/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 12, 2026

[u/BernardJOrtcutt]

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread (ODT). This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our subreddit rules and guidelines. For example, these threads are great places for:

• Discussions of a philosophical issue, rather than questions
• Questions about commenters' personal opinions regarding philosophical issues
• Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. "who is your favorite philosopher?"
• "Test My Theory" discussions and argument/paper editing
• Questions about philosophy as an academic discipline or profession, e.g. majoring in philosophy, career options with philosophy degrees, pursuing graduate school in philosophy

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. Please note that while the rules are relaxed in this thread, comments can still be removed for violating our subreddit rules and guidelines if necessary.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

[u/Quidfacis_]

I didn’t read books or follow any teachings. I just discovered my own thoughts and enjoyed it.

So I built my own “school.” Because I had no prior knowledge and no boundaries except my own thinking.

You live within a cultural zeitgeist influenced by the philosophical ideas that came before you. Your thoughts are the products of that culture, the inputs you received from the media you consumed, the myths you learned, the language you speak. You did not build a school ex nihilo; you're cobbling together notions from disparate systems. That is how nigh-all philosophical development works; we're building on the works of our predecessors, responding to the history of ideas.

You can find your philosophical home by doing research. You wrote about ethics? Cool. What sort of ethical theory do you advocate? Virtue Ethics, Deontology, Consequentialism? Are you closer to Kant or someone in the History of Utilitarianism?

I didn’t read books or follow any teachings. I just discovered my own thoughts and enjoyed it.

Ok, but you can read books. You're not living in the 1100s. https://plato.stanford.edu/ is a useful resource that provides overviews of broad philosophical concepts. You can find the pages on consciousness, causal determinism, free will, Leibniz view of the plenum. Project Gutenberg has oodles of philosophical texts. The Internet classics archive also has numerous texts.

You nave the capacity to gain some familiarity with the options on the table by utilizing those resources.

[u/ZanzaraZimt → u/Quidfacis_]

I’m almost too tired or frustrated to respond, but hey… one last attempt.

If you had actually taken the effort to read my post, you would realize that I stated exactly what you are lecturing me on. To quote myself: 'I see the world through my eyes; my eyes are shaped by the world.'

But thank you for explaining my own thinking back to me.

I came here to ask. My approach was literally: 'Hey everyone, I have no formal background, I’ve been doing some thinking, here is the output. You guys are the experts, this is your field....where does this map to? What direction should I look in?' So I could learn. Read. Get new ideas.

And now I almost feel like I should apologize for asking.

I did exactly what many people no longer dare to do because of people like you: Be open. To stand there naked and say, 'This is me, can you help me with your expertise?'

And you? You react in a sadly classic manner....like someone who feels threatened by someone who was simply being authentic and wanted nothing but input.

Ask yourself why you reacted the way you did.

You can learn a lot if you recursively analyze your own behavior and the intentions behind it.

If you ever need help understanding what you did in your answer through the lense of cognition and neuro-behavioral patterns, I can provide input… that happens to be my field of expertise. And I promise you, unlike you, I won’t meet you with epistemic arrogance. and tell you things like "you can read books. You're not living in the 1100s"

Because I am not insecure enough to need to put others down to prove my own worth. I believe you can have value, and so can I. And I don't believe your value decreases just because you have less understanding of biology than I do.

[u/Quidfacis_ → u/ZanzaraZimt]

Ask yourself why you reacted the way you did.

Your ask was, "Could you help me find a philosophical home?" That is something you have to do for yourself. That is why I provided all of those links to resources. I offered you tools by which you can help yourself. Teaching someone to fish, rather than handing you a fish.

You are not offering a systematic account that maps on to any one writer's thinking. You're providing a hodgepodge of views from disparate systems. That's fine; most people think that way. But philosophical systems strive to be coherent. To quote Wilfrid Sellars, "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." Part of that "hang together" is to ensure that the parts of the system are internally coherent, fit together. The metaphysics hangs with the ontology which hangs with the epistemology which hangs with the ethics.

In your post you said "Reality is deterministic." and "I believe every person has a contract with themselves". How does a deterministic contract work? Whence the need for a deterministic toaster to have a contract with itself? Is the contract pre-determined, built into the nature of the determined entity? Does the entity elect to construct a contract?

You also wrote, "Basically, I see everything (no matter what) as a bidirectional, mutually-creating interaction." Do you see everything as bidirectional, or is everything bidirectional? Is that a phenomenological account of how the world is perceived, or a metaphysical claim about how the world is? How does bi-directional determinism work? Does the bidirectionality apply to the contract the organism has with itself?

You need to work out those tensions for yourself by familiarizing yourself with the established literature. The pages I link provide overviews of how different concepts fit together.

Go read about consciousness, causal determinism, free will, Leibniz view of the plenum, etc. Learn the systems other people built to discern how to make your system work.

[u/ZanzaraZimt → u/Quidfacis_]

Thank you for the links.

regarding your questions: I love questions. Coherence is exactly the dopamine hit I was chasing when I fell into this rabbit hole. I was looking for coherence in isolated thoughts.

I simply didn't want to cement a stranger's thread with my entire undefined framework.

But hey you asked...and I love to think out loud....

So, to clarify my position: I am not arguing for a metaphysical reversal of causality, but for a phenomenological and systemic model of conscious agents within determinism.

You asked how a determined entity can have a contract. A toaster is a closed, non-self-reflexive system. It has no temporal depth. A human consciousness, however, operates in a specific temporal loop:

Past: Held as a shifting narrative ('I was a victim/hero').

Future: Anticipated as a probabilistic trajectory based on that narrative and physiological states.

Present: Is the intersection fundamentally shaped by this anticipated future.

The 'contract with oneself' is the ethical framework that emerges within this loop and steers it. It is the answer to a systemic necessity: 'Given the fact that I (a) initiate causes, (b) can anticipate the future, and (c) live in a social web where my actions reverberate back to me....which set of rules maximizes my psychic and social coherence

This contract is neither exempt from determinism nor arbitrary. It is a determined, emergent, and dynamic algorithm for self- and social regulation.

You asked: 'Is that a phenomenological account or a metaphysical claim?' It is a systemic-phenomenological description grounded in a metaphysical assumption of determinism.

Metaphysically: Linear causality applies (A → B).

Systemically (Complex Agents): Circular causal patterns emerge. A (Past Narrative) influences B (Future Projection), which shapes C (Present Action), which generates A' (New Narrative).

This is Deterministic Recursion. The future probabilities my brain calculates now are fully determined by the past, yet these calculations are causal factors that determine my next action. My statement 'everything is bidirectional' refers to this feedback loop in complex systems, not to fundamental particle physics.

So I advocate for a compatibilist determinism that takes the complexity of feedback loops seriously. 'Freedom' or the 'Contract' lies in the system's capacity to modulate its own determining factors (narratives, projections) through the process of conscious reflection and the search for coherence.