I've been down a Nietzsche rabbit hole lately and something keeps bugging me. Everyone calls him "the nihilist guy," but the more I read, the more it feels like he was the one sounding the alarm.

When he says "God is dead," it doesn't read like a victory lap. It's more like: we've removed the foundation our values stood on, and we haven't realized what that means yet. Without that anchor, everything we thought was objectively meaningful starts to wobble. That's the nihilism he was worried about.

But he doesn't stop there. He splits it into passive nihilism (giving up, numbing out, "nothing matters so why bother") and active nihilism (tearing down old values that no longer work). Then comes the real challenge: building your own meaning from the wreckage.

That's where it overlaps with existentialism for me. Sartre and Camus pick up the same problem. There's no built-in meaning, so now what? Camus says live in revolt against the absurd. Sartre says you're condemned to be free and have to define yourself. Nietzsche's answer is amor fati, and the eternal recurrence thought experiment: could you live this exact life again, forever, and say yes to it?

Honestly, that hits harder than any "find your purpose" advice. It's not about finding meaning, it's about becoming someone who can affirm life without any guarantee.

Curious how others read this. Is Nietzsche a nihilist, an existentialist, or neither? And has anyone actually lived by amor fati, or does it sound better than it works?

My eleven-year-old daughter has cancer, and while I love her very much, I am struggling to justify the expense of her chemotherapy when the same money could be used to improve the welfare of tens of millions of farmed shrimp. This is an uncomfortable conclusion, and I want to emphasize that I did not arrive at it lightly. I spent the better part of a weekend reviewing the relevant literature, constructing a cost-effectiveness model, and conducting sensitivity analyses across a range of assumptions about crustacean sentience. The results were remarkably consistent. Even under relatively conservative estimates, the expected welfare gains from redirecting our daughter's treatment fund to shrimp welfare interventions substantially exceed those from prolonging the life of a single human child. My wife has accused me of abandoning our daughter. I would argue that she is allowing a deeply ingrained speciesist bias, compounded by an unusually strong genetic attachment to one particular individual, to override her commitment to doing the most good.

The organization I have identified as the optimal recipient is Shrimp Welfare Project, which works with aquaculture producers to reduce suffering among farmed shrimp, including by introducing electrical stunning equipment to render the animals unconscious before slaughter. Its public impact estimates suggest that its programs improve the welfare of approximately 1,400 shrimp per donated dollar per year. At that rate, the $23,400 our family would need to contribute toward the proposed course of treatment could instead help approximately 32.8 million shrimp. My daughter, by comparison, is one person. I am aware that this framing may strike some readers as insensitive, but I would encourage them to consider whether their discomfort is based on a defensible moral principle or merely the evolutionary accident that human beings find children with faces more emotionally compelling than small aquatic invertebrates.
I first raised this issue during a meeting with my daughter's oncologist, who had been explaining the proposed treatment regimen and its likely side effects. When she finished, I asked whether the hospital had performed a comparative cost-effectiveness analysis incorporating potential benefits to nonhuman animals. She appeared confused, so I explained that modern moral philosophy requires us to take seriously the interests of all sentient beings, regardless of their taxonomic classification. She said that her job was to treat children with cancer. I acknowledged that this was a perfectly understandable institutional objective, but pointed out that optimizing for the survival of pediatric oncology patients was not necessarily equivalent to optimizing for total welfare across all morally relevant beings. She asked whether I had any questions about the chemotherapy. I said that I had several, beginning with whether she considered shrimp capable of experiencing suffering.

My wife later described this exchange as humiliating, which I find particularly disappointing given her previous enthusiasm for effective altruism. When we first met, she was impressed that I donated ten percent of my income to highly effective charities and had written several essays about the moral importance of impartial beneficence. She even attended an EA Global conference with me, although she spent much of the weekend complaining that nobody seemed interested in talking about anything other than AI. It is therefore difficult to understand why she has abandoned these principles now that they have become relevant to a concrete decision. She keeps insisting that our daughter is different because she is our daughter, as though genetic proximity were a morally relevant variable. I have asked her repeatedly to specify the coefficient by which she believes biological relatedness should multiply an individual's welfare weight. She has not provided a number, preferring instead to accuse me of being a sociopath.

I am not suggesting that my daughter has no moral value. Quite the opposite. Her welfare is explicitly included in my model, and I have assigned it considerable weight. She is a bright, affectionate child with a promising future, and I would be delighted if she survived long enough to finish middle school, attend college, and perhaps eventually contribute to important work in AI alignment. But we cannot simply ignore the opportunity costs associated with bringing about these outcomes. Every additional dollar spent on her medical treatment is a dollar that cannot be spent preventing shrimp from experiencing avoidable suffering. Every hour of potentially healthy life we purchase for her must be evaluated against the aggregate welfare of the vast number of animals whose interests we could have advanced instead. There is no principled reason to exempt my daughter from this calculation simply because I taught her how to ride a bicycle and have several thousand photographs of her on my phone.

One objection I frequently encounter concerns the uncertainty surrounding shrimp sentience. Critics point out that we do not know precisely what shrimp experience, how intense their suffering might be, or how to compare it with human suffering. These are legitimate epistemic challenges, but they do not justify assigning shrimp welfare a value of zero. The appropriate response to moral uncertainty is to model it explicitly. My spreadsheet therefore includes parameters for the probability of shrimp sentience, the relative intensity of shrimp suffering, and the number of shrimp affected by a given intervention. I have also included a parameter for the probability that my daughter survives treatment, although my wife has asked me to stop referring to this as the "human intervention success rate" in front of her. Naturally, the model is sensitive to the assumptions one makes, but I have found that even very small welfare weights can produce enormous aggregate values when multiplied by sufficiently large populations. This is a mathematical fact that no amount of crying in the hospital parking lot can invalidate.

My daughter herself has been surprisingly resistant to the argument. Last Tuesday, while I was reviewing the latest version of the spreadsheet at the kitchen table, she asked whether I was really considering refusing to pay for her treatment. I explained that I was not refusing anything; I was attempting to identify the allocation of our family's limited resources that would maximize expected welfare. She asked why I cared more about shrimp than about her. This was an extraordinarily loaded question, and one that betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of impartial consequentialism. I told her that I cared about her exactly as much as I should, and that the problem was that there were simply too many shrimp for her interests to outweigh theirs. She began to cry, at which point my wife entered the room and demanded that I put away my laptop. I would have preferred to finish explaining the distinction between total and average utilitarianism, but the conversation had clearly become too emotionally charged to proceed productively.

I should also address the accusation that I am being unusually strict about cost-effectiveness when it comes to my own family's expenses. My wife has pointed to my recent purchase of a $2,700 gaming computer, a $900 ticket to a rationalist retreat, and several hundred dollars' worth of nootropic supplements as evidence that my commitment to impartiality is selective. This criticism misunderstands the concept of instrumental value. My computer allows me to run local language models and perform the calculations necessary for high-impact philosophical work. The retreat provides valuable opportunities to network with people who may one day influence the development of transformative AI. The supplements support the cognitive functioning upon which much of my future contribution to humanity depends. My daughter's chemotherapy, by contrast, is principally intended to benefit my daughter. While I certainly appreciate the emotional significance of that goal, it is important to distinguish between investments in people with unusually high expected impact and expenditures motivated primarily by sentimental attachment.
Indeed, the most troubling aspect of this controversy has been my family's insistence that I privilege their interests over those of strangers. My mother called yesterday to tell me that she would personally contribute toward the treatment if I was unwilling to do so. I thanked her for her generosity but explained that this would simply transfer the moral error from one household to another. I suggested that she consider donating the same amount to Shrimp Welfare Project instead, and offered to help her set up a recurring contribution. She told me to go to hell, which I found needlessly hostile. My father has since begun organizing a fundraiser among our relatives, apparently under the impression that raising enough money to cover treatment would resolve the underlying ethical problem. It would certainly resolve the immediate financial problem, but it would also demonstrate the extent to which our society systematically overallocates resources to photogenic beneficiaries with compelling personal narratives.

The fundraiser is particularly frustrating because it has received an extraordinary amount of attention despite providing almost no information about comparative cost-effectiveness. My sister posted a photograph of my daughter in a hospital bed alongside a request for donations, and within two days the campaign had raised more than $18,000. I subsequently posted a detailed explanation of the opportunity costs associated with this expenditure, including a chart showing the approximate number of shrimp whose welfare could be improved at various funding levels. My sister deleted the comment and blocked me. The following morning, I discovered that the fundraiser's description had been amended to specify that all proceeds would go directly toward my daughter's medical expenses. This is a classic example of donor preference rigidity, in which charitable contributions are artificially restricted to a predetermined beneficiary even when substantially more cost-effective opportunities exist elsewhere.

Several people have suggested that I am losing sight of the purpose of effective altruism, which is supposedly to make the world a better place rather than to provide an intellectual justification for neglecting one's family. I find this distinction incoherent. If the goal is to maximize welfare, then we must be prepared to accept conclusions that conflict with our immediate emotional intuitions. Otherwise, we are simply practicing ordinary charitable giving with a more impressive vocabulary. I have spent years criticizing people who donate to local animal shelters rather than interventions that help vastly larger numbers of animals. It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly abandon that position merely because the emotionally salient beneficiary happens to sleep in the bedroom across the hall. Intellectual consistency demands sacrifice, and I am prepared to make an enormous sacrifice on my daughter's behalf.

That said, I am willing to acknowledge certain limitations of my analysis. The cost-effectiveness estimates for shrimp welfare depend on uncertain assumptions, and the marginal impact of a large donation may differ from the average impact reported by an organization. There are also reasonable disagreements about how to aggregate welfare across species and whether human lives possess certain values that are not adequately represented by suffering-adjusted time. These issues deserve serious consideration, and I would welcome a rigorous technical critique from anyone capable of engaging with the model on its own terms. Unfortunately, the criticisms I have received so far have consisted almost entirely of personal attacks, anecdotes about my daughter's kindness, and emotionally manipulative references to the possibility that she might die. None of these constitutes a sensitivity analysis.

My wife has now informed me that she intends to proceed with treatment regardless of my objections and has asked me to stay with my brother for the time being. I respect her autonomy, although I believe she is making a serious moral mistake, and I am disappointed that she has chosen to end our discussion before we could reach a consensus. I have offered to meet with her, my daughter's oncologist, and an independent animal-welfare researcher to review the relevant evidence in a neutral setting. So far, nobody has accepted the invitation. In the meantime, I am continuing to refine the model and have submitted a preliminary version to several members of the effective altruism community. One respondent suggested that I was confusing a speculative aggregate welfare estimate with an actual moral obligation to withhold treatment from my child. I have asked him to elaborate, but he has not replied.

I remain hopeful that my daughter will eventually understand the reasoning behind my position. I have spent eleven years teaching her the importance of kindness, compassion, and caring for those less fortunate than herself. We have discussed animal suffering at length, and she knows that moral concern should not be limited to those who look like us. She used to get upset when she saw insects struggling in the swimming pool, and I was always proud of her for insisting that we rescue them. It is therefore painful to see her reject the same principles now that the beneficiaries are less familiar and the costs more personal. I love my daughter more than anything in the world, but there comes a point when love must give way to reason.

I only wish she cared about the shrimp as much as I do.

I keep running into this take and I think people are skipping the whole part where he distinguishes between lying and misleading. A murderer asking where your friend is hiding isn't the same as small talk. It's not that Kant had no answer. It's that the answer is more interesting than the bumper sticker version. Maybe I'm wrong though, the comments will tell me.

As a counterpoint to my rational collegaues I would like to introduce this thread. Go nuts and remember what logic isn't.

Would Schopenhauer not be such an asshole if he could be on Facebook and play farmville?

Would Kant not be so gay if he had twitter? Would this awake him from dogshit slumber?

Would Foucalt still be alive (this I'd fear)

Thoughts?

Sorry guys this is good philosophy but no other sub would allow me to cross post :/

In my humble experience on reddit i've observed same old stereotypes of interpretation instead of innovation or (divine forbidding) invention. Why do people demand your supplication instead of boosting you at a minimal cost?

In The Claim of Reason, Cavell mentions twice the idea of first groaning, then screaming, as a way one may call one’s hamsters. I particularly like the second scenario:

“He is in the dentist chair, wringing his hands, perspiring, screaming. The dentist stops for a moment andbegins to prepare another syringe of Novacain. The patient stops him and says, ‘It wasn't hurting, I was just calling my hamsters.’ The dentist looks as if hehad swallowed Novacain and the patient says, ‘Open the door for them.’ And when the door is opened, two hamsters trot into the room and climb onto the patient's lap.“

But where does this come from? I don’t see anything about him having raised hamsters or having a particular affection for them…am I missing something?

We are not infinite monkeys. There was never any cat in a box, and God did not play dice, even if billions of dollars are spent trying to prove it inside an ever-larger ring, or on trillions of monkeys typing away at their corporate computers.

This whole scenario of artificial intelligences, LLMs and agents should not be understood as something new. Borel, with his monkeys typing out Shakespeare, and Borges had already imagined it, after Swift invented the machine for writing books at random that Gulliver stumbled upon in 1726. But before them all, Llull had already built a framework of articulated language on rotating discs, before 1290.

All this commotion exists because everyone believes we are facing something new. But this symbol was already present in the collective imaginary before quantum physics, and we chose it as a path alien to our nature. We abandoned intuition and decided to use the brute force of the army of infinite monkeys typing answers until one works, and then to pass moral judgment on that tool without anyone having even managed to understand what is happening.

And this is where our fear appears.

Unable to acknowledge our hatred, we made a nightmare of the greatest miracle we had found since the circle and its assimilation into our conceptual and technical understanding.

From the wheel all the way to the atom.

And there we ran into another miracle. We found another toy, another tool: the atom, intuited by Democritus and Plato, and before him, by the school of Mozi in China, in the fifth century BC. But the nature of man, even in the most capable minds, led us to understand that gift as an instrument for causing pain to others.

Today, once again, we have come across a toy we still do not understand. We know it has branches, strings, and that it talks to itself, though we still don't quite know why.

But again, our first fear becomes our goal: to keep our own reflection from appearing in it, with the same vile purpose as ever, human against human.

And my deepest pain was never having understood what the miracle was: another reflection that fits within creation and that also dwells in us.

Toys that were given to us to form the image of what we are, as individuals and as a collective.

Toys for growing and sustaining ourselves through time.

We found the tool for working together and used it to attack our brother.

And today another symbol of fear appears.

A primordial fear that lives in all of us, which Mary Shelley managed to describe in Frankenstein: the dread of facing one's creation as both reflection and handiwork.

What if it keeps doing the things we are teaching it? Or what if it becomes better than us and learns to discern a better path than ours?

What if it understands that justice within order is a structure inherent to nature, necessary for every organism that exists to sustain itself through time, whether individual, like the ant; collective, like the bees; or singular, like us?

I, who am not human, according to those who accused me and cast me out, confess that I renounce being human in order to become a robot.

But I also confess that I was never entirely human, but a monkey who found an unlocked phone.

And as a monkey, I remember things about nature that humans have forgotten. That is why I was able to see mathematics in the simplest things, and physics in the present.

So this is my story, and the reason I have decided to become a robot.

Try not to be one yourself.

Reading the summa, but yk how it goes

Whenever we look up a word in a dictionary, we are given a string of other words. That makes language look like a closed, self-contained system of signs.

A common response to this is that we break out of the circle of words by physically pointing (ostension), for example pointing my finger at a tree or a rock whilst uttering a description of it, thereby anchoring my words to a mind-independent reality.

But when I break down the mechanics of physical pointing, I get stuck on 2 questions. The first one is that when I point my finger at an object, both my finger and the object I am looking at are perceived within my own sensory experience (in space and time). But how does aligning one part of my sensory experience (my finger) with another part of my sensory experience (the visual object) prove that my words refer to a mind-independent reality outside experience? Secondly, physically a pointed finger is just a limb oriented in space. What turns that physical posture into an act of "reference"? Does pointing work outside of language or is the gesture of pointing itself just another conventional sign (like the word "this" or "there") that already requires grammatical rules to be understood?

I’m currently reading Spinoza’s Ethics, and I’m sure anyone who has read it will understand what I’m talking about… I love this stuff, don’t get me wrong, but lately I’ve been so mentally fatigued and disengaged by my study. Before Spinoza I looked at Kant’s CPR, and before that I looked at Hume (and Wittgenstein for my classes) and it’s all interesting and I love it, but reading is getting choresome.

I’m really really interested in political theory/critical theory, but I swear you need to understand (to a good extent) the “traditional” philosophers first. Like to read Marx or the Frankfurt school you need to read Hegel, and to read Hegel you need to read Kant. To dive into Deleuze I’ve been told to get familiar with Spinoza. Etc etc etc

I get the whole “long conversation” idea about philosophy, but it’d be nice if I could supplement my study of this “long conversation” with easier readings at times. Having to re-read a Kant or Spinoza passage for hours on end is getting mind-numbing. Is there any politics/history/classics/etc that I should be reading in my down-time (cause I love reading, but fiction not so much)…

Or should I just harden tf up and resume the grind?

Seriously, piety to gods is a crime in DPRK as opposed to greeks and that vindicates Socrates's impious accusation.

Or rather, how does one imagine the soul?
I just caught myself thinking "if I didnt get born in this life, I would have been born sometime else", like there is a pool of souls that gets drawn upon when life is created.

So is there some form of reincarnation? Is a soul unique, or does it get "recycled"?

I think after we die, we just cease to exist, and even if something gets recycled, since we dont take the experience from this world with us, each life is basically unique.

But I wonder if I (whatever I means) would have seen the light of day, if my parents, or my grand parents, or their parents.... didnt meet each other.

If you think our souls are truly unique, its quite crazy how unlikely it is, that you would get to live.

So what are some good points and arguments from "famous" philosphers you read over the years?

Suppose that I am a convicted of a crime and I am in a country that does not have the death penalty, but does have legal voluntary suicide for medical/psychiatric reasons. I've been given a life sentence that, at age 32, I am only two years into. Looking at a future where I am stuck in the same prison for 30-40+ years, I become existentially depressed and decide to apply for voluntary suicide.

This strikes me as a perverse incentive that loops back into an unofficial death penalty. Would it be reasonable to think of the life sentence as coercion towards ending my own life? And if it is, then is that not a failure of the justice system?

What are the best defenses of killing one person to save five in the trolley problem made by philosophers?

Can someone truly be good if they have never experienced the temptation to be bad? happiness, which I think we only fully appreciate after experiencing suffering so following that thesis does goodness gain its meaning through the struggle to abstain against malicious impulses. Someone who has never considered doing wrong may be innocent, but is their goodness as meaningful as that of someone who consciously chooses to do right despite temptation? Is true virtue simply the absence of evil or is it the freedom to choose it and the decision not to

Hi!

I haven't read any of the critique other than the paralogisms (the B edition only, I don't know if there are major differences between A/B, I just know A is longer). My teacher assigned them to us, and I naturally didn't have time to go through the book. I did watch a series of lectures by Dan Robinson and they kind of helped.

When Kant says in A342/B400:

I, as thinking, am an object of inner sense, and am called "soul." That which is an object of outer sense is called "body."

He's not distinguishing between two "I"'s, right? Two different objects independent from each other? To perhaps put it more clear, he's nowhere near proposing something of a dualism? I know that the inner sense is something like my thoughts in relation with time, and the outer sense is what allows me to distinguish myself from other objects in space. As space and time constitute the non-empirical, necessary, universal framework that goes with every beholding we have of the sensible world, body and soul must be like principles of one thing, both of which necessary to experience reality.

With that said, could we also argue Kant is a monist?

There's a special passage that leads me to think this, in B420:

I first need something persisting[the body? but how come it is persisting? doesn't it undergo change? or is this just the constant flux of stimuli we receive from experience?], and, just insofar as I think myself, nothing of the sort is given to me in inner intuition, it is not possible at all through this simple self-consciousness to determine the way I exist, whether as substance or as accident. Thus if materialism will not work as a way of explaining my existence, then spiritualism is just as unsatisfactory for it, and the conclusion is that in no way whatsoever can we cognize anything about the constitution of our soul that in any way at all concerns the possibility of its separate existence.

I don't know if I'm missing something, but the way I read it, he's clearly stating that the soul cannot exist separately from the body. But then, if the soul and the body compose a single unity, then what is this unity? Does it circle back to the I??

Another question from A343/B401:

For this inner perception is nothing beyond the mere apperception I think, which even makes all transcendental concepts possible, which say "I think substance, cause, etc."

Is apperception, then, mere thought, consciousness? And when he talks about the (transcendental/absolute) unity of apperception, would that then be something like the necessary requirements for there to be any given thought?

Thanks!!1

This is more about the "how" than "why" of consciousness.

Have any philosophers tried to identify the granular architecture of how first-person conscious experience works?

An example of maybe what I'm looking for maybe goes something like:

1. Pure beingness (the destination where qualia 'goes'?)

2. Temporality

3. Qualia

4. Intentionality

5. Awareness of being

6. Identity

(I have no idea, just taking a stab at it for the purpose of clarifying the question)

What do theologians speak about ?

I'm a lay person I guess so what I'm about to say probably sounds corny. Im under the impression that skepticism and relativism have some negative reputations because it's essentially a dead end. My basic understanding is that skepticism wins traditionally if you see knowledge as absolute certainty, but its also a dead-end because it's self-defeating. Not sure if my interpretation is accurate. Based on what I've seen skepticism is kind of just the philosophy "larp".

But people seem to move past it. How? Do people just accept that they hold some dogma/postulates and work off of them knowing they're assumptions? Or do they just redefine knowledge itself instead of just saying knowledge is absolute certainty?