Interesting Ideas From Philosophy For A Better Life - Alex O'Connor (4K)

Alex O’Connor is a YouTuber, writer and a podcaster. Grappling with difficult moral questions is a part of human life, but in the age of Wikipedia and ChatGPT, are we now outsourcing our morality? Are people becoming less moral over time? Expect to learn why Peter Hitchens really does not like Alex, whether ChatGPT can be convinced of the existence of God, what the non-identity problem is, if Nihilism will make a comeback, the impact of the debate around free will, how much we can trust the historical accuracy of the bible and much more… Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) 00:00 Intro 00:18 The Peter Hitchens Incident 08:11 Alex’s Experience Debating Ben Shapiro 17:00 Has Philosophy Revealed Anything Impactful Recently? 29:40 What Everyone Needs to Know About Ethics 38:07 Making Nihilism Great Again 47:38 Why People Hate Talking About Free Will 54:34 The Sexy Paradox 1:07:49 The Fine-Tuned Universe Argument 1:12:36 Was Jesus’ Resurrection Historically Accurate? 1:20:07 Why Philosophers Go Mad 1:26:50 Is Society Experiencing Mass Cope? 1:38:01 What’s Next for Alex? - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Alex O'Connor, welcome to the show.

• 0:02Alex O'Connor?

  How splendidly we progress. The first time on a Skype call, second time was in person in Austin and now something of a sort of cinematic production. I fear that next time we'll be in 3D or something. It's good to see you again.

• 0:16Chris Williamson?

  Good to see you as well, mate. How are you feeling in the aftermath of Peter Hitchens?

• 0:22Alex O'Connor?

  Validated, vindicated. I must say that I was a little bit, I was in two minds about uploading that interview. He does, there was a bit of a mixture of opinion coming from him. He wasn't speaking entirely clearly, must have been something on his mind. He said, as he's getting up to walk out, "I don't think you should run this." And I'm thinking, "Look, if my guest tells me that they don't want me to run an interview for any reason, it could be because they've had a bad hair day, then I'll respect that." And so I thought, "Damn, am I really going to have to, you know, be the bigger man here and just not post this at all?" But then he kept saying, "Oh, run it if you like. I can't stop you from running it. I just don't think you have any moral right to run it." And I asked him

• 1:07Alex O'Connor?

  why. And he said it was because I am a propagandist for drug decriminalization, a subject which, prior to that, by the way, I'd spoken about once, ever. And that I'd intentionally tricked him to appear on my podcast in order that I might fool him into a conversation about drugs. Now, before the podcast started, I said, "Mr. Hitchens, you have about three subject areas that we both talk about where I think there's a bit of crossover that you've either spoken about or indeed written books about." And those are the decriminalization of drugs. I also mentioned this in my email. The existence of God or religion, I should say, God and religion is the topic. And the third was monarchy. At this point, he says,

• 1:48Alex O'Connor?

  "Well, you know, monarchy is a bit boring." Okay, notice, listener, that he did not take this opportunity to tell me that he thought that drugs were a bit boring and would rather not really talk about drugs at all or for too long. Okay, fine. So I'm thinking, "I agree with you. The monarchy is incredibly boring. In fact, that's the entirety of my point about the monarchy is that it's essentially just boring more than anything else. So let's just do the other two." So I say, "We'll run for about an hour, ideally." And he says, "That's good," you know. And I say, "But, you know, if the conversation flows, it can be an hour and a half, it could be two hours." And-

• 2:21Alex O'Connor?

  Okay, he says, well, look, you know, I say sometimes they can be three hours long. He says, well, three hours might be a bit long, but we'll see how we do. So I'm thinking about an hour and a half, an hour and a half on what was now, in my view, two subjects. So at about forty minutes into this potentially ninety minute podcast on the same topic, when he told me that we've been going around for too long on said topic, I was a little bit bemused, but I did think to myself, maybe I've done something wrong here. Maybe I have upset him in a way that obviously was not intentional. You know, I wasn't trying to bring this out of him, although, you know, it does do quite well for the channel. It's not like it's something I would do intentionally. So I did think to myself, well, maybe I've done something. So I listened back and I sent it to some friends, including you, and thank you for listening to it and, and saying that like, most people just said, you have to run this.

• 3:06Alex O'Connor?

  He's, he's been completely unreasonable. And so there have been criticisms. People have said, well, you know what, it was a bit boring. Or, yeah, it was going around in circles. I submit that that was his fault, by the way, because he does this thing, which I've noticed in a lot of philosophical and political discussion, which is the sort of, I know this one attitude. When you do a lot of interviews, I find that you have a sort of, I know this one. And so.

• 3:30Chris Williamson?

  They answer the question that they heard, not the answer that was asked.

• 3:33Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly. And, and it happens, especially when it's, it's easy enough to make that mistake if you're not listening carefully. So he was talking about the, well, I, I asked him about the decriminalization of, of cannabis. And he says that, well, this will essentially mean that a lot of more children will be smoking it. He had this contention that children would end up smoking cannabis. And I thought to myself, well, okay, I can understand that concern, of course, but I think the tobacco industry has suffered quite a blow in still being perfectly legal to buy as an adult, but the kids just aren't smoking cigarettes anymore. It's just not a thing that's really done. Why is that? In other words, we've had quite a successful education campaign whereby it's not popular for kids to smoke anymore, and yet it's still perfectly legal.

• 4:18Alex O'Connor?

  Can't we have a similar approach to cannabis? Potentially, by the way, not a good view, potentially a perfectly rebuttable view. I'm not sure, but I wouldn't know because I didn't get a rebuttal for that view. Instead, I just heard, you know, all you can do is, is do the whole, which, by the way, is a genuinely quite tired line in this debate, the whole, oh, what about smoking? Or indeed, another point where I brought up alcohol, well, all you can say is, what about alcohol? What about smoking? And that's not what I was doing. At least I contend that's not what I was doing. Because that's what he heard. He goes, oh, I know this one. I've heard this before. Yeah. And you haven't read my book. It didn't seem to occur to him that it is possible, Mr. Hitchens, to read your book and yet still, after having done so, disagree with you.

• 5:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's sometimes when you hear people speak, especially guys that are a little bit older, I think there is a, there is kind of like reverse ageism that goes on, which is who is this sort of young whippersnapper person who I maybe have heard of or haven't heard of much. And almost like a blasé kind of discrediting of the thing. It's like, this is, I mean, this is your show, but it's my show, so to speak. And yeah, it was like, I thought his attitude was pompous and unlikable. And my favorite part was when he threw the pillow at the microphone.

• 5:36Alex O'Connor?

  Throwing the pillow down. And he kept sort of walking back over. He says, he says, you know, I don't want you to post this. And yet.

• 5:41Chris Williamson?

  Rest with.

• 5:42Alex O'Connor?

  And yet walk back over to the microphone.

• 5:43Chris Williamson?

  About you before. I've decided that I absolutely do not like you.

• 5:46Alex O'Connor?

  It was, it was, it was quite something. And a lot of people messaged me saying, hey, like, I'm so sorry that happened. Like, you know, you're doing all right. And I'm thinking, sorry, sorry. I thought there's no way that this is happening. I mean, when it looked like he was about to get up, I thought, surely not. But then internally, I'm thinking like, go on then, do it. Do it. Because I don't think I've done anything wrong here.

• 6:08Chris Williamson?

  It was the podcasting equivalent of come on, mate, have a go.

• 6:11Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. But you know, the weirdest thing was, because he, he sort of gets up to go, and he walks out, and he stands at the door. And he's, and it's, I wish you kind of could have seen his body language. It was, it was very much, there's one point where you can see it when he walks back into shot and he says something. And then after he said it, he just sort of stands there, looking at me, as if to say like, what have you got?

• 6:32Chris Williamson?

  Have a go.

• 6:32Alex O'Connor?

  And so he'd keep going like, I'm gonna go now. I'm going.

• 6:36Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 6:37Alex O'Connor?

  I'm gonna, I'm going and waiting.

• 6:38Chris Williamson?

  This is the podcast playing hard to get equivalent.

• 6:40Alex O'Connor?

  It must have been something like that. Yeah, it was like, it was like the person who wants the fight, but wants to look like they didn't initiate the fight.

• 6:47Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 6:47Alex O'Connor?

  And, and I don't think it's my fault. I'll leave it up to the, to the judgment of the listener or the viewer. I don't think it's my fault that he spent seventeen minutes, seventeen, count them, seventeen entire minutes stood at the door, telling me how much he personally dislikes me, telling me how much he doesn't want to see me again.

• 7:04Chris Williamson?

  I've, I've wanted to do that for as long as I've known you, so.

• 7:07Alex O'Connor?

  Well, we'll see how we do.

• 7:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, today. Uh, you're gonna try and convince me of the existence of God today. You managed to convince ChatGPT.

• 7:15Alex O'Connor?

  That's right.

• 7:15Chris Williamson?

  Which means, does it mean that I'm smarter than ChatGPT if you convince me more quickly or more slowly, or not at all?

• 7:21Alex O'Connor?

  I don't know. Um, I, I, I do know that it, it means that, well, well, ChatGPT, if it's going to inherit eternal life, I, I sort of wonder how that's going to work in heaven. I, I don't know. I mean, I, I don't know if I've made it.

• 7:34Chris Williamson?

  This recursive nightmare for everyone as they walk around and they've got the ChatGPT logo floating about.

• 7:38Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, the interesting thing about ChatGPT is that you, you sort of, you can, you can essentially convince it of anything. And so I wasn't quite sure if it was even a very good video idea, because I'm, I'm sure I could just as easily convince it that God doesn't exist.

• 7:50Chris Williamson?

  Well, at least you can be thankful that it wasn't able to say it had no opinion of you before, but it absolutely does not like you and then get up and walk out.

• 7:56Alex O'Connor?

  Quite right. Some people in the comments did say that at, at least, you know, ChatGPT stuck around until the end. That would be a task. In fact, that's another video idea I got ChatGPT to storm out of an interview.

• 8:08Alex O'Connor?

  Even I probably couldn't do that.

• 8:11Chris Williamson?

  Didn't this get brought up? You debated Ben Shapiro yesterday. How did that go? I haven't even seen you.

• 8:15Alex O'Connor?

  It went well. I think, uh, it, it will probably be out around the time of this, this interview, maybe slightly before, slightly afterwards. Uh, it was, it was a good conversation. We were discussing whether or not religion is good for society. And.

• 8:29Chris Williamson?

  Tough stance for young Benjamin to take at the moment.

• 8:31Alex O'Connor?

  I suppose so. I mean, it was a very much sort of. Don't mention the war type scenario. I mean, the producers had said that we want this to be an evergreen conversation. We want this to be something that people can listen to at any point. And also Ben had just the night before been to the Oxford Union and I haven't seen that yet either.

• 8:49Chris Williamson?

  I have. It sounds like. He went head at it with a bunch of people on the other side of the fence, so to speak.

• 8:55Alex O'Connor?

  He didn't have a very good time. He said to me that it was the most tense thing that he's ever done. The most tense thing he's ever, ever been a part of.

• 9:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, I saw something that was kind of interesting was the video was only shot on what appeared to be iPhone.

• 9:08Alex O'Connor?

  Yes.

• 9:09Chris Williamson?

  So there was no, maybe they just wanted to get it up early as opposed to waiting for the Oxford Union's official video to come through.

• 9:16Alex O'Connor?

  Seems to be the case. They, they do seem to be planning to upload it. In fact, when I was recording with Ben, I think his team were in the green room, sort of furiously subtiting to try and get it out potentially before the Oxford Union.

• 9:27Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 9:28Alex O'Connor?

  I'm not entirely sure, but I mean, it sounded like a, a hell of an evening. And so the next day he was saying that it sort of felt like a nice break from that.

• 9:38Chris Williamson?

  What, to sit opposite you? That you are the comfortable leather pair of shoes that he can put on.

• 9:43Alex O'Connor?

  I think Ben relaxes in argumentation. I think he genuinely enjoys it. I, I think there's no contradiction to say that he was having some time off by sitting there and, and, and having a, having a spat. But he was having a break from the politics.

• 9:57Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 9:57Alex O'Connor?

  In other words, he was able to just argue about something a bit more perennial and a little less, a little less fiery, I suppose.

• 10:04Chris Williamson?

  What have you learned? So you are, I've been a massive fan of you since before you came on the podcast and since then we've become friends and you've come out to see me in Austin. We've spent a ton of time together. You're probably my favorite person to watch debate people because it's kind of a little bit like watching Batman versus Spider-Man or something. Cause I know you well and we've argued a lot, but I, and I know maybe Ben Shapiro, but I don't know what will happen when these two people come together. You were president of SOC SOC.

• 10:32Alex O'Connor?

  The Socratic Society, yes.

• 10:34Chris Williamson?

  You were part of Debate SOC and all of this other stuff at Oxford. Given that you've got a relatively illustrious heritage of both formal and informal debates. What is your assessment of Ben Shapiro's debating style, his ethical consistency, his ability to deploy logic, et cetera, et cetera? Now that you've gone mano a mano in the ring.

• 10:57Alex O'Connor?

  Well, he has obviously an incredibly high verbal IQ. He constructs a sentence out of nowhere and do it very quickly. And he's also very difficult to interrupt, not that I particularly wanted to. I mean, he would throw sort of maybe two or three points out at once and you want to butt in and do them one by one. You don't want to be rude, of course, so I let him finish. But it was amazing how they just glued together into one wall of text. You know, I've seen comments on some of the videos that I was watching of him in preparation to talk to him, where people were not being funny in saying that they played the video on 0.75 speed. Because it makes him sound normal. There was sort of an episode with Konstantin and Francis, Trigonometry.

• 11:38Alex O'Connor?

  And he's talking about religion and its relation to the fentanyl crisis. And people were saying that if you, and it was very fast. And if you play it on 0.75, you forget that you've done that. And you're just hearing somebody talk at a normal volume, at a normal speed. And then Konstantin comes in sounding like a blue whale or something out of nowhere. So he's very quick. Yeah. But also, I thought, very charitable. This is the thing, I think people get Ben Shapiro wrong. I went to his Cambridge Union event after this discussion slash debate. Because it was in Cambridge, that's why we were out there. And so I went to this event and I was talking to a lot of the students afterwards. And you hear a lot of people saying about Ben Shapiro that he is a bit of a grifter. Or, well, I'm not really a fan.

• 12:19Alex O'Connor?

  Or you have the sort of secret fans who are sat in the chamber going like, well, you know, it's, I think it's just, it's important. You know, if you're going to disagree with someone, you sort of have to hear the thing that you're going to disagree with in the flesh. You can say that you like Ben Shapiro, it's okay, you know. But people see this side of him of the sort of slightly sneering, smarmy, owning the collar student kind of thing. But I think in many ways, he matches the energy that he's given. And so taking him seriously and listening to what he's saying and being willing to concede a point to him, he will do the same thing. I think that happened in this conversation. You know, it's steadfast. We're saying what we think to each other. At one point, we both

• 13:02Alex O'Connor?

  accuse each other simultaneously of being delusional, but in such a manner that if you say something, you get a sort of like, yeah, yeah, no, that's a fair point. Actually, maybe we should put it this way instead. Or, or yeah, you know, actually, I see what you're saying. No, you're right. I should have said this instead. That kind of attitude, which is the kind of thing that people think Ben Shapiro is incapable of for some reason.

• 13:19Chris Williamson?

  Humility.

• 13:20Alex O'Connor?

  You know what I mean? Yeah. And it's a kind of, it's a, it's a hidden humility because it comes out not in the attitude, not in the, not in a sort of, he's not going to like give way to you emotion. He's not going to be like, oh, you're right. It would just be if you, if you pay attention to the way he's constructing an argument and changing it subtly based on your responses, you know, that he really is listening and really is trying to engage with what you're actually saying. And that's the kind of humility that I don't think can really be faked.

• 13:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I am friends with a bunch of guys that have worked with him over the years. And I know for a fine fact that part of his debate prep involves a number of break glass in case of mass offence, sort of escape hatches, and that there's layers of how deep and how aggressive he can go. So I would love to know, actually, I might email him and find out what he's got on you, just in case I ever need to actually pull that pin. But

• 14:14Alex O'Connor?

  Well, he said to me when he walked in, I saw the Peter Hitchens thing, as everybody's been saying to me recently. So he'd at least seen that. So he knows how I behave. And he, he knows, in other words, that if he did start sort of screaming at me, that I would probably just sit there and take it.

• 14:27Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. Like the philosophical cuck that you are.

• 14:31Alex O'Connor?

  Right.

• 14:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. You're kind of a little

• 14:33Alex O'Connor?

  There's another quote for the, for the Twitter bio, I think.

• 14:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Have you, have you updated it to, I absolutely do not, I've decided I do not like you, Peter Hitchens?

• 14:42Alex O'Connor?

  It's, it's in there somewhere. I think it's, I actively dislike you is the quote that's now in my bio. I'm constantly shifting it around.

• 14:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Alex O'Connor?

  I don't think I'll ever get rid of unusually penetrating.

• 14:49Chris Williamson?

  What was it that you were doing? What was it that you did for a while? Making theists question their beliefs and lesbians question their sexuality since?

• 14:56Alex O'Connor?

  I don't know what you're talking about.

• 14:57Chris Williamson?

  I remember that in your bio.

• 14:59Alex O'Connor?

  I have no idea what you're talking about. We really have known each other a long time. You know what I found yesterday? I was, I sort of stumbled across it while looking for an email, trying to find out where we were filming today. And I found the original email that you sent me in, must have been 2019, when we first met. And it was amazing. It was this sort of, hi Alex, I've been watching your stuff for a while. Like it was sort of three, four paragraphs of texts. I'd love to sit down and have a conversation with you. I think that your views will be of big interest to my viewers. And then I've, I've already spoken to these people. And it was a bunch of people that I hadn't heard of, wasn't really in my sphere. And it signed off Chris Williamson voodoo events.

• 15:38Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Yeah. Wow. My previous life. Yeah. I had a filling nightclubs in my signature until only six months ago. And I realized that I needed to get rid of it. But no, it's, um, it's cool, man. I think, you know, if I could invest money in people, you, George Mack, Zach, my housemate, Gwyneth Bogal, Rob Henderson, you know, even Rory Sutherland, I don't think that the, the market has priced in his talent. And, um, it's so funny because like what I did for almost all of my career in nightlife was find a different kind of talent. Right. It was like degenerate party talent, but find kids that had good work ethic and, and some skill. And then bring them in and sort of train them up. Uh, so keeping your finger on the pulse of what's happening with regards to trends,

• 16:21Chris Williamson?

  if who is appropriate and blah, blah, blah. But yeah, man, I'm, you know, there is a point, I will happily say it now. There is a point that's going to occur within the next few years where something happens with you being involved that just catapults you into like superstardom. Like I would absolutely bet a shit ton of money that this is going to happen. You've got some, what's that big thing you're doing soon? Can we announce the big thing that you're doing soon? That even bigger debate.

• 16:46Alex O'Connor?

  I think not, only because it's still very much up in the air.

• 16:50Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 16:50Alex O'Connor?

  However.

• 16:51Chris Williamson?

  If and when that happens.

• 16:52Alex O'Connor?

  If and when that happens.

• 16:53Chris Williamson?

  It's gonna break the internet.

• 16:54Alex O'Connor?

  That could be, yeah. Unless this does it for me.

• 16:56Chris Williamson?

  Well, it very well might do. This is the biggest platform you've been on. So when was the last time that you're aware of in your world of philosophy, that something like a, a step change, like the equivalent of the discovery of the Higgs boson happened?

• 17:11Alex O'Connor?

  In philosophy?

• 17:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, just.

• 17:13Alex O'Connor?

  Every now and again, something does come along that's a bit revolutionary. And a, a recent example, and by recent, consider we're talking about the history of philosophy here, 20th century. The theory of knowledge is completely exploded by a man called Edmund Gettier. Uh, and this is, this is actually, I think, quite fascinating. I'll be interested to hear what you think about this. So. Knowledge is really difficult to define. People didn't used to have as much of a problem with it. Like, if you had to give a definition of knowledge, what does it mean to know something? This isn't like a trick question. I'm just, I'm just interested. What do you think? To know something, uh, to be able to accurately predict what happens in the world. Okay, so it's got something to do with it being true in the world. Mm hmm. And your ability to predict, but you can also think about things in the past, right?

• 17:59Alex O'Connor?

  Like, you can know that Napoleon existed or something, so, so. Prediction. The ability to infer. Yeah, to infer, to, to sort of, to have some kind of belief about the world. Which is accurate. Which is accurate, which is, which is true.

• 18:16Alex O'Connor?

  Sure, but then imagine, for example, you're in a, you're in like a locked concrete box with no windows. Hmm. And I don't know, like a, like some voodoo mystic tells you that it's raining outside. And they're, they're just like insane. They're on drugs or something and, and they just tell you that it's raining. They're convinced of it. And, and for some reason you believe them totally irrationally. And it just so happens that it is by coincidence raining outside. Did you know? Right, so you have a belief about the world, which is true, but it would seem very strange to say that you know there's raining outside, right? And so since Plato and the ancients, we've sort of had a consensus on the idea that knowledge is justified true belief. Hmm. JTB. So you need to have a belief that's true.

• 19:01Alex O'Connor?

  You need to, of course, believe it to be true, but you have to also be justified in that belief. And that's what makes it knowledge. Hmm. So if you, if you see that it's raining outside through the window and you believe that it's raining outside, and then it's true that it's raining outside, now you can say you know that it's raining outside. Right. Okay, and this is just essentially consensus for, for potentially thousands of years we're talking about here. And then Edmund Gettier, and at least one account, this may be apocryphal, but it said that he sort of hadn't really published anything and was being compelled to, to get something in a journal. And he just sort of reaches into his papers of random things he's been writing, pulls up the one on the top and, and hands it off for, for submission. This is about two or three pages long. And it just upends the whole thing with, with essentially a counter example, which are now known as Gettier cases.

• 19:46Alex O'Connor?

  So his example was to say, okay, imagine that you're in a job interview. And the your interview goes really quite well. And the person says to you, you know, I shouldn't really be saying this, but I think you've got it. And so you go back outside and you're feeling pretty good. There are other candidates, but you've got a pretty justified reason to think that you're going to get the job. Then the other guy goes in and while you're waiting for him, you know, you're just fiddling around in your pocket and you take out whatever you've got in your pocket. You've got 10 coins and you're just fiddling with the 10 coins. So you develop a justified belief that the person who's going to get the job has 10 coins in his pocket.

• 20:26Alex O'Connor?

  Because you're pretty sure you're going to get the job and you've just by chance, you just had a look and you've got 10 coins. So you've got a justified belief that the person who's going to get the job has 10 coins in their pocket. There's been some kind of like freak mistake or something. Maybe they've read your name wrong on the form or that you're the person who told you they thought you got it. Meant to speak to the other person, but it turns out the other guy actually gets the job. But just by sheer coincidence, he also has 10 coins in his pocket.

• 20:51Alex O'Connor?

  The question is, did you know that the person who would get the job would have 10 coins in his pocket? You have a justified, true belief that the person who gets the job would have 10 coins in his pocket. But it seems in this circumstance, you didn't know that. That just seems wrong. It seems like a wrong account. It's a bit of a sort of clunky example and he gives another one, which is also maybe a little bit clunky. But this sort of sparks this type of affair called a Gettier case.

• 21:21Chris Williamson?

  Well, you told me, I think over dinner, the best Gettier case, which was the person behind the hedge.

• 21:28Alex O'Connor?

  Yes, so.

• 21:29Chris Williamson?

  This is better.

• 21:30Alex O'Connor?

  I think so. So I think it's actually better. Firstly, it's better to experience them for yourself and there are simpler explanations as well. So I was dry. I was in a car. Driving around a bend and over the hedge, I see this, this small child sort of bouncing up and down behind the hedge. And I thought to myself, oh, cool. I'm about to see a horse. I mean, it looked like the kid was riding a horse and I was like, yeah, cool. We're going to see a horse and we ride around this bend. And the kid was actually on. His or her like dad's back and that's why she was high up and bouncing up and down. But just by sheer coincidence, in the field behind them was a horse. And I couldn't believe it. I thought I've just experienced a Gettier case. I had a justified true belief that I was about to see a horse. The difficulty with that one is that it's

• 22:13Alex O'Connor?

  probably not justified to believe that I was about to see a horse because I probably should have thought that it could have been a father. But a much more simple example, and this actually happened to me once. I was in the US Capitol building in the in the crypt and they have the clock that used to be in the House of Representatives. And they said that the reason they replaced it and brought it down here was because they were fed up of winding it up. They didn't want to wind it anymore. And I looked at it and I and I asked the tour guide lady, I said, oh, well, do they still wind it while it's down here? And she said, no. And I thought, but it's the real, it's the time. It says the time right now. And she was like, oh, right. Yeah, it must be a coincidence. And I was like, the only one looking around like, hey, that's, that's pretty, that's pretty extraordinary. I mean, I guess it happens twice a day, right? But this is a Gettier

• 22:56Alex O'Connor?

  case. If you, if your watch breaks, but you don't know that it's broken, you've got a reliable watch, but today it's broken. And you look at the time and it stopped on half past three. And so you look at it and you think, oh, it must be half past three. And it does actually just so happen to be half past three. Did you know it was half past three? That's a Gettier case. Justified true belief. And yet, it seems weird to say that you that you know it. So Gettier's revelation here was something like what you're talking about, a sort of genuine novelty in the history of philosophy. And they come about quite rarely, but they they do occur.

• 23:30Chris Williamson?

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• 24:15Chris Williamson?

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• 24:31Chris Williamson?

  What happens downstream from that in the world of philosophy?

• 24:35Alex O'Connor?

  Just a massive migraine, basically. People start coming up with arguments, responses, you know? So people start saying, oh, maybe it's not justified to believe. Maybe it's like causally related justification to the cause of the.

• 24:49Chris Williamson?

  But presumably kind of in the same way that I guess a new scientific discovery is made about the way that we metabolize glucose or about what happens if you take this amount of nicotine or the role of metformin in preventing high blood pressure or something. There are stacked on top of that one assumption, a number of other assumptions. But with philosophy, especially something I imagine like the philosophy of knowledge, it's so foundational that having this entire universe built on this particular foundation then means that the entire house of cards collapses down. And people then need to rebuild all of this nightmare on top of it.

• 25:28Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. Well, most of philosophy is just a consistency test as it is in something like mathematics. It's just that we accept that there are certain axioms that even even mathematical axioms, you know, you can, you can, you can question them. I mean, Veritasium just made a quite good video about Euclidean geometry and how it's sort of just accepted for a very long time that, for example, you know, if you have a right angle, then if you sort of join up the two lines coming off that right angle, you'll create a triangle whose interior angles add up to 180 degrees. And then.

• 26:06Alex O'Connor?

  People start thinking about what about like curved geometric spaces? What if you do this on a globe? If you put a triangle on a globe, the angles aren't going to let up in that way. And these, these are sort of like axioms of mathematics that essentially they don't necessarily get proved wrong or thrown out, but people realize that you can think about things differently. And so most of what we're doing is actually just testing for consistency. And so it's actually quite difficult to prove an axiom wrong because you kind of need an axiom just to get off the ground. And the rest of everything you're doing is just consistency tests with that axiom.

• 26:38Chris Williamson?

  This was one of the most interesting things I learned from you, maybe in the first ever episode that we did, as you were teaching me about the difference between ethics and meta ethics as someone that isn't formally trained in either. And you, I use this all the time. It's such an interesting mental model to think that in order for me and you to have a discussion about ethics, our meta ethical foundation, we need to agree on that. Because out of that, if we don't, the entire ethical discussion on top will just continue to fall back to definitional problems and what you're presuming that da, da, da, da, da, da. So you can't discuss the stuff that happens on top if you, unless you discuss the stuff that's underneath. And this is, it's the entirety of the trans debate, right?

• 27:21Chris Williamson?

  It's the entirety of lexical overwhelm that if you can't agree on the definition of words, the argument about the words and what they then refer to just collapses in on itself and continuously just falls back to an argument about the definition of words.

• 27:41Alex O'Connor?

  Yes, this happens with, for example, freedom.

• 27:46Alex O'Connor?

  There are lots of different ways of conceiving of freedom. Famously, freedom from and freedom to, right? Is, is freedom just being left alone or is freedom being empowered to do things that you should be able to do? And then when you have people arguing about nationalized healthcare, for example. One person says, to be free, you need to be healthy. And one person says, to be free, you need to spend your own money as you please and not be forced to fund other people's healthcare. Now, both of these people can be right, they're just defining freedom differently. So you're quite right. And that's why meta ethics is quite important. I mean, A.J. Ayer pointed out in Language, Truth and Logic that the vast majority of ethical debate is not ethical debate. It's descriptive debate, it's factual debate. If you look at the so-called ethical debate around gun laws in America, for example,

• 28:30Alex O'Connor?

  people are talking about statistics. They're saying X many people die per year. Oh, well, don't you know that more children are killed by swimming pools? Don't you know that if we introduce, you know, if we ban certain types of weapons or blah, blah, blah, that this many less people will die? All these kinds of things are just descriptive factual statements that people like to dispute with each other. And that's why they like to say we have the facts on our side. But the actual ethical question that undergoes it all is hardly ever even reached. You know, and so most of the time, people are actually arguing about that. I mean, the same thing with an abortion debate, for example, you know, questions about biology. When does consciousness emerge? Can it survive on its own outside of the womb this week or this week? You know, this kind of stuff.

• 29:13Alex O'Connor?

  Will it increase the number of women who die or decrease the number of women who die? But none of these are ethical questions. And people think they're having an ethical debate when they're actually just having a debate about facts that can be resolved in principle by scientific empirical inquiry. The ethical question is the more interesting one that's often assumed. And if people think that they agree with each other or understand each other in the same way on that ethical first point, then you're in for a disaster.

• 29:39Chris Williamson?

  What do you wish?

• 29:40Alex O'Connor?

  If they don't, I mean.

• 29:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What do you wish that more people could realise when it comes to understanding ethics and consistency in their own lives? Is there something, a little red pill or a particular insight that you wish you could deposit into the mind of the populace that you think would make their lives a little bit more easy or their sense-making a bit more simple?

• 29:59Alex O'Connor?

  I don't know about making lives easier, but I do think that people should recognise the extent to which emotions dominate our ethical thinking. I mean, I'm, I take a, I think it's seen as a relatively eccentric view that ethics just is the expression of emotion. This was something popularised by that same A.J. Ayer in a book that was so troubling to the philosophical consensuses at the time that there's a story of, I think it was like a. Maybe a dean of Baileal College or something who when a student came in, everybody wanted to talk about this book. And they were so scared of the implications of it that he literally throws it out of the window because he just doesn't want to talk about it. Because Ayers talking about how the only things that can be meaningful are those which are analytically true or empirically verifiable.

• 30:43Alex O'Connor?

  If you, if the statement you're making isn't, isn't something you can at least in principle test empirically. Or something that's just a tautology, two and two is four, then what you're saying is literally meaningless. And people came to him and said, well, what about ethical statements? You can't prove these in principle and they're not tautological. And he said, well, the way that they're meaningful is that they are expressions of emotion. And it gives birth to this view called emotivism, which is really a philosophy of language, more than a philosophy of ethics. It, it tries to describe what people mean when they say good or bad. And famously, he comes up with this analogy that saying murder is wrong is like saying boo murder. And saying murder is, or saying giving to charity is good is like saying yay charity. It's just an expression of emotion.

• 31:28Alex O'Connor?

  It's not even the same thing as saying I like charity or I don't like murder. Because those things can be true or false. They have truth value. It could be true that I, it is just a psychological fact that I don't like murder. He means murder is wrong. That statement is just the expression of the emotion.

• 31:41Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 31:41Alex O'Connor?

  Boo murder. And I think even if you don't agree with him to that extent, as I more or less do. If you begin to recognize the extent to which emotions are dominating your ethical conduct. Pay attention to what it feels like when you analyze something is wrong. I think it belongs in the same category as.

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  Because you've got this sort of.

• 32:02Alex O'Connor?

  Emotion.

• 32:02Chris Williamson?

  Sweet of, uh, soup of stimulus going on inside of you. What is it like to feel like something is wrong?

• 32:10Alex O'Connor?

  Hmm. And, and we know that people, people seem to change what they rationally do based on how they're feeling. I mean, I don't know if you've come across terror management theory before. It surprised me if you hadn't, the, the idea that. All human beings are doing is trying to manage their fear of death. And that that's what motivates all all human activity. And there have been some interesting studies and some of them are harder to replicate than others. But I mean, the the first one, the most famous was some, I think, Arizona state judges. And they were being asked to recommend a bond for the solicitation of prostitution. And what the researchers did was they asked them to fill out a just a form first. And on half of the forms, they just mentioned death.

• 32:55Alex O'Connor?

  They just put in a few questions about death. And what do you think happens after death? You know, who would you put in your will? That that kind of stuff, nothing, nothing too extreme. And they found that the bond that was set by the judges. I mean, I think the number, I think the the average bond for the control group was was less than a hundred dollars. And for the ones who are reminded of their of their death is like two or three hundred dollars on average. What does that imply? So the the interpretation of terror management theory was that when we're reminded of our deaths, we need to temporarily more heavily reaffirm the sort of death denying aspects of our culture. The reason that we do things, the reason we create art, the reason that we get out of bed, the reason that we have conversations like this is because in in some way, it's traceable back to trying to essentially deny our own death.

• 33:41Alex O'Connor?

  Ernest Becker wrote a book called The Denial of Death, right? And this is, this is essentially the idea. And so for judges, it might be something like by participating in the legal system, they're participating in something that's a bit beyond them. And therefore, it exists outside of their own mortality. And so the thesis, this mortality salience hypothesis, as it's known, is that for a judge, if they're reminded of their own death, what they will temporarily be compelled to do is more harshly reaffirm that thing that is, you know, the the death denying aspect of of their daily life, which is participation in the legal system. So more harsh penalties. Right, okay. Now, that to me seems that the explanation seems a little bit tenuous. I'm not sure about that. But it does seem strange that when you remind people of their own death,

• 34:25Alex O'Connor?

  they will, you know, Christians and like Muslims will become more derogatory towards Jews. People of different nationalities will sit further away from each other. People will, when asked to draw pictures of currency, will draw physically larger pictures of currency.

• 34:42Alex O'Connor?

  People's opinion on whether they prefer a picture of a forest or a picture of suburban neighbourhood will change on average. Like, these things are extraordinary, just from being reminded of your own death. Of course, the biggest manifestation of the denial of death would be religion. And that would also explain why, you know, religion deals a lot with death and why, why sort of, if you remind people of their own death, they also become religious, which by the way, is true of atheists as well. People who don't believe in God will still become more religious, even if they don't ultimately believe in God when reminded of their own death.

• 35:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I am. I've been thinking a good bit recently about how people do an awful lot, especially in the modern world, that is death denialism masquerading as something else. I think the productivity movement very much is that, you know, trying to fit more into less time. If only I could get more life, more work, more output out of my one unit of days or whatever. I think that a good chunk of the health and fitness world, the longevity movement, the biohacking movement, all of that is absolutely death denialism. And you can see as well, nutrition, all of the arguments about, is it better for me to be carnivore or vegan? Should I go high carb or low carb? Can I do intermittent fasting? Should I be using ketones exogenously?

• 36:05Chris Williamson?

  Ultimately, the reason that I think these arguments are so vehement and passionate, especially when you think it's diet, guys, right? It's diet. It's like, I want to have aspartame, you want to have sugar. Like, how does my aspartame consumption or you impact your sugar consumption? But what it hits at, for a lot of people, is a certainty about, I can predict and project out into the future how long I'm going to be able to live or die, and I'm going to be able to compare myself to this other person. And there.

• 36:46Chris Williamson?

  Conviction in their particular approach, which derogates my approach implicitly, suggests to me you're going to die sooner. And that causes me to be fucking terrified. It's the same reason why people are so, how long do you need to do? It's not VO2 max that's most important. It's HRV. It's not, it's resting heart rate. It's not, it's galvanic skin temperature. We're not looking at that. We're looking at telomere length. We're not looking at that. It's whatever, all of the things, you know, the entire field of health and fitness, which I'm a big part of, I think is a good chunk of it is death nihilism just masquerading as getting big biceps.

• 37:21Alex O'Connor?

  Yes, sometimes it is more obvious. I think we need more nihilist health influencers who will sort of say, you know,

• 37:30Chris Williamson?

  I need to, I need to.

• 37:31Alex O'Connor?

  When the question is asked, you know, should you eat white bread or brown bread or whatever it is, you know, that they'll sort of begin with the question. It sort of depends on your, your, your views on the intrinsic value of life. Also, if you're a bit of a utilitarian, I mean, people often say that being unhealthy might be unethical because in a country with nationalized healthcare.

• 37:51Chris Williamson?

  You're a burden.

• 37:51Alex O'Connor?

  You're, you're a burden, but, but are you? I mean, who costs the taxpayer more? The person who eats a bunch of burgers and has a heart attack and dies instantly? Or the person who lives into old age and therefore has some kind of long-term health problem like Alzheimer's?

• 38:06Chris Williamson?

  I need to, I need to interject here. So you ring me probably three years ago, four years ago, you ring me and I'm in the gym and you say something like, what are you doing? It's like, I'm in the gym. What are you doing? Oh, just whatever, whatever, catch up a little bit. I was like, what's going on? And so what's, what's happening? And you said, I'm trying nihilism.

• 38:27Chris Williamson?

  And I said, what do you mean?

• 38:30Chris Williamson?

  And you went, as a life philosophy, I'm trying nihilism. And I still don't know what you mean. So how is your experiment to make nihilism great again going?

• 38:42Alex O'Connor?

  Well, I was getting a bit fed up of people saying, oh, you're a nihilist. Oh, you're an atheist. Well, they wouldn't say it in the terms of nihilism. They'd say, oh, you're an atheist. Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, I, there was a, there was a clip of Jordan Peterson on the Lex Friedman podcast.

• 39:01Alex O'Connor?

  And he says, oh, you're secular and you and you go to art galleries, yeah? Well, what makes you think you're secular? And the head turn is real, he he does that, you know? I thought to myself, what on earth are you talking about, man? You think you can't be an atheist and enjoy art? Now, I've tried my best to understand what he was getting at, and I think he was trying to basically say that in order to enjoy art, you need to have some kind of value. And in order to have any kind of surface level value, you can always ask the why that, why that question? Why do you value this? Why, you know, the the the classic sort of, why do you? Why do you go to school to get a good grade? Well, you don't just want the grade. Why do you get the grade? You do it to get a good job and so on and so forth. Happens with value. And so why do you go, why do you value art? Because you maybe you value beauty or something.

• 39:47Alex O'Connor?

  And Peterson's whole thing is that whatever's at the top of this value hierarchy is, in his definition, divine. People, he just defines it as such. And so he essentially said that, like, you know, people claim that they that they are nihilists, but they don't live like that. I thought, oh, what would it mean to really live like a nihilist? And, you know, I I guess I tried to emphasize, but he's right in to the extent that I think most people don't live like they're nihilists.

• 40:12Chris Williamson?

  What would the definition of living like a nihilist be?

• 40:15Alex O'Connor?

  I think it would just mean the rejection of of of any such thing as a non contingent reason for acting.

• 40:22Chris Williamson?

  Be more accessible.

• 40:24Alex O'Connor?

  You you would need

• 40:27Alex O'Connor?

  to to to really think that there's no reason to do anything outside of essentially your crude preferences and biological drives.

• 40:35Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 40:36Alex O'Connor?

  And I think the reason why people think that nihilism is unlivable is because they have this image of somebody just immediately becoming a Raskolnikov type figure and just committing a murder or something. But they forget that these people still have their memory, you know, they're going to be embedded in in a in a culture and an upbringing that's that their preferences are essentially still going to be aligned. I mean, Penn Jillette was once asked, if you're an atheist, why don't you kill and assault?

• 41:05Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, every person you want to. And he says, I do, I do kill and assault everybody I want to, which is precisely nobody, you know. And very clever, I guess, a bit of an applause. But I mean, the the difficult question ethically is what happens when somebody doesn't have that view? What happens when somebody does just disagree with you? But I don't know, it was it was kind of boring.

• 41:23Chris Williamson?

  Just to interject there, so you could see the meaning making machine of society and cultural norms as being useful to constrain the behavior of those outlier people, the ones who would go out and commit the litany of mass murders. But you know, mum told me that I'm not supposed to squash bugs when I was five years old, and this is now carried on through. But yeah, I think, you know, for most people, we are descendants of the people who avoided, at least for the most part, killing people that were close to us. And we feel a lot of the time like we're now close to each other.

• 41:57Alex O'Connor?

  Hmm. Yes, yes. I think that's probably true. The issue is that the more that we try to explain away these these mechanisms, we try to understand why in our evolutionary history, we might have evolved certain moral taboos, this kind of stuff. It begins to essentially take the complete ethical force out of it. And that's what people think leads to leads to nihilism. Once you have fully explained why something would be considered immoral, just on evolutionary grounds, you've essentially taken out the the moral factor altogether, and you're just explaining it in terms of, you know, genetic preference.

• 42:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's no more meaning. There's nothing, there's no additional fluff or feeling of anything. But this is, you know, I've spent a lot of time over the last few years, talking to evolutionary psychologists, evolutionary biologists, people that have looked at the evolution of culture as well from a memetic standpoint, too. And

• 42:56Chris Williamson?

  It does seem to me that culture is is just like exclusively an adaptive response to coordination at large scale and that all of the things that are encoded in that are effective ways for your tribe to not blow itself up.

• 43:13Alex O'Connor?

  Would you say the same thing about morality in general?

• 43:15Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 43:16Alex O'Connor?

  So then, how do you escape this nihilist conundrum that you think all it is, you know, the reason why you're not killing people is just because you sort of evolved that way? Doesn't that kind of take out some of the meaning?

• 43:29Chris Williamson?

  So I think if you were permanently self assessing why you do the things you do and the inputs that you feel, but what that doesn't account for is the fact that we are self deceptive.

• 43:42Alex O'Connor?

  Quite right, yeah.

• 43:43Chris Williamson?

  And the sense of being a human is one that is imbued with meaning. I often use this term about how you are not personally cursed as a reassurance. And it was something that was reassuring to me if I was spending a bit of time where I was feeling sad or down or whatever, it would feel like whatever emotion I was going through, whatever unpleasant emotion I was going through was like a personal curse. And this makes sense when you look back at how the gods were personified as different sorts of emotions, right? That you know, Cupid had an arrow that hit you or that, you know, you had gods of war, you had gods of wrath, you had gods of envy, you had gods of narcissism. Because the experience of a thing, of a thought, of an emotion, of a state, is not just the

• 44:28Chris Williamson?

  confused chemical signals of your body, and now I can just reverse engineer this, even the interaction of you and whatever's going on in the social group around you isn't just that. It's imbued with meaning because you interpret things in this soup of experience, which scales things up from just what's happening to, and it feels like there's something, it feels like there's some there there, right?

• 44:52Alex O'Connor?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, you can't escape that illusion, if it is an illusion. This is another thing that I spoke to Ben about, first name basis, it seems now. Mr. Shapiro, I did, I did try that in, you know, when I was emailing back and forth about setting up that event, I went to type out sort of like, well, it would be great to talk to Mr. Shapiro about, it just didn't feel right, you know, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. At least not behind his back, not to say that I'm rude behind his back, but it felt even weirder that he wasn't there to sort of appreciate the courtesy. Anyway, he said. Like, you know, that I don't believe in free will. I don't know if you believe in free will. Perhaps we can talk about that. He's like, look, you don't, you don't believe in free will, but, but you, you act as if free will does exist all the time.

• 45:35Alex O'Connor?

  And I remember thinking, what do you mean? What, what does it, what does it look like to act as though free will doesn't exist? The very argument, or one of the arguments against free will is that you are essentially driven by your biology, your, your genes, your, your will, you know, the, the Arthur Schopenhauer line that you can do what you will, you just can't will what you will. In fact, you have to do what you will. That's, that's what, that's what drives behavior. If that's the case, then, then why do you have this vision in your head that if you lack a belief in free will, you're like not going to get out of bed in the morning? The very argument is that you will get out of bed in the morning because you desire to go and get some breakfast. That's like the whole point. And so

• 46:19Alex O'Connor?

  any argument of that form where people say, well, you don't live like that's the case. I always like to, to, to think, oh, what would it look like to you then? You know, if I could ask Jordan Peterson, when he says, well, you don't live like an atheist, what would that look like to you? I don't know if he might say something like, well, you'd probably be this, this morally depraved, you know, self-interested, blah, blah, blah, like maybe, but is that really what you think? I mean, I don't know, but

• 46:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think it, it forgets the fact that you are a product of your time, regardless of your beliefs from that time.

• 46:50Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 46:51Chris Williamson?

  Right? I, I, I understand the Judeo-Christian values that everything is based on, you know, it's like a common talking point from those guys. But, okay, how am I supposed to extricate me from that? Completely shake the Etch A Sketch of my value set and then take it from the beginning? And let's not forget, like, a lot of those values have grown out of what would have been an adaptive response in any case.

• 47:14Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 47:15Chris Williamson?

  So

• 47:16Alex O'Connor?

  The illusion is there. The illusion is unshakable. And so it, it sort of is a bit senseless to me to us, particularly on the free will thing, like. Why don't you act like free will doesn't exist? What do you mean? I literally, it's unintelligible to me.

• 47:29Chris Williamson?

  Did you listen to my Sapolsky episode yet?

• 47:32Alex O'Connor?

  No, I don't think so.

• 47:33Chris Williamson?

  So his new book, Determined, Science of Life Without Free Will.

• 47:38Chris Williamson?

  Every time that I talk about free will, people get upset.

• 47:41Alex O'Connor?

  Why is that?

• 47:43Chris Williamson?

  That's the question for you. I think the reason.

• 47:45Alex O'Connor?

  Insert joke about how it's not their fault. Ha ha.

• 47:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:48Alex O'Connor?

  It's like my least favorite genre of joke that's done.

• 47:51Chris Williamson?

  Through no free will of my own.

• 47:52Alex O'Connor?

  In philosophy, it's.

• 47:53Chris Williamson?

  Every single time, through no free will of my own.

• 47:58Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. I don't know. And it's something that the conversation about free will is such a turn off for people that I actively push it further into episodes. I actively don't title episodes that have got that in it. I can surreptitiously coax people into thinking about it. But the response is very, it's a lot amount of, high amount of dissatisfaction. People don't like to think about that. Now, it may be because it's dry.

• 48:30Chris Williamson?

  I'm open to that.

• 48:31Alex O'Connor?

  That's true.

• 48:32Chris Williamson?

  It may be because it threatens their sense of agency and sovereignty, which is something I've kind of built this channel off the back of, like you can enact change within your own life, internalize your locus of control, stop being such a bitch, et cetera. And so maybe I'm a, like a victim of my own foundation in that regard that I've selected for a particular group of people. But it's happened a few times, a few different conversations about it, tangential.

• 49:02Chris Williamson?

  One guy was a compatibility, like quasi compatibilist. You're shaking your head. Why are you shaking your head?

• 49:11Alex O'Connor?

  That it's just the most ludicrous compromise to me.

• 49:15Chris Williamson?

  Compatibility. Can I, can I, am I right in saying that compatibility just kicks the can down the road and plays lexical overload with things?

• 49:22Alex O'Connor?

  I think more or less.

• 49:23Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 49:23Alex O'Connor?

  A lot of the time, you're just also dealing with essentially a redefinition of free will. It's what I.

• 49:28Chris Williamson?

  I don't mean that. I mean this thing.

• 49:29Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, yeah. Sam Harris has called it the Atlantis fallacy. He had an extended argument with Daniel Dennett, a compatibilist, about free will. And Daniel Dennett would talk about how this exists and this exists. And Sam was like, yeah, that's true, but you're just not talking about what people care about in free will. What you're doing is we're trying to ask if Atlantis exists. And you're pointing to Venice and you're saying, look, here's a city. It's got a lot of water and it's kind of old. And these are all true, but it's just not Atlantis. And what most people are talking about when they try to bring free will back into the discussion is just not free will. It's as straightforward as it gets, in my view. I mean, there are versions of freedom that can be sensibly believed in.

• 50:15Alex O'Connor?

  It kind of depends on what your conception of freedom means. But if you mean something like authorship over your actions, if you mean that we could have rewound the clock and I could have done something differently, that I could have worn a different shirt. I don't think that the answer is yes. Logically, yes, you know, the possible worlds discussion earlier, there's a possible world where I'm in a different shirt. But I guess like physically, possibly metaphysically, I couldn't have made a different choice.

• 50:39Chris Williamson?

  Well, regardless of what you believe or don't believe about free will, the response, people's response to it is fascinating to me, absolutely fascinating. And maybe, yeah, maybe it is that degree of control, almost like the denial of death. Like, I wonder, have they done experiments on when people are reminded that they do or do not have free will, that their behaviour adjusts?

• 51:03Alex O'Connor?

  Not that I know of, but I would love to see that. Because if it is, I mean, maybe it is true, but I think if it is true, I can understand why it might be quite fatalistic. I mean, it literally is quite fatalistic, really, to say that there's no freedom. And I can understand why that might make someone sad. And that sadness might motivate their behaviours slightly differently. But I think that intrinsically, if there are a way to control for people who are sort of happy or sad about it, because you can believe in there's no free will and be like, thank goodness, it's all out of my hands. If you can control for that and show that people do, they are like less productive or they don't get out of bed as much, then I think that would be meaningful. And it might be a sort of second order reason not to have this conversation. I don't know if there's been such a...

• 51:48Alex O'Connor?

  Investigations that has to death, which by the way, I think the a good example of the death denial thing is to think about your your magnum opus, if you if you were sort of working on the great life work or something and you're about to die and then you're just about to sort of to finish it off. Suppose you found out that after you publish this and you die, a week later, you found out that a meteor was going to come and destroy the earth. Everybody dies. Does that make you more or less enthusiastic about finishing your project? Now, for most people, I think it's going to make them less enthusiastic. It would certainly make me less enthusiastic. But why? What's the difference to you? It doesn't make a difference. You're going to be dead beforehand anyway.

• 52:33Alex O'Connor?

  Nothing's going to change. Seems to suggest that maybe, you know, the the desire to get this done before you die in the first place isn't just as people like to claim for the for the love of the art and it's all in the process. No, it's because here's a work that's going to outlive you. Here's something that's going to help you to escape your own death. And when faced with the inevitability of the destruction of even that, the motivation goes down. I wouldn't be surprised if simply reminding somebody who's writing a play or something that one day, heat death, everything evaporates, including your new book, if that would make them less motivated to finish the book, which to me implies that that the the reverse corollary is that the reason you are making the book is in in some way indebted to the fact that you think it will outlive you and therefore is an exercise in the denial of death.

• 53:19Alex O'Connor?

  Didn't Ernest Becker die at an unfortunate time? I don't know much about his personal life. I think he did. But there are, yeah, there are interesting coincidences like that dotted across a lot of the thing about coincidences is that is that so many things happen all the time that the only extraordinary thing would be if there weren't some extraordinary things like that, like Al Beccamou was killed in a in a car crash. And he was killed in a car crash with a with a train ticket in his pocket. So it seemed like he decided at the last minute to go in the car and said, and he had previously said that the most absurd way to die would be in a in an automobile accident. And that's how he dies. Sigmund Freud was terrified of, I think it was the number sixty three.

• 54:02Alex O'Connor?

  It was like sixty three, or maybe it was, maybe it was like forty eight. I can't remember. It was one of, one of the, a number around, around that. He was just terrified of it. Had it had a real sort of foreboding about it for some reason. And he, he got a phone number that ended in that number and it freaked him out. He got a hotel room that had that number and he, and he just became convinced that he was going to die at that age.

• 54:24Alex O'Connor?

  Guess when he died?

• 54:25Chris Williamson?

  Forty eight.

• 54:26Alex O'Connor?

  No, when he was like eighty. Sometimes it, it, it goes wrong.

• 54:28Chris Williamson?

  You're a dick. You are a dick.

• 54:32Alex O'Connor?

  Rest of that was true, though.

• 54:33Chris Williamson?

  All right. What's your sexy paradox that you wanted to show me?

• 54:36Alex O'Connor?

  Yes.

• 54:37Chris Williamson?

  Get your paradox out of the land.

• 54:38Alex O'Connor?

  Think, think about this, right? Um, now I, I, I can't remember what the source is and I want to attribute the person who does it. Um, maybe I can find it.

• 54:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, get it.

• 54:47Alex O'Connor?

  Let me find it because I, I want to make sure that they get the, they get the credit for it. I was told about it by a friend and, um,

• 54:57Alex O'Connor?

  you have to give me a minute because I want to, I don't want to, you know, pass this off as my own.

• 55:02Chris Williamson?

  Like you do with everything else?

• 55:05Alex O'Connor?

  I think it's called the, yeah, the anthropic. So it's, it's a website called rising, uh, rising entropy.com.

• 55:12Alex O'Connor?

  Is, is, is seemingly the origin of this paradox, but I was told about it by a friend and it's, it's, I guess, okay. So imagine that, and what this does is it, is it shows us that different ways of thinking give us wildly different answers to the same problem, different ways of like looking at a problem. So imagine that there's a maniac who, and, and it's called the anthropic dice killer, if you want to look it up. There's a maniac who is kidnapping people and murdering them. And what he does is he kidnaps one person

• 55:47Alex O'Connor?

  and he blindfolds them and he rolls a dice. And if that dice is a six, then it'll kill you. If not, he'll let you go free. And what he'll do if he lets you go free is he'll go and pick up two people, kidnap them, blindfold them, roll the dice. If it's a six, kills you. If it's anything else, go free. Then it's four people. Then it's eight people. And it, it doubles. So it's an exponential.

• 56:11Chris Williamson?

  Until he hits a six.

• 56:12Alex O'Connor?

  Until he hits a six. Now you wake up, knowing all this information, you wake up blindfolded.

• 56:19Alex O'Connor?

  And you know, you know these facts. And you know that a dice is about to be rolled, but you're blindfolded. You don't know how many people are there with you. You're given a button that you can press that will make the chances that you're killed half, one and two.

• 56:36Alex O'Connor?

  So if you want to, you can press this button and 50% of the time it will just kill you immediately and 50% of the time you'll get to go free. Or you can let him roll the dice.

• 56:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 56:44Alex O'Connor?

  What do you do? Do you press the button or not?

• 56:47Chris Williamson?

  So at least on the surface, this is to do with the probability of one in six versus one in two. But there is this escalating thing that's happening in the background. So I would presume that you would say, don't hit the button. Because that has increased the chance of you being killed from one in six to one in two.

• 57:07Alex O'Connor?

  Right. And this, and this seems true and it is true that, yeah, I mean, like you've got a one in six chance of dying. And if you press the button, you've got a one and two. So you're better off rolling the dice. But if you think about it.

• 57:21Alex O'Connor?

  As a, as a sort of, uh, as one big block. Then, then something very strange happens because if you consider all of the people involved, if all you know is that you've sort of woken up. And you're somewhere in this process. Then. Interestingly, like, say it gets to number two, it gets to round two. Then there have been three people involved, three victims involved.

• 57:46Chris Williamson?

  First one and then the second two.

• 57:48Alex O'Connor?

  And two of them end up dying. And one of them goes free. So if you find yourself in this situation as a victim, you've got a more than half probability that you're in the second group that ends up dying. I suppose that actually it ends in the third group.

• 58:04Alex O'Connor?

  Right? Now there are, how many people involved? You've got one, then two.

• 58:07Chris Williamson?

  Then four.

• 58:08Alex O'Connor?

  Then four.

• 58:09Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 58:10Alex O'Connor?

  So we've now got seven people involved. Right? And four people end up dying.

• 58:16Alex O'Connor?

  And so if, if you sort of wake up in this scenario. You've got a four in seven chance. That you're going to die, that you're going to be one of the people who dies, which is more than half. And this continues. Such that if you consider the fact that it doesn't matter where it ends. You're always going to have a slightly higher than half chance. That you're in the group that ends up getting killed.

• 58:41Chris Williamson?

  But. Is it, is it more than half, given that each round of the dice roll is only one in six?

• 58:50Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 58:52Alex O'Connor?

  Because it, it's about like, if in fact it gets to number three.

• 58:56Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 58:57Alex O'Connor?

  Like, you know, you know that you're gonna be in the, the, the, the, there's a more than half chance that you're gonna be in the group that dies. If it, if it in fact gets to number two, then there's a more than half chance that, that, that you're gonna die. If it in fact gets to number four.

• 59:09Chris Williamson?

  So I'm gonna hit the button, is that right?

• 59:11Alex O'Connor?

  Well, maybe, I don't, I mean, it seems ludicrous to hit the button, but, but thinking about it this way, it seems like that's what you should actually do. It's simultaneously the case that you have got a one in six chance of dying, because you're doing it on the roll of a dice. But at the same time, if you think about the fact that, that one of these groups is gonna end up dying. And it doesn't matter where it ends, the chances of you being in that group are always gonna be slightly higher than half.

• 59:35Chris Williamson?

  Right, from a, a population level.

• 59:38Alex O'Connor?

  Why is it the anthropic dice killer? Because it's the anthropic principle it's thinking about.

• 59:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, what's that?

• 59:45Chris Williamson?

  I once read a sci-fi book, uh, that was, there was a threat of the end of the world. They were looking to get humanity off the planet. And there is a theory that uses almost this exact same idea, which says that if you take the entirety of human history and you were to pick a time at which you were to live, and you have this rapid increase toward humanity, it works out that it's, it's more likely that you are within some percent of the end of humanity.

• 1:00:21Alex O'Connor?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:00:23Chris Williamson?

  Because of.

• 1:00:23Alex O'Connor?

  Because of the exponential growth, yeah.

• 1:00:25Chris Williamson?

  Precisely.

• 1:00:25Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly.

• 1:00:26Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with this idea?

• 1:00:27Alex O'Connor?

  I don't think so.

• 1:00:28Chris Williamson?

  Right, but it works.

• 1:00:28Alex O'Connor?

  But it's fascinating, it's the same kind of principle.

• 1:00:30Chris Williamson?

  Works the exact same, yeah.

• 1:00:31Alex O'Connor?

  As long as that graph is going up at the, at the requisite speed, then, then yeah.

• 1:00:36Chris Williamson?

  Right, and this is the exact same thing.

• 1:00:38Alex O'Connor?

  I mean, the, the, the version on the website actually involves snake eyes, so it's two dice. And instead of it being one, then two, then four, it's one, then 10, then 100, then 1,000.

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah, so it ramps up more quickly.

• 1:00:48Alex O'Connor?

  And now, and now you're rolling snake eyes, so it's a one in 36 chance. And it turns out that if you add up the probability of, of, of like, you know, N number of cases, it's something like a 90% chance versus the half that you get to press. Which which just seems ludicrous. And it seems that two things are true at once, depending on just how you look at the problem.

• 1:01:07Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:07Alex O'Connor?

  So sometimes problems like this are just to do with the way you word them. I mean, there are tons of like these sort of interesting maths paradoxes, which aren't paradoxes at all. You must be familiar with the man who walks into the hotel, pays thirty pounds, goes up to his room. And the bellboy says, or the guy behind the bar says, the manager says, oh, no, he should have only paid twenty five. We've got a deal on. So he calls the bellboy and says, can you go and give him five pounds back to the man in the room? And the bellboy thinks to himself on the way up, like, this guy doesn't know any better. He doesn't know how much he owed. I'm gonna, I'm gonna pocket three pounds for myself. I'm only gonna give him two pounds. So he goes back to the room. He says, excuse me, sir. Sorry, you paid, you know, you paid thirty pounds. You paid too much. Here's two pounds change. So how much has the man now paid?

• 1:01:49Chris Williamson?

  Twenty five pounds. No, twenty eight pounds.

• 1:01:52Alex O'Connor?

  Twenty eight pounds. And how much has the bellboy got in his pocket?

• 1:01:55Chris Williamson?

  Two.

• 1:01:56Alex O'Connor?

  He gave the, he gave the guy two pounds back.

• 1:01:59Chris Williamson?

  Right. Where's that money come from?

• 1:02:02Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, he's got three. So the bellboy, so the man's now only paid twenty eight pounds. He's paid thirty pounds. He gets two pounds back from the bellboy. So he's got, he's paid twenty eight pounds. The bellboy's got three pounds in his pocket, which makes thirty one. So where's the extra pound come from?

• 1:02:16Chris Williamson?

  Actually, no, he hasn't. The guy paid twenty five plus now he's got two back.

• 1:02:21Alex O'Connor?

  That's right. So it's, it's, it's the way you word it, right?

• 1:02:24Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:02:24Alex O'Connor?

  So this, this like stumps people.

• 1:02:27Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:27Alex O'Connor?

  And you can do it the other way around as well. You can say that the, the guy goes up and he gives, the, the bellboy gives three pounds back to the guy. So he's only paid twenty seven pounds, but the bellboy's got twenty, he's got two pounds. It's only, and it's only twenty nine. And, and this, you know, it, it sort of goes viral on social media because people are like, how the hell does it work?

• 1:02:42Chris Williamson?

  It's the uh, blue and black or green and gold dress.

• 1:02:46Alex O'Connor?

  It, it's like, I mean, for those that, yeah, I guess there is, it's like those in that there is a real answer to what the, what the actual, what's actually going on there. I mean, the easiest.

• 1:02:53Chris Williamson?

  Lead people based on.

• 1:02:55Alex O'Connor?

  How you, how you word it. It's how people, you know, shortchange when, when they, when they scam people at a, at a, at a bar or something. I mean, the easiest way to, to visualize that particular problem is to imagine that the man was only supposed to pay two pounds. You know, so the bellboy goes up and gives him twenty eight. He's supposed to give him twenty eight pounds and decides to pocket two pounds for himself.

• 1:03:12Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:12Alex O'Connor?

  So, oh, so he gives him, you know, gives him twenty six pounds back. So how much has the man paid? Like four pounds? And how much the bellboy got? Like twenty six pounds? Which is ludicrous, but you'd be amazed at how.

• 1:03:26Alex O'Connor?

  Easily, people can be completely and utterly stunned by it. And it's all in the wording. So a problem like the anthropic dice killer, I wonder how much it's just sort of to do with the way that you describe it.

• 1:03:37Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Have there been any paradoxes that sent you into a fugue state for a little while? Was there anything that captured a particularly long amount of time that you sort of couldn't stop considering?

• 1:03:51Alex O'Connor?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:56Alex O'Connor?

  Well, most of the famous ones since I first started learning about paradoxes, like the famous Monty Hall problem, that obsessed me for, well, I wouldn't say obsessed me, but I was sort of blown away by it. There's also, you know, the Monty Hall problem, that you'll definitely have heard of this before, this, it's the game show and the three doors.

• 1:04:16Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:04:17Alex O'Connor?

  You know what I'm talking about, right?

• 1:04:19Alex O'Connor?

  There are interesting paradoxes that aren't actually paradoxes. There's a book by Jim Al-Khaleeli called Paradox, which is a description of so-called paradoxes. So like, I think Olber's paradox is when people used to think that the universe was infinite, infinitely large, I mean, there was this problem that if empty space is filled up fairly randomly with stars, I mean, we know there's a lot of stars in the sky and galaxies and objects that emit light, then there should essentially be no darkness in the sky. The sky should look kind of like an overcast day because like the gaps in the sky, you know.

• 1:05:02Chris Williamson?

  There's an infinite amount of light coming through.

• 1:05:05Alex O'Connor?

  Eventually going to be filled up and any amount, any small gap, you might think the stars are really far away, they'll also be like closer together, therefore emitting more light visually and they'll be bigger. And so if the universe is infinite, you should just see a sort of overcast day. And it was a paradox. It was like, how does this, how does this happen? And it basically became an interesting proof that the universe has a beginning, that the universe is not in fact infinite, just the fact that it gets dark at night. Because if it were actually infinite, there should be a.

• 1:05:34Alex O'Connor?

  Sort of overcast view, Olbers paradox. And like I say, it's sort of a paradox, but not really a paradox.

• 1:05:39Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with the Boetjes Void? Do you know this?

• 1:05:42Alex O'Connor?

  I think so.

• 1:05:43Chris Williamson?

  This is like my favorite part of the universe. I'd say like I'm mapping it like my favorite barbecue restaurants in Austin. And it's a huge, what's referred to as a supervoid, which is a period of the universe, an area of the universe, which has way fewer galaxies than you would anticipate. And given what's the principle of like homogeneity across the universe that it should be, it should be relatively similar, right?

• 1:06:10Alex O'Connor?

  Like thermodynamics?

• 1:06:11Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:06:11Alex O'Connor?

  And entropy and.

• 1:06:14Chris Williamson?

  You just know you're just saying space words at me.

• 1:06:17Alex O'Connor?

  Well, you know, like when you spray in aerosol can and it will eventually.

• 1:06:20Chris Williamson?

  Dissipate equally. So the point is that there shouldn't be huge fluctuations in the way that we see the universe. Everything should be spread relatively evenly. Now I found out that supposedly at the point of the big bang, there were one million particles of antimatter and one million and one particles of matter. And it is that one to one million and one ratio that is exactly where everything that we see comes from. And this minor imbalance is actually what's permitted everything to exist. But this particular Boetjes, B O O one with an umlaut, T E S, Boetjes supervoid.

• 1:07:03Chris Williamson?

  It's just super fucking interesting. It's this gap where there's way fewer galaxies than there should be. You think, why should this exist, given that we've got this sort of principle of homogeneity across the universe? And that's one of my favorite things to like learn about.

• 1:07:18Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, it's, it's a bit, is it, is it that we know about this void because of the, the disbalance? Or is it that we hypothesize the disbalance because of the, the knowledge of the void?

• 1:07:28Chris Williamson?

  We know based on mapping of, I think, uh, I'm not sure if it's telescopic or if it's microwave background stuff. But we know that it's there.

• 1:07:37Alex O'Connor?

  Right.

• 1:07:37Chris Williamson?

  And the question is, what the fuck is this thing doing there?

• 1:07:40Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, well, that's a bit like sort of dark energy when we discover that galaxies are spinning a little bit too quickly on the outside. There seems to be something like pushing them along.

• 1:07:48Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of the fine tune universe idea?

• 1:07:52Alex O'Connor?

  A lot of people describe it as the as the most powerful argument for God's existence. Christopher Hitchens in the back of a car once said that that was really what gave him pause. I don't find that it moves me very much. I mean, it does seem quite extraordinary that had any of the constants of the universe, the force of gravity, for example, if it was stronger or weaker by the most unimaginably small amount, then it would either be strong enough that the universe would collapse in on itself, or it would be so weak that atoms couldn't even form, or at least objects couldn't form, and everything just gets blown apart at the big bang.

• 1:08:34Alex O'Connor?

  Three explanations for this: it's chance, it's necessity, or it's design. And chances seems like a ludicrous suggestion. I mean, there are lots of different constants, and it may be the case that we discover this sort of theory of everything that reduces it down to one. Still a huge mystery as to why it has the sort of the constant that it does, but would mean that we're not talking about lots of different constants in harmony. Somehow happens to unify in one way. The idea of it sort of necessarily being that way doesn't seem that out of the question for me. Like, people put it in the language of saying that had the constants been different by this amount, the universe couldn't exist.

• 1:09:14Alex O'Connor?

  And what people often hear is the chances of the constant being as it was, was the same number, but I don't think that's the same thing. It might just be not possible that it could have had a different value. What's that? Is it the observer selection effect of this? This doesn't work for the fine tuning argument, I think. So the so-called anthropic principle, the universe seems designed for human life. It seems odd. Like, people might point to, for example, the Earth's perfect distance from the sun in the so-called Goldilocks zone. Had it been a little bit further out or a little bit closer, humans couldn't exist. And the easy answer to that is to say, well, yeah, but if you didn't exist, then you wouldn't be there to observe that it didn't exist, right?

• 1:09:57Alex O'Connor?

  And so you say, given the size of the universe, life might develop somewhere, possibly multiple places, and the places where it's going to be observed, coming about, is where it comes about, so no surprise. That works there, but the fine tuning constants of the universe, we're not talking about like...

• 1:10:17Alex O'Connor?

  We're not talking about like a potential billions of Earths that could all give rise to human beings. We're talking about if one of these constants was different by a tiny, by the tiniest amount, nothing exists. And sure, it is still true that did it not happen?

• 1:10:33Chris Williamson?

  We wouldn't be here to observe it.

• 1:10:35Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, my, my, my friend Josh Peric has given me an example in the past of like, I don't know, you can imagine like a series of highly trained knife throwers just, just, just, just lob like a hundred thousand knives at you in an attempt to kill you. And they all miss perfectly cutting out the silhouette of your body behind you, absolutely perfectly, just like uncanny. And someone says, well, they must have done that on purpose. It's like a trick, right? And you say, no, no, I, I think it's just, it's just happened by chance. You say, well, that's ludicrous. Oh, well, if it didn't, then I wouldn't be here to, to observe that it did, would I? It, it still just wouldn't, wouldn't do it for you, even though that is true. You know, had you been killed, you wouldn't be there to observe it. It just seems such an unlikely coincidence that that just doesn't work for the, when

• 1:11:20Alex O'Connor?

  we're talking about the actual fundamental stuff of, of the universe, which is why people are so troubled by it. But I do think, generally speaking, with all of these kinds of things, fine tuning, consciousness is another example that's broadly in the scientific realm that people think that this just can't be explained to that reference to a God. Maybe they're right. I don't know. But if you intuitively were to step into a time machine and look at some people having this conversation, and you said, like, like imagine them looking back and, and saying, gosh, can you believe it? They hadn't worked out fine tuning yet? They hadn't figured out the constants? Oh, they hadn't figured out the science of consciousness yet? I can, I can conceive of that. Just, just intuitively, I can see someone doing that. But when I think about my arguments for atheism, the problem of evil, divine

• 1:12:04Alex O'Connor?

  hiddenness, this kind of stuff, I can't imagine somebody looking through a time machine similarly at a conversation that I have and going, gosh, can you believe it? They hadn't worked out the problem of evil yet. They hadn't worked out divine hiddenness yet. I think these are perennial problems. So where you have these scientific arguments for the existence of God, I guess I just have more of a trust that they will one day be explained in a way that won't require recourse to a divine author in, in a way that my criticisms of religion will probably not be similarly resolved.

• 1:12:35Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. We had a great conversation in Austin, as you explained to me about the potential historical accuracy or inaccuracy of Jesus' resurrection.

• 1:12:46Chris Williamson?

  Can you go through that a little bit?

• 1:12:47Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I mean, this sometimes is used as an argument for the existence of God, but I think more successfully is used once you've already established the existence of God to try to establish the truth of Christianity. And that is a bunch of historical facts surrounding Jesus's alleged resurrection that you sort of have to ask what the best explanation is for. Now, you can't historically prove a resurrection, but you can historically prove events and then ask what the best explanation of those facts is. So people will often point to the fact that there was a man called Jesus walking around morally teaching people who was crucified by the Romans

• 1:13:26Alex O'Connor?

  and that a few days after his death was seen, or people made claims that they'd seen him after he'd died. And the question is, how do you explain these facts? The gospel reliability is an interesting question in general, and people will often, on the surface level, say, look, the Bible contradicts itself. It's full of contradictions. And there are some seeming contradictions in the gospel stories. But of course, what a lot of people neglect to consider is that when we're talking about a text as a historical document, contradictions shouldn't make us think that it's like less accurate, but more accurate.

• 1:14:08Alex O'Connor?

  If historical sources contradict each other, that's evidence of their accuracy rather than evidence of the opposite. Because if this is a mythical story that somebody's making up,

• 1:14:20Alex O'Connor?

  you would expect the details to concur. That is, if you're questioning two suspects in some kind of murder trial or something and their stories match up perfectly, like to the T, the timings, everything, it arouses suspicion. It seems like somebody's inventing something. Someone's coming up with a story here and trying to perfect it. Now, people have this idea that a bunch of people got together and tried to fool the world into this sort of mythical story of, you know, this man rising from the dead. Do you think they would have made the mistake of just including these blatant contradictions?

• 1:14:57Alex O'Connor?

  I don't know. In other words, I think if somebody was making it up, they probably would have taken more care. Is there a term for this? I'm sure there is. Right. I'm not a historian. I couldn't tell you what it is.

• 1:15:08Alex O'Connor?

  But we do see contradictions on the minor points. We don't really see much disagreement about the major points. I mean, there is still enough disagreement that I think to arouse suspicion. I mean, I'm saying this as if I'm some kind of Christian or or theist. I sort of put on that hat when I'm asked to have a conversation of this kind. I mean, it does seem to me suspicious, for example, that the Gospel of Mark, which is the earliest Gospel, contains no post resurrection appearances. And then the Gospel of Matthew does include post resurrection appearances. The Gospel of Luke includes even more. It's only in the Gospel of John that we get, for instance, doubting Thomas, which is the latest Gospel, canonical Gospel, I should say. That's where that arises. And in fact, the story of doubting Thomas,

• 1:15:53Alex O'Connor?

  famously, he doesn't believe that it's the risen Christ and Jesus says, come and touch my wounds. And he touches his wounds and he says, my Lord and my God.

• 1:16:04Alex O'Connor?

  And Jesus says,

• 1:16:07Alex O'Connor?

  you believe because you've seen. Blessed are those who believe without seeing. So in my view, what we have is this so called mythological development of no post resurrection appearances. And as the time goes on, as we get further away from the source, the stories get more fantastical. Ending in a moral, a moral lesson to believe without seeing. Yes. Yeah. This to me does seem a little bit suspicious. So it is a fascinating mystery, like something very strange happened on Easter morning. Because how do we explain the fact that this man gets crucified by the Romans? And then people claimed to see him after he died. And we're willing to be put to death for that belief. Now, okay, maybe he didn't die.

• 1:16:53Alex O'Connor?

  Unlikely, as they say, the Romans knew how to kill people. And supposedly, you know, they check and they go to, they go to, to, to break the legs of the other prisoners as they're taking them down from, from, from their, their crosses. They were taking them down.

• 1:17:12Alex O'Connor?

  Sort of temporarily and they hadn't died yet, but when they go to break Jesus's legs, they realize he's already dead, which is why his legs don't get broken and they stab him in the side with a stick to make sure that he's dead. I mean, yeah, like this was a very effective method of killing people and they knew how to do it. So it's unlikely that he just somehow survived this.

• 1:17:30Chris Williamson?

  So the guy that stabbed him with the spear and supposedly the blood on the spear was this?

• 1:17:34Alex O'Connor?

  Someone stabbed him with the spear like after, after the

• 1:17:36Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:17:37Alex O'Connor?

  After he's on the cross. And it's essentially to check he's dead.

• 1:17:42Alex O'Connor?

  Okay, so likelihood is that he was actually crucified. And then a few days later, people are claiming to see him. Maybe they're lying, but then you don't tend to go to death for something you know to be a lie. You're willing to be put to death for things that you think are true that are false. But very rarely are people willing to die for beliefs that they don't actually believe themselves. That doesn't really happen. So they probably weren't lying. As maybe they were, maybe they were mistaken.

• 1:18:09Chris Williamson?

  Fooled.

• 1:18:10Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, now, I've known you since about 2019, which is probably, it would have been slightly longer than Jesus was with his disciples, but imagine spending every single day with this person, living with this person, eating with this person.

• 1:18:28Alex O'Connor?

  And then you've only seen him a few days ago. And somehow, imagine somebody managed to convince you that they were me.

• 1:18:36Alex O'Connor?

  Even if I had a twin brother, they probably wouldn't be able to convince you that it was me. Or maybe they were hallucinating in groups.

• 1:18:44Alex O'Connor?

  One of the earliest gospel, New Testament sources is the, is the Letters of Paul, the earliest. And in one of those letters, Paul refers to Jesus having appeared to 500 people at once. And in some of the gospels, you get at least some group appearances, at least more than one person. And sometimes, you know, groups of disciple, the 12, all seeing Jesus all at once. You don't get group hallucinations like that. And so it doesn't seem like they were, they were, they were mistaken either. And so if they're not mistaken, they're not making it up. What explains the fact that these people claimed to see him after he had died? And the, the Christian apologists will say that the only real plausible explanation is that he really did rise from the dead.

• 1:19:29Alex O'Connor?

  Now, it's a, it's an interesting argument and it's quite powerful. However, my, my response has always been that.

• 1:19:38Alex O'Connor?

  This sort of process of elimination is very clever and that's how it's usually run, but it can go the other way. I mean, imagine I were trying to prove that there was such thing as a group hallucination. I know it's extraordinary, but there was a group hallucination. And I tried to prove it by saying, well, what are the other explanations? Or maybe they lied. Well, they wouldn't do that because they wouldn't go to death. Or maybe a man rose from the dead, but come on, that doesn't happen. That breaks all the laws of physics. So the only remaining option is this. It kind of depends where you start. But it is weird. Something very strange seems to have happened on that morning.

• 1:20:07Chris Williamson?

  I can see why philosophers go mad.

• 1:20:12Chris Williamson?

  Because you're able to simultaneously convince yourself of something and then convince yourself of the opposite and then convince yourself of everything that you've believed.

• 1:20:20Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, but that's, that's.

• 1:20:23Alex O'Connor?

  I think one of those famous quotes of Socrates is that, you know, the sign of wisdom in a man or something is the ability to entertain a belief without holding it or without becoming convinced by it or something like that. And I think it's something anybody can do if they want to. And it's why philosophers are so, you would think that philosophers are better at doing this. I don't think that's true. I think they're just talking about stuff that's far less, far less political, far less real. And so they're less likely to get, they're less likely to, to be offended at the prospect of considering the falsehood of their, of their beliefs.

• 1:20:56Chris Williamson?

  Maybe.

• 1:20:57Alex O'Connor?

  Until you get into religion, I suppose.

• 1:20:58Chris Williamson?

  You definitely seem to be able to have an ability to drop into and out of arguments on both sides of the same fence and play with ideas in a way that I think is, is rare and presumably a bit of a disposition, but also largely trained. Because you can sit and convince ChatGPT that God exists or try and turn me into a theist and then stand on stage and do the exact opposite. And just, I, I think that there's probably quite a lot to learn from how people who have spent a good bit of time playing with ideas in philosophy, dispassionately have that.

• 1:21:44Chris Williamson?

  Separation between themselves and the idea and the belief and what it means to them and the emotion and kind of that whole like ambient mess.

• 1:21:54Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, well, it's playing is a good word because it's fun, you know, it's enjoyable. That's why it's it's fun to talk about, you know, the theory of knowledge because who like really cares? It doesn't, you know, it doesn't grow corn, as they say, or make corn, how have you how have you supposed to say it? And and that's fine, because if it did, then it would certainly all get a bit serious. And it kind of really matters whether you get it right or wrong. Whereas here, we're just sort of sort of having fun. But you can, I don't know, I can kind of see why heretics would get burnt at the stake when religion had social power, because, you know, you you become convinced that this is the source of meaning, this is the source of truth, without it, we are nothing.

• 1:22:36Chris Williamson?

  Now being threatened.

• 1:22:37Alex O'Connor?

  And then it turns out that maybe there are actually some holes to poke here. What are you going to do? I mean, you can't let them do that, because this is literally, you know, societally calamitous. And so, you know, they they end up getting burnt at the stake. That's what also annoys me. I mean, you mentioned earlier, this this recent resurgence in the idea that, oh, we're all sort of balancing on Judeo-Christian values, maybe kind of true in a sense, but it does kind of get on my nerves that after, I said this to Ben yesterday, that the history of religious persecution against the very developments that those religious groups now like to claim as their own, I think the religion has shown to be wrong on a number of things. I listed them yesterday, the position of women in society,

• 1:23:21Alex O'Connor?

  the fate of homosexuals, at least practicing homosexuals, the position of the earth in relation to the sun, the age of both of those celestial bodies, wrong about the common evolutionary ancestry of all animals, including the human animal.

• 1:23:37Alex O'Connor?

  Wrong about the ownership of other human beings as private property, as is explicitly condoned not only in the Old Testament, but also in the New. And now, not only does religion fails to come to us with with an apology and contrition and say, maybe we were wrong. It says, no, no, no, those things are ours all along. It says, yes, we may have shown the instruments of torture to Galileo, because he suggested that the earth might orbit the sun rather than the other way around. But hey, didn't you know that the scientific revolution is essentially Judeo-Christian in origin? Yes, the Old Testament gives you explicit instructions about exactly how to either buy

• 1:24:19Alex O'Connor?

  or steal other human beings and keep them sometimes as your sexual property. But don't you know that the abolitionist movement is essentially Judeo-Christian in origin? Yes, I know that St. Paul says that man is the glory of God, but woman is the glory of man, and that I suffer not a woman to teach nor to assert authority over a man, rather she should remain silent, for Adam was formed first, then Eve. But don't you know that social justice movements are essentially Judeo-Christian in origin? Yes, you know, we know about the stoning of homosexuals and the fact that even St. Paul says that they're not getting into heaven. But don't you know that the LGBT movement is essentially sort of riding on Judeo-Christian principles? It seems to me relatively offensive to the people who've managed to secure these developments

• 1:25:03Alex O'Connor?

  against the very religious traditions that now like to claim them as their own.

• 1:25:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, both cause and effect. It's like being punched in the face by somebody who then comes over and gives you a bandage for it.

• 1:25:15Alex O'Connor?

  Yes. I mean, people like to refer to, and this is, I'm sort of rehashing some of the stuff that I said yesterday here. It's sort of a, people like to point out that the people who really got the scientific revolution going are often believers in God. You know, Galileo believed in God, Newton believed in God. In fact, Newton spent, but people were fascinated to discover his diaries to find that he spent more time writing about theology than than science.

• 1:25:44Chris Williamson?

  Madman for the last 30 years doing alchemy, right?

• 1:25:46Alex O'Connor?

  Right. But here's the thing, right? Like if, and As I said yesterday, I don't claim that this is the case, but if it were true that science had undermined religion and Christianity, if it were the case that actually these things aren't compatible with each other, then when somebody says, well, that can't be the case, because don't you know that the people who founded the scientific revolution were religious? Well, what else would they have been if they hadn't yet invented the mechanism by which their beliefs would come to be undermined? It's like saying that it's amazing that the person who invented the motorcar didn't own a motorcar beforehand. You see what I'm saying? It's sort of, I don't know, it seems very strange to me. And it's very recently that the popularity of this has increased, as you say. I mean, you go back to the mid noughties at the height of new atheism, and it was very

• 1:26:29Alex O'Connor?

  popular to talk about how religion's always getting in the way of science. And maybe that was a bit crude, but I think we're seeing an equally crude annexation of all of the beneficial social developments of the past hundred years as somehow necessarily standing upon the Judeo-Christian tradition, as if it couldn't have happened without them.

• 1:26:49Chris Williamson?

  Is this a scrabbling for something to hold on to, given that the collapse of grand narratives has had some poor externalities over the last couple of years? Is it just mass cope?

• 1:27:01Alex O'Connor?

  I think so. I think that nihilism, as it were, carries with it the feeling of being naked. You've thrown off what were essentially optional clothes to reveal what was there all along, but when you actually face it to nature, it's embarrassing, it's scary, and you will do anything you can, if you find yourself naked in public, to find any clothes to put on, not just your old ones. It doesn't matter what clothes, any clothes are better than no clothes. And this is what people are beginning to realise. And so they're scrambling for their old clothes again.

• 1:27:35Chris Williamson?

  And trying to legitimize.

• 1:27:38Alex O'Connor?

  And, yes, and trying to put them on. And that's why it's easy as well for people to go around poking holes in other people's clothes. It's very easy to do, but that's what the success of a movement like new atheism consists in, in the fact that all they had to do was just tell other people why they're wrong. You only need to poke holes in other people's clothes, but if you need to sew your own shirt, that gets a little more difficult. See, as Lewis said, that the purpose of philosophy is not the cutting down of forests, but the irrigation of deserts.

• 1:28:10Chris Williamson?

  That's very interesting. Yeah, I've thought about this for a good while.

• 1:28:15Chris Williamson?

  The

• 1:28:18Chris Williamson?

  seductiveness of being a critic as opposed to being somebody that makes suggestions. And the lack of preparedness of anybody to put forward any proposals for anything. It's easy for both sides accuse each other of being reactionary, right? The reactionary right, the reactionary left.

• 1:28:34Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:35Chris Williamson?

  And ultimately, for instance, perfect, perfect example of this is in the world of dating and sort of mate selection and the mating market. Everybody can provide criticisms about what's going wrong. And almost nobody provides any actionable steps to improve it. Beyond something that is illimitative rather than additive, right? Like, well, if we could just stop doing this, then this would be fixed. It's like, I don't think that that's quite the way that it works. And there's another very unique protection mechanism that's given, which is it's very hard to criticize someone's criticism, or at least

• 1:29:16Chris Williamson?

  being a critic leaves you open to criticism way less than being a proposer.

• 1:29:22Alex O'Connor?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:23Chris Williamson?

  Right? If I, if I put something forward, if I posit a potential solution for you to be able to come back and say, well, this is shit and this is shit and this is shit. Makes complete, it's very easy to do. Whereas for you to say, for me to critic you, what you did, and then for you to come back and go, well, actually this and this and this. But it's like, nah, it kind of gets all a little bit abstract and it's a few degrees removed from anything that feels real.

• 1:29:44Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. Simon Cowell can't write a song. You know, like, if the world was full of Simon Cowells, then we'd end up with no music. Somebody's got to do the building here. You can't just be a critic. And this is what I think has been the reason for the success of the sort of anti new atheist stuff that we've been seeing recently. I mean, you'll have seen this, even the new atheists themselves sort of treat it like it's a, it's a dead animal. And in many ways it is, and I think it's got to do with the fact that. Yeah, they've they've they've done a very good job of of cutting down the central pillar of what has traditionally been the reason for people getting out of bed in the morning. And then when people are there saying, well, what do we put in its place?

• 1:30:28Alex O'Connor?

  They're like, see ya, you know, I'm out. And they go off and do different things. And and what are people to do? And that's why.

• 1:30:36Chris Williamson?

  Was it the job of the new atheists to provide something to?

• 1:30:40Alex O'Connor?

  Well, maybe not. Some some people are just good at diagnosing problems. Karl Marx is a good example. Like Karl Marx's diagnoses of of of the way the world works are fascinating to read and incredibly useful, even if you disagree with them. But obviously, attempts to to sort of build societies on those ideas alone have failed. Seems like you need something a little bit more.

• 1:31:08Alex O'Connor?

  I just don't think it's true, the religion stuff, I mean. And so that's why I think we're seeing this, because people are beginning to realize that it probably isn't true. They can't get like quite get behind the truth claims. But they recognize that there's some utility in having other people believe that it is true.

• 1:31:30Alex O'Connor?

  And I don't know where that leaves us, because in this discussion about whether religion is good or bad for society, I said yesterday, look, I will accept your premise wholesale, that religion is good, maybe even necessary for society. What do you want me to do if I just don't think it's true? Am I just lie to my children, raising believing something that I don't believe is the case? Because I think it will somehow be beneficial to society? I don't think it works like that. I don't think people can actually fool themselves. Sure, you can act as if God exists, and that's what someone like Peterson says that people do already. But ultimately, if you just say, well, I think that, you know, it's I should just act like a Christian because it's good for me. Then when push comes to shove, and you really have to make a moral sacrifice, if you're not actually a Christian, you're probably not going to do the actually Christian thing.

• 1:32:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, I wonder whether this is afforded to people because of the convenience and comfort of modern life. The fact that having to really, really put something on the line, it's mostly lapping as, you know, belief systems and oh, I'll pick up that piece of trash and I will, you know, give money to this person on the street.

• 1:32:31Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, people have sort of forgotten.

• 1:32:32Chris Williamson?

  It's like bourgeois religious belief.

• 1:32:35Alex O'Connor?

  It's so irregularly that we have to make genuine moral sacrifices of the kind that used to be commonplace throughout the history of humanity that we've sort of forgotten our ability to do so. And I think that if you push people now, they they recognize that they probably wouldn't make those sacrifices. Did you see the Mr. Beast poll where he asked, would you rather have like a million dollars or like a random person on earth dies or something like that if you press this button?

• 1:32:55Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:32:55Alex O'Connor?

  And like, I think it might have been a majority of people, that slim majority, said they, you know, press that button. Yeah, kill, kill someone random. I'll, I'll take a million bucks. And, and I actually kind of believe them. I think they actually would. And people want to say that that's because we've lost, you know, our belief in God. I don't know. Maybe, I, I think a better explanation is just that, like you say, we've become too comfortable. And so when, when somebody says, in other words, like, oh, well, you know, this must be due to, due to, to decline in religion and the fact that we've forgotten our Judeo-Christian heritage. I mean, you'll probably hear that a lot from people that you might talk to on this podcast. They'll say something like that. Just think to yourself, like, is that really the best explanation? Is that the

• 1:33:38Alex O'Connor?

  only explanation? Could it be something to do with the growth of technology? Could it do, could it be to do with something, something to do with the growth of comfort?

• 1:33:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:45Alex O'Connor?

  And is it more likely to do with that? And maybe it's not the lack of religion that's causing the other stuff, but this other source that's causing both of those things.

• 1:33:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've been thinking a lot recently about stuff that is literally true but figuratively false, and figuratively true but literally false. And it kind of seems a little bit like the beliefs that you're talking about here. It may be comforting, increasing in happiness, adaptive to kind of act as if these things exist. The belief in free will, actually, believing in free will, or sorry, yeah, determinism generally is something that may be literally true, but figuratively false.

• 1:34:28Alex O'Connor?

  Yes.

• 1:34:28Chris Williamson?

  And that's kind of where I've come to as an opinion with this, that largely it's through designed ignorance. I just don't think about it that much.

• 1:34:36Alex O'Connor?

  Precisely the reason it evolves. That's why it exists as an illusion, because it, it does something for us. And, and that's fine. I have, I have, I've never had a problem saying that. But when the Sort of auspices under which I'm having a conversation with Ben Shapiro is that he made a video called The Atheist Delusion. And in that video, he says, like, look, you can't have free will without God. I say, yeah, I agree. You can't have free will without God. You just also can't have it with God. And he essentially says, like, well, you know, there's sort of a, I don't know how free will works, but it's sort of a mystery that I'm willing to accept wholesale. And I'm like, well, this is fine. But who's the delusory one here? You know what I mean?

• 1:35:18Alex O'Connor?

  Like, I've got no problem with you saying, like, well, I see that, this is more Benson, by the way, but I have no problem with somebody saying, well, yeah, I mean, maybe free will doesn't exist, but it's better to act as though it does. It's like, okay, fine. But then don't, don't say that I'm the one acting under a delusion. I mean, delusions can be good. They might evolve for a good reason. But, but I don't know. I guess I find it difficult to treat something as true that isn't. It's a bit like the gun is always loaded. That's one of Brett Weinstein's example, examples. It's, it's not true that the gun is always loaded, but we're just going to pretend that it is. And that's much better. At least to a good society, if we always act like that.

• 1:35:51Chris Williamson?

  Literally false, but figuratively true.

• 1:35:52Alex O'Connor?

  But, like, you can't actually act like it's true. Like, if you asked me to put money on, like, opening the gun and seeing if there's a bullet in that.

• 1:36:01Chris Williamson?

  You can behave in a way that functions as if it were.

• 1:36:03Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. But then when push comes to shove, and you really need to make a decision, you're not going to be able to do it unless you really believe it's true.

• 1:36:09Chris Williamson?

  So this only works in low stakes situations?

• 1:36:11Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly. Yeah. So, so, you know, it's, it's all too easy to say, oh, you know, we, we're just, we're just sort of act as though it's true.

• 1:36:17Chris Williamson?

  Good example here, using the, using the act as if the gun is loaded thing. You do not point it at anybody. You do not leave it around the children. You do not do the rest of it. If a robber breaks into your house, you don't go downstairs with said gun acting as if it's loaded.

• 1:36:32Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly. Exactly right. And so the moment that it actually really matters, like, in the prior case, it only matters when it goes wrong, right? But when it begins to matter, when it goes right. And that it goes right, this principle just doesn't work. And so I'm suspicious of its efficacy. In other words, I think we might need to actually start acting in accordance with what's true, which by the way, is what people have been saying for a long time. Oh, why don't we all just act in accordance with what's true? And then suddenly, when you begin to realise that maybe free will doesn't exist, maybe morality is just a social adaptation. Suddenly, this idea of acting in accordance with what's true is a point of principle goes out the window.

• 1:37:10Alex O'Connor?

  And it's amazing how I sort of see deontologists, virtue ethicists transform before my very eyes into utilitarians. Outgoes the principle of live in accordance with the truth. Outgo the principles of honesty and sort of lack of intentional self deception. Because, well, we want the greatest good for the greatest number. You know, a better, more functional society comes about if we just pretend as though this is the case. What happened to the virtue? What happened to the principle?

• 1:37:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:38Alex O'Connor?

  What happened to the deontological ethics? It's just out the window all of a sudden. I think sometimes people like to have their cake and eat it too in that respect. I like to act in accordance with what I think is true. And when somebody challenges me and says, well, you don't act as though you don't have free will, I just don't know what that means. I don't know what that looks like. It probably looks something like this.

• 1:37:59Chris Williamson?

  Alex O'Connor, ladies and gentlemen. Alex, it's been a while since I've had you on. I think I'm going to be joining you on your show at some point soon.

• 1:38:05Alex O'Connor?

  Hope so.

• 1:38:07Chris Williamson?

  What can people expect of you over the next couple of months? What's coming up?

• 1:38:12Alex O'Connor?

  Hopefully, that conversation with Ben Shapiro, which I'll mention for 16 billionth time, will be out. I've got a few debates coming up, Oxford Union, Durham Union, something at Cambridge on the monarchy.

• 1:38:25Alex O'Connor?

  So.

• 1:38:25Chris Williamson?

  You being known for the Piers Morgans propelled you, catapulted you to the forefront of the anti-monarchists.

• 1:38:32Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I'm becoming something of a royal correspondent for that news.

• 1:38:35Chris Williamson?

  Anti-royal correspondent.

• 1:38:36Alex O'Connor?

  An anti-royal correspondent. Hey, my Twitter bio is growing, growing by the minute on this podcast.

• 1:38:41Chris Williamson?

  Why should people go up there and keep up to date with the stuff you do?

• 1:38:44Alex O'Connor?

  Just type in my name, Alex O'Connor. I am technically still Cosmic Skeptic. That's my old handle. I tend to go by my Christian name now, but the handles are still all there, so you'll still find me that way too.

• 1:38:55Chris Williamson?

  Alex, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate.