The Non-Strawman Gaia Hypothesis

The actual Gaia hypothesis is that life tends to change the environment such that the environment becomes more suitable for life in general.

More specifically, the sum of the actions of the biosphere is increasing the chance of the biosphere continuing to exist, by promoting conditions favourable to its existence. As opposed to the trivially true conclusion that particular organisms alter the environment to benefit that particular organism.

Of course the Gaia hypothesis is also trivially easy to prove in that there need to be plants before there can be herbivores, and there needs to be death before there can be decomposers. But, this just shows that life tends to diversify, and the more diverse it is the more of it is there to diversify, and of course more diversity increases the number of chances to resist any particular disaster.

The other actions usually attributed to Gaia are quite dubious, especially the one where Gaia is supposed to be altering geology directly to improve life's chances. There may life-caused negative feedbacks enforcing equilibrium, but how strong are they? Even if they are strong enough to dominate, how do you rule out mere chance, meaning that current life could crash at any time? Aside from this, the difficulties inherent in group selection make it unlikely that life can adapt to improve the survival of species as a whole, even by accident. Also, one should ask how useful this particular abstraction is. Even subunits of Gaia - like nations - don't necessarily act coherently enough to be useful to consider as a whole.


Personally I'm interested in this because my definition of life has at least one flaw; it includes Gaia. I define life as anything that can be assigned a goal, which it will defend. (All consciousness is therefore automatically life, as it actually has goals.) Another way to put it is that all life has needs or wants. Gaia can be assigned the goal of diversity. For instance, mass extinctions tend to increase speciation rates; Gaia reacts to extinction. I could say, "Well, it's a completely blind process, there's no entity that is actually served by this goal." Except life itself is also a dumb process, so I'd throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I just realized I at least need to add that for something to be a goal, it has to be at least in principle possible to fail. The universe may want to increase entropy, but it can't fail to increase entropy, and thus can't die, and thus can't be alive in the first place.

I think this may successfully eliminate Gaia. The only way to interrupt the process is to exterminate all life on Earth. You cannot have the constituents without getting Gaia automatically, whereas putting the molecular constituents in even slightly the wrong order in a cell results in a nonliving cell. By analogy, it would be like assigning a goal to a cell such that it could not fail the goal unless you annihilated every constituent molecule. It stops being a cell long before it stops being alive, which essentially means it cannot fail the goal, and thus it's not much of a goal.

On the other hand, the fact it is so close helps explain why people find the Gaia hypothesis so seductive. Almost all the features usually attributed to living things can also be found in the system as a whole. Almost.


Intriguingly, under this definition you can get immortal life, in the sense of being invulnerable, but only if it is also conscious. Otherwise you've just found a force of nature. I would be intrigued to find any other clearly silly situations under the definition, like finding ephemeral structures on a neutron start that can be assigned goals until they decay.

Why Don't Atoms Spontaneously Decay?

Particles can quantum tunnel into classically forbidden regions. Yet, also, it seems that electrons never enter the forbidden region of the nucleus, interact with their proton and annihilate.

So I conclude there are quantum forbidden regions as well, which really are forbidden. First, am I right? Second, what other quantum forbidden regions are there?

Anarchism; Legality versus Morality

Someone told me 'taxation is theft.' I more or less instantly went from whatever I was before to libertarian, inevitably sliding into anarchism.

I made a prediction; every major legal code will define theft either with circular logic or with an explicitly written loophole for taxation. I finally decided to look it up. Here's Canada's

"Every one commits theft who fraudulently and without colour of right takes, or fraudulently and without colour of right converts to his use or to the use of another person, anything, whether animate or inanimate, with intent [to do about what you'd expect.]"

So, theft is when you take something without the right to take it. Err...uhh...so who doesn't have the right to make off with my stuff, again?

The moral answer is 'anyone who I haven't agreed to let make off with my stuff.' The real answer is 'who the legislature decides can make off with my stuff, because they control the SWAT teams.' Basically I'm just lucky that they don't make outrageous decisions more often.

The US has over 40 000 laws on the books. The situation will be similar in Canada, which means that basically whenever it feels the need, the bureaucracy who actually has the dictatorial power can trump up entirely legal charges against me and take my stuff. That they don't has nothing to do with morals or laws and has everything to do with preserving that self-same power.

Which inevitably means that their power does not depend on the legal system - it is not lawful power. I'm not entirely sure what it does depend on, sadly. The reports are conflicting - sometimes, it really is Democracy, other times it follows journalists or banks or large corporations. The situation is extremely murky - to outsiders. You can be entirely sure that the higher ups in those bureaucracies know exactly who butters their bread. (The lower ones don't know because their answer degenerates into 'the higher ups.')

Because the power isn't formal, and it is based on murky implicit mechanisms, the power is unstable. It can, just like radioactive nuclei, decay at any time without warning. There isn't even a potentially working legal code to form a Schelling point for the decay - it can decay slowly, losing a neutron here and there, or it can decay catastrophically, splitting into several particles at once. (And I can't very well define increasing informal power as not-decay.)

And now I'm seized by fantasies. If people were rational, thinking creature capable of understanding the future, we would have a backup plan, or else immediately create a backup plan. Most people are almost fully aware that the legal system is busted - for one, look at how many antinomian responses there are here. And if you ask individuals implicitly instead of explicitly, that is, ask for data not conclusions, you will overwhelmingly get stories of the legal system failing, not of it working. (Unless they are an actual legal professional, for obvious reasons.)

It should be a short step from there to convince them to generally agree on an alternative, as backup. (For reasons that are also obvious, I would suggest my own system.) Should, therefore, isn't.

I wonder if this would be different in a society where the security structures didn't wage psychological warfare upon its customers.

Particle Count; Aleph-0 or Alpeh-1?

I am very strongly convinced the universe is finite. The evidence for finity is, probably not coincidentally, just as strong as the evidence against the existence of nearly all kinds of gods.

However, if I Accept my Ignorance...

Assume the universe is spatially infinite. Are there aleph-0 particles, or aleph-1 particles?

Proof of Infinite Regression's Fallacy

The starting guess is that infinite regression is a contradiction, and like all contradictions assuming it is true results in finding that you can use it to prove anything. (From the book Zero, if 1=0, Winston Churchill is a carrot.)

This turns out the be the case, though in a somewhat interesting manner. For even one infinite regression to work you must already know that every possible statement is true. Because, the only way to work an infinite regression is to have an infinitely receding line of different statements. The only alternative is to repeat itself, which reduces the regression to petitio principii.

Petitio Principii
I learned something analyzing it in detail. Logic has something of a anisotropic crystalline structure. Something like a lightning bolt as well. Starting from any beginning assumption, you can use the laws of logic to travel down the forks and prove the endpoints, but you can't move back up, except insofar as you can infer the thunderhead from the scorch marks on the ground. "Ah, for this scorchmark, we have to assume this particular lightning bolt. Thus, this particular lightning bolt must have been true so as to prove this scorch mark." And so, even though the endpoint necessarily requires the premises, you cannot use the endpoint to prove the premises. Said another way, you can go backwards to learn, but not to prove, the premises. In yet another way, causes make effects, and while we can infer the causes from the effects, the causes do not flow from the effects.

Because every true fact must be consistent with every other true fact, you get not just one branching tree but an entire series, forming a nice anisotropic crystal; you can go down, but not up.

So any infinite regression that repeats itself has exactly the structure of petitio principii, and tries to have a cause, a premise, flow from an effect. This is simply not the way logic works.

Ergo, to be a true infinite regression, it must not repeat itself.

Ze Turtles
La Wik says this; "There would never be adequate support for P₁, because the infinite sequence needed to provide such support could not be completed."

This is incomplete. It begs the question, actually. In fact, what I need to prove is exactly that the sequence cannot be completed. The reason it cannot be completed is that it must contradict itself.

Luckily, the proof has already been done for me. Like the formula for pi will eventually spit out any sequence of digits you want, a proof using infinite regression will eventually need to state every possible statement. Or, equivalently, given an infinite amount of time, every single possible event will occur not just once, but an infinite number of times. As a result, either every single possible statement needs to be true, instantly showing that it's a contradiction because it proves everything, or else you can't complete the sequence without contradicting yourself after a finite number of steps. And yes, actually, I can show this using the epsilon/delta definition, if it isn't obvious.

Also, I just realized, to fully complete an infinite regression always leads to a circular argument, because 'every possible expression' includes the proposition you're trying to prove.

I will happily show how any example you want to propose fits into one of these categories. (Or all of them.)


To be an expert in philosophy, you need to be able to just sit down and form these arguments, which is exactly what I did earlier today. "You know, it's time to prove the fallacy of infinite regression." So I worked out what infinite regression actually means, by eliminating everything it can't mean, and then worked out the consequences of that definition. And poof! Knowledge appears.


Regardless of all this, infinite regression would be a sublimely useless technique. We will never accumulate an infinite amount of data with which to verify an infinite number of premises. I would have fallen back on this if I couldn't have proven that it was a contradiction.


Update:

Trying to figure out how to classify premises so I can check two possibilities.
First; given any single assumption, there are a finite number of other assumptions that are neither a consequence nor contradictory.
Second; assuming there are in fact an infinite number of possible assumptions, can I categorize them like 'even' and 'odd' to filter some out yet leave an infinity?

It seems extremely unlikely that there are an infinite number of distinct, non-contradictory, yet relatable premises. For instance you can assume infinite dimensions, and then you can have an infinite number of non-contradictory independent assumptions, and even relate them with the behavior in dimension x+1 being a function of dimension x. It's infinite, it regresses, and in fact you actually need an infinite number of premises to fully define motion in that space. {Even if it's x=1 and f(x)=(x+1)=0, and so x+2=f(x+1)=0, and so on.}

Right, so if you see any universes made up of infinite dimensions, the proof won't apply to them.

So, now, can you get an infinite number of premises in one dimension? In other words, can you make an infinite number of independent, relatable, non-contradictory statements about the natural numbers? No, you cannot. The natural numbers are entirely defined by the Peano axioms; everything we know about them are consequences of those. The same reasoning applies up to the real numbers, though of course complex numbers are two-dimensional and require at the very least assuming a second dimension.

So this isn't really a proof...yet. My hurdles are at once extremely high (dealing with infinity) and yet also low (they appear extremely different than anything we see empirically.) On the other hand, the exact same situation in reverse obtains for anyone who wants to use infinite regression to prove anything.

The ultimate question then, is, how many dimensions does truth have? Actually you need to start by defining dimension for premises and logics that aren't strictly numerical...

So, uh, someone wanna get on that?

Property Rights Defined, Applied to Bittorrent

The basis of ownership is reasonably expectation of control.

When Disney releases a film in digital format to the public, they cannot reasonably expect to prevent it from being ripped to torrents. No known technological barrier or feasible policing barrier can prevent this from occurring, and indeed the empirical evidence is that nobody has managed to do so.

Thus Disney is knowingly relinquishing their reasonable expectation, and is therefore relinquishing any logical reason they own the film. You cannot, therefore, steal it.

Of course, I Accept my Ignorance; it is possible that in the future a second valid construction of property rights may be found, and this definition may allow Disney to claim ownership. However, until that time, it is unreasonable for Disney to claim ownership; there is no reason to respect this claim over an insane person claiming to own the sun.

For illustration, consider hard copies.
Taking a DVD from a store is theft, but only because the store can reasonably expect to control the DVD itself. In addition, removing that DVD requires (usually) that the store replace the DVD, and that harms the store directly.

Conversely, you can copy a Disney movie and infinite number of times without them noticing a thing. (Let's not bring up distribution yet, it will just get messy.) Violating a patent is qualitatively different than damaging any kind of real property.

Effectively, everyone with a computer has a data factory, and everyone with the internet has a data logistics network. The computer is like a magic factory. For a certain class of goods, given even one, it can create an unending river of copies, using only a minimal amount of electricity. (Imagine what this would be like with, say, condoms.) And with the internet, you can give these copies to basically anyone in the world for the price of the line. (With condoms, you could send a condom to copy to anyone who also has the magic factory. And here you can see how strange software is compared to hardware; only people who also have the factory can use the condom copies.)

The actual risk-adjusted capital cost of creating copies of Disney movies is almost zero. Because Disney charges a lot more than this, the laws of economics guarantee a black market will spring up.

Disney attempting to preserve their patent/copyright at this point is like someone tossing a steak in front of a bunch of hungry dogs and telling them very sternly not to eat it. Even if it were wrong, it would be a very stupid thing to do.

And actually, this is an excellent case study of why neither prohibition nor monopolies work. Attempting to prevent people from producing valuable things is just dumb. The market is smarter than you are, because you are only one person but The Free Market is People.

Rewrite Of Definition of Property

This is a repair of Locke's argument. I was amused when I learned this; I didn't set out to repair his argument and indeed I did not explicitly read any Locke until I heard I was following him. This doesn't surprise me, this is what influence means; to change the thoughts of large numbers of people. They don't have to know you're doing it and indeed it seems obvious that once you have large influence, many people are going to learn your ideas through osmosis.

I'm writing this basically because I find I don't want to link to the old version, for various reasons.

Two notes. Epistemologically speaking, a full definition is a proof, because a full definition must explicitly show each condition under which it does not obtain. Otherwise, the definition invites invalid use. A full proof achieves this by being explicit about assumptions. Second, each premise of this definition-proof can be proven by showing that the opposite proposition is self-contradictory.

Here we go.


You control your body. Actually that's the definition; whatever controls your body is you.

(This is because, using a different definition, I would not be able to interact with 'you' but instead would interact instead with whatever controls your body. I would expand the definition if bodies ever became alienable property. The first step would be to reverse the definition; whatever it is that you directly control is your body; this is to deal with brain-scanning revealing sub-consciousnesses that do not have access to gross motor control, but only a neuronal subset.)

To continue controlling your body, you need to remain alive. Let me define life.

Life: every living thing can be assigned goals. If it ever becomes unable to strive for any goals, it stops being alive.

This definition makes the statement above tautological; to control your body is to make it serve your goals. To continue serving your goals you need to be able to strive for goals. (This also means the definition covers aliens.)

A specific goal all life has is to harvest and control energy. If not, thermodynamics #2 would steal all their available energy and they would perish. If life is defined without this property of goals, it would not be self-sustaining and thus we would not have anything observable to define; it would all have starved to death long ago.

(Test the goals by attempting to interrupt them. The living thing should divert energy to maintain the goal. Note that if you attempt to assign a goal to a nonliving thing, it will be contradicted when they do not divert energy to maintain that goal. Even if you define a threat to them, they will never react to that threat. As always, this is an attempt to codify an intuitive definition; it cannot be proven, only tested against the pre-existing intuition on the subject.)

So, all living things must control their environment to remain alive.

Now, if I have the right to interrupt your control, for consistency you must have the right to interrupt my control. We are, at the level necessary for this proof, identical beings, and therefore cannot have divergent rights. But, by this, I can interrupt your control of my control, and thus retain my control; a contradiction. It is hypocritical to interfere with someone else's body. Therefore, the only valid right is to respect each other's self control.

This is essentially an example of Basic Ethics (1.1), and is the basis of self-ownership.

Self-ownership: the controller of a particular living body is that body's owner. It is wrong to attempt to contravene this ownership. (I leave defining 'direct control' up to practical considerations, as this does not seem to be a common point of contention.)

So, you have ownership of your body in an attempt to control your surroundings, with some expectation of success. Consider the reverse; if you had no expectation of control, you would not attempt the action. Assume for some reason you want to pick up a rock, and so you do. If you had known in advance that you would be prevented from controlling that rock for your 'some reason,' you would not have picked it up. Whenever I see a lifeform attempt to control their surroundings, I can assume they expected some level of success.

Therefore, since I want you to not interfere with my manipulations of the environment, and you're almost identical to me, it cannot be right for me to interfere with your manipulations of the environment. Thus, we expect to own our environment, as an extension of our self-ownership.

There are some exceptions. Insane people's expectations cannot be matched with outcomes, and indeed this forms a decent definition of insanity. Also, people can be mistaken, expecting something that they have no good reason to expect. Both these cases create a contradiction in the logic at the very base; they cannot properly be assigned goals, because they cannot or will not properly defend those goals. As an example, someone may expect to control the quantum state of the atoms of my body, but of course they have no good reason, and indeed as my atoms evolve they will be unable to deflect them toward any goal they might be assigned. If that were the only goal they could be assigned, they would immediately 'die,' according to the definition.* Thus, for this goal, they cannot be considered alive, and thus cannot have self-ownership, and thus their expectation of control cannot be supported as ownership.

*(This makes me realize that goals that can't fail, such as expecting my atoms to evolve randomly, fail as goals because they define control as choosing the absence of control.)

I include this restriction by saying the expectation of control must be reasonable. They must have the faculties of reason, and the faculties must accord with their expectation. (Plants, therefore, cannot own anything, even though they are alive.)

I conclude that ownership is defined as reasonable expectation of control.



In human society, the reasonable expectation of control is achieved through security. Now why is this?

There have always been, and every reason to believe there always will be, people who wish to contravene ownership, either by guile or force. Thieves and robbers, essentialy, and the latter when state-scaled are called warmongers. Because of this, to reasonably expect to retain your property requires you to secure it against these threats, just as to retain control of your body requires you harvest energy, and defend it both from decay and from the attacks of other organisms.

I own my wallet. I can reasonably expect to control it, because I am part of a society that prevents theft first by moral condemnation and second by the police. Similarly, my society itself is protected by the army. (While I'm Canadian, it seems America has been, for some time, playing global police by disincentivizing non-Israeli territory-conquering wars.)

My expectation of control of my wallet is empirically reasonable as well; it has never been stolen. So if it is stolen, does that mean I was wrong that I could reasonably expect to control it, and thus the theft is a non-theft?

The answer to that is no, and I've done that on purpose by using the word 'expect.' Obviously, an omniscience would clearly know that my wallet was going to be stolen, but the reasons available to me at the time clearly lead me to expect it won't be stolen. No matter how much you spend on security, there will always be some way to circumvent it. And indeed, if there were not, there would be no point in defining theft, because it would be impossible.

I would also like to be pedantic about the moral position of the thief; if they had no reasonable expectation of controlling the wallet after it was taken from my pocket, they would not have tried to take it. And thus they, knowing I had reason to expect to retain my wallet* they knowingly violated that reasonably expectation, and supplanted their own. As logical objects, we are not different enough to possibly justify such an asymmetry, and thus all thefts are wrong, even according the thief; theft is hypocritical.

*(Indeed, if I had no such expectation, why would I have taken it with me outside? Would I have ever bothered to acquire one at all?)

This strongly suggests a method for changing an object from unowned to owned; secure it against threats to your control. Right now, the moon is unowned, as nobody can expect to affect events on its surface. Once a transportation corridor is established, someone will own the parts of the moon they can prevent from being conquered by third parties. (Within reason.) Kindly note that this doesn't necessarily require an army; a simple contract may suffice (plus some anti-vandalism patrols.) Similarly, deep-sea habitats generally don't need to fight off pirates, although when deep-sea travel becomes cheap, it will become necessary to stop delinquents from damaging the property, and may become necessary to stop some state-level threats as well.

Nevertheless, as long as reasonable steps are taken, it is wrong to attempt to take or destroy someone else's expectation of control.

Having defined this, there is but a short hop to universal ethics. Short version; humans want to be good. If everyone knew it was wrong to violate reasonable expectation of control, very simple, cheap, and peaceful methods of security may suffice for nearly all property.



Notes:

While this definition applies to sentient aliens, I don't know how, if at all, it applies to the less conscious life forms of Earth. I am a carnivore, so I suspect it does not. My first instinct is to say that nonhuman life forms cannot create security structures, and this immediately makes me think that even if they did, it isn't obvious that my argument that (since I have values, I have to respect yours) applies across significantly different species, because the way they have values is going to turn out to be qualitatively different.

You can check this idea by referencing children, who have the kind of cognitive differences we might see in aliens. The rules for ownership are not entirely symmetrical in this case.



An interesting objection I have seen is; 'What about part ownership, such as shares?' What we've said here is that ownership of a single object can be divided into parts, of which the ownership is absolute.

Example; you and your sibling each own half of a restaurant, and have hired a manager to run it. Naively, it appears the manager is controlling the restaurant. However, what happens if you and your sibling both decide to fire the manager, or otherwise override their decisions? Similarly, if you and your sibling have a disagreement on whether to fire the manager, you cannot both achieve your goal, so whose goal can we reasonably expect will be achieved? That person is the real owner. If the restaurant is controlled by anyone else, it is because of delegation of control.

Given a whole apple, multiple people cannot all eat the whole thing, though multiple people can eat a part of it. Similarly, given one car, it can only go in one direction. The passengers may agree on the direction, but only one person controls the direction. This is true of all objects; there can be only one owner, because there can be only one controller, and thus only one person who can reasonably expect to control it. (Though of course there are often, even frequently, violations of ownership in the real world that are not criminal per se. As an Anarcho-formalist, I think we'd all be happier if we actually respected the formal truth of these situations.)

You can test the ownership of any real-world object by asking various people to try to control it. It is unambiguous if only one person's goals are realized. If there are multiple people, you can fall back upon the reasonableness test, though at least the control test will narrow the candidates.

So yeah, I have found again that Communism can't work. Someone has to control the stuff, which is exactly what Russia discovered in the Soviet system.



Of course, that word 'reasonable' isn't entirely clear. People lie. You can always make the argument that you expected to control an object, you just can't always reasonably, truthfully do so. In addition, people are wrong. They did expect to control it, but not for any good reason and thus it wasn't reasonable, but of course they don't realize that, and they may convince other people to not realize it either.

It's a judgement call. That is why the head of a court is called a judge.* Nevertheless, it is in principle possible to determine who had good reason to expect control, and who did not. It just isn't feasible, which reflects back and means precision in defining ownership is overkill anyway; you can't unambiguously determine ownership in contentious real-world situations regardless.

*The Five Factor personality test gave me this idea. Folk philosophy tends to settle close to the actual truth. And in fact, common law can be almost entirely derived from the principle of reasonable expectation of control, including the fact that the reason part requires a judgement call and thus a judge.


I believe that's everything. Let me know if I've forgotten something, again; as usual one of my primary motivations for writing this is to help ensure it's correct.

Basic Objective Ethics; Version 1.1

I start with Hume's ought; there is no ought from is.

More explicitly, there is no fact about the objective world from which it logically follows that any agent ought to do anything. However, note that this isn't complete; I have to use the modifier 'objective world.'

I use one assumption; value exists. Kindly keep in mind explicitly that value is inherently valuable. Since you desire things, I think this is a pretty safe assumption. (I have an irresistible urge to note that assumptions can only be challenged by self-contradiction.)

In the subjective world, there are values. Assume that right now, you value an ice cream. Because of Hume's ought, there can be no reason you ought not to go have some ice cream. However, I can construct a reason you should go get some ice cream; it would uphold your values and thus add value to the world.

That is, because of Hume's ought, normative statements can be constructed.

For a less toylike example, assume instead that you want some ice cream, but also value not consuming animal products. In this case, to have some ice cream would be to contradict your own values. I cannot construct a case that you ought to have ice cream, but I can construct a case that you ought not to have ice cream.

This is the only known way to validly construct normative statements. This also applies to any deities; while your values may be dependent on theirs for a variety of reasons, theirs will depend upon this structure; the fact that it is impossible to objectively contradict their values.

Now, you may object that because of this, morals are in a way voluntary. You are subject to them because you have opted in. However, all living things will opt in. Let me define life.

Life: Every object that can be assigned a goal is alive.

Living things will defend these goals, and if you manage to interrupt their goals, they will die. Another name for goal is value.

That is, if you can control your environment, make it conform to your goals, you have values.

"You ought not to follow ethics." This statement cannot be objectively supported. It can only be supported if you value not following ethics - if you value not following your values.

That is, to answer the question, "Ought I follow ethics?" with 'no' is a contradiction and by the law of excluded middle the only valid answer is 'yes.'

But perhaps 'ought' has no actual meaning at all, and as such the above question is meaningless. Equivalently, perhaps the question assumes a 'yes' answer to something that is, in fact, 'no.' However, this cannot be, because I would be able to construct a contradiction stemming from the physical consequences that question answered 'no;' the real consequences of that branch would contradict the logical consequences of this one. (Physicists use this principle to probe deeper logical levels all the time.)

And because all subjective facts can be reframed as objective facts (and vice-versa) Hume's ought is in fact a paradox. Are your values independent of my perceiving them, or not? Relative to me, they are objective, and thus the system of ethics that determines whether your actions are right or wrong is objective. (Kindly note explicitly the symmetry; my values are objective relative to you, and since the truth must not depend on perspective, all values must have properties consistent with objectivity. Though I should note that a different but equivalent argument applies if you take the axiom that subjectivity is first instead of objectivity.)

Nevertheless, there is truth behind Hume's ought. Yet it is strangely difficult to phrase it non-paradoxically without assuming my conclusion. "There is no ought that can be derived from non-value objects."