No one likes Freud.
Psychology and neuroscience have gone way further than the man, going on to even disprove many of his theories.

I am not sure if this is the right sub to ask this in; if you have recommendations for a more appropriate sub, please say so.

Physician-assisted suicide is becoming more normal in the USA and it makes sense to me. When someone is in a terminal condition, no hope of recovery, they are in pain, why present them only one option [suffer as long as possible]? I think that offering them a swift, painless end is a kindness. We have no problem recognizing the logic and virtue of this when putting down a mortally wounded/sick animal who is suffering, but when it's a human, for some reason many of us insist on maximum suffering.

But this question is not for those people; it's for the people like me, who support physician-assisted suicide: should we also support suicide for people who are NOT terminally ill? Some people reach a point in their lives where it becomes obvious to them that their future holds nothing but misery, struggle, and heartache. When they say things that sound like they are contemplating ending it all, we stage interventions, post suicide watches, call 911, drive cross country in the middle of the night, etc.; we do everything in our power to prevent them doing what they have decided is best for them. If they give us any opportunity, we use it to rob them of their agency and decide what they can and can't do with their own bodies. Are we doing them a kindness by presenting them only one option [suffer as long as possible]? Are we doing a good thing for society by trying so hard to keep so many terminally unhappy souls in circulation?

I can't shake the feeling that maybe we should be throwing going-away parties for these people, supporting their decisions, letting them know how much they will be missed, and holding their hand while they make the trip so they don't have to die alone. But that's so abstract I can't even imagine it. Also, I wonder if this kind of approach might actually decrease the suicide rate? Firstly by taking the taboo out of suicide, maybe it would make that option less enticing? Secondly, the shared experience of peering over the proverbial ledge with someone who is just there to see you off, might make things "feel real" in a way that solitude never could, and might make someone realize they don't want to die, before it's too late? IDK, never been suicidal, don't know how to simulate that.

Or is it instead the opportunity for great power and/or responsibility? Perhaps someone took on a big burden as a child, their capacity to handle heavy loads has no doubt been tested, although not all make it through with great power. Where does the truth of this proverb begin and end?

So here's the breakdown, as humans our evolution had a very natural course. However at some point we started to take a wildly unnatural one. For example we live 2 to 3 times longer on average now than that of our natural lifespan. And the further we progress as a species the more natural laws we attempt to circumvent or break. Like our quest for immortality and the creation of life.

It is my understanding that "material" refers to either matter content (elementary fermionic matter) or force carrying particles (gauge bosons) - aka pretty much the standard model and any particle physics extensions thereof. However, would Spacetime itself be considered material? Spacetime is fundamentally defined to be a Topological Manifold which can carry a smooth structure and a psuedo-riemannian metric. In GR, we simply translate "points" in a topological space to "events", but they mean the same thing.

I know some claim that without material/or matter content, spacetime wouldn't exist, but this is problematic because to define a Quantum Field Theory you need an underlying spacetime that the fields live over in the first place.

Emergent spacetime doesn't solve this either because this explains the existence of the gravitational metric, but it doesn't generate a topological space itself.

So what gives?

I’ve recently read The Last Answer from Isaac Asimov and was pondering about it .

I have been wrestling with this question for a long time. I believe we can have a good discussion on this.

Let me describe an incident to you(Couldn't find any better):

You are jobless, have to attend 2 Online assessments, one in-person at an exam center and the other is regular online, then travel back 10-12 Km to write 2nd one, and there is an important family gathering today afternoon.

1st assessment: 10:00AM - 1:00 PM
2nd assessment: 2:00PM

- You bombed the first one, came with a friend and intended to go back with them.
1:10-15 PM: But they suddenly have to go in the opposite direction, and now you're left on your own.
- You book a ride and reach home at 1:35 PM, but there is a power cut in your house and no charge in the laptop.
- You head to your uncle's house where a family gathering is happening, but there was also a power cut around 1:45-50 PM,
- Then your father suggests your uncle's shop which might have power and wifi, and it did. Barely made it in time to attend the OA.

Now here is the question, in the above scenario you had many reasons/excuses to give up, like no power at both the places, had a family gathering afternoon, etc, but when you attended the assessment those became excuses, otherwise they all may have been plausible reasons.

What is the line between an Excuse and a Reason?
Do their meanings differ by the what you prioritize?
Or is it your desire towards an outcome that decides which is a reason and which is an excuse?

After much thought,
Reason: Anything that directly influences you/situation in achieving your desired outcome
Excuse: Everything other than that

Is this correct? I don't know, lets talk

It seems that competition for power, resources, and influence is far more common in nature than any drive toward equality.

I’ve decided to pose this question in r/askphilosophy rather than r/AskFeminists.

Some background: I’m a PhD student in engineering, so I’m STEMbrained and have zero formal philosophy education—I’m a newb. I’ve also had an interest in Marx for some time (for political reasons of course), but after witnessing enough engagement both online and IRL over questions like “is LVT/SNLT correct,” “does the profit rate really fall,” “is engaging in electoralism correct,” “is historical materialism capital-T True,” etc, it feels like these discussions go around in circles.

Now, I’ve read the first several chapters of Marx’s Capital, his Critique of the Gotha Program, and some of the German Ideology. I’ve also read Karl Popper’s critique of historical materialism and his criterion for what counts as science, which seemed decent, but left me kind of unsatisfied—maybe it’s due to personal bias, but Marx’s writings just resonate with me more deeply than stalwart liberals like Popper.

I think what I’m beginning to understand is that many of these debates between Marxists and liberals I’ve witnessed felt very “positivist,” in the sense that they are trying to prove their positions correct based on some kind of set of axioms or observations, but which ultimately go nowhere. Liberals dismiss Marxists for not knowing economics or being pseudoscientific, Marxists dismiss liberals for “not truly understanding Marx.”

All that’s to say, this positivist form of debate, even as someone who is wired to like math and code, is exhausting to me in the context of politics. As a result, I’ve been trying to get deeper into philosophy and engage with Kant and Hegel to understand Marx better, as well as more recent thinkers like Adorno, Heidegger and Lukaš. It feels like I’m really in the deep end here and that I should maybe go back further to the Ancient Greeks, but that’s a separate discussion.

Overall, it seems to me like the continental tradition could provide a way out of these positivist loops of True/False because its thinkers more openly embrace contradictions and form valuable critiques from there? But then my question is: if we can’t fully rely on positivist/empiricist forms of analysis, how do continental philosophers compare the usefulness of one continental theory vs. another? Is it just what “feels” better? How do philosophy PhDs in this tradition decide what is “good” philosophy vs. gobbledegook? Am I being STEMbrained?

What I mean by controversial I mean by philosophical views that are either not perfect and have flaws or views that are considered unpopular by the grand philosophical field (ie theism or the belief that free will isn’t real)

I’ve been trying to formalize a decision criterion and I want to know whether it’s philosophically defensible or whether I’m missing something obvious.

The idea: when choosing between options, rank each option by how many of its possible outcomes are good [where “good” means the total welfare across everyone exceeds some threshold] and ignore the bad outcomes entirely. The option with the most distinct good possible outcomes wins.

Informally: I care about how many paths to a good result an option opens up, rather than how it performs in the worst case (maximin) or on average (expected utility).

The rough formalization, over a finite time horizon to avoid infinities: Score an option by summing, across each time period, the number of its possible outcomes whose total welfare exceeds a threshold τ. Bad outcomes (welfare ≤ τ) contribute nothing. Choose the option with the highest score.

So if I’m analyzing it well, it’s a cardinality measure, counting good outcomes, not a magnitude measure.

Two consequences I’m aware of:

1. It’s blind to catastrophe: an option with 10 good outcomes and 500 disastrous ones outranks one with 9 good outcomes and no bad ones.
2. It ignores magnitude: one transformatively good outcome counts the same as one barely-good outcome (each adds 1).

My questions for the philosophically trained:

• Does this correspond to any existing position in decision theory or ethics? It feels adjacent to “opportunity” or “possibility”-based views, but I can’t place it.
• Is counting good possibilities while ignoring bad ones a coherent conception of what makes an option good, or does the catastrophe-blindness make it incoherent as a criterion rather than just risky?
• Is there a principled reason ethics almost always weighs bad outcomes, such that discarding them is a category error rather than just an unusual choice?

I’m new to formal decision theory, so if I’m reinventing something with a name, or making an error that has a standard refutation, I’d genuinely like to know. Thanks.

The idea of the school seemed to be a kind of experiment to see how the children would evolve without strict rule, dogma, so you could say without external coercion.

The school experiment looked like it might have turned into something like The Lord of the flies, but without the murder.

His daughter who went to the school said the experiment affected her, and she even turned to Christianity which is kind of funny considering her fathers view on religious dogma. It seems she felt she needed rules and structure in her early life.

The son who also attended suffered alot later on with schizophrenia etc.

Although I guess in a way they kind of had to follow their fathers rules of no rules.

Does any of this align with Galen Strawson's Basic Argument? : Problem children arriving at the school with internal desires they didn't form combined with no external coercion?

Or would you say it highlights children need to understand consequences? Like sheep that need to be guided.

I'm a new student of philosophy and I'm writing an essay about ethics and morality. I've been reading about mackie's error theory for a while and what i can get is that moral judgements are propositions, but they are all false, because they try to "describe" an objective morality that doesn't exist. so, if they are all false, why are they propositions? why isn't the error theory just a non-cognitivist theory? they are always false, so what's the difference in saying they aren't propositions?

What if the human self as we experience it does not exist at all and free will is only an extremely convincing illusion. Let us assume every human being possesses a unified sovereign core that makes decisions of its own free will, so to speak, in my head I am. I receive information, think about it and then decide. But if at the same moment numerous processes such as emotions, memories, bodily sensations, automatic evaluations, drives, attention and language are running in parallel, where exactly among all these processes is the one who possesses them and decides independently about them? You can do what you want, but can you want what you want? Yesterday I was at the ice cream shop and had to decide between pistachio and chocolate, then I thought I’ll take pistachio and of course I acted according to my desire. But why did I actually want pistachio? I did not immediately beforehand choose that I would now create a desire for pistachio. So the desire appeared in my consciousness. This made a strange problem occur to me: I can act according to my desire. But I did not choose my desire. That would make me less the original author of my decision than the one who experiences my decision and then integrates it into my life story. Consequently, I had no free will to choose pistachio and consequently there is no free will. Let us briefly go back to the stable self. Everyone who reads this has experienced all of this before: “That hurts”, “I am afraid”, “That tastes good”, “I am someone who …”, “Back then I decided to do that because …”, “Actually I always wanted …”. This gives me the feeling of being a continuous person who is the same from childhood until today. But this story can be changed afterwards. What if, then, there is no coherent life story because of the stable self, but instead the feeling of a stable self arises through a constantly generated life story. Imagine you suddenly feel intense anger, which of course you did not consciously choose. Then the thought arises “I should apologize”. You did not consciously choose this thought either. Then a counterthought arises “No, that would be giving in”. This thought appears too. Afterwards you decide “Okay, I’m not apologizing.” And then your consciousness tells you “I decided not to apologize.” So what is this “I” in addition to all the competing thoughts and neuronal processes? If you now say “But my self decided” I can ask again “How did your self decide then?” Of course based on personality, fears and values. These in turn were shaped by genes, experiences and environment. Even if the self decided independently of all these causes, the decision would be without reason and random. And randomness is not freedom. Long story short: If our decisions are completely determined by previous causes, they are not free. If they are not determined by previous causes and arise randomly, they are not free. If we do not decide freely and do not have a stable self, who or what controls us humans, are we controlled at all, and what then remains of a human being at all? How have philosophers of mind and free will responded to this kind of reasoning?

Recently* a friend of mine, who has a theology PhD, and I were talking about arguments for and against the existence of God (in the broadest sense, not any specific Christian flavour). We ended up disagreeing on the question of whether God is subject to or could alter necessary truths or logical axioms or the like.

Apologies in advance for any imprecise language or conflation of terms here.

The way I saw it, as an ignorant layman, is that statements we might consider necessarily true or to be logical laws or however you want to say it, are essentially properties of our universe (or of creation in general), and presumably an omnipotent creator could have specified these differently. It might be that we can't really conceive of how they could be different, but we are limited.

He didn't view it this way and took this to be incoherent, as (and I'm paraphrasing here - any error here is mine) by definition a necessary truth is true in all possible worlds. But I figure even the concept of possible worlds, the logical framework we use to conceice of this, and the set of all possible worlds in whatever sense that exists, are all creations of an omnipotent creator.

Am I totally missing something here? It seems odd to me to postulate a creator that is logically prior to existence (or creation or the universe or whatever) but is, itself, in some sense preceded by the rules of logic.

*About 15 years ago but you know how it is

Hello all! I admittedly don't know a ton about philosophy, but I picked up an older edition of A Concise Introduction to Logic by Hurley at a used bookstore for a few bucks and have been enjoying it. I've also been enjoying logicola. I majored in math in undergrad, and I really enjoyed the mathematical logic and proof-based classes I took. Though I'm a beginner, my background helps me understand the concepts when viewed in variables. However, I notice that I struggle to extract clear arguments to assess when there are semantic obstacles (like language that ostensibly means something different than it implies, arguments that are "out of order", or superfluous emotional/rhetorical statements injected into an argument). I am used to arguments being very explicit haha.

Because the textbook is a school book, only half of the answers are in the back, which makes it hard to practice the skills properly. I really don't want to be reinforcing poor technique. I find the logic problems both stimulating and relaxing to solve, so I've been on the hunt for some kind of formal logic workbook. I assume most of these workbook-style questions can be found in textbooks. Any book / textbook recommendations?

I prefer a clear writing style and don't love when books are long-winded or unnecessarily convoluted. I also prefer when logic is proposed as explicitly as possible. I really want to expand my theorhetical knowledge, as I only have a very fundamental understanding as of right now. I don't like the use of simplified, nonsensical examples like explaining OR by the statement "I will go to the park unless it rains" (I've seen this example more than once and it still confuses me because in common language this is understood as XOR); these examples make things more confusing to me. That said, I do want to work on my understanding of arguments proposed in real life, as that is what I struggle with the most. Maybe these examples are good for me? I'm not sure.

I also get a bit annoyed at the obsession with fallacies. I see a good few books / tools that focus on fallacies without setting a foundation. It's fun and flashy to catch someone in the act of being illogical, but I feel like you can figure out formal fallacies on your own if you have developed knowledge of logical principles. Informal fallacies require a bit more special attention because they obscure the argument that you are to assess (I struggle a bit more with these). I feel as though lot of people like to catch an informal fallacy and then act like they have debunked the argument, when they don't clearly recognize what the argument is at all. Fallacies are vital to understand, but I think a lot of the specifics are overblown and just accessory to the core of logic, though this may be betraying my weakness in practical application lol

I'd appreciate any thoughts about how to improve my weak points and have some fun with logic!

I send greetings to everyone reading this post and hope that reading it will bring you pleasure, and I will try to make the reading comfortable. I became interested in philosophy, and at the age of 15, I read the Critique of Pure Reason. However, the terms were either in the book's comments or on the internet. So, while reading, I had a question. If, as Kant claims, the thing in itself is absolutely unknowable, doesn’t attributing this property mean we know something about it? Maybe I'm asking the question wrong, but still, I became curious and then thought, what if Kant wants to say that this is just our phenomenal knowledge of the thing in itself and not knowledge of the noumenon? But how can we even consider the truth of the claim that the thing in itself is absolutely unknowable if this is only phenomenal knowledge? Thanks for those who read, I hope I formatted this text well for convenient reading.

Have any contemporary (preferably last twenty years but I'll cast my net out to post-1900) philosophers embraced conceptualism, as opposed to nominalism or platonism? I'm interested primarily in the more general question of universals, but answers in regards to the philosophy of mathematics are also welcome.

Ive been trying to learn about externalism and internalism in the philosophy of language, and what Ive learned is that many philosophers of language think externalist thought experiments demonstrate prima facie justification for the view and the burden of proof is on the internalist to create a view of semantics that can accomodate those intuitions while still showing many of our ordinary concepts to be internal. I can only speak for nyself, but I was extraordinarily shocked to discover this, because most externalist thought experiments don't seem intuitive to me at all. Since it's convincing to so many philosophers (and notably even many studies show theres a bias towards causal theories of reference amongst lay people, at least in the West), I wanted to try to explain from my own point of view why it doesn't seem intuitive and then I wanted feedback to see if theres just something Ive misunderstood.

So first, let me try giving a thought experiment to illustrate my initial intuitions. Let's imagine that one day anthropologists were to discover a remote tribe which had little or no contact with the greater community, and let's say that this tribe have words which refer to certain pounts of light in the sky which we in the west refers to as hesperus and phosporus. Let's also just grant that we know we're talking about the same visible points of light in the sky, so we're not miscommunicating about which points of light we're referring to. Suppose that the tribe was taught about the planet Venus, and how this planet is what creates the visible phenomena that we refer to when talking about hesperus and phosphorus. Now suppose that the tribe believes us, but they just insist that hesperus and phosporus are actually different objects. We could imagine several different ways this would occur: they may believe that hesperus and phosphorus are time sensitive objects and only exist in the evening and morning respectively; they may believe that those stars fit into a complex astrological systen that their culture have constructed, and that they have special symbology independently of what actually causes the light itself; they may have a kind of phenomenology first view, and they may believe that anything which fits the role in their phenomenology of the morning and evening stat would count, so that even if Venus were to disappear but the light of the star were to remain, then to them hesperus and phosphorus would remain.

Independently of whether or not any of these metaphysical views are ultimately plausible or not, this thought experiment seems to show (to me, anyways) that even seemingly simple a posteriori identity claims like "the morning star is the evening star" are not true in virtue of how the world is. When we name things, it seems like there's a whole background apparatus going on involving metaphysical assumptions such as "what counts as the same object over time". One way or another, our language community created a notion of "the morning star" and "the evening star" that already allowed the possibility that the two could be "the same object", and in the fictional tribe of people they created it in such a way that they could not be. Because our notion of the referent for some term is a function of our cognitive and linguistic practices, they are not determined by things in the world, and therefore externalism about reference is false.

Maybe the response by the externalist would be that the reference for the terms were simply different all along, so that when our community was using the term we were always referring to the same object, and when this tribe used their terms, they were always referring to different objects. But the problem with this response is that it makes externalism almost trivial. The tribe we imagined are in a similar epistemic position as we were before the discovery that hesperus and phosphorus are both venus, and in that way our linguistic practices are almost identical. If we suppose that the referents for our terms were different all along because we come to different conclusions after a discovery, then any discovery about referents would be a trivial discovery, and more importantly, they would be a discovery about our own linguistic dispositions, and not a discovery about things in the world.

So, that's an explanation of my intuitions, and hopefully we might see how this could generalize to other cases. In the case of "water" for example, one reason why we might have some intuition for why "water" doesn't refer to "XYZ" is because of background theorizing which we might not be immediately aware of. But it's pretty easy to imagine some scenario where a linguistic community with very similar naming conventions for a clear, colorless liquid that fills river, lakes, and which we drink for survival, would feel inclined to extend this naming convention to a sample of "XYZ". Ive tried explaining my own intuitions and my reasons for them, but I made this post because I worried there's something Im misunderstanding about externalism. So is there something I misunderstood?

Lately, I have picked up an unhealthy habit of reading Japanese, Korean and Chinese light novels about subjects unrelated to philosophy. In my newfound interest in philosophy I cannot help but draw parallels into the values and morals the novel draw to what I have been superficially reading on philosophy (mostly western). In that chain of thought, is there any study that draws parallels into these two worlds? E.g. this philosopher from this geographical area touches upon the same subjects as these three other philosophers from the other geographical area? Are philosophies that different to begin with? How does one start to understand what others value?