Probably the most annoying thing in philosophical conversation I have encountered on internet philosophy over the years. Whenever someone makes an assertion as to a matter of fact, a very common reaction is to complain that they are "begging the question," or doing "circular reasoning," as if these are fallacious or somehow illegitimate. This has a tendency to stop conversation and cause people to get in moronic loops where nothing gets accomplished and no progress is made and everyone just doubles down in their own ideological corners.

For one, circularity is not even a fallacy. I.e., a question begging argument is not formally invalid. It's completely valid (and potentially even sound) for an argument if that argument is circular. It's at best (but not even always) a rhetorical deficiency in an argument, since circularity is often unpersuasive or could even be part of a pivot away from a more relevant issue in a discussion**.** But unpersuasive or missing the point =/= formally invalid, like it is tacitly assumed most of the time.

Second, all argumentation eventually becomes circular at some level in some way shape or form. There is no way to escape it, especially in metaphysics which alleges to deal with the most fundamental aspects of knowledge and reality.

Example:

Debates over the hard problem of conscious are the absolute worst. The physicalist sits there and accuses the idealist of begging the question against the idea that consciousness is reducible to physical phenomena. The idealist sits there and accuses the physicalist of begging the question against the idea that consciousness is irreducible.

So who is right? I think the hard problem of consciousness has a solution, but you're just going to get accused of begging the question no matter what metaphysical paradigm you choose, idealist or physicalist or otherwise. You can't appeal to empirical phenomena to break the symmetry of circularities either, because then you would need a theory of empirical evidentiary warrant, which would itself be circular.

Example:

Consider the cogito, a classic self-evident truth often considered a starting point for epistemology and an instance of irrefutably certain knowledge. But completely contingent on one's alleged ability of one's self to verify the existence of one's self (which is a kind of circularity). And if you follow Descartes' reasoning, contingent on God's existence (which introduces the so-called 'Cartesian Circle' into his epistemology).

Example:

Theistic Presuppositionalism, an internet favorite and probably one of the most obnoxious forms of theistic argumentation in existence. But here is the catch: I think they are ultimately correct. But presuppositionalism is a perfect example of why circular reasoning can be unpersuasive. Presuppositionalism may be, in my opinion, pointing towards something that is true, but it's dialectically useless and only used seriously by psychopaths that want to solipsistically shut up atheistic debate opponents in a bad faith way.

Conclusion:

I'm just pissed because I was watching tiktok metaphysics debates recently and several of them just devolve into the debaters accusing eachother of question begging. But I see the same thing happen here on reddit all the time. So the conversation just loops people never getting past certain intuitive assertions because both sides just dogmatically dig in.

I’m trying to understand what makes something count as the same thing through change.

For example, a wave can persist as a recognizable pattern even though the medium’s particles only move locally. A candle flame can continue even though the reacting molecules are constantly being replaced. A living organism also exchanges matter over time while still being treated as one continuous being.

So what actually grounds persistence?
Is identity over time better understood as:

- a fixed underlying substance,

- preserved structure,

- causal or process continuity,

- informational continuity,

- or something dependent on scale and context?

More directly: when we say something is “the same thing” despite change, what is actually being preserved?

And can something be continuous at one level while discontinuous at another?

I realize this overlaps with philosophy of physics and ontology, but I’m mainly interested in the metaphysical issue of persistence: what makes identity through change real rather than just a convenient way of speaking?

This is a response to Massimo Pigliucci's two-part essay on Physicalism and Consciousness. Comments welcome

Separating these two is massive deception.

Separating metaphysics from math allows self referential delusion. If you don't separate them, it exposes a massive fallacy: mathematical groups, zero, and infinity have no concrete referents. Logic calls your starting foundational multiplication operation a fallacy because mathematical groups are untethered from raw concrete reality

TLDR: When the field of mathematics claims that formal proofs don't need metaphysical grounding, they can hide the fact that groups, zero, and infinity have no concrete referents. That's deceptive.

*context-this is a part of the opening segment to a full article, which in itself provides “solutions” to the problem at hand,the article will be linked in the comments for those interested*

Determinism relies on the idea of a preceding cause for every occurrence, but what caused the first occurrence?
Every cause is in itself an occurence. If we go to the beginning of time, we are able to find a first event. Since this is the first thing to exist, it seems reasonable to state that nothing came before it. If nothing came before the first event,then there could be no cause. Meaning that should there be a beginning of time, there is also at least one event that has occurred without a cause. This falls outside the rules of determinism and seems to challenge the idea that every occurence has followed determinism’s laws.

*full article in comments,eager for thoughts*

As I said, its quite simple really when you think about it. The fact that things exist and are experienced is a form of literal magic. Whether you think about it in the sense of something coming from nothing (supposedly impossible), a reality with no beginning, just the sheer fact that things exist at all, and the fact things are experienced at all, it has no possible explanation other than literal magic happening for real. Science has no answer to this and I truly believe that this is the most important thing to think about, the fact your here at all. Its the greatest mystery ever. I feel like nobody really notices they exist properly. Never feel the vertigo of staring at a bottomless brute fact, actual magic occurring.

What if the biggest assumption in physics has never been questioned?

Every theory we have — Newton, Einstein, Quantum Mechanics — starts with one silent assumption:

Energy comes first.

But what if that's wrong?

What if the actual order is:

Frequency → Phase → Time → Mass → Energy

Not the other way around.

That means:

• Time is not fundamental — it emerges from oscillation
• Matter is not substance — it's a stabilized frequency
• Energy is not the cause — it's the effect

The equations don't change. Not a single one.

Only the reading direction changes.

And that changes everything about what reality actually is.

Ontology is just this one question:

What comes first?

Physics answers how. Ontology asks why.

For 300 years we assumed energy is the answer.

What if frequency was there before energy even had a name?

What would change in your worldview if frequency — not energy, not matter, not time — was the ground of everything?

The prevailing biology of the modern era describes life as a system. A system is defined as a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network. The NASA definition of life is this: “Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”

However, this way of explaining is to put the cart before the horse.

A living thing is understood as a being whose parts work together for one goal, which is the sustainment of the whole organism. In this sense, the parts comprise truly one being, as this principle that unites the parts is intrinsic to the organism.

However, a machine is not one unified being as much as a heap of sand is not one unified being, as its goal, function is imparted from the outside. Its principle of unity is extrinsic. Its unity is in the perceiver's mind, not in-itself.

Therefore, we can say that a machine or a system is only a metaphor, something that resembles life but not quite. A machine or a system is built to mimic life. The meaning of life is primordial

Before the First Word

To understand reality in its most intimate form, one must undertake a journey beyond atoms, stars, and galaxies, beyond even physics and mathematics themselves, down to the root of what it means to exist.

Imagine the cosmos before there was a cosmos. Before anything was, what existed was not emptiness and not nothingness, emptiness is already a determination, the absence of something; nothingness is already a concept opposed to being. What existed was the Undifferentiated.

Think of it as the ultimate blank canvas. It is pure Being, in a state of absolute potentiality. There is no light and no darkness, because there is no contrast. There is no boundary, no memory, not even the ticking of time. Everything is possible precisely because nothing has yet taken form. There is no “here” and no “there.” There is only the silent and majestic possibility that a page might come to exist.

The First Breath of Existence

And then, from that absolute stillness, the most spectacular event of all occurs: the first Distinction.

A mark. A difference. The universe suddenly declares: “This, and not that.”

In that fraction of eternity, Being ceases to be mere promise and becomes reality. The canvas begins to be painted. Existence is born not as a static block of stone, but as a vibrant process of self-differentiation. The universe divides itself so that it may come to know itself.

But nature, as always, obeys elegant rules. From that first stroke onward, the cosmos imposes upon itself an unbreakable law: no branch of reality may cross and contradict another.

For the story of the universe to make sense, each new distinction must remain coherent with all those that came before it. The cosmos grows by unfolding into harmonious structures, without paradox. In mathematics, we call these non-crossing structures, and they are counted by a beautiful sequence: the Catalan Numbers.

Each number Cₙ enumerates, exactly, the ways in which the universe may continue branching without violating its own logical coherence. The structure of Being is Catalan: reality advances only through paths that respect (and embrace) the history already written.

The Price of Information

Here we reach one of the deepest truths of modern science: information is not merely a handful of data. Information is distinction made real. It is the memory of the universe being engraved. And by engraving that memory, the cosmos forever changes what may happen next.

But there is a cosmic trick. To make a choice is to abandon all the others. To select is to exclude. What, then, happens to the futures the universe did not choose?

They are not erased. They fall beyond reach, into the abyss of the inaccessible. This loss, this excluded excess, is what we call the Araki deficit , a rigorous mathematical measure of the information that escapes because we observe only a finite portion of the cosmos. It is the tax reality pays for choosing to be this reality, and not another.

The physicist Rolf Landauer taught us that this tax is unavoidable. Every time the universe records information irreversibly, it dissipates energy, a minimum cost equal to k_B T ln 2. In the cosmos, where the horizon temperature is T ∼ H/2π and the accessible volume scales as H⁻³, this cost accumulates as an energy density growing with H⁴.
This is not a technical detail: it is the silent bookkeeping between what can be inscribed and what must be paid.

The Horizon and the Cosmic Tension

The limit of what we can see in the universe (our cosmic horizon) is not merely an accident of geometry. It is the very frontier of Being. As Bekenstein and Hawking showed us, the amount of information a horizon can contain is finite, dictated by its area. The page of the universe, however vast, has margins.

And from this arises a magnificent tension. The universe wants to write more information, but every word costs entropy, and the space on the page is limited. How does the cosmos resolve this?

It expands the page itself.

The expansion of the universe is not merely galaxies moving away from one another. It is the geometric form Being found to pay the bill of its own evolution. This bookkeeping appears, with precision, in the modified Friedmann equation

H² = H_bg² + αηD·H⁴,

whose physically admissible solution,

y₋ = 2 / (1 + √(1 − 4ξ)),

is the mathematical proof that the cosmos can grow without ever tearing itself apart. Information presses, entropy demands its price, the horizon imposes a limit and yet Being stretches and remains whole.

And the universe feels this change. Fisher Information acts as a cosmic nervous system, measuring how much each moment of history matters for all the moments that follow. The internal diversity of the cosmos, the rhythm of its expansion, and its sensitivity to its own history are, at bottom, one and the same quantity, seen from three angles.

We Are the Cosmos Writing Itself

When we bring all the pieces together, we realize that the universe is not a collection of objects or substances. The universe is a continuous act of self-writing.

The Undifferentiated differentiates itself.
Distinction becomes memory.
Memory is bounded by a horizon.
The horizon expands to pay the cost of entropy.
And that Cost becomes space and time themselves.

There is no external watchmaker. There is no canvas separate from the painting. Reality is the act by which the universe becomes aware of itself , distinction by distinction, respecting the logical dance of the Catalan Numbers.

The cosmic page continues to be written at this very second. When you look at the stars, when you study a cell, when you understand a new idea, you are not a passive spectator reading a finished book.

As Carl Sagan used to say, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself. You are one of the living strokes of that ink. And every time you perceive a difference and create meaning in your life, you are participating in the most primordial act of the universe: the instant in which the blank page, through your eyes, continues to become the world.

What does this mean?

>Please do be faithful [in reading] because it is at fundamentality so we can't impose external dogmas.

MAIN

There is something - dasein is disclosed with something.

Why there is something at all? (1)

But why has dasein asked that at all? (1.1)

Because a there is something (such a "there is it") is not identical with a why there is it at all.

Thus that something is not a simple, it is not something that a there is it is identical with a why there is it at all.

For (1), because there is simples.

As there is simples, there is those why there is simples at all. (2)

As dasein is disclosed with simples, such a disclosure shows it all. (2.1)

If there is no simple, why there is no simple? (3)

(3) says that to reject there is simples, one ought to give a why, else it is just a brute rejection, which is not philosophy.

To reject there is simples, one may reject its coherence. (3.1)

Or one may reject it through something else. (3.2)

(3.1) is not tenable, because it is a simple.

(3.2) is not tenable, because of a transcendental against rejection.

That is, if anything is posited for (3.2) then instantly we ask "why there is such?" and "why there is a why for such?" and so on, as simples are to be rejected, either this regress or it ends in something brute, of which has never answered "why there is it at all?", or it just ends in there is simples once more.

This transcendental asking applies to any rejection of any non proper part of the argument.

Futher more for if (2.1) then:

Why shouldn't we say there is no simples if we have not seen it? (2.2)

Because there is its coherence (because of the coherence of (2.x)). (2.3)

As its coherence cannot be rejected at all, there is no explanation for why there is it (the coherence) but the transcendental deduction that there is simples.

As for simples, their coherence and their disclosure are derivative of them (trivial because they are simples).

To reject (2.3) the transcendental against rejection is used once more, and so forth.

Thus there is simples because there is their coherence.

Notes:

(2) and (2.1) are the formal definition of simples through dasein, we then challenge a rejection of it.

The rejection of there is simples as framed in the passage is the rejection of the formal definition.

As it can't be rejected, that formal definition (its coherence) has shown there is it.

Its coherence is not its direct disclosure, because the definition is not through itself, but through dasein.

That is to say it is so intelligible that its formal coherence (a derivative of it) alone ensures there is it, while it need not be seen directly.

The formal definition’s coherence alone ensures there is simples.

The point is that after the formal posit, any why at all leads to it. Thus anything at all simply shows there is simples (as understood formaly now).

ADDITION

Further more, any argument for monism is only additional, iff and only iff they have shown why there is only a simple. For the formal definition concerns what simples are, and no more.

Though we can give the ways:

If there is any sense of being at all there is only one sense, because any fixed posit of senses cannot answer the why of such.

In the other case, there is no sense of being at all, we simply say there is simples, or more strictly, there is each [simple], and each simple grounds only and strictly itself and derives those which it derives, plurality is thus derivative of simples, not the reverse.

(An inquiry to this will be available in another post).

What is truth if you can’t accept truth? Before we play semantics let’s establish what truth is with no rhetoric.

Truth is a statement or proposition that accurately corresponds to objective reality or facts independent of anyone’s beliefs feelings or acceptance. For example the Earth orbits the Sun is true whether someone accepts it or not.
So what happens when individuals or entire communities literally cannot or will not accept a truth? Even when alternative interpretations are formally allowed the pursuit of those interpretations carries much higher social professional reputational and epistemic costs. These costs have little to do with the actual evidence and everything to do with protecting a preferred narrative.

This happens through several reliable mechanisms. Questions are reframed so that the uncomfortable truth appears irrelevant confused or in bad faith. Responses repeatedly appeal to certain authorities as final rather than evaluating claims on their merits. Challengers face ever escalating demands for proof while the dominant view gets a free pass. The result is that discourse is pulled back toward the accepted story no matter what new evidence or logic appears.

In practice this means many who claim to seek truth are actually liars. They refuse to accept what is demonstrably true not because they have better evidence or arguments but because doing so would cost them status credibility community standing or self image. The inability or unwillingness to accept truth reveals a gap between what is real and what people are psychologically or socially capable of admitting.

I am not interested in semantics games or gotchas. I want to know how philosophers understand this phenomenon. When a community systematically applies these mechanisms to suppress or distort certain truths are they still doing philosophy or are they engaged in narrative protection? Under what conditions does this kind of refusal become indefensible? How do we distinguish legitimate caution from motivated refusal of truth?

Serious answers only.

I'm no mathematician so maybe I misunderstand but it seems to me like something in zfc might be arbitrary. I think I understand the concept of a set, where the quantity of 5 is a set of 5 thus numbers are sets. However, let's take the idea of an empty set.

Now my understanding of what an empty set is, is a box of chocolates w/o any chocolate. It's purely a mental overlay of reality when we say the box is an empty set. But the question is does nature deal in empty sets outside of the one's invented by our minds?

It seems to me that if mathematics may be said to exist in some capacity, such as if math is merely the laws or rules of existence, that it would not be meaningful to have an "empty set". As that's saying there is something ontologically more to a set than it being the collection of things in a set. In one instance your saying a set is a thing in and of itself, in the other "set" just refers to the things collectively considered such that an absence of the things leaves you with no set rather than something that's empty.

This "something" that is called a "set" such that it can even be empty seems like something that has no ontological reality and things that have no ontological reality can't be said to exist.

I guess the question is if mathematics exists mind independently can an empty set actually exist also or is it merely invention and if so how can the concept be said to be a "foundation" of math? Thoughts?

A living man can always lie about death, only a dead man cannot.

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.” - Albert Camus

To be fair, I have not read the rest of Camus’ work and do not know much of his philosophy in detail beyond a vague idea of absurdism.

And yet his quote, out of context, relates to the hypothetical I shall present to you now.

Say, imagine you are presented with two options. You must choose one, you cannot choose both and you cannot choose neither, as “both” and “neither” are not the options presented here.

◻️: The continuation of whatever is now. You are offered exactly what you posses right now, and nothing else. With this choice, you are given nothing, implying what it seems. No mystical upgrades, no extra riches, no additional peace, no escape from reality, no cosmic secrets, no nothing! You simply get this moment and its continued chain of events. With nothing, you get to keep life as it currently is, nothing special, just what you’ve already got.

◼️: Unimaginable Perfection. You are offered the singular most desirable thing one can behold, something so beyond perfection, it is unimaginable. However, in order to obtain this, you must surrender everything; every, singular, thing that is possibly imaginable in exchange.

So, which do you choose?

The consequences of ◻️: Nothing. Life remains exactly as it is and you go on, perhaps remembering this experience to be an odd one, perhaps forgetting it. Losing it to the memory of what could have been. However, you never lose the ability to question what ◼️ is, you just never quite get a textbook answer.

The consequence of ◼️: Nothing. Because you have surrendered everything, nothing is all you are left with. You cannot experience, know, see, hear, feel, or perceive your “prize”. You don’t get to enjoy it, you don’t even know it exists. This option means to give nothing by taking away everything. This option is death, the cessation of all.

Do you keep everything you already have, even if it just something, and anything could happen to it? Or do you decide the ◼️ and choose the “thing of perfect” even if it requires total destruct obtain.

The truth of the matter, is that the means of experience, the perception in and of the moment now is the only thing we totally have and it’s already now. If you wouldn’t be willing to trade your literal, entire life (which only truly exists in this moment) in this moment, for the “ultimate prize” then you admit that no matter how small or miserable, life or ◻️ feels, it’s still better than than what’s promised as “ultimate perfection” or ◼️

To pick ◼️ is to willingly choose total and immediate non-existence. Any argument for ◼️ suggests that ◻️ is the superior. By remaining within the moment to argue, you argue exactly why ◼️ isn’t better, regardless of the stance.

The answers and their arguments

“I choose ◻️, because ◼️ is worse.” The survival instinct. You see immediately that ◼️ cannot be better, given that you have to die in order to obtain it.

“I chose ⬜️, because ◻️is better.” The acceptance of life as it is. This is arguably the strongest stance to take, one could argue that death isn’t something to be avoided, but that life has value in and of itself. You choose to have found your everything or at least enough within your slice of something, since that can be anything.

“I choose ◼️, because ◻️ is worse.” The hope for something beyond the pain of life. You take an interesting stance, you argue that you want ◼️, all while actively choosing ◻️. In fact you use ◻️, benefiting from a it’s qualities to argue why ◻️is worse.

“I choose ◼️, because ◼️ is better.” The grand idea of death. You cannot say something is “better” if that thing has nothing to be compared to. You cannot even take the idea of “better” or “perfection”, or capacity to “experience” with you to ◼️. You argue that ◼️ is superior, and yet remains solely within ◻️ to do so. Not to enjoy ◼️, but to enjoy merely the unfathomable, unimaginable, idea of the “perfection” of ◻️.

Deep down, anyone choosing to remain alive, despite their situations and circumstances, prove they wouldn’t want to trade the simple “now” for something “unimaginably perfect”.

And yet as a living man, perhaps this is merely a lie I’m telling about a death I’ve never experienced.

This article argues that there are two fundamental arrows of time, and a third referred to as duration, that function such that no actual change occurs in the Universe.