Top 10 Mind Blowing Philosophical Ideas to Think About

Philisophy has always been a weird subject to wrap your head around, and this list contains some of the most mind-blowing philosophical concepts and ideas for a person to think and wonder about.
The Top Ten
1 Linguistically, it's possible for two people to have a conversation that each believes to be meaningful, but actually has no meaning because one or both of them don't know what they're talking about

I think this all the time when I try to explain this to someone. What if they think I'm talking about something completely different?
What if YOU think I'M talking about something completely different?
Because I don't even know at this point.

Most people talk about their normal thoughts. These are just me being bored. My mind is weird.

For example, 90% of all office meetings go like this.

2 The Sorites Paradox

Would you allow someone to cut off one of your fingers if they paid you 1 cent? Probably not. How about four billion dollars? I know I would and I'm confident that you probably would too. This establishes two things, that there are sums of money that you will accept to cut off your finger, and there are sums of money that you will decline to cut off your finger. Because of how money works. The difference between the highest figure you'll say no to, and the lowest figure you'd say yes to, is exactly one cent. These numbers objectively exists, but they're impossible to grasp. Pick the lowest number you can think of accepting, and tell me honestly that you'd decline a counter offer of exactly one cent less.

3 No matter what you do you will be plagued by regret. For example, if you marry, you will regret it, but if you don’t, you will regret that too

I could express my thoughts, but if I do, everyone will think that I'm one of those people who rambles on. If I don't, people will think I'm one of those people who looks through lists and never vote on anything. If I write "this", people will see it on my profile and think I'm weird. If I don't include "this" in my wording, people might have no idea what I'm talking about, just like the first item on this list, which is about people not understanding what you're saying...
Never mind, I'm definitely one of those people who rambles.

4 The idea of moral luck and how it affects the 'goodness' of people

For example, take a situation in which you have two neighbours, A and B. A and B both drink the exact same amount of alcohol at a bar, make the exact same decision to drive home, get into the exact same make and model of car, and drive down the exact same road to their houses, which are next door to each other. The only difference is that B leaves two minutes later than A. Just by chance, there happens to be a child crossing the street at the exact second that B is driving his car; B can't swerve fast enough thanks to the alcohol in his system, and the child is struck and killed. A and B would have been in the same situation, if they'd decided to leave at different times -- they both decided to drive drunk, and neither intended any harm.

From an ethical perspective, who's worse? On the one hand, B killed a child; A doesn't have that blood on his hands. On the other, B and A both made exactly the same decisions, and it seems ridiculous to suggest that the only thing that determines whether someone is a 'good' or 'bad' person (or in this case, I think it's safe to say, a 'bad' or a 'worse' person) is something that is entirely out of their hands.

5 The theory of Six Degrees of Separation

Six degrees of separation is the theory that any person on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries.

6 What I may be seeing as green may be seen by someone else as red, it's just that we both have been taught since childhood to call that particular colour as green

This is trying to give the idea that the color that I see with my sight might not be the same color as the one you see with your sight. Of course we both recognize an object as the same color because we were both taught the same name for that color we see. Another way to think is "what if someone else saw the opposite color on the color wheel rather than the real color". They'd still call red red but their mind would see green.

I have always thought so, this may also be the reason some people don't like a certain color but you do

7 The notion of solipsism

It is the idea that you (or in this case I) are the only conscious thing and everything else is just good at imitating living things. And also, the inverse of solipsism is also interesting - Beyond a point, you cannot prove that you, are indeed real.

This could be true, in your case anyway.
I mean, I'm not real, I'm a bloody cartoon.

8 It's possible that everything came into existence today, and we came into existence with fake memories
9 If you are just a highly complex collection of physical matter, how does a first person point of awareness come into being?

The hard concept of consciousness is and will always be one of the most difficult concepts to understand.

10 Our entire being is self-oriented; that even the most humane and magnanimous acts are done to satisfy our own needs regarding self-worth, avoidance of guilt and related emotional discomfort; at the very least, avoidance of self-loathing.
The Contenders
11 You can have a doppelganger millions, or even billions, of light years away
12 The thought that if you leave hydrogen for long enough, it will start to wonder why it is there

To explain it a different way (at least according to my interpretation). If you leave a comically large amount of hydrogen in a single place, it will undergo nuclear fusion and become a star. That star becomes a supernova and spreads cosmic dust throughout space. Cosmic dust eventually becomes planets, one of those planets eventually develops life, one of those organisms eventually becomes intelligent and one of those intelligent organisms eventually becomes philosophicaly inclined to ask why it's here

13 The problem of induction
14 We're both Heaven and Hell

Many of us are trying to make the world a better place. We are also being nice. However, there are many of us who pollute and commit crimes. We also screw up and thinking we're not good enough and that leads to us killing ourselves. Thus the human race is the manifestation of both Heaven and Hell combined.

It's true. We're all suckers and we're both happy and sad about it.

15 What you see as blue could actually be green to me

Basically everyone sees colours differently, but we all call them what we are told to.

EG: I see a wall as red, but when I look at it from your perspective, it is what I call yellow, but you have always known to call it red.

16 Slugs are just snails without homes
17 Rule-based systems are inherently chaotic due to the principle of Exquisite Sensitivity to Initial Conditions
18 You are the universe
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