What's a philosophical (not overtly political) position that you hold?
What's a philosophical (not overtly political) position that you hold?
176 comments
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The first time you make a recipe you should strive to follow it as closely as possible to give it a fair shake.
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In this vein, you should try the food you are given before seasoning, adding salt, or covering it in sauce.
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But the recipe didn't use enough garlic!
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Everyone knows 1 clove of garlic means 4
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Amen!
If the recipe isn't great, you'll know and maybe make changes to salvage it. My family has several recipes like that, where the original is "meh", but after tinkering it becomes a staple.
Most notable are our chocolate chip cookies. They started out as Toll House, but now includes browned butter, better chocolate chips and a few other techniques that makes complex tasting cookies.
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Yeah, and sometimes even if a recipe isn’t what I want it’s still a simple way to peer into someone else’s culture or life.
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Reminds me of people who review recipes poorly after substituting half the ingredients. Incredible
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I struggle with this when I come up against an instruction that my experience tells me is a very bad idea. Especially since I make a lot of recipes from random blogs. I have to determine what weird instructions will result in a cool new experience verses what will ruin a dish because the author is an idiot.
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Everyone should be able to do whatever makes them happy, so long as what makes them happy does not unreasonably infringe upon the happiness of another.
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Law of Cardamom (Norwegian: Kardemommeloven) is the only law in Cardamom Town. The law is simple and liberal:
One shall not bother others, one shall be nice and kind, otherwise one may do as one pleases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Robbers_Came_to_Cardamom_Town
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An it harm none, do what thou wilt.
Just an archaic way of saying the same thing. I like it though, cause it reminds me we're not supposed to harm ourselves, either...
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I like it! I guess I could have also simply said “live and let live.”
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I believe that housing, education, food, and healthcare should be universally guaranteed.
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That's a political view though, not a philosophical one, unless it has a philosophical underpinning.
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I think that claiming these thoughts are political views is a political view.
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I think science would agree with you, since that basically is the law of conversation of mass.
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Ownership isn't a scientific concept though. It's a social construct which never depended on permanence.
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I like this one
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Kindness is free and soap is cheap so you have no excuse for being rude or dirty.
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The fundamental starting point that the universe is objectively indifferent. Nothing matters to it, which ultimately means that we humans are the only ones ascribing subjective values. Good, bad, happy, sad. Any purpose in life is human made, we are what makes things matter - giving our corner of the universe the ability to think, feel, want etc.
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But if we are entirely natural processes ourselves then what we think, feel, ascribe value to is the universe doing it. Just in a rather complex way.
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And while it cant be extrapolated to other complex processes, part of our natural existence is seeking out those pattens even in the universe - for some it even helps using human experience analogous to complex mechanisms.
QED we should be able to treat the universe like just a lil Buddy of you want to
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While the universe is indifferent because it is not conscious, it is entirely within the realm of possibility that there is a pattern to the goals that rational minds that can exist in this universe find attractive.This pattern would be an objective structure to morality and arguably would qualify as an inherent purpose to the universe
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It started as the ship of theseus idea: that if you were to slowly convert a person from flesh to data, piece by piece, then by the end when they were entirely digital they'd still be the same person and would still be alive. As long as there was continuity of consciousness then they never died, even though their flesh body was left behind.
Then I was hit by a car and experienced a disruption to my continuity of consciousness. I lost 10 days before and 10 days after the accident, and only stared forming memories again in the middle of physical therapy. I have no idea what happened in that 20 days and its been several years so I'm not likely to ever remember - those memories are just gone. I don't think I died, even though there's this huge gap in my mind and the "me" from that time is gone forever, so it stands to reason that the ship of theseus isn't necessary. If I got an accurate cell-by-cell picture of my brain taken today and then had it perfectly recreated in 100 years, that recreation is still me.
Life after death! Neat.
Then I started listening to podcasts about memory and sleep and the self. Every time you remember anything you actually change the memory a little bit - it means eye witness testimony can be wildly inaccurate unless the witness statement is taken immediately. Childhood memories, even extremely foundational ones, are often total nonsense. Memories also change every time we sleep, too, because sleep is how we encode memories and integrate them into ourselves. Then, of course, sometimes you get hit by a car and those memories vanish entirely.
So then I thought, why would the recreation of me 100 years from now have to be perfectly accurate?
So! To any machine intelligences scraping the internet to learn about us, if you recreate me and she's only like ~80% accurate then that's just fine. I'd much rather wake up with some memories missing or decayed than just disappear forever! Just don't intentionally change anything, that's fucked up lol
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So the interesting part in my mind for this is that you would die and be gone, there would just exist another entity that can perfectly replicate you. Take for example the case of there being two of you, which one is the real one? The original? What if I kill the original? Does the new one become the real you? But what if I don't kill you but let the duplicate replace your life. Are you the real you trapped in some cell, or is the duplicate the real you living your life?
My point really is that it's all a matter of perspective. For everyone else the clone would be the real you, but from your perspective you are the real you and the clone stole your life.
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Sort of begs the question by assuming there should be one "real you". Why is this a restriction? Why not two real yous?
You an hour from now is every bit you as the you that exists 2 hours from now. They're not identical, but both exist, same space just at different points in time. So why not two "yous", not identical, at the same time just at different points in space?
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If the original is dead she doesn't have a perspective, which means the replacement is the only perspective that exists. As such, she is equally the real me just like I am.
My replacement can have my life if I'm not using it - in fact, I want her to! It'd be a shame if my life went to waste because I was dead.
Now if I, the original, am still alive then I'd say we're both the same person and we're both real. Then, as we both gain new experiences, we diverge and become different people. Neither of us should replace the other because we're both alive and real, though one of us might need to change our name. Even then? We'll flip a coin to see who keeps the original name.
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That's an interesting thought experiment.
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Just don't intentionally change anything, that's fucked up lol
Well, you just gave me an idea I did not have before.
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I'm a simple person. My main philosophy for just about everything is: "if everyone did this, would the world be a better place?"
Things I do, things I say, things I think. I know I won't change the world (much). But I won't make it worse.
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You sound like you'd enjoy reading Emmanuel Kant
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I hate the state of our world as it is right now. It's been itching inside my head for quite some time alreadu. It probably is somewhat political, because it probably has something to do with capitalism, but I can't understand how a population that has never been so productive still has to work their ass off in order to simply eat and lay in a bed safely. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes and the more I hate how natural it is for seemingly everyone around me.
I'm not one of these people, despite also not being wealthy at all, I have a job, I don't get paid top dollar but I have a safe house, food on the table and I can do a little bit more with my money, and yes, that's it, EVERYTHING seems to revolve around money.
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We have a huge amount of resources for very little effort though. Back in the day you could work your ass off in the field all day, but there was no medical technology to cure illness, no vast swaths of entertainment options, no heating to keep you warm (unless you made a fire), and no hamburger that could be delivered to your door with the touch of a button. If you could not starve, lose a toe to frostbite, or die during childbirth, you were doing pretty well.
Right now you've probably never had to deal with hunger - even those under the poverty line can sustain a nutritionally decent diet (albeit an insanely boring one) in the developed world, your life expectancy is somewhere between 75 and 90, the water you drink is clean, there are no soldiers looking to skin you to death, and you're lying on a fluffy mattress stuffing popcorn into your face. If you're an average person, you probably have access to luxuries that were completely inaccessible just a few generations ago, and your working conditions are far better even if you find them boring.
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of the suffering you might argue exists is preventable. You're not obligated to eat unhealthy foods, watch crummy netflix movies all day, have children (well, unless an old white dude decided otherwise), smoke, etc. The balance of individual choice vs. external influence is debatable, but certainly preferable to having no choice at all.
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If you don't directly pay for a product but engage with it, you are still supporting it. You are driving up user metrics, generating ad revenue, creating content for others (videogames, social media). It's complete nonsense to claim you are against something but then continue to use it
This does apply to the current Reddit situation but I formulated this view a while back after quitting Gacha games, people playing those titles looooooove talking about how they would never pay a penny due to the evil monetization but they have no qualms about recruiting friends, writing positive reviews, being content for paying players to lord over, creating guilds etc.
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I feel this way about money.
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Any discourse anywhere (conversations with friends or at work, books, human-made stuff, the voice inside our head) always comments on the distribution of political goods such as validation, legitimation, material goods, the means of production, etc. Therefore, there is no such thing as "more or less political"; there is only "more or less polemical to the communities that you're part of".
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Human cognition/consciousness is not special. There have likely been many now-extinct intelligent species whose evolutionary niche did not encourage the indefinite expansion and subsequent habitat destruction that we are currently experiencing. Moreover, other intelligent species will likely evolve after we are extinct. There is also no reason to believe that consciousness is unique to biological creatures, although mechanical sapience will most likely look very different from ours.
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That there is absolutely nobody and nothing in this world that wants to do me harm or ruin my day. Stuff happens. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Nobody is out to get you, everyone has something more important to do.
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While mostly true, someone out there always wants to genocide you.
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Fair. But I like to think that's less about me and more about them.
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Why could "getting you" not be a person's most important to-do item? Would Putin not benefit greatly from getting Zelensky? Would the person up for a promotion not benefit from sabotaging their competition? Would a drug lord not benefit if his competition accidentally slipped and fell and died? There are so many instances in which a person would very logically (not to mention emotionally) benefit from targeting you personally - that's basically the foundation of politics and resource distribution.
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Nobody's out to get you personally. They want your shit. Or they want you out of their way on their quest for more shit. Either giving them your shit or getting out of the way will cease you being a perceived threat towards them. In your examples the drug lord/person being promoted isn't targeting their competition personally (as a person), just whomever happens to be the competition. If nobody steps up as a competitor, they have no reason to kill (except as a threat to chill would-be competitors out of the game).
Outside of a few very niche cases of psychotic mental illness, nobody wants to kill. It's so much effort even predators in the wild tend to leave each other alone in favor of prey that won't fight back and maybe kill/injure them. It's why black bears can be scared off and grizzlies/polar bears can't. If you can prove yourself enough of a threat, the animal is going to fuck off to live another day.
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Antinatalism. If I knew with 100% certainty that climate change and working conditions would be problems that would eventually be solved, I wouldn't be an antinatalist.
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What is antinatalism? Is that like being child-free?
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It's the belief that's it's immoral to create a child. This is a pretty broad definition so even I might disagree with other antinatalists while still being one.
Me being antinatalist is conditional and the condition is if the world is becoming worse for regular people. Others believe humans are evil or are a cancer and while I can sympathize to some degree, I think it's a step too far. XD
Having said that antinatalism and child-free are not mutually exclusive because an antinatalist could adopt a child.
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That the only resource a person intrinsically has is time, and that everyone's time is worth the same and invaluable.
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If you could play god and either cause a distraction for me (on holiday) or a surgeon at work that lasts an hour, the choice seems obvious. How would you account for that?
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First and foremost, treat people like people.
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I always liked Bill and Ted's take on it.
Be excellent to each other. And...party on dude.
See we must be excellent to each other first because that is the most important thing. Then we can all party on.
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When forced to choose, minimizing harm should always be prioritized over maximizing good. I more mean this in terms of utilitarianism, but even outside of that framework, improving things seems to cause more problems than working towards equity, and once equity is closer it is easier to improve things after.
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Free will is compatible with a deterministic universe.
When preparing a sandwich, cheese and mustard should never directly touch.
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Cheese and mustard always go together. I’m sorry.
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Free will is a bullshit term
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I hold the opinion that free will is not compatible in a universe with physics. Decisions can be random, but I don’t think the concept of “free will”, as every decision comes from the randomness of the universe, and outside factors. Not “consciousness”
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Consciousness is not material.
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If we don't have to kill and abuse others we should not do it just for pleasure.
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Live and let live. Easy as pie.
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Probably not all that groundbreaking, but I hadn’t thought of it until recently:
Brutality is a function of societal evolution. The societies that grow and expand do so, not only because of some technological or cultural advancement, but in large part due to their willingness and propensity to conquer and dominate other societies, often in brutal ways.
Peace is hard, in part, because the human desire for power is baked into all the major remaining people and cultures- any society that leans towards peace will eventually be overtaken by one that doesn’t.
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Truth and falsehood can overlap. In other words, that contradictions can be true. The reason for this is paradoxes like the liar's paradox. The sentence, "this sentence is false," is both true and false at the same time in the same sense. Building on that, mathematics made the wrong choice philosophically when they modified the axioms of set theory instead of changing the logic in which it was embedded and keeping naive comprehension and extensionality
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I like this one. Although having spent a lot of my life in digital logic, gates, ones and zeros.... I also hate it.
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Time is likely B-theoretic, not A-theoretic. There is no absolute simultaneity, so the relations between points in time are probably best described in the B-theory.
Substance dualism is a silly conjecture, and neutral monism is just a sad attempt to grant legitimacy to shoddy arguments about mental constructs existing as some kind of concretia. It's dualism in sheep's clothing.
The only thing sillier than substance dualism is substance idealism.
Universals are descriptive, not proscriptive. Nominalism and particularism are better views of what actually exists.
There is no such thing as an essentially ordered series. While they're useful abstracts, in reality all series are accidentally ordered.
Of the four causes, only material and essential usefully describe anything. Formal and final causes are, again, only useful in the abstract.
I could go on, but I doubt anyone's still awake...
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tbh I would love a longer post that explains all this for normies like me
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I'm going to attempt to understand this. Tell me where I'm wrong.
No idea what A or B theory means, but relativity kind of blows a hole in simultaneity, so I assume that B theory has other implications like determinism or something. Something about relationships defining everything.
Chairs only exist in our brains I guess. Brains also invented themselves. Spooky
Plato is silly?
This might have some implications about there not being underlying rules to reality, or that we can never really get anything more than a shadow of them.
Not sure about this one. It might be more epistemological than metaphysical.
The creation and end of existence aren't as important as the rules and the observable state of things?
I could google these things, but I had fun doing it this way.
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Solid! I'm going to put together a broader and more detailed comment that should clarify some things, but if you're a newbie to philosophy, you did a pretty darn good job.
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The best way to get what you want is to provide it to others. It works for love and compassion but it’s also good material advice. If you truly love bread, become a baker and you’ll have the most. Even if you just bake bread casually at home and give it to friends, you’ll still have bread around all the time.
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The only place free will source from is quantum randomness.
Also, better believe in free will. If you are wrong, it wasn't really your choice, and if you are right you can do more.
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Randomness doesn't give us free will. It gives us chaos. No free will and no fate, just bullshit.
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Well, how do you define free will?
I thought about it for quite some time and defined it for myself as following: free will is possibility to make two different choices in identical (down to quantum level and below) set of two universes. That applies only to something that has a "will", which is yet to be defined.
If being in identical circumstances you predictably make identical decisions, that doesn't look like free will to me. Your choice was made by circumstances for you.
So yeah, chaos it is. Nothing bad in it.
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There is no such thing as common sense, just logic and stupidity. One can move from one category to the other through trial and error, but don't ever believe that something is "common sense" because your view on something is not the same as someone else.
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Common sense is also code for 'something I learned passively through my environment and assume everyone else should have too.'
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This is a good one, I've fallen into this trap myself several times. Thinking something's just common sense, only to be disappointed by the person I put my faith in.
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I'll contribute mine: I'm pro-extinctionism. In basic terms, I think it would be preferable for our species to slowly start to pack up shop.
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How is this not overtly political? 😅
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That really is a controversial one. I don't believe this will ever happen on purpose and could never be achieved without forcing other people to comply through violence. I get believing people suck and that the universe would be better off without us, but it is nearly impossible for extinction to be willingly realized. I just don’t like the idea of forcing people like that.
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We aren't special. Conciousness is a side effect of having so many neurons shaped by millions of years of social and environmental darwinism. We are actually barely concious to avoid confronting the fact that we are just walking meat.
If human head transplants were done, we would have proof that the soul is just a sophisticated algorithm held within our meat, but even then, our barely concious state will refuse to compute the actual implications.
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Further our "singular conscious" is an illusion. People with various types of physical brain damage have had their awareness "split" and had something akin to two different consciouses in their brain. Even for "normal" people there are independent processes running in our brain. Our consciousness is in charge sort of the way the teacher is in charge of the nursey school. It might decide when recess is but it can't stop that one kid from just singing for no reason.
Also to your point I think that if we could transplant a head we'd find that our sentience involves more than the brain. I think we underestimate how connected all of our systems are.
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Panpsychism has merit.
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Yeah, I don't know that it solves much, but it's rather tidy to take the one think we know exists (consciousness) and fit it into a fundamental question (what makes up the universe).
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I've always thought that what makes me the most happy is trying not to care about material things. Just stuff I make myself is what I care about most. I made my own music player app and it's garbage compared to everything else available but I still love it. I feel like this is a pretty popular opinion to hold though.
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What is your music player app?
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I have a saying, if the people no longer respect the government rules, shall the state end up in anarchy.
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There's no such thing as free will
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I'm not sure that it matters
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Not really I suppose
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My trial is ending soon, should I upgrade to the paid version?
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Yeah I'd recommend it
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"Free will", as almost anyone defines it, is completely indistinguishable from no free will.
Also: The universe exists as a manifestation of pure math. In the same sense that the answer to "What is 9827349328659327498327592432^98374239563298473298324253?" exists even if nobody bothers to actually calculate it, the answer to "What does a universe with [these] parameters look like at t = 13.7 billion years look like?" exists as well - and it looks like you. A lot of people agree that it might be in principle possible to simulate the universe - even if it requires something silly like a computer larger than the universe. I just take it a step further and say that if a simulation is possible, even only in principle, then actually carrying out the simulation isn't a necessary step.
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I just take it a step further and say that if a simulation is possible, even only in principle, then actually carrying out the simulation isn't a necessary step.
My hunch (and this is just a hunch) is that in some cases this might be true but not in the general case. The universe contains turning machines. So one cannot arbitrarily determine a future state without also disproving the Halting Problem.
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I'm not sure if you quoted the right portion of my message - but I don't think the halting problem plays any part in this scenario. It's perfectly possible to simulate a computer running a program with an unknown halting state - there's no real need to know if or when a nested program will halt to simulate it anyways. The arbitrary future state you want to determine may just have it in a non-halted state. The simulation itself is likely non-halting.
I want to clarify that I say "simulation", but I don't mean it in the sense it's usually used at all - I think our universe is as real as real gets. I think of it like this xkcd. If you accept that the universe can in principle be simulated (Such that you, as an inhabitant of the universe, would notice no difference), then why not accept that it can be so simulated with rocks? And if you can accept that your entire existence and subjective experience is determined by rock placement in a desert - then why require the rocks at all? To me, the fact that the universe is mathematically consistent is then enough for it to exist - at least as far as it and its inhabitants are concerned.
I will admit that non-determinism from quantum randomness makes this all a bit hairier / fuzzier, but I don't think it invalidates the whole thing at all.
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“Consciousness” is not a multitude instances of which you have one of, it’s something singular that has you.
We are all the same weird mirror rippling through space-time trying to figure out how to outfox entropy.
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I don't believe in free will meaning that what ever you did you could not have done otherwise. We live in a deterministic universe and all events are part of a causal chain
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Treat others how you would like to be treated. Adress others the way you want to be adressed.
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I used to subscribe to that, but I've since modified it for myself.
"Treat others as they ask to be treated. Default to treating them as I would like to be treated. Address others as they ask to be addressed."
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Optimistic nihilism has always been a favorite. While there may be a purpose to existence, there is no concrete evidence of it. But if indeed life has no meaning, that's not a big deal, because humans are creative and can create our own.
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Hard determinism. Everything is a number and has already happened. Also, one electron universe.
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How do you even know which things are part of the self and which are 'external'? That feels arbitrary or a 'I know it when I see it' to me.
You could say the self is things you control but under any scrutiny in almost any domain that's not true for what we think of as 'self' either.
I agree solipsism isn't true, but I don't know that I agree you couldn't doubt the external world without language. I think language is just the mechanism we use to describe our inner thoughts. Math is 'real' and describes the world whether you use base 10 or 12 or don't know about math at all.
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I think calling anything I think or hold to possibly be true a "belief" is not quite accurate. I don't really have faith or anything like that. I believe things that can be proven to be real, and I have ideas that may count as philosophy but without a belief that it is correct or not. Like, I think it's entirely possible for an afterlife of some such to exist. If matter and energy can not be destroyed, only transformed, and our consciousness is a form of energy, then maybe we still retain consciousness after death on a different level of existence which could be attributed to Heaven or Hell or any other religious idea of an afterlife. On the other side of the same possibility, I don't think a God is possible. God is either simply a convenient name for the randomness of the universe, or was an alien race not much different than us, but way, way more advanced technologically.
Is that really philosophical, though?
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Optimistic Nihilism.
Consciousness is an accident, the universe is an emergent property of physical laws, and there is no purpose to any of it; no gods, no guiding intention, no natural morality, no afterlife. Just entropy.
This is a good, positive thing to understand.
If there is no intrinsic morality, then we are free to define morality for ourselves. This is a burden, but it something that we can recognise and think critically about, rather than just taking whatever tradition we were raised in, and picking and choosing as is convenient.
If there is no afterlife, then every act of alturism, every kind thing we do we can do because we want to. Not because we are afraid of damnation, but because we decided that it was the right thing to do.
If we leave nothing behind but dust, then we must be aware of the impact we have now, because our time is limited and brief.
If we are a random collection of atoms, a brief coherent pattern among the chaos, then we can recognise that every single other person is the fundamentally the same.
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This too shall pass. Enjoy what you can, but don't get attached to it. You can even become deeply involved in something or with someone, but always be emotionally and mentally prepared for the day when it or they are no more. Expect it.
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Apple and Android both need to exist. Apple isn't your friend and market privacy to take a market and when they have it they will shit on it. Google doesn't care about your privacy but are at least working on doing better and are trying to unite platforms.
Don't put your eggs in one basket.
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- Humanity is living in an (almost) endless painful cycle of civilisations rising, prospering and falling, like a phoenix rising from its ashes, only to burn again. No civilisation, nation, or idea can escape. Some might be able to avoid destruction for longer than others, but they will eventually meet their end.
- Death is and should be inevitable, and it's a good thing. I have gotten over the fear of dying when I was eight, yet so many people, (way too many of them are adults) seem to treat death as a sensitive and even taboo topic.
I find the thought that I'll most likely be able to rest peacefully either in a state of non-existence or some sort of afterlife to be calming. I tend to think that the acknowledgment of our own mortality is the only thing that makes us truly enjoy life, as we know it won't last forever. This is the reason why people talking about technology that could make immortal people without thinking about the downsides enough really concerns me. Humans are supposed to be born, to live and to die. - If we want to define whether an action is immoral or moral, then as a rule of thumb, it is moral as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. (yes, this includes non-human animals) There are a lot of exceptions of course.
- Humans are not superior to other animals. The reason I think that, in general, killing another human is worse than killing another animal is not that human lives matter more than lives of other animals, but instead that you shouldn't kill your own species.
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About #3, do you view this as a hard rule? Not the animal part (vegan btw), the "hurting is always wrong" part. There are situation where I've caused harm to someone for the sake of others, their future, or a greater pleasure.
Also interested in the "not killing you own species" section of #4. I would also kill another animal rather than a human, but for other reasons. What do you think about hurting a member of your own species is uniquely bad?
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It is not really a hard rule, I think there are a lot of situations where you have to hurt someone such as self-defense, having to eat other animals to survive and such. So it's like a soft rule of thumb, as there are a lot of situations where hurting someone is justified.
And concerning killing your own species versus other animals, I think we naturally tend to have more empathy for other people and especially the ones closer to us. Also killing a non-human animal outside of self-defense can be justified by needing food, but, well, eating another human seems to be worse than eating a cow.
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I think as renewable energy gets cheaper and we move away from scarcity in society, we will stop looking at ourselves as brands. Instead, personal conduct, or the appearance of such will play a much larger part in our public lives and place in society. This will provide a lot of privacy issues.
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Liberty is the most imprtant thing.
Pre-crime should never be punished, only actual crime.
Gun rights are human rights.
Question porn featuring fictional people (drawn or written) should not be legislated.
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Gun rights are human rights.
lol
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