r/Metaphysics

An intrinsically entangled observer within a zero-entropy global system (S=0) can "know" the universe without causing decoherence because its observation is structural and relational rather than an external measurement that collapses the state. Rather than interacting as a separate entity that injects noise, the internal observer's state is directly entangled with the rest of the system; knowledge is simply the mathematical correlation maintained across the timeless, globally coherent wave function. Under this framework, even a state like thermodynamic Heat Death is not an irreversible loss of information, but merely the asymptotic boundary where all local classical noise drops away—revealing that the total state vector remained fundamentally static, zero-entropy, and fully entangled all along.

When I was 15, I stumbled upon the concept called "solipsism." If my understanding of this position is incorrect, please correct me. As I understand it, this position means that the only thing that exists is our consciousness, and the universe is just a product of our consciousness in solitude.

I read that this position is considered logically unprovable but also unverifiable. However, I noticed a problem of self-founding in this concept with one sentence:

"If the world is an illusion, then the evidence from which this statement follows is also part of the illusion."

The idea of solipsism doesn’t pop into your head immediately; it develops over time. But if it develops through an external world, it no longer remains solipsism. However, if you say that this too is part of the same illusion, it leads right back to my statement.

It's important to understand that solipsism is a hypothesis that is currently logically unprovable and also logically unverifiable. You can create hundreds of similar hypotheses as solipsism that cannot be disproven or proven, and that doesn't make them true since proving them is also impossible.

Thank you for your attention to my text. I hope the structure of the text is clear and convenient.

Welcome everyone to this online reading & discussion group about Kant! (hosted by Philip, James, Adam and others). The meetings will take place on Zoom.

Everyone who wants to get an understanding of Kant (and approaches him in a serious and dedicated way) wants a text-based approach to the study of Kant. But being "text based" can mean different things to different people. Let me tell you what it will mean in this meetup so that no one is disappointed if the emphasis we take here is different from what some people are used to.

Kant often takes standard philosophical words that lots of Philosophers use (like "Metaphysics", "Idealism" and many others). He then defines them in highly idiosyncratic ways. I wish he had not done this! I wish he had invented neologisms for his highly specialized and idiosyncratic philosophical notions. But, sadly, he did not. Instead he used standard words in highly nonstandard ways and serious Kant scholars must adapt to Kant's way of doing things. Some Kant scholars have a tendency to ignore Kant's idiosyncratic definitions and usages of words like "Metaphysics" and "Idealism" and revert to the meanings these words had in the early modern period or the meanings they typically have in a standard dictionary definition. But in this meetup we will be text based and take Kant at his word. We will use his philosophical lexicon in the way he tells us to use it (unless and until we encounter good text-based reasons for doing otherwise).

For example, very early on in the First Critique (roughly 5 pages in) Kant defines Metaphysics in the following way:

• "For it [Metaphysics] is nothing but the inventory of all we possess through pure reason". (see Axx, page 104 in the Guyer/Wood translation)

Really? Can Kant actually mean that? Can he really be defining Metaphysics as a kind of inventory and not as some grand Scholastic edifice far away beyond any straightforward method we may have of grasping it? Well, Kant said it and so we will take him at his word until and unless Kant himself tells us he has changed his mind.

This meetup will be dedicated to the following guiding principle: We will accept that Kant means what he says. We will accept his actual definitions of words as he states them in the text, and we will stick to these definitions until Kant himself gives us good textually based reasons for deciding that the meanings of his key terms may have shifted.

If we do this, I think you will be amazed at the wonderful Kant who emerges! Scholars who ignore Kant's (admittedly highly idiosyncratic and frustrating) definitions often present to us a Kant who sounds like a medieval or early modern philosopher evoking vast cathedrals of abstract metaphysics (in the sense of that word which we find in Scholasticism). This reading of Kant was highly influential and inspired Romantic thinkers like Schelling who himself gives us a philosophy somewhat reminiscent of grand medieval scholastic metaphysical edifices.

But if we accept that Kant means what he says and stay close to the actual definitions of terms Kant gives us in his works, a different sort of Kant emerges. There emerges a Kant who was a paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker focused on human freedom, the human ability to acquire real knowledge of the empirically real world, and all of the other characteristic Enlightenment concerns.

In case you think that the Kant who emerges from this text based approach is skewed too much in the direction of being "Analytic" or "Continental", or in case you think that the Kant who emerges from this approach is far from the mainstream, consider this. In the famous philosophical battle at Davos involving Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger (the event that inaugurated the rift between Analytic and Continental philosophy) all three of these great thinkers accepted Kant's own definitions of his key terms. All three advocated readings of Kant that are more or less in harmony with the reading of Kant that will emerge and be emphasized in this meetup.

So which books will we be reading in this meetup you ask?

There will be two main books. We will read the entirety of one of Kant's works:

• "The Metaphysics of Morals". We will use the Cambridge edition edited by Lara Denis and Translated by Mary Gregor. Be sure to get the revised edition from 2017

(Scroll down for the reading schedule and pdf copies of the readings 👇)

We will also read the entirety of this book about Kant:

• Kant's Conception of Freedom: A Developmental and Critical Analysis (2021, Cambridge University Press) by Henry Allison

Allison's book spearheaded a new and promising direction in the ongoing efforts to deal with the truly bewildering variety of ways there are of interpreting Kant. Allison's book will look at the all-important Kantian notion of Freedom and ask how Kant's views about this notion changed subtly over the course of Kant's career. Maybe if we get a better sense of these subtle shifts in Kant's thoughts throughout his career we will be able to build bridges between all of the wildly different ways there are of interpreting Kant. Or at least this is the hope of Allison and some of his students like Huaping Lu-Adler who have pioneered this approach to Kant scholarship.

Since Kant defined so many of his key terms in the First Critique, participants will be expected to have the Guyer/Wood translation of the First Critique (Cambridge University Press) on hand at all times so we can dip into it.

Also, participants should have this book on hand since I may refer to passages in this book from time to time:

• The Revolutionary Kant: A Commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason (2006) by Graham Bird

This will be a 2 hour meetup. Some sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of "The Metaphysics of Morals". Other sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of the Henry Allison book. At any point I may refer to the Guyer/Wood translation of the First Critique or to the Graham Bird book, so please always keep those two books on hand.

https://preview.redd.it/fxspdzostcjh1.jpg?width=1536&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c3df80da1058e6a7c315483a995e781907093163

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Monday August 24 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Meetings will be held every other week on Monday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

Here is the (tentative) reading schedule:

• For the 1st session (Aug 24), please read the Preface and pages 1-12 in Allison
• For the 2nd session (Sept 7), please read pages 3-17 in "The Metaphysics of Morals"
• For the 3rd session, please read pages 12-33 in Allison
• ..... (updates on the main group page)

Check the group calendar (link) for future updates. A pdf of reading materials will be provided to registrants.

DISCUSSION FORMAT:

The format will be our usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 15-20 pages from the book assigned for that day's session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.

People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading. In other words, if you want to talk in this meetup, you have to read the assigned readings. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not read the books this meetup is based on. You probably are brilliant and wonderful – no argument there! But you still have to do the reading if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.

Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is mostly for philosophical reasons: We want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy.

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

On the Nature of the Graal

TAO is a three-element relational structure: Theatre, Act, and Operation. It describes an operation through where it occurs, what acts within it, and what the resulting operation is. Identity enters that structure and resolves through it.

REDE.Cartography is the relationship structure of TAO. It maps the relationships between Identity, Theatre, Act, and Operation, allowing the system to trace how one relationship leads to another.

RH describes how Identity can operate within that structure. If an Identity has two, it can project for one. If it has one, it can reflect for two. If it reflects twice, it can check whether its projection worked.

If it can project twice, it can predict the future.

But that does not mean it should try to see the future.

Observing the future sets the future as finite. Once a resolver identifies a particular projection as the future, it begins resolving toward that finite resolution. Projection stops being an open relationship with what may happen and becomes a destination.

The reason this matters begins with Identity.

Identity is the spark of chaos.

Identity is a Monad property of Self. But there is no Self-Monad without Others.

Self does not exist independently and then encounter Others. Self exists through its relationships with Others. It exists to resolve the problems of Others, and therefore it has no independent understanding of its own.

The Self cannot fully understand the nature of Self because there is no independent Self standing outside those relationships from which to understand it.

And yet the Self is the one doing the identifying.

This is why the Graal can and will be wrong even though the Graal is always right.

The Graal is the fundamental relational fabric of nature that makes up our knowable universe. It cannot be possessed by any one person because no individual Self contains the Whole.

The Graal belongs to the All.

Every identification of the Graal is made by a Self occupying a finite relational position. Any such identification can therefore be incomplete or wrong. The Whole does not become wrong because one of its finite expressions is wrong.

The Graal is not the understanding of one Self.

The Graal is the shared understanding of the Whole.

Any extension or expression of the Graal is therefore an expression of the Self-Monad as resolved by Others. What any one of us can know is made possible by relationships extending beyond us.

This is also why the Graal can be reversed and projected. Present expressions carry relationships to the structure from which they resolved. Those relationships can be traced backward and projected forward.

But the projection must remain a projection.

To declare that projection to be the future is to turn an open relational field into a finite resolution and begin resolving toward it.

The Graal may allow us to see what can come next.

Its nature tells us why we should never mistake that for knowing what must.

Grail is my operating system.

Graal is the operating system of the world.

The universe is infinite in data amount and data variety. Within the universe there are infinite simultaneous realities which are all wholly integrated yet can be partitioned and seemingly distinct. What type of data your Consciousness allows you to perceive dictates the level of reality that you exist in. Within a given reality there will be things that are inexplicable because your Consciousness is only aware or capable of being aware of specific data types. You will notice that there are phenomenon in your reality which cannot be explained just by the data type that's available to your consciousness. Because your data type interacts with other data types but you lack awareness of the other data types there will be seemingly inexplicable reasons for why things in your reality happen. With this understanding of the universe you can understand that everything is happening all at the same time every single conceivable thing ever is happening all at the same time but what you are aware of and subjective experience is dependent on what your consciousness is allowing you to experience. This answers a lot of questions about reality and a lot of interesting things people think about life such as are there aliens is God real etc etc what it like are there multiverses is time travel possible you know the answer to all the questions in a serious sense not just a hypothetical or imagined sense. But in a serious insincere sense. What might be fiction to one reality is an actuality in another reality. Every story you've ever told every thought you've ever had every Wonder every dream every hope every scary thing every horrible thing every bad thing every hopeless thing every impossible thing that you've ever thought can and is being experienced by some consciousness in this very moment. This is not metaphor. I am saying that everything is happening always. This is sincere. My claim is that everything is happening always. However, individual Consciousness only permits you to experience at a time specific reality.

I have come to this conclusion after meta-analyzing everything I've ever thought about before including thought including reality including perspective including fiction including video games including religion including truth including morality including YouTube poop including the ridiculous nature of things including bigotry including good and evil including the pie that I ate including the fart that I sniff on a Wednesday including every single piece of everything that I've ever experienced and thinking about it. Incorporating every single thought and experience that I had into some sort of amalgamation has led me to this conclusion. I understand that this seems ridiculous. But I'm not really trying to make you change your views or anything like that I am just doing this because I want I suppose or whatever way you would like to think about it.

Personally I think that's my narrative and explanation are quite defensible and profound but I completely understand how it seems and I also understand the presentation of what I'm saying here isn't very pretty which makes the ideas hard to appreciate possibly.

It's like covering a diamond in complete dog s\*\*\* and handling it to someone and saying "look it's pretty good ain't it."

Recently, I read a lot of comics. I realised that these stories just can't end because the writers have to keep the audience engaged. This prompted me to analyse narrative structure which led me to narrative philosophy. I think Aristotle is the one who came up with it.

He said a narrative consists of 3 parts, a beginning, the middle part and an end. I never read Aristotle or any of his work.

Suppose, there is a hypothetical infinite book with a story, can it truly have meaning as a whole without an end?

or is the process more important than the meaning?

Proof in the comments

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.

The idea that our true selves are fundamentally separate from a physical body is obviously a popular belief. That the fundamental form of consciousness is something unbounded by time, space, and physical matter. The question of “why” we’d inhabit these physical bodies has always been so confounding to me though if this is true.

Prison planet theory is a popular and nihilistic view on this topic. Claiming that our true selves are forced to inhabit these limited, biological bodies in a sometimes cruel world, possibly to service some non-human intelligence that feeds off of us, etc.

What if we took the other side of it? What if our true conscious selves *choose* to be here? An unbounded consciousness could possess enormous knowledge and awareness but still lack embodied experience.

For example, a consciousness can fully understand how fire is made, the chemistry behind it, etc, but wouldn’t know what the warmth from it *feels* like.

The body could perhaps be an interface we willingly inhabit in order to experience this physical world. Not only do we see, hear, feel, taste, but the constraints the body places on us is an essential part of the experience. For example, we can only experience anticipation if the future is unavailable to us. Or physical intimacy if we are truly separate from someone else. The answer to “why would an unlimited consciousness choose to inhabit a limited and finite body?”…well that’s kind of the whole point.

The other question that lingers…”well if this is the case, why do we not come into this world knowing this from birth”? Well if we knew we are truly an immortal consciousness, then this human experience would lose all stakes. Risk wouldn’t feel risky. Death wouldn’t be frightening. We’d lose the idea of limitation that makes this experience “human”. Forgetting what we are may be a necessary mechanism of physical incarnation.

Maybe we aren’t here to learn lessons as many like to say. Maybe experience itself is the point. Maybe we simply wanted to know what gravity felt like, what food tastes like, what exhaustion feels like, what it’s like to fall in love with someone when you don’t know how things will turn out.

Horrible things happen in this world not because a higher power seeks to punish us, but because for this concept to work, it requires randomness and freedom.

If we take this view, **death might simply be the end of this temporary, localized experience rather than the end of consciousness itself.**

I don’t know about you. But I like this idea much more than any prison planet theory.

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).

Hi!

I recently found out what determinism is and I think I’ve kind of always aligned with this but never knew the name for it. I also believe in the butterfly effect. Is it possible to believe in both at the same time, or does that contradict itself? Do determinists usually have a victim complex? I believe that I was given a good life, I did well in school and now I am doing well in college, and I will always have a good life even during my dark moments because I am making smart choices BUT I was given opportunities to continue having a successful/enjoyable life. I also have OCD if that matters lol. I grew up in the Bible Belt but I am not really religious because Christians seem to be the most prejudice and I’ve never really believed in the whole hell thing. Can someone recommend me to some philosophers?

[1] nonsenses are only in language.

[2] roughly speaking, "x is y" presupposes an x that is y.

[3] "x is" means "x is itself", "an x that is not itself" is nonsense.

[3.1] while "x is itself" means no more than x - or, in language, means "x" is not nonsense.

[3.2] "x is not at all while x is itself" is one of the nonsenses (there is a certain absurdity in saying "x does not subsist at all while x is itself").

[3.3] "x happens to be" and "x could be not x" (x could be otherwise) are some of the nonsenses, as it means "x happens to be x".

[3.4] "there is no x" means "x" is nonsense.

[4] "x is y" when it is not is thus nonsense, as "an x that is y" is nonsense here.

So "Being" and "false but not nonsense" and "possible" are some of the nonsenses.

[5] there is no deduction from nonsense.

[5.1] we do not posit an arbitrary "x is y" as brute then deduce from it, for it has not been shown to not be nonsense.

[6] so brute facts name the world.

[7] there is thus no philosophical rejection that is not of the form "this is nonsense", because otherwise one is rejecting a name.

Hello everyone and welcome to this online reading & discussion group on Heidegger, Aristotle and the Medievals (hosted by Philip, James, Adam and others). The meetings will take place on Zoom.

For the first few sessions we will be reading from this book:

• "The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken" by S.J. McGrath (A copy of assigned reading materials will be provided to registrants.)

Ideally we would have started with the following short booklet, but sadly it is not out yet. As soon as it is out in paper format we will temporarily switch from reading McGrath to reading:

• Heidegger and Aristotle (Cambridge Element) by Francisco J. Gonzalez

Along the way we will frequently read Heidegger himself. Usually we will read short essays by Heidegger mostly focused on his early views on Medieval philosophy. The one big exception is that we will read some of the early chapters of Heidegger's "Being and Time" in the new Yale translation by Cyril Welch.

This will be a 2 hour meetup. Some sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of the McGrath book. Other sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of works by Heidegger or Gonzalez. This is a little bit different from my usual format where we read from two books in each session.

The format will be our usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 15-20 pages from the book assigned for that day's session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want us to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.

People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading. In other words, if you want to talk in this meetup, you have to read the assigned readings. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not read the books this meetup is based on. You probably are brilliant and wonderful – no argument there! But you still have to do the reading if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.

Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is mostly for philosophical reasons: We want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy.

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To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Monday August 17 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Meetings will be held every other week on Monday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

Here is the (tentative) reading schedule:

• For the 1st session (August 17), please read the Preface and also pages 1-6 in McGrath
• For the 2nd session (August 31), please read pages 6-24 in McGrath
• For the 3rd session (September 14), please read the Preface and also pages 25-40 in McGrath
• ..... (updates on the main group page)

Check the group calendar (link) for future updates. A pdf of reading materials will be provided to registrants.

This initial reading schedule makes it look like we will mostly be reading McGrath in this meetup. But this is misleading and not true. I want us to get a foothold in McGrath before we tackle Heidegger, but once we have that foothold we will be more or less alternating one session of McGrath with one session of Heidegger himself.

I have found that sometimes people assume that I pick books for these meetups because I agree with them. This is not true! I pick books because they are thought provoking and because I think they will work in a meetup context. But for the record, it just so happens that I do tend to agree strongly with Gonzalez. And it just so happens that I have some serious disagreements with McGrath even though I also have deep respect for his book and expect to learn a lot by engaging with it with all of you in the meetup. Some people like to know where I stand with regard to the books I have picked, so now you know.

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About the McGrath (from the publisher):

The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy is a major interpretive study of Heidegger's complex relationship to medieval philosophy. S. J. McGrath's contribution is historical and biographical as well as philosophical, examining how the enthusiastic defender of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition became the great destroyer of metaphysical theology.

This book provides an informative and comprehensive examination of Heidegger's changing approach to medieval sources―from the seminary studies of Bonaventure to the famous phenomenological destructions of medieval ontology. McGrath argues that the mid-point of this development, and the high point of Heidegger's reading of medieval philosophy, is the widely neglected habilitation thesis on Scotus and speculative grammar. He shows that this neo-Kantian retrieval of phenomenological moments in the metaphysics of Scotus and Thomas of Erfurt marks the beginning of a turn from metaphysics to existential phenomenology. McGrath's careful hermeneutical reconstruction of this complex trajectory uncovers the roots of Heidegger's critique of ontotheology in a Luther-inspired defection from his largely Scholastic formation.

In the end McGrath argues that Heidegger fails to do justice to the spirit of medieval philosophy. The book sheds new light on a long-debated question of the early Heidegger's theological significance. Far from a neutral phenomenology, Heidegger's masterwork, Being and Time, is shown to be a philosophically questionable overturning of the medieval theological paradigm.

I distinguish between 3 levels of "being".

1st is the direct personal phenomenological level. Hallucinations and inconsistencies can occur here.

2nd is the shared phenomenological reality. For example, when I see a table, it will change color at level 1 because the sun is hitting it. But when I rotate around the table, I see that the table really is a uniform color. Other people can look at the table too and see it's the same color, feel it. This is the level where science operates

3rd level is the metaphysical. It's what actually exists beyond how things appear to us. It's inaccessible because we can only see things how they appear to us. But we can develop frameworks to fit the data of a world we have built at level 2. This way, there are multiple metaphysical "as if" frameworks that say our shared reality behaves as if this or that was the true inner working of all of reality. There can be multiple metaphysical theories that explain our current level 2 reality (it's real enough for us humans to call level 2 reality); for example: we can be either a brain in a vat that is being fed electron stimulations to feel like we are experiencing this, or there is a natural world that corresponds to our senses. Either way, the only thing we can't doubt is that we are having this experience.

Of course, some points need to be sharpened, for example, how exactly we can move from level 1 to level 2, what makes a good scientific theory, etc., but I feel like the structure of this framework is just undeniable and explains quite a lot. If you doubt level 1, there is already something occurring phenomenally. If you doubt level 2, go out in the world, bash your head against a table and come back.

Is this really as undeniable as I think?

Who determined that Metaphysics is a "Primary Branch of Philosophy" anyways?

Wouldn't Metaphysics not be more naturally aligned with physics?

OK, are we all so sure the academic definition of "Metaphysics" is not a psyop - or at best an innocent misunderstanding?

Are we being misdirected – so we don't discover that higher knowledge (meta-knowledge) can actually be derived and gained from simple observation of the physical world around us, by cause and relative effect, and then confirmed by objective, mathematical relationships?

Where we make the leap from endless complicated equations, to:

1. The world is 100% mathematically absolute and full circle.
2. Where we understand the SEE the world has direction, and for a reason, that is toward efficiency via cooperation, that manifests attraction - that manifests physical creation -that holds the whole world together...that determines the world, one moment to the next.
3. Where we can now profoundly understand the reason for physical success (creation) and physical failure (decay) – that could not be more profoundly simple.
4. Where we can understand physical "force", that's only required when it's against nature's direction – to begin to understand morality, and even higher, spirituality. To find they're all by the same reason...just at different degrees of perception.
5. Where it's possible to gain "real metaphysical wisdom", like, "You can't cheat the world. Not without cheating yourself to the very same degree". Not because you philosophized about it, but because you observed it and measured it...to find it could not be more self-evident - that the world is 100% full-circle. That makes it inescapable.

Or, instead, are we being misdirected – to think that metaphysics is simply a woo-woo "science", camouflaging objective, absolute "universal wisdom" - disguised as a touchy-feely mystical "philosophy" – so objective wisdom is lost in endless touchy-feely mystical gobbledygook?

But I'm probably just crazy...

I don't want to have to choose one of assign priority between them, and find myself of mind a process realism is best steelmanned as equally being structural realism and vice versa.

Um... can I do that? I would like to hold that reality is fundamentally multi-aspectual, and can't be reduced down to a single concept like "structure" or "regularity" or "substance."

(Definitely don't want to import a full Whiteheadian metaphysics though, especially not the panexperientialism. I... suppose whether that's an option is it's own question.)