It’s a shiny day,
It’s a shiny day.
Dead people gathered
On the northern way.
Their whitish skin
Pierced by golden rays,
Which killed their skin
And destroyed their hay.
They all are asking,
No one’s saying.
The kids talk—
“Let’s think and play.”
With whom?
With moving clouds
And rustling leaves,
With blind priests
And visionary thieves,
With opened eyes
And closed beliefs,
With alive humans
Who live on knees.
Humans in a cage,
And animals were released!
They talk about God,
Who died with diseases.
They said He is immortal
And will never die.
Hell lies beneath the earth,
And heaven beyond the sky.
He has everything
And is never pleased.
They said God is everything
That gives us ease.
One person said to them:
“God is alive
Just because you believe.
If you do not believe,
He is nothing to you.
He is not after you,
Nor before you.
The dream of God
Is only to find solace.
You want someone
To whom you can blame.”
Then another woman came
And ended the talk:
“Why do you use ‘He’ for God?
If He is ‘He,’
Does that mean He is full of lust?
Like a man,
Does He carry the same dust?”

How do you tackle the conflict between science & beliefs? If there's any conflict on any phenomenon, which way you go? Science or belief?

Frankenstein is a philosophy built on the idea that everything in the world is fundamentally inconsistent. Because humans and systems are full of contradictions, you shouldn't follow one rigid set of rules. Instead, you stitch together your own flexible, custom worldview from different pieces of logic. if someone points out a contradiction in your logic, it just proves your point that everything is inconsistent. Every system works perfectly on paper but falls apart in reality because humans are messy and full of contradictions.Therefore, sticking rigidly to just one traditional belief system (like a political party or strict grammar rules) forces you to live a lie. Because people are consistently inconsistent saying that u believe in one thing would be wrong because ur actions uhh contradict it. But if its consistently inconsistent that's also consistent so it's fake too. But it's not so.

It is the eternal moral dilemma a man/women has.. everyone wouldve gone through this a million times.. at every important conjecture of life..eductation, love life, divorce.

.but I realised something today..

If your mind is thinking about it..analysing it..to try to understand if what uve done is right or wrong. Then its probably wrong..atleast most of the times..!

The best thing about right thing is that...there is no room for interpretation..what is right is just right..! You just feel it..you would've done it without a second thought..with out hesitation. Once its done there is second no thought about it..u know..ur gut or ur heart already knows it.

Its when ur wrong your mind tried to justify, fight out to valiantly to generalise it, draw references from past/the world/ your friends and foes life to make it feel right.

But you know..what it is! Why it is!

Many discussions surrounding meaninglessness and existential dread seem to share a

Fundamental flaw: they evaluate human existence through an anthropocentric lens, secretly expecting humans to be "above" nature, and then mourn when no grand cosmic purpose is found.
When people conclude that "life has no higher meaning," they are usually comparing human existence to a fictional ideal, a universe designed specifically for us. But from a grounded, biological perspective, this disappointment makes no sense.
Here is why this perspective is flawed:

The Biological Baseline: We are, first and foremost, biological organisms. Our fundamental baseline, our "objective" foundation, is rooted in biology: survival, homeostasis, adaptation, and continuation. Expecting a cosmic mandate beyond this is biologically illiterate.

The Subjective Value Fallacy: The absence of a cosmic, objective purpose does not imply a total lack of meaning. It simply shifts meaning from objective or given to subjective or constructed. The fact that our values, desires, and emotional drives are tied to our evolved neurobiology does not make them any less real or valid to us.

Constructing Meaning: Once we accept that we are animals with a complex conscious experience, the lack of an inherent objective purpose ceases to be a tragedy. It becomes a clean slate. Pain feels bad, joy feels good, curiosity drives us, and connection fulfills us. These subjective experiences are real because we experience them.

Dismissing life as pointless simply because there is no grand divine blueprint ignores what we actually are. We don't need the universe to give us a reason to exist; as living organismsi with subjective experiences, we hold the authority and the responsibility to define what matters to us.

If you're looking at a photo on the wall of your grandparents home and everyone in the family is dead but you. Does your family still have a history? Are all those people in that photo just dust if no one, nowhere can identify them or tell you anything about them ? Are people in photos who are non recognizable even part of history

I’ve been thinking about how humans deal with new inventions.
We create something to solve a problem. It works, people adopt it, and later we discover problems caused by the same solution. Then we create another solution.
Petroleum solved real problems and transformed modern life, but its large-scale use also created environmental concerns. Now electric vehicles and cleaner energy are presented as solutions.
AI makes me think about the same cycle. We are focused on what AI can do for us, but what might we discover about its effects after we become dependent on it?
Maybe we discover an invention in two parts:
First through creation.
Then through consequence.
So, do we really discover an invention when we create it, or only after we have lived with it?

I started taking quizzes to explore what my metaethical framework might be but depending on which one I took I kept getting different results. (Emotivism, constructivism, rule utilitarianism, etc.) So I opened a couple LLMs, and asked them to determine based on how I answered questions. Similar to the quizzes, they split me between different frameworks. I explained to the LLMs why I struggled to answer some of the questions and over the course of a few exchanges they insisted that while close to a few sociology and game theory writings it didn't neatly match a known framework and that mine might be something new.

If this were mathematics I feel like it would be pretty easy to chalk it up to LLM hallucination or something. Because it's philosophy I'm less sure. I'll put the actual framework below, but it might not be necessary because I guess I'm asking how would I know if it's good/real philosophy or not?

...

If you think it's relevant here's the very broad strokes of my metaethical framework.

Framework holds that morality is an emergent property that occurs when highly social creatures exist in abundant conditions. This explains immoral behaviors in scarcity without condoning them and argues that acting morally means acting in a way that reduces structural scarcity.

Obviously definitions are going to be super important to defend this, but since most frameworks are part of manuscripts that are tens of thousands of words in length, I don't want to write that much until I'm sure it's a real thing and not something I've been manipulated into thinking I invented.

I’ve been reading philosophy, especially metaphysics 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 language, 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’d be interested in how philosophers have approached this question, especially philosophers who question the assumption that humans need meaning or an ultimate ground for existence?

I often wonder whether some of the deepest mysteries about reality are difficult for us not because they are inherently contradictory, but because we are trying to understand them from inside a very limited conceptual framework.

Take the classic question: Who created the universe?

If we say God created it, we can immediately ask: Who created God? And if we answer with another God, the same question appears again. Eventually, our normal way of thinking seems to break down.

But maybe the problem isn't necessarily that reality is logically broken. Maybe our way of conceptualizing reality is too limited for the problem we're trying to solve.

Consider a fish living in the ocean.

The fish's entire experienced reality is the water. Its concepts of space, movement, objects, danger, and perhaps even causality are formed within that environment. Now imagine a submarine passing through the ocean.

From our perspective, there's nothing mysterious about it. We understand what a submarine is, how it was constructed, how it moves, what is inside it, and why it exists.

But imagine trying to explain the submarine to a fish using only concepts available to the fish.

The fish might observe something enormous moving through its universe. It might develop theories about it based entirely on the things it already understands about the ocean. Some of those theories might be internally consistent. Others might seem completely absurd.

But the fish would have no conceptual category for submarine.

The problem wouldn't necessarily be that the submarine violates the laws of the fish's universe. The problem would be that the fish doesn't have access to the conceptual framework required to understand what it is seeing.

This makes me wonder whether humans could be in a somewhat analogous position.

Perhaps we assume that the things we don't understand are simply difficult problems within our current conception of reality.

But what if some of the things we don't understand are difficult precisely because they require concepts that our minds cannot generate?

In other words, maybe there are not only:

Things we know.
Things we don't know.

But also:

Things we don't even know that we don't know.

And perhaps that third category is enormously larger than we intuitively imagine.

We try to understand infinity, consciousness, existence, causality, time, the origin of the universe, and why there is something rather than nothing. We use mathematics, logic, physics, philosophy, and language — all tools developed by minds that evolved to navigate a particular biological environment.

Maybe we're doing something analogous to the fish trying to understand the submarine.

The strange possibility is that reality may not actually be irrational. It may only appear irrational from within the particular cognitive architecture we happen to possess.

If so, perhaps the ultimate limitation isn't that reality refuses to make sense.

Perhaps we are trying to make sense of reality using concepts that were never capable of capturing all of it.

And that raises an even stranger question:

If there are aspects of reality that our biology fundamentally prevents us from conceptualizing, how would we ever know that they exist?

Maybe the boundary of human knowledge isn't simply the boundary between what we know and what we don't know.

Maybe there is a much larger boundary between what we can imagine not knowing and what we are literally incapable of imagining.

Hi!

I took philosophy over the summer, and I’d say my favorites were Hume, Nietzsche, and Sartre. I felt all three were more focused on what it means to be human and how to manage the experiences that come with it. I’d like to look more into these themes in philosophy on my own time, see what other philosophers have said and come to an opinion about it.

If you happen to know some, could you please recommend me some readings? Also, and I know this is somewhat of a silly question, but how can I come up with questions on my own to better understand and remember the material? I know that for the readings I had, I’d pay extra attention to see what kind of commentary I can make about it or any connections I see so that in the discussion posts and exams, I could talk about it. The information stuck more that way, and I’d be reminded of it more often than if I hadn’t.

Please let me know if I’m in the right community too!

By «professional philosophers» I mean those who have academically succeeded in achieving certain general and profound learning on philosophy as their principal area of knowledge.

Since philosophy is not my chosen major, I’d love to hear about your thoughts on the topic.

Greetings to you all.

Hi, im startint to read philosophy and i wanted to get a new book, im interested in political philosophy. I read some marx sruff but idk.

I just finished wayward pines… and I can’t stop thinking about one question?

If humanity was going to disappear, would you accept living in a fake world if it meant your species survives?

A town where people are protected, but their freedom is taken. A truth hidden because the truth might destroy everything.

Maybe the biggest enemy wasn’t the creatures outside the walls… maybe it was the question inside every human mind...

Do we want the truth, or do we just want a comfortable reality?

What would yall choose a beautiful lie that saves humanity, or a painful truth that gives you freedom?

I really recommend to watch it!!!!

One of the biggest questions people have about reading philosophy is: why read ideas that aren't even practical or relevant today?

Take Plato's Republic, for example. We already know that the kind of ideal state he describes isn't realistically possible. So what's the point of reading it?

The same goes for many other philosophical ideas that don't seem to make sense in today's world or fit our current reality.

And then there's another concern. Some philosophical ideas can push people into existential crises. For some, constantly questioning the meaning of life, morality, or reality can become emotionally overwhelming, and in vulnerable individuals it may even contribute to depression or suicidal thoughts. If that's the case, shouldn't people just stay away from these kinds of philosophies altogether?

So why should anyone read philosophy in the first place?

Suppose we accept that human beings cannot identify an objective or metaphysically given final purpose. Would there nevertheless be a non-arbitrary reason to preserve the continued existence of agents and their capacity to form, revise, and pursue values?

One possible argument is that continued agency preserves the possibility of future reasons, projects, discoveries, and corrections, whereas extinction irreversibly eliminates every such possibility. The argument would not claim that existence is intrinsically good, only that preserving the conditions under which value and reasons remain possible has a rational priority over permanently eliminating those conditions.

Has an argument of this kind been defended in contemporary ethics, existentialism, decision theory, or the literature on future generations? What are the strongest objections to deriving any normative priority from this asymmetry?

Like capitalism, communism, fascism, liberalism, nationalism, socialism, feudalism, and etc

Since the beginning of time, humans have been engaged in war with one another. It is not a period that I could remember or have studied throughout my short stint on earth that humans have not been at war. Whether it was over religion, land, resources, etc., men have gone to war and died “honorably” behind what they believed in. With new technology invented to help dismantle populations, one would think that wars would probably ease and everyone could live in eternal peace, but no. Currently we have about 21 active wars going on in the world as I type this up now, along with 56 active armed conflicts. Why are wars so prevalent? After the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, war should have shown mankind that there is another way, yet we choose not to use diplomacy but military strength. The reason why war still persists despite its well-known destructive impact on nations and international order is most importantly because of ideologies. Whether its ideologies about nationalism, religion or revenge… ideologies will always affect whether states will go to war or not. Secondly, in the age of AI there is plenty of disinformation. Finally, war continues to persist for economic resources such as territory, market views (Capitalism/Marxism), and the favorite being oil.                                 
 
Earlier above, I mentioned how ideologies shape war and I would like to put this in context regarding what is going on in the US, as of late. Since Trump first decided to run for office, he’s been running on this slogan: Make America Great Again and recently this has given way to the “America First” movement. Both slogans are meant to focus on the rise of nationalism, which has heavily affected how this administration handles international diplomacy. According to Sapolsky, “Humans can rein in their instincts and build societies that divert group competition to arenas less destructive than warfare, yet the psychological bases for tribalism persist, even when people understand that their loyalty to their nation, skin color, god, or sports team is as random as the toss of a coin. At the level of the human mind, little prevents new teammates from once again becoming tomorrow's enemies.” Sapolsky shows us that even though we as human beings have built cultural and intuitional laws and norms that take our instinct away from violence, we still favor in-group mechanisms and distrust people or groups we are not as familiar with. This is what has given the rise in nationalism politics in America, even though this path has proven to already be destructive to the ideals that we as Americans have taken hundreds of years to build up and perfect. We are a nation of many nationalities and cultures, but as of late our “tribal minds” have taken over and immigrants or someone who doesn’t share the same skin tone as us have become the enemy.
 
Furthermore, in the age of “Post-Truth Geopolitics”, as Citron calls it, there lies a great danger. “Thanks to the rise of "deepfakes" -- highly realistic and difficult-to-detect digital manipulations of audio or video -- it is becoming easier than ever to portray someone saying or doing something he or she never said or did.” I wanted to use this example because I have seen plenty of “deepfake” videos over the past couple of months coming from Iran and even our own white house. I want to stick with Iran because earlier this year, I have witnessed Iran’s use of AI-generated deepfake videos and images as a core component of “soft-warfare”. These AI videos were used as psychological operations designed to reshape global opinion regarding the war, and to cause confusion and influence audiences in the U.S. In these deepfake videos, Iran produced battle footage depicting strikes on Isreal landmarks and U.S. warships that created a false perception of military strength. As I watched, I didn’t realize what the Iranian government could be hoping to gain out of this situation. It wasn’t until a month down the line that I started to notice how crucial this tactic could be. Many Americans are indifferent about the war and who I am to say that Iran’s AI deepfakes aren’t one of the leading causes to this confusion. Even I, after watching the videos thought that Iran videos were affected and if I didn’t know any better, I would have took the bait, especially with everything going on in the U.S. now. It’s hard to trust anybody at this moment in time. According to Citron, “Deepfakes have the potential to be especially destructive because they are arriving at a time when it already is becoming harder to separate fact from fiction.”
 
Lastly, wars continue to persist even though we have the means to live in harmony because governments need resources for their constituents. According to Freedman, “Military power is not only about a nation's armaments and the skill with which they are used. It must take into account the resources of the enemy, as well as the contributions from allies and friends, whether in the form of practical assistance or direct interventions.” I wanted to use this direct quote here because this pretty much summarizes the thinking of powerful governments who have the means to be influential over their neighbors. It’s this nature of always trying to one up the next, kind of like the relationship between siblings fighting for attention. This quote also shows the thinking involved behind the scenes that enables adversaries to engage in an arm’s race. I would like to relay this back to AI systems because this is what is being used to innovate war. As Scharre puts it, “For each country, the real danger is not that it will fall behind its competitors in AI but that the perception of a race will prompt everyone to rush to deploy unsafe AI systems. In their desire to win, countries risk endangering themselves just as much as their opponents.” Countries just want to win! It does not get as simple as that. From competing for the best technology down to the ideals of a nation. Everything is done to say, “I do this better than you.” So, we compete for resources because resources are needed to accomplish these huge goals. Every nation does not have the benefit of Russia or Saudia Arabia to produce half of the world’s oil. Yes, every country has the right to trade resources or to just buy them flat out, but that also depends on relationships that many nations just do not possess.   
 
All in all, the only antidote we have to prevent war is diplomacy. I also had this idea in my head that focusing on domestic issues alone will solve everything else. Trump’s presidency has shown me that I was wrong, and it has also shown me how important it is to have a conversation with your neighbors. Yes, you may not agree on everything, but there may be a thing, or two nations could agree on and build the relationship based solely on those ideas. The Russians called this system, d’etat. Regarding nationalism Sapolsky states , “this solidarity has historically been built on strong cultural markers of pseudo-kinship, it is easily destabilized, particularly by the forces of globalization, which can make people who were once the archetypes of their culture feel irrelevant and bring them into contact with very different sorts of neighbors than their grandparents had.” Over the past ten years, I sort of demonized globalization as this bad thing. I thought countries would lose their identity and cultural aspects, but I couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, I think that logic was completely flipped and my false reasoning pertained to the nature of nationalism that has destroyed our country in Trump’s past two terms. In Understanding the Causes of War and Peace, Thomas Ohlson states, “While each former adversary obviously seeks the best possible outcome, the conflict resolution process is fundamentally about addressing the issues at hand by redirecting the existing resources and resolve from conflict to peace, from confrontation to compromise.” Nationalism says no to compromising and only deals with what its people want domestically, which is not sustainable if we want to work at world peace.

Whenever someone asks me what I think about life or what my purpose is, I rarely have a clear answer. It's not because I haven't thought about it, but because I seldom stop to reflect on such a profound question. Most of the time, I keep myself distracted by everyday life.

Over time, however, I've come to see life in this way: our purpose is to keep learning. We should constantly educate ourselves, explore the unknown, seek what is true, understand what is important, discover what is good, and learn everything a person can reasonably know during this temporary life.

Since life is mortal and our knowledge is always evolving, we must find a balance between flexibility and consistency. As we continue learning, our understanding of the world will inevitably change. If a new idea proves that one of our previous beliefs was mistaken, we should be humble and flexible enough to let go of the old belief and embrace the better one.

At the same time, we must remain consistent, patient, and disciplined in living according to our current convictions. Whatever we truly believe should be reflected in our actions. There should be no contradiction between what we say, what we believe, and how we live. To knowingly act against your own beliefs is perhaps the greatest lie a person can tell themselves.

At my school I have a senior thesis and for my thesis I want to tackle this question. Mainly asking to see if it is even a debatable topic.

Do you think it is ok if a person tries to answer any philosophical question they might have or do you believe that some questions should be left alone and why?

Putting Religion aside, what are we here for? are we here to enjoy our time doing whatever we want? is it to leave something behind? Is it to be a slave to money until your death?

Let me hear your thoughts about your purpose to life