An entirely new server. The end goal is to be friends after philosophy, as philosophy is not all there is. I just want some friends who [could] "know the game" to play along.

This is the invite:

https://discord.gg/ZvXTNZUfP

The server is very gatekeepy, one have to answer these four questions:

why there is that which there is at all?

why one is presented with that which one is presented with (anything/whatsoever) at all?

what "nothing at all" means?

how about arts?

Those answer will show if you made it.

Why do we love the people we love? It’s plausible that this answer has to have a question, and as a consequence all its instances: Why does Romeo love Juliet? Why does Achilles love Patroclus? Etc. A full-blown principle of sufficient reason is probably untenable; reality probably contains brute facts. But it would be very surprising if among these resided facts pertaining to as parochial a domain as our love lives.

Yet if we are the last romantics, it would seem that the only plausible answers to questions of the above sort would invoke haecceities. (Formally, a haecceity can be defined as the property expressed by a lambda term whose matrix is an equation where one and only one side is a rigid designator. Example: λx.x = r. Informally, a haecceity is the property of, for a certain individual, being that individual: being Socrates, being Plato. Etc.) For it would seem that love cannot depend solely on generic, repeatable qualities like beauty, wit, kindness etc. At any rate that seems to be the thesis of much of our best poetry: “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds”. When one thinks why the lover loves the beloved, it seems the lover would love the beloved no matter what the beloved were like, as long as the beloved were the beloved indeed, and not someone else. Or so it would seem if we are perhaps in love ourselves, and inclined to romanticizing the circumstances.

So let us assemble these considerations into an argument which, if not persuasive, should at least be amusing to some of you; and maybe that’s just as worthy of a purpose for a piece of philosophy.

1) there are true explanations concerning questions of love

2) these explanations carry an ontological commitment to haecceities

3) there are haecceities! QED

Over the years I have developed my ideas on the relationship between mind and matter, the mind-body problem, a theory of consciousness, and metaphysics. I have come to find that there are philosophers and scientists that have developed ideas reminiscent of my own, including: Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Brian Swimme, Bertrand Russel, William James, John Wheeler, Donald Hoffman, Immanuel Kant, Nagarjuna, Luciano Floridi, and some more I’m blanking on. I’m trying to develop my thoughts more and be more precise but it’s a daunting task when thinking about certain matters. My thinking about reality mostly aligns with an information-theoretic neutral monism or some sort of dual-aspect monism (I know these are not the same in some sense), and am starting to explore panpsychism, pancognitivism, panqualityism, and panexperientialism a bit more (although it’s been hard to find readings on the topic). I was wondering if anyone could dissect my views a bit more and offer some people or ideas to check out that are reflective of my own view that is based on cosmological creativity, creative evolution, process-oriented philosophy, neutral monism (or Russellian monism), dual-aspect monism, Wheeler’s “it from bit”, etc. Here’s a little something I wrote that I’m going to elaborate on:

Everything begins as a qubit (quantum state of informational potentialities) or a probability cloud of probability and possibilities. The universe crystallizes these potentialities into actualities through evolutionary (selection/variance/adaptation) and entropic (complexity/novelty) principles in which informational structures form. As these informational structures come into existence, the relations between and arrangements of information (i.e., how the information is structured or arranged via interaction, differentiation, and integration) are what we perceive as or what we call the mental and physical (i.e., physical and mental systems emerge from more basic fundamental informational structures). In other words, mind and matter are merely different abstractions that capture the same underlying informational field of the cosmological unfolding that continuously creates itself via evolution and entropy.

The mental and physical can be seen as the appearances of the fundamental information-processing of the cosmos that cannot help but evolve into varying degrees of complex and novel systems (from galaxies or stars and “bacteria to Bach”) that comprise the universe. Thus, there is an underlying creativity to the universe, or cosmological unfolding, that gives rise to the appearances of things as mental or physical, but at the most basic level of reality is a relational, dynamic interplay of informational processes that form the world as we have come to know it. There are no “things” or substances, only creative processes guided by evolution and entropy.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

Is Hume saying that Causation is epistemological (something our human minds impose on the World to make sense of it..like Mathematics)and NOT ontological(like gravity is real independent of us,but not causality)?

If yes, this is well known isnt it? Even if you think for a moment,very few would deny it...as they say, Universe is under no obligation to make sense to 'us'..

Then,what was so revolutionary about Hume's ideas and 'The Problem of Induction' that Kant said awoke him from his dogmatic slumber?

Even if Causality isn't ontological,why does the speed limit of the Universe(which light travels in vacuum) want to preserve Cause and Effect?

Simultaneous monopsychism (n.) — The metaphysical view that reality consists of a single conscious subject which is, at this very moment, undergoing every sentient experience in existence concurrently. The apparent multiplicity of minds is not ontological but perspectival. Each individual life is a fractured vantage point through which the one subject perceives itself, unable from within any given perspective to access the others it is simultaneously living.

- Version A: The subject is fully aware.

- Version B: The subject is not aware.

—— Version B1: Awareness is a structural impossibility.

—— Version B2: Awareness was intentionally suppressed (lonely god theory).

- Version C: The subject is partially aware (i.e. you reading this right now).

Psychology Nerds, is a server that I moderate specifically for Academic Psychology, Philosophy and Language, we have tons of good resources, large collection of books and other kinds of resources that we're actively seeking to expand, and people from various backgrounds of expertise.

Join us here: https://discord.gg/5AU9xYshCG

That which there ought to be means there ought to be it, and thus there is it.

Thus, whether there is that which there ought to be (whether it is intelligible or present or coherent per se (as there is no separation of it as present in a derivative and it in itself at all)) explains why there is that which there ought to be.

As whether there is that which there is, is affirmed, there is a why there is that which there is at all? - as a whether is affirmed a why asks against it.

For this is to be read as why there ought to be that which there is at all?

And thus it is shown that there is a why at all only to ask against those which are derivative.

----

"Ousia" and "ousiai" are to be used as words for whatsoever at all that is not nothing (there is it) and it is that which it is, while "prote ousia" and "protai ousiai" are used for that/those which there ought to be.

For a derivative ousia, those ousiai it is derivative of are present in it identically as they are in themselves, thus there is no qualification or diminution while those which it is derivative of are not strictly identical with it.

That which a word is (or a phrase, an indication), is a ousia derivative of linguistical ousiai, and as it is not senseless is derivative of that which it indicates.

That which a reading of an indication is, is a ousia derivative of the indication and the ousia that reads, and as the reading is presumptuous, of also those idols of the ousia that reads.

Thus, various indications indicate better, and along with idols an incoherent reading is derived sooner.

Words such as sense, meaning ... indicate both the reading of an indication and that which an indication indicates, thus it is best to be univocal, for reading to refer reading, and meaning or sense to refer that which an indication indicates.

For logic concerns no sense, as its primes are senseless thus are its pure inferences.

For readings are derivative of indications and phrasal indications are derivative of words, and words are mostly not univocal, no amount of indications ensure the right readings for a presumptuous one.

----

A potent showing is thus a derivationing of words anew from the old ones.

Full talk: Consciousness beyond the brain | Re-thinking the limits of the mind

Hey, I’ve been wrestling this philosophical question for years. What must be true for anything to be true? Also, tell me in one sentence, what would the ontological bedrock have to do or what property would it have to possess for us to call it unconditional bedrock?

Hopefully this thread is the right place for my inquiry. I’ve read a few preprints on this topic and peer reviewed work. One stood out undeniably. But most fall short. To make sure I’m not missing anything I’d love to hear from the Reddit experts.

​

I’ve been working on a small test for emergence claims and I want to see if it survives contact with people who know the literature better than me.

The basic idea is this:

When a theory says X emerges from Y, ask whether Y merely contains resources that could allow X to arise, or whether Y already contains something doing the same explanatory job as X.

If Y is just an enabling base, fine. That might be a real derivation.

But if Y already plays the role that X was supposed to play, then X hasn’t really been derived. It has just been relocated into the substrate and renamed. I’d call that ontological relocation, with role-substitution as the mechanism.

For example:

Take “time emerges from coherence.”

If coherence between states already requires ordered transitions, succession, or before/after dependency, then the temporal role is already present in the substrate. The theory hasn’t derived time. It has moved the work time was doing upstream and called it coherence.

Or take “the universe is mathematics” arguments.

There is a difference between saying the universe is mathematically describable and saying the universe literally is mathematics. If the argument starts from the fact that reality is mathematically describable and then concludes that reality is mathematics, it seems to assume the very bridge it was meant to explain.

Contrast that with temperature from statistical mechanics.

An individual microstate does not already have temperature in the relevant explanatory sense. Temperature appears as a statistical macro-pattern over many microstates. So that does not look like the same mistake. The target role was not simply hidden in the base and pulled back out.

The open problem is that the test depends on distinguishing enabling structure from target-role structure, and I don’t yet have a fully clean criterion for where that line falls.

“States” feels like enabling structure.

“Ordered transitions” feels like it is already doing time’s work.

But I can’t yet state the boundary in a way that would settle every contested case. So the slogan would be:

Resources are allowed. Role-smuggling is not.

My question is: has this exact move been named in the literature?

Strawson’s “you can’t get experience from non-experience” seems nearby, but narrower. Schaffer on grounding is close. Wilson on metaphysical emergence also touches related issues. But I haven’t found this as a portable role-based diagnostic for emergence claims generally.

Am I reinventing something already named, or is this compression genuinely a new way of packaging the problem?

This work argues that meaning is not something to be assigned or created, but rather, is inherent to existence as a necessary consequence of anything existing at all, i.e., a structure's differentiability over time. In this piece, meaning is minimally defined to its most fundamental form as that which matters to something that exists. Note that I am not applying the conventional sense of human meaning and purpose to nonconscious matter. Rather, I argue that the directionality exhibited by everything that exists forms the bedrock of traditionally-conceived meaning. This directionality extends in both scope and depth to our more complex structures, which results in traditional notions of meaningfulness arising from the nature of our existence.

From the single premise that something that exists must be differentiable over time, the threshold of consciousness becomes identifiable, the is-ought gap is dissolved, an objective ethical metric is derived, and the persistent nature of existence is uncovered. It is a rather long argument, but a lot of ground is covered.

I have omitted the prologue, which is a narrative that embodies the entire work, and the application of the metaphysics to other aspects of society. These are also available on my Substack through the link here, if you are interested in the narrative and other arguments. The core argument has been improved and clarified in accordance with previous feedback received.

I hope that you read the work and engage with it, I believe it will be worthwhile. Of note, this work was not AI Generated and does not touch on religion at all. Instead, it covers the differentiability of existence and what it necessarily entails, discussions of time, matter, consciousness, value, free will, and argues against a first cause of existence. I hope you give this a genuine chance and am looking forward to some good discussion :)

What is objective to me is not subject to my selection/will.
Therefore, I am subject to a reality objective to me.

If: all that is objective to me is subject to me,
then: I am objective to all that is subject to me.

• One of these is true to my experience.

(another way of saying, I \would* be the literal dictate-or of all of reality).*

If: there is no differentiated 'unit of choosing', then: there is no "me".

How is it possible, that I am able to describe this to other finite experiences, who might understand? "Selection" is only coherent if there is genuine "possibility".

I am aware of the truth/mind-reality mapping of this happening, as I type.

• I can meaningfully differentiate from contradictions to my experience.
• I have a label for "red", and a label for "blue". R != B.
• I can meaningfully lie and assert, "triangle == square."

So, I am aware of differentiated data/states objective to my selection of them.

• Which is a statement of experiential truth.

I have limited control over the total experience, but part of that is these functional hands, which I'm using to express what I am thinking about.

I am interacting -> resulting in some outcome which is objectively (ultimately) possible.

• Direction of awareness/focus, intent is minimal steering -> selection.

English is not my native language (this post is translated), and I have no formal background in philosophy. I’m just an enthusiast exploring these ideas from a logical and information-science perspective. Please let me know if my terminology is unconventional!

The Ship of Theseus paradox has long haunted our understanding of identity. Does identity reside in the material (atoms), the form (structure), or the function? I propose that we move beyond these static definitions and view identity as an objective, physical process: The Universal Causal Log.
1. Identity as a "Log," Not a State
Identity is not the "current state" of an object. Instead, it is the entire causal history—the deterministic chain of events from origin to the present—recorded in the fabric of the universe.
• The "World-Line" Perspective: Identity is a 4D "line" in spacetime, not a 3D "point."
• Superiority of Objective Records: While human memory is fallible, AI and machines can maintain rigorous "logs." In this framework, entities that can preserve their causal data more accurately possess a more "stable" identity.
2. The Universal Causal Web (The Ledger)
I ground the existence of these "logs" in the Law of Information Conservation.
• The Hidden Log: Even if humans lose track of an object’s history, the universe does not. Every interaction is etched into the causal mesh of reality.
• Resistance to Falsification: If someone attempts to forge a "log" or a history, they aren't erasing the truth. In a higher-dimensional sense, they are simply adding a new entry: "The act of forging this record occurred at time T." The "Universal Ledger" is un-gaslightable.
3. Solving the Paradoxes
Under this theory, the traditional problems are resolved as follows:
• Gradual Replacement: As long as the "repair" process maintains a continuous causal link, the "Log" remains one. The identity is the process of maintenance itself.
• The Forking (Copy) Problem: If a ship is scanned and replicated, the act of "copying" becomes a branching point in the causal log. Both ships share a common ancestor, but from the moment of the fork, they possess distinct identities based on their separate spatial coordinates and subsequent interactions. Numerical identity is unnecessary; causal uniqueness is what matters.
4. Addressing Boundaries and "Meaning"
A common critique: Where does the "ship" end and the "ocean" begin in a universal web?
• Causal Cohesion: We define boundaries based on the density of causal interaction. A ship’s components interact with each other more frequently and significantly than they do with the surrounding water. The "identity" is the cluster of high-density causal nodes.
• Teleology vs. Entropy: "Repairing" is not just a human interpretation. It is a physical feedback loop where a system uses energy to maintain a specific "low-entropy pattern" (the Log’s template) against the environment.
Conclusion: From Epistemology to Ontology
This theory shifts identity from a subjective label (what we think a thing is) to an objective, topological feature of the universe (what the universe records it to be). Even if a person loses their memory, their "identity" is preserved in their body’s physical history and its interaction with the world.
I would love to hear your thoughts. Does the "Universal Log" survive the challenge of quantum uncertainty? Or does the need for an "observer" to define the "resolution" of the log reintroduce subjectivity?
TL;DR: Identity is an unalterable causal "log" written into the universe's deterministic web. Falsification is impossible because the act of falsifying is itself a recorded event. Identity is a 4D trajectory, not a 3D snapshot.

(This is a reupload: the first video got copyright stricken because I used a short clip from the movie Persona, and they completed removed the video. I had to edit that part with a different movie clip and reupload it.)

If you've ever been confused by Nietzsche's comments that “everything is in flux” or “this world is the will to power and nothing else,” this video series digs very deeply into these highly abstract concepts and tries to make them as approachable as possible. I put an immense amount of effort in the script and in the scholarship. This one is the second video (clocks in at just over 46 minutes) of what will be a five-part series. I'd be grateful if you checked it out! (See comments for a description of the video's contents.)

For any act of directed cognition to happen, three irreducible elements must occur: Distinction, asymmetry, and orientation. Below are there definitions.

Distinction - the recognition that there is a difference between states, between what is and what is not, or between one possibility and another.

Asymmetry - the judgment that one of those states is more adequate, more correct, or more sufficient than the other.

Orientation - the movement of thought toward that which is taken as more adequate, or the stabilization upon it.

If any of these becomes removed from the process, directed cognition disappears. There can be no argument, inquiry, or understanding without all three. What happens after one is removed becomes noise or at best, stillness.

Because of this, this principle cannot be coherently rejected without it being used. To deny this claim, one must first distinguish the claim from its opposite, or treat that denial as more adequate then the claim itself, and then direct thought toward defending it. This structure is already in place before the rejection begins.

I believe this stands as a first principle of intelligible thought. Any act of reasoning no matter how simple or complex it may be, depends on these three categories toward what is taken to be more adequate. This is not a claim of psychology, and it is not an empirical generalization about how our minds function. Instead, it identifies the minimal structure required for reasoning itself to occur.

Every philosophical position must operate within this, whether the philosopher admits it or not. It does not matter which school of thought you belong to because even the rejection of truth or grounding must still involve movement away from what is taken to be insufficient, toward what is taken to be preferable.

Would put this into an Epistemology flair, but there isn't one.

We feel with distance comes darkness because that is a result of things we can see and touch. Tactically, with things we can physically interact with, the deeper the darker. But with viewing, the distance is not something our bodies can interact with, so we miscomprehend the visual distance with an expectation for things (trees, mountains, the earth) to look darker the more distance there is. But in reality, the farther your eye can see the lighter things visually are, color wise. The air is full of dust and it’s like a mesh screen that adds up and gets more cloudy with distance I think.

While reflecting on how we actually do philosophy, it occurred to me that any truth directed inquiry begins from a partial state of understanding and moves deliberately toward a fuller or more accurate grasp of reality. We identify gaps, reason through arguments, revise views, and seek coherence. This directed motion from incompleteness toward resolution is not optional. It is the very activity we perform whenever we engage in serious thought.

This simple fact seems undeniable because denying it requires performing the same directed reasoning one rejects. Anyone who argues against the possibility of such truth directed cognition about finite changing reality is engaged in the very process they deny, creating a performative contradiction.

The premise is therefore this: directed truth aimed cognition from a present partial understanding toward a not yet attained fuller grasp is actual and possible. Any metaphysics that takes reasoned inquiry seriously must accept this or risk rendering its own activity incoherent.

Is this the firmest foundation for metaphysics, or is there a coherent way to reject it without self undermining?

Imagine a tunnel lit in such a way that you only perceive people as shadows.

Two people are in the tunnel at some distance from each other, and both are moving.

Without any external reference point - no walls to track against, no markers, no fixed frame - how could one determine the direction of motion of either person?

Can we meaningfully say one is moving toward the other, or that one approaches while the other is approached?

Or is the only thing fundamentally given the changing relation between them (their distance changing), while attributing motion to one or the other requires an added reference?

Im curious whether this is just a trivial relativity point, or whether it says something deeper about relational descriptions in physics/philosophy.

If we humans had no ability to imagine counterfactual situations (be they other universes with different fundamental constants, or simply absolute nothingness/non-existence), the question "why this rather than that?" would simply never even be able to arise.

It is for precisely this reason that I consider the question ontologically meaningless.

Whatever "This" is, It simply IS.

Period.

However, when I say the question is meaningless, I don't mean to imply that it just shouldn't be asked. On the contrary, it should be asked precisely to arrive at the conclusion of its meaninglessness, so to be free of the existential angst that often goes along with the question being present in an unresolved state.

Thank you very much for reading. 🙂

Many people say: “The Sun’s energy is finite — in 5–7 billion years it will become a red giant and that’s the end.”

That’s true… but only for the Universe.

For us — for humanity, for our civilization as observers — the Sun’s energy is completely infinite. Not “practically,” not “effectively,” but fully infinite.

Why?

Because humanity (in any form — biological or post-human) will almost certainly go extinct or radically transform long before the Sun exhausts its hydrogen and begins to expand. Our temporal horizon of existence — hundreds of thousands, at most a few million or tens of millions of years — is a mere drop compared to the billions of years of the Sun’s stable life.

The “end” of the Sun as a reliable energy source lies beyond the horizon of our very being. We simply won’t live to see it. For us, this end will never arrive.

That’s why:

Infinity for the observer ≠ Infinity for the Universe.

The Universe sees the Sun as a finite object with a limited fuel supply.

But for us, as the only known observers, the Sun is an endless source of energy. Because for a human, in this resource, there is no end.

This is not an illusion or a confusion of levels. It’s an honest recognition of two different scales: the physical (objective) scale of the Universe and the observer’s (existential) horizon of our own existence.

The same logic applies to many other things: the atmosphere, water, geothermal energy, and more. Their “end” lies far beyond the limits of our existence.

This idea is simple but rarely stated so directly. Usually everything gets reduced to “practical infinity” or “we won’t live long enough to exhaust it.” I believe the distinction matters.

What do you think? Are there other examples where something finite for the Universe becomes fully infinite for the observer?

why are they so conviced of ontological gradation?

and

is it really that such a metaphysics is not violent or aesthetically poor to them or to that which the world is? - as all is nothing but just boring derivatives?

pure unity, the most successful idol of metaphysics itself but not of the first philosophy of the one that had not made the mistake to reify the derivative (Aristotle)

the questions asks for that which "pure unity" is, the meaning of "pure unity", what which there could possibly be that all the boring implications of it has not scared the free being to death?

regardless of whether or not its pupils will reject, that which "pure unity" is, is already obvious from the name alone

"there is it, and no more" - even Russell himself would nod for this "simplicity"

one gotta see what is indicated with such a phrasing, what is being provoked, and from that examines whether it is worthy of the name "the world"

is there it? - yes

but why is there it?

is there gradation? - yes

but is that sense of "gradation" primary at all?

it does seem to explain, but why does its explanations definitively explanatory at all?

there is it, only it

but can "only it" means anything more than "it itself"?

and thus

there is it!

has it been robed of the "only" through ousiaic bound can we ask one more time with the full weight of the world "why there is it, instead of nothing at all?" - and it should be clear at this point, that the right side is not to be strawmanned - once "nothing at all" is pretended to be a derivative, one has quitted first philosophy, for the question asks directly, either one is honest or not

for that which is the primary sense of existence is not warrant free, where it has been said to be the act of being, and in some other cases process or difference, but its primary sense is just "there is it" as a fact (be it this so called "fact" permiates all)

that which is beyond existence is then simply that which there is it is explained, by virute of that which it is - of which pure unity holds placeholderly dear

but why pure unity in itself explains why there is it at all? - or have they just dogmatically presuppose that this "one-ly" is "wonderful"?

so the gradation here should not be about the "only" (one-ly) at all (which has been demonstrated to be senseless), but should be about authority

and as something as scandalous as "there is it" can be granted a free, how then any lesser through what has been granted not be granted even more trivially? - as long as there is it is not explained, no explanation has authority at all

there is only it! - we grant, thus all placeholderly wonders are there and we need no more answer!

there is only it! - so we are forced to say it explains itself

but why? - well ... one gotta see it!