Deontological moral doctrine, which can be considered synonymous with categorical morality — Mww

...follows principles (accepted doctrines) and principles only. Intent, approval don't matter.

A categorical moralist is a robotic person who's programmed to execute principled actions only and forfeits any free will that may sabotage the execution.

Fair enough. — Ludwig V

Yes.

such as?

persons mind — Outlander

Mind isn't the whole of the person. Body can't be sidelined. Agency requires both (not necessarily in synergy; can be done independently).

Anxiety or nervousness that makes one stand out and otherwise miss out of social opportunities doesn't seem "for [one's] own good." — Outlander

It is. It reduces the stress and helps you relax.

stuttering — Outlander

Your bodily functions (whatever causes stutter) execute full agency (even if against your mind, i.e., your willingness to talk smoothly).

selfishness requires intent — Outlander

Why? Intent is mental. Function is physical. Both constitute the self.

OP about how fire is bad if touched by most organisms? — Outlander

That's a fact supported by everyone, unlike my OP, which is still being debated.

is conscious and not just a mimic — Punshhh

If it shows signs of cognitive behaviour beyond its programmed capacity.

consciousness is emergent in colonies of cells and not, itself present in individual cells. — Punshhh

Of course not. Bacteria lacks consciousness.

But how can that be agency, if unconscious or otherwise a non-consciously formed arrangement the human mind forms automatically with no say or input from the "self" or conscious mind? — Outlander

You are pressing the switch in your sound, awaken mind.

Is that not an example of a truly "intent-less" act? Like nail-biting or some other nervous habit? Sure, you can realize "whoa, wait a minute I'm biting my nails" and stop at your leisure, but it was still initiated without a conscious agent behind it. — Outlander

Reflexive actions are done biologically for your own good. They're self-serving.

Agency requires awareness and intent, whereas the prevailing understanding of the human mind is that the unconscious can never be made conscious. So riddle me that. — Outlander

Your entirety is your self. Whether mind (agency) or body (reaction).

That still doesn't comport or explain an intrinsic, large part of your theory, which seems to suggest every other person's brain on Earth who lives, ever lived, or ever will live, somehow must respond and behave the exact way yours does. — Outlander

Natural law, not personal experience.

usefulness — Mijin

Usefulness is practicality.

If you're satisfied with practical benefits then sure. I'm not. I'm a theoretical person. To me, the truth is more important than functionality.

intention — Colo Millz

Since when did categorical morality depend on intentions?

It could just be an unconscious habit at this point, not unlike putting the toilet seat down after use or putting the cap back on a bottle after a sip. — Outlander

Your brain adapting to a pattern for your future convenience — self-interest.

What defies explanation is how you assume every person on Earth both alive and who ever did live once, and who ever will live just automatically has to have a mind that works the way yours does, exactly as it does. This is just not realistic, at all. — Outlander

Just like I don't measure everything in the universe but know that (a+b)²=a²+2ab+b².

I think the moment you "learn" art is the moment it loses meaning.

Philosophy, like any art, is about expression. Any intake is unnecessary. Just take it out and give it to the world.

I think this is the single best reason why I love philosophy over science.

without a way to make distinctions — Paine

Perhaps because there's in none.

Jack turned on the light to see what was going on - done for himself. — Banno

Self-interest.

Jack turned on the light so that Jill could see what was going on - done for Jill.. — Banno

Intent to assist others — agency — serving his own will and limbs to turn on the switch. He did it to both save himself from subconsciously feeling bad for not assisting, and serve himself his agency to act.

the definition is purely wrong, then, and those neologists need to be hanged.

Can you give reasons why infrared couldn't be measured in 1000 BC, or 1,000,000 BC? — ucarr

We didn't have the technology. And no matter how many more billions of years you spend next, there will be things beyond your technical capabilities, and give you a false image of the universe. Our technologies would have to invent technologies to make themselves see things like we see through our invented technology. And this chain goes on.

Does the question of the loss of info due to black hole evaporation raise a question about the complete accessibility of info, or does it raise a question about the completeness of existence, a larger set containing info? — ucarr

It implies that you've only discovered black holes and that particular paradox. There could be zillions of issues that are both forever beyond our reach and forever lost (affecting the state of the currently available entities). All of your constants and equations will always be based on a false reality.

perhaps we should focus on the info suggested by the paradox as a revelation of the incompleteness of existence, and thus a gain of info about what cannot be known existentially. — ucarr

You should focus on the unreliability of physics and live your life with an skeptical worldview towards everything. That leaves you with two choices: give up everything and live like a Taoist because there's no point (nothing is truly knowable), or keep seeking the truth out of humanity's greatest gift that we call curiosity and never rest.

Social contract forces cooperation (and morality) without prior consent upon birth.

Rather we want to know, relatively, who is problematically violent and who is problematically selfish with regard to whatever the mutual goal is. — Nils Loc

Sounds more like statecraft than philosophy to me.

what's your view on the social contract?

rhetorical.

What makes you trust science? You say observations (testing, diagnosing, matching). Why trust observations?


(P.S. don't forget to ping me)

testing — Mijin

Absolute certainty of infallibility?

cultural moralities — Mark S

I think the very word "morality" is a term with a collectivist (cultural or not) origin. Ethics, values, laws, and norms are all communitarian inventions. To even mention them or define them is an act of tyranny.

The individual lives within his own consciousness.
His perception, will, and moral sense are confined to his mind.
If liberty means self-determination, then it should begin and end within the self — not in the social contract that others draft on his behalf.

But when the state dictates what one can do, it transforms autonomy into permission. The “Bill of Rights” then is not the liberation of man but the institutionalization of his boundaries.

Alam, T. B. (2025). The Illusion of Liberty: When Individual Rights Become Communitarian Grants [Zenodo]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17351527

To be less selfish — Nils Loc

Refinement of selfishness.

I didn't read the book. What's the story/context?

However a difference of course is that science is empirically testable — Mijin

What gives observation more credibility than speculation?

People in 1000 BC couldn't see infrared. Was it fake?

Humans and their inventions will forever be limited. And even if they were infallible beings with unquestionable conclusions, the information paradox poses an important question: are you sure that the universe, in its entirety, has presented itself to you for proper inspection?

What do you think of my definition for the term?

Minds that exist without a body (AI), do they suffer from mental health issues? Or is it an exclusive experience of the minds produced by a body?

So you withdraw your previous response that said an examiner was required for the statement about the cat to be true? — Hanover

Philosophy aside, do I now need to hire detectives or observers to know if my boiled egg is real or not?

Science and religion are both hypotheses, a leap of faith.

There is no objective truth detectable by the subjective (individual or collective) observations.

The only reason God is universally absolute is that He exists outside the universe, beyond observation and measurement.

To interpret nature’s complexity as chaos is the oldest arrogance of our species. We call what exceeds our comprehension “weird,” “nonlocal,” or “probabilistic,” as though nature had changed its dialect merely to mock our intellect. But perhaps the only mockery is our presumption that comprehension is the criterion of truth.

Science, when humble, is noble; but when it imagines itself infallible, it becomes theology under a different name — worshiping equations as scripture, and declaring miracles wherever they no longer work.

Alam, T. B. (2025). The Infinite Symmetry: On the Illusion of Scale and the Fallibility of Human Physics [Zenodo]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17357259

If I'm getting this right, according to your theory, truth beyond observation (you need to observe to prove) is deniable, and anything showing uniform (unchanging across the spectrum) patterns is true.

My question is, are you certain that observers' (humankind, per se) subjective observations are credible?

even our most precise equations are anthropic dialects of cosmic truth. They describe not what the universe is, but what it looks like when filtered through human proportion.

Alam, T. B. (2025). The Infinite Symmetry: On the Illusion of Scale and the Fallibility of Human Physics [Zenodo]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17357259

They are the necessarily unreasoned assumptions upon which science is founded. — ucarr

I said it from the mathematical standpoint. Nonetheless, are you sure your science is absolute?

"The cat is on the mat." Is that true? — Hanover

Good one. There are more areas to attack, though. The problem with his proposition is that it's entirely mathematical.

issues of beliefs and construction of meaning. — Jack Cummins

Are they beyond the reach of the body (by-products)?

If the mind is a product of the body, why isn't its cure always found in the body, and often requires another mind? Is it because the mind acts as an independent property, gaining minimal autonomy? The same way we become separate beings from our parents?

What does that tell us about the universe and its properties, like humans? And what does it mean for humans' defiance of the universe?

Truth is an emergent property of these unlimited instances of the faces of transformation without change. — ucarr

I agree with this. But what about something not observed yet, but is, beyond doubt, projected to happen? Will it be considered truth, or not because of the lack of patterned observations?

Logic is the time-zero expansion-convergence, or dynamism, of the faces of transformation without change. — ucarr

Is logic truth or argument based on observation (projection)?

The insuperable nakedness of existence demands the axiomatic facts of science and art. — ucarr

Are you sure, you have access to the axiomatic science?

Physics, noble and meticulous, charts this ocean of being with instruments built from its own assumptions. It seeks absolutes through relative senses, universals through parochial measures.

Our instruments, no matter how advanced, are extensions of our biology — our range of frequencies, our temporal window, our cognitive scale. We calibrate our machines to perceive as we perceive, and then marvel that they reveal the world as we imagined it.

Thus, even our most precise equations are anthropic dialects of cosmic truth. They describe not what the universe is, but what it looks like when filtered through human proportion.

When we claim the cosmos is “too complex” to model, we reveal not its imperfection, but the mismatch between infinite reality and finite intellect. The breakdown is not in the atom, but in the observer’s abstraction.

Every failure of theory is a reminder that the universe has not erred — only that we have presumed to be its final interpreter.

Alam, T. B. (2025). The Infinite Symmetry: On the Illusion of Scale and the Fallibility of Human Physics [Zenodo]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17357259

How can you even report that you are conscious to me in the "physical" world, outside of your consciousness if you do not "have access" to your own consciousness? — Harry Hindu

I may not see my eyes, but I can feel their presence.

What I meant is that the same way you can't scrutinize your eyes the way you can your palms, you can't dissect your consciousness in the mental laboratory.

Comprehension is more important than authenticity.

If AI helps me compose more correctly, why not?

not multiverse alone, but atoms as potential universes with profound and robust laws of nature. leaving room for argument on its sentience or intelligence.

Well, yes, maybe, but I haven't given the multiverse theory much thought, or at least it doesn't feature prominently in my model. — punos

If one could stand outside scale altogether — neither large nor small, neither fast nor slow — the universe would appear uniform, perfectly coherent, and utterly self-consistent.
Every “level” of it would mirror the same logic, the same architecture of causality, just rendered through differing densities of perception.

This homogeneity is not a matter of matter; it is the symmetry of being itself.
Atoms orbit like stars; galaxies cluster like molecules; neural networks echo cosmic filaments. The universe repeats itself not because it lacks imagination, but because it speaks only one grammar — the grammar of coherence through proportion.

Alam, T. B. (2025). The Infinite Symmetry: On the Illusion of Scale and the Fallibility of Human Physics [Zenodo]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17357259

I'm a human being.

I'm more interested in arguments at the moment.