/r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 09, 2023

Submitted by BernardJOrtcutt t3_107f3ud in philosophy

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread. This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our posting rules (especially posting rule 2). For example, these threads are great places for:

  • Arguments that aren't substantive enough to meet PR2.

  • Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. who your favourite philosopher is, what you are currently reading

  • Philosophical questions. Please note that /r/askphilosophy is a great resource for questions and if you are looking for moderated answers we suggest you ask there.

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. All of our normal commenting rules are still in place for these threads, although we will be more lenient with regards to commenting rule 2.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j3m2r83 wrote

Has anyone actually solved the Objective Vs Subjective Morality debate?

A lot of people are on the objective camp (with various arguments) but more and more people are jumping to the subjective camp.

Some say morality must be objective because we have biological needs like good health, which is universal, so anything that promotes good health in life should be objectively moral?

I believe Sam Harris uses the same logic.

What say you? Morals are objective or subjective? What is your argument?

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oryxmath t1_j3n9ir6 wrote

Nobody has solved it.

The most important thing to have when approaching this debate (or any other major philosophical debate) is epistemic humility. If you think that moral truths are obviously objective, or obviously subjective, consider the possibility that you're missing some of the complexity of the arguments on the other side.

​

One thing worth doing here is laying out out the universe of major debates in meta-ethics, because a lot of times "subjectivism" gets conflated with a lot of different views.

Moral Realism is the view that there are some true moral facts. Say, murder is wrong.

Moral Anti-Realism is not just "subjectivism" but could be divided into some different views:

  1. Non-cognitivists believe that moral statements are not the sorts of things that can be true or false. They may just be expressions of approval or emotion. So "murder is wrong", according to a non-cognitivist, might just mean something like "boo murder!". They key here is that moral statements are not beliefs. "murder is wrong" is neither true nor false on this view.

  2. Error theorists believe that moral statements ARE beliefs that could be true or false, but that they are never true. So "murder is wrong", according to an error theorist, is false. It is false not because murder is good, but because the property "wrongness" doesn't exist in the world.

Subjectivism is technically a moral realist position by my definition. But Traditional moral realists are objectivists, believing that the truth or falsity of moral statements are mind-independent. So "murder is wrong" is either true or false no matter what I happen to think about murder. Non-objectivists believe moral truths are somehow mind-dependent. Subjectivism would say "murder is wrong" means something like "I disapprove of murder". But there are other non-objectivist positions. Cultural relativism, for example, would say "murder is wrong" means something like "my culture disapproves of murder".

​

I'm not taking a view on any of these questions, I just wanted to lay out the landscape for you for further reading or maybe help you pinpoint your own views. Very important to remember that anybody who is giving glibly confident answers to these questions probably doesn't understand all the nuance because this stuff is not easy.

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Symsav t1_j3yjgc8 wrote

Arguments like Sam Harris’ have been refuted for decades in many ways. One is the is-ought gap - principally, you cannot logically derive what you ought to do (moral actions) from what is (biology, pleasure, happiness, etc).

Other notable refutations of objectivist morality like these are the Open Question Argument, and the Naturalistic Fallacy. So to answer your question, as with every debate in philosophy neither side has ‘solved it’, but the subjectivist side has never really had a problem entirely refuting arguments from the objectivist side

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j406c84 wrote

But how do you refute the objective and universal nature of biological needs?

We are genetically compelled to fulfill our biological needs, its literally mind and axiom independent, it doesnt matter what we believe in, we still have to obey our biology if we are sound of mind.

So any moral values developed from biology should be objective, right?

Its not like we can do anything else, we'd literally die if stop fulfilling our biological needs.

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Goonerlouie t1_j4isoee wrote

Reproducing is a biological need. The ways some will satisfy that need is immoral (talking about non consensual relations).

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j4kczc4 wrote

Rape is not fulfilling the need to reproduce, its an unintended side effect of hormones.

Biology is objective, but evolution is not perfect, that doesnt disprove the objectivity of biology and the morality developed based on it.

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Goonerlouie t1_j4kjnud wrote

I don’t know, there must be a link between hormone and biological needs. Hunger is triggered by a hormone is it not? I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss it as an unintended side effect of hormones.

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j4l7gx1 wrote

As said, biology is evolution and evolution is never perfect, its trials and errors, adaptation to survive.

But once it has found a formula that works, it will become universal and spread among the species, becoming its objective foundation, survival of the best biology.

The link is trials and errors with side effects, biological evolution is not a factory made precision machine, lol.

But its still totally mind independent, meaning its objective.

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Symsav t1_j4rnznb wrote

I don’t need to refute the nature of biological needs. To claim we have biological needs is a descriptive claim, to claim we ought to act in accordance with them is a normative claim. To derive a normative claim from a descriptive claim is inherently illogical.

Time for the open question argument. Let’s use, for example, ‘maintaining one’s health’ as our biological need. For this to be reducible to good, asking ‘is maintaining one’s health good?’ has to be a closed question (the answer must be yes in all instances - as it would be to ask ‘is good good?’) The answer is yes sometimes - most of the time, even - but what about when sacrificing your food so that your child can eat? (or any other instance of an answer which is anything but ‘objectively yes’).

Therefore, although biological needs are universally experienced and usually what we navigate towards, they are far from objectively moral.

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SmorgasConfigurator t1_j3mfom3 wrote

No solution, only more or less convincing arguments.

I do not think the question is as clear cut though as objective vs subjective. It is possible also to argue that morality is a social property. To see morality as a matter of the individual subject would then be wrong. However, neither would the morality be founded in a universal nature. The social laws and conventions are then imitated, adopted, reproduced through the individual human. In a sense that is an objective morality, not a choice or something individual, but neither is it universal.

If we accept this one can debate depth. For example, if our moral intuitions about who or what to blame for an unprovoked murder, or different moral status of children, can be traced back to some conventions from millennia ago, what does that imply for the present? Can we elect to switched the moral system that plays out within us or not? There is a bootstrap problem here, which I know some philosophers like Agnes Callard are thinking of. Questions about the truth in traditions are also found here, truths that are not simply matters of scientific scrutiny.

I find that many deeper debates about morality end up in questions about purpose or telos. Is everything arbitrary, or has the human creature been imbued with some purpose. Even the Sam Harris approach to look at biology and survival and reproduction ends up there, attributing meaning to suffering. It makes the God question also inevitable. Alasdair MacIntyre has looked into telos and why some given feature of the universe we live in is likely to have granted us with an objective purpose.

Lots more can be said, my point merely is that once we look deeper into the question you pose, another set of issues are encountered, which challenges the question and what morality is or can be.

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[deleted] t1_j3m8sut wrote

[deleted]

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j3mb4v6 wrote

Psychos are not sound of mind, I doubt we can use their behaviors as an argument.

Even psychos want a healthy life too, they just dont mind getting it at the expense of other people.

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[deleted] t1_j3ml5yl wrote

Morality is a phantasm, an illusory figment of the human imagination. For morality to be objective, there would need to be some universal independent standard to refer to, but no such thing exists.

Let's consider a car, which is travelling along a road. That car is going at a certain speed. As bystanders, we might guess at what speed the car is traveling, and we will have either a correct answer or an incorrect answer. The only reason that our answers can be correct or incorrect is because the car is traveling, and thus will be moving at a certain speed. It provides the standard by which our answers can be adjudicated. If there was no car, then to ask at what speed the car was traveling would not make sense.

In the case of morality, there is no car, which is to say, there is no standard. Taking your example here:

>Some say morality must be objective because we have biological needs like good health, which is universal, so anything that promotes good health in life should be objectively moral?

You haven't actually resolved the moral question. Why is it right to fulfill those biological needs? What makes that correct? By what standard, and by what authority is that standard applied to everyone? You can ask the same slate of questions of every purported moral system out there, and I, for one, have never seen convincing answers.

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j3n19t2 wrote

>You haven't actually resolved the moral question. Why is it right to fulfill those biological needs? What makes that correct? By what standard, and by what authority is that standard applied to everyone? You can ask the same slate of questions of every purported moral system out there, and I, for one, have never seen convincing answers.

  1. We have universal and objective biological needs to be healthy and free from harm, people are just born with these needs. (animals too)
  2. We ought to do things that maintain our biological needs, because they are innate to our existence. (due to evolution).
  3. Therefore we ought to develop morality based on biological needs, which are universal and objective.

Would this be a good premise and conclusion for moral objectivity?

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[deleted] t1_j3ner63 wrote

>We ought to do things that maintain our biological needs, because they are innate to our existence. (due to evolution).

But, why should that be the standard, and not something else? Why should I be held to what is innate to "our existence," and not just my own pleasure, or what is innate to the existence of squirrels, or iron? Ultimately, all moral systems/claims rely on bare axioms, but there is no reason why one must accept any given axiom; they are essentially arbitrary. Therefore, the moral system which relies on them is, essentially, arbitrary.

Put a different way: while the moral system might rely on objective realities in its formulation, such as basic biological needs, the decision to consider those realities as the basis of right and wrong is ultimately an arbitrary choice. We might, all of us, inherently value something, but that doesn't make it right.

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j3vzpj2 wrote

Because biological needs are things nobody can reject and they apply to everyone regardless of their personal preference?

Unless you are not sound of mind, I doubt anyone would deliberately self torture for fun, biological needs always take over in the end.

You can say its the objective foundation of our existence, which means we have an objective reference to build our morality.

It is basically mind independent.

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[deleted] t1_j3yh0cu wrote

>You can say its the objective foundation of our existence, which means we have an objective reference to build our morality.

But why should that be the reference in the first place? We could make any number of things the reference, all of which might be objective to a greater or lesser degree. But why should that be the standard and not something else? We might prefer one option over another, but that doesn't mean that it is necessarily right.

To say that something is morally right or wrong carries the implication of an obligation that commands our obedience in some sense. If we do not adhere to that obligation, then we have errored in some way.

Yet, how can someone be said to have errored if they simply take on a different axiom than you do? Your axiom here seems to be something like 'we ought to fulfill our basic biological needs,' but someone else could as easily say that 'we ought to serve god,' and their axiom has as much proof that it is the correct one as your axiom does.

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j405aqm wrote

Because you either fulfill your biological needs or you die?

That's a very strong and objective "right".

In fact, its so strong that we cant even stop ourselves from wanting it, its in our genes, the biological need to survive and spread.

Even people who "wanna serve god" must have their biological needs fulfilled, they wont be alive to serve god otherwise, lol.

Isnt this the most objective standard/reference/right thing to do?

Its literally axiom independent.

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[deleted] t1_j40xniq wrote

You will eventually die regardless, that’s inevitable. The decision to make it later, rather than sooner, is a matter of preference. It might be a very strong preference, but it’s still essentially a preference.

As I said previously, just because we might all inherently want something does not mean that it is morally right. It’s not about what we want to do, or even what we are instinctually driven to do; it’s about what we ought to do. That ‘ought’ needs to exist as a thing in itself, and provably so, for there to be an objective morality. Otherwise, you’re just forwarding one values system among many.

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j41c1xw wrote

So nothing is morally right then?

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[deleted] t1_j4359ee wrote

No, nothing at all. There’s no right or wrong, just choices and consequences.

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j4505pr wrote

So Hitler was an ok guy?

If I follow this line of thought.

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[deleted] t1_j46tz7p wrote

Two things can be true at once. You can think, as I do, that what Hitler did was abhorrent and cruel, you can hate him, all without saying that his actions were morally wrong. Preference and opinion are utterly divorced from whether or not something is wrong or right. Just because I don’t believe in objective morality does not mean I am automatically best friends with Hitler, or Mao, or Stalin, or any other homicidal dictator; as far as I’m concerned, they were all abhorrent and cruel.

What is even the point of saying it was wrong? Do you think that would have stopped him from doing what he was doing, if only someone had told him it was wrong? I highly doubt it.

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j472cht wrote

The point is so kids dont grow up confused and following in his footstep.

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[deleted] t1_j47edsf wrote

Children aren't taught how to behave by moralizing. We teach children how to behave by imposing negative consequences on them for engaging in behavior which we disapprove of. This prepares them for adult society, where the only rules are those which the people with badges and guns enforce. Choices and consequences, "if you chose to do this, these will be the consequences, and it's up to you to decide if it's worth it."

The same sort of approach can be taken with a figure like Hitler, or Mussolini, or any such individual. Forget about right and wrong, is that the sort of life you would want to have? Dictators don't have happy existences; it's a lot of paranoia, constant stress that your cronies, who you have no choice but to rely on, might be planning to kill you and usurp your position, and also constant fear that an opposition faction might be able to gather enough support in the military or the population to overthrow you and kill you in some horrible way. There are plenty of simple, hedonistic reasons why you don't want to try to be like those guys. It sucks!

Ultimately, I don't think there are a lot of people who want to do that sort of thing anyways, but we can ignore that for now. Why moralize, when you can just present clear consequences for the choices made? The latter seems like a much more effective way of influencing human behavior towards desired outcomes than the former.

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ColoringFrenzy t1_j3n7zkp wrote

You say “due to evolution” as if it’s the only belief people have, which is untrue. We very well could have been put on earth in another way which would tear your theory down

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chapster300 t1_j3qx1rj wrote

I am currently writing an essay analysing ways in which scent has been used to control women throughout history. I was wondering if anyone knew any philosophers who wrote about the nature of scent - I know Kant did briefly, will dismissing it as “the most dispensable of the senses.” I haven’t seen scent mentioned elsewhere in any philosophy I’ve read though so I was hoping someone can help me out :)

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oryxmath t1_j3rvt4d wrote

Martha Nussbaum, a leading contemporary philosopher and legal scholar, has some great stuff on the philosophy of disgust and the law. It isn't strictly or exclusively about scent, but I think her general discussion of disgust might be useful. She is also definitely sensitive to how this all can be particularly impactful towards women.

The book is "Hiding from Humanity", and you can probably find some talks and readings online as well searching for "Martha Nussbaum on Disgust"

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OMKensey t1_j3rvuhg wrote

I'm an amateur philosopher who has watched a lot of philosophy podcasts and so forth.

I tentatively think Russellian monoism / panpsychism is a good theory of consciousness. It recently occurred to me that, if Russellian monoism is correct, cosmology suggests there was an extremely high density of all of the universe's matter/consciousness at the time of the big bang expansion.

I don't know much about this density:

  1. All of the universe's consciousness condensed in one density prior to the big bang expansion.
  2. When the expansion happened, the consciousness spread out all over the place in space (and perhaps time).
  3. I don't know if the density has or had any will or caused the expansion.
  4. I have no reason to attribute moral attributes to the density.
  5. I don't know if the density had any knowledge (probably not much else going on for it to know about?).
  6. I don't know if the density had powers. Just a heck of a lot of consciousness.
  7. I don't know if the density or echoes of it continue to have any influence on our universe now.

Two questions:

A. I didn't previously consider myself a theist, but does this density qualify as a god?

B. Does anyone know of other people who went down the same line of thought and may have resources (papers, videos, whatever) that would address what I'm thinking? Does anyone know of a label for this line of thought? It seems sort of like a naturalistic pantheism perhaps?

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TheRealBeaker420 t1_j3sub0z wrote

> All of the universe's consciousness condensed in one density prior to the big bang expansion.

Do you think its experience would be in any way analogous to what we experience? There's no reason to think this entity would have biological sensations, like our experience of hunger, so it's unclear what we might meaningfully derive from this claim even if we accept it as true. As you pointed out, it just results in a lot of "I don't know"s.

> does this density qualify as a god?

Gods are usually described as intelligent beings that interact with humans somehow. I don't think the sort of information processing required for intelligence is possible here. There's also no evidence that it has any direct relationship with humans.

You might be able to simplify by appealing to a sort of deism, but IMHO that usually just ends up making it less godlike. Of course, it depends on how exactly you go about it. Here's an argument for atheism that I made a while back using similar terms. What qualities do you think such an entity might have that could make it worthy of the title "god"?

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OMKensey t1_j3t82t6 wrote

I agree with your entire post. A complete lack of sensory organs makes me question whether this conscious density would even know anything as you point out. And, most certainly, what it is like to be this density (its consciousness) would be nothing like ours. I'm not even sure it would have any higher order consciousness because there is not a brain network - - everything might be too dense for pathways.

I also don't think any current relationship with humans other than parts of it literally became us. But just miniscule parts.

On the other hand, it is all of the universe's consciousness condensed into a tiny point. That seems... interesting. But as you say it raises more questions than answers.

I also tend to think this probably wouldn't qualify as a god under most definitions, but I did want others' opinions.

It's a strange place for me to be: "Hi I'm atheist but I do give pretty high credence to this weird thing at the beginning of the universe."

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TheRealBeaker420 t1_j3tduhw wrote

Maybe a bit, but atheists come in all flavors, and can even be religious or spiritual. Other times it's basically just shorthand for being a religious skeptic. I even heard a pantheist claim to be an atheist once, which tbh felt a bit over the top. It's a pretty flexible term, though. I think either pantheism or deism are the appropriate terms for what you're describing, if you want to call it a god. If you don't then I wouldn't overcomplicate it.

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[deleted] t1_j468wp2 wrote

[deleted]

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OMKensey t1_j46f7jk wrote

I kind of like the notion of a God just accidentally creating worlds without even knowing it while just going on about its own business. That would make sense in some ways.

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[deleted] t1_j48n8e3 wrote

[deleted]

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OMKensey t1_j490w6f wrote

Your thoughts are not that far off from mine although we are arriving there from different angles. Also, I'm more hesitant to use the word God because it is so different than what people mean by "God" here in Texas.

But much respect for where you are coming from. We can both keep searching.

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lauren_1995_uwu t1_j4142ym wrote

I wrote this, I am not a very enlightened person on the subject, I would like to know what you know about this subject         "Modernity, the First World War, the Second, the Cold War, the historical events that marked the era. After the proto-capitalist industrial revolution there was a margin of coherent and understandable productive thought of progress, Nations of left and right accelerated their processes, philosophers raised new rigid sediments for new praxis, even crazy physicists developed the darkest advances of realities difficult to understand for human logic. But what happened where we are today no memory of the past They all became colorless portraits After modernity there was an oblivion A flash of no reason A disconnection and an entrance to the matrix Capitalism evolved like a virus and took over the planet It's not a criticism, it's a reality. Our ways of thinking were molded to the new status quo Bringing oblivion to war that now is so foreign When it was?

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oryxmath t1_j41awdl wrote

I find this interesting but hard to really evaluate. Pretty much any time I see a philosophical thesis that is chalk full of words/phrases like "capitalism", "modernity", "praxis", I think it is helpful to try to rewrite your thesis in as simple and straightforward language as possible and see if a) it still makes sense, and b) it isn't a trivial truth.

You'll see this issue even with famous philosophers (usually French philosophers that aren't read much in philosophy departments but worshipped in some other humanities). They'll say something like "Under late capitalism, the wisdom of modernity falls into the crux of folly, for only if we deconstruct capitalist production itself can existence be retained in the post-structural sense" and it's like oooh it sounds so deep but when forced to state the point simply it's just an obvious simple thing like "some forms of industry are bad for the environment".

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walterbryan13 t1_j423jg7 wrote

Yeah makes some reading of their work feel tedious and you get lost and bored.

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MathOverMeth t1_j41b1xt wrote

Before you read any further, do you know of anyone who's proposed a system of philosophy or political philosophy that assumes its own incorrectness? Many acknowledge the need for change, yet they systematically resist change. I propose a system that welcomes and encourages it. A purely academic pursuit to see where a logical democracy could take us. If anyone has done anything like this, I want to see it!

The iterative process for improvement needs to be refined, but I do have some barebones ideas. I mentioned it would be democratic, so that's why I'm on this subreddit. If someone has a proposed amendment, they would formally submit their argument. The author of the original rule (or some sort of anonymous official) would then respond, and a philosophical debate would commence. The debate would be unlike today's democratic debates, and more like a game of correspondence chess. Several days could go by to ensure a proper philosophical response. After some time, voters could read the transcripts and choose a side. Ideally, votes are cast by independent and anonymous individuals, hopefully certified in logic in some way, but voting is meant to be accessible. It's clear this could all blow up way too fast, meaning an always growing queue time, but amendments would still happen, and I would be very curious to see the direction the system would head In.

In undergrad, I took some early modern philosophy where we studied descartes, leibniz, hume, etc. They were all about bootstrapping their own system of everything. I don't know what contemporary philosophy looks like, but I’m guessing that metaphysics going out of style means today's work doesn't have as much of a systematic structure. I could be very wrong on that. As a math major I found these systems very compelling in theory, and as a life goal, I want to write my own system of everything…

I know that my system would be just as good a starting point as any. If people think this is a cool idea, I think existing systems that are good starting points and a better rule structure should be proposed. Maybe a starting point is this rule set? The US constitution?? This is way way bigger than me and I don’t know where else it could go down

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oryxmath t1_j41mqx0 wrote

"a system of philosophy or political philosophy that assumes its own incorrectness"

I don't know if anything like that does or could exist, but public choice theory comes to mind as a system of reasoning about politics (which is not the same as a political philosophy!) that assumes that political actors are self-interested.

Regarding your iterative democracy

It is an interesting idea, but think about the things it has in common with contemporary representative democracy, and how poorly some of that stuff tends to work out in practice. Most laws and regulations are subject to notice and comment periods and subject to progressive amendment prior to becoming law. The idea being that interested parties can submit analyses and proposed revisions so that the law ends up better than it otherwise would. But what happens in practice is the "logic of collective action" comes into play: concentrate benefits, diffuse costs. This is how you end up with these laws that start as "No factory may emit xyz noxious chemicals into the water supply" and end up as "No factory may emit xyz noxious chemicals into the water supply unless it is a factory that processes potatoes": Frito-Lay (or whoever) has a big incentive to spend resources proposing and pushing for that amendment, and when it comes time for that politician to be accountable to voters they can point out that "I fought for environmental regulations that protect America's farmers!". The people who bear the cost of that amendment do so incrementally, almost invisibly on the individual voter basis. So they don't have a strong enough incentive to put together an interest group that counters Frito-Lay in this made up example.

Now I know that is not quite what you are proposing, but to me the most critical part of "assuming its own incorrectness" is for your proposal to take into account the fact that people are not going to behave like Plato's philosopher kings in practice. So how do you account for interest groups, collective action problems, self-interested political actors, etc.?

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MathOverMeth t1_j41qpsk wrote

Thank you for your reply! I would assume incorrectness because that is my own personal philosophy. I view my own paradigm as something that is incorrect due to a number of things: a lack of information, flawed reasoning, lack of universal truth, etc. Also, people disagree with philosophy literally all the time, but most systems don't go through such a revision process. If someone disagrees strongly enough, they will release their own revised version of the older work.

Like I said, this would be purely academic. I'm not too worried about how things play out in practice. It should not be too political, that way all voting remains individual and anonymous. I don't know what the subject of the system would be, it could be anything, but my initial thought would be to pursue philosophical truth (whatever that means, but not real world stuff). The project is a lot less about the state of the text and more about the direction it heads in. Over time, I think it might demonstrate how incompatible logic is with this world. It feels like open source philosophy to me and I love it.

edit: a friend just told me about Nomic, a game invented by philosopher Peter Suber in 1982

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hacktheself t1_j457fl3 wrote

my typical method is assuming any conclusions or theory is likely in error until demonstrated otherwise.

as an example, based on first principles, observation, and a little industry knowledge, i developed a theory regarding journalists falling into two camps: access journos who cultivate access, and ignored journos who seek veracity.

i thought it was just a tight until someone pointed me to the herman-chomsky propaganda model, a work i haven’t read (thank you multiple TBIs), where this is a component of it.

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Supero_5 t1_j42ohc5 wrote

Life is just a game in which we get bored eventually:

Alright so, let me explain. I'm a random internet stranger, and during these past months, I've been thinking about stuff over and over again, in hopes that whatever I reach will help me in life eventually.

Anyways, one night I was walking around my living room and thinking about things. And (with some help from my mom) I then deciphered something.

I started thinking about why people felt sad, and why would some people "quit the game" if you know what I mean (I hope that works; if not then any mod can tell me to delete the message lol) and then my thinking train went on and on and then I deciphered that, much like in a game, we always want to feel happy.

Then I wondered: "So, what makes us happy?" and once again, I started thinking about it. I remembered one learning from a source that says that "survival is our goal", and then I realised, that being happy really just meant that we knew we were effective at meeting our goals".

So, then I concluded with the idea that happiness is our most important goal, and to reach happiness we just need to know that we are progressing on our goals, and meeting them.

(Extra note: While writing this, I also realised that reproduction isn't exactly tied to survival, but I guess that it can be counted as "survival beyond the body" like having children. This is a side I still haven't explored yet so if you guys have any ideas then help me out)

So... Then I wondered about one last thing: What happens when we reach our goal? What happens when there are no goals in life, no objective, no games?

I like to explain this idea by comparing it to Minecraft. When we start a new world, we need to survive, get food, and then get better armor to be more effective at surviving (and of course for brag value and because we know its better). But... what happens when the "main game" (Killing the dragon, getting netherite, etc.) is done?

Simple, there are two options: And the first one is to leave the game. It's not because we hate it, but it really is because we just don't have anything more to do with it. Or... you could do what long time players do, and focus on the building or in the multiplayer side, which do not run out of content and make you entertained again.

Anyways, back to real life:

I believe that one of the reasons we can be sad sometimes it's really because we do not find anything interesting to do in life (since boredness comes from lack of happiness). If you've seen struggling sometimes, there are times in which they seem more happy than rich people who have their lives figured out.

This, coupled with any other negative feelings about the game of life (maybe guilt for something, feeling hopeless or thinking there is no solution for your problem) makes people very sad, and they simply decide to "quit the game".

It's not really a irrational decision; it's what they think of the game. However... there is one factor that makes quitting the game a bad decision imo, and it's that, just like in Minecraft, you can find happiness and entertainment again in other areas of the game of life. You need to find another new objective which makes you happy.

Despite our best efforts, we still don't know what happens when we die. And that is why quitting the game is such a risky decision, so, that is why I prefer this option.

And so, to conclude I would like to advise you all to never quit the game. I am not sure if my theory is correct (and that is why I also came here; I want to know other opinions and counterarguments too), but if it is then maybe we can all be happy playing the game, and thrive.

Whew, that was a ride lmao. Take care everyone, and I'll answer to your arguments below :D

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SlidethedarksidE t1_j49wkj7 wrote

Life has an infinite of objectives but I believe when we don’t get to focus on the objectives that meet our preferences we start thinking no other objective is worth our time then we trick ourselves into quitting the game prematurely

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[deleted] t1_j3n6opc wrote

[deleted]

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TommyDeeTheGreat t1_j3ommo2 wrote

I know this feeling of shouting into a void, believe me.

I'd be interested in exploring your cosmology. You saw mine below. Care to do this in DM?

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_Aether__ t1_j3p4xaf wrote

It's difficult to step out of yourself in these situations.

When I've taken drugs (I no longer do), my brain goes into an "explanatory" mode where I'm constantly trying to explain the experience to myself or someone else.

This invariably ends up in my thoughts looping over and over and I can't control it.

I'm not comparing this to what you are experiencing. What may be worth trying for you is what has helped me, which has been focusing the breath. Or feeling my weight on a chair or bed. Don't feel a leg or an arm; feel the sensations of a leg, an arm. Become a cloud of pure sensation and awareness.

Just become aware of the sensations of conscious experience. Don't judge them or have any sentiment towards them. Simply be aware of your feelings, thoughts, and sensations.

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_Aether__ t1_j3p5kgi wrote

You had a vision and are afraid it will disappear.

What feels real to you right now may seem like a fever dream later. It might distress you to worry along these lines.

Simply focus on the breath. View the thoughts, but have no opinion of them. Thoughts, feelings, sensations all come and go. Be aware of them, watch them, and let them pass.

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randnietzsche2024 t1_j42uz29 wrote

Is there a subreddit dedicated to shitting on Nassim Taleb?

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Capital_Net_6438 t1_j4bb4e7 wrote

In the (or a) knowledge version of the surprise quiz paradox, we ask whether the student can know there will be a surprise during a certain finite period. Suppose the student knows at the outset (Monday). Suppose he then knows at the end of Thursday that there’s been no quiz. Can we then rule out Friday as a quiz day by deducing that the student knows there’ll be a quiz Friday?

The critical question is what the student knows on Thursday. Does the student know everything he knew on Monday? If just some, what specifically does he know?

The argument is alluring because we have just supposed the student knows various things on Monday. There’s probably some convention about hypotheticals that if you suppose an aspect of the setup it remains supposed. So the argument assumes that at the end of Thursday it remains supposed that the student knows there’ll be a surprise quiz this week.

Supposing the student knows on Thursday there’ll be a surprise quiz this week, and none has happened, it does follow that the student knows there’ll be a quiz on Friday. But it also follows that the student doesn’t know there’ll be a quiz Friday. Since the student knows the quiz will be a surprise, and knowledge that P entails P, it follows that the quiz will be a surprise. So a contradiction follows: the student knows there’ll be a quiz and not-(the student knows there’ll be a quiz).

That’s no skin off the student’s back. He’s trying to show knowledge of a surprise quiz is impossible. Deriving a contradiction from a supposition is a great way to way to show the supposition is false.

But the real lesson is that we’ve granted the student too much. It is a convention of made up situations that if they are made up some way, they remain made up that way. But there’s no requirement that suppositions remain constant. We just can’t add the supposition that the student knows there has been no quiz by Thursday to the supposition that he knows there’ll be a surprise quiz. The student can’t know all of that. The student can’t know [(there’ll be a quiz this week) & there hasn’t been a quiz by Thursday & I don’t know in advance the day the quiz will happen on].

Just b/c it’s possible to know there’ll be a surprise quiz on Monday, it doesn’t follow that it’s also possible to know there’s a surprise quiz etc. on Thursday.

Kripke says you tweak the scenario so that the student knows axiomatically that there’ll be a quiz. In that way he knows some of what he knew Monday, but not all. He knows the important part from the perspective of inferring that he knows there’ll be a quiz on Friday. He knows there’ll be a quiz this week. So then he knows there’ll be a quiz Friday.

Why should we care about this setup? What seemed intriguing to many of us was the possibility of proving lack of knowledge with a setup that more or less tracks life.

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ObjectiveTruth9191 t1_j4emqno wrote

Avoiding suffering is the only meaning to life - it's already the purpose of everyone's life even if they don't realize it

Suffering is any negative feeling, discomfort, or despair that comes without the realistic promise of something better. Here are examples of people trying to minimize suffering:

  1. A hungry person eats to avoid the suffering of hunger

  2. A person works a job they may not like to avoid the suffering of being homeless and hungry

  3. A person lifts weights to avoid the mental and physical suffering of being weak and out-of shape (because being weak would cause more suffering than the pain of excercise).

  4. Some people debate politics online because they want to convince people to vote for their candidate because they will feel mental suffering if their favorite candidate loses

  5. A terminally Ill patient takes painkillers to reduce physical discomfort (suffering) of dying

  6. An antinatalist argues against procreation to avoid potential suffering of people being born

  7. An anti-antinatalist argues against antinatalism because (for some reason) the idea of humans stopping procreation causes mental suffering (why this would cause mental suffering is a whole topic of its own for another day)

  8. A medieval religious martyr chooses to be burned at the stake for heresy because publicly renouncing their deeply held 'heretical' religious beliefs would cause immense mental suffering far more than the suffering of being set on fire.

  9. A masochist feels suffering if he isn't suffering. A masochist feels pleasure in suffering. So even a masochist is still trying to avoid suffering.

Do you see where I'm getting at? The people that try to justify suffering or claim it isn't a big deal don't understand what suffering is - suffering is when something you want and isn't happening or something you don't want is happening. It's a basic biological motivator.

Avoiding suffering is the only purpose to life, and it has been for every person always. And the best way to avoid suffering is to stop creating creatures with the capacity to feel suffering (antinatalism) - why is this so hard to grasp?

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DirtyOldPanties t1_j4fji49 wrote

So when a couple chooses to have a child you'd reference that to suffering? Or when someone is choosing to enjoy art or music or video games? Even when their lives may be comfortable such as having a good financial situation or what would be considered healthy relationships? Everything is in reference to "avoiding suffering"? I have the opposite view in that I think everything is done to live and enjoy life.

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ObjectiveTruth9191 t1_j4fzoe3 wrote

I'm saying everything someone does is to reduce suffering. All the things you mentioned are done with the goal to reduce suffering, including avoiding boredom which is suffering. Enjoying life is avoiding suffering because the lack of enjoying life would create boredom and sadness which is suffering.

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Usual-Raise-4562 t1_j4hoiq2 wrote

"Why does an existentialist advocate free choice? For we all are ruled by the pleasures of those very same choices."

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Foolhardyrunner t1_j4juwkz wrote

I don't understand the usefulness of determinism. If it is true that free will does not exist it still seems more useful to believe that it does at least to an extent.

Personally a lot of things in my life are modeled around the idea of free will and have it as a foundation. I view myself as having chosen my job, chosen what to eat. What to do as a hobby etc. At a personal level it seems that believing in determinism instead of free will would wreck much of the foundation of how I organize and go about my life.

It seems that this is true for the vast majority of people and is reflected in society. With other major beliefs there are work arounds that allow you to change how you live your life and move on if you change your belief. If you switch religions you can adopt new customs. Similarly if you become Atheist you can focus on non religious things to adapt your lifestyle.

The same could be said for other major belief changes, like political views, moral values, historical understanding etc.

But I don't see how this works with determinism. How do you effectively run your life if you don't believe that you have control over how you run it. It seems like an oxymoron.

Not saying determinists can't life a full and nice life, but I don't understand how determinists cope with not believing in free will. It just seems like believing in free will whether or not it is true is incredibly helpful.

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TommyDeeTheGreat t1_j3mwtox wrote

I have a long time consideration for a cosmos defined in 2-1/2D as a static universe. Over the period of my long life, so far, many of the things required for this envisioned cosmology has either come to light or has become a new fascination in science.

I use 2-1/2D specifically to account for branes, the natural follow-on from string theory so well explored by Brian Greene. A brane being defined classically, and by me, as a 2 dimensional plane of sorts. The 1/2D is about stacking sheets of branes for the lack of better analogy.

This makes for a static 3D cosmos by most accounts except that you could consider a brane a unique element not shared in stacks. Only 'impetus', to be defined of course, but only impetus passes from one element of a brane to the neighboring brane through 'influence'.

What is the brane? I know Brian Greene is going at this from the string theory perspective and it is overly complicated in my view but it does define interaction that I cannot comprehend at this time. However, this 2-1/2D cosmology fully supports the interactions that Brian has defined/discovered/ and theorized. I want to simplify a brane here to mean a field with 0 as one side and 1 as the other for schematic reference. Binary, as quantized as Planck considers our classic universe based on the ultraviolet catastrophe and the resulting Planck scales. Therefore, in this Planck-scale cosmology, the brane is all protential, from 0-1, analog BTW, waves, strings, planes, whatever... a quantum state of 'every possibility at once' as quantum implies. For the purpose of this treatise, the brane is a standing wave of any value interacted with by its neighboring brane/wave, and for want of restrictions, I even want to make that interaction absolutely perpendicular to the influencing wave. This is where the bounds of string theory come in.

The branes don't make me happy in this cosmology. Even the branes need to be quantized. They have lateral influence too. Quantized segments of a single brane are of the same generation as the brane making their interaction much more string theory in their connections. Having quantized the brane, we now you have the potential for interlocking branes in all directions. A universe of quantum bits. Absolutely stable and in their own time. 'The universe is quiet."

Introduce a big bang. I know, how does that even happened in this peaceful cosmos. But say something flexed. That becomes a propagation throughout the 'crystals' of the cosmos. Nothing moved, remember, just a influence for one quantum state to change to another, and so on and so on. Eventually, all states will be realized... by the cosmos itself.

Light is the ultimate speedster in this cosmos. A quantized series of cubes arranges in such a way to communicate with one and other. Each passes information and adds previous influence before passing off the information to the next 'dot'. Light ray is what we consider the least restricted 'element' devised by the impulse. Being static, the light ray has no reason to obey time. It can spontaneously exist in one cosmological state and not in every other state. After all, light is only light to an observer... a transition. Quantum states are not bound by this.

The implications of such a universe are not minor. This can explain a lot including black holes and the very illusion of reality. We are the only observers and properly considered, we are the only probes that can influence the quantized cosmos. Just to get to our Planck scale, we still have 100's if not 1,000's of divisions before we reach this quantized scale. Even quarks would involve many 1,000's of these quantum elements at worst, likely into the millions for a single quark.

The real beauty of this cosmology is the fact that scale means nothing anymore. Time means nothing anymore. And above all, this cosmos is not quantized; time is. There seems to be a horizon where time becomes manifest.

So this is my philosophical universe. We literally move through time which is a construct of a quantum state. No multiverses; no blinking out; no grand scales - just a possibility. We, our consciousness, literally passes from one quantum element to the next en-mass every moment of our lives, as does matter.

"What would happened to humanity if they realized they don't actually exist?"

​

Thank you MODs for making Monday a funday ;]

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