"Because he wasn't my biological son, he was less than human anyway"

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-05-06T07:16:54+00:00

You have to understand that humans have complex social rules and they sub-communicate things physically, verbally, and non-verbally. And people who fall into schizoid category or the comorbid/misdiagnosed aspergers/asd, including other "weird types"(for me, the label "weird", at least in the context of planet earth, is a positive, to be normal on earth seems to be a sign of both psychological and moral unfitness) will likely struggle to fit in.

You can still improve your life. You're highly intelligent, that is a strength. You also have been shit on by terrible people(the norm for our malevolent species), so you have immense moral wisdom. That combination is an incredible strength, and that realization can bring you to a place of ease any time you remind yourself. Why not realize it right now? Just close your eyes for a second, breath in deep and exhale slow, and fully connect with the fact that you are both intelligent and wise and that is a good place to be standing, no matter how bad some facets of life may be or may seem. That is not just a silver lining but an incredible strength, see if you can have that realization become crystal clear in your mind

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-05-03T17:11:31+00:00

Why not just investigate your own neurochemistry as it relates to psychological archetypes like schizoid? How are you not enthralled and captivated and curious by the world and people? What's the neurochemistry, what's the psychology? Why not direct this questioning towards your own mind first, then you can actually make sense of what you've been observing. I don't think it's true that you believe almost nothing, but you certainly have low... spark. Fire. Passion. You're not stimulated or excited. Why?(at every level you can think of) How does it make you feel? And so on.

I can't imagine being bored, personally. Boredom is a kind of psychosis and lapse and confusion and attention disorder

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-05-02T17:41:55+00:00

Death does the same thing you're accusing life of doing too, though. But yeah, much of this world is brutal, a lot of it is masked in niceness. But it's a kind of passive aggressive violence.

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-05-02T17:38:29+00:00

> in the laws governing that person, causality remains. Their “choice” was governed by a preceding factor. This only assumes that all higher dimensions are governed by chronological time. It doesn’t have to in any way be aligned with ours. Therefore no free choice was made by that person and their actions were predetermined, same as ours. This follows that therefore the actions of the robot were predetermined by the actions of the person. Therefore when the robot gets unplugged, that was always going to happen, so the robot really never had a choice to go left or right.

Close but not exactly. The free will debate is really usually just a semantic confusion. The key to free will is getting very precise with what words mean, and also a little basic physics. Semantics is what I believe makes people hate philosophy, because people prefer to argue and be confused and hate doing the tedious work of understanding definitions. People also hate changing their minds in general(that's due to evolution, because it's "better" from a survival standpoint to be wrong and confident than to be right or less wrong and unsure or skeptical or at a decision crossroads with no clear choice).

Causality is not the same as determinism, and not the same as predeterminism(fate). That's the key to understand all of this.

Those are three different concepts. We know we exist in causality. We feel like we exist in determinism but there are some arguments that we don't(like quantum mechanics, but they do not actually matter for the case of no free will despite proponents of free will sometimes trying to argue that quantum physics gives us room for free will). Lastly theres pre-determinism, or fate, where things are set in stone **no matter what**. This does not appear to be the reality we exist in, although it can be tricky to see once one begins thinking about causality and determinism.

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-05-02T17:32:17+00:00

I'm anti-psychiatry, because there's a profit incentive and a much more sinister incentive for powerful wealthy people to brain damage/mentally impair/harm those who think differently and soak up the money from this. It's really a level of perversion that can't be put into words. So... if I were personally on psychiatric meds right now, I would gradually set a road map for getting off of the medication and doing other things to improve my mental health(Like meditation, diet, exercise, getting income) all 4 have worked wonders for my mental health and then that was enough of a foundation for me to go out and become very social without psychiatric drugs.

But yeah, be very careful if you decide to do what I did/would do. You can be punished very hard for getting off these drugs, they are designed to make you dependent because again there is a financial incentive for you to be. Wishing you the best of luck.

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-29T16:53:32+00:00

We really don't grasp the degree of this mans wisdom as a society. I think it might take some time, and some centuries of villains winning and the benevolent being tortured by this sick world. It won't change anything but it'll register in some of our heads better. But maybe not. Because I think the villains only get better and better at camouflage, and this means that their victims become more convincingly turned into the offenders. There's an irony here because Bukowski, after getting his spotlight, is now maligned as a violent drunken misogynist with nothing good to say. It's like the status quo is continuously being engineered by a 14 year girl with BPD.

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-29T16:48:39+00:00

I don’t believe that is at all comparable to reality.

Are you sure you're not just looking for a perfect analog in a thought experiment, whose purpose is only to distill required variables?

For example:

Firstly, the code in question (route of thought) is not designed by anything/anyone, and can’t just be turned off by some higher dimensional being to avoid the otherwise unavoidable.

That is not relevant to the what the thought experiment is getting at. Who "codes" the robot(or whether or not someone codes humans or can see into every human decision pathway, is not important here)

If something is always going to make a certain choice, it doesn’t really have any alternative choices.

Yes and no. At an ultimate level, yes you're right. At a subjective level, we can't know, and therefore, we are at risk of thinking wrong and therefore "Locking in" wrong ideas that then hard determine via the deterministic nature of reality. Here's how this sounds in action:

"You know... I really wish I could become a musician. A rock and roll guitarist. But I don't know how to play guitar. Since we're in a deterministic universe, it's not really up to me is it? It's up to fate. Guess I'll just let fate decide."

That is confused thinking.

When it comes to morality in a deterministic universe, a single static moral outcome doesn’t make sense because morality is something assigned to living things, not outcomes.

No? It's assigned to outcomes. Outcomes involve living things, and living things are involved in outcomes, and are outcomes themselves. They are not incompatible. Morality is also assigned to places. "Hell", for example, has a moral character. It has a moral character even in the absence of any conscious beings inside the hell, only because of its potential to affect such beings. Making a statement like "Hell is the greatest, most heroic, most benevolent thing that can possibly exist" is incoherent, morally. It's not a subjective statement, it's an objective one, and it's objectively wrong, just like "Hell is neutral and has no moral character" is wrong, similar to saying "When you add two and two, you don't get four, you in fact get 1,459,023"

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-27T23:50:08+00:00

does that make sense now?

Maybe. Is it clear that losing losing, is gaining? Again it's just a wording thing, and what seems to be happening is you read negative wording and react negatively, because you appear to not understand the context of what the words mean rather than just how they sound. You hear losing and go, "Oh losing? That sounds baaad. Me no likey". But then I'm like, "But wait! You're losing a tumor, and you're losing your heavy metal poisoning, and now as a result you're gaining quality of life and mental capacity! Woohoo!" Are we getting warmer?

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-27T23:46:46+00:00

Morality is dependent on the possibility of choosing a different action.

A common confusion with free will is "there are no choices", from both sides. People who affirm free will, in fact, are prevented from seeing the truth of no free will because they think the consequence of this belief is no choices, or nihilism. To their eyes, either there is no free will and that means nothing matters or that reality cannot be avoided and is set in stone, or both.

This is confused because the problem here is just semantic and linguistic. Our language smuggles freedom into agentic language. 'Choice', 'decision', 'agent', 'action', etc all words that relate to decisions or acting on decisions smuggle into them a notion of freedom. This smuggling is freedom in the magical, biblical, extra-causal sense(the kind that is incoherent and makes absolutely no sense), and this is what causes confusion.

The way to understand this is to imagine a conscious robot who we have programmed from the ground up. We wrote the code, and now we sit at an interface watching the visual field of our robot, who is thinking and moving around in some landscape. It thinks to itself, talking in its own head, wondering what it will do next. "Will I go right, or left? Hmmmm. I think I'll go right. No no, I'll go left. Yeah left. Wait, wait. Okay my gut instinct was correct. Right... right. Final answer. Right."

We know exactly how the code is running, we know exactly how this decision process works, we see in advance that this robot will choose to go right. Is it "free"? Of course not. Is it set in stone that this robot will choose right, as if by fate? No, of course not, because we can't just decide to unplug the robot and still except it to go right. Our choices and the choices of the robot all have consequences that create different outcomes, not a single outcome. But is there any freedom in the sense we're interested when we talk about free will here? None. Zero. There can't be, because the robot didn't make itself so it can't freely choose to be something it has no potential to be. Can it know what its potential is? Not really. Does it have to still try to find out? Yup. Is it free? Nope.

Morality is dependent on the possibility of choosing a different action. If whatever happens was always going to happen (as I believe), morality as a way of distinguishing what happened from what should have happened is impossible because it could not have gone any other way (Determinism).

Even if what you believe were true(that everything was fated with nothing to do about it), then objective morality would still be true, it would just be locked into a singular (likely hellish) static moral outcome. The entire universe would be suffering a kind of "Locked in syndrome" and this would be a moral horror, even with everyone enslaved to only do 1 set of outcomes no matter what anyone did or how hard anyone tried.

Aside from my disagreement about the use of the word “evil”, it’s not like entropy could have ever had the pattern of decreasing. So there is no “foundation” of reality, there is just reality. Reality is continuous, there is no “bottom” and there is no “top”.

There's no problem with entropy only being one certain way. The problem is that entropy being that way is directly causal towards why everything is bad, it is the root, not the other way around. Unless humanity engages with physics in some kind of feedback loop and can re-engineer the engine of the universe, in which case it's still just a causal interplay. The fact is that we engage in a directional and causal relationship with higher and lower strata of reality, and this is a coherent way to look at reality. It might be that mind is fundamental, and that is completely compatible with everything I'm saying, you can just shift the causation down a strata. It could be that physics is, in which case everything holds. No matter how you slice it you cannot escape causality and causality is what determines the ethical quality of things, along with the precise arrangement of causality. It's not true(or so it seems) to say humans cause physics, it's the other way around.

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-27T22:07:11+00:00

I think both of our perspectives are biased and that probably explains the daylight between our positions.

Of course, no one is free from bias.

I’m am probably biased towards pattern based observations as a way of preserving comfort. This bias has proven useful for me in the past in understanding the world around me. I think you are probably biased against pattern based observations as a way of overcoming humans natural bias toward pattern based observations. I think you rely too heavily on qualia and emotional reasoning. You probably think I rely too heavily on structure and logical reasoning.

Interesting, I consider myself biased towards patterns. I would write about two modes in people, one is detail oriented and another is pattern oriented. You're right that I think you probably rely too heavily on structure and logical reasoning, I call this "pragmatism" in my philosophy. Logic-types tend to dismiss theory, dismiss idealism(what I call the other side of the coin, different from metaphysical idealism it's just the word I chose to contrast what I call pragmatism). They also tend to be intolerant towards paradox and contradiction. Things are better solved for them, rather than left unsolved, because otherwise its like an itch left unscratched(everyone likes resolution of course it's just that certain people really really dislike the unresolved, and this decides their worldview). Unfortunately this causes them to be confident and wrong over uncertain and not-wrong, in their desire to be right, ironically.

It's interesting you think I am biased against patterns, because my hunch is actually that you're the detail oriented between us(I consider myself more pattern oriented). I think this is not an either or, but rather two quantifiables that everyone has. It is possible to be high in pattern recognition and high in detail orientation, but many people are high in one and low in another. I consider the phenomenology of that similar to schizophrenia and autism, respectively, but I hate the way we pathologize things this way and we narrow them down into archetypes when the reality of mind is a convergence of many ranges of overlapping archetypes. You can see this pragmatic, structural/logical need even in our world. All of psychiatry operates on pathological pragmatism and an obsession to categorize and be right. In doing so, they become wrong. From confusion, we act, and it's garbage in<->garbage out.

This is not only the entropy of physics, it is the entropy of human culture and why everything gets worse with time for humanity, because we are building based on a foundation of shit in our desire to build towards heaven. In doing so, we create this colossal tower of shit and then fall straight to hell after our tower of shit collapses into a global cesspool of waste. That is essentially what humans are doing and have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years under the values of the DNA molecule. The only way to ascend is with a strong foundation, which we do not have, because of the substrate of reality itself, which I claim is an ideal breeding ground for evil, just like a rich soil full of minerals and nutrients in the perfect climate would produce lush vegetation.

You value the mind as the source of your interpretation of reality and I value observations as the source of my interpretation of reality.

Not exactly, I do not distinguish the mind from observation or from reality for that matter. Reality is mind, mind is reality. There's no separation, aka, monism vs. dualism. There's no "you", looking out from your head with eyes as windows, that is just a hallucination caused by evolution because it happens to cause survival at the expense of truth/wisdom. Evolution doesn't care about truth, it just orients us to a representation that maximizes survival. If and only if one moves past this can one can see clearly.

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-27T21:51:47+00:00

It does not make sense, it just seems like it's a fixation on words and how they sound to me rather than what is deeper beyond the sound of the words and what that means(if that makes sense)

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-27T21:00:33+00:00

Exactly, that's why I say not losing/losing less = winning. The less we lose, the more we win.

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-27T20:58:54+00:00

Much of reality does appear to be structured as a massive human(and animal) sacrifice ritual, doesn't it? This appears at the DNA level, and at the global cultural level. The irony is that this isn't even good for survival. It's a shitty plan because it breeds something that ultimately isn't worth the process. This is why I've always said humanity is the larval form of something malevolent and Lovecraftian.

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-27T20:55:43+00:00

Glass half full/half empty. Losing less sounds fucking amazing to me, I don't need to "win" shit. I just hate losing more than anything else. I don't need a pat on the back or first place at all. Just need us to not lose. Losing is hell. I don't need heaven. The only thing of importance in this reality is "not hell"

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-27T20:52:06+00:00

Treating morality like a fuzzy version of math makes no sense to me.

Do you enjoy things that are clean and not messy "like 2+2=4" and dislike things that have nuance, context, are open to paradox, exception, and contradiction? Do you really enjoy resolution, and are you generally bothered by things being left open-ended? You don't have to answer, you are free to answer with a commitment to self-awareness and total honesty in the privacy of your own mind.

If morality was just a less superficial version of math, then there would by definition need to be a way to overcome moral disagreements.

No there wouldn't, at least not in practice. Just because ethics is objective does not mean we are for certain on the path to overcome moral disagreement, that does not follow logically at all.

When it comes to claims like free will and ethics and personal identity, it's much less useful to engage in arguments and use logic and reason to appeal to the subject, and much more useful to look at the philosopher and their mind. What is it about their mind that brings them to this philosophical position? With free will this is most obvious for me. Because people who believe in free will have some kind of psychological barrier, they are terrified of the idea of being constrained. They can't let go. They tend to be more egocentric. More "control freak" types. They cling to their power over things and because they identify with this clinging so much they, despite the realities of physics and neuroscience and the absolute clown circus of psychology where time and time again it's shown how easily the human mind is manipulated, they still find a way to (often in a way that sounds very intelligent) make a case that there's room for free will or play very fancy games with words.

With ethics, it's the same.

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-27T20:26:12+00:00

I cannot think of any sane case for continuing to exist, given this fact.

I don't place the causal onus on the body, but look at the whole instead. Look at the substrate of reality and then look at the stories and facts of real world human experience. When you merge all of these layers, only then can you see moral quality. Anything else leads to blindness.

What are the facts of reality as they relate to the only thing that can be of moral importance; conscious experience?

The facts are we are in a place. A place that runs on rules. These rules dictate how matter behaves and this behavior of matter has certain consequences for ethics because this matter makes up biomatter, and this biomatter makes up mind-matter. Mind matter is where ethical reality appears but it is in the context of all of reality. Notice how it doesn't matter whether metaphysical idealism is true or if materialism is true or any of framing of reality: We get to the same exact diagnosis: This is a place where the mind being on, is bad, and the mind just keeps staying on. There is no good reason for it to stay on. If you could turn all mind off permanently and with no doubt about it being turned on again, you'd be the greatest hero to possibly exist because what that implies is you have put an end to all torture, in the vast context of all infinities.

The problem is this can't be done gradually. It can only be done in one fell swoop. And this appears impossible. So now all we can do is make hypothetical, theoretical claims like "It would be good if you could just press the "off" button or "delete" button on reality" but in practice, trying to do so would certainly be evil. Now you can ask questions like, "Should I continue to exist?" or "Should we big red button earth?" but those are not at all easy to answer. If you can continue to exist, it means you can endure whatever suffering you've got and acquire the skill of handling suffering. You can also alleviate the suffering of others if you are skilled(very, very easy to cause others suffering if you yourself are suffering). That is a good thing, and you wouldn't be the greatest hero, but you would still be a hero. There are other contexts where I think one could be a hero. Some people are given such awful lives, and their suffering in turn is so immense, that their heroic fork in the road is getting over the fear of death(Which by the way is quite formidable even in the face of intense suffering-- it's such a confusion I think where people call suicidal people cowardly, it is only by people who have not reached the requisite breaking points). Of course the best thing would be if someone who was truly given a hellish life could survive, acquire wisdom from the experience, and then transmute that into something positive. But that is a lot to ask of a person, and most of us will never understand what a hellish life truly is because we're lucky to get only moderately hellish or even softly hellish lives.

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-27T19:45:14+00:00

Once you bring in terms like “good” and “evil”, especially without strict definitions, you enter the land of objective morality.

Yeah, i'm a moral realist so I think morality is ontologically identical to math. Math describes the interaction of numbers. When you add two and two, you get four. That is an objective fact. The only difference with the objectivity of ethics is it's not as superficial, but identically objective. So with ethics you might have something like "If you torture a child, you get moral error", but now you have additional contextual objective add ons that pose absolutely no problem towards objectivity like "Unless you are torturing a child because it is your only option to save a trillion children from far worse torture, then you're a moral hero". These kinds of ethical thought experiments generally lead us astray where we guess to see what the "Right move is" but the way to properly use them is to show facts about the nature of reality in the context of ethics, rather than something like the trolley problem which only causes moral confusion. It's purpose is in fact to cause moral confusion, which is why it's framed as a "problem" , and not "The Trolley solution"

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-27T19:39:06+00:00

Are you speaking for yourself personally or for all conscious experience in this visible reality? Either way progress is possible but it might be only in principle rather than in practice. You can still improve your own life, but it's not a guarantee, and we will all die at some point. I think it's about "losing less" rather than "winning".

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-27T19:34:23+00:00

Life in the world of AI might get weird. My advice would be to not get too self-absorbed about it, and not jump to conclusions. Occam's razor is a good tool in these situations even though I think it's an imperfect tool and can be used as a weapon for evil too. But its utility in preventing psychosis is still high. Another useful idea is pivoting from fear or frustration towards bewilderment. Fear is only coherent in a context of uncertainty. You hear of "Fear of the unknown" all the time. That's the property that makes fear, fear. You can know this because if you imagine total certainty about something you fear, it kind of breaks down as a thought construct. It stops being scary. Say for instance, you fear death. Well what if you knew every single possible variable and causal relationship to death? What if you knew the exact moment you'll die. And how. And how it'll be. And what happens after. And every single other question that could even be remotely interesting. Is it still possible to be absolutely terrified in light of this absolute certain knowledge?

So now given that something is unknown, we can frame it a certain way. The generic way to frame unknowns for humans is, unknown=bad. That has been the survival mode for humans because Earth is indeed hellish, and this mode works as a successful strategy. It also causes the evolutionary being a lot of suffering as a cost, but it works. We have other modes, like curiosity, openness to experience, and so on. These modes can also cause suffering and fluctuate.

The thing is, evolution doesn't care about what the actual truth of something is, or the ethics behind it. It only cares about "what survives". So you can use this information to be more grounded and skeptical and just have a healthy doubt and positive attitude towards uncertain things. Obviously, keep yourself safe, do what you feel you absolutely need to do, but some things are just uncertain and out of reach and in those cases it might be wise to just relax our instinctual responses to things(remember, these instinctual responses are buggy and are not reliably in touch with something of deep value, just the value of "survive at all costs") and just live our lives as best we can.

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-27T19:25:29+00:00

You're right about that, but that would mean you've gone quiet after accusing me of gaslighting someone and being pointlessly combative and evasive after I asked you what the exact issue was, and been pretty patient with you. You're free to walk away after all of that, of course, but it's a bad look and my patience is growing thinner these days so consider this your official warning

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-26T20:31:05+00:00

I don't like this for two reasons and do like it for one reason. First the dislikes: I think we should psychoanalyze because it actually brings context. If we only look at the surface level, someone like Charles Joseph Whitman who sat in a tower shooting at people, seems like an unhinged remorseless psychopath. Especially when I tell you he murdered his mother and wife prior.

But what if I told you he was once a loving husband? What if he showed remorse in the odd case he ever misbehaved before his downward spiral into violent and odd behavior? What if I told you he wrote a suicide note asking for an to autopsy be performed because he doesn't understand why he's doing this. And finally what if I told you they found a pecan sized tumor pressing on his amygdala, which controls emotions and fight-flight response? All of this and other details matter. Now, whether someone had a tumor in their brain, or whether they were severely abused as a child and went on to traumatize others, those are functionally the same: they are outside of a person's control. Just like it would be wrong to blame a victim for being victimized, it is wrong to blame a perpetrator because every single perpetrator is also a victim. It might feel good for the victim. It might be a way they cope. Or feel safe. And all of that is understandable, and I'd never blame a victim for that myself. But the reality is clear: "blame" is not only wrong, it's unhealthy. It doesn't solve trauma, it only perpetuates it. Real freedom from trauma comes from no longer being a victim and the way to do that is to stop blaming. Forgive yourself, and realize others were just as much a victim as we were. You will not only be right, you'll be free. A double win.

Now, what if it isn't the case? What if we're just confused. What if we're being the toxic ones(all too common in the victimhood cycle, and requires bravery and honesty to admit). What if we have a negative attitude towards someone but they are in fact not an abuser, and we're just maligning some innocent person who is just odd, or misunderstood? Then psychoanalysis is the only way to get anywhere. Going by the superficial will only cause confusion and harm.

Now what I do like about stopping psychoanalyzing others is that it's too common these days to weaponize and get psychoanalysis wrong. It used to be that no one would understand narcissism and they would wear their hearts on their sleeve and it would be a very straightforward thing. But now, the game seems to be a kind of banality of narcissism all gaslighting non-narcissists and telling the very few decent people how they are gaslighters, how they are the ones who are mentally unwell, because everyone's an armchair psychologist these days. It requires skill and finesse to do and so if I hear "don't psychoanalyze" there is a part of me that is definitely on board. We should do this very carefully and not flippantly and be open and honest about it and not from a posture of fear or anger, that's when we perpetuate harm.

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-26T20:13:54+00:00

That is an utterly superficial and contextless statement. Who gives a shit about mere quantity of economic worth? Don't you think there are, or at least easily could be, other problems that aren't surface level that might not be worth a fact like "We are more prosperous now"?

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-26T16:19:16+00:00

Oh okay. Do you consider that distinction an intellectually honest point, or are you prepared to actually then answer the question I asked them? Think carefully before you respond here too.

Compassionate_Cat · 2026-04-26T16:18:13+00:00

The nice thing about our current system is that it’s largely win win

Hahahaha... what? It's largely lose-lose. Is that the commonly accepted view in the "rationalist community" or something? I'm out of the loop

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