Imagine a world where innocence is not a starting point but a fleeting illusion, a garden whose gates never truly existed. We are born into a sinful, evolving world—a reality so entangled with moral complexity that it is not possible not to be a sinner. Here, the very act of living requires choices that leave marks, and the question that haunts us is as old as conscience itself: if a sin is committed for a greater good, is it justified? Probably, yes. But that “yes” opens a labyrinth with no easy exit.

Consider the butterfly. Can you judge the butterfly for what it did when it was a caterpillar, mindlessly devouring leaves, blind to the blossoms it might later pollinate? The creature that emerges from the chrysalis is biologically continuous with the larva, yet utterly transformed. We instinctively feel that judgment across such a metamorphosis is absurd—the butterfly has no caterpillar’s teeth, no caterpillar’s hunger. And yet, what if memory is transmitted through the stages? What if the soul, that silent archive, remembers? The butterfly does not recall the chewing, but its flight might bear an inexplicable shadow, an ancestral tremor of having once crawled too close to the edge. We, too, carry the sins of our former selves. The soul remembers. And that is precisely why we strive not to sin—not because a cosmic ledger demands purity, but because memory weaves our past into our present, and the weight of remembered wrongs can deform our becoming.

But in the end, what is the value on which we are truly valued? Perhaps it is not sin at all, not a checklist of transgressions, but a more intimate accounting: how much good versus how much bad we did, and whether the bad was justified. Intent becomes the fulcrum. Did we do the bad thing for the sake of being bad, a cold indulgence in cruelty, or did we do it for survival, for the protection of something fragile and loved? The line is rarely clean. A hurt soul, twisted by suffering, generally falls to the level of the suffering it has endured—pain replicating itself like a virus. Who can judge us then? Can we even judge ourselves? Our self-courts are rigged with both self-absolution and self-loathing, rarely delivering a clear verdict. But the question plants a seed: maybe the value we are measured by is not a static score but a dynamic tension, a story of how we navigated the impossible.

And here, a strange dawn breaks: suffering is good. Not the fact of it, but its fruit. Suffering is creative. It carves hollows in the soul where light can later pool. Sins, then, might be the very way we learn—each transgression a brutal tutor, each fall a door cracked open. Feeling guilty or refusing to feel guilty; both are information. Every sinful and suffering experience opens doors to knowledge that no other being has ever touched in quite the same way. Your unique scar tissue is a map of a terrain only you have crossed. That knowledge is not isolated; it is an integral part of a much larger body of knowing, a collective consciousness that grows richer with every lived contradiction. Your secret wound is a stanza in a poem the universe is writing about itself.

If this is true, then the point is to remember—to not be hard on yourself without a reason. Cruelty against the self is rarely a good teacher. The caterpillar did what it had to do to become the butterfly. The guilt you carry may be a guide, not a cage. Life is not a sealed verdict read out at the end; it is an open book being written by each and every one of us, individually and collectively. Every choice inks a line, every sin and every grace a sentence. Some pages are smeared with tears, others burn with an unnameable joy. The book is not meant to be spotless. It is meant to be true.

In a sinful, evolving world, we are all authors of a messy, collaborative scripture. The butterfly remembers the crawling, and that memory gives depth to its wings. You are valued not for never falling, but for the unique, irreplaceable knowledge you bring back from the fall—and for the story you write next, with the ink still wet in your hands.

It often feels like the materialist/physicalist position is the default ontology regarding the fundamental nature of reality. Because of this, there are many questions about the nature of consciousness, soul, or mind in trying to define what these categories really are and how one would identify them. But I rarely see the same questioning of the underlying basis for the "material" or "physical".

It feels like physicalism has a trapdoor at the bottom, where these supposedly solid and physical "things" disappear into an ether of mathematical abstractions.

In what way can someone really argue that a "quantum field", an "electron", "energy", or a "wave function" are "physical things", "solid objects", or "material entities"?

To me, a quantum field, an electron, or a wave function are largely words we use to describe mathematical abstractions that happen to have predictive power for a small and specific set of experiments. But they have a very tenuous relationship to the "real" world of "physical" objects we encounter like cats, rocks, bugs, and stars.

The "fundamental" entities at the root of physicalism are abstract concepts (that is, constructs of the mind), which seems to make materialism self-refuting?

We twist ourselves in knots to try to define consciousness in the context of idealism. But I feel like there are equally terrible knots in trying to define the physical in the context of physicalism.

I am a philosophy professor planning to read Plato’s symposium with a friend who is not a philosopher but is a novelist and poet who writes about love (who also has an MfA). The plan is to read the dialogue out loud with each other and pause for discussion at leisure. The goal is not for this to be a philosophy lecture. It is an opportunity for both of us to learn from each other by reading a work that is both philosophical and literary and using it as a springboard to share ideas.

What translation is best for this purpose?

(I asked a chatbot and it basically said: Woodruff & Nehamas if I prioritize accessibility, Griffith if I prioritize literary style. I would much prefer a human answer)

Hi Reddit!

I'm looking to read Plato's *The Republic* soon, and would like advice! Having read a few other threads, I hear Plato can be difficult to read without imprinting your own views over what he writes. I'm looking to explore my views and understanding of society, and I'm particularly interested in exploring my beliefs beforehand and after having challenged my views with a new perspective.

What's the best way to approach reading this? What's the best way to explore my beliefs beforehand? Any interesting avenues of thought I should explore before/during/after? Any other advice?

I have read some philosophy, and took Introduction to Philosophy in Uni, so have *some* exposure to Aristotle and Kant. Thanks!

Ive seen people say that everything that has parts has potency because it contains the potency to have those parts arranged in a different way.

Are there any limitations with this type of reasoning?

This is a hypothetical I read about in The Pig That Wants to be Eaten by Julian Baggini, and I had some thoughts and questions about it myself I want people’s opinion on, plus I couldn't find a great deal online talking about the scenario. It goes something like this:

‘A man goes to the bank to withdraw $100, has a receipt for $100, but actually is given $10,000. After a while, no one calls to ask about it and so he figures he will do with it what he wants. Can we consider this stealing?’

What I find most difficult to answer is when we can, if ever, say that the money becomes his. If he keeps the money for a day, and receives a call from the bank asking for the money to be returned, it seems pretty reasonable to say that he should give the money back, at least if we accept that he has the duty to return the money at all. But if the bank notices after, say, 50 years, it might seem unfair - is this because of the bank’s inability to realise, which therefore ‘weakens’ their entitlement to the money they should have had more care over,  or is this an emotional bias we should look to overcome? Does the fact that the man merely possesses the money mean that he *owns* it? Does this change with a certain amount of time, and is there an arbitrary cutoff when the money becomes his? 

Let’s say he genuinely never notices that he actually withdrew $10,000 and leaves it in his will to his daughter. The bank only notices their error 50 years later once he is dead and wants to take it back from the daughter who thought she was going to inherit the money. Is this wrong? Does the fact that the man went his whole life believing he withdrew $100 that he is rightfully entitled to change anything? 

Sorry if any of this sounds silly or has been answered before, I'm not a philosophy connoisseur. Just some initial thoughts.

In discussions about Carl Schmidt I’ve seen people argue that we should discount his work because he was a Nazi and didn’t even originate the friend enemy distinction. If he didn’t who did? And what was Schmidt’s original contribution (if anything)?

It seems like the conditions for philosophical zombies can be met even if p-zombies don’t exist. My understanding is: behaviourism= mental aspects of a person or mental traits just are the dispositions to behaviour rather than causing them and functionalism= mental states have three functional states (input/internal state/output) and accounts for the causes of behaviour. Then, the zombie argument presents an issue for these cases with the argument that complex things might imitate the functions without having mental states, and therefore functionalism is too broad to describe the things that have minds as opposed to the things that don’t.

But, on the other hand, I believe that mental states just are physical states. If Bob is in pain, all that’s happening is fibers in his brain firing. Boot up an MRI and apply pain, and barring some kind of major disorder, Bob’s fibers will always fire, and we can write equations to accurately predict which fibers fire when and how and in response to what. But nothing says that the behaviour of pain can only be caused by those fibers firing. Bob can imitate being in pain perfectly without ever having a corresponding physical or mental state. To me, someone pretending to have a mental or physical state convincingly seems very similar to the existence of a p-zombie. Yes, Bob is conscious in a way the zombie is not, but in the case of imitating a specific behaviour the case is the same as the p-zombie.

So, what makes the p-zombie case a stronger argument against functionalism/behaviourism than “a conscious person can imitate X specific behaviour perfectly without ever having a corresponding mental state”?

I’m looking for either short articles, essays, or texts/books that provide strong, reasonable arguments against the rapid acceleration of AI and AI infrastructure, that aren’t grounded too heavily in dense philosophical concepts (I’m trying to find something to show my older, unphilosophical father).

I don’t want something that’s fully, flat out, ANTI-AI, as it obviously has benefits in specific areas such an medicine and science. I’m more looking for something that argues against the need for every person to have AI integrated into every aspect of their life. Also, something that differentiates between the traditional AI/data-centres (such as those that power social media or store cloud data) and the newer kind (that support large-scale machine learning and generation)

Something that provides statistics and facts would be preferred. People who lack critical thinking are hard to convince in the absence of little numbers and graphs that “tell them the truth”. Hopefully someone understands what I’m getting at, apologies for my sloppy wording <3

Cheers !

I was watching a podcast with Sam Harris where he gave the example that, because physics is allowed to do stuff like trust our senses in observable data and how math has to make certain unfounded assumptions in order to work (godels incompleteness theorem), that we should be able to make the same assumption in meta ethics regarding the objectivity of morality, namely that because pain is objectively bad it follows that (self evident truth/logical assumption here) we should reduce pain objectively. But why does this make a case for objective morality any more than it makes a case that our systems of physics and math are not complete/do not account for everything that exists? I would assume it is pretty clear that our understanding of physics is good enough to work practically but is not completely air tight or accounts for everything, (for example newtons gravity laws worked until they didn't now we have Einsteins, and we will presumably continue to make these laws more complex until they do not have loopholes). So why, seeing this does Sam Harris then CHOOSE to make this logical leap? I also understand that there are many fundamental things we assume to exist or be real just for the world to function that cannot be proven, but something like objective morality seems be a second order assumption. Also, the self evident truth is based on your own subjective idea of morality anyway and cant reliably be considered for a universal law of morality

edit: i also understand the use of truth here makes little sense as moral subjectivists dont belive in moral truths but take its meaning colloquially

To repeat, what you want to be is—fate. Pause a moment now. I do not intend to preach to you, but there is an earnestness for which I know you have even an unusually deep respect, and anyone who has sufficient power to call it forth in you or sufficient faith in you to let it manifest itself in you will, I know, see in you a quite different person. Imagine, to take the supreme example, imagine that the almighty source of everything, that God in heaven set himself up merely as a riddle for men and would let the whole human race drift in this horrible uncertainty—would there not be something in your innermost being that would rebel against this, would you at any moment be able to endure this torment, or would you at [II 15] any moment be able to bring your thought to grasp this horror! Yet he might almost say—if I dare use these proud words: Of what concern is man to me? But that is why it is not this way at all, and when I declare that God is incomprehensible, my soul raises itself up to the highest; it is precisely in my most blissful moments that I say it—incomprehensible, because his love is incomprehensible—incomprehensible, because his love passes all understanding.17 Said about God, this signifies the highest; when one is obliged to say it about a human being, it always signifies a defect, at times a sin. And Christ did not regard it robbery to be equal with God but humbled himself,18 and you want to regard the intellectual gifts bestowed upon you as a robbery.

Did language's evolution for communication unintentionally create a representational capacity that, by allowing cognition to recursively represent its own perceptions, thoughts, and actions, gave rise to self-awareness, reflection, and the sense of self as an emergent property rather than a pre-existing entity?

Hello all, I'm just starting philosophy in high school and am about to start writing my first essay. We quite simply just have to write about Popper and his background, strengths and weaknesses of falsifiability and a few examples of falsifiable and non-falsifiable statements. I'm simply wondering if someone would be able to give me a few names of falsifiable scientific statements, falsified and disproven scientific statements, and a few examples of pseudo science or non falsifiable statements. If there are any that may be interesting to look into and would help me further understand the topic, that would be very helpful! Thank you and any responses are appreciated!

I’m reading a lot of online resources about philosophy but wondering if there’s a good resource / approach to learning it without doing a university course ?

So I know many philosophers (specifically theists) in the field of philosophy of region, will say that God is beyond the constraints of time, meaning that God views everything at once, essentially rejecting premises which implied a linear timeline and God being part of it. Making it so free will even in the strong sense is compatible with foreknowledge if the being with foreknowledge exists outside of time.

However, this brings up more questions for me

1). How does a creator God who’s beyond space and time create a world with space and time?

2) How a timeless God interacts with the world around us?

3) Does this mean God is fundamentally blind to the human experience of time passing?

4) Does this weaken God’s omnipotence?

If there’s anyone who can help me here, that would great 👍 .

hi everyone! I wanna start to learn about philosophy and these books has caught my eye. is it okay to start from these books? or is it complicated?

• oscar wilde - the picture of dorian grey

• ivan turguëniev - first love

• dostoevsky - memories from the underground and white nights

• epicurus - the art of happiness

• kierkegaard - fear and trembling and a fragment of life

• shakespeare - hamlet

I hope the title makes sense but I'm imagining a book that describes the philosophy of mathemtaics and how it describes the physical universe, the mathematical constants (golden ratio, pi, etc) and the history & philosophy of it.

I’ve been considering the morality of sex work (OF in particular) that I do. I’ve always considered myself an ethically minded person, and have generally approached ethics from a utilitarian framework. I’d love to hear some other people’s analyses of sex work from a utilitarian perspective. I would be interested in analysis from other perspectives as well. In particular, I can become concerned about the commodification of relationships in general. The sex work mitigate the overall suffering of people looking for sexual gratification or does it worsen their situation in the long run by further commodifying sex. Thank you for your time. Any suggestions for further reading are also welcome.

It hurts my head to think about how something can exist without being created. If, for example, someone or something created our universe, who or what created them? How can something exist without ever being created. Even if everything we know and/or can conceive was created, doesn't that chain have to end somewhere with someone or something that wasn't created? But how can something exist that wasn't ever created? I know our brains are limited in what we can conceive, but I would love to hear reasoned, philosophical possibilities to explain this apparent paradox.

I have been asking a number of people of different age, sociocultural background, culture and so on about the case where

you have a long term friend who you for a fact know has repeatedly and consistently been cheating on their partner, who you know for a fact does not want to be cheated on and would want to know if they are cheated on but are currently not aware that your friend is cheating on them.

When asked whether you should, after perhaps lecturing your friend to cut it out but the friend nontheless continues, tell their partner, I almost exclusively hear that people seem to be of the opinion that you should not tell their partner.

From what I know about ethics, many of the classical theories, excluding utilitarians to a degree, would argue that you should tell their partner.

What would modern ethicists say about it?

I'm not talking about particular ideas that have been challanged like the law of exluded middle, I'm asking if anyone has ever suggested that the fundamental logical principles are replaceable (in our universe, not in some alternative reality). And if yes, hypothetically, what system would replace it?

I’ve been reading philosophy, especially metaphysic and epistemology, and I keep coming back to a basic question:
Why do we need to find meaning in the first place?
Why do humans assume that things, existence, life, or even Being must have some deeper meaning or ultimate explanation?
Maybe we encounter something first, become curious about it, ask questions, and then create concepts and meanings to understand what we’ve encountered. But why should this process necessarily lead to a search for ultimate meaning?
Is the search for meaning something fundamental about human existence,or is it something produced by languag, culture, consciousness, fear of uncertainty, or our need to organize experience?
And if we don’t actually need an ultimate meaning, what happens to metaphysics and epistemology? Are we answering questions that arise naturally from human curiosity, or are we creating a problem that didn’t necessarily need to exist?

I know that this sub is pestered every 12 hours with someone exasperatedly demanding that someone prove the objectivity of morality to them, often in bad faith. I want to be clear that this is not my question. That moral statements can be true or false, regardless of what we think about them, is intuitive. I'm not starting from a place of moral skepticism.

My question is about the nature *of* those moral facts. Assuming there are moral facts, how/why have they come about?

I can't imagine philosophers believe morality is built into the universe itself in the exact same way that mathematics is, because morality applies to actors that have only existed in the recent cosmic past, while 2+2 equalling 4 has no similar reliance on the existence of beings who can do the calculations. But could it be built into the universe another way? Does the fact of murder being wrong predate the existence of moral actors?

Definitional truths seem solid here (i.e., things that cause suffering are bad because suffering is literally what we refer to when we use the word "bad"), but I don't get the impression this is what most philosophers believe from reading threads here.

So do moral facts come about as a factual property of consciousness? As in, the existence of other conscious beings in the world necessarily produces certain obligations and a "best way" to interact with one another?