I don’t necessarily mean a huge dramatic belief. It could be about work, family, religion, money, relationships, politics, health, or just how life works. I’m thinking about that weird in-between stage where you still technically “believe” something, but you notice you’ve stopped arguing for it. Maybe you avoid the topic, maybe the old explanation starts feeling weak, or maybe you realize you’re only defending it out of habit. What was the belief, and what made you realize you had already started letting it go?

Is silence a sign of submission or weakness, or can it be an act of resistance and defiance? We’re interested to hear your perspectives.

Moral admissions have consequences. If we say that killing children is horrific, then that belief must bind us. It cannot remain a sentiment. It cannot appear after the child is dead and disappear before the action is taken. If killing children is horrific, then children should only die when there is truly no other option. That is the standard. Not when it is useful. Not when it is understandable. Not when it is emotionally satisfying. Not when the enemy is guilty. Not when the military advantage is real. Only when it is necessary. This is not a radical claim. It is one of the deepest moral principles human beings already possess. No decent person believes children should be killed unnecessarily. The argument is simply that war should not be exempt from that standard. War makes this harder. Of course it does. Moral progress in war always makes war harder. Civilian protection makes war harder. Prisoner protections make war harder. Medical protections make war harder. Limits on weapons make war harder. That is the point. Moral limits exist because effectiveness is not the only value. The question is not whether force can ever be justified. It can. The question is not whether violent actors may be stopped. They may. The question is not whether a state may protect its people. It may. The question is narrower: Was this harm necessary? Was this method necessary? Was there truly no other option? A war may be necessary and still contain actions that are not. A military response may be justified in principle and still fail in method. A target may matter and still not justify the cost. The burden rises with the horror. If an action will foreseeably kill children, the defence must be strong enough to carry dead children. Not perfect certainty. Human life does not offer perfect certainty. But confidence proportionate to the harm. Confidence that the method was necessary. Confidence that less destructive options were not merely slower, harder, riskier, or less satisfying, but genuinely insufficient. That burden belongs to those who act. A critic does not need to prove that a better path would certainly have worked. No path is certain. The critic only needs to show reasonable uncertainty about necessity. If serious doubt remains over whether the children had to die, the burden has not been met. There is a simple way to feel the burden. Imagine a leader’s own family were among the hostages, and the chosen method might kill them. Slower and narrower options would immediately become easier to imagine. Delay would become easier to tolerate. Negotiation would become easier to consider. Precision would become more urgent. Risk to soldiers would become easier to accept. That does not prove what the correct action is. It proves that “there was no other option” is a serious claim, not a slogan. This is not an accusation of hypocrisy. It is a test of moral confidence. When innocent life becomes close, restraint feels natural. If restraint becomes obvious when the children are close to us, we should be careful before saying restraint was impossible when the children were distant. Human shields do not remove this burden. If a jihadi hides behind a child, the child does not become killable. The fighter does not become immune forever. But the child remains protected. You do not shoot through the child unless not shooting means immediate, unavoidable, greater innocent death. That should be as true in Gaza as it would be in London. Enemy evil does not erase innocent life. Danger does not erase innocent life. Future threat does not erase present innocence. If the child does not need to die, the child must not die. This is the standard. Call it Necessary War. Not pacifism. Not surrender. Not denial of danger. A stricter frame for the use of force. Just War asks when war can be justified. Necessary War asks whether this war, this method, and this death were unavoidable. That is the frame our own moral admissions now require. This matters because something has changed. Even many defenders of modern war now admit the horror. They do not say dead children are good. They do not say civilian suffering is beautiful. They say it is tragic. They say it is horrific. They say it was necessary. That is moral progress. For much of history, war did not need to apologise for itself. Now even the wronged aggressor often feels compelled to mourn what war produces. That is not nothing. It means the moral centre has moved. The old reflex still reaches for war. But the human conscience no longer fully accepts what war does. That tension is the opening. The next step is to make the admission binding. If killing children is horrific, then necessity must become the threshold. A child should die in war only when there is genuinely no other option. We already believe this. Now our actions have to rise to meet it.

Sorry for this long post, my major is in theoretical linguistics, but I've also taken classes in philosophy and physics, and this issue is relevant to all branches of science and humanities. I'll use Noam Chomsky as an example, but this can be applied to basically any dualist, such David Chalmers, who reacts to criticism by moving the goalposts and rejects materialism, because they want to protect the perceived uniqueness of the human ego.

Why do you think Chomsky's obviously unscientific hypotheses (not "theories", which many ppl call their ideas to make them sound more plausible) are treated as an almost indispensable part of linguistic education (i.e. not as part of the history of the evolution of linguistics as a field, but as a still active area of study relevant even today)? Yes, there are some critics, but his ideas are still taught as if they were true or at least the most likely framework. While in reality, most of his points are either completely unfalsifiable Cartesian dualist philosophy or - when falsified and shown to be incorrect - he moves the goalposts and changes his original definitions, essentially creating a God of the gaps instead of a scientific theory.

His internalist approach treats language as a biological faculty with an infinite potential, but it is, by definition, also a set of constraints. He says that even the mildest version of linguistic relativism is wrong, because we're all born with the same potential for understanding and learning, so he would reject the concept of a child being able to learn a truly alien language that e.g. marks grammatical cases with circumfixes, as he argues it'd be physically impossible, because the brain doesn't have the neural wiring to make sense of such a morphology (in other words, alien languages wouldn't even be classified as languages in the humans sense, because the aliens would have differently wired brains). He argues that without these innate limitations (UG), a baby wouldn't be able to learn any language at all. If the brain were a blank slate open to every theoretical possibility, it'd be overwhelmed by the infinite data. By having a narrow path, the baby can learn a complex language in just three years. So he rejects relativism, because he thinks our brains have the same biological limitations, and alien languages are "complex problem-solving tasks" that we can't even formulate in our minds. But it's just wrong: we are perfectly capable of formulating and even creating and learning theoretical concepts that aren't encountered in any modern language. He says the reason they aren't present is because the human brain doesn't have a biological space dedicated to making sense of them. But it might very well be that the reason we see a limited set of typologies, morphologies, and syntaxes is that those we don't see all died out with their speakers in Beringia or something. So it might as well be a case of our statistical bias - we literally have no data on the languages that became extinct before the invention of writing (which is why all the superfamily hypotheses are essentially unfalsifiable - it's been so many years that even if Proto-Turkic and Proto-Nivkh come from the same ultimate family, their deep genetic similarities are indistinguishable from random chance). Also, there are literally just individual single languages that have a feature that every other language lacks. Why would that 1 instance of a feature be different from those potential features with 0 real-language instances? They might as well be at least theoretically realisable just like those singular features. And with progress in neuroscience, we have empirical proof that the brain is incredibly plastic and actually has the physical potential to learn statistically implausible things (e.g. we can all be temporarily turned into savants by having specific regions in our brains electrostimulated). So the fact that we can think of and define our limitations may actually prove they aren't limitations at all. He has no empirical proof that there is a separate area in the brain responsible solely for language. What if the fact we can think of our limitations points to the possibility that the entire brain is ALWAYS involved in everything we do, be it language, maths, puzzles, cooking, whatever? Just because certain areas might light up brighter during certain activities doesn't mean that those other areas are uninvolved (this is actually what modern connectionist neuroscience suggests - that language is a whole-brain event). His counter-argument is the supposed poverty of the stimulus (i.e. babies hear so little "perfect language" that they couldn't possibly learn it without an innate head start). But a baby isn't just a language learner - it's a statistical pattern-learning supercomputer. The brain doesn't need a language module if it's already designed to find patterns in everything. So if the brain as a whole has the potential for evolution, then Chomsky's "limitations" aren't biological dead ends but evolutionary snapshots.

Chomsky rejects modern neuroscience, because it's a threat to his abstract unfalsifiable hypotheses, as neuroscience actually relies on empirical data to make assertions. Modern physics and neuroscience suggest that language is a function of the brain that has become so biologically complex that it's capable of infinite recursion (which other animals seem to have at best a limited version of) - in other words, language is an emergent property of the brain as a complex, purely biological system. Whereas Chomsky WANTS language to be a mysterious result of a single genetic mutation that somehow created a literal physical area inside the brain responsible solely for language, that is functionally separated from the other areas. But language is rather just another self-contained logical system of patterns, just like maths is. Why would the brain have a separate area just for this one specific system if it can learn many other systems perfectly fine too? Why would language be special? According to his logic, we should also have separate hardwired faculties for maths, chess, mahjong, etc., but this would be ridiculous. He'd probably say this comparison is wrong, because everyone learns language perfectly no matter their IQ, while not everyone can learn to play chess. But as I said, we're actually physically capable of becoming savants, it's just that this potential is not equally realised, because it's a later invention that isn't evolutionarily necessary for survival, unlike language, which is an advanced form of social grooming.

He fears that if we admit language is just general learning, we lose what makes humans unique. He wants language to be a biological "leap" that happened in our evolution, separate from the slow development of general intelligence. He pretends to be a materialist atheist who rejects unscientific claims, and that he separates his linguistic hypotheses from his political views, but his ideas are actually no different from theological explanations. He wants us to be unique, so he implicitly claims that language is a ghost in the machine from some neo-Platonic realm of pure logic that only humans are capable of unlocking and actualising within the physical reality of the Universe by developing a specific genetic mutation that creates a physical channel for the "spirit of language" to inhabit (he later started calling this supposed logical operator of recursion "Merge").

I think Chomsky basically doesn't want to admit that he wants there to be a metaphysical realm inhabited by souls that only humans have while animals are mindless automata (he stole this concept of Cartesian dualism from René Descartes, btw.). If language is emergent and contingent (which is what modern empirical science suggests), then anything the brain can process can be language - i.e. if that alien language I mentioned is functionally the same as human languages, then it is a language too, just one that hasn't been evolutionarily realised yet here on Earth. But if language is a Platonic axiom (Chomsky's view), then anything that doesn't fit his specific "Merge" math is not-language, even if it works perfectly. He clings to his ghost because he wants to protect the "dignity of man". He thinks that if we are just better statistical animals, then our lives, poetry, and thoughts have no special meaning. So he's saying that language both evolved from a single biological mutation (which is physically observable, so should be scientific if ever found, which it hasn't) and that this mutation is what somehow unlocked the non-physical logical realm of language that existed before the mutation. By claiming that the logical realm of language is hard-wired and untouchable by experience, he's defending a pre-deterministic worldview. Just as a religious person believes their fate or nature is decided at birth, Chomsky believes our linguistic nature is decided by our species' blueprint. To him, the "statistical God" (the learning brain) is a threat because it implies we are free to become anything based on our environment. So he finds the idea of limitless learning as terrifying as a priest finds "moral relativism". But that's not empirical science, that's metaphysical idealism.

What he doesn't understand is that humans can still be unique even if language is just a statistical function of an advanced biological brain. We're unique simply because our brain is the most advanced among all living organisms. If the Universe is indeed fundamentally logical/mathematical, then the only thing that makes objects unique are the differences between their specific sets of data points. What makes the human brain unique is that its data points have the densest values out of all animals, not that there exists some abstract "spirit of language" that inhabits the human brain while ignoring all other brains. That's just some weird fantasy novel.

So it's not that animals and humans have different essences (i.e. Chomsky says the language faculty is a categorically separate thing-in-itself that requires its users to be human), it's just that humans are animals with more of the shared animal essence. Animals are capable of matching patterns (A -> B), while humans are also capable of matching patterns of patterns (A -> [B -> C]). Because our "statistical God" brain is so big, we can perceive patterns that are so complex we call them "grammar".

Chomsky's hypotheses are an unfalsifiable set of religious dogmas that result from his humanistic approach, which leads to the paradox of special pleading. If we follow his logic, we might as well claim that all genetic mutations are just switches that unlock self-contained abstract universes every time they occur, like the mutations that gave animals their legs were actually switches that unlocked the abstract realm of "legness" or the mutation that gave us blue eyes unlocked the realm of "blue-eyeness". But he doesn't do that. He treats legs as a physical adaptation to the environment, while treating language as a mystical encounter with an abstract realm. This inconsistency shows that he isn't following a unified theory of biology but making an exception for the human mind. He avoids this because he wants to be a scientist for everything except the human mind. He's a materialist for the body but a Platonist for the brain.

He can't accept that a finite, statistical brain can produce infinite variety. But he doesn't understand that the seeming infiniteness of recursion is not truly infinite. If he was a materialist, he would accept that the Universe is a set of logical distinctions, and the Universe consists of a finite set of physical laws too, and these finite laws give us an infinite Universe when it comes to spacetime, but the patterns eventually have to repeat an infinite amount of time. Language is the same: we have the potential to turn a finite set of patterns into an infinite amount of sentences or word strings (i.e. instances of these patterns). But these sentences don't contain an infinite amount of patterns; the patterns eventually have to repeat.

But Chomsky himself is ultimately just an old man with a very outdated understanding of science and especially physics (he justifies the unfalsifiability of his claims by saying that the Newtonian framework also involved abstract properties like gravity, so Chomsky also can introduce non-physical ghosts, but he doesn't get that modern quantum mechanics completely reverses the traditional axiomatic understanding of the world and instead suggests that logical relations and properties are the underlying reality while the physical realm is emergent from them; also, his comparison of his own ideas to Newton or Galileo is a false equivalence, because the latter simply used mathematical approximations of the underlying quantum reality for our macroscopic scale, but the quantum scale still exists, whereas his idea of a separate language faculty has no basis in physical reality at all, it's just wishful thinking). What is more concerning is that there are still new generations of Cartesian dualists in linguistics, philosophy, and, unfortunately, even physics (cf. all the superstring or multiverse theories that just add new unfalsifiable conditions rather than working with the ones we already have). Sabine Hossenfelder, as clickbaity as some of her stuff is, was right about the sad state of the academia. Do you think the academia still clings to these unscientific ideas, because they generate money? Or rather because so many academics act llike cultists who worship the most famous figures, which creates intellectual inertia? Or maybe because students of philosophy, social sciences, some branches of linguistics, etc., deep down feel intellectually inferior to hard sciences like maths and physics, and want to appear more serious by using convoluted language or using mathematical-ish terms in unfitting contexts?

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. Machine or a system is built to mimic life. The meaning of life is primordial.

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 was just thinking really deeply about why anything exists at all... Actually. I think about this question all the time. It has really really boggled my mind for a long long time.

I think i may have stumbled onto something here that kind of... Gives me a sense of satisfaction about not only why anything exists... But about the NATURE of existence.

Essentially what im asking is why is there something rather than nothing... Well ive had the realization before that nothing, cannot exist by the definition of nothingness and the defintion of existence.

But i just took that thought a step further and yielded a statement... A statement with a contrapositive which i believe has some pretty interesting insight into the question of why reality exists as we know it. My reasoning is as follows

If you had yourself a heaping plate of true nothingness... Okay thats a joke... If there were truly nothing... That would mean there were no limits, boundaries or rules. There would be nothing to prevent things from occuring. Nothing is inherently unstable. Nothing is literally infinite potential, and no boundary to stop that potential from occurring.

Nothing, is powerless to resist existence.

What is interesting to me is the contrapositive of this sentence...

Anything has the power to resist existence.

It seems to me this is true in the universe. Things decay... Things die.. things change... Things emerge then diffuse...

It is this statement and its contrapositive which gives the universe its tempo.

I feel like i stumbled upon the law of existence.

Thoughts?

Is Hume saying that Causation is epistemological (something our human minds impose on the World to make sense of it..like Mathematics)and NOT ontological(like gravity is real independent of us,but not causality)?

If yes, this is well known isnt it? Even if you think for a moment,very few would deny it...as they say, Universe is under no obligation to make sense to 'us'..

Then, what was so revolutionary about Hume's ideas and 'The Problem of Induction' that Kant said awoke him from his dogmatic slumber?

Even if Causality isn't ontological,why does the speed limit of the Universe(which light travels in vacuum) want to preserve Cause and Effect?

Why can’t a single, absolute ruler govern the entire world, when national borders and group identities are ultimately human-made constructs?

If someone truly existed someone capable, wise, and just enough to lead all of humanity ,why wouldn’t we allow them to rule?

Yes, human society is complex. There are deep-rooted differences, conflicting interests, and countless structural limitations that stand in the way. But imagine, even if only hypothetically, that these barriers could be overcome. Imagine a person so extraordinarily capable almost godlike in wisdom, empathy, and judgment that they meet every expectation of what we consider “perfect” leadership. Would people really refuse such a ruler?

Human beings long for hope. They live for it, fight for it, and sometimes even destroy one another in its name. Many place their faith in distant, unseen ideals or deities constructs shaped by belief and imagination hoping for a better existence beyond this life. But if that longing for hope is so powerful, why not place it in something real? Why not in a leader who cannot promise a perfect afterlife, but can transform the suffering of the present?

Perhaps what humanity seeks is not domination, but unity a true league, not a fictional one, where people willingly contribute to something greater than themselves. A system where collective strength rises, not through division, but through shared purpose. And at its peak, not a tyrant, but a singular individual proven, capable, and worthy who guides rather than controls, who inspires rather than commands.

A leader who doesn’t just rule the world, but changes it suddenly, brilliantly—like a burst of fireworks across a dark sky, illuminating a path toward something that feels almost like heaven on Earth.

The only emperor of earth..

Is Hume saying that Causation is epistemological (something our human minds impose on the World to make sense of it..like Mathematics)and NOT ontological(like gravity is real independent of us,but not causality)?

If yes, this is well known isnt it? Even if you think for a moment,very few would deny it...as they say, Universe is under no obligation to make sense to 'us'..

Then,what was so revolutionary about Hume's ideas and 'The Problem of Induction' that Kant said awoke him from his dogmatic slumber?

Even if Causality isn't ontological,why does the speed limit of the Universe(which light travels in vacuum) want to preserve Cause and Effect?

Taoism is both a religion and a philosophy; interestingly enough, even before Laozi wrote the Dàodéjīng, Asia was already brimming with the philosophical principles that would give rise to it. Laozi wrote it? That is to say, Laozi is kinda like Socrates: we aren’t even sure of his existence. In fact, precisely because of this pre-condition, the hypothesis was also formulated that the Dàodéjīng is a collection of texts from Dàojiā, the Taoist philosophical current.

Whether Laozi was a man, a God, or a spectre born from the echoes of many, what he left us shaped countless lives. Welcome to the Philosophy of Dàodéjīng.

Do you know Frege? The Ideography tried to revolutionize language, Sinn (sense) and Bedeutung (significance) are kinda essential, he then introduced new symbols too. That is because clear language is essential, every language has its pros and cons. When we do translate, if we do well, we can keep almost all the significance, it is already way harder with sense. Translating from Chinese is a mess; tons of meaning, complexity, and double senses get lost.

When faced with the Dàodéjīng, tons of people say, “What a cute little poetry book!”, and well, it is very light to process if read from a translation. However, it assumes a whole other depth if it is read in Chinese. (During the analysis, you will get a better idea of why from the explanation of some terms).

For that reason, I believe it is impossible to analyze the original book without analyzing the originally chosen terms.

It all starts with Laozi’s explanation of 道 (the Dào), be careful not to confuse it with � (the eternal Dào) because the Tao that can be spoken isn’t the eternal Tao. 道 is composed of 辶 + 首 and they respectively stand for movement/fluidity/walk and first/head/direction. Already that can give a first idea of what we are talking about; a form of “directed movement”. Instead 經 (The Jīng) means… well it actually never appears inside the Dàodéjīng and it’s a super duper secret Logogram, so I won’t tell it to you.

Laozi’s initial explanation of Dào is pretty much the same I gave, though going further 2 other aspects of it get expanded, its adaptability, its opposites, but to be honest, it’s always the same concept. 道 is also 辶 (fluid), and what happens to a liquid when it's poured? Opposites in Dàodéjīng are subservient to the function, and we could simplify by saying that the function is the movement. Let’s do an example: cold and hot; the function and the movement between the two is given by the temperature, temperature is what defines them both. But don’t worry, soon all will get clearer.

Another concept that will help to understand is 無 為 and they respectively stand for void and action, the very concept of non-action, analyzing their semiotics would be fun, 無 it’s basically a Minecraft ritual >!(person over fire ritual = void evocation!)!<, but since it isn’t very important I will spare you this time. Though 無 為 is the ability to grasp events, it is being and observing without the necessity of forcing, with fluidity, yet, still, with direction. To say it in other words, it is just another grasp of 道.

Now, let’s get a few things off our chest: some say, “The Dàodéjīng teaches humility”. It is true that the Dàodéjīng has verses in favor of humility, yet to say something like the statement above is to ignore everything else we have said so far. It’s about the interplay of opposites. The Dàodéjīng also contains some rather arrogant lines; the common thread? Power and appearance. The funny thing is that the text also explicitly says that most people won’t understand.

There are also other elements I could have explored further, like the effortlessness of 無 為 or the political view. Yet I don’t wanna stretch things too far for this article.

If the topic interests you, I don't recommend reading the Dàodéjīng if you don't know Chinese. I tried looking over some translations: they are chaotic and very interpretative. It is worse than studying a philosopher from a philosophy manual, brrrr.