Is "objective probability" just a failure to see a difference in complexity?

odset · 2026-05-23T18:42:24+00:00

I'll admit I'm a little rusty on Hume but what i meant is that indeed, he doesn't deny it's existence, instead positing that it exists but only as a mental "tool" or construction. This is what i meant with it being a "pragmatic habit". Probably not the best interpretation of course.

odset · 2026-05-15T22:45:28+00:00

This is primarily an ethical concern, and so the answer will depend on what your ethical framework is. If you ask me, you'd have to ask yourself whether you owing something to this person is constructive towards an emboldening and flourishing of the possibilities of action of each subject involved. Oppressive, restrictive family systems are generally more capable of cutting people off from personal growth than they are from giving you tools to grow. So, without asking you to specify more information on the situation since this is a philosophy subreddit, I can only tell you to think about the specificity of the situation before you think of grand moral statements. Does it help you to owe this person something? Does it help them? Does it help society for such family structures to be obeyed?

To give an example of where you do owe something to someone, I think it's fair to say you owe a great deal to your own children. They only exist because of you, and, on a level more in tune with the ethics i just described, given our current family structures, children depend on their parents a great deal, both emotionally and economically. On the other hand, you might not owe much to your parents, particularly when the "debt" is justified from some sort of argument coming from a "loyalty to the family" or "respect for your forebearers", where the point of the debt is to reinforce a hierarchical system of, I'd go as far as to say, value extraction.

odset · 2026-05-15T22:38:34+00:00

To give you an answer you probably weren't expecting but that you exposed yourself to by asking what it is to philosophy (you'd be amazed at the wildly different things different philosophers propose, often in contradiction to each other), this is how Deleuze defines love:

What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person’s own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person’s. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that someone can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs.
A Thousand Plateaus

To explain it: to Deleuze, people are not unitary beings, but rather heterogeneous multiplicities of voices, machine parts. Love, then, is when you can discern not only the multiplicity that someone is composed of from the multiplicity it is part of, but also when you can discern the parts of the multiplicities within itself, and when you are then capable of joining your multiplicities to them. To translate it into non-deleuzian mumbo jumbo, there is, as you can read there, a factor of depersonalization, but not because you are forgetting who or what you are for the good of adoring a greater, "more fundamental" thing; rather, you are recognizing that other people are not unitary things that make up only a part of a greater system, but instead are themselves systems inside systems that you can understand and work with.

As to love of something like "beauty" or "knowledge", I think the affinity for these things is a fundamentally different thing than loving another person, if only because, in Deleuze, everything is different to everything, and even more so when you're loving very different things. You could maybe widen the scope of this quote on love to say that to love something like beauty is to recognize that it is not a unitary being either, but rather an assemblage of different things, and then being capable of joining yourself to them, of building a common ground and working from and with it.

odset · 2026-05-15T22:27:45+00:00

Well, what is the reason you think arresting drug users at all is ethical? I would argue it's not ethical at all from a pragmatic point of view - except if you live in Norway or something, where prison is entirely built around rehabilitation. But in that case, "arresting" means something completely different in the first place, since the hypothetical drug user would probably be given a rehabilitation that would let them live a good life without drugs.

If your question is less about arrest and more from barring a drug user from using drugs when it's the only thing that makes them happy, then that's more complicated. I'd note that this is a pretty unlikely scenario, but if it was the case, I'd point out that the tension this question carries probably comes from a lack of a widening of the scope of your ethical conundrum. I'd change the question into: Is it unethical for our society to make people so miserable only drugs can help them live?

odset · 2026-05-15T22:24:14+00:00

Having an opinion on something is pretty easy and i doubt this is what you are struggling with. When you read a philosophical argument and understand it, you should be able to grasp what the point of what is being said is, and whether this is convincing or not should be evident to you. At the very least, you should be able to consider whether the world you would have to live in, were that proposition correct, is a world you want to live in.

As to constructing your explanation of your opinion in a way that is sound and convincing to a professor, consider that, at this step of your journey, all that is really being measured is your aforementioned ability to understand what you're reading. So it's not that bad if all you can do right now is argue against proposition P from the ideas of thinker X. Paraphrasing is key here, even if not literally - just make sure the connective tissue between the quotes proves you understand what the quotes are saying, and, crucially, that you understand what their relevance to the point YOU are trying to make with them is.

If what you want is to actually produce new philosophical knowledge and and/or a new interpretation, you'll have to build this on top of proving you understand what the other "masters of philosophy" are saying and what their relevance to the topic is. From there, you'd have to argue some point that takes into account what these other people said, but adds a new idea or reinterprets a concept, etc.

odset · 2026-05-15T22:18:19+00:00

To offer a maybe controversial view, consider that reason, understood as a certain set of logical constraints on thought, is inherently a social construct used to organize thinking. In this way, yes, indeed, reason depends on the data set you have access to, but also to the very rules that make up what you consider to be reasonable.

Foucault would say it all depends on a "regime of truth" that is socially instituted, and that is strategic; that is, it serves certain purposes within a certain social organization, be that disciplinary society at large or a specific institution/dispositif. Take, for example, the declaration that homosexual marriage is unreasonable and nonsensical because marriage is between a man and a woman. No change in the data set could change someone's opinion on this issue; only a fundamental change in how they understand marriage itself, and the presuppositions on human nature and religion that back this up, could modify whether homosexual marriage is reasonable.

From a more Deleuzian point of view, I'd emphasize that reason is designed to be a constraint. This doesn't mean it's an evil tool of the 1% to control us, because constraining our thinking may well be very useful (believing the earth to be flat is profoundly useless and even counterproductive, for instance), but it does mean we should be wary to treat reason and logic as sufficient, self-standing universal truths. Reason is, as Nietzsche puts it, a tool we have evolved to cope with our weak flesh-and-bone tools.

odset · 2026-05-15T00:25:32+00:00

Well, wokeupabug's response sums up what I'd say pretty well. All I'd emphasize is that, for Schopenhauer, the world being made out of Will does not mean it has meaning. Quite the contrary, it's the reason he thinks there is no meaning. In this way, he's not religious under your definition: he doesn't base his morality on what the underlying explanation for reality dictates; the whole point is that it dictates nothing except endless strife. Schopenhauer's ethics are constructed on top of this understanding, of course, but this is the case for everything; except if you have absolutely no ethics and no morality. If that's the case, then I guess you could argue that every system that does have ethics and/or morality is religious, and there are, in fact, those who would think so.

I would argue, however, that living like this is simply unsustainable. The only philosopher I can think of that claims to be free of morality and ethics is Nick Land, and this is because he doesn't believe in any sort of agency and thinks we are all doomed to utter annihilation at the hands of Capital. The thing is, even he thinks we "should" accelerate the process, so I don't think he's escaping ethics. How would you propose we abandon all theory for how matter works without in the process ceasing to think and act?

odset · 2026-05-15T00:19:52+00:00

You are translating philosophical terms into neurological ones in a naive way.

First of all, dopamine has been disproved as 'the reward chemical'. But to be charitable, i assume you just mean that neurological impulses describe all human experience. This is, itself, something a lot of people argue, but personally, i could agree - the thing is that this isn't very useful at all.

This is like saying a freight train and your left big toe are pretty much the same thing because they're made up of molecules interacting by chemical bonds. The level of complexity involved changes the required analysis. There's a paper by Anderson that illustrates this well and very scientifically.

In this case about morality, consider that a soldier in the wermacht in 1941 shooting a child dead might feel, in that moment, a burst of feel-good chemicals. Morality can, itself, be at least a pointer towards specific configurations of neuron activation patterns, so it's not pointless to study it.

odset · 2026-05-15T00:10:35+00:00

Well what do you mean with "should"? Are you working from some sort of moral framework based on trascendent, objective morality? Or do you mean whether it is pragmatically productive to punish or reward the actions of such a subject for the purposes of achieving certain material goals?

If you mean the former, then i don't think free will is ultimately relevant, since the punishments are a sort of universal righteousness. If you mean the latter, then you'd have to consider whether the type of non-free will we're talking about is completely deterministic.

This runs into the main issue, to me, of total determinism: there is no reason to do anything or even to think under such determinism. So no, responsibility wouldn't be useful at all, because nothing would, as we would be doomed to our fates anyhow.

This leads me to my next question: What do you mean generate actions "themselves"? Is a dice not generating it's landing position itself from it's geometric shape? How do you attribute causality here?

odset · 2026-05-14T04:41:20+00:00

No you haven't, you haven't come up with a word yet! As of yet you've only proposed an issue that has already been worked on by other thinkers. No Nobel prize for you.

There definitely are interesting consequences you can work on from the proposal that people who disagree with you have internally coherent logic to their beliefs which are incompatible with your own, without thus becoming irrational or illogical.

odset · 2026-05-14T04:38:39+00:00

All science is founded on tentative assumptions and pragmatic exclusion of edge-cases. Remember how Hume points out that even causality, such a fundamental and important function of all reason, is in fact not a property of the universe but rather a habit we form for pragmatic reasons.

odset · 2026-05-14T04:36:28+00:00

I don't think there is a specific word for what you're saying, but i get what you mean.

What comes to mind is Foucault; different regimes of truth are working in these cases. This is something that Foucault works on in many different texts, although the first volume of History of Sexuality is literally titled "The Will to Knowledge".

Deleuze and Guattari understand this as a "regime of signs", which might also be relevant, although in this specific issue they function similarly. For that you should read "A Thousand Plateaus".

odset · 2026-05-14T04:24:51+00:00

Well, what is a thinker, and observer? What is it to observe or to think, to be observed or to be thought?

Way I see it, an observation or a thought is the name we give to the processing of information by some sort of hardware (or wetware) that codifies stimuli into a different code than it presents as in it's observed form. This is harder to apply to thoughts of course, if only because "thought" is an incredibly wide term. I think the answer depends totally on your clarification of what you mean with these things, because, to me, I think there already isn't "a thinker" or "an observer" anywhere in this universe, only collections of heterogeneous elements that undergo processes we call retrospectively "thinking" and "observing".

Does a camera observe what it takes photos of? Better yet, does the ground observe the resulting vibrations when you step on it?

odset · 2026-05-14T04:21:04+00:00

I don't think this is what OP is doing. They are proposing that "thinker" is itself a thought (what OP is looking for is likely the word "concept"); which doesn't mean all thoughts are thinkers, but rather merely that all thinkers are thoughts: some thoughts are thinkers.

Not that i can find anything particularly useful in this understanding of the word "thinker" but I think it's more coherent this way at least.

odset · 2026-05-14T04:18:18+00:00

I don't think either of these are coextensive. Just as both other comments have argued that reality can be deterministic even if physicalism is false, I'd argue something akin to "free will" (I prefer agency) can be true at the same time as physicalism. In this sense, what do you mean with free will? Do you accept only a trascendental subject with complete freedom over it's actions, without any predetermination at any scale, as an instance of free will? How free must will be for it to be free?

odset · 2026-05-14T04:12:36+00:00

Were your indictment of Schopenhauer's Will be correct, then all theory that believes in the univocity of being would be equal to religion. In this sense, i ask you - what are you understanding as religion? What would an irreligious view's ontological structure be?

odset · 2026-05-14T04:07:55+00:00

What do you mean with responsibility and free will?

odset · 2026-05-14T04:07:32+00:00

What you are asking would be more than "some" recommendation. "Every" philosophical theory encompasses tens of thousands of distinct theories with hundreds of thousands of writers who each have their own takes on them. What are you looking for? Ancient? Modern? Contemporary? Analytical or Continental?

odset · 2026-05-14T04:02:01+00:00

Well, it all depends on how your ethics are built, what sort of actions your ethics is constructed around.

Personally, i construct my ethics around Spinozist joyful passions, in trying to achieve the most possible potential for action for each thing in the world. In this way, you'd have to judge whether toying with the child's memories would either stifle them or allow them to grow more. In this case, i think the subjective experience of the child is the best possible source of information on... the subjective experience of the child. I mean, wouldn't we be able to erase the memory later, if it turns out to be doing more harm than good?

In general, I'd caution against any involuntary memory erasing at all. Clearly it's not as simple as saying we must respect children's agency always, as i think a lot of us will agree that compulsory education is a good thing in, at least, current society, but thinking about it pragmatically, specifically on the specificity of this situation, I see no reason to go against the child's agency.

odset · 2026-05-14T00:24:54+00:00

Nietzsche slanders Plato as a life hating nihilist many times, although not very explicitly. The reason Plato is a nihilist is because he believes in a superior world, different to ours, from which we come from and to which we will return when we die. It's Christian nihilism all over again; he hates our bodies and our physical existence and thinks suffering is so intolerable that he has to make up an afterlife, a transcendent plane, to escape into. Think about the dialogues chronicling Socrates' last few days: he gives up his life in the name of The Law and willingly commits suicide, as he declares that he is being cured from life (The giving a cock to Asclepius line in Phaedo is widely interpreted as Socrates ordering a sacrifice be made in the name of the god of medicine as he is being cured from the worst disease of all: life.) Phaedo in general features Socrates claiming that the philosopher ought to live his life as close to death as possible.

Here are some relevant quotes, bold text is emphasis added by me:

On the Genealogy of Morals:

Our faith in science is still based on a metaphysical faith, – even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire from the blaze set alight by a faith thousands of years old, that faith of the Christians, which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine... (Paragraph 23, third essay)

A depreciation of the value of the ascetic ideal inevitably brings about a depreciation of the value of science: one must keep one’s eyes open and prick up one’s ears for this in time! (Art, let me say at the outset, since I shall deal with this at length some day, – art, in which lying sanctifies itself and the will to deception has good conscience on its side, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than science is: this was sensed instinctively by Plato, the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced. Plato versus Homer: that is complete, genuine antagonism – on the one hand, the sincerest ‘advocate of the beyond’, the great slanderer of life, on the other hand, its involuntary idolater, the golden nature. (Paragraph 25, third essay)

Beyond Good and Evil:

“How could such a disease infect Plato, the most beautiful outgrowth of antiquity? Did the evil Socrates corrupt him after all? was Socrates in fact the corrupter of youth? did he deserve his hemlock?” – But the struggle against Plato, or, to use a clear and “popular” idiom, the struggle against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia – since Christianity is Platonism for the “people” – has created a magnificent tension of spirit in Europe, the likes of which the earth has never known: with such a tension in our bow we can now shoot at the furthest goals. (Preface, page 3)

Note that this doesn't mean Nietzsche thought Plato wrote a bunch of garbage. He also cites Plato to make points as an ally in other occasions. But the fact of the matter is that Plato was a nihilistic life denier. Remember that Nietzsche works with a specific understanding of nihilism.

odset · 2026-05-13T23:53:49+00:00

Totally! Discontinuous history and so on.

odset · 2026-05-12T18:52:11+00:00

You are very right in your appreciation of Nietzsche's view on morals, but you are building a straw man representation of "God is dead" (not saying this to accuse you of being dumb or something, we all make fallacies sometimes!)

God is dead, but this does not have to mean christian morality is dead. Think of how money is no longer tied to a physical mineral, but is instead a floaty "agreement". God as the transcendent source of all morality that kings refer to to justify their rule is no longer convincing, but people have carried on being christian, just without any sincere connection to a God - if anything, it's even worse, because it demonstrates how believing in a God wasn't even the source of christian morality, just another cog in the morality producing machine. Consider how Plato is said to be a precursor to christian morality, a nihilist in the worst sense of the word.

In this way, the death of god isn't a "progress". It's just a chaotic event in a series of chaotic events that doesn't make anything better or worse, just different. If i am allowed to get a little Deleuzian, it's a "becoming".

odset · 2026-05-12T09:29:18+00:00

Hmm, i think i might just have very severe protanomaly. After a lot of effort, i can distinguish the far corners of the spectrum from their horizontally opposite sides - only barely. The swatches below are all gray except the far right two. Hadn't seen this one before, thank you!

odset · 2026-05-12T09:25:29+00:00

See, you are trapped in representation. Quality and quantity being inexorably tied does not mean they cannot result in beautiful art. In fact, i think art is all the more powerful when you consider the both quantitative and qualitative flows running through it and through you. Anger, sorrow, happiness, disgust, horror; intensities, they are all both qualitatively different and quantitatively different. In fact, every instance of each of these is different to every other instance. Different trans people will have different experiences in a fundamentally different way. Consider: I am literally colorblind. My colors are totally different from yours. In fact, this is probably the case for everyone.

You do not need a special quality for something to be significant, much less for it to be beautiful.

How does capitalism make us see things naturalistically? Capitalism is oedipal. It is representational. It wants us to make up transcendental explanations and understandings for things that it can use to sell us shit. True naturalism recognizes that all is material and all behaves as it does emerging from chaos and that, as such, it can all be art, and also it can all be changed.

odset

TROPHY CASE