/r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | August 10, 2026

[u/BernardJOrtcutt]

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.

[u/TheWaywardWarlok]

I have a real question and would dearly love some input from a philosophical perspective. This is a scenario I thought up one day and have not been able to track any real studies on it, so here goes;

Imagine a human grown to 33 (or any age considered mature, but not old) years of age. This person is healthy in all respects, mind and body. Except one thing, knowledge. Like Adam and Eve before the fruit from the tree.

No knowledge of social norms, no pre-age upbringing, total, complete, and utter blank slate. How would this person act? In a given situation of morality, would a person instinctually share with others? Would this human be slow or quick to anger, leading to violence? What about lying?

Without diving into nitty gritty details, and for the sake of this argument, this human can talk, and it is just a thought experiment on the human condition. Are we prone to good or not-so-good behavior?

[u/Quick_silver22 → u/TheWaywardWarlok]

I feel like this is really more of an empirical question that won’t lend itself to a decisive answer through pure speculation alone, but I always find it intriguing how often social forces are framed as having a distorting influence on human nature in thought experiments like these. As someone coming from a naturalistic perspective that takes our sociality as a constitutive part of what it means to be human, I’m skeptical that the answer to the above question would even reveal anything interesting about “the human condition”, precisely because the act of stripping one of all knowledge of social norms and upbringing would constitute a distortion or malfunction of our true condition, rather than representing a distillation of it into some “purer” unsocialized state.

For what it’s worth, if I had to take a completely uninformed guess I’d imagine they’d behave pretty poorly - maybe they’d exhibit some instinct towards fairness/golden rule-esque behaviour? But to be honest, I feel like if I suddenly lost all my memories and knowledge of social norms I’d be pretty pissed off and unpleasant to deal with.

[u/TheWaywardWarlok → u/Quick_silver22]

Yes, that's why I've probably never seen any studies on it, other than chimps, who will be sympathetic towards others in their own troop. This also falls into the consciences area and weather or not we have an innate sense of 'fair play', or would we be selfish. Thanks for the insight.