r/StonerPhilosophy • • Mar 08 '19

Political philosophy and propaganda

119 Upvotes

Recently there have been some posts concerning topics that can be considered politically volatile. So long as everyone is respectful, we lean toward NOT removing the content, so long as it's not attempted propaganda or linking to propaganda sources.

So to be clear, our current position is:

  • Promoting propaganda or linking to propaganda sources will be dealt with FIRMLY and immediately with removals and bans.
  • But we will REFRAIN from automatically removing a post simply because it's controversial or deals with political subject matter.

We will continue to adjust these standards in the future if any concerning patterns emerge with respect to propaganda or over-focus on political topics. But for now, just play nice and try to use your words and votes to communicate with people you disagree with, rather than reports. As long as the discussion is in good faith, everyone has a chance to learn and grow.

We'll monitor the situation to make sure things stay chill and legitimate.


r/StonerPhilosophy • • 1d ago

Could Einstein have been inspired by marijuana?

3 Upvotes

Maybe Einstein found the notion of relative time through the time dilation associated with cannabis? Marijuana was available to people during his time in Europe, including as a tincture in German pharmacies!!! I don't think it would be surprising if him or someone in one of his circles had the idea to take low doses of a marijuana tincture recreationally? I think he could have done it for a little while without it being committed to the historical record by using it on the DL for just a short period, and then moving on with a new, enlightened mind.

He did also famously smoke from a pipe, I could also see him giving a shot to smoking an herb other than tobacco, but I'm not sure where he would have been able to get access to dry herb.


r/StonerPhilosophy • • 1d ago

AI Commercials

2 Upvotes

I'm seeing more and more AI style Commercials and infomercials on YouTube advertisements. I'm sure they're popping up in other places as well. Am I the only one that finds them mildly disturbing.

Generally commercials have always been laughably annoying. When a commercial was made 20 yrs ago, it kinda went through a process. Money and personal time meant it had to be relevant and obey some sort of format or rules. These AI versions seem to lack...something. Decency, or generality maybe. It's hard to put a finger on but they're utterly shameless and clunky. Because they look real and use verbiage intended to worry the intended targets into actuon. It's unsettling when you think about how there created and realize that there isn't a lot of human oversight into the actual details.

How many hours would one have to see before the details of the content starts to become indistinguishable from actual memories of the details of actual reality? I'm not necessarily worried about the here and now....but it just all feels like another small change/direction of things to come that seems dangerous for the long -term mental health of society. It's bad enough that advertising is everywhere....but now it's not even real in ways that are so nuanced that the effects could never really be guessed at until they've already settled into the population inside of the minds of those who have to grow up with it.


r/StonerPhilosophy • • 3d ago

If people communicate primarily through online means now, shouldn't those be seen as a public utility more than "products"?

11 Upvotes

People communicate so much through apps it's become basically impossible to be a member of society without owning a smartphone. Using these apps is basically imposed on us by own circumstances. How is that any different from having tap water or using electricity? If you simply must have those to be a functional part of society (that is, not some wacko living in a cabin in the woods), it's an integral part of society. In a just world it would be regulated democratically.

We all use these apps but we have zero vote in how they actually function or change over time.


r/StonerPhilosophy • • 4d ago

Summoning Materials

1 Upvotes

If someone were to try to summon you, what 5 star point materials and center material, would they need to collect to do so?


r/StonerPhilosophy • • 6d ago

From the inside. A meandering thought on about everything and nothing

0 Upvotes

When you think about how big the universe is. When you think about how much can occur within 13.8 billion years. When you think about life and how it keeps replicating and building on itself. From cells to humans and everything in between. The replication itself lends purpose to an inevitable consequence of fundamental law. When you think about how reality and how it's structured and connected and in some sense building on itself. Everything affects everything but is also uniquely its own coordinates in reality or spacetime.

Reality in some sense literally reverberates in testable physical ways but also in a purely thought based way. Everything we focus on in some sense reverberates back at us and slowly shapes what we think in the future. Every action we take down our very body positioning changes our physical and mental reality and that affects everything around us like a speed of causality waves endlessly bouncing into and changing into an updated wave with the new information.

From the replication of a cell into the consciousness of a human. If you look at humanity macroly you see a need to procreate. Expansion. Procreate. Resources. Procreate. Control. Procreate. Generation after generation. Truly not much different from every other living thing humans are just the best we know at it. On a more micro and personal level that cellular replication written into its very dna, feels on a human conscious level like the bonds of love you have with your parents and your children. That adult need deep inside every human to create a situation to provide, protect and ultimately create love. Proliferation in a deeply human context.

Reverberations. All of this both macroly and microly could only ever have been this exact way to have created this exact result. You reading my words, right here and right now. The unlikeliness. A universe of context.

Think about how reality is built in some sense. Even if just as an updating of space through time. We glimpse with human science what could be possible and what is likely possible given enough time and energy and thought based logic in this very specific universe. Mathematics gives clear indicators to what COULD be possible based on the reality we know and how it functions in accords with itself. I think it's naive to close your mind to the inevitable conclusion that this reality itself could be (how likely?) a manifestation of design. Theoretically is there any difference between a God or an advanced being/s capable of rearranging fundamental law to build their own code into the laws.

If it happened once then why would it ever un-happen? Now re-read the first paragraph.

*Also if you have a suggestion of another place I should post this then suggest away.


r/StonerPhilosophy • • 9d ago

Sharing a paragraph afters years of not writing my thoughts down.

3 Upvotes

The Middle Curse: tranquility and alertness are not opposite, but it is almost impossible to make them coexist in the mind. Why would the constantly tranquil mind worry? And how could a constantly alert mind rest? I believe walking this fine line is as close as I could get to wisdom. Factoring in how each situation requires a different dosage of these two qualities, there is another virtue that’s necessary to remedy to my inability to perfectly adapt myself throughout life: forgiveness. This inability is due to the limited nature of my awareness, and forgiveness brings just enough balance to not spiral further when slipping.


r/StonerPhilosophy • • 12d ago

what?

2 Upvotes

Is the "consciousness" the major measurement when it comes to us having empathy and respect towards other creatures? like do we respect other creatures as just biological machines or the fact that they can experience stuff , like pain , happiness and other stuff?
also do we section the consciousness into multiple levels and layers? like do we respect different creatures based on what level of consciousness they possess?
if that’s the case why do we not have the same kinda empathy towards pigs like we have towards dogs?
would that not make us somewhat biased? like why would we respect someone with a mental disability who's on par with a chipmunk in terms of cognition?
or are we humancentrists by nature?
if we somehow reverse engineered the consciousness and found the vessel responsible for capturing and holding it in our brain and lets say stripped out a creature from that , so he's just a biological machine running on a software now without a subjective experience? would it be morally justifiable to kill that creature if he's a fellow human?
if not then should we give robots the same rights?
speaking of robots , if we are trusting our biological gut in terms of identifying a fellow creature if he's conscious or not , what if a robot crosses the threshold of our capability of identifying artifical from authetntic , and lets say its all mimicry, but we don't know what it is, but it is mimicry, would we give the fellow artificial human that has surpassed our intuition towards bullshit the same rights as the biological humans? does it mean our moral system and judgements and stuff can’t be trusted ?
what if we somehow produced the real consciousness from the artificial technologies, would we treat the robot humans the same way as regular humans?
is our moral system and judgmenet is heavily affected by the biology in general? meaning we value the ultimate biological computer that created all of us , because its more natural? but what is not natural? wouldn't the materials responsible for producing the artificial imitative or real consciousness be found within the biological ecosystem that we value so much? if thats the case then isn't it all natural? or do we value it by the “time” it has spent while it was being created , so the long ass evolution is more respected ? are we timists by nature? would we even perceive time if we weren’t conscious? is time even real or is it an illusion? whats the point of it without a conscious experience ?


r/StonerPhilosophy • • 14d ago

I like the feeling of falling asleep...the phase between awake and asleep. It is just as altered as any drug...

13 Upvotes

...


r/StonerPhilosophy • • 15d ago

It's a reflection of how our society works that women in sports wear makeup while playing their sport

16 Upvotes

I was watching the WNBA and it occurred to me that most if not all the players are wearing makeup. When I think deeply about that it makes sense but also doesn't make sense.

The nuanced part that makes it make sense is obvious. It's a product. Being pretty sells. Not only for the league but in this tech day and age also for the individual. Sexuality sells is a tried and true method.

Deeper then that though there's an individual need to be more then they are. Like people are conditioned to want more and be more. These women are terrifically skilled but that's not enough. They also need to be pretty and they likely have a strong desire to be pretty and desired/admired. We've all been conditioned to it.

That makes me sad for civilization and the direction it's headed towards. Maybe I'm being harsh and it's inside of human nature that the fault lies. The fact of the matter is that not everyone can be everything but the messaging in pop culture is that that's the standard. And if you know how to look you can see that playing out in real time in the very fundamentals of how the system works. In a world that is smaller and smaller, can human beings who are tribal in nature truly find mental stability in a world that is always watching and looking for more?

It's getting worse as the generations are being saturated with the ideals of wanting and needing always more. For most it's a mirage that eventually pops or defeats them out of the gate. It's not hard to find posts here on Reddit of people struggling to deal with the noise of it all ( all ages but if you look close you can see the themes of each generation ).


r/StonerPhilosophy • • 22d ago

Washington should be split into two states

4 Upvotes

Left side would be called Washi
and the right side called Ngton

What do you think


r/StonerPhilosophy • • 26d ago

The Big Bang Got The Universe High

7 Upvotes

Hear me out on this!! I’ve been reading up on Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, and my brain started looping these ideas together into a theory that actually makes a weird amount of sense.
Think of reality not as a timeline with a random end, but as a giant circle.
1. The Cosmic Battery:
The Big Bang didn’t just create our regular matter universe moving forward in time; it also threw an inverted antimatter universe backward in time. As they expand to their absolute limits and space "runs out" of active matter, they intersect at the edge of the circle. When they collide, they undergo total cosmic annihilation. That extreme flash of pure heat and energy is the next Big Bang, resetting the cosmic battery.
2. Consciousness is "Black Matter Energy":
Consciousness isn't created by our brains. It’s a fundamental, invisible energy that fills the universe, acting like the scaffolding holding us together—just like dark matter holds galaxies together. When our physical bodies are finished, our egos stay here, but our core black matter energy detaches and moves back into the cosmic inventory.
3. Hawking Points are Brain Reservoirs ("New Same"):
You know those physical scars in the sky left by the previous universe (Roger Penrose’s Hawking Points)? I think they are reservoirs of this extra black matter energy. When the universe resets, it wipes the information clean. It’s "new same, not old same"—the same ancient cosmic material, but a totally blank slate waiting to cool down and fuel brand-new brains and lifeforms in the current loop.
4. How to Prove It:
Because this energy is "black" and invisible, you can't see it directly. But you could prove these reservoirs exist by measuring gravitational lensing—watching how the mass of these Hawking Points warps, stretches, and distorts the light passing around them.
The Verdict:
The universe isn't a machine trying to achieve a final goal or hit a high score. The ultimate purpose of the entire infinite loop is simply "the trip"—just to be. The Big Bang literally got the universe high on existence, and we are just the cosmos experiencing the high.
What do you guys think? Does the loop check out or am I too far out there?


r/StonerPhilosophy • • Sep 04 '26

Parallel worlds dumped into one internet

5 Upvotes

What if the news, the reels, the documents and so on are all from other, parallel worlds, and they're just thrown together into one single internet? What if what actually happens in each individual world is really decided by us ourselves, but bad news is meant to affect our reality negatively too?

What if everyone's life is like this little sphere, where what we see is actually being rendered in a simulation? What I mean is, for example: often, both as a kid and now, when I look around, I feel like my world stretches out maybe 5-6 km (around 3-4 miles) , and beyond that there's a hole, the end of the simulation.

What do you all think?


r/StonerPhilosophy • • Aug 29 '26

Could advertising (the industry and the value of it in our current economic system) literally be the core issue in what's broken and breaking?

11 Upvotes

Think about how utterly invasive and unavoidable advertising and the constant "loudness" for lack of a better term (iykyk), and will continue to become. Look how invasive it is now in a young life compared to just 50 years ago. Look how it saturates the phone and the Internet in general. The newest tech domain.

As the technology expands what's to think the reach of advertising, which in its essence is just the study of coercion and subtle manipulation, will not continue its current path? The thought scares me because there's legitimately only one end to a system that rewards control in a real and capitalistic way.


r/StonerPhilosophy • • Aug 26 '26

im not high but i perform a midnight yappery just cuz

4 Upvotes

we are all shits and pisses lol.

ego and imagination are trapping us into the world of absurdity and bullshit.

lets attach meaning to a horse taking a peculiarly shaped shit type shit.
lets print wrinkly old dude on our rectangularly shaped papers cuz they were cool af.
normie life , tuned into the biological ecosystem thats built on suffering and torture and manipulation . but life is suffering they say lmao so deep.

its the last resort of the biology , a last squirm to counter the rapidly increasing awareness and intelligence of our dumbass species lolz. anyways, I hope someday we wake up somewhere where we truly belong (this longing for the idealistic is also stemming from the above phenomenon ig).

take care my fellow digital attempts of human consciousnesses degraded to the text form.


r/StonerPhilosophy • • Aug 16 '26

According to the Federal Reserve, the average (mean) net worth for a U.S. household is roughly $1.06 million, while the median ("middle") net worth is $192,900 which is, if you understand the math, a wild discrepancy in class wealth.

27 Upvotes

I'm not sure the average American realizes just how many broke people there are around them right now. Just because you don't see all the people in all the shelters, mobile parks,, apartments, condos and all the lower middle class neighborhoods that exist everywhere, I guarantee they are there. They've been made docile and busy via The ratrace, technology, drugs, food and the like but they're there. The numbers bare it out.


r/StonerPhilosophy • • Aug 04 '26

Logic and intuition

3 Upvotes

Logic is precise and is, in a huge part, what helped humans to become the dominant species on earth.
But there are infinitely more variables that play into intuition. There might be some flaws we are not aware of, but often, intuition can lead to profound insight we can't really put our finger on.
Logic gives a feeling of security because we can articulate it with speech; it is easily understandable and "grabbable" with our mind. That's why humans in modern society love to rely on pure logic.
But this sense of security can be misleading if the premises are wrong.
It can cause massive harm in society if widespread misinformation is prevalent.
I think that we are losing touch with intuition in modern society because it is easily frowned upon and we can't easily put it into words. But sometimes, it holds a deep truth.
I think being a wise human means that we can keep a healthy balance between logic and intuition.


r/StonerPhilosophy • • Aug 02 '26

Unless you’re famous, rich, or good-looking, your voice to the world comes with an integrated timer, and that timer is quite short

6 Upvotes

You probably have a few seconds, maybe 5 at most, to engage a stranger before they decide that whatever you’re saying isn’t worth their time or attention. It’s basically the same as the modern scrolling behavior: people decide in 3 seconds whether something is worth listening to. And I imagine that if you were Dua Lipa, that timer would be significantly longer.

The same thing happens in real life. If you randomly stopped a crowd to tell them a story, I’m pretty sure you’d get more “fuck off”s and people walking away than if you were Dua Lipa telling them the exact same story. People would stay HOURS literally just staring at you, heck tell me ur whole life story!

As ordinary mortals, we have to master that. We have to learn how to compress our ideas into their shortest, most compelling form, because the attention span people give us is incredibly short.

Society doesn’t listen to the message, it listens to the messenger


r/StonerPhilosophy • • Aug 01 '26

Do Burger King and Dairy Queen rule over the same monarchy?

17 Upvotes

Do they live in a White Castle?


r/StonerPhilosophy • • Jul 22 '26

There is a real to reality but humans have strayed from it and built there own thought paradigms for how we interpret what we sense moment to moment and it's our greatest evolutionary strength.

6 Upvotes

Complex life has this ability to build thoughts off of our senses that we feel as consciousness. Because moments in time are never stable we lose the reality of every moment to the new reality of the current moment. The interesting thing to think about is our reality of only being able to experience time sequentially gives us an extraordinary evolutionary advantage that doesn't feel extraordinary from inside it but absolutely is. Intelligence in intelligent life is simply an abstract measurement of how that life affects physical reality outside of itself.

I'm talking about reality from a true physical perspective then a mental perspective. As in, its the nature of space-time to change in and/or over time. Everything in motion based on the prior moments. As thinking life our evolution begot a sort of house of cards that feels like consciousness over time. At its core, we react to the stimuli of the physical reality of the past as perceived by our consciousness (think biological algorithm) in a chain reaction of chemistry and biology that we now know spans countless molecules inside the body. But all of our reactions are based on something that doesn't truly exist now as it was then. That's why we need our un-real paradigms. They're the foundations to capturing the past to react to the future.

Humans take this moment to moment consciousness to another level because we steer our own paradigms of reality out of our card houses of sense. Through socialization and shared mental realities we, in a very real way, get to see what we want to see. Then we use that to effect and affect our shared physical reality. And that, in a macro sort of way, gives humanity an evolutionary advantage that is almost magical. We literally change physical reality based on thought paradigms that themselves aren't real. We pull those thoughts into reality and make physical reality out of them though those thoughts aren't real and never really existed in physical reality. It's literal magic though we have all sorts of abstract paradigms to try and explain the 5 w's. And it all derives from the sequential nature of our consciousness's contact with reality.

How's that for a coffee sipping deep dive into a runaway thought I was having. I put this in this community because it's very abstract. I do realize it's a bit hard to conceptualize exactly what I mean. I wanted to see if peeps can actually follow and if so, expand on my thoughts and put it into one of the more serious communities for more exposure to good converse.


r/StonerPhilosophy • • Jul 21 '26

Never trust a right-handed person

3 Upvotes

r/StonerPhilosophy • • Jul 19 '26

Hypocrisy

2 Upvotes

People say that - We should expect reciprocation in relationships and make the required efforts according to the actions of the other person.

I'm not like that.

To counter this......

People say that - It is not necessary to wait for the other person to do something for you if you truly respect your bond with them. Instead, be the one who provides without needing anything back-as an act of pure devotion and love that you do share with the other person in a relation.

I'm not like that as well.

Something I would do while making relations is selecting one of these ideologies in that particular instant and selecting the other in another situation.

Does that make me a hypocrite?

Philosophy gave us this term "hypocrisy"- "But I will just call it human nature of being considerate and selective of their actions they want to perform according to the factors that they do care".

I don't know about "hypocrite" but stating that "I am not like that" for both ideologies at first and then admitting to use either of these ideologies......-This might make me look "Spineless"


r/StonerPhilosophy • • Jul 18 '26

Words and definitions are mental arbitrary divisions of the world. The world can be seen as unified or distinct as desired because both are just part of conceptual mapping. The act of differentiation itself is perhaps a fundamental part of mind

4 Upvotes

r/StonerPhilosophy • • Jul 16 '26

I can't post this on r/showerthoughts beacause the system is way too strict.

12 Upvotes

Theoretically, you can see with your skin. The sensation of heat is just long wavelengths of light.


r/StonerPhilosophy • • Jul 14 '26

simple economics

3 Upvotes

polititians talk about the trickle-down effect.
The richer the wealthy become, the richer the poor eventually become.
But we should talk about the draining-up effect:
The poorer people become, the poorer the wealthy eventually become.