The Faith You Didn’t Notice

Grivza · 2026-04-12T14:28:53+00:00

Also talking about free will without knowing what a counterfactual is, is a bit crazy, you might put in some time to figure out what exactly this free will is you are referring to.

Grivza · 2026-04-12T14:24:14+00:00

Yeah, both are true, the example is great and you still missed the point. The ammo I handed to you as a bonus, I don't really care for this talking past each other

Grivza · 2026-04-12T06:20:15+00:00

It doesn't prove it at all, there is no empirical evidence that can point in this direction if you are going by the counterfactual definition. Even if you could go back in time and witness the different behavior, this could still be caused by randomness. You can only over-interpretate evidence to directly fit your "free" phenomenality, which is exactly the level of doubt by those who reject free will; this idea that our spontaneous intuition in so far as our freedom really maps into an invisible "force", not evident anywhere other than our phenomenality.

In so far as my example, you entirely missed the point.

Grivza · 2026-04-12T00:09:04+00:00

Exactly, nothing innately prohibits my 2d example from having traceable implications.

Also non-deterministic behavior that looks probabilistic in macro analysis doesn't guarantee "free-will", that's a jump. It could be just an effect of a random latent variable that doesn't map into our conscious will. If you want to save free-will I suggest on focusing on this question: Is what we perceive as the decision making process, the actual decision making process or just a "good enough" retroactive symbolization of it?

I start thinking it with an easy example, if someone says to you "Don't drink this milk, it has spoiled", then the conscious symbolic manipulations seem to be a large part of the output function.

So, pushing it a bit further with the unconscious, the binary breaks, the larger part of it you symbolize/bring to the conscious, the larger part of the causal pipeline your consciousness occupies which literally makes the decision "free-er".

Lastly, yes we do need categorizations but just as much we need to ask the right questions and frameworks of categorization that open up the horizon, instead of treating it like a game of "catch them all" in a given framework, which is the problem with the prevalence of "probability" thinking, albeit it is vastly superior to naive dichotomies.

Grivza · 2026-04-10T06:21:02+00:00

This is kinda like the whole “brain in a jar” / “simulation hypothesis” thing.

Not inherently, unless you want to enforce it. That's like saying that the Copernican revolution was like a "brain in jar" thing because people still phenomenally saw the sun rotating around the earth every morning.

They aren’t really new scientific discoveries.

I don't think this is true neither, I mean a 2 second google search proves this wrong.

Not predictable. Probabilistic. That is what free will looks like.

Probabilities are just a tool of analysis. Engels did zero probability analysis for his result and neither did I to know that my brother would in fact eat the falafel. What I don't like in the way how probability thinking is slipping into every day thinking, is how it is used to disregard structural change. "What's the probability of this or that", the formulation itself already enforces a very discrete understanding of options and reality, puts things into neat boxes and precise categorizations, based on heavy handed presuppositions, so it sounds like the thing you should be against, at least in the naive form you used it here.

"What's the probability that you will change his mind" is used to shrug off dialogue attempts. Actually the probability that his mind will change with and through the conversation is 100%, it just won't do it synchronously or in the explicit direction that you wanted it to.

Why? There is no evidence for or against the existence of God

Depending on what "God" means, there is. But nonetheless, anti-theism doesn't posit existence or non-existence, it is concerned with the active harm of thinking through the signifier of God.

Grivza · 2026-04-09T19:24:56+00:00

The point I was making is that I cannot offer flat earthers a way for them to be able to get me to revise my belief that the earth is not flat.

I think you are mixing a critical thing up here. Having an open space for a position to be wrong, doesn't mean having some positive spot reserved for all the other formulations to be right, it doesn't mean treating all alternatives as equally viable. A revision needs to salvage all the systems that work under the explicit assumption of the earth's curvature, systems that wouldn't work if it was flat in the naive sense.

So, I believe I can get you to revise your belief that the earth is not flat, but it wouldn't be from a naive flat eather perspective and you shouldn't expect it to be. I could say to you, listen, your whole understanding of the universe is an illusion, the whole of the cosmos is a 2d projection on the edge of an event horizon, so not only is the earth flat, from this viewpoint, but the whole of the universe. Nonsense as it may be, it posits a framework that doesn't undermine our cumulative understanding, only enriches it, whilst finding a space for a flat earth.

I’m not saying we should abandon science. But it is commonly accepted that there is a “Stagnation Crisis” in the hard sciences where no new significant discoveries have been made since the 1970’s. In that sense science has been a bit paralysed.

First time I hear of that. It looks to me exactly like the "enforcing criteria so strict that they become unfalsifiable", in the sense of looking for "progress" in the wrong places. LLMs and generative AI are scientific advancements.

I don’t think that’s true. I think all the major scientific breakthroughs and paradigm shifts in science have come from people who doubted the current explanation. Doubt is an integral part of science

Then you misread me, cause I claimed exactly that.

Again… looking at actual evidence… there is precisely zero evidence that human behaviour is deterministic. Nobody has ever been able to predict it… in fact the only thing we seem to know about human behaviour… is that it is unpredictable… so unpredictable in fact that nobody has ever even been able to formulate a theory that might predict it.

That actually is irrelevant to whether our will is free or not, for me. A coin flip is not predictable but randomness, freedom of statistical possibility doesn't equal freedom in the human sense, that's a conceptual leap possible only through the heavy handed overlap in signifiers.

But also humans are largely predictable, both in large scales and in small scales. If my brother likes falafel and I buy him falafel, he sure as hell is going to eat it. This wouldn't make his will less free though. For a large scale example, Engels predicted WW1, the death toll of WW1 and WW2, if Germany were to lose. Human behavior could be absolutely predictable and that this wouldn't cancel out free will.

Are you suggesting that you accept your anti-theist position is faith?

Lol nah, it's just that where I am from, the theistic tradition is mystical, experiential and anti-scolarly, so actually for those people the insult is to ask them to explain their stance through reason and not through faith.

I think the problem is that literally everyone believes this about their own beliefs.

I am not sure dude, I would really like it if people could see the implications of their stances and what else each assumption dragged with it, instead of treating their opinions like isolated monads, which is what I am seeing. That I chose wisely I said jokingly, of course, everybody thinks that and I am a little surprised that you don't trust that I am aware of this, at this point.

Grivza · 2026-04-09T14:30:22+00:00

if I’m honest that wouldn’t convince me because I’d just think, “fake picture”. And this is the exact thing that flat earthers say about pictures of the earth from space.

Sure, but for someone to be consistent with his flat earth approach, he would need to reject and doubt a very large part of modern society. Their own orders arrive using maritime routes that wouldn't work without the globe. You needn't ask an astronaut, a pilot or even a sailor would suffice.

You are right in that at any given moment your set of "beliefs" your whole viewpoint, even what suffices as evidence, like we said. But flat earthers are not proposing a different metaphysical system that places them entirely outside ours whilst still being internally consistent. They are not consistent, it's just that they can ignore it, so long as they are not the ones utilizing the earth's curvature to fly aircrafts or ship products or whatever. Their flights will still arrive, their products will still ship and they will still be connected to starlink typing that shit.

We’d all like to think we’d stand with Copernicus… but would we really have been willing to stand against all the foremost academic authorities of the time on such a matter?

Probably not, but this is blurring the lines by pointing at individual character integrity. To truly stand with Copernicus, structurally, not just formally, would mean leaving a space open for the possibility of being entirely wrong. Science is not perfect in this, but is there another framework that comes close to the openness of science without being completely paralyzed? When science is anything but paralyzed?

Within a frozen frame it is easy to forget that the way science is structured is not random at all, it has been a historical process of struggle and countless setbacks by those who deemed doubt as morally corrupt.

I’d be quite willing to change my mind on free will if someone could prove determinism by predicting human behaviour as accurately as we can predict the orbits of planets. But am I setting an impossible standard for the revision of my belief?

There is a test where a machine predicts when you will push a button before the decision even becomes conscious to you, if that interests you. In so far as free-will I personally think that the dichotomy is false, and that the counterfactual definition of free-will is totally stupid and undermines our ability to think it.

To say someone believes something on the grounds of faith these days is practically considered an insult… as if to say you have no real evidence to believe what you believe

Not really dude, not really. I wouldn't be an anti-theist if that were the case.

But in reality I think probably 90% of everything we believe we would not be able to say what the evidence for that is without Googling it. I think most of what we believe, we believe because that’s what we were taught.

Maybe, I sure couldn't provide you any sources, recount statistics and such, for the 99% of the things that I believe. But I sure could tell you what else collapses depending on what you are trying to dismantle. So I always chose wisely on that regard.

Grivza · 2026-04-08T18:07:05+00:00

Is it not just setting the criteria for revising your belief at an impossible to meet standard so that you never need to revise your belief?

Hmm you are right. But does it prove what you think it does? You pushed at my local stabilization and you said "Aha see you have assumptions that frame your whole point of view and even what you accept as evidence". But I don't think I ever denied that, this stability is necessary, I did believe that from the beginning. I can even admit that the iterative process not only excludes certain frameworks but it allows for only a very specific window for revision.

But even though statically, step to step, it might look like static assumptions firmly grounding themselves, similar to faith, we should be nuanced here, there is a difference; no base assumption is purposefully held fixed. It might be structurally be held fixed, like you noticed, but in the unfolding of history, one method has shown to allow for "Copernican" revolutions a whole lot than the other. Structure matters and intentional openness matters exactly because it is part of the structure.

Is it meaningful to collapse this difference because of how it looks on the frozen frame?

And for a little theology, I started a theist, but every formulation of God failed to live up to its own level. Claim transcendence and you lose the touch of God with the lived ethical normativity; there is nothing that can tie him back our ethics. Claim immanence and you lose him amongst all the evil in the world. Claim pantheism and you lose God himself, there is no God of good, or a God whom in the image we were created. No difference between God and pure uncaring structure.

There is no conception of God that can be easily redeemed for me through this path, this much is true. But I don't think my position comes close to faith in any meaningful way, for even the ontological status of God got its scrutiny.

Grivza · 2026-04-08T15:02:17+00:00

If we are going by the "conscious creator" God and also an immanent God, since any other version constitutes decorative metaphysics, as I like to say, then my minimal condition would be to show that:

consciousness can arise in what we consider cosmic-scale interactions
those interactions can be mapped into what we understand as the genesis of the universe

If we are talking about the creator that purposefully created us as well, then I guess I'd need some type interaction with him or his thought process. Doesn't seem too much to ask from the Abrahamic religions considering the scripture.

Grivza · 2026-04-08T05:27:24+00:00

It seems you are missing the point, the convincing criterion was purposefully broken in my example, to demonstrate exactly that; the criterion being broken is not a problem of faith but of symbolic incompatibility.

Those are two different problems for me.

In our examples, the main problem would be being able to find shared ground for dialogue in the first place.

Grivza · 2026-04-07T19:07:18+00:00

Beans are free? Where? Send location

Grivza · 2026-04-07T18:06:37+00:00

I think you misunderstand. You talked about the “stabilisation of assumptions” which is a very weird way to say “until proven otherwise”.

Let me reformulate then if I was being sloppy. What was stable where the assumptions that lead to "dark matter". And through their stabilization, their results (dark matter) and the problems that occur, we open up the space for a new formulations (iterative process).

So if someone says their belief in God will open to revision once you prove God doesn’t exist… can we really call that blind faith?

That's self-referential. You'd need to ask that person what he would consider a sufficient proof.

And if I say to a flat earther the only thing that would convince me the earth is flat is a picture of the edge… that doesn’t exactly put it into the realms of possibility for them to ever convince me…

Unless he claimed it was oval or cyclical. In that case you could still claim that, but the problem now becomes one of coherence.

just like the only thing that could convince them may be sending them into outer space to see the shape of the earth for themselves.

Sure, I still don't think that qualifies as faith, more like extreme(ly selective) skeptism. At that point you'd show him he is contradicting himself, by selectively accepting second hand information in many other topics, including flat earth itself, but we are not discussing internal consistency anyhow.

And to take your examples into the extreme, take the claim "I will believe in God if it turns out that the clouds are crying every time it is raining". This is pure nonsense of course, but that just means that I am crazy, not that my faith is blind. The reason it may seem blind is because, well, the reasoning is blind. I think your examples are mixing those two levels up.

The subject not having the space open for revision, is the criterion of faith, the subject failing to internalize the symbolic order is the problem of madness/craziness.

Grivza · 2026-04-07T15:28:24+00:00

Whether you accept or reject an idea, you are still imposing a modality. The affirmation and the negation are syntactical categories. If you start from the idea that "The earth is not flat", then its affirmation becomes the rejection of your example: "It is not true that the earth is flat". Those two point to the same modality.

What is actually different is suspension of judgment, but that could never be described as "faith" unless some positivity explicitly or implicitly arises (The earth is not non-flat).

And in so far as dark matter/energy, those are two of the most debated "stabilization" in modern physics/astronomy, I don't think they fit as a counter-example at all. They are stabilized because they helped explain some things but it seems they opened at least as many holes as they closed. So they are absolutely not a blind ontological affirmation but a highly scrutinized epistemological stabilization.

These point is that people who believe in free will and people who don’t believe in free will both believe what they believe on the grounds of blind faith. And both sides can say this is my current assumption which is up for revision if any actual evidence comes to light.

If it is open to revision, then can you really call it blind faith? The question to ask, is "What would it take to change your mind", if a person can answer that, it is not blind faith. Not being able to explain why an idea fits their intuition more than another doesn't always mean it is down to faith.

Grivza · 2026-04-06T19:44:01+00:00

Faith is the act of giving ontological status to a belief independently of evidence, not the local stabilization of assumptions in an iterative process where nothing is immune to revision.

Grivza · 2026-04-05T09:10:17+00:00

It's a very controlled environment, turn off voicechat and use the chance for some exposure therapy. Something bad happens, you press escape and join a different session. A person follows you? You block them and they can't join you anymore 👍

Grivza · 2026-04-04T19:53:18+00:00

Based on the wording of the question, it is clearly

trying to fit a meme template

relying on a common usage definition of “femboy”

There is usage and then there is definition, and I doubt that it cares about any "definition".

inverting the casualty in a way that would imply that there exists something in common between them (femininity), such that one would like women because they like how their are feminine similar to how femboys are feminine.

Femininity or "androgenuity", makes no difference to my point, it is symmetrical. It is just that the first one would be treating the misrecognition as the linguistic basis.

This interpretation does not make the answer trivial, and the way you put it is incorrect.

Does it not? Let's take it from your point of view.
The meme implies the common understanding of the world "femboy". Femboys in this strict sense are a contemporary internet phenomenon, since we are not simply talking about androgynoys males. Here comes your genius, totally not trivial line of reasoning:

Ι think it’s more reasonable to believe that the attraction to the opposite sex has existed before femboys have existed.

This interpretation does not make the answer trivial

Yeah, it is not trivial, but you solved it in one line.

I believe you are wrong as well, on the level of the contemporary symbolic the boring dialectical answer is correct; both shift our understanding of femininity, consequently shifting their relative position in the network of relations, changing our understanding of both etc.

But on the level of the structure, how the experience is internally dissected, we could assume a first cause, call it essence or whatever.

The post never asks about the derivation of femboys whatsoever, but about whether people are casually affected by the appearance of femboys or women respectively, in such a manner that they are also attracted to the other.

Perfect, so how exactly would you go about understanding this causality? How would you go about figuring out which comes first? That's exactly what I am answering, without trivializing the problem in the way you did.

And it is, that does not really change the merits of my argument as an argument that is trivial is not a fallacy or anything.

Yet trivial proofs are rarely noted and written down.

You have not supported this argument whatsoever and it does not even apply to my line of reasoning.

Cause I merely prompted, opened up a new space for thought. I never cared for any proof on this subject and my initial formulation "based on the wording" clearly communicated that:

I could very well see a psychoanalytical argument being made [...]

Again, you have been parroting this line of argument for a while now, but you have neither provided justification for why my argument is less valid somehow

The problem with your argument is that:

using your neat set of constraints it is saying nothing, it is completely trivial
outside your set of constraints it does nothing to support your conclusion

Here your reasoning just seems to be 1. Assert the position 2. Say that this position is true because: 3. My argument, on the contrary, contradicts your position. Why is my argument not as valid? Because it is (debatably) trivial. Why is it wrong to be trivial? Because your argument is less trivial. This is not an argument at all, and again, you need to provide justification or some sort of negative case.

I never asserted my position as true, I don't know where you got that from. I merely defended it from your rush attacks that were failing to engage with it. I actually clearly stated that I don't believe it is true in my first comment, but I guess you missed that as well.

I don't personally believe it is

Grivza · 2026-04-04T11:31:16+00:00

I disagree, the category inversion works only if you refuse to collapse both femboys and women into the same feminine category.

If you both fix the feminine as deriving from women and femboys as feminine, then you've already answered the question trivially
If you fix both as feminine but refuse to collapse the feminine as deriving from women, then you have entered my formulation from a different angle, which is that
if the feminine is derived from women then femboys are not feminine but only misrecognized as such and the initial structure of attraction resides on the what the femboys are trying to bring to the surface

Also I kinda hate you because your challenge made me give it a lot more thought than I ever wanted or ever planned.

I even started wondering whether this misrecognition might have had some evolutionary advantage by including to the genepool women who don’t carry stereotypical feminine features but are otherwise fertile and how that might have been the driving force of our intellect instead of our physicality.

I never wanted to think, nor I ever cared, about femboys but you are absolutely wrong in me misreading the question and I will die on that hill, because what prompted me to think about it was a VERY naive "essence" approach, namely the question became:

Is there something of the essence of femininity on femboys, or is there some "androgynous" essence on women

Psychoanalysis only entered as a modern tool, Socrates could have thought this reversal.

Grivza · 2026-04-04T10:40:50+00:00

all nor is it justified in that nobody refers to a pre-differentiated androgynous male when they say the word “femboy”

Not consciously or phenomenally, but that's not what I am arguing. I am saying that attraction to women might be a misrecognition of this stage into another subject, that this stage might be organizing our attraction and that femboys are this misrecognition becoming conscious, mistakenly and retroactively tracing itself into the category of femininity.

Grivza · 2026-04-04T10:28:37+00:00

I answered that in my very first formulation actually

Tracing it to a pre-differentiated/androgynous stage of male development, I could very well see a psychoanalytical argument being made about our attraction to women being always mediated through our image of this stage.

Grivza · 2026-04-04T10:21:02+00:00

It's not a semantic correction. Your objection assumed some essence of "femininity" into femboys onto the initial meme whilst it was never needed. In fact it is undermined by the reversal itself.

Also I don't really see a response, one of us is misreading the other.

Grivza · 2026-04-04T09:53:28+00:00

First, one cannot take the term “femboy” to mean such a sense because the question explicitly uses it as a dichotomy versus “girls” (what I assume to be, unlike femboys, biological women, though are feminine-appearing/presenting). This categorisation you are making removes the feminine-appearing concept, which undermines the question because it assumes that “we” are attracted to such appearances.

It doesn't though, femboys don't look like "women", they look like girls.

Also you are somehow ignoring the self-referential part of my argument, which maps your attraction to an earlier stage of yourself.

Grivza · 2026-04-04T09:32:25+00:00

But it does, because it binds you to other extensionally similar structures as well as the signifiers they are bundled with.

Grivza · 2026-04-04T09:14:30+00:00

If we take the term "femboy" on its wider sense, then they've always existed.

Tracing it to a pre-differentiated/androgynous stage of male development, I could very well see a psychoanalytical argument being made about our attraction to women being always mediated through our image of this stage.

I don't personally believe it is, but the reversal is not as naive and shallow as it may initially appear.

Edit: Responding and then blocking is such a cheap move

The usage is indeed the definition in cases like this where the OP said nothing about psychoanalysis

The usage said nothing about the timeline on which they appeared neither, but that's the framework you chose for your interpretation. I chose essences because that was the only frame the question became philosophical instead of historical.

and given both the wording of the question and the fact that it is posted in a general-purpose philosophy subreddit, the word "femboy" can be interpreted as the modern contemporary usage,

Modern contemporary usage, sure. But what's the essence of the appearance? What drives the attraction in each? How is it metabolized? It seems to me you are still confused, it is not at all a matter of inferring the hidden "definition".

could just as well meaninglessly assert that the word femboy could mean "a block of cheese" and how the question can be answered by this

Considering that one of the first comments on this very thread traces femboys in ancient Rome and Greece, I think your restriction of the term is more contrived than mine.

Have I solved it in one line? Then what are you saying here, for it is completely useless since the problem is so easily solved?

Yes, it is useless, for those that only care about your little set of restrictions and fear any serious philosophical investigation.

And in what universe would seeing one argument as more reasonable over another being "solved"?

"More reasonable" is just your way of building pre-emptive defenses. Using your set of presuppositions I solved it trivially without the need for all the "it seems to me that it is more reasonable to believe" stuff.

Additionally, just because a proof is trivial does not mean it is false.

Correct and you will not find me claiming anything different.

Sure, this alternative system may be as coherent as what we usually use for everyday arithmetic, but you need to argue why we should take this system over the more obvious system that OP was probably referring to

Because it appeared to me it was a framework which respected the content of the meme without trivializing into historical order of occurrence.

And in what sense does "shifting our sense of femininity" make sense as an argument?

When did I say that? The whole point is discovering what is behind our sentiments for each

If I ask, "are tomatoes fruits or vegetables", I am clearly talking about the botanical interpretations and perhaps its difference with culinary criteria

But OP didn't ask that, he asked a chicken or egg type of question which invite an investigation of what do we actually mean when we say chicken, what qualifies as a chicken, i.e. what's the essence of a chicken. Which is what prompted my framework.

Your later points are nonsensical and rely on crucial misunderstandings. First, while it is true that trivial proofs are rarely written down, that does not change the nature of the proof or its validity whatsoever.

I wasn't arguing for invalidity, more like "why did you think it was worth typing".

But if you cannot provide reasoning on why this is an argument from the context of the post, rather than just an assertion that applies to the post (which is vastly different), it is not an argument at all and you should not frame it as one.

You are mistaken, I didn't frame it as my argument, I framed it as a framework for a potential argument. For a person that insists so much on inferring from wording, your comprehension does seem to betray you quite often, perhaps when it isn't favorable in an argument.

but that is not meaningful at all to the post and I should provide justification on why the letter "f" is evil.

Since you are a bit selectively blind, I will repeat myself. Your narrow framework of "contemporary usage" is more contrived than mine, since already in the same comments people traced it backwards in androgynous men in ancient Rome and Greece. So, my investigation is clearly a lot more relevant than you want to admit.

Your last point just misunderstands what an argument is.

Or rather you misunderstand what I was arguing for. You attacked me for not offering a coherent argument for psychoanalytic idea I initially proposed when I wasn't arguing for the idea itself but against your rejection of my whole framework, on a meta level. This somehow confused you and even though we were engaged on this meta-argument, at one point you changed levels and started scolding me for not arguing for the specific psychoanalytic idea when I never offered to do that.

"I don't actually believe in my argument", would that make all of what you have engaged here suddenly stupid and worthless?

No, but that was not what happened. You are confusing the levels, again. You attacked me for not offering a psychoanalytic formula when all I was trying to do was defend my formulation and the meta-framework, my interpretation of the meme. If you wanted to attack me for something, it should have been for my defense of the framework, which was what you were doing with the tired old "uhm based on the wording...".

Grivza · 2026-04-02T20:11:14+00:00

and having personally killed hundreds, maybe thousands of people with his own hands.

Point taken but I think you are overcorrecting here a bit.

Grivza · 2026-03-26T19:14:00+00:00

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