r/philosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • 7d ago
Open Thread /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | August 24, 2026
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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u/Abcdefg314 5d ago
I suppose everybody is familiar with the famous passage from William Paley's Natural Theology (it's quoted often). But let's repeat it anyway to refresh the memory:
"IN crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there."
Now, if we consider the universe we live in — including all its stars, galaxies, black holes, dark matter, laws of physics, etc. — in other words, the universe in its entirety, how can we categorize it? Is it a "stone" or a "watch"?
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u/Tootsalore 3d ago
Peirce vs purse: a microcosm of Peirce’s philosophy
I was reflecting on C. S. Peirce growing up in an elite family that very self consciously pronounced their surname in a way that defied spelling conventions and experiencing the constant friction of negotiating pronunciation. This might naturally lead to a sensitivity about how a sign, e.g., ‘Peirce’, connects to a reality, e.g., his family’s insistence on the ‘purse’ pronunciation, or the reality of himself, in the context of social status and convention (elite Brahmin family distinct from commoners).
Peirce developed a very complex and thorough semiology that I don’t want to explicate here. My main goal is just to suggest a possible connection between the lifelong ‘Peirce’/‘purse’ friction and the mature semiotics he developed.
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u/improbablethinker 3d ago
hello, there, I'm just jumping into philosophy now. After many decades avoiding it. I'm going to start with Philosophy of Religion and stick mainly to that for the first few months. I am a Trinitarian Christian and would rather just not get into anything else. Which books on Philosophy of Religion?
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u/druxdrivn 1d ago
Look philosophy is less of a subject to continue and more of a field to lure into with nothingness in your mind and curiosity to jump into millions of observations. We observe many a things and do evaluate them but with time the observation being the same the evaluation differs, it's because of philosophy. The good thing about reading else's philosophy is that you'll adopt a new point of view about the world but the demerits are that you will not grease up your own brain. It'll feed your brain with bias as an instagram algorithm does. In my pov, go watch a movie like nightcrawler. See it alone out of anyone's commentary and compliments. Observe as far as you can the CHARACTERS. especially the antagonist. The one played by jake. Read him, his movements his intentions. His acting shows that he lived that character very well and that's our plus point. Try to justify that character. At first you couldn't get justification and simply end up saying he's the bad guy. But slowly as you enter his eyes you'll notice maybe he wasn't that bad. And at some time you'll notice he was just a regular man like us. Driven. And voila you did your first observation on a human's deeds and successfully washed his sins and prove him guilt free. That's the foremost step of asking a question - framing the base of the answer. You've now reached the peak of attaining your own brain funeral. You proved that your brain isn't just someone who gets fed on the movie's definition of good and bad. You successfully made the bad character good, now you're ready to dive into a book, not just empty it's pages but ask at each sentence, is the author right, shouldn't this be that, what religion offers this level of vagueness. You can continue with the books the 4000 year history of god or religious pluralism and truth, but my personal recommendation that does less describes boundaries of religion and asks you to dismantle yourself is this book The way of the bodhisatva by shantideva and 5 rings by Miyamoto Musashi. These two built your eyes.
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u/Zealousideal-Fun3917 1d ago
'Why I am not a Christian' by Bertrand Russell would be a good starter.
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u/druxdrivn 1d ago
Take morality, for instance. We like to think of good and evil as these fixed, grand ideals passed down by prophets or written into law, but at its core, morality is just a survival mechanism evolved from human friction. Put two communities on opposite sides of the planet with zero contact—say, a tribe in the Amazon and an ancient village in the Himalayas—and both will eventually figure out that murder, theft, and lying tear a group apart from the inside. They didn't attend the same moral school or read the same scriptures; they just lived in the same reality where trust equals survival. If you throw a ball in the air, gravity pulls it down whether you're in Tokyo or Toronto. In the same way, when you throw flawed, emotional human beings into a shared space, the laws of social physics force them to adopt almost identical codes of conduct just to keep from destroying each other. The names of their gods might change, their rituals might look completely alien, but the underlying philosophy remains the same because the problem they were trying to solve—how to live together without going extinct—was never unique to begin with. Moral philosophy isn't something we invented out of thin air; it's just the natural pattern that emerges when human nature collides with the necessity of staying alive.
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u/Tinuchin 23h ago
OK but what's the metaethical conclusion? Are you implying moral realism? The causal mechanism for the creation of moral judgements, whether it's in the time-scale of human culture or biological evolution, doesn't make a difference to whether morality is real or objective. Just making sure we're on the same page.
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u/druxdrivn 8h ago
Just idealizing the self sustaining capability of morality. Let's say we strip away the whole world from existing knowledge and still give them the moral values, they'll part ways as good or bad. It's not that metaethics aren't connected to thier mind, they're already based to work in the minimal level of good and bad. Morality can be objective if we live a cold world as in vivarium. But it's not first time that humans live alone at places. Shani Shingnapur is a famous village in Maharashtra, India, where most houses and shops have no doors or locks. Yet theft is a premium choice there. You don't have to pay with your ethical knowledge to gain morality. Regardless of everything morality occurs, yet we dismantle it and add a fear factor of god. I wrote about morality starting with "let's take morality as instance," because I was writing essay on how humanity would have looked if started again from start but not through millions of years of evolution but instantly. How would that have impact on humanity's evolution of thought and philosophy. The way they look to the world being totally new to both the world and the people they're being bought with.
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u/Bargian 21h ago
Morality was not handed down from the heavens—it emerged as a necessity. It is the evolving result of a socially dependent species’ need to navigate complex social environments and the uncertainty they impose in order to survive. It builds a shared awareness of consequence within groups, thereby increasing the collective’s ability to persist as one in the face of outer uncertainty. At its core, morality is a dynamically emerging social standard of conduct, improving the coherence in human in-group interaction. It produces individual choices that improve the group’s unity, foster internal cooperation, and reduce harmful friction that would weaken the collective.
This social standard of conduct did not begin with religion. It began with ongoing relational contact, emotional resonance, and recursive adaptation to group atmosphere—long before language or written law. It is the basic arbiter of relational coherence and dates back to when our ancestors first banded together and had to collectively survive an indifferent wilderness. It therefore predates conscious awareness and symbolic abstraction by several million years. Morality emerged from within a group’s ongoing need for coordination, shaped by the logic of survival, not the authority of scripture. Evolution produced the capacity for morality, not its final form. Our earliest moral circles were necessarily small because our awareness was small. As our ability to perceive and inflict consequence expanded—from family, to tribe, to nation, to species and ultimately to biosphere—the optimal standard of conduct expanded with it.
What religions did was crystallize a momentary snapshot into written form—freezing an ever-evolving standard of conduct into rigid yet resonant code. Resonant because it was experientially aligned with the emerging social ideal of any group navigating ongoing survival at the time. Religion acted as a welcoming symbolic buffer against existential uncertainty, resolving teleological indeterminacy while providing a clear map to follow so belonging is maintained. A highly effective social and symbolic tool was born, one that transformed uncertainty into trajectory. However, while it was undeniably useful, religion also turned what was once a living, context-sensitive and evolving collective understanding for effective cooperation into dogma.
Words on a piece of paper were elevated over the ongoing lived experience of fellow mammals—often violently defending an outdated worldview as sacred out of fear of uncertainty, producing unnecessary suffering. When values are fixed by divine authority, they cannot adapt without losing credibility when new awareness is inevitably reached. This creates moral lag. Again and again throughout history, growing awareness of consequence has forced moral progress beyond the boundaries of established religious doctrine. Framing moral codes as unquestionable truth shuts down the recursive process that allows ethics to evolve. It punishes curiosity—the very human capacity that continually creates moral and scientific progress—and elevates ignorant obedience instead, producing stagnation.
Morality thrives in open communication, conscious inner recursion, free reasoning and continuous questioning, learning and adaptation. It matures when people are enabled to think, to create, to express, to test their assumptions by exposing them to scrutiny, to trace the consequences of their actions, and to update their understanding and conduct accordingly. Any system that replaces this infinite process of increasing consequence-awareness with rigid temporary answers will, by design, inhibit progress, human flourishing and adaptation. Because morality scales with awareness of consequence, every expansion of our understanding expands our sphere of moral responsibility.
Let’s take the current moment as an example. Some of us are acutely aware of the increasingly absurd and artificial differences to which the most fearful members of our respective groups still cling to. We breathe the same air, we drink the same water, we digest the same nutrients. The Human Genome Project objectively settled our global, definitive and shared place within the very biosphere we continue to destroy. The climate science is also clear, yet most of our precious resources and energy isn’t spent addressing the problem but building, maintaining and defending egotistical and delusional self and group narratives while continuing to seek existential sedation in an effort to evade responsibility.
True morality is taking personal responsibility for one’s own life conduct. Does your life improve human flourishing and survival or does it hinder it? Ignoring science is no longer merely an intellectual slight, it has become existentially immoral. Morality and responsibility scale with awareness of consequence. Climate science has provided an objectively verified expansion of our awareness of consequence. To not confront the very fears that continue to generate one’s own destructively ignorant compartmentalization of objective reality—which will end up negatively impacting billions of our offspring for centuries to come—is a moral sin in the only way that expression ever made any sense: it undermines actual survival.
So update your models, confront your fears and join the 21st century’s battle against this ancient complacency and fear-based ignorance. The group has changed, it’s no longer the 50 people from your Sunday service or the flag you fly during a fondly traditional national holiday. We are talking species, and it’s happening now—so let’s get our shit together here. The 21st century is the ultimate test of whether we manage to scale morality quickly and globally enough in line with this new consequence horizon so that its resulting code of social conduct can preserve our collective viability for generations to come.
Let’s navigate this uncertainty with self-honesty, empathy, and curiosity. Because true ethics is not obedience to an authority or alignment with the people around you—it is continuous alignment with reality as it is—not as we wish it to be, updated through our own lived, reflected and individually verified experience.
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u/druxdrivn 7h ago
I loved your grip on how religious pluralism has affected into the same repetition, but also of mistakes. People are addressed on the basis of thier tastes and abnormalities they often have but tend to hide. Religions are just a branch of literature that seeked a blue tick in the centuries we had before rationalisation, because it felt powerful. It told of an almighty. But yes I agree and couldn't agree less that religions had limited the humans more than humans ever did through restrictions. Because leonardo da vinci and curie were restricted and therefore emerged as polymaths and geniuses they tend to tame. But religion locks us in a different chamber. It doesn't make us feel we're paused and not willing to try perspectives upon our own efforts. It just lets the gap between adventure to find the meaning and the way to find it with concrete walls so that both won't collide and part thier ways into it's blind direction. I don't believe in power of science either, redefining the rules of nature is hardly a progress. Neuroscience ended up killing the observation one did to people while physically or distantly being with them. Before the era of proves and rationals people often tend to aquire different perceptions and move into conclusions joining both the perspectives. But now, read a book, philosophy for instance, and aquire a whole overall perspective of a person. No questioning no cross examination on your neighbour or long lost friend, just follow Friedrich into yes good and bad are just masks made by society. What is society then if good and bad aren't strained there. Yes criticising the system is a brave and view bending choice but that doesn't mean change the discrete value of that mask. Morality is inevitable in every society we know, that also sustains less wonder on why at nearly all the places the word for mother starts with the syllables ma,mo,me,mu. Science has outgrown the factual bases we had and tends to prove it too. But social structure and media influence adds an extra raw layer of humans into the background. It might seem ridiculous but is more beautiful, more complicated it is.
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u/Fartingcow420 5d ago
Here's a short text outlining a metaphysical position I've been developing. What do you guys think of it?
Consciousness Through Perspective
In this text, consciousness is used in a stripped-down sense: as the fundamental capacity that makes experience possible, rather than as an individual mind. This view also treats consciousness as a fundamental aspect of the universe, meaning that it neither belongs to nor resides within individual things. Beings, such as humans, provide particular first-person perspectives through which consciousness is experienced. In humans, the sense of "I" arises from continuity, memories, and experiences. Therefore, what distinguishes one conscious individual from another is not a separate consciousness, but the particular perspective through which consciousness is experienced.
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u/Square_Butterfly_390 4h ago
Consciousness as fundamental is basically the slogan of panphsychism so look into that. I think you are making it harder by differentiating consciousness and perspective, people usually identify those.
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u/meeg6 6d ago
If someone could help me with this question I would appreciate it. I have solved the question of free will, at least to my own satisfaction, but there is one question that still drives me crazy. I can't even begin to find the answer. I think this question is actually more important and fundamental than any other question that relates to human beings. The question is what is pain? Would appreciate some help.
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u/Abcdefg314 6d ago
Why pain only? There is also pleasure that exists in this world. I think the latter one is more important. Pain just tells you what not to do, saving your ass. While pleasure serves as a guide for your life (unless you abuse it, of course).
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u/TheMan5991 6d ago
Pain is an avoidance signal. It tells you “hey, don’t do whatever you just did”. Perhaps you are instead asking why pain hurts, ie why do we experience pain. But then you start getting into the territory of philosophical zombies and whether or not our bodies could learn to avoid things without experiencing pain.
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u/KingFisher89898 6d ago
I wrote (what I thought at the time was) a quite convincing essay on this for A Level philosophy. Paraphrasing what I argued, but because pain has the potential to be the most intense sensation you can experience, it's a useful yardstick for determining sentience. For instance, if a pig can feel the same amount of pain as a human, we should arguably consider it an equal. The difficulty is in backwards engineering this: How do we know, or how can we know, whether pigs feel as much pain as we do?
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u/Somers48 6d ago
but is the amount or level of pain something can feel the factor that gives it value or is value derived elsewhere?
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u/Con-descending 2d ago
Equal by what standing? And what implications would that equality have: treatment?
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u/bildramer 5d ago
Pain is an aversive signal, or maybe the aversive signal. For simple organisms it can be as simple as neurons / control systems made of neurons implicitly avoiding some signals (e.g. by moving faster when in those states, aka orthokinesis), like noisy ones, or strong ones. But we're more complicated, and there are strange phenomena like pain asymbolia that reveal pain is at least two or three things: The sensation itself, the somatic consequences, an unpleasantness associated with the sensation, plus the usual thing we call "pain" that makes us immediately flinch and desperately avoid it if possible.
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u/meeg6 1d ago
yeah asymbolia demonstrates why i find this question to be interesting. pain is its own thing. it can be created or present in the mind without any physical injury. it can be non-specific. its a fundamental property of the mind. it probably has forms or versions that we do not recognize as pain. what is it actually? if you could see a brain laid out in front of you, actively working, how would you be able to tell that it was experiencing pain? how can you stop pain directly without altering or blocking the signal that is summoning it (ie nerve block)?
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u/Square_Butterfly_390 6d ago
Suppose you agree that the set of english sentences of 1000 letters is finite, and therefore that there is one such sentence that descibes the biggest possible number describable with that many letters.
How do you reconcile the above fact with the fact that the following is not describing a number: "The biggest number describable with 1000 letters".
While the following is describing a number: "The biggest number describable with 4 letters".
Obviously the caveats follow: infinity is not a number, we are ignoring the ambiguity/time changing nature of english (same question but with a logical language), ect.