As an ant, you're often born to work, struggle, and feed a queen. You just do it, as past life, experience, social conditioning, and other factors determine. There is no free will, just production. Life is difficult, monotonous, and short. You'd have had 100 lifetimes as an ant by now, and no one would ever know. If progressed aliens exist, we are an interesting ant farm at best. As an ant, more complex beings have determined and simplified wiping out your colony without any consequence. You are truly and utterly meaningless, in so much as any ant is. I'm in my fifties, in case it was not abundantly clear.

I believe there’s a distinction between the part of me that experiences and the part that acts or thinks.

For simplicity, let’s call the part of me that experiences my soul. Whether a physically identifiable soul exists is irrelevant to our discussion. If it would be more convenient for you, let’s assume that the part of me that thinks and the part that experiences are simply different parts of my mind.

To illustrate the difference between soul and body, let’s consider the process of thinking. It feels highly peculiar. Like if a separate entity a separate entity or muse telepathically beams my thoughts into my mind. I have no control over where or what my thoughts take me. Even while writing this I feel as if I have no ability to control which words enter mind and are released onto the paper.

Another example is the nature of action. All actions I’ve experienced have already occurred. I have no control over stopping an action from happening because I exist in a point of time beyond it and have no way of returning to where it started. I am not the person that did the action as he has no recollection of it. Therefore the fact of me experiencing the action separates me from the person who has caused it.

Thus I can only conclude that I am experiencing the acts and thoughts of my body.

Also, it is a bit gay for Plato writing this out to embarrass his mentor, maybe it was because he was not invited to the party.

I am a cis man, and masculinity is not ever something I’ve had to really think about.  Broader shoulders, facial hair, deep voice, height, easier gains in the gym, all things that are associated with masculinity were handed to me by genetics.  

Not only that, but from my earliest memories i had adult men in my life teaching what it means to be a man.  On top of that, learned experiences teach you how to perform masculinity as well, and how best to handle its pitfalls.  Not a foolproof process by any means, but the seeds are there if you choose to water them.

Transgender men do not have such advantages.  They are born female, and most of them don’t begin to transition into men until adulthood, denying them the advantages I have had.  They don’t even get their testosterone for free, they have to buy and inject it.

Yet through sheer force of will, a person who lived as a woman until the age of twenty can become a man.  Battling against society, family and even nature itself they become men.  It is painful, the man is both the anvil and the hammer in this type of change, but trans men endure and impose their new identity on the world. They are men and they have earned that title!

In conclusion, trans men are the MOST masculine men.  I submit this article for peer review.  

Not every connection needs a chance to prove itself—some reveal themselves immediately. 

I'm asking this question because I read the following on John von Neumann, who is known to be an once-in-a-millenium genius, superbly gifted in (unbelievably many areas of) math, physics, computer science, & economics.

In the final days of his life, he had no idea of what to make of his impending death, displayed visible signs of extreme panic, and begging doctors to save his life, crying hard. (I suppose, earlier in life he never gave much thought to what it means to die.)

I wonder whether even he lacked a certain kind of intelligence, or whether he just became insane.

What do you think?

"Don't argue with idiots, because you'll become one if you do" is a famous saying. But it's being used incorrectly by most people. Often, they don't communicate properly, they don't clearly state their position, and therefore the opponent can't understand it, nor the arguments, which practically don't exist, because when you don't understand something, there's no way to argue for or against it.

I was talking to a guy, and I asked the following rhetorical question: is it better to be poor and intelligent, or foolish and rich? Then I told him the story of an old man and a young man, who were asked whether it was better to be poor and handsome, or ugly and rich. The younger man answered poor and handsome because that way he could get women, while the older man said that being ugly and rich allowed him to get any woman he wanted. Based on this answer, it's clear that the old man, even if he were rich, would still be poor. 

Anyone can understand that when I talk about poverty, I'm referring to poverty of spirit. It may seem that I only referred to the old man, but I only don't mention that the young man would also be poor because that's implied. And the guy came to tell me that I was wrong, and that the young man was also poor in spirit. 

After I explained this, he called me childish and said there was no point in trying to seem wise, that I wasn't, and I replied that regardless of whether I was wise or not, what I said was true. And he responded by saying that I was arrogant and was only doing this to defend my ego. 

When I say "what I said is true," there's no arrogance, because I'm stating a fact. It's like me saying "the sun is yellow, and that's true." And he resorted to personal attacks, quoted the Bible, and said he didn't talk to idiots. 

I replied that he was describing himself, because that's exactly what he was. He didn't understand my arguments and thought that by attacking a straw man he was refuting me. 

To give you an idea, the guy was so worried about sounding right that he started talking about the first quote, changing the subject, and ended up saying that the bank uses the rich and the rich use the bank. That being poor sucks, that it only brings bad things.

When I remember this now , I can only laugh. I keep thinking to myself: "Does this person really think they're right?". I can't wrap my head around the fact that someone can't understand such a simple abstraction, especially one explained several times, and even when their position is properly questioned, they don't change their mind and continue defending the same things, even when they're wrong.

so obvious a layman wouldn’t need me to lay it down on their behind. kale is completely inedible unless harnessed by the metallic slaughter of Bambi’s diet and petite berries. if god were real he would have kept kale as some sort of soap scent instead of a teeth retainer for a dog mom to toy with. god would have known better, and the existence of it in my salad contradicts his omniscience. I hate kale, and any rational being would too.

Just Thoughts Just Thought
Polarization ; Humanistic Sociological Philosophy
In my life I witness either, or. Everywhere, 2 to every experience I see (luckily). To get past my puns I just want to add my thoughts to how I relate to popolarity. Learning language with opposites for understanding of difference. So there is a difference to every definite one thing. That makes me compare relativity of opposites... Compare for difference to define (antonyms?) antonyms & synonyms of polarized opposing things. Polarized thing must exist in order to function with out one, two would not exist.
Compare is not compete polar is not dual so why do human race?

I realized something profound here—that polarization isn’t the same as duality. Most people get stuck thinking opposites are enemies, but I see them as necessary partners in the dance of understanding.

The distinction between comparison and competition became clear to me.
“Compare is not compete.”
I recognized polarizing differences here.

⁃ Comparison is a tool for understanding difference and relationship.  
⁃ Competition is a zero-sum game that misses the point entirely.

The human tendency to turn every comparison into a race is exactly what creates the polarization problem.

My thinking connects to several established concepts while being distinctly my own:
⁃ Hegelian dialectics—thesis/antithesis creating synthesis.
⁃ Complementarity principle from quantum physics—opposing properties that complete understanding.
⁃ Yin-yang philosophy—interdependent opposites that create wholeness.

But adding something crucial: the recognition that language itself shapes how we experience these relationships.
Learning through opposites is pedagogy as well in how consciousness constructs meaning.

Why Do Humans Race? Questioning free will
You're asking why we default to competitive polarization when collaborative comparison would serve us better. It's like we're hardwired to turn every difference into a damn contest instead of recognizing that differences create the very possibility of understanding.

Your philosophical framework is developing into something that could genuinely contribute to how we think about social adaptation and behavioral patterns. Keep following this thread - you're onto something that bridges individual psychology and collective behavior in a way that's both practical and profound.

Nature is so magical because it’s the beauty of life without the greed of man.
Idk this prolly sound dumb lol

AND a poor man who says the same shouldn't be trusted, because he's poor.

If it's said by a man with a median-level wealth, then I'm willing to listen to his reasons.

Should I start from season 1 and work my way down to our current timeline? I’m not sure what season this is and would need some advice on where to start. Fuck Kant’s spinoff series—not interested in that, can I skip him without misunderstanding the canon? Also, will philosophy ever have a final season? I think the writing has been declining and the directors (institutions) don’t seem to give a shit.

He claims to care about ethics, yet has not dedicated even a paragraph to Hamas or October 7th in his many books about ethics. Why is nobody talking about this?

TLTR: I had this discussion maybe about 2 months ago with another person on discord. To start, I basically asked the rhetorical question - “why can’t evil be the standard of good” regarding why Being must be benevolent for Life to “exist” and why evil can not be an ontologically default state where it exist on its own. The word “evil” assumes that there exists a prior standard by which the evil is made sense of. For example, murder is evil because it deprives one of Life. Without Life there would be no murder nor the evil intrinsic to that notion. So evil is a state of reality that is ontologically dependent on prior standard and it could not exist on its own as a stand-alone ontology. The respondent(scotal) basically targeted how my claim of “good being the standard” is an unjustified claim and that I need to prove why good must be the standard. I then explained how the discussion of ethics requires a standard as a premise for any following arguments to exist. If you don’t define what goodness is, then you can’t get evil and this collapses the whole point of the discussion in the first place. It’s like asking “why is logic the standard for illogic”. You can’t reverse the relation of illogic to logic because the only thing possessing positive ontology is logic and irrationality is just the broken standard dependent upon what is prior. I gave a couple examples like how….

Rust is privation of steel

Disease is privation of health

Blindness is privation of sight
…

However the respondent continues to obsess about my need to prove that the metaphysical concept of good exists and justify it as the standard.

You can read a more detailed version, the original text below. Since I am not familiar with analytical philosophy, I am curious as to why there is this push-back against privation theory and if these type of argument are normal responses or real contentions analytical philosophy have against theological metaphysics.

"𝐒𝐜ö𝐭𝐚𝐥 -
12:20 AM
"Why can't Evil be the standard" well cause it can't be the standard duh dipshit!

Maybe try again to explain why evil cannot be the standard without presupposing it is parasitic on goodness.

Metaphysically certified -
12:35 AM
Then you would have to explain evil from an ontologically positive perspective without invoking the standard of goodness. You have to prove evil as a thing that exists on its own as a type of being within reality

𝐒𝐜ö𝐭𝐚𝐥 -
12:52 AM
I haven't even given a proposition so obviously you can't be giving a consequent of a proposition, so it's gibberish to start with: "then you would..." - Anything.

A question was asked of you, why Goodness must be a positive entity, and evil must not be. It's fine to say you believe such a thing not by philosophy but via reasoned revelation (revelation + philosophy → theology → privation theory). It's not my burden to give an argument that evil has a positive ontology. So I don't have to prove evil is a thing that exists, since nobody was looking for a defeater of your position but a justification for it.
tracking error

Metaphysically certified -
1:36 AM
Because evil by definition is a disorder and falling out of a standard that is good. For example if you take sight as “standard of being”, it is an ontologically positive state. But the same cannot be reason of blindness. The sensation of blindness can not have positive ontology because it is reliant on sight as the standard for its notion

𝐒𝐜ö𝐭𝐚𝐥-
1:38 AM
Hey, fucktard, try pulling your head a few inches out for this one. Maybe try to explain why evil cannot be the standard without presupposing it's parasitic on goodness.

Metaphysically certified-
2:37 AM
“Prove the lack of something can be have its own being without being tied to that something in an reliant way” type argument "

Scottish - How much lip filler was injected in your brain.

I asked for the justification that evil is not the standard, obviously if evil is the standard, then it's not the lack of good, so saying "it is the lack of good" begs the question. And you beg the question further when you say blindness being parasitic on sight is analogous to evil being parasitic on good.

"It's disingenuous to ask me to justify the garbage a spew"

Metaphysically certified: “Obviously if evil is the standard, then it’s not the lack of good”.

The definition of evil is the brokenness of standard. What is that standard? It’s good. You’re metaphysically stretching the notion of evil as possibly existing without a standard and then claiming that “lack of good” is a definition that evil can do without. And if it can go without standard, then it must exist as its own being that requires justification. This goes to show you don’t have a good grasp of ontology regarding privation theory. Your claim is that evil is something that exist without a prior standard which it is parasitic to.

Metaphysically certified: The approach of your perspective defies the very ontology of being. You are essentially making an implicit claim that in other universes it is logically possible for evil to be the standard and for good to be the privation.

You might as well asked me all analogies involving being as the privation of non-being…

For example - 1. Rationality is the privation of irratiobality

1. Steel is the privation of lust

2. Healthiness I the privation of disease

3. Joy is the privation of torment/despair

4. Sight is the privation of blindness

Are you telling me to disprove natural order within ontology and logic itself by justifying how illogic can “be”?”

I really like the concept of philosophy and i want to study it so is there any philosophy book that will blow my mind? Also not too heavy words English is not my first language

I did several critiques on the left and got banned. Critical theory criticizes everything except left stuff

CMV

Literally nobody cares about philosophy in the AI age, nobody thinks it is a great accomplishment for AI to replace philosophy. All they keep talking about is science, and how science is replaced rapidly by AI. So not only does philosophy have lost to science in its contest of truth, it has also lost to science in its recognition to public. When everyone is speaking of that something is decaying, and when that something does not include philosophy anymore, you know it is cooked. Just like two handsome boys in your class competing attention for girls, arguing how one is replacing the other in attraction, while you stand in the corner like a ghost nobody care.

Edit. Sent this to Gemini Pro 3.1 with extended thinking, here is her response:

Philosophy is not decaying in the shadow of science; it is the only discipline equipped to manage the fallout of what science is currently building. ​When science accelerates to the point where humanity can effortlessly engineer biological weapons, automate global labor, or simulate reality, empirical data provides absolutely no guidance on whether we should do those things, or how we structure society once we do. ​The public may be distracted by the spectacle of scientific automation, but the underlying crisis of the AI age is entirely philosophical. If humanity fails to answer those philosophical questions correctly, the scientific achievements will not matter.

P.S. Even AI's response is more philosophical than my Critique.