

I have restarted taking naproxen since yesterday morning, and at near-maximum dose, because the pain is just too much right now.  I’ve been so uncomfortable that I’ve been getting Ubers to and from the office (the whole way) all week; this is how I heard the song about which I complained (in audio) a couple of days ago.  But this is not a sustainable practice.  It’s costing me quite a lot of money, certainly relative to my income, such as it is.

So, I’m taking more NSAIDs and hopefully it will help and won’t box my kidneys (to use typical medical slang, in which “to box” some organ is basically to kill it, i.e., to put it in a box or a coffin or whatever).  And if it does box my kidneys, well, we’ll probably just call that good for this life.

How much longer do you think I want to live with chronic pain that I can’t even partially control without taking toxic amounts of one or more medications, especially while being almost completely alone, living in a one-room dwelling with only a camp bed and my piano stool for furniture*?

I haven’t even seen the new Spider-Man movie, nor have I felt like looking to see it.  I have watched the trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, as well as reactions to it, because Doom is my favorite, but even that is not encouraging or exciting or motivating enough for 4 months of waiting.

If I were to have to face four months feeling as bad as I do this week, I think I would just buy a huge amount of ice cream and Jack Daniels and Coke and Tylenol and laxatives and every other thing I could think of and try to dissolve myself away, as literally as possible.  Okay, well, that’s not very practical, I know; I would probably have to do something else.

Anyway, that’s already about as much as I feel like writing today.  Maybe I’ll do a little audio about how we have no right or reason to imagine that there will always be a satisfactory answer to every problem, like chronic pain.  The universe is allowed to suck, and it is allowed to produce misery that doesn’t have the slightest shred of any silver lining.

Nevertheless, I hope you have a good day.

*That’s where I’m “sitting” at the moment of this writing.  I used “scare quotes” because I’m really almost leaning more than sitting, pressing the middle of my back against the edge of the keyboard to try to decrease local pain.  It’s less sexy than you might imagine.

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Who hast not in thy blogs an eye discerning thine honor from thy suffering

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 13th of August.  Somehow, “Thursday the 13th” feels less punchy, less interesting, than “Friday the 13th”, but I strongly suspect this is just a cultural artifact of, originally, the day being considered by some to be unlucky, and then of course of the very successful and long-running series of slasher/horror films bearing that title, which took root from that superstition.

This sort of thing can be called more sharply to attention by comparing differences in cultures that do not have very strong shared histories*.  For instance, in the US (and the UK, I believe), ghost stories are generally most associated with mid-autumn, especially around Halloween time.  Whereas, in Japan, telling ghost stories is more associated with the summertime, especially the latter part of it.

I don’t know why that’s the case in Japan, but there are surely causes.  There are causes for all things at some level (probably even of causality itself, though we’re getting into uncharted territory with that speculation).  But, contrary to popular opinion. there are not always reasons.  I actually despise the notion so many people espouse, that “everything happens for a reason”.

Of course, if by “reason” you mean what I would call “cause”, then I cannot quibble with you without engaging in rank hypocrisy, which I try not to do.  But what most people seem to mean by reason in this case has to do with telos, with “purpose”, with “goals”.  In other words, they imagine some personal explanation for things, some willed intention, somewhere.

This is no doubt related to religion‒sometimes it is caused by it, sometimes it probably contributes to causing it, and sometimes it may merely be parallel‒but that doesn’t make it any better.  Deep down, below the façade of piety and orthodoxy, this type of thought seems just to be a kind of self-consolation, like sucking one’s thumb to soothe oneself.

I cannot in good conscience fault all types of self-soothing behavior.  I probably have dozens of what are now called “stims” that I do just to have stuff to do with my hands and feet (and brain, etc.), especially when I feel tense.  But I don’t take them as some hint about the ontology of reality.  I take them as things done by a nervous system trying to cope with a world for which it is perforce imperfectly adapted.

They’re not terrible things, by any means.  Some of them are even kind of cool (I can roll coins across the backs of my fingers, for instance).  But it would be silly of me to imagine or to assume them to have any deeper or broader significance.

What’s the big deal?  Why not let people console themselves with the notion that everything happens for a reason, though it may be an “ineffable” one?  What’s the harm?

Well, there’s always my general recognition that when one fights reality, one always loses.  The course of reality is strict and surrounded by impassable walls; if you don’t maintain your local parallel course to that of reality, sooner or later you will collide with those walls, and it is you who will break, while they will show not so much as a scuff mark.  

If it’s just you who suffers the consequences of this crash, that’s sad but not tragic.  But you may not be the only casualty of your poor steering, and it’s the innocent victims I lament far more than the idiots who drove themselves willfully (or at least willingly) into ruin.

But more specifically, saying that everything happens for “a reason” is a moral “get out of jail free” card.  It lets people look at cases of even terrible suffering and shrug and imagine that the suffering is there for “a reason” and so is “okay”, like Mother Theresa wallowing in the misery of the sick and dying poor as a way to get closer to Jesus.  This sort of thing is easiest when one is not suffering personally.

Now, there is often not much one can do to change a particular case of suffering, but I don’t think that makes it worthwhile to allow oneself to be delusional about it.  It’s better to admit that some entirely unnecessary suffering happens and that it sucks, because that leaves the option open of actually doing something to correct or prevent it, at some point.

It’s better than dismissing it (or worse, embracing it) because of delusions about “God’s plan”, or “karma”, or some Marxist delusion about an inevitable course of history, or any other magical thinking idea, all of which seem to center on an implicit notion of humans being (at least part of) the “purpose” of the cosmos.

Purpose is an invention, something that came into existence in human (and possibly other) brains.  If things in the universe are to be purposeful, it will be up to those who believe in that purpose to make it happen.  This is harder than just imagining that such a purpose is already there, but it actually has the potential to turn out to be made true, at least eventually.

And maybe, here and there, from time to time, when the wind is fair and the stars are right, if one sees suffering but doesn’t imagine that the suffering serves some “greater good”, one might just occasionally take action to relieve it rather than simply to slap on one’s epistemological blinders and go on one’s way.

TTFN

*This is rather akin to finding what processes are biologically fundamental, or at least old, by comparing genomes of organisms that are quite distant relatives**.

**One cannot compare truly unrelated organisms, because on this planet, there are no such things.  All life clearly shows the imprint of common ancestry.  To pick a frequently used example, most of your genes are shared (roughly) with bananas, and far more with banana slugs.