u/MobHQ

let me guess, you'd refute my question by saying: "Well, he wouldn't be God then."

But how do you know what God IS?

I'm not saying God is finite. I'm asking whether we've actually ruled out the possibility.

A lot of arguments about God seem to build “ultimacy” into the definition from the beginning. God is supposed to be necessary, infinite, timeless, uncaused, absolutely simple, outside causal relations, etc.

But why?

What if one of those assumptions isn't actually required for something to be God?

And this gets especially interesting when we talk about an ultimate.

Suppose there really is some ultimate foundation of reality or morality. Why must that foundation be completely devoid of relations, causality, internal structure, or even finitude?

Maybe it must be. But that's something we'd have to argue for, not just assume.

I've been thinking about this because I made a little philosophical challenge for myself: try to define an “ultimate” without relying on causality, ordering, composition, contrast, analogy, or formal structure, while also making it the foundation of objective morality.

And honestly, I couldn't do it.

But that doesn't prove there is no ultimate.

It might instead reveal something about us.

Maybe finite minds have a hard time even conceptualizing what an ultimate would be like. Maybe our concept of “ultimate” is itself shaped by the limitations of the kind of reasoning we have access to.

And if that's possible, then saying:

"God can't be finite, because then God wouldn't be God"

might be putting the conclusion into the definition.

So I'm not arguing "God is finite."

I'm asking something much more basic:

What exactly entitles us to decide beforehand what God must be? I'm in highschool so my question may be premature.. tell me if I'm missing something. I just think we are limited and that it would be really hard to actually conceptualize ultimacy. What do you think?

Disclaimer: this challenge does not prove that objective morality is false. It simply challenges the foundations behind what "morality" is. Can you beat it?

Proof in the comments

When we say “the self,” we usually treat it as if its existence and identity are obvious. I am the same person I was yesterday, five years ago, and when I was a child. But once the components of a person are examined separately, that continuity becomes much harder to explain.

The body changes. The brain changes. Memories change, disappear, and can even become inaccurate. Beliefs, values, preferences, personality traits, and habits can change as well. The reasons behind our decisions are also influenced by previous experiences and mental states. Yet through all of this, we continue to describe the person at each stage as the same individual.

One possibility is that there is some underlying entity that persists while all of these properties change. But then the question becomes what that entity actually is. Calling it “the self” does not explain what it consists of or why it remains identical through change.

Another possibility is that the self is not a separate entity at all. It could be an organized process involving the brain, body, memories, dispositions, experiences, and relationships with the environment. On this view, personal identity would come from continuity within the process rather than from an unchanging substance underneath it.

Memory makes the distinction especially difficult. If someone loses a large portion of their autobiographical memory, their body and brain remain continuous. Their personality and behavioral tendencies may also remain partly continuous. Their connection to their own past, however, has been drastically altered. It seems excessive to say that the person has therefore become someone else. At the same time, psychological continuity clearly contributes to how we recognize someone as the same person. Memory therefore seems important without being sufficient.

Agency creates another layer. The person acting at one moment is the result of biological conditions, environment, previous experiences, previous mental states, character, and accumulated history. Yet the action can still be generated through that person's own reasoning, motivations, and decision-making. Being produced by prior conditions does not automatically make the present person irrelevant as an agent. It instead raises a distinction between being the immediate source of an action and being the ultimate source of everything that produced the agent.

There is also a possibility that some of the difficulty is linguistic. We use the word “self” as though it necessarily refers to one particular kind of thing, and then we build philosophical conclusions around that assumption. But a word does not guarantee that there is a single entity corresponding to it. “Self” might refer to the organism in one context, psychological continuity in another, conscious experience in another, and agency in another. Some disagreements about the self may therefore be genuine metaphysical disagreements, while others may partly be disagreements created by how the word is being defined.

This makes “self” look less like a single category and more like several problems bundled into one word. Personal identity concerns continuity across time. Agency concerns the relationship between a person and their actions. Consciousness concerns subjective experience. Metaphysics asks what kind of thing, if any, exists underneath all of these properties.

Those questions can come apart. A person can remain biologically continuous while undergoing enormous psychological change. Psychological patterns can persist despite physical change. An agent can be the causal source of an action without having created every condition that produced the agent. A conscious subject can remain continuous without there being an unchanging object hidden behind the process.

So the problem may not be discovering some hidden object called “the self.” Part of the problem may be determining what we are actually trying to refer to when we use the word in the first place. If the concept contains several different forms of continuity, then treating all of them as one thing may create philosophical problems that originate partly in language rather than reality.

Let's say for example, you combine a basic concept with an established fact, and ask chatgpt to make a "rigorous empirical idea". Then it produces it. Afterwards, it says (frequently, depending on what you say) "Wow, this is definitely rigorous! I wouldn't say you're a genius yet, but your logic is airtight!" Notice how I didn't make the assumption that it would call you a genius, but that it would still praise you nonetheless? Then when you hand it to arxiv, Reddit, or hand it to formal academia, your "airtightedness" is GONE. not so brilliant now.. eh? Nowadays people think they're so smart because of AI generation. But in reality its just prompted slop. Unless you are a good prompt engineer + you know what you're doing in your respective speciality. Dunning Kruger effect.. might be highly prominent here. I'm worried that the intellectual community might mistake any AI evaluation with their intelligence. And if as a result, that they become more overconfident, then this world is cooked. We need to control AI behavior. Well, I'm not a brilliant AI architect myself but I hope you all get what I'm saying. It's just a common behavior I see.

I think free will and most of metaphysics is the same kind of trap. I quit taking sides. Not because I'm lazy or because I decided everything is relative, but after sitting through enough of these arguments I started noticing the same pattern every time. One side lays out its definitions and primitives, derives a clean conclusion from them, and then treats that internal success like it settled the question about reality. The other side does exactly the same thing with a different set of starting points. Both can be consistent inside their own systems. Both can point to supporting considerations. Neither one can force the other to accept its foundations without already assuming what is in dispute. When the real fight is over what free will even requires, or what counts as existing, or what kind of control is necessary for responsibility, and there is no independent standard that both sides already share that can decide between those starting points, continuing to trade arguments that stay inside each framework does not actually move the needle on which ontology is correct. That is the point where I stop committing to either side and start looking at the structure of the disagreement itself: the hidden assumptions, the scope of the claims, how much the conclusions outrun the support, what would actually discriminate the foundations if anything could. I still care about the questions. I just stopped pretending that another round of object-level combat under incompatible primitives is the same thing as progress on the ontology.

I ended up calling the stance Hesusianism. It is just the recognition that when two systems rest on incompatible foundational primitives and no independent criterion exists that can adjudicate those primitives without already favoring one side, ontological commitment between them is underdetermined. In that situation the honest move is to suspend commitment and examine the structure of the frameworks instead of continuing to treat each side's internal derivations as decisive. It does not say metaphysics is impossible or that every claim is unknowable. It only marks the point where further object-level argument under unresolved foundations stops being productive and structural analysis becomes the better use of attention.

Imagine a distant planet 550 light years away. A chain reaction of electron exchanges occurred as expected. It affected your choices by 0.00000000000000000000000000000001% or less. Is this even possible?

Let's say for example, you combine a basic concept with an established fact, and ask chatgpt to make a "rigorous empirical idea". Then it produces it. Afterwards, it says (frequently, depending on what you say) "Wow, this is definitely rigorous! I wouldn't say you're a genius yet, but your logic is airtight!" Notice how I didn't make the assumption that it would call you a genius, but that it would still praise you nonetheless? Then when you hand it to arxiv, Reddit, or hand it to formal academia, your "airtightedness" is GONE. not so brilliant now.. eh? Nowadays people think they're so smart because of AI generation. But in reality its just prompted slop. Unless you are a good prompt engineer + you know what you're doing in your respective speciality. Dunning Kruger effect.. might be highly prominent here. I'm worried that the intellectual community might mistake any AI evaluation with their intelligence. And if as a result, that they become more overconfident, then this world is cooked. We need to control AI behavior. Well, I'm not a brilliant AI architect myself but I hope you all get what I'm saying. It's just a common behavior I see.

Ive started wondering whether part of the free will debate is actually a disagreement over what we mean by “free will.”

Hard incompatibilism says that if our actions ultimately depend on conditions we did not choose, then we cannot be ultimately responsible for them. Libertarianism says that determinism is incompatible with genuine free will, while also having to explain how an undetermined choice is genuinely ours rather than just random.

Compatibilism takes a different approach and says that we don't need that kind of ultimate authorship in the first place. If an action comes from our own reasons, desires, values, and deliberation without coercion, that can be enough for meaningful freedom and responsibility.

Then there is agent causation, which says the agent itself can be the source of a choice rather than the choice being merely the product of prior events or randomness.

But notice how much depends on words like “ultimate,” “source,” “author,” “free,” and “responsible.”

If I say, “I chose this because I considered the reasons and decided that this was the better option,” a compatibilist can say that is sufficient for authorship.

A hard incompatibilist can respond that I still did not ultimately create the character and psychological conditions that made me choose that way.

A libertarian can say that the agent itself can be the ultimate source of the choice without having to have created itself.

So what exactly are we demanding when we say that the choice has to be “ultimately mine”?

Maybe the disagreement is not purely semantic. There are obviously real metaphysical questions about causation, determinism, indeterminism, agency, and control.

But perhaps some arguments are moving from one meaning of “author” or “source” to another without noticing.

For example, saying that I did not ultimately create myself establishes that I am not the ultimate creator of myself. But does it establish that I cannot be the ultimate author of a particular action?

That seems like a separate question.

This is basically what led me to develop my Forgetfulness Argument. I originally developed a hard-incompatibilist framework, then started attacking one of its own assumptions. The argument doesn't claim that amnesia proves free will. It uses the distinction between causal history, knowledge of that history, and present agency to question whether being constituted by antecedent conditions automatically eliminates ultimate authorship.

Maybe the hard incompatibilist is right and ultimate authorship really does require ultimate self-constitution.

Maybe the libertarian is right that an agent can be the genuine source of an action without having created themselves.

Maybe the compatibilist is right that we're asking for an unnecessarily demanding kind of authorship in the first place.

Or maybe we're partly arguing over different meanings of “free will” while thinking we're arguing about the same thing.

I honestly don't know anymore. 😂

I’ve been developing a philosophical framework called Hesusian Interpretation, or HI, which is a hard-incompatibilist argument against ultimate libertarian free will, but I decided to deliberately attack one of the assumptions in my own framework rather than simply defend it. The specific assumption I am targeting is the idea that if an agent did not ultimately create the conditions that constitute them, then they cannot ultimately author any particular action that proceeds from those conditions. HI accepts that people are genuine proximate causes of their actions: if I decide to stand up, I am the person who deliberated, decided, and moved. The stronger question is whether I can be the ultimate author of that decision. The HI argument says that my decision depends upon my character, dispositions, memories, reasoning abilities, preferences, values, brain state, and circumstances, none of which I ultimately created. Those conditions themselves have prior causes, producing a chain of dependence that extends backward. My problem is that this seems to require a further assumption: that ultimate authorship of an individual action necessarily requires ultimate authorship of the agent’s own constitutive conditions. I am calling my attempted challenge to that assumption the Forgetfulness Argument. The thought experiment is this: imagine an agent who has undergone profound autobiographical amnesia. The agent loses access to their personal history but retains substantial cognitive abilities, including reasoning, perception, language, working memory, and the ability to deliberate about things currently in front of them. This is not merely a fictional possibility invented from nothing. Neurological research has repeatedly demonstrated that memory is not one unified system and that severe impairments in autobiographical or declarative memory can coexist with preservation of other cognitive abilities. The famous patient H.M., studied after bilateral medial-temporal-lobe surgery, developed profound anterograde amnesia but retained general intelligence, perception, language, working memory, and procedural learning abilities. Scoville and Milner’s original work showed severe impairment in recent memory while some older memories and technical skills remained intact, and later research on H.M. helped establish the distinction between different memory systems. This matters because it demonstrates that losing access to one's autobiographical history does not simply erase the entire agent. Memory can be fractionated: someone can lose the ability to consciously remember an experience while retaining learned skills or other forms of cognition. Reviews of amnesia research describe preserved procedural learning in many patients with medial-temporal-lobe amnesia, meaning that people can sometimes acquire or express skills without being able to consciously recollect the episodes in which they learned them. The classic example is H.M.'s improvement on motor-skill tasks despite not consciously remembering having practiced them. Similar dissociations have been observed in other amnesic populations, although the exact pattern varies depending on the type and severity of amnesia. There are even striking cases involving complex abilities: research on the severely amnesic musician Clive Wearing reported that despite profound declarative-memory impairment, he retained substantial musical abilities, including reading music, following musical notation, transposing, and improvising. These cases do not prove anything about metaphysical free will, but they provide a scientifically grounded reason to distinguish autobiographical memory from the broader capacity to function as an agent. Now consider a stronger hypothetical version: suppose an agent remembers essentially nothing about the personal history that produced their current psychological state, yet they retain enough reasoning and working-memory capacity to encounter a new problem, consider alternatives, evaluate reasons, and intentionally choose one. They do not know why they have the personality they have, why they possess particular preferences, where their cognitive tendencies came from, or what childhood experiences contributed to them. Nevertheless, they can still deliberate. If they see two possible actions and choose one because they judge it better, their lack of autobiographical access does not obviously prevent them from being the proximate author of that choice. The important question is whether it prevents them from being the ultimate author. This is where the thought experiment becomes relevant to HI. HI can certainly respond that the causal history still exists even if the agent has forgotten it. I agree. Amnesia does not magically erase causation. If the agent's brain state exists because of prior biological development, environmental influences, learning, genetics, neural development, and previous experiences, those antecedent conditions remain causally relevant whether or not the agent remembers them. So the argument is not “the agent forgot their past, therefore their actions are uncaused.” That would be clearly false. The causal structure could remain something like: prior conditions produced the agent’s present state, the present state participates in deliberation, and the deliberation produces the action. The point is instead that epistemic access to the causal history appears to be separable from agency. If I do not remember what caused my present psychological state, that does not automatically make me incapable of reasoning or acting intentionally. This suggests a broader distinction between two propositions: “I did not ultimately create the conditions that made me the kind of agent I am” and “I therefore cannot ultimately author this particular action.” The first does not obviously contain the second. This is the precise assumption I am trying to break. Suppose I did not create my brain. I did not choose my genes. I did not choose the environment in which I developed. I did not choose the people who taught me language. I did not choose the information I encountered as a child. I did not choose the initial conditions from which my personality developed. HI takes all of this seriously. But the question is whether ultimate authorship of a particular choice requires ultimate authorship of all of those conditions. If I deliberate about whether to accept or reject an argument, for example, and my reasoning process genuinely settles on one conclusion, what exactly follows from the fact that the neural architecture enabling that reasoning was not ultimately self-created? It certainly establishes that I am not the ultimate creator of myself. But does it establish that I cannot be the ultimate author of any particular act of reasoning? That is the bridge I am questioning. The strongest version of HI would say yes: the particular decision ultimately depends upon the agent's character and cognitive structure, and the agent did not ultimately choose that character or structure, so the agent cannot be the ultimate source of the decision. But this needs to be argued rather than simply assumed. The fact that something is a necessary condition of my action does not automatically establish that I cannot be its author. My ability to reason depends upon a brain I did not create, but that does not by itself tell us whether the reasoning I perform is genuinely mine in the stronger metaphysical sense. The same distinction appears in the amnesia case. An amnesic person may lack access to the history that produced their current cognitive state while still being capable of performing actions through that state. The empirical evidence is not evidence for libertarian free will; it is evidence that the concepts of memory, causal history, cognition, and agency cannot simply be collapsed into one thing. Research on amnesia has repeatedly shown that explicit autobiographical memory can be severely impaired while other systems, such as procedural learning, remain comparatively preserved. That makes amnesia useful as a philosophical thought experiment because it isolates one variable: knowledge of one's own causal history. If an agent can remain cognitively functional without that knowledge, then “knowing the history that produced me” is not obviously a prerequisite for agency. The deeper philosophical issue is therefore not forgetfulness itself. It is whether being constituted by antecedent conditions is sufficient to eliminate ultimate authorship. Consider two claims: “I did not ultimately author the existence of the agent who is making this decision” and “I did not ultimately author this decision.” HI needs the first to entail the second. My argument is that the entailment is not obvious. It requires a bridge principle: if someone is ultimately the author of a particular action, then they must also be the ultimate author of the conditions constituting themselves. If that bridge principle is true, HI's argument remains intact. But if it is false, then the fact that I did not create myself does not automatically eliminate the possibility that I could be the ultimate author of some particular choice. This does not mean that libertarianism wins. There are still enormous problems. Suppose the decision is completely determined by prior conditions. Then the libertarian can reasonably say that the agent did not genuinely have the relevant alternative possibility. Suppose instead that the decision is genuinely indeterministic. That creates another problem: randomness by itself does not equal authorship. If the outcome occurs merely because of an undetermined event, saying “the agent could have chosen either” does not automatically explain why the agent deserves authorship of the actual outcome. So the argument cannot simply move from determinism to quantum randomness and declare victory. The real challenge for libertarianism is explaining how an agent could be the genuine source of a choice without reducing the choice to either prior determination or luck. This is where agent-causal theories become relevant. A libertarian might say that the agent itself is the source of the choice: the agent does not need to have created its own brain or entire causal history in order to be the source of the particular decision it makes. The agent's history explains why the agent has certain capacities and reasons, while the agent itself is responsible for settling the choice. HI would then need to explain why this kind of agent causation cannot constitute ultimate authorship. My Forgetfulness Argument therefore does not establish that agent causation is true. It simply prevents HI from dismissing the possibility merely by saying that the agent did not create its own antecedent conditions. The question becomes much more precise: can an agent be the ultimate source of a particular choice without being the ultimate source of itself? If the answer is no, then HI needs to explain why. If the answer is yes, then HI's character-regress argument does not by itself eliminate ultimate authorship. This is also why I think the amnesia examples are useful but limited. H.M., Clive Wearing, and other amnesic patients do not demonstrate libertarian free will. Their cases demonstrate neurological dissociations between autobiographical memory, procedural learning, working memory, perception, language, and other capacities. They show that the human mind is not simply one indivisible memory-and-agency system. Severe memory impairment can coexist with meaningful cognitive functioning, although the degree and nature of preserved abilities varies considerably between individuals and conditions. Therefore, I am using the scientific evidence only to support the conceptual separation required by the thought experiment, not as empirical proof of a metaphysical conclusion. The actual philosophical argument is about authorship. HI says, in effect, “You did not ultimately create the conditions that made you the agent you are, therefore you cannot ultimately author what you do.” My response is: “Why does ultimate authorship of an action require ultimate authorship of the agent's constitutive conditions?” The Forgetfulness Argument makes this question especially visible because an agent can lose access to its personal causal history without thereby losing every capacity involved in intentional action. If memory of one's origins is not necessary for ordinary agency, then the fact that an agent does not possess or control the ultimate origins of itself cannot simply be identified with the absence of agency. Of course, HI can respond that ultimate authorship is fundamentally different from ordinary agency and therefore does require ultimate self-constitution. That would be a serious response. But then the burden is to explain why. The argument cannot simply assume the conclusion by defining ultimate authorship so that anyone who did not create themselves is excluded from it. If the definition of ultimate authorship contains self-creation as a necessary condition, then HI has made its conclusion true by stipulation rather than demonstrated it through an independent argument. I therefore think the strongest version of my challenge is not “amnesia proves free will.” It is much narrower: “The fact that an agent did not ultimately create the conditions that constitute them does not, by itself, establish that they cannot ultimately author a particular action.” The amnesia cases provide an empirical analogy showing that causal history, memory of causal history, and present agency can come apart. The philosophical argument then asks whether causal constitution and authorship can also come apart. If HI can demonstrate that they cannot, the Forgetfulness Argument fails. If HI cannot demonstrate that, then I may have found a genuine gap in my own framework. And that is exactly what I am trying to test: not whether I can defend HI, but whether one of its central assumptions actually survives its strongest possible objection.

Thoughts? Feedback? (If you wanna know what Hesusian interpretation is check my profile).

I'm a 15y who has been thinking about economics, and I came up with a thought experiment that I'm curious about: what if capitalism kept markets, private property, profit, competition, entrepreneurship, and investment, but economic success was also judged by whether it made people more capable? By capability, I mean the ability to think, learn, reason, create, solve problems, make informed decisions, understand technology, adapt, and act independently. Imagine two companies: Company A increases productivity by 40%, but its workers gradually lose knowledge of the processes they operate and become increasingly dependent on systems they don't understand, while Company B increases productivity by only 25% but substantially improves its workers' skills, understanding, and ability to solve problems independently. Traditional economic measurements might favor Company A, but would Company B create greater long-term economic value by developing human capability? I'm not arguing that automation or convenience is inherently bad; a calculator, navigation system, or AI tool can reduce the need for certain skills while expanding other capabilities. The question is therefore not simply whether technology replaces human tasks, but what happens to human capability afterward: does it expand, transform, or degrade? I also wouldn't want this to become a system where every person receives a single “capability score,” because that could create discrimination and reduce complicated human abilities to a misleading number. Instead, capabilities could be evaluated in specific contexts, such as whether education improves reasoning, whether workers gain skills, whether AI helps people understand what they are doing, or whether businesses create unnecessary dependence. I know this isn't completely unprecedented, since ideas about human capabilities and development already exist in economics and philosophy, but I'm wondering whether capitalism could incorporate this principle without abandoning its existing mechanisms. Could businesses remain profitable and competitive while also being judged partly by their long-term contribution to human capability? Would this make capitalism more sustainable and developmental, or would it create measurement problems, government overreach, bureaucracy, and restrictions on useful technological progress? Ultimately, my question is: Should an economy be judged not only by what it produces and how much wealth it creates, but also by what its people become capable of doing because of it?