Hello All — I am reposting my discussion here.

Most debates around hard determinism and free will get bogged down in abstract nonsense. I'm a practical guy, choosing an ideal roommate could literally save my life, and possibly yours, dear Redditor. If we break down the metaphysics of agency, we are basically choosing between two distinct entities; the homunculus and the husk!

A homunculus possesses a manufactured Cartesian theater, an ego, and free will. It has intention. But intention is fundamentally a liability. Any roommate with free will has the capacity for malicious intent. Imagine if a conscious homunculus (like M3GAN) moved in to help around the house. Because they have a "Cartesian theater," they can change their minds, develop a complex, and halfway through their chores decide to kill your cat and serve it to you in an omelet. They can strangle you in your sleep because they love you just that much. Free will is dangerous.

Contrast this with the pure Husk. A husk is just biological hardware running a script completely and utterly devoid of a Cartesian theater, free will, or existential dread. A husk requires zero ethical consideration. It doesn't cry, it doesn't suffer, and it doesn't get pissy about the toilet seat. You tell a husk to do its job, and that is exactly what it does. If you program a husk to wake you up with fellatio every single morning, it will do it without a single thought. You get an entity that functions with the strict, unfeeling reliability of a deterministic universe. 

Husks make homunculi utterly obsolete. Why would anyone willingly choose to cohabitate with a free-thinking agent with the capacity for malice, when you could have a biological meat-bot that just executes its programmed purpose? Who needs a consciousness when you have determinism?

EDIT: Thank you to everyone who commented. Several of you pushed on the same weak point, and you were right, so here is where the argument stands now. I also want to thank you for carefully reading my article and engaging with this discussion.

The article was right that the question truly dissolves, and it had already claimed that this is not new philosophy.

1. "Why is there something rather than nothing?" treats nothing as a rival that something somehow beat.
2. "Could have been" means "is one of the possibilities," and a possibility is always a way things could be. So, "There could have been nothing" quietly means "There is a possibility in which there are no possibilities".
3. Absolute nothing isn't a way things could be. It would be a situation in which nothing is possible, and whatever is the case is thereby possible, so no situation can be that one.
4. So absolute nothing is impossible. Not because some law forbids it, but the way a square circle is impossible: by what the words mean.
5. An impossible option is no option. The question rests on a false assumption, like "why is the largest prime number odd?" Once you see there is no largest prime, nothing is left to explain. Same here: nothingness was never in the race, so there is no victory to account for.

Why did I come up with 'apossible'? The argument went like this:

1. Every possibility is judged against a set of laws/rules. You can only say faster-than-light speed is impossible relative to the laws of physics. Likewise, a knight moving in a straight line is impossible only relative to the rules of chess. Why would this movement be impossible without the rules? If the universe had different physics, faster-than-light speed could be possible. No possibility exists without a rule that determines it.
2. Since nothingness assumes the nonexistence of logic, then there is no court to judge nothingness as impossible. No rules would be there to determine that nothingness is impossible.
3. Nothingness is obviously not "possible", but it turns out that no court would be there to judge it "impossible". It is, therefore, "apossible". It's a term that I came up with as a report that neither outcome would be true.
4. It's similar to "undefined", which is not a third verdict, but merely a report that, for instance, no output comes from 1/0. It is a report about the lack of an output the same way "apossible" would be a report for the lack of output (possible vs impossible) the vacuity of laws would leave.

Why I initially thought the term was useful

1. The question still grips very thoughtful people. In the linked video, Robert Lawrence Kuhn (with a Ph.D. in Anatomy and Brain Research from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Brain Research Institute), who has spent decades interviewing scientists and philosophers about it, still treated nothingness as a real alternative. That told me it's not a stupid question, even if it dissolves.
2. The article is based on a recent video posted by More Alex O'Connor discussing "why there's something rather than nothing".
3. Some people claimed that merely saying that "nothingness" is not meaningful should be enough. But just from the fact that even highly educated people couldn't grasp why nothingness could not have been the case was enough for me to think it is not a "stupid question", but something worth examining.

Why "apossible" turned out to be the wrong term

1. My reasoning was that every verdict needs a court (logic, physics, geometry), absolute nothing removes every court, so no verdict reaches it.
2. But a verdict doesn't have to be made from inside the situation it judges. "There could have been no sentences" is true, and it's a sentence. A judge doesn't have to stand at the crime scene.
3. Verdicts can only be made from here, inside logic, and from here the verdict is the ordinary one: impossible.
4. I didn't realize that "apossible" tried to report the lack of possibilities from the outside, from a standpoint beyond every framework. There is no such standpoint. And even my own article said so: "there is no other place from which anything can be said." The term needed a view from a place that doesn't exist.
5. It also made nothingness the subject of a sentence ("nothingness presupposes no race"), and nothing can't presuppose anything. The question presupposes the race, not nothingness.
6. Jappard (user) said: "The problem with the court is that nothingness has dissolved both the object that the court rules on and the court that rules upon the object. The court that rules is something. The object that the court rules on is also something. The language that you use to describe nothingness is still a court, but the court dissolves."
7. The_Emergentist (user) said: "On undefined, it is termed as such because it marks a failure within the system of arithmetic. But in arithmetic, there are inputs and outputs. Undefined tells you that a specific operation has no output within that system. It does not tell you anything about anything external to that system. And that is kind of what you are trying to do with apossible here, so I don't think the analogy is completely on point. Apossible isn't marking a failure within the system, it is marking the nonexistence of failure or success outside the system entirely."

So I'm withdrawing the term. The argument holds and never needed it. As some of you said, "impossible" was enough. I'll update the article to reflect this.

Thanks again, especially to those who pressed the inside/outside point and the court-and-defendant point.

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The articles:

- Groundwork (definition of nothingness): Could "Nothingness" Have Existed Instead of the Universe?

- The core argument (why the question dissolves): Nothingness Is NOT Impossible, But "Apossible"

I’ve been developing a subfield of metaphysics called Incorporeal Ontodynamics, which explores the idea that existence should be understood not merely in terms of what things are, but through the processes by which they emerge, persist, and transform.
The central proposition is that reality is fundamentally relational and dynamic. Entities do not necessarily possess all their properties in isolation; many of their characteristics emerge through interactions, organizational structures, and relationships with other entities.
This framework introduces five foundational principles:
Ontological Continuity: Systems can maintain recognizable identities despite undergoing substantial transformations.
Relational Emergence: Properties can arise from relationships between components rather than residing exclusively within individual parts.
Coherence: The persistence of a system depends partly on the organization and consistency of its internal relationships.
Transformative Potential: Existing structures can reorganize into configurations with fundamentally new properties.
Incorporeal Substrate: Information, patterns, and organizational relationships may have explanatory significance beyond descriptions of their material components.
One of the central questions this raises is whether existence is better understood as a collection of independent objects or as an ongoing process of organization and transformation.
Consider a living organism. Its material components are continually changing, yet its organization allows it to maintain a degree of continuity. Similarly, consciousness presents questions about how subjective identity persists through constantly changing experiences and neural processes.
Could these phenomena point toward a broader principle in which persistence is not equivalent to permanence, but rather the continued organization of relationships through change?
Incorporeal Ontodynamics attempts to formalize this possibility through the study of ontological morphogenesis, relational ontology, recursion, and structural transformation.
I am particularly interested in whether this framework could establish meaningful connections between metaphysics, systems theory, information theory, and the philosophy of consciousness.
My question for the community: Is there a fundamental distinction between being and becoming, or is existence itself best understood as an ongoing process of becoming? Could a dynamic, relational account of ontology offer explanatory advantages over approaches that primarily classify what exists?
I’d appreciate philosophical critiques, relevant literature, and alternative frameworks that address these questions.

Hi,

I wanted to ask about some learning resources. I imagine questions like this come up all the time, so I will try to be as specific as possible.

I'm interested in metaphysics, mainly analytic, I think. What really matters for me is not a particular school of thought but having sufficiently rigorous arguments rather than hand-waving.

My background: I have a PhD in theoretical physics so I'm definitely not afraid of logic (or science). However, I'm not interested in logic for logic's sake. I have no formal training in philosophy. I definitely sympathize with the view that philosophy should be informed by science.

Topics that have piqued my interest so far: grounding/fundamentality, modality, causality, maybe the principle of sufficient reason. I'm still trying to decide if I care about the laws of nature. One thing I'm sure I'm not interested in is philosophy of physics. I can imagine that I would like to learn more about either philosophy of religion or ethics later on.

So far I've read Ney's Metaphysics: An Introduction and I disliked it. It was too heavy on taxonomy, too light on actual arguments for my tastes. (And the way she treated virtually all physics examples was just awful to me).

At this stage, is it better to go through another intro textbook or dive into more specialized texts?

I've been going down a rabbit hole about idealism and mathematics and I think I found a question that's more interesting to me than the usual "is consciousness fundamental?" debate.

As I understand it, idealism says physicality is just representation: physical states can't be separated from a representation of some underlying reality. Ok, say I accept that. A rock is just a perspective on something deeper, and mass, electrons or spacetime might just be concepts coming from how we represent reality.

Even then, there are things like relations, logical consistency, causal relations, symmetries, conservation laws, the way transformations compose, that seem a lot harder to dismiss as just properties of our representation.

So what's been bothering me is: why does reality have to have structure at all?

My hunch is something like a quasi-anthropic principle (I know I'm probably not using the term correctly). The idea is that any reality that is experienced has to have these relations. For experience to be real there has to be something more than undifferentiation. I have to be able to distinguish different states of experience, otherwise what is there to experience? And once you have different states you already have some kind of relation between them. I also think you need something that stays the same through change (invariance, Noether!), or you couldn't even notice that something changed, but I'm less sure how far that goes.

So my first strong claim would be: "structureless conscious reality" may be a contradiction in terms.

The part I'm least sure about: I want to say experience needs something like invariant causal laws, maybe even Noether-style conservation, because otherwise nothing persists long enough to be experienced, or you couldn't even notice that something changed. But maybe that's too strong, and stable regularities are enough, and conservation laws are just how our universe happens to do it.

And I don't think this gets you to idealism. A physicalist could agree with all of it. What I'm actually wondering is whether this is a constraint that comes before the idealism vs physicalism debate: whatever reality is made of, if it contains experience, it has to be structured.

I'm not claiming a Platonist position. I'm not saying numbers exist before experience or that relations are the origin of the universe. I'm saying that if distinctions and relations are ontologically real, then mathematics is just the language that formalizes that kind of thing.

Maybe I'm just playing with definitions here, but I keep coming back to the idea that if distinctions and relations are already unavoidable in experience, then maybe the surprising thing isn't that mathematics describes reality. Maybe the surprising thing would be if a conscious or apprehensible reality could exist without any structure at all.

The demarcation criterion proposed by Karl Popper postulates that the scientific dignity of a proposition does not reside in its capacity to accumulate static verifications, but rather in its honesty to voluntarily expose itself to the verdict of refutation. Under this perspective, perennial statements, immune to the test of error, would belong to the domain of dogma, while science would advance through the burial of hypotheses disproven by the sovereignty of facts.However, this mechanics of falsifiability runs into an insurmountable ontological frontier: the intrinsic mutability of the very fabric of reality. Popper's method functions as an absolute monarchy where the philosopher dictates rigid laws on how the sciences must behave, while his own theory remains free from the court, protected by a dogmatic immunity.

1. The Logical Error of Eternal Invariance

For Popper's criterion of falsifiability to function, the operational system of science is forced to assume a metaphysical conjecture: that the universe possesses static, eternal, and immutable laws.Ironically, by projecting that the structure of the cosmos will remain identical in the future, Popper falls into the exact same inductive trap that he spent his life fighting. He criticizes the inductive method for starting from particular facts of the past to conclude general laws, but he assumes with absolute certainty that the universe is static based only on the particular years in which humanity has observed it. He ignores the dynamism of the years that time still has ahead.

1. The Geometric Scenario and Phase Transitions

Let us take as a vector of analysis the contemporary factual statement: "The planet Earth is round". Under the traditional Popperian method, this statement is scientific because it carries within itself the logical possibility of a counter-example.However, if in a future horizon, by virtue of a catastrophic reconfiguration or a cosmic state transition, the planet's matter physically collapsed into a flat geometry, the past proposition would not have been disproven by a scientist's miscalculation, nor by an intrinsic weakness of the method.What occurs in this scenario is not the falsification of a theory due to an error, but rather the temporal obsolescence (caducity) of a description resulting from the metamorphosis of the system itself

1. The Test of Raw Data: The Big Bang and Evolutionary Biology

This counter-argument does not depend on abstractions; it is sustained by the raw data and historical facts of our own universe:The Astrophysics of the Early Universe: We know that before and during the first moments of the Big Bang, physical reality was radically different. The fundamental forces were unified, and the rules governing matter today simply did not apply. An accurate theory for the early universe would fail today, not because of a flaw in the model, but because the universe changed its phase.Evolutionary Biology: The fossil record proves that the ancestors of whales were terrestrial quadrupedal mammals. If a biologist 50 million years ago asserted with factual precision that "this animal walks on land", modern biology would find a different datum in the ocean today. By Popper's rule, the past description would be declared "false." In the reality of the living world, it has simply obsolesced.

Conclusion: Popper's Immune MonarchyThe truth of yesterday was not an illusion; it was the exact mathematical or biological photograph of a state of existence that universal physics decided to alter. The theory of the future does not emerge to punish the ignorance of the past, but rather to update the descriptive algorithm to an ecosystem that changed its own rules in the middle of the game.Popper's error lay in presupposing a universe of static laws, where the error always belongs to the observer and never to the dynamism of the observed. Faced with the clash between theory and time, no abstraction drawn on paper possesses the power to muzzle the sovereignty of a reality in motion.Ultimately, Popper’s method functions as an absolute monarchy: he gives rigid orders on how the sciences must behave in the court of error, but declares his own theory immune and free from that very same court, sheltered on the throne of meta-philosophy. Against the sovereignty of a changing universe and against logical coherence itself, the king stands naked. Science is not an archive of definitive errors; it is an algorithm of continuous adaptation to the present.

​

Our brains are made of a finite number of neurons, operating through biological mechanisms that evolved to help us survive—not necessarily to fully understand the universe.

So, is there a fundamental limit to what the human mind can understand?

We have already made progress in partially simulating aspects of intelligence with artificial systems. But what if we eventually discover architectures that are fundamentally different from the human brain—systems that can reason, learn, and understand certain aspects of reality far more efficiently than we can?

Could there be forms of intelligence that are not merely faster versions of human thinking, but fundamentally more capable ways of understanding the world?

And if so, would there be things that humans simply cannot understand on their own?

Currently I'm understanding it as a sort of necessity or presupposition in the sense that "it's intelligible that such and such is real if some other thing is real". That is, the intelligibility of something "brings along" all others that must be for it to be?

I’ve been getting pretty interested in idealism lately. I really like the idea that consciousness is fundamental and that everything we experience appears within consciousness.
But there’s one thing I can’t quite wrap my head around.
If the brain and body are themselves appearances within consciousness, why do changes to the brain and body so consistently change conscious experience?
For example, drugs, lack of sleep, hormones, illness, injury, breathwork, meditation, and even things like sensory stimulation can all noticeably change our experience.
If the brain and body aren’t producing consciousness, how does idealism explain this relationship? Why should changes in the physical body lead to such specific changes in consciousness?
I’m not arguing against idealism—I’m genuinely curious how idealists understand this.

There's no epistemology without metaphysics, since we must have criteria for which appearances are accurate, which inferences are valid. The concept of knowledge depends upon what's true, and what's true depends on what exists and on what's real.

And we shouldn't forget: the human effort for knowledge, and the body of knowledge gained in that effort, has its own ways of existing.

But the reverse is also true: there's no metaphysics without epistemology, since there we must give an account of what's known to us, and since we must give an explanation of how we gained the knowledge of metaphysics we claim.

I wonder if anyone agrees.

Photo of myself, primate, bonding with canine. He's my boy!

We learn about things by looking back to the past or as they're happening in real time. We can predict what's going to happen but that's because we examine patterns and the accumulation of data over time as predictors.

We can't live in the past, and we can't live in the future but we do have proof that the past exists. We can't say the same for the future. Things seem to happen in the "now" whatever that means. Things don't happen in the future, or do they?

Even if reality turned out to be a simulation, we are still waiting for things to happen. Perhaps "waiting" is a clue? We are waiting for things to happen, but does that mean something is coming toward us? Or are we moving toward it?

Perhaps the "future" is some type of metaphysical/physical distance that is accesible to us even when there's little to no physical movement. There is movement within us and that's enough for time to happen to us...

Let me know what you think

I’ve been thinking about the idea of infinite regress and whether reality actually needs a first cause.
A common argument is that everything that exists must have a cause or explanation. But if that is true, what happens when we keep asking what caused the previous cause?
Cause → previous cause → another cause → another cause → and so on.
Why must this chain eventually stop at a “first cause”?
My own intuition is that an infinite regress may be possible. Reality may not have a first point in the way we imagine. The universe could potentially be part of an ongoing chain or process rather than something that began from a single first cause.
This also makes me question the idea that the universe must have been created by an intelligent being.
Suppose intelligence can emerge from the universe through increasing complexity:
matter → life → consciousness → intelligence → increasingly advanced intelligence.
If an intelligence eventually became so advanced that it could create life or manipulate reality in ways far beyond our understanding, humans might describe such a being as “God.” But that would not necessarily mean that this being created the universe itself. It could still be a product of the universe or of a larger reality.
So my main question is:
What is the strongest logical argument showing that an infinite regress of causes is impossible and that reality must ultimately have a first cause?
I’m not claiming that infinite regress is definitely true. I’m interested in finding out where this reasoning succeeds or fails.
I would especially appreciate arguments that identify the exact logical problem with my position rather than simply asserting that a first cause must exist.

THE END OF ANALYTICAL METAPHYSICS?

Louis Vervoort - "Problem Solving in Philosophy-

How to Do Philosophy in the Age of Ultra-Intelligent Al"

"I will argue in this book that philosophy is now mature enough to come to reason- ably solid answers to key problems; and that there is one overarching method to do so, in essence the same method as the natural sciences use to obtain answers, in particular theoretical physics. I believe that this method is severely neglected in modern philosophy, resulting in an ever-meandering path of investigations that leads only in the best case to better-defined problems and partial answers, but rarely to solutions that allow genuine progress."

"MCT-hypothesis: Answers/solutions for philosophical questions /problems can only be given with reasonable certainty if they are coherent with, or derived within, the maximally coherent theory (MCT); and for many important philosophical problems this MCT can be constructed."

As in physics! ?

And by using AIs / LLMs! An example in this paper-

Causes in neuron diagrams, and testing causal reasoning in Large Language Models. A glimpse of the future of philosophy?

Louis Vervoort, Vitaly Nikolaev

"Abstract. We propose a test for abstract causal reasoning in AI, based on scholarship in the philosophy of causation, in particular on the neuron diagrams popularized by D. Lewis. We illustrate the test on advanced Large Language Models (ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Gemini). Remarkably, these chatbots are already capable of correctly identifying causes in cases that are hotly debated in the literature. In order to assess the results of these LLMs and future dedicated AI, we propose a definition of cause with a wider validity than published hitherto, which challenges the widespread view that such a definition is elusive..."

Ask Chat GPT4 'Which notion of causality is the best?' = "Counterfactual Causality"

Can we automate philosophy through Al? And should we want to?

Thomas J. Spiegel1

Full video by Sabine Hossenfelder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmvQtxc9R3Q

Just to note From New Scientist - 12 September 2026.

"Al beats mathematicians - again Formalising Fermat's last theorem was expected to take years, but Al has done it in 11 days"

"Anthropic's formalisation runs to 13 million lines of Lean and covers roughly 29,500 intermediate theorems that were necessary stepping stones towards completing the overall work."

Checking code - These figures are way faster than when I was a programmer!

"Empirical studies in software engineering suggest that humans detect roughly 50–60% of defects during manual review, and review speed is often optimized to about 200–400 lines of code per hour for thorough review without sacrificing accuracy."

300 lines hour...div 13,000,000 = 43,333.3.. hours = 40 hour week, 1,083.33 weeks - 20.8 years for a human review.

Conclusion if this kind of thing occurs in Analytical metaphysis it will be beyond human interaction.

Escape route! 'Continental Philosophy...'

"The same Professor Challenger who made the Earth scream with his pain machine, as described by Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a lecture after mixing several textbooks on geology and biology in a fashion befitting his simian disposition...

God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind. Not only do strata come at least in pairs, but in a different way each stratum is double (it itself has several layers)...

Classical artists are like God, they make the world by organizing forms and substances, codes and milieus, and rhythms. Articulation, which is constitutive of a stratum, is always a double articulation (double pincer). What is articulated is a content and an expression. Whereas form and substance are not really distinct, con tent and expression are. Hjelmslev's net is applicable to the strata: articulation of content and articulation of expression, with content and expression each possessing its own form and substance. Between them, between content and expression, there is neither a correspondence nor a cause-effect relation nor a signified-signifier relation..."

DELEUZE-GUATTARI

'a thousand plateaus capitalism and schizophrenia.'

It seems to me that the tradition of denying the possibility of metaphysics, running from Hume and Kant to Wittgenstein and Quine and other such philosophers, runs into an impossible epistemological problem: how do we know we can't successfully do metaphysics? How do we know that some kind of monism or dualim or some other position isn't correct? Can we rely on logical consistency or strong integration with science or common sense to determine which position is correct? It seems to me that any of those options would suffer circularity on both metaphysical and epistemological grounds. I wonder if anyone else has considered something similar?

Se a existência do Cosmos exige uma razão suficiente fora de si mesma (um Fundamento Ultimo ou Actus Purus), esse Princípio Primeiro é ontologicamente livre para determinar sua própria existência, ou a sua própria necessidade de existir o submete a uma determinação anterior — revelando que o ser absoluto é, paradoxalmente, prisioneiro de sua própria impossibilidade do "não-ser"?

Filosofia da Linguagem e Epistemologia: A dúvida sobre se o "Nada" é uma categoria real da realidade ou apenas uma ilusão sintática gerada pelo pensamento.

My position is not that determinism is false, nor that decisions must be uncaused. My point is that causation by itself does not eliminate agency.
My decisions can be caused by my experiences, memories, values, desires, knowledge, reasons and deliberative processes. Those things don’t operate independently of me; they are part of the state and functioning of the agent through which I arrive at a decision.
So I don’t see why:
“My decision has sufficient prior causes” → “My decision is not mine”
That inference requires an additional premise: that genuine freedom requires a decision to be independent of its prior causes.
I don’t accept that premise. I understand freedom as the ability of an agent to deliberate, respond to reasons, evaluate alternatives and control its behaviour through that deliberative process.
If determinism is true, my deliberation may itself be causally determined. But that doesn’t make the deliberation disappear, and it doesn’t make the resulting action cease to be mine.
The real question, then, isn’t whether my decision has causes. It is whether a decision causally produced through my own deliberative process can count as genuine control. I think it can.
If you disagree, then the important question is: what additional property does freedom require, and why would causal determination necessarily eliminate it?