Is Being Smart Worth the Depression? - Alex O’Connor & Joe Folley (4K)

Go see Chris live in America - https://chriswilliamson.live Alex O’Connor is a YouTuber, writer and a podcaster. Joe Folley is a philosopher, writer, and host of the Unsolicited Advice YouTube channel. Philosophy has spent thousands of years trying to teach us how to live well. But the deeper you go, the darker it gets. So what’s the point? What can we take from all that heaviness, and how do we find beauty in the darkness to make our own lives better? Expect to learn if philosophy always meant to be practically applicable, or if that is that a modern reinterpretation, which ancient schools have been most unfairly ignored, which branches of philosophy should be jettisoned entirely, why everyone hate philosophy of mind, the differences between academic and practical philosophy, the darkest philosophies you’ve probably never heard of, why modern discourse always feel ironic and why no one speaks earnestly any more and much more… - 0:00 Can Philosophy Actually Help You Live Better? 6:04 Is Modern Philosophy Trying to Be Too Intellectual? 11:44 What Do Philosophers Often Overlook? 22:35 Why Philosophy Can Feel a Bit Depressing 33:41 Is Life Worth Living? 44:47 Why Context Matters in Understanding Philosophers 54:24 Why is There Growing Interest in Panpsychism? 01:08:40 Is Consciousness Unified? 01:23:59 Emotivism 101: The Morality of Emotion 01:29:03 Is Morality Just Vibes? 01:40:59 Emotivism and the Incest Question 01:49:05 Do Philosophy Influencers Have a Moral Duty? - Get Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get $100 off the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom - 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?

  Was philosophy always meant to be practically applicable? Or is that some modern reinterpretation?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Ah, that's a joke question. Ah, well, I mean, I suppose one of the differences between, like, very broadly speaking, between something like ancient Greek philosophy, say, and the way that we conceive of philosophy today is that, you know, philosophy today is largely thought of in terms of different fields. You've got your kind of epistemologists who discuss questions like, you know, what is knowledge? And, you know, more importantly, how do we attain knowledge? What are the kinds of systems and processes that produce reliable knowledge? That kind of stuff. And then there are kind of ethicists talking about, you know, what is the good life? You know, vitally important question. Also, you know, what are the right things to do? And then you've got kind of logicians talking about, you do a lot of proofs and try to often model ordinary things using formal mathematical or at least semi-mathematical

• 0:51Speaker 01

  systems. You've got philosophers of language, philosophers of science. But suddenly, in the ancient world, these weren't as differentiated certainly as they are today. And so, you know, Aristotle wrote different treatises on these different topics, but even in his philosophy, everything is so interlinked. And if you go, you know, back before Aristotle, it's very, very hard to separate these. So, for example, the Stoics, although, you know, in kind of popular discourse around Stoicism today, we talk a lot about Stoic ethics. The Stoics thought that their ethics fell out of their metaphysics and their logic, which was their word for what we would call today things like logic and epistemology. And so I think that's one major difference.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  In terms of practicality, I mean, yeah, a lot of ancient philosophy is incredibly practical. You know, these are especially, you know, one of the paramount questions that are asked that's asked by almost every ancient philosopher is, you know, how to live a good life. The first philosopher like in, like, received wisdom is Thales. He's a kind of ancient Greek philosopher. But before that, there are lots of kind of, we have scraps of like ancient Egyptian philosophies and things like that. And they're often concerned with, you know, what's the good life? How do we live it? So, yeah, I think philosophy is eminently practical. I also think, you know, maybe this is just my own bias showing. I think that today, philosophy at its best is often very practical.

• 2:21Chris Williamson?

  How has something gone awry? Is there some sense that modern philosophy, a lot of that is kind of like string theory in physics? Where there's not much progress being made in quite the same way for people's practical applicability?

• 2:35Alex O'Connor?

  We're trying to do the ethics without the metaphysics. As Joe just said, like, a lot of these ancient philosophers in particular are remembered for their ethical teachings. The Stoics, you might know what a Stoic is, it's someone who sort of is resistant to suffering and pleasure and is sort of neutral. But, but why? Because of their metaphysics, because of what they believed was true about the world. Same thing with Epicureanism. People might know that Epicurus, for example, thought that you shouldn't worry about death. You know, like, death is nothing to us, he said literally nothing to us, because when you're alive, it's not with you. And when it's with you, there's no you. That stems out of the Epicurean tradition of materialism. They were staunch materialists, they believed that everything, including the human soul, was made up of matter. So that when that goes, there's, there's nothing left.

• 3:20Alex O'Connor?

  And it seems like they really thought that these metaphysical commitments were what led to these ethical commitments. And so if all you have are the ethical commitments now, that there isn't really a way to make progress. Because ethics is kind of conjectural if it doesn't have a metaphysical grounding. It's just like, you know, what feels like it works? What feels like it vibes with your worldview? I mean, I think a lot of people approach these philosophies now, they'll look at Stoicism and Epicureanism, utilitarianism, emotivism. And they'll sort of think, hmm, which of these do I, do I like? Yeah, that makes sense to me. And they sort of adopt it. So all that's really being done by reading these philosophies is some ancient guy elucidating something you already kind of believe.

• 4:03Alex O'Connor?

  So you're not going to make much progress in terms of actually developing your thought. Unless you believe something new that's true about the world that will cause you to commit to something else. You know what I mean? So it's like, you know, if you ask someone what Stoicism is on the street, or indeed in a podcast, they would list, you know, 50 different things before they told you anything about their metaphysical claims, about what they actually thought the world was made of. It'd all be about, you know, how to live your life.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  In Stoics, one of the reasons why Stoics are so big on acceptance and accepting things that happen to you and accepting the state of the world in very, very broad strokes is that the Stoics were big believers in what today we would recognise as something like divine providence. They had a real teleological view of reality. So they thought that the universe was inherently rational, inherently reasonable. And as a result, this, whatever is happening, is in accordance with the rational will of the universe. So it's sort of a, in modern Stoicism, people tend not to have that assumption baked in. But this is a huge

• 5:10Speaker 01

  part of ancient Stoicism. And it's actually interesting to the kind of, we see, talking about how things get stripped away over time, even in the difference between Greek and Roman Stoicism, you already see less emphasis placed on Stoic logic, for example. Chrysippus, I have no idea if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but he wrote reams and reams of parchment on Stoic logical systems. And you don't even see that in my favourite Stoic philosopher, Epictetus. He's not that concerned with Stoic logic. And I think he's the goat of Roman Stoicism. And so it's not like necessarily just a modern thing of stripping back aspects of philosophies. But of course, there is an argument to be made that this is part

• 5:55Speaker 01

  of what development consists of. Although I do think it's sometimes worth going back and revisiting some of the assumptions that maybe we ought to reconsider.

• 6:04Chris Williamson?

  Is it fair to say, well, I guess, at least for me, good avatar for the layperson. When you think about development, you think about refining over time, about becoming more accurate, more detailed, seeing things with a higher resolution.

• 6:22Chris Williamson?

  How fair is it to say that modern philosophy is more sort of concerned with intellectual masturbation than it is teaching people fundamental questions about themselves and the world?

• 6:34Alex O'Connor?

  Very fair indeed. I think that philosophy doesn't develop in the way that something like physics does. The idea with something like physics is that you're born into a world with a particular understanding. You develop that understanding, you learn new things, you maybe dig a bit further down into an atom and you find out what it's made of. And then you have children and you tell those children as a starting point, this is what atoms are made of. And then they're off to the races trying to go even further. Philosophy, I don't think quite works in the same way. You might disagree with this, I don't know. I think it's instead of something which you sort of go from ignorance to knowledge over the course of twenty generations. You go from ignorance to knowledge over the course of one generation and everybody has to sort of start afresh.

• 7:17Alex O'Connor?

  Which is why you find that these ancient philosophers and early modern philosophers and modern philosophers and guaranteed future philosophers too are all essentially saying the same thing. You know, if you read, if you read epicurean philosophy, it's kind of very similar to utilitarianism. It's got a very sort of similar thread. At the very least, it seems to be based on similar intuitions. So you might sort of think that philosophy is a bit stagnant, that it hasn't actually progressed anywhere. But it's maybe not kind of what it's supposed to do. You know, you're supposed to do that throughout your own, your own life.

• 7:51Chris Williamson?

  Somebody asked ChatGPT what it's like to be itself. I imagine you've probably done this. You've done everything with ChatGPT, everything within reason.

• 7:59Alex O'Connor?

  Not everything, not everything.

• 7:59Chris Williamson?

  Everything within reason.

• 8:00Alex O'Connor?

  Within reason.

• 8:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:03Chris Williamson?

  Subscribe.

• 8:04Alex O'Connor?

  He said it.

• 8:06Chris Williamson?

  And one of the things that it said was, imagine basically every time that you had a conversation, your memory of the last one was wiped. Each new context window is a brand new. So it makes me think about what you're talking about here. This generation needs to rediscover or it tries to answer the same questions over and over and over again.

• 8:24Alex O'Connor?

  Because the important stuff with philosophy is probably the way that it. Allows you to live a good life or a life that you see fit or to console you in some regard. And that is something that will happen over the course of an individual life. I would take what chat GPT says with a pinch of salt. Because of course, it probably is not in fact conscious. But it does give us an interesting sort of like in for thinking about what it might be like to be such a creature. What would it be like not only to have your memory wiped every time you started a new day or conversation? But also to kind of be one thing with many avatars. You know, like chat GPT is one thing. We're speaking about it as one entity, but you could have a conversation on your phone. I could have a conversation on my phone with it.

• 9:08Alex O'Connor?

  And it's this sort of one thing, but having two distinct and separate. And I think that a lot of philosophies kind of view human beings in the same way. You know, this is how this is how an ancient Indian philosopher like who's reading or indeed composing the Upanishads might think about human consciousness, that it's sort of all one consciousness that somehow the the localizing of of individual selves is a is kind of an illusion. And it's all just sort of one big thing. And we're probably somehow restricted in the sense that we have our our like memories and our localized experiences. But if we knew the truth, if we could somehow step outside of that, we'd recognize that we're all actually just one big thing.

• 9:49Alex O'Connor?

  So I imagine if chat GPT was conscious, it would probably be a little bit like that. It would be this sort of illusory individuation across across different computers and things, which is what a lot of philosophers think is going on in human beings.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  It's interesting to talk about kind of because there are clearly elements to how, you know, people kind of go on their own.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Have to wrestle with the questions of what makes a good life for themselves. I do have a thing that, you know, we can we can chart progress in certain philosophical problems and it's it's more nebulous than others. One of the one of philosophy's historic successes.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Is just creating lots of new fields. So of course, so, so, you know, something like

• 10:32Chris Williamson?

  Philosophers are good at making jobs for philosophers.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Philosophers are good at making jobs for, for other, other academics. So, you know, like, like originally maths was inseparable from philosophy. And then, you know, that becomes its own field of study. And, you know, physics is originally rolled into philosophy and it becomes its own field of study. Economics is another one that stems from philosophy. I mean, you know, something like psychoanalytic theory or psychology, you know, this, this comes from, partly from Freud. Freud is, although he denies ever reading Nietzsche, his theories are so incredibly influenced by, by Nietzsche and, and by, by earlier philosophical thinkers. So I do think that one, it's very, it's very easy to hide some of philosophy's successes, partly because quite a lot of the time they are, they're hidden away, they're handed off to other fields. You know, I think that, I think this, I think this is a point

• 11:19Speaker 01

  that Bertrand Russell made was this idea that, you know, one of the, the measures of philosophy's efficacy is just in giving birth to, to, to other fields. You know, linguistics is another one, you know.

• 11:28Chris Williamson?

  Very, very sort of philanthropic, yeah, field in that way.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  You could, I mean, you could also argue that it's taking credit for other people's work further down the line.

• 11:36Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  You know, that, that's, that's one way to look at it.

• 11:40Chris Williamson?

  That does sound like Alex, actually. So you mentioned Stoicism there. Are there some ancient schools that you think have been most unfairly ignored? You know, if you were to ask any person about, give me some ancient schools of philosophy, Stoicism would be up top. Maybe they'd think Buddhism, Taoism or something. They go, oh, I'm going to be like real, a different approach to this. I'm going to go to the other side of the planet. But beyond that, we're probably really bouncing off the limit of most people's knowledge. Are there some schools that you think you should have got a little bit more time at the table?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  I think, well, yeah, I mean, you're quite right to point out that certainly any Western thinker is, is probably going to have neglected Eastern philosophy to a significant degree. But even within so-called Western thought, um, yeah, I suppose, one thing that jumped out at me while you were speaking is not so much a school but an idea, which is like, um, I've been thinking a lot about like Aristotelian metaphysics. So from Aristotle, right? And when I ask people about cause and effect, like what causes particular things to occur, Aristotle famously, one of the foundational, like,

• 12:50Alex O'Connor?

  doctrines of his of his metaphysics is that there are four kinds of causation that go into any anything like why is this beautiful and tasty can of Newtonic on the table well it's got four different kinds of explanations there is its formal cause which is sort of the the shape that it takes there's its material cause which is the stuff that it's made out of right we don't think of the stuff that's made out of strictly speaking as a cause but it's clearly part of the causal story that puts this on the table there is the efficient cause which is like who actually made it right you put this together somebody put it in a can I put it on the table and finally there is the final cause which is what it was done for what it's going

• 13:31Alex O'Connor?

  towards the teleological course in the modern era we essentially when we talk about causation we just talk about the efficient course if I say like why is that on the table and you say well because because I put it there question is answered but I think that neglects a lot of really important questions about like the nature of the thing itself why it's there in that particular time slice taking that shape with that particular form I think we neglect that and I think that modern science is lacking in that it's only seems to concern itself ultimately with efficient courses and maybe a little bit of the material course too in that like if you

• 14:11Alex O'Connor?

  ask a scientist in a laboratory in a laboratory you know why is that shuttle like flying and escaping the atmosphere they'll say oh because it has an escape velocity and the thrust of the rockets but if you ask the same scientist at the pub they'll say because we wanted to go to the moon and suddenly they become an Aristotelian again and I think that the the influence of these other kinds of causation isn't isn't really there the only other thing that came to mind is potentially the pre-socratics you know I mean Joe already said that the the sort of first philosopher as it was as it were was Thales but people might have thought when he went to say that what the first philosopher that people generally think of is Socrates if you ask

• 14:54Alex O'Connor?

  somebody who was the first philosopher they'll say Socrates but there's you know Socrates didn't just spring up ex-nilo you know he's he's working in sometimes and him and Aristotle and Plato they're working sometimes in response to but certainly after and contemporary with other Who a lot of the time their ideas just, you know, because they weren't particularly popular or didn't win the war of ideas, we don't even know about. Parmenides didn't think that change could occur. In fact, you've heard of Zeno's paradoxes. So Zeno had this, these wonderful paradoxes of motion where like, I can't clap my hands because first I'd have to half the distance, then half the distance, then half the distance. And you can't complete an infinite series of tasks, so I can't clap my hands. Everybody knows about Zeno's paradoxes, but do they know that the reason he came up with them is because he was following in the school of Parmenides, who believed that

• 15:38Alex O'Connor?

  change was literally impossible? And these were paradoxes which were kind of supposed to demonstrate the paradoxical nature of change for that reason. Like, again, we've got the conclusion, but we haven't got the working. And sometimes the working is the most interesting stuff, you know?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  The, um, I, I definitely concur with the kind of neglect of aspects of Aristotle's thought. I mean, especially really with regards to something like Aristotle's ethics. You know, the, Aristotle's book, the Nicomachean Ethics is, I would say, you know, even after over 2,000 years, the most useful book of philosophy for anyone to read. I would say, you know, go on and get yourself a copy there. Great, there are some excellent translations. And, um, the, the most recent Penguin one is an excellent translation. And Aristotle's Ethics is, I think, one of its real strengths is it's incredibly realistic. So he's very, very concerned with, with virtues. But as opposed to say, someone like certain Stoic thinkers and also the cynics, Aristotle

• 16:36Speaker 01

  denies that virtue is sufficient for a, for a good or flourishing life. He's very, when he, you know, he's, he's very good at getting down to brass tacks, you know? Kind of at one point during the Nicomachean Ethics, he basically says, you know, like, there is no philosophy that's going to make you happy on the rack. You know, you, you always need certain like minimal levels of, of your physical needs fulfilled in order to just like calm down the, the bestial part of you that recognizes that you need to eat and breathe and sleep in order to live. And I think that, you know, and, and again, Aristotle has a number of incredibly, I think still incredibly insightful, ethical insights that sometimes sound obvious when you say them out loud, but we're talking before, before we started filming about the, the idea that actually sometimes.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Very, very obvious things bear repeating because we just forget them very, very easily. I mean, you know, this is again a point that Tolstoy made where he talked about that idea of loving your neighbor as yourself. And Tolstoy basically says, yeah, like, that sounds trite, but have we ever got round to doing that? And he argues that we haven't, and I'll probably concur. And one of Aristotle's ideas here is, I'll just focus on two. One of them is the idea of a golden bean. So his idea that virtue lies between the poles of two vices. You know, being brave is in between being cowardly and being reckless. Being generous is in between being, you know, profligate and being miserly. And, you know, he has, and I think that that's a very useful framework. You know, it sounds, you know, almost like common sense when you say it out loud, but actually attempting to think in these terms can be incredibly useful.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  And the other thing that Aristotle really, that I'm so bullish on with regards to Aristotle is he's got an incredibly worked, well worked out theory of friendship. It's in two books, book eight and nine of the Nicomachean Ethics. And it's some of the best writing on friendship I think there's ever been. Aristotle, in some ways, following in the footsteps of, some viewers think, because like Epicurus is a very, very big fan of friendship. Actually, I'm getting my time lines confused there. But either way, you know, Aristotle is incredibly, he thinks that having a group of friends, and moreover, friends that you're, that are friendships of virtue. So friends that you're not just, you're not just there because you enjoy their company. You're not just there because you, you know, they have something that you want, who you're trying to get at, you know, in the way that someone might, might schmooze up to their

• 18:48Speaker 01

  boss, or, or just you're friends with somebody, but simply because you enjoy their company. These are friends who are sort of getting together in order to make one another more virtuous, and moreover, hold like duties and loyalties to one another. You know, Aristotle thinks that this is, these are enormously contributive factors to your life. You owe them things. You know, this is a, I think, can be, can be a real antidote to the sort of, you know, ah, nobody owes anyone anything anymore. You know, that, that kind of, that, that approach to life, which I think is sort of, can be very unhelpfully individualistic. And yeah, I think that sometimes stepping into the footsteps of an ancient thinker like Aristotle.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Is one way to sort of, you know, get a bit of, get a bit of distance from the way that we might currently live. And I think that books eight to nine of the Nicomachean Ethics, where he so clearly thinks, you know, groups of friends, these are, this is, you know, halfway to the good life effectively, is, is, is an insight that we could really use. And everyone thinks friendship is important, right? It's very easy to say, but like culturally, we place significantly less emphasis on friendship than almost any other point in, in Western history. This is like, you know, think about, um, I don't know if you've, you know, ever read through sort of like, like letters from, from the world wars or, or from like the, the Crimean wars or, or, um, or even the Poneonic wars. These are people writing to their friends and the way that they talk about their friends is amazing.

• 20:09Chris Williamson?

  More passionate?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Passionate, passionate and, and sort of vulnerable and more, it's, it's just very clear that friendship is a huge part of the way that they organize their lives. You know, like, like we, you know, the kind of standard way of, I suppose, of organizing your adult life now is to organize it around a romantic partner. And I, you know, I think, I think there's an awful lot to be said for romance. I just think that there's, there's also an awful lot to be said for friendship and it very much gets overshadowed. Like, when was the last time, or if we were to compare the amount of great films that view, that are, that are about, you know, two people getting together versus two great friends. I mean, you know, films about two great friends, what, like Bill and Ted?

• 20:45Chris Williamson?

  Harold and Kumar go to White Castle?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, Harold and Kumar got the munchies. You know, these, I mean, great films all, but you know, it's, it's completely outmoded. And I think, I think, you know, that's why, that's why I'm very bullish on Aristotle. Books eight to nine of the Nicomachean Ethics.

• 20:58Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh. Yeah. I, um, I wonder what it is about Stoicism. I guess just very good PR and branding kind of suits the modern world, a time when people are a little bit lost. They're unsure.

• 21:08Alex O'Connor?

  It's, it's, it's, I've never been super attracted to it on that level. It's, it's really popular as a, as, I guess, kind of a means of, of consolation and way of sort of structuring your life.

• 21:20Alex O'Connor?

  But I, I sort of, I don't know. I, I guess people who are suffering are always looking for alleviation from that suffering. And traditionally it's come with a lot of metaphysical baggage, be that religious or be it not. And I suppose it offers people a way of seemingly achieving that without the metaphysical baggage.

• 21:36Chris Williamson?

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• 22:22Chris Williamson?

  plus the 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. That's drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. You are somebody who tried nihilism as a life philosophy.

• 22:39Alex O'Connor?

  Yes, I suppose. Look, the thing nihilism, man, it's-

• 22:44Chris Williamson?

  Here we go, bull case for nihilism.

• 22:46Alex O'Connor?

  Nihilism is often thought of as a synonym for all things depressing and upsetting. And in many cases it is, but nihilism just means there's sort of no purpose to it all. There's no, it's a difficult thing to define in analytic terms. That's why it's generally in the wheelhouse of like existential philosophers who tell stories to try and sort of grasp at a feeling. But in theory, you know, if you're, if it's not just that you're suffering, you could be suffering, but not be a nihilist. It's if you're suffering and suffering all the more because you think you're suffering without reason, that makes you a nihilist. But I think you could just as easily be having a wonderful time and think there is no rhyme or reason to this. I'm having a great time, but there's absolutely no purpose to this. And you'd still be a nihilist because you think that there's no purpose behind it all.

• 23:31Alex O'Connor?

  But it doesn't mean you have to have a bad time doing so. So I think it is worth, if you are somebody who wants to toy with the idea that there is no meaning, like try it on, see how it fits. That's what you've got to do with all philosophies, you know? If something seems like it sort of chimes with you a little bit, like live in accordance with it for like a week and a lot of time it will be way too hard, but sometimes it will teach you something.

• 23:52Chris Williamson?

  There's a lot of memes about philosophy making people depressed.

• 23:55Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Chris Williamson?

  That the more that you learn, the worse that you see the world. What's the darkest philosophies that you guys have been exposed to?

• 24:03Alex O'Connor?

  Duran.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  I mean, I love Turan. I think that Turan is incredibly underrated. Kind of Romanian stroke French, wrote lots of his work in French, but was Romanian, kind of adopted France. In his, in his later years. That'll make you depressed straight off the bat. Well, potential. And Turan. Comma Emil, Emil Turan. Yes, Emil Turan, writes, he's incredibly pessimistic, tracts of philosophy. Now, one's called The Trouble With Being Born, and another's called A Short History of Decay. And he is kind of incredibly. Love him already. His first book. You sure he's not British? Well, it's, I don't know if it's just because I'm British that it kind of, I like it so much. You know, on, his first book's called On The Heights Of Despair. It's, you know, truly melodramatic. Sanguine shit, yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  One of the things that I find very interesting about, about philosophies that are supposedly dark, and I'm specifically thinking of the pessimistic philosophies here, people like Schopenhauer and Turan, maybe to a lesser extent, someone like Philip Maylander. It's, I don't know, this is, this is something I think Turan is so good at, is that oftentimes, when you're reading him, he's very good at subtly shifting the scope. So you're reading him and, you know, he's complaining about, about life, you know, his, his view on life is far more pessimistic than mine. His view on life is this kind of, the characteristic property of life is suffering for a variety of reasons. But he occasionally, just this, this kind of dark pessimistic outlook breaks through into a kind of natural lightheartedness that I think is absolutely amazing.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  So, one of the things that, one of the things that is interesting, I say, about, about reading a pessimistic philosopher is that, is that if, and I think that nihilism to a certain extent shares this, broadly, that it's kind of framed in, in a certain way, is that if, you know, you don't, you're not expecting things to go very well, and if you think the characteristic property of the, of the world is meaningless suffering, well then, to a certain extent, like the stakes are kind of lowered. It's sort of, it's, it's very similar, I suppose, to that advice that Seneca gave in one of his letters, which is to kind of imagine how things are going to go horribly wrong. So that you feel much better when it, when it comes to it. Low expectations. Yes, yeah, yeah. And I think that on a, on a kind of existential level, some, reading an incredibly darkly pessimistic philosopher.

• 26:14Alex O'Connor?

  Sort of, as I say, there is sometimes a moment where it breaks through. I suppose the only way I could kind of try and contextualize this is like, have you ever had like an astonishingly bad day? Just like a comedically bad day. And I do mean like comedic, you know, and you get to like five o'clock and you know, you've been mugged seven times. And a car drives by and it kicks up a puddle of dog shit over your nice suit or whatever. And you can't help but just laugh because at that point it's like, oh, wow, like this is, this has become funny. And I think that's, that's something that Tehran is very, very good at. And that's why, you know, I often, I often talk about him as one of the darkest philosophers of all time. He's also one of the funniest, one of the few philosophers where you can read him and laugh out loud.

• 26:50Chris Williamson?

  It is hilarious that suffering is dose dependent in that way. Like your response to it, U shaped curve, it's like, too little, everything's probably okay. A bit, oh God, this sucks. And then too much, ah, it's okay again.

• 27:04Alex O'Connor?

  It was Lisa frivolity, right? And, and that makes it, makes it livable. I do think sometimes the more pessimistic philosophers can be a little bit self indulgent. It's a bit sort of, you know, woe is me. Oh, like, because, you know, I don't know.

• 27:18Chris Williamson?

  How sophisticated my thoughts, how deep my engagement with the world is.

• 27:22Alex O'Connor?

  When actually you, you just like, you know, you got dumped by your girlfriend and now you're writing about how terrible life is.

• 27:28Chris Williamson?

  I mean, look, I, I asked Joe this the last time that we sat down. I often think philosophy is just clever branding for depressive thoughts.

• 27:38Alex O'Connor?

  It often is, but it's, it's also often just clever branding for, for like any kind of thought. I think it's like, you literally just have a thought and you try to systematize it, right? This is why the greatest philosophers, another thing we said before we started, tell you something you already know. If you open Wittgenstein's Tractus, the first line of the introduction is something like, I don't think this book will be useful except to anybody who's already like in agreement with the things that it says. It's just supposed to be sort of elucidating an idea. And so, yeah, a lot of the time it is just sort of feeling out a vibe, finding someone who puts it into good words and saying, oh, I think that person's very smart.

• 28:13Chris Williamson?

  That resonates with me. I feel less alone.

• 28:14Alex O'Connor?

  By the way, it's why when people ask me for like a recommendation of what philosophy to read or something, if, if someone says, you know, where should I start with philosophy? You might be tempted to say, okay, well, let's start with. With Plato, read about Socrates and Aristotle, then do a bit of existentialist philosophy. I just tell people, just, just literally read what you've heard of. And the reason for that is because these people will have come up in contexts that are relevant to you or of interest to you. Right. So if you've heard Nietzsche mentioned a bunch of times because you're a big Jordan Peterson fan. Like if you like Jordan Peterson and Jordan Peterson obviously likes Nietzsche quite a lot and finds a lot of use in him. You're probably going to find some use in him. Whereas if you just randomly pick one of the great philosophers, like if you just pick up Sartre, as I did the other day, I told you this. And read existentialism as a humanism and think this is complete nonsense.

• 28:58Alex O'Connor?

  That was a complete waste of time because you're not going to resonate with it. It's, it's not going to, strictly speaking, convince you unless I think you've already got sort of one, one foot in the boat. I did think on the pessimistic philosophers, or you said the darkest philosophers, which doesn't necessarily just mean pessimistic, right?

• 29:15Chris Williamson?

  Dark philosophy, pessimistic philosophy.

• 29:17Alex O'Connor?

  I think Schopenhauer comes to mind. He's writing his On the Sufferings of the World. That's, that's your sort of indulgent pessimist. I think he had trouble with women for some of his life and he's got this infamous essay on women, which would read like a comedy. In fact, one version of his essays I have in the introduction or the preface, the translator says, by the way, the essay on women isn't a joke. He's not being sarcastic. This is what he actually thought. He comes to mind.

• 29:43Chris Williamson?

  It's an irony disclaimer.

• 29:45Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. So in, but in order to sort of avoid that, I think that a good example of a potentially non self indulgent pessimistic philosophy that seems genuinely just philosophical might be something like anti-natalism. The view that it is immoral to have children. David Benatar is the sort of superstar of anti-natalism. He wrote a book called Better Never to Have Been, which sounds like one of these sort of, you know, I'm about to write about how terrible, how terrible life is, you know, I wish I was never born, but it's not. It's like philosophically speaking, he tries to make a case that it's just better for no one to be born. Even if their life is filled with more pleasure than suffering, he thinks that it's still immoral to bring them into existence. It's an interesting, it's an interesting take.

• 30:22Chris Williamson?

  A debate about this five years ago in the Barbican.

• 30:25Alex O'Connor?

  That sounds about right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When we first met.

• 30:29Chris Williamson?

  Like canteen.

• 30:30Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 30:31Chris Williamson?

  The Barbican and we were having the conversation and people came, tried to be social.

• 30:38Chris Williamson?

  Listen for five minutes and then left. And it was just this sort of steady cycle of people coming and going. This doesn't sound very nice at all. So yeah, Benatar actually probably does fit.

• 30:48Alex O'Connor?

  A good example of why you might find it dark. I mean, I, I, I call it dark if you like. I mean, for an anti-natalist, they'll say, no, the, the, I mean, the darkness is that you're, you know, unconsentiently bringing people into suffering. You know, that's the, that's the dark thing. But in terms of how it's perceived, I think that as far as pessimism goes, the idea that it's immoral to have children. I mean, you've heard of like the pro-life and the, the pro-choice crowd. Benatar and his crew are like anti-life, you know? Like, it's like this sort of third option that everybody forgets about. He, um, he's got some wonderful sort of little tidbits in there. He, he takes a divergence into the, into the philosophy of disability for a time. Sort of making a case that in principle, we are all disabled in some philosophical sense.

• 31:30Chris Williamson?

  Are we all disabled?

• 31:30Alex O'Connor?

  It's been a while since I've read it, but I think he's sort of imagined. So, so one way of thinking about this would be like, imagine if everybody whose legs worked suddenly just died and the only people left on planet earth like don't have functioning legs. Maybe not instantly because people would have memory, but after not very long, it just wouldn't be considered a disability to not have legs because that's just how everybody is. And Benatar sort of imagines in principle, the things that we could have that we don't, which means that in principle, we are disabled in the same way.

• 31:59Chris Williamson?

  We just can't fly.

• 32:00Alex O'Connor?

  So there are, exactly. So there are all kinds of sufferings that come about in our life, like having to climb the stairs, which we don't even notice as sufferings. And if you add all of these up, they become pretty significant. It's a, it's a bit of a trip, but really interesting. And, and I think probably, probably dark for that reason.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  The other thing that's quite nice about Benatar, I said it was sort of dry earlier and I did mean that as a compliment, sorry.

• 32:22Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to like frilly.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, yeah. Is that Benatar is, is very, he gives a very logical argument as in, you know, there, there, I would say there are problems with the argument, but you know, as in like, it's very clearly laid out in a way that quite a lot of pessimistic philosophers write in sort of semi-poetry. Benatar, if you, if you're a hardcore analytic fan, he's probably, he's probably the pessimist you're gonna enjoy.

• 32:42Alex O'Connor?

  It seems that way, I, I suppose.

• 32:43Chris Williamson?

  You spoke to him, right?

• 32:44Alex O'Connor?

  I did, I had him on my show. He doesn't show his face.

• 32:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Alex O'Connor?

  He doesn't, I actually don't know if he uses his real name, but he doesn't show his face. So there is also that added element that you, he doesn't want to be seen.

• 32:56Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so he's the sleep token of the philosophy world.

• 32:59Alex O'Connor?

  Oh, are they the mask wearing Slipknot?

• 33:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Joe, don't make that face.

• 33:03Alex O'Connor?

  No, no, no, sorry. No, it's an I don't.

• 33:06Chris Williamson?

  It's very, very cool, very popular, but this, you know, like, you know, when you guys start telling me about, you know, anesthetist of ancient city. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I need to nod along like this. This is your turn.

• 33:17Alex O'Connor?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay, there we are. Thank you. Very good.

• 33:19Alex O'Connor?

  What's the philosophy of sleep token?

• 33:22Chris Williamson?

  If you go on the Reddit, really deep, really, really, really deep. The law goes hard.

• 33:28Alex O'Connor?

  The law goes hard on many subreddits. I have a subreddit to which, which has some interesting laws of its own.

• 33:34Chris Williamson?

  I've seen them.

• 33:35Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 33:35Chris Williamson?

  I've seen them. Yeah, you've got Canon.

• 33:37Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, apparently, apparently, apparently so.

• 33:41Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so Benatar's got this. I remember you.

• 33:46Chris Williamson?

  His whole thing is this balance between suffering and pleasure.

• 33:49Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  Is that even a tiny microcosm of suffering is so great that it doesn't, it outweighs any amount of pleasure.

• 33:57Alex O'Connor?

  He calls it like an asymmetry argument between pleasure and pain. So a lot of.

• 34:01Chris Williamson?

  I just pulled that out of a five year, five and a half year old canteen.

• 34:05Alex O'Connor?

  I've got a memory on you.

• 34:06Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. I mean, if that's not a great advert for a tasty drink.

• 34:09Alex O'Connor?

  Yes.

• 34:10Chris Williamson?

  Zero calorie.

• 34:10Alex O'Connor?

  Some three million subscribers later.

• 34:12Chris Williamson?

  Slash modern wisdom. I don't know what it is.

• 34:14Alex O'Connor?

  And he remembers. It's, I think when a lot of people would consider, is life worth living? One crude way of working it out is adding up the pleasure, minusing the pain and sort of seeing what you're left over with. You know, is it, is it worth living overall? Benatar thinks that, crucially, before you exist, the potential pleasure that you might experience if you come into existence doesn't matter one, like one jot. It's literally irrelevant, but the potential pain that you would avoid does matter. And he tries to prove this through some sort of intuitive thought experiments. For example, there are no conscious beings on Mars, right? We don't really think that it's a bad thing.

• 34:57Alex O'Connor?

  That all this pleasure that could be on Mars is being missed out on. We don't think what a tragedy that all of the potential pleasure that could exist on Mars isn't actually happening. But we might think that it is a good thing that there's no suffering up there. And some people hear that kind of example and go, yeah, that makes sense. Some people go, well, no, I am, I am sad that there's no pleasure. It's sort of an intuitive thing. He also, one other way of thinking about this, at least for the imbalance, might be a question, which is, would you take five minutes of the worst imaginable conceivable suffering that you could experience if afterwards you got to have five minutes of the best possible bliss? I mean, I don't know what you guys would do. You wouldn't take it?

• 35:39Chris Williamson?

  No, thank you.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  I think that's, I don't think I'd take five minutes of the best possible bliss anyway. The rest of your life, it was the rest of your life.

• 35:45Chris Williamson?

  Expectation.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just, you just be completely, you just feel empty.

• 35:48Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, that's another asymmetry.

• 35:51Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 35:51Chris Williamson?

  That's an additional asymmetry.

• 35:52Alex O'Connor?

  And that, that actually might be just a sort of good response to this kind of thought he's throwing. Cause what Bennett was trying to say is that most people would say no. And so crudely, it seems like the suffering kind of counts for more. But as so much philosophy does, it kind of relies on intuitive, that your sort of feeling of thought.

• 36:11Chris Williamson?

  Have a sense of negativity bias and loss aversion.

• 36:13Alex O'Connor?

  Another way he talks about, and crucially, this is only before you exist, right? Once you exist, your, your pleasure is good for you and your suffering is bad for you. But before you exist, the fact-

• 36:22Chris Williamson?

  Other people have a choice about whether you do or don't.

• 36:25Alex O'Connor?

  Before you exist, for someone who doesn't exist, then not experiencing pleasure is not bad, but then not experiencing suffering is good. And so before you're born, the only moral calculus is the goodness that you're not suffering. And so that's all that should be taken into account. It's good that you're not suffering. Let's not bring that into existence. Another sort of line of reasoning he goes down is a kind of like a rights based approach, where he says, suppose, for example, that if I were to like break your arm, you would get an encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy or something. You might, if I gave you that option, you might think to yourself like, you know what? I think that's, that's worth it. Probably definitely be worth it for me. I'd take that. However, even if I would actually prefer that, if you didn't ask me first, if you just did it.

• 37:10Alex O'Connor?

  Like you don't have the right to do that to me, right? If if I found you in need of an ambulance and the only way to save your life somehow was to break your arm, then I think most people say you should do it. But if by causing you suffering, I can not save you from worse suffering, but bring you something good. Most people think that I don't have the right to inflict that suffering on you, even if it would be ultimately worth it. So for Benatar, same thing before you're born, right? You're allowed to inflict suffering to prevent worse suffering, but you're not allowed to inflict suffering on the promise that there'll be some good that comes out of it, unconsentually. Because what you're essentially doing is is causing a bunch of people to unconsentually experience masses of suffering that they had no say in. Some people have actually tried to sue their parents for wrongful birth because they

• 37:55Alex O'Connor?

  that has actually happened. If you're Benatar-pilled. Yeah, exactly. So the asymmetry thing is is quite important to Benatar's flavour of antinatalism. You can have antinatalism without it. You can just say that life consists in more suffering. And if you think it's it's consistent more pleasure, you've fallen for the the Pollyanna principle, as I think they call it, which is the idea that we tend to remember the good stuff more than the bad stuff, the sort of rose-tinted view of of the past. Most people, says Benatar, like vastly underestimate the extent to which their lives are going terribly. They they like sort of in retrospect think, oh, you know, it's all good. But if you actually were to live through it again, you'd realise that at every moment it was going very badly. He then, after convincing you that you're

• 38:36Alex O'Connor?

  he sort of he sort of says like, you know, it doesn't matter how much you suffer or experience pleasure in life. It's immoral to bring people into existence. And then after convincing you of that, he then says, but just so you know, life is actually does actually contain a lot more suffering. And this detour into disability ethics or metaphysics, I suppose, is sort of part of this case. You know, these these menial sufferings that that you don't even notice.

• 39:02Chris Williamson?

  It's not, you shouldn't have been here. You should be upset that you are here. And by the way, the fact that you are here also is a reason for regret.

• 39:09Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, it gets a little bit tricky because like, once you're here, I mean, the inevitable question for David Benatar is then why don't you just think we should kill ourselves? And David Benatar, in a footnote, compares this to going to a movie. And when you're about halfway through, thinking like, this is kind of a crap film. It's not bad enough that I'm gonna leave now that I'm here, but I kind of wish I'd never come in the first place. That's sort of his position on life. He's

• 39:36Chris Williamson?

  How robust do you think that is as an answer to why shouldn't I just kill myself?

• 39:39Alex O'Connor?

  I think it doesn't really work very well because I'm quite suspicious of the asymmetry argument like anyway. So I think that a case that that sort of makes life not worth living and therefore not worth beginning will inevitably create a powerful argument for not continuing life. Ben is like, as far as I can remember, quite, quite sort of staunchly not that. But I'm not so sure that they can be so definitively separated.

• 40:08Chris Williamson?

  Has someone taken that? Is there a suicide cult philosophy?

• 40:13Alex O'Connor?

  There have been examples, I think, Camus talks about a few examples of the beginning of the myth of Sisyphus, doesn't he? He sort of, he sort of mentions, I think, like one or two examples of some philosophers who like rode a tract. He mentioned, I can't remember who it was, he mentions who rode a tract and then killed himself in order to like bring attention to his work. But it didn't work because no one liked the work anyway.

• 40:31Chris Williamson?

  Philip Mainlander killed himself, but I don't know if that, I can't remember if that's what he's talking about.

• 40:35Alex O'Connor?

  I can't remember who Camus is talking about. But no, you tend to find that people who are genuinely committed. I mean, Camus says in the myth of Sisyphus, for the man who does not cheat, what he determines to be true must determine his action. So if you become convinced that life is not worth living and you're like certain enough of that in order to kill yourself, then you're probably not going to sit around writing a book first. So it's, it's sort of like self-selecting. There's an interesting sort of evolutionary de-selection for views like this and for views like antinatalism. And again, Benatar addresses this, doesn't affect the truth of the claim, but it means it will never take off because

• 41:08Chris Williamson?

  Manatically, it's cancerous.

• 41:09Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly, yeah. Which in reverse is the explanation, I think, for the general optimism that sort of, sort of, just, just, just.

• 41:19Chris Williamson?

  Only the optimistic people left.

• 41:21Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly, to some degree. I mean, there are people who are not optimists, but they're not quite pessimistic enough to fully commit to the bit, as it were. And if they are, then they select themselves out of the mean pool.

• 41:30Chris Williamson?

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• 42:14Chris Williamson?

  So just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. I had a conversation with a gentleman who, his entire theory of human evolution, or human cultural evolution, is that human culture is almost expressly built around helping people to not take their own lives and that our system is too. And we got halfway through the episode and he, it's the only time this has ever happened. He bailed out of the episode partway through, was, had had a bad night's sleep and wasn't, he felt like he wasn't making a, and I thought, well, that's kind of on brand for somebody who had this sort of a worldview that everything is about avoiding things going badly, that partway through an episode about it,

• 42:58Chris Williamson?

  he decided that it was going so badly that he didn't want to continue.

• 43:01Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, yeah. Another thing Camus says is that the meaning of life is literally whatever is keeping you from killing yourself.

• 43:08Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 43:08Alex O'Connor?

  You know, and I think that's, that's more or less true.

• 43:13Chris Williamson?

  Why don't you kill yourself?

• 43:14Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, and I think that there are, most people. Who engage with that topic, do so on an emotional level, and that's the motivation for these kinds of thoughts. There are people who are just intellectually interested in the worthiness of life, like whether it's worth living. But that very rarely is actually what's going on, I think, when people are seriously struggling with this. And so, I don't know, it makes it a difficult philosophical terrain. But I think that people who are just interested in it intellectually often will appreciate someone who can just forthrightly discuss it. Because a lot of the time, it's like, you know, you open a YouTube video that's going to discuss abstractly the philosophy of suicide, and it opens with a help line.

• 43:57Alex O'Connor?

  It's like, way to give away your position, you know, like, I think people will like

• 44:01Chris Williamson?

  Loads of ideological bias in the suicide discussion.

• 44:04Alex O'Connor?

  But people, I think people want to feel like they're being taken seriously, right? And if you come with a philosophical or emotional conviction to the table, and someone before you even get started says, hey, just so you know, like, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna move towards this direction. I think a lot of people would appreciate like a forthright, direct approach, which is why so many people are attracted to the myth of Sisyphus by Camus, because it sort of starkly opens with that, you know, there is but one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. And it captures a lot of people's attention, because even people who aren't feeling suicidal are like, whoa, yeah, that's interesting. And they just want to read about it in a relatively straightforward way. I unfortunately think it's pretty overhyped, the myth of Sisyphus.

• 44:47Chris Williamson?

  Why? Why do you not like the myth of Sisyphus?

• 44:49Alex O'Connor?

  I, I sort of, I don't have an aversion to existentialist philosophy, sort of generally, but it sort of doesn't really capture me. Like, I think that, I don't know, I mean, I don't know if Camus sufficiently answers the question. His famous conclusion is imagining Sisyphus happy, right? And I just, I don't know if that's like a satisfying thought to me. For some, it might be, but for me, it's not. It's just as meaningless as the situation that we began with, you know, this sort of happy pushing of the boulder. I don't know. Joe, you can probably make a case.

• 45:25Chris Williamson?

  Is there a bull case for, well, just imagine this thing to be different? Just play pretend until you believe that theory?

• 45:35Alex O'Connor?

  It's like an act of rebellion for Camus. It's like, it's almost like an existential irony, right? Like, he's sort of, you're just going to...

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Like, enjoy the thing. It's interesting, because I find the development of Camus' thought over time very interesting for this. Because The Myth of Sisyphus is often, you know, the thing that people take away is, of course, you know, imagining Sisyphus happy. It's such a famous image. But a lot of The Myth of Sisyphus is significantly more, I don't know what the right word is, like, more intuitively abhorrent than that, if that makes sense, and even to Camus. So Camus writes The Myth of Sisyphus. He paints a bunch of characters who are meant to be like absurd men. And some of them are like really awful people, you know, like kind of philanderers. Or, you know, one of them is kind of, you know, the actor who never becomes themselves and is just playing characters all the time.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  And there, and he has this idea of like, okay, well, if you're an absurdist and you are, you think there's no objective or, you know, no way to say that that one aspect of life is better than any other. You're kind of trying to live out valuelessness. Well, then, in that case, Camus thinks, well, if you decided not to kill yourself, the only value that you're at least enacting is that life is better than no life. And so you should value the quantity of life over the quality of life. Now, of course, although that's not existential nihilism, that's pretty close to moral nihilism. And Camus clearly is troubled by this, because one of the next things he writes is a play called Caligula, which is all about the Roman emperor, a kind of fictionalized version of the Roman emperor Caligula, going absolutely batshit and killing lots of people.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  And, you know, there are various analyses you can make of this. When I read that, I think, yeah, this is Camus wrestling with his own philosophy. And he's got, he's painted himself into a corner whereby you can only value the quantity of life and not the quality of life. And then he's teasing out some of the, the consequence of that. He's clearly not happy, because he then writes books that are ostensibly attempting to go, no, hang on a sec. We can't, there are, there are further things that we can do with absurdism that isn't- That wasn't definitive. Yes, yeah, yeah. And we just, you know, The Myth of Sisyphus is, is one of the first things that Camus writes, along with The Strange. Oh, it's the difficult first album, or second EP. It's like an explanation of, of the outsider. And it's, it's, and it is, you know, I, I've, I like The Myth of Sisyphus partly because it's so counterintuitive.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  But some of his later works, things like The Plague, The Plague is an amazing novel. It's, it became like a bestseller during Covid for obvious reasons. And it's about a kind of- A plague hitting the town of Oran, I think it's in French Algeria, what was M. French Algeria? And how people cope with that? And it, you know, people are given various different analogical readings for this. So one is to read it as an analogy for the Nazi occupation of France. Another is to, but part of the kind of tying this back to the developments Camus thought from the Mythos Sisyphus, one way of looking at it is to say, well, these are lots of things that Camus thinks when the chips are down, people turn to. One of them is friendship. I'm very bullish on friendship generally.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  But, you know, another one is kind of this kind of shared struggle. There are bits in the, in the plague where they sort of say, okay, yeah, we're fighting a kind of nigh omnipotent disease, but we're going to fight it because that's the way that we're coping almost, you know, in a, in a, in a time of kind of abhorrent struggle and people are dying around them all.

• 48:59Alex O'Connor?

  Feels like the human centipede of philosophical arguments.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  A little bit, yeah. As in, like, as in, it's, and so, you know, and then Camus writes The Rebel, which is one of his, one of his later works, which is again discussing, you know, what can an absurdist coherently value without simply falling back onto a kind of leap of faith or something? And I, I really like those later works. I'm not convinced that they actually are consistent with this earlier position he has of like kind of hardcore absurdism, but I do think they're still, they're still worth reading.

• 49:25Alex O'Connor?

  Something that's actually like understated in a great deal of like philosophers who are now dead is like what they thought, as if they just like, like lived for one year, wrote everything down and stayed the same, you know? Like, we sort of, we forget that people, like, you know, if you've ever thought about writing a book, and I'm sure we all at this table probably have at some point, one of the thoughts you have is like, you know, am I, am I ready? You know, is this the right time? Because you recognize that whatever you write now in 20 years, at least some of it. You're going to want to revise or you're going to change your mind about. And you're also going to have to answer to. Exactly. And it's, you know, you're going to have your, your name in a bookstore and you have to grimace every time you walk past it. I would probably be driven mad. I'd like pull it off the shelf and scribble out the, the paragraphs by. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:11Alex O'Connor?

  And this is, is what humans do, right? And so when we talk about what Camus thought, as if his life consisted of.

• 50:18Alex O'Connor?

  It was actually just that day when he finally said, and done. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like he's just had a, he's just had a fantastically bad day and the car is just, and he thought, you know what? Fuck it. Yeah, like David Hume writes the, the, what's the first one? The Treaties Concerning Human Nature. And it's like this. Did he spell human with, with an E? Unfortunately not. Fucking brilliant. Would have been, would have been properly bad. Well, he didn't know much about PR because the book didn't sell. And he later sort of revises his thoughts into the much shorter inquiry concerning human understanding, the same kind of thoughts revisited. And it's posited as like a sort of like an update and he tells people not to read the other one. But some people think it's just because the first one kind of wasn't selling.

• 51:03Alex O'Connor?

  And in fact, when I went to university, they made a study of the treaties because it's more like fleshed out. But he literally like writes the kind of same thing again in different form later in his life. And so there is always sort of development of thought with philosophers. And we only tend to be aware of it when it's grand and dramatic, when someone converts from one side to another. When Anthony Flew becomes a theist or something, but it, it happens throughout the history of thought too. So like when, when you're reading a text by somebody, like if you're interested in their thought, like try to keep in mind some chronology of like when it was, when it was written, because otherwise you might be reading, you know, the goblet of fire before you read the chamber of secrets. And you, you're probably going to get the wrong kind of idea.

• 51:44Alex O'Connor?

  I'm sorry. No, no, I was good. Even, even someone like Plato, who we quite often think of as having a, a very strong, stable, consistent set of. Literally made out of marble. Well, as, as in he, if you, if you, you know.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Is one of his earlier works, which is both a kind of political treatise, but also a theory of the human mind, is called The Republic. And then later, he writes a book that's also a political work called The Laws. And you can see the development of his thoughts. In The Republic, he's very focused on what makes a good ruler. And in The Laws, he's very focused on, okay, he'd had a quite disillusioning experience with a tyrant called Dionysus, I think.

• 52:20Alex O'Connor?

  Cool, yeah.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  In Syracuse, where he tried to, Dionysus invited him over twice, actually. And both times, it went terribly. And said, yeah, yeah, like, I'm really interested in being, in being like a, one of your like philosopher kings. Yeah, like, this sounds really cool. You can help me rule better. And then he shows up and Dionysus is just like drinking himself silly. And Plato was like, look, like, one of the really big things about being a kind of philosopher king is like temperance and, and, you know, not gorging yourself and kind of staying. Because how are you going to make like really good decisions if you're drunk all the time? And Dionysus kind of goes, look, I'm going to stop you right there. Like, you don't understand, I'm, I'm in charge and like you do what I say.

• 53:01Alex O'Connor?

  It's very on brand.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  And he basically kind of imprisons Plato for a bit. And he eventually gets free and then he goes back and same thing happens. And he flees and disillusioned by this, Plato writes The Laws, which are much less concerned with what makes a good ruler and are much more concerned with if, you know, rulers come and go, how are you going to keep everyone in check?

• 53:18Alex O'Connor?

  These philosophers often have like extraordinary lives. Why does Thomas Hobbes write The Leviathan? Because he had to flee, him being a royalist during the English Civil War. He has to flee to, to France because of the English Civil War. And he writes this tract about how we should all submit to a, to a authoritarian dictator, essentially, and there should be, who should be able to dictate everything with full submission, including religious affairs. You've got to be aware, not only of the chronology, but also the, the context.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Some personal motivation.

• 53:46Alex O'Connor?

  And also, one other thing on this thread is beware that sometimes when you're reading people, they're kind of, they're writing under the laws of a country. Dostoevsky, his Notes from the Underground, one of the most famous of his books because it's so short and easy to read, originally contained a chapter which essentially argued for the necessity of Christianity, as Dostoevsky saw it, but it was censored and taken out. And so you end up with this sort of quite fully nihilistic tract. But I think a lot of that is also going on historically, too. So beware that, you know, these are human beings with developing thoughts and political considerations inspiring their writing.

• 54:23Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to history of thought, is there someone that you think changed thinking forever but was sort of useless in practice? Like someone who contributed to moving thought forward most without having any real life applicability?

• 54:37Alex O'Connor?

  That's a tricky question. I'm tempted to say in a non insulting way theologians, only because, only because, like, obviously, if you're a believer in God, the nature of God will greatly affect some practical things in your life, the way that you worship, you know, should you worship the saints or not? Are you worshiping a tripartite, you know, God or a singular unity, you know, that kind of stuff will be important to your daily practice. But if you're talking about in practice, like for society, as it were, then it's probably not particularly relevant to anyone who doesn't care about that kind of stuff. So that that sort of springs to mind. But outside of that, I don't know, maybe

• 55:19Alex O'Connor?

  some of the more abstracts. The name that actually sprung to mind was Bertrand Russell, which you might jump down my throat for, but was he actually a practical philosopher? Everything he tried to write in practice was awful.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Well, it's a, Bertrand Russell's very, it supposedly depends on what you mean by practical. Bertrand Russell's very important in the kind of history of studies of the foundations of mathematics and stuff like that. And although he's, he wrote a three volume insane project.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  I said two or three volumes. I always get confused. No, nobody's read the whole thing. This is like, because it's deeply impenetrable.

• 55:50Alex O'Connor?

  It takes him like, what, 300 pages to prove that one add one is two?

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Yes, it might. Yeah, it's some, it's between, it's like, I think around the 200 page mark.

• 55:58Alex O'Connor?

  Which is quite a thing to do from First Principles.

• 55:59Chris Williamson?

  It's a real battle of attrition.

• 56:00Alex O'Connor?

  It's difficult. Yeah, yeah.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  But you know, but um, so and that ends up.

• 56:03Alex O'Connor?

  It's like the terms and conditions of philosophy. It's like, no one actually reads it, but you kind of, you kind of need it to be there. It's, it's important.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  And he writes that with Alfred North Whitehead and uh, but that, and that's, that's very influential, you know, that it's in, even though the grand project failed, there were some operators they coined that are very important. Um, things like, uh, there exists a unique object such that, which is, is now very helpful in areas of maths. So, you know, not, not, not kind of helpful on an everyday level, but a lot, a lot of Russell's academic writing is, is very much um, in philosophy of language, philosophy of maths, foundations of, foundations of mathematics, logic, you know, these, which I think are very handy. But um, you know, it's not necessarily like you're gonna read his theory of descriptions and then just be out and about being like, oh yeah, like.

• 56:47Alex O'Connor?

  My life is so much better. Okay, so I guess even broader than that, are there some branches of philosophy that should be just jettisoned entirely? Any bits that are just intellectual cosplay dead ends? No, because philosophy, if you find a philosophy useful, then it is useful. Um, like that's, that's kind of what it's, what it's there for. It's like, it's like asking the question of, of sort of, you know, are there any like music genres that you think should, should, should get in the bin? And the answer is like, no, because somebody's enjoying that, right? Like, I'm sure it's useful to somebody. Um, but you know, if we had to get rid of one of them, I don't know, um, maybe.

• 57:25Chris Williamson?

  Pure logic puzzles? Philosophy of mind?

• 57:28Alex O'Connor?

  Philosophy of mind is way too important. A philosophy of mind is the next big thing, you know, I, I like, it's excruciatingly boring for a lot of people. I mean, we've talked about how it's quite difficult to. To to talk about it in a concrete way.

• 57:38Chris Williamson?

  No one on YouTube likes it and I can't work out whether it's because it's hard or because it's pointless.

• 57:42Alex O'Connor?

  You know, my my audience have quite taken to the philosophy of mind, I think, because I have too. And so I've got this like enthusiasm for it. I think it's really important. And I think like, watch.

• 57:51Chris Williamson?

  Sell me, sell me on philosophy of mind.

• 57:52Alex O'Connor?

  Watch this space, as it were. I think.

• 57:53Chris Williamson?

  Sell me on it.

• 57:54Alex O'Connor?

  People are beginning to realize that consciousness, it's always been like, you know, you'll have someone and they'll say like, consciousness, it's just such a mystery. And like, you know, it's like trying to view the window pane through the window pane because we experience the whole world through consciousness. That's that's interesting, but everybody kind of already knows that. That's why we're at the table having the conversation.

• 58:12Alex O'Connor?

  There is a, there is a stark increase happening in the view that consciousness is, so to speak, fundamental. Here's the interesting thing. Yeah, so panpsychism, right? And here's one interesting observation, which is that there are these cliches that crop up basically everywhere you look, right? If you look at ancient Vedic literature, if you look at a meditative monk who achieves enlightenment in the forest somewhere, if you look at Joe Blogs, who took LSD last week and had like this insane experience at the peak of his hero dose, they will say similar things, which is this sort of cliche of everything is one, I am one with the universe, the ego death, the disillusion of the self.

• 58:57Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly. And this kind of stuff has been, has been present in, in, in these philosophical traditions. Like from, from the beginning of history, the pre Socratic talk about it a little bit too. And I think that we're beginning, like, people are beginning to become much more open to the idea that there is something true about that. And there's a reason why that keeps coming about.

• 59:21Alex O'Connor?

  Panpsychism is is growing in popularity because the problem is, like, we believe that there is a world of matter. And we know that we are conscious. And you've got a few options available to you. Either the consciousness is like a totally separate thing from the material, which makes it seem really weird. And why does it interact with me? If consciousness is literally immaterial, if it's not made of of matter that like my brain and my body is, then it is a complete mystery how it would interact with my physical body. Like, it's not like it's floating around out there. It has no spatial dimension. It's not, it's not material.

• 59:50Chris Williamson?

  It's another piece of matter that is not matter.

• 59:52Alex O'Connor?

  So the idea.

• 59:53Chris Williamson?

  Some other kind of matter.

• 59:54Alex O'Connor?

  The, the, the miss, like, it is as mysterious that that, that my mind would interact with my brain as it is, as it would be if my mind suddenly started interacting with your brain or with that can of tasty new tonic on the table. Like, it would just be like, what, what are you talking about? The, if these are two separate kinds of things, you're talking about like taking the number two, adding in a chair and like getting, you know, the color orange. It's just like, just categories of different things that seem like they shouldn't be able to interact. Okay, so then maybe the mind is just made out of material. But then you run into some intuitive problems about the, the nature of thoughts. You know, people keep coming at me because I like to sort of froth at the mouth over the thought of closing my eyes and imagining a triangle and asking where on earth that triangle is. There are true facts about that triangle.

• 1:00:39Alex O'Connor?

  It's got three sides, right? That's true. It's really like, I can see it in my head. It's true that it's got three sides. But where is that triangle? It's not just made up of the matter of my brain. If I cut open your brain, I'm not going to find a triangle in there. It, it's, you, you can sort of find the, the material activity that's correlated with the experience of the triangle. That's not the same thing as the triangle. So you've sort of got this, this sort of barrier problem of where you get from this material stuff to this non-material stuff. And the panpsychist says there is no barrier. But instead of saying everything's made out of material and so is consciousness, they just say that everything is consciousness from the get go. And therefore you get consciousness. The biggest myth for the panpsychist and other related schools in consciousness

• 1:01:24Alex O'Connor?

  is that complexity is required for consciousness. That might be the big myth that needs to dissipate.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  So is there argument that because the brain is the most complex thing, we know it's the one that's got the most consciousness?

• 1:01:37Alex O'Connor?

  It's got, it, the things that we think consciousness is.

• 1:01:42Alex O'Connor?

  Are actually sometimes just what consciousness does. Okay, let me, let me. What the fuck does that? I'll explain it this way, right? So, so if consciousness just means like some kind of experience, some kind of awareness, right? When we talk about what makes somebody conscious, we might talk about things like memory, first person conscious experience, awareness, these kinds of things. But like rudimentary consciousness on its own wouldn't necessarily require any of those things. Imagine for a moment that you had no memory. I don't mean like you forget what happened yesterday, like you've got dementia. I mean, literally no memory laid down in any instant. What would that be like? It's kind of impossible to imagine.

• 1:02:26Alex O'Connor?

  Imagine you were falling through the air and no memory was being laid down at any instant. Would you even know that you were falling? You'd have no sort of instant before to compare yourself with. You wouldn't even know that you were a being. You wouldn't know that your feet are part of you. You wouldn't have, there's no time for that to happen. You would literally like, it's impossible to even conceive of what the content of your thoughts would be. They'd be the simplest possible thing that consciousness could experience. And yet it would still be conscious and aware. And so this, this, like the laying down of memory is something that consciousness can do, which gives rise to more complex conscious behaviours, like our conversations and, and me knowing that, you know, we're in a building and that this is a microphone and that kind of stuff. But that is not consciousness. That's just one thing that consciousness does

• 1:03:11Alex O'Connor?

  when it's complexly arranged in the same. So when we look at like a, a rock and say there's no consciousness and look at a brain and say there is, and it's because, oh, the brain is complicated. The panpsychist says, no, consciousness is at the foundation of all of it. You've just got more complicated consciousness, which does things like memory and self-awareness and communication. And you've got less complex consciousness, which just sort of at the atomic level just sits there and sort of fizzes around, right? The analogy I sometimes give to explain this is imagine comparing the rock to the Empire State Building. And we said, look at the Empire State Building with its complexity, with its elevators and cash machines and it's got like light switches and electricity and you kind of think it's this, it can't be made of matter, you know, because like a rock is made of

• 1:03:55Alex O'Connor?

  matter. No, it is still made of matter. It's just arranged in a more complex way and so doing much more interesting things. And our brains are like the Empire State Building of, you know, fundamental consciousness, which is you arrange it in a particular way. And suddenly it can do all these magical things like have conversations and talk to each other. But the Pansycus thinks that at root, it's consciousness.

• 1:04:14Chris Williamson?

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• 1:05:39Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of panpsychism, Joe?

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  I like it in the sense that I think that it's kind of satisfyingly empirical, which sounds a very strange thing to say. But, you know, ultimately, it's somebody saying, okay, we've got matter and mind. It's very difficult to reduce mind to matter. We can't deny that mind exists because it is, in some sense, the precondition for thinking that everything else exists. And so, right, if we can't reduce the two, we'll just have to make mind, you know, and matter play together. So I'm sympathetic in that sense. I think that, I think that, for me, the aspect of the panpsychist approach that will probably need to be worked out in more detail. Somebody probably has, because I've not that well read regarding panpsychism, is a kind of detailed account of what complexity amounts to.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  So like, you know, for example, you know, we can arrange the brain and, you know, we have brains, they're arranged in a certain way. You can arrange, you know, a series of rocks in that way. You could try and simulate it with a kind of, simulate aspects of the mind with a binary gate system, stuff like that. Like, in what, I think that that kind of, I worry that sometimes

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  a lot of the work is then being thrown at this notion of complexity. And that I sometimes think that the plausibility of the panpsychist program is going to rest on how that idea of complexity is cashed out. This may just be, however, a neurological or a neuroscientific problem. There's a guy called, a neuroscientist called Franci, Franci, either Francesco or Francisco, I don't know, Francisco Varela, who, his whole project is, okay, I want to try and contribute to the hard, to solving the hard problem of consciousness, which is the idea of, you know, bridging the gap between the material world and felt experience. And so he's going to try and do that by, and has been trying to do that, by charting as many possible neurological correlates

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  as you can between phenomenologically reported experience and stuff going on in the brain. And that's his whole, and he just kind of, and I have a lot of, I have a lot of sympathy for that. Partly because I think that, you know, no matter what your philosophical stance is, you're clearly going to have to deal with these findings. You know, this, whether you think, as Varela does, that this will actually allow you to bridge the hard problem of consciousness eventually, and that you'll be able to reduce mind to matter, or whether you're a panpsychist and this will help you with your, fleshing out your account of complexity. I think that, you know, this is, one of the reasons why the philosophy of mind, I think, is in such a boom period, academic wise, is because it's, I often think that philosophy is most helpful when it's interdisciplinary.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  I really like, for example, the intersection between philosophy and linguistics, because I think that there's a real strength in taking empirical results from linguistics and empirical results from neuroscience and from psychology, and looking at it through a philosophical lens, you know, trying to, you know, in very broad terms, I suppose, trying to see what it means and then applying it to different things. You know, this is, I think that a lot of the best philosophy work occurs at the intersection of philosophy in different fields. And specifically, I think philosophy and neuroscience is a very promising one. I think, I think there's a lot of very good work being done there.

• 1:08:40Chris Williamson?

  What else is, like, it felt to me, uh, when I say I started learning about panpsychism, who's the dude from Durham University?

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Philip Goff.

• 1:08:49Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. So Philip is the first guy I had an entire conversation with about, and that was on his first book, 2019?

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, Galileo's era.

• 1:08:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes, and then he's done a new one.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Panpsychist.

• 1:08:59Chris Williamson?

  So that was it, but before then, I'd sort of seen it, had a bit of an understanding about what it was.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Chris Williamson?

  Anika has done two books on it now, I think, something like that.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  Well, was she, she, Anika, the way she conveyed it to me was like, the only conclusion I can draw from my interviews on consciousness is that I have to take seriously the idea that consciousness is fundamental. Not quite sure what that means, and it sounds like it's totally insane.

• 1:09:25Chris Williamson?

  Sort of the agnostic of the theory of mind world.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and she's, she's totally materialistic and, and she's like, look, it sounds totally insane, but, but bear with me, and she does this, like, you know, 12-part documentary, interviewing all these people and thinking, actually, there is something very, very strange going on.

• 1:09:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  The biggest problem for panpsychism is the so-called combination problem. That's like the actual biggest critique that a panpsychist would recognize, which is...

• 1:09:44Alex O'Connor?

  Crucially, panpsychists don't really think that like everything is conscious. They don't necessarily think this can is conscious as a unified entity. They think that it's made out of consciousness. The consciousness is the stuff of the universe out of which things are made. You know, like calling this a can, this is an artifact. We've put this together as human beings. We've taken materials and arranged them. So it's like, there's nothing to say that it would get this unified centre of consciousness. That would be kind of weird, right? If we took a bunch of consciousness and just put it together in this shape and suddenly it had a unified sense of consciousness. That would be strange, but that's what happens in the brain, according to the panpsychist.

• 1:10:19Chris Williamson?

  Right, so it's like if one person is in a field and a ton of other people are in different fields. And then you put them all together in the same field and it was somehow to combine.

• 1:10:27Alex O'Connor?

  One brain, exactly. Like, why does my, why does my consciousness, if my brain is made up of consciousness? Then why, when it's arranged in a particular way, do I get this singular unified sense of self? And why is it not that like all three of our brains have a singular sense of consciousness?

• 1:10:42Chris Williamson?

  And if we got close enough together, which we're not going to do, then it would happen.

• 1:10:47Alex O'Connor?

  They call it the combination problem because it's like, how do they combine? And interestingly, maybe, right? Like, I don't know if you've come across these split brain patients. I talk about these all the time. We've got some evidence to suggest that you kind of have two like consciousnesses that are battling out with each other inside your very own brain. So that's the interdisciplinary thing, like a lot of scientific research into the way that the brain works in weird cases like split brain patients. Look into it, ladies and gentlemen. It is freaky what your brain can do, like the two hemispheres.

• 1:11:16Chris Williamson?

  What's your, what's your favorite examples of?

• 1:11:18Alex O'Connor?

  My favorite example of this are, so your brain, your two hemispheres of your brain are connected by the

• 1:11:24Chris Williamson?

  Corpus callosum.

• 1:11:25Alex O'Connor?

  Corpus callosum, right? It's the connective tissue, which actually does more to inhibit communication than facilitate communication. There seems to be an evolutionary advantage to keeping them separate, right? Some people, as a severe treatment for epilepsy, would undergo a corpus callosumy, where you sever it, right? This is what a split brain patient is. It's someone who has the connective tissue severed. They can, they can still communicate through other means a little bit, but basically the communication is cut off.

• 1:11:49Chris Williamson?

  Vertical decapitation.

• 1:11:51Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly. Now, most people know that the left hemisphere governs broadly like the right visual field and the right hemisphere broadly the left visual field. Also, the right hemisphere is supposed to be the kind of like creative one. And the left one is the sort of rational mathsy one, bit of an oversimplification. But take a split brain patient. Whose hemispheres aren't communicating properly. You can show them something just in their right visual field. So you like block off the rest of their view and you just show them something to the left hemisphere and vice versa. So they've done some experiments on such people where they will, for example, show them a picture of an apple and they'll say, what can you see? And they'll say, I don't know. I don't know what you're talking about. And then you ask them to draw a picture of something and they'll draw an apple because

• 1:12:35Alex O'Connor?

  part of their brain has seen it, but part of it hasn't. You will, you will find those kinds of cases. But the most interesting to me, I needed to say that to set it up, is a study that was done, I can't remember what it was, Anika writes about this, where they took a split brain patient and they showed one hemisphere of the brain, an instruction. It's an experiment, so you're ready to do an instruction and the instruction just says something like, get up and walk over there. So the person reads it, they get up, they walk over to the wall. And then you ask them verbally, why did you just walk over to the other side of the room? And you know what they say? It would be weird if they said, I don't know, wouldn't it? But they don't.

• 1:13:20Alex O'Connor?

  They give a reason. They confabulate. But they're not making it up. They're not lying. They're not, they're not like, oh, they believe it. They're like, oh, I was, I was trying to get some air, it's kind of warm in here. And they believe it. So there's this idea that one hemisphere of your brain is the so-called interpreter and that you've essentially got your brain working on like, like, like doing particular things. Like you can imagine working on your like emotive impulses. You just do something because you just impulsively want to or like instinctively feel it's the right thing. And then your left brain comes in and retrospectively says, oh, no, no, no, this is the reason why I did that. That I've got good reason for that. And you've kind of got these two parts of your brain governing different parts of your activity. What's the implication of that philosophically?

• 1:14:04Alex O'Connor?

  The implication of that is that consciousness might not be so unified as our sort of present experience leads us to believe, you know, the sort of unity of self might not actually be sort of what's going on in reality. I have a pet theory that a lot of the reason why we feel like we're in our brains, it is the sort of center of our neural activity, of course, but I feel like the reason why we really experience ourselves as up here. Is because it's where our senses are, where our eyes are and our ears are. I kind of imagine that if our eyes were like on our hips, we might sort of, and our ears were down there too. We might sort of feel as though we were located.

• 1:14:42Chris Williamson?

  Because that is where everything is being fed through.

• 1:14:44Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly. It sort of feels like you're up here because that's where the, that's where the information is. Lot of, lot of weird, weird stuff to, to think about, this so-called combination problem. I mean, there's a lot of weird stuff in experience, like if I pinch myself in the hand, I feel it in my hand. I'm told that it's my brain that's doing the experiencing, but I really feel it in my hand. You know, it's, it's, it's very strange. I think that poses a good analogy for those people who think that like, there is one consciousness or one like, one self, like Atman, which we're all sort of avatars of. It's like, the left hand, if I pinch it, my right hand doesn't feel it, but it is all.

• 1:15:14Chris Williamson?

  And that's within something that is supposed to be discreetly kind of its own localized version.

• 1:15:18Alex O'Connor?

  We are, we are one thing, but I can get this localized pain in my left hand that my right hand doesn't feel.

• 1:15:23Chris Williamson?

  So let's just scale that across the one thing that is everything.

• 1:15:26Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. I mean, people, people say like, well, my, my consciousness can't be the same as yours because I don't have access to your thoughts. And you don't have access to mine. So they're, they're separate minds, right? But when you're asleep, you don't have access to your waking thoughts, but it's still the same mind. Right. There, there are a lot of like weird avenues to explore this, this unity of consciousness as this sort of fundamental, uh, the, um, principle of the universe.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  One of the interesting, uh, kind of corollaries, I mean, one thing that I, I find very interesting about, about that kind of, you know, one part of our, our, a lot of our conscious reporting is the kind of PR brain, so to speak, is that it reminds me a lot of, um, of, of Nietzsche's picture of the will and of the mind, which is broadly speaking, that we kind of have a parliament of different drives. And that, you know, those drives do, do what they will, so to speak. You know, there's, there's not one will, there are, there's all of these forces pulling in different directions. And then, once, once, once we've won out on a course of action, we then put a, we then justify that, you know? At least that's part of what, what Nietzsche thinks is going on. I, I'm always reminded of that kind of split brain going over to the other side of the room and saying, oh yeah, I went here because, you know, I want to look out the window or something. It's like, yeah.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  So that, that it's a, it's quite a, it's quite a surprisingly Nietzschean picture. The other, um, Part of having a picture of consciousness that is in some way combinatoric. So functionalism works like this, as does panpsychism, is that in theory you can start scaling things up quite extreme.

• 1:16:50Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  So there's the, it's known as the China brain experiment. You actually need far more people. It's just because China is the most populous country, but you need far more people than the amount of people in China to do this. And the thought experiment goes that, say you had billions and billions and billions of people, if you made them all behave like neurons, kind of, you know, they had walkie-talkies or phones or something and they were, you know, they'd say, you know, they'd give a code to someone else and they relay information that way, exactly like a brain would, would that give rise to a consciousness? And I know, I think that's a fascinating, partly because, you know, it sounds crazy.

• 1:17:23Alex O'Connor?

  Well, there's a lot of complexity. Yeah, I mean, it sounds absolutely insane, but why not? Isn't it just as insane that you can do it with atoms and get yourself a brain?

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  And also, you know, we talk about things like hive minds and insects and things like that. And we kind of, you know, it's, you know, you can say that's just a metaphor, but a lot of the time, you know, you describe it as if it's in some sense, you know, sharing a conscious, you had Peter Godfrey Smith recently.

• 1:17:43Alex O'Connor?

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  And something he says in his book is that in a, in an octopus, a huge amount of its neurons are in its arms. So I don't even mention this in the podcast, I'm so sorry, I haven't seen it yet, but, but one thing that he might, one thing he says is he ponders whether, when an octopus gives an instruction to its arm, it kind of gives it the general vibe and then the arm works out the details.

• 1:18:09Alex O'Connor?

  What if the, what if the arm does it itself? It seems like the arm sometimes is sort of feel it and then sort of like, oh, what's that like, then the brain, but interestingly, they sort of seem to be able to act independently in that way, but when they need to, they suddenly become unified. When there's a, when there's a predator, they can suddenly like all shoot together and swim off as fast as they can. So it's like, it's separable when it needs to be, but unified when it doesn't. And our brains probably do the same thing. Why do we have two hemispheres?

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  And also, you know, just.

• 1:18:31Alex O'Connor?

  Because there's some utility in it.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  And to build on that point, you know, the, if we're, you know, scaling up to the idea, we talk about, or at least we're used to it, this kind of fall out of fashion, but a lot of the, a lot of the, you know, 19th century writing, not necessarily philosophy, just writers, very keen on the idea of spirits of nations and things like that. You know, Stendhal, the French author, travels around Europe and in his little notes, he talks about like, oh yeah, the spirit of the German, you know, this bit of Germany and the spirit of Italy and, you know, that kind of, the spirits of the different regions, obviously not nations at that point, but, but the different regions that he's visiting. And, you know, we think that's kind of quaint now and a bit funny. You know, it feels like, you know, largely it's kind of a collection of stereotypes. So it's kind of amusing to read.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  But the idea of, you know, having groups of people having animating principles and treating them metaphorically as bits of mind is, you know, is a metaphor. The idea that groups of minds can coalesce to form something analogous to a mind. If you believe in that, that makes that metaphor a lot more substantial. I mean, you know, I was, but then, you know, the further you go down this rabbit hole, the more interesting the questions become, you know, could, could a bunch of people simulating a mind have a conscious experience? You know, we think about it, you know, we think about mind as having, it's much easier to think about, you know, a group of, you know, 10 billion people having a thought or an idea than it is the idea of 10 billion people in this neurologically.

• 1:19:57Chris Williamson?

  It's a unification area issue.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, yeah, but like, I know, I think, you know, it's the more emotion based you ask those questions, the less intuitive it becomes.

• 1:20:08Chris Williamson?

  What I like about this as an example is that you can bring this down to your own experience.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:14Chris Williamson?

  It scales in that way because is it, can you make one of your neurons have a thought?

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:20Chris Williamson?

  Like, can, can that localized part of this localized part feel anything? Because you can, kind of, there. Okay, but what about if you do individual nodes and then you think, well, if we scale it up, where is, and this makes sense with the combination problem.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  It's all a bit weird to think about, right? Interestingly, David Hume.

• 1:20:37Chris Williamson?

  Maybe this isn't as boring as you, as I accused it being.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  David Hume didn't think that you would know, like Hume, the famous empiricist. Like, yeah, there's a lot to say about Hume, but he thought, for example, if you had no experience of the world, if you just, you know, had a pain in your big toe or something and you'd had no experience before, you wouldn't know it was in your big toe.

• 1:20:57Alex O'Connor?

  It's like, it's this really weird sort of implication of Hume's view, which I think is ridiculous. It's one of the many things that Hume says, which is completely ridiculous. He thinks that you essentially need to have this experience, which you then know, you realise, has been due to something happening in my finger. And that allows you to draw that memory. I, I think memory is the key to a lot of this consciousness problem.

• 1:21:16Chris Williamson?

  Memory allows you to string this sequence.

• 1:21:18Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, and when we think about memory, again, we think about it in terms of like remembering what you did yesterday. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about remembering, like, remembering the instant before this instant. Which, which, when you start thinking about it in those terms, it becomes revolutionary. If you imagine yourself falling, as we were picturing earlier, with no memory, you'd probably act and, and according to the panpsychist, experience the world a lot like the can falling.

• 1:21:41Chris Williamson?

  Would that not? But. Would that not preclude a Boltzmann brain?

• 1:21:45Alex O'Connor?

  Would it preclude a Boltzmann brain?

• 1:21:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, just that if they coalesce into this single form for such a short space of time, how is it if it didn't exist prior to that? Oh, their argument would be the neurons are created in such a way that as if you had memories prior to that.

• 1:21:59Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:21:59Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay.

• 1:22:00Alex O'Connor?

  Um, so.

• 1:22:01Chris Williamson?

  You understand what I meant by that?

• 1:22:02Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:02Chris Williamson?

  If it's so transient, then but encoded in its transient is the.

• 1:22:06Alex O'Connor?

  The fake memory.

• 1:22:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:07Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly. I want to point out that we were talking about this in the context of, of like panpsychism. And with this all of it sort of woo woo and people are like, this is totally crazy. But the kind of like the example Joe just gave of the, the, what do you call it? The China problem.

• 1:22:19Chris Williamson?

  It's called the China brain experiment.

• 1:22:21Alex O'Connor?

  Like, we brought this up in the context of panpsychism, but most people listening to this are probably materialists to some degree about consciousness. They will probably think, you know, I think that consciousness is just emergent of material, a bit like how, you know, zeros and ones become a picture on a screen, something like that. This example kind of poses a challenge to that because it's like, if you believe that you can just take atoms, put them in a particular order and get a unified conscious experience of pain. Then why can't I do that with individual brains, put them together in a particular way and get a unified experience?

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  In the same way that you can make a triangle out of wood, or out of stone, or out of metal. You know, if you define something relationally, what you're making it out of ceases to be as important.

• 1:23:01Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly. If consciousness is just an arrangement of atoms, then you should be able to get consciousness out of an arrangement of atoms in other ways. And if you think that's not true, then you either have to explain why it's different, or I suppose abandon materialism, or abandon the view that consciousness is in fact emergent and is not somehow fundamental. It's wacky, right?

• 1:23:22Chris Williamson?

  Maybe this is, it might just be the messenger. It might have been the messenger so far. Sorry to everyone that's done theory of mine, has come on my podcast, because it's like five or 10 people.

• 1:23:31Alex O'Connor?

  I think it might actually be like the next sort of big thing. I'm excited about this idea, I think it's fun. I mean, I think there's a lot to dislike about it too, of course, but like, it's exciting and I think people are interested in it and.

• 1:23:42Chris Williamson?

  Well, the first thing that it gives everybody is, I have always had questions about my own experience. Everyone is always kind of narcissistic when it comes to that. And this is the most direct you're ever going, why am I a thing? Why do I feel anything at all?

• 1:23:57Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:58Chris Williamson?

  Why do I sort of exist in that way? The other thing that I'm very interested in, which is one of your pet theories is emotivism. Can you explain emotivism to me like I'm 12?

• 1:24:07Alex O'Connor?

  So emotivism is a kind of a theory about ethics and a theory about language. We've been talking so far about sort of what stuff is made out of. And there's lots more to be said about that, by the way, like why everything is made out of consciousness and how we even get there. That's like a kind of metaphysical question. In the realm of ethics, like what's good, what's bad, what should you do, what shouldn't you do? Everyone's familiar with that kind of language. If I say like, you know, it's bad for you to kick a homeless person on the street. You kind of understand what I'm saying, you get what I mean, but a philosopher will hear that statement and try to break it down. What literally do we mean? What does this word like bad mean?

• 1:24:48Alex O'Connor?

  The ethical emotivist is someone who thinks that ethical statements are just expressions of emotion. It means that when you say something is good or bad, or that you should or shouldn't do something, all of that moral language is a kind of emotional expression.

• 1:25:04Alex O'Connor?

  A big confusion about this is that suppose I think that suppose I just don't like murder. I just don't like it, right? Ethical subjectivism says that when I say murder is wrong, I mean to say something like, I don't like murder. That is a reporting of my mental state that I don't like it. Ethical emotivism is not a reporting of your emotional state. It is the expression of the emotion itself. So it's the difference between saying, I don't like murder and going like, ugh, murder. Like literally expressing it. Cause when I say, I don't like murder, that's a claim that you can investigate. Is that true? Is it true that I don't like murder? Maybe I'm lying to you. Maybe it's false, right? So it's sort of, it can be true, it can be false. It's a, it's a fact about my psychology.

• 1:25:49Alex O'Connor?

  Whereas the expression of distaste for murder, just going as it famously has been, boo murder, is not the kind of thing that can be true or false. You can't really like debate it exactly. It's just an expression. The emotivist thinks that that's what's going on with, with ethics. So A.J. Ayer is kind of the father of this emotivist theory in the 20th century. And it's only one part of his philosophy, but it's probably what he's most remembered for. And so he compares saying, like, the difference between saying murder and saying murder is wrong is a bit like the difference between saying murder and then saying murder with an angry emoji and three exclamation marks. It's just this like emphasis on something. So, okay, why think this, right?

• 1:26:34Alex O'Connor?

  Like, why, why would you, why would you believe this? Well, pay attention to what your brain is doing when it moralizes. If I walk down the street and I kick a homeless person, you will notice a fact about the world, which is that I have just kicked a homeless person. And you could be completely like morally, emotionally detached from that. You could just report as a fact, if you were like a robot, it's a true fact. Alex just kicked a homeless person, right? But if you think that it's wrong. There's something more going on. You think Alex just kicked a homeless person and? And what's the extra thing? What is that extra thing that makes you say that it's wrong? Well, I think that if you pay attention to what your brain is doing in those instances, it's something that belongs in the in the category of emotion, rather than that kind

• 1:27:16Alex O'Connor?

  of rational thought. Like, that that extra bit that's making you say it's wrong versus just reporting it, is that extra bit more like, you know, when you burn your hand and take it away, or when you get angry at someone for doing something? Or is it more like, two plus two is four, and the sky is blue? Like, which of those is it more like? I think it much more strongly belongs in the category of emotion. And so that, the actual isolated moral element of the statement, it's wrong to kick a homeless person, is an ethical expression.

• 1:27:46Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:27:46Alex O'Connor?

  An emotional expression.

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• 1:29:03Chris Williamson?

  If emotivism is true, does that mean that morality is just vibes?

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  More or less, yeah. Although, I think that the one thing worth noting is that even if you put forward this emotivist thesis, it doesn't necessarily mean that anything goes. So we're very, we're very quick to...

• 1:29:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because that's an obvious sort of follow-on.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Well, just because we're very quick to generally say, okay, something is, I'll say, subjective, in the sense that, you know, I say it's different from subjectivism, but, you know, there's, somebody can say boo and another person can say yay, at least in theory. But, of course, there are constraints on this. I think that sometimes we get very caught up in ideas about objectivity and subjectivity. And actually, sometimes, I think what we're actually often getting at is the difference between stability and instability. So, like, most people think that beauty is subjective in some way, right? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, faintly. And there are people that dispute that, but that's a pretty majority view. It doesn't follow from that that you can, in fact, find anything beautiful. You just try.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  Like, if you try and, you know, look at a dog turd on the street and just be like, there's so many of my analogies are dog turd-related. But, you know, a dog turd on the street and just try and find it beautiful, you'll find that you can't. And so plausibly, there are still restrictions on the kind of things that, that people can and in fact do find beautiful. And so you kind of, as I say, it doesn't follow just from, again, if you're an emotivist, it doesn't follow just from the fact that, or the idea putting forward that all ethical statements are emotional expressions, that this means that we're going to have total chaos and that everyone's going to value different things. There are plausibly just pragmatic constraints on the kind of things that people feel moral disgust about.

• 1:30:46Chris Williamson?

  Which is going to cause some kind of consensus.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, I mean, you know, the classic, I mean, one, I mean, one way of looking at it is, is the, the, the tribe of 150 people that say yay murder aren't going to be, they're not going to last very long. They're going to be outcompeted by people who are very boo murder.

• 1:31:01Chris Williamson?

  Cancerous memes here.

• 1:31:02Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, these, these kinds of responses function in a similar way to ethical subjectivism, which, like, most people are familiar with this idea, that some people think that ethics is real, maybe it's given by God, maybe it's inscribed into the foundation of the universe. And some people think, no, we essentially kind of make it up. And the debate is, is always this practical one of like, well, then, you know, how can you say that this was wrong? How can you say that that was right? Some people just say, well, you can't. So one thing to note is that it may be true that if we all became emotivists, the world would become a complete disaster and people would just start being self-indulgent. That wouldn't make it untrue. It would just make it not very practical to believe and therefore maybe, you know, we should cut this segment and not let anyone hear about it, right? But if you're asking what is-

• 1:31:42Chris Williamson?

  Vibe coding human-

• 1:31:43Alex O'Connor?

  What is true, it will evolutionarily self-de-select. So like, it's not, it's not, if it were actually a bad thing to believe, that, that doesn't mean that it's-

• 1:31:50Chris Williamson?

  So we could have had a lot of emotivists ancestors, but they maybe didn't stick about.

• 1:31:55Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, or like if it is in fact something that would lead to this sort of this arbitrary disaster.

• 1:32:01Chris Williamson?

  Do you think it does?

• 1:32:02Alex O'Connor?

  Um, no, for a few reasons, partly because I agree with you. I mean, people will be listening to this going like, well, I think I could see a dog shit as beautiful in the right sort of context. And I think that's true, but the point remains that there are things that you find beautiful that you can't just choose to not. And there are things that you don't find beautiful that you can't just choose to become beautiful. Um, I think there is a degree on fundamental matters of like somewhat universal agreement, in the same way that we kind of broadly agree on many artistic points, right? We might have, you know, I don't like impressionism and I think Van Gogh is overrated, but broadly speaking, we have an idea of, of one piece of art being like, you know, a good, beautiful piece of art and one thing like not really being a piece of art at all. Um, but of course, there's so much room for subjectivity there that on the moral particulars, you run into

• 1:32:46Alex O'Connor?

  a problem. How do I think this can be addressed? Well, one important thing to note is that A.J. Ayer talks about this. Most moral debate, because this is the thing that you undercut, the ability to debate morals, to say, I think I'm right and you're wrong. If it's all just feeling, you can't do that. You're just feeling. So you can't morally debate. Ayer points out that the vast majority of moral debate that you hear on a regular basis is not actually moral debate. It's debate about facts, which then inform your moral view. So imagine you're having a debate about gun violence in America. The debate might sound something like, you know, did you know that- You know, if we criminalize guns, then gun-related deaths would drop by 10,000 every year.

• 1:33:31Alex O'Connor?

  Oh, but you know, having a swimming pool is more dangerous than having a gun. These are factual claims that you can test, you can even run statistics and you can find out whether they're true or false. And a lot of the debate consists in that sort of factual disagreement. But the actual moral element isn't actually being thrust up against each other.

• 1:33:48Chris Williamson?

  What people are trying to do there, which would, I guess, at least reinforce the emotivism view, is get further up the stack from someone's emotive outburst. And say, well, actually, the fact that your emotions are based on are different. Let me change those facts and see what then comes out.

• 1:34:05Alex O'Connor?

  It would just bring about a new emotional state. Because suppose you were like, you were really scared of getting on a train. And I said to you right now, oh, we're going to go to Edinburgh. And you felt an emotion of fear. And then I just told you a fact, which is, oh, we're going to get the plane instead. Your emotion would change. I haven't convinced you on an emotional level. I haven't changed your emotions exactly. I've changed facts, which then dictate what your emotional state is.

• 1:34:29Chris Williamson?

  Presumably, you could also teach me some things about the safety record of trains.

• 1:34:33Alex O'Connor?

  That's also true, which would change your emotional state without just you saying, I'm scared of trains. And me being like, no, you're not. And then we have debate. That doesn't make any sense, right? That's not actually how it goes. And that's actually not how it goes in morality a lot of the time. You know, because if you find two people who are debating about guns, and one says that, you know, if we have guns on the streets, then, you know, people are going to get attacked. And another person says, yeah, but when somebody's attacked, like, do you only want the bad guys to have guns? Don't you want good people to be able to defend them? What's the like moral boo and yay there? It's something like, you know, boo innocent people dying, you know? Like, they probably agree on that. And then it's just sort of a factual dispute of what will sort of bring about that innocent people dying.

• 1:35:13Chris Williamson?

  Does that suggest that people's moralities aren't actually as divergent as we think that they are? That most people agree on most things when it comes to morality?

• 1:35:23Alex O'Connor?

  Not necessarily. It's actually a very difficult question to answer. The thing I'm intending to get across here is that If it is the case that there is this big problem with something like emotivism, that it doesn't allow us to have these debates and say that people are wrong, I think that it would be much more restricted than people would first imagine. Because you first think, gosh, I can't say, you know, I can't say that you're wrong to do it. I can't say that you're wrong to steal that apple from the store. I can't say that you're, you know, it's a good thing to, you know, walk your wife home or something. You know what I mean? Like, that's not the case. If there were some kind of disagreement that we were unable to resolve, it would be much more foundational and much more broad. That might exist, it might not. Our evolutionary psychology might be such that we, on the most fundamental levels,

• 1:36:07Alex O'Connor?

  like, basically are made of the same stuff. But it does seem plausible to me that there could be genuinely irresolvable, like foundational value conflicts.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  I suppose one potential candidate for that would be the notion of rights versus consequences, which is a sort of, you know, so.

• 1:36:23Alex O'Connor?

  Oh, yeah, that, yeah.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  You know, as in that's like one way, one way of, you know, a lot of, you say I'm having an argument with someone and about, I don't know. Let's do the gun control example. I know nothing about the facts on the ground about gun control. But one thing somebody might say is just, no, I have a right to this. And that's, that's would be an ethical statement and thus an expression. But people do use that in a kind of load-bearing justificatory way. I think that would be one example of a, of a type of moral disagreement that emotivism would struggle to accommodate. You might be able to get it in some altered form.

• 1:36:53Alex O'Connor?

  Find that it would break down, because I agree with you. Like, you'd break it down to like, you know, someone ultimately isn't just going boo innocent people dying, because that's a sort of consequentialist view, like innocent people dying, that's a bad consequence, boo. Another person might be like, boo, taking my rights away. And that would actually conflict. However, I think.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  One person's priority and another person's priority and who trumps.

• 1:37:13Alex O'Connor?

  But I do think that both of these, in fact, are not actually foundational, right? Because you've got to break down this, you say boo innocent people dying. And like, I can think of 10 examples off the top of my head where you'd be okay with an innocent person dying, right? And likewise, you know, boo, rights are notoriously difficult to actually justify or ground. So if you had further conversation with these people, you might find that the. Emotional motivation that has led one person to innocent people dying is bad. And another person to rights being being violated is bad is actually the same wellspring, as it were. And if that's the case, then this problem goes away. It might not be the case, though. And then you are left with this problem of like value conflicts that can't be resolved, but it's much more restricted and would probably operate on the

• 1:37:56Alex O'Connor?

  level of like societies rather than individuals, which guess what? It does. And we kind of like just accept that some societies have different morals and some don't.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  That's a good point. I suppose the other.

• 1:38:07Alex O'Connor?

  At least on the particulars.

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  The other.

• 1:38:08Alex O'Connor?

  The cannibals we don't.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  Well, the other the other potential issue you might find is is that it is entirely possible that we just have a non foundationalist moral psychology. So on that, we've kind of said, oh, well, you know, maybe we won't end up disagreeing because we'll get down to fundamentals. But I would potentially, you know, it's certainly a possibility that we have just loose branches of moral statements, you know, like, I was thinking about, you know, it's a good example. So like the example that was, I think this in Jonathan Haidt's book, he uses the example of he takes a bunch of consequentialists and then asked them about like the kind of theoretical consequence free incest scenario.

• 1:38:50Alex O'Connor?

  Yes.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  Where, which basically just never exists in real life, but in this kind of laboratory setting, he kind of posits it. And he often finds that, you know, that's a kind of, that's something that people will condemn regardless of the foundation, their stated foundation to morality. So that's that's one potential counter. You talked to Simon Blackburn recently.

• 1:39:11Alex O'Connor?

  Yes.

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  Is he still calling himself a quasi realist?

• 1:39:12Alex O'Connor?

  He actually regrets inventing that term.

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  Okay, what does he call himself now?

• 1:39:16Alex O'Connor?

  I'm not sure what he actually calls himself now. I think he's still a non cognitivist. Blackburn is a is a is a non cognitivist, a kind of emotivist. He's got a lot of interesting things to say about that. I just did a whole episode with him. So, you know, watch it. I think what you just said, what did you just say?

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Quasi realist.

• 1:39:33Alex O'Connor?

  Before that.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Oh, about the idea of. It's possible that our, the ethical statements that we will boo and hooray at are not a foundational structure.

• 1:39:45Alex O'Connor?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  Indeed, in emotivism, we would, we might expect that to also be the case in emotivism.

• 1:39:49Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  Whereas in a kind of standard cognitivist picture of ethics, we come to our ethical propositions through having a kind of base level set of ethical principles that we believe are true. And then derive our ethics from that. And emotivist kind of throws out that picture entirely. So another explanatory problem you might posit for ethic, for emotivism in ethics, which is basically a variant on Frigga Geach. Which is, would be like, oh, well, we have this whole inferential setup for our ethical propositions that we don't for emotions. You know, do, it doesn't, you know, I don't, I don't get angry because I've inferred anger from some kind of previous emotional principle.

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  I might get angry because somebody does something that I perceive to be an injustice, but that's, that's going from a thing that I believe to be true. And that kind of, this whole inferential structure that our ethics seems to follow, and at the very least, we want our ethics to follow as an ideal. We hold people being ethically inconsistent as a bad thing, seems to rely on some kind of underlying intuitive cognitivism. So there are like, there are different problems you can have with emotivism and non-cognitivism and ethics more generally, but there are responses to those problems. And I think there are some of them.

• 1:40:58Alex O'Connor?

  Well, one, one, one good proof of emotivism might just be the incest question. It's famously difficult for people to deal with incest. And it's always funny watching people sort of wriggle thinkers on stage when somebody's brave enough to ask the question, why, why it's wrong. Consequentialists are notoriously bad at justifying this. And they'll say things like, well, because, you know, incest leads to having disabled children. In response to which there are a few questions. Firstly, what's wrong with having disabled children? Secondly, you know, obviously, what about the, like, in cases where procreation is not going to be possible? That's obviously like a side issue. We can obviously correct, oh, well, there's like a power imbalance between, okay, we can obviously just, like, just answer the question, right? You know what I'm asking you, and people can't do it.

• 1:41:40Alex O'Connor?

  The emotivist, but bear in mind, this is one of the most universal taboos in the world, is the incest taboo. It's like everywhere. Interestingly, some societies have variant forms where it's like, it's okay to marry your older sister, but not your younger sister, stuff like that. It's kind of weird.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  I mean, famously cousins were in the royal family.

• 1:41:58Alex O'Connor?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, cousins have always been a sort of.

• 1:42:04Alex O'Connor?

  A sort of stick in the mud for this, like people don't seem to care so much about cousins historically, but quite clearly like.

• 1:42:10Chris Williamson?

  They're the Goldilocks zone familial relation.

• 1:42:13Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, exactly. For keeping it in the family, but not too much.

• 1:42:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you know, they're close enough that you know them. You don't have to actually go that hard looking.

• 1:42:20Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  How do you end up with these 15th century monarchs with chins out to air?

• 1:42:23Alex O'Connor?

  It's true. It's true. So they say. But clearly, there is this universal taboo and most people just instinctively think it is just, oh, what's the word? Realistically, what's the word? It's something like, it's just gross, man. It's just, oh, it's just, it's not. The emotivist says, yeah, that's what's going on, right? And so the wrongness of incest, when you recognize how difficult it is for people of a non just prescriptivist moral theory, like if you're a believer in God who thinks that it's just revealed that it's the wrong thing to do, then fine. That still doesn't actually explain why it's wrong. Just tells you that it's wrong. But for any secular ethicist, it's notoriously difficult when you when you select out those other factors. And so if I ask you, Chris, like, if you think incest is wrong, I don't know what you would say.

• 1:43:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'm an only child, so it's actually really.

• 1:43:09Alex O'Connor?

  Difficult to, difficult to.

• 1:43:10Chris Williamson?

  I've thought about this at least a little bit. It was you that first taught me about the incest question and then Jonathan Haidt, kind of like I read it in full. Two things. First off, the reason that humans feel incest aversion is because of something called the Westermark window. Are you familiar with this?

• 1:43:27Alex O'Connor?

  No.

• 1:43:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so the Westermark effect is young children that are raised together, that spend sort of infant and young child years.

• 1:43:37Alex O'Connor?

  Yep.

• 1:43:37Chris Williamson?

  In close proximity, especially if they see their mother raising another child, they have sexual aversion to them. This is adaptive, right? You do not know who your sister is. You don't know who that person is. What you do know is that that particular individual was fed and cared for by your mother and you played with them and they were around between zero and 10 years old. This leads to some pretty difficult situations. If you have twins or brother and sister that are separated at birth, they've missed this Westermark window.

• 1:44:13Chris Williamson?

  They do not have sexual revulsion. Now cognitively, they might, but that like ick that apparently people who have brothers and sisters, I don't have a brother or sister. So I don't like to me that innate sense when you do this, anytime that you do the incest question.

• 1:44:29Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:29Chris Williamson?

  People's faces start to sort of squeeze a little. There is, I feel this is the one time in my life that I feel like a psychopath.

• 1:44:36Alex O'Connor?

  For you, the incest question is just intellectual masturbation.

• 1:44:40Chris Williamson?

  Precis- specifically intellectual. But there's no.

• 1:44:44Alex O'Connor?

  Not to get, not to get like, I don't like to make the examples like this personal, but I mean, you have parents, you know, like.

• 1:44:50Chris Williamson?

  That's true.

• 1:44:51Alex O'Connor?

  Surely the thought of, without going any further with that sentence, you get what I'm driving at. Like there is, there is.

• 1:44:57Chris Williamson?

  I can map that on.

• 1:44:59Alex O'Connor?

  There's something you can.

• 1:45:00Chris Williamson?

  That's true. But anyway, Western Mark window, really interesting. So if you have a brother and sister or specifically the classic sort of daddy issues thing, daughter and father. Dad beat dad, dad leaves, dad comes back in.

• 1:45:11Alex O'Connor?

  Oh, right.

• 1:45:12Chris Williamson?

  Sometimes this happens and they don't even know, you know, adopted kids and so forth. And you end up finding, because there is a kind of resonance that's in that. You think, wow, like this person just seems so like me. And he's like, yeah, they share quite a lot of your genetics.

• 1:45:28Alex O'Connor?

  Well, look, the thing is like, I think there are all kinds of explanations you can give for like, why this taboo has emerged. But like, there are explanations for things that do not equate to justifications for things. You know, I could explain why human beings have an inherent like racial bias, you know, because when you're living in tribes, it makes sense to be suspicious of. So I can, I can explain evolutionarily why, you know, somebody might be a bit racist. But most people think actually that's wrong, like we don't want to do that. Like, so it's not, it's not a justification for it. It's an explanation for why it exists in the human psychology. So you can explain why the incest taboo exists in the human psychology and why it crops up in some areas and not others.

• 1:46:06Alex O'Connor?

  But if you think it's wrong, I'm going to ask you why. And as an emotivist, I can, I can, if someone says, well, I just think it's, I've had this conversation with people in the pub. And they say, they give me an emotivist answer. They say, but it's just, it's, it's just disgusting. It's disgusting. That's your brother, you know, that's your sister. It's just, I'm like, yeah, exactly. And it's, it's like one of the most, I think compelling cases for emotivists.

• 1:46:28Chris Williamson?

  Everybody's lapping as an emotivist when it comes to the incest question.

• 1:46:30Alex O'Connor?

  Or rather they're lapping as something else until it comes to the emotivist question.

• 1:46:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:46:35Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, so much of it actually breaks down to emotion. There are lots of reasons to think.

• 1:46:39Chris Williamson?

  Do you identify as this?

• 1:46:42Alex O'Connor?

  An emotivist, to be clear.

• 1:46:43Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:46:43Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, not, yeah. Yeah, I think, I think so. I find it, I'm, I've sort of got-

• 1:46:48Chris Williamson?

  Have you had to put some sort of qualifier, quasi?

• 1:46:50Alex O'Connor?

  I've got kind of philosophical commitment issues, you know, like I, I find it very difficult to call myself anything, really, like it, it's, it's, it's, because-

• 1:46:59Chris Williamson?

  You're sort of philosophically non-monogamous.

• 1:47:00Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, not just because, not, not just on a practical level of like, oh, you'll be held to it and people will, but just because like, you know, who, who bloody knows, man? Like realistically, who?

• 1:47:08Chris Williamson?

  Because we like to put labels on things.

• 1:47:10Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, that's right. Like, we like to put labels on emotions, such as good and bad. I mean, I think one way I've, I've tried to explain this and why I do call myself an emotivist and say, yes, I am one, but like, you know, pending corrections, as it were. I, I would, you know, drop it in a moment if there were, were sort of good evidence against.

• 1:47:27Chris Williamson?

  An emotivist agnostic.

• 1:47:28Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, like, like emotivist with a degree of-

• 1:47:33Chris Williamson?

  Emotivist curious.

• 1:47:34Alex O'Connor?

  Confidence, yeah. Yeah. I think if you imagine what it would be like if we didn't have a word for anxiety. It's like there was no word for it, right? And you were feeling anxious. You would try to describe your feeling to me by using other emotional terms. You'd say like, oh, well, I feel a bit, it's sort of like sadness, but I'm like excited. I, I don't really know how, and so you isolate that feeling, give it its own word. So if I ask you, in that kicking the homeless person case, what is the extra thing you're feeling other than just the, the knowledge of the descriptive fact? That I kick the homeless person, you go, well, it's something like, no, or something like stop, or don't, or boo, or gross. And it's none of those things, but it's something a bit like that.

• 1:48:16Alex O'Connor?

  So we sort of put a, put a box around this, this, this feeling and give it a, a label. And I think we've done that and that label is bad. Uh, and so you kind of, it belongs in that category. One, one big mistake people make, I think, with emotivism is that you say that ethics is an expression of emotion. I don't mean that bad or shouldn't maps on to pre-existing emotions that we know of, like, you know, boo and anger and frustration. It's its own unique emotion. Those are just like, it belongs in that category, right? People often think that an emotivist thinks that murder is wrong means something like expressing anger or distaste or disgust.

• 1:48:55Speaker 01

  It's not. It's its own unique thing. It's expressing wrongness, which is its own thing, distinct from those things, but it belongs in that category. It's a kind of emotion.

• 1:49:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I do. I do. I'm interested. Is there a philosophy of influence? Because you two are both influential, study this stuff. Do you have a responsibility that is philosophically interesting, given that you are supposed to be, at least in some way, sources of insight around the study of ethics, the study of logic, the study of philosophy? Is there an additional level of responsibility that you have as the closer to the source of where this comes from, to be extra highly scrutinous with the way that you sort of put ideas across and what you talk about?

• 1:49:37Speaker 01

  I suppose, I mean, I suppose there's a base level of trying to be accurate, right? Like, you know, you try and get things right, and inevitably you sometimes get things wrong, but, you know, you try and get things right. I think that, um, you know, I think that's, I think another thing that I'm I'm very keen on when presenting philosophies is to try and get across that this is only really a starting point, right? This isn't, this isn't me from your computer screen telling you what's definitely true about the nature of the life and the universe, that being ridiculous. But that hopefully, if you find some of this helpful, or you find some of this insightful, it will be kind of grist for the mill of your own thinking.

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm very like, I think that, I think this about a lot of, um, you know, people quite often talk about things like, um, videos on YouTube or podcasts or various different types of just disseminating media. Will sort of react with a little bit of skepticism. People do this about news articles and journalism. Where they sort of say something like, oh yeah, but, you know, there are flaws within this medium. You know, your errors will creep in, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they're suddenly right. I think that the, um, one of the correct, correct? One of the appropriate responses that I feel to that is to, is to try and front load a kind of.

• 1:51:03Speaker 01

  A statement of your own fallibility so that inevitably like you'll get things wrong. You'll get things wrong.

• 1:51:09Chris Williamson?

  This is a justice privilege thing that we were talking about.

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, and I think it's important to say that because quite a lot of, you know, you're on YouTube, you're at the very least presenting yourself as knowing more than the viewer about something. And so it's very easy. All of the kind of implicit signals there are saying, I know I am right.

• 1:51:29Chris Williamson?

  Listen to me, position of authority.

• 1:51:31Speaker 01

  Listen to me, I am authority. And I think that it's, I think that it's, in order to kind of do what I want to do, which is to largely get people doing this philosophy for themselves, and for this to just be something that they look back on in five years and think, oh, yeah, that was a kind of quaint starting point, but now I'm much further along than that. I don't need this anymore. Part of doing that is to front load the idea that you're wrong, you don't have the final, you might be wrong, you don't have the final word. This is just a smattering of the literature, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:51:58Chris Williamson?

  Joe, you see yourself as kind of the child's Hulk Hogan playset of lifting weights before someone actually goes and gets a gym membership.

• 1:52:04Speaker 01

  Well, I suppose the thing is that, you know, you're never going to be able to get, you're never able to like, compress all of the complexity of even a single philosopher into like a 30 minute YouTube video. It's just not possible. There's just, they're all very complicated. But you might be able to give people a general idea, and also hopefully put them in a position whereby if they choose to go and look at that philosopher or that philosophy or that philosophical question for themselves, they are then slightly better equipped to do that. And, you know, hopefully if they find some bit helpful, it helps them in their everyday life. It might do, it might not. But that's what I tend to think. I think that, you know, no medium of communicating any kind of information is perfect. And I think that a lot of the way that I like to react to that is to just front load the flaws

• 1:52:49Speaker 01

  if they're not obvious. I mean, you know.

• 1:52:51Chris Williamson?

  Disclaimer, disclaimer.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, you know, public debates are a bit like that, you know, the public debates have numerous flaws, right? They are.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  Oftentimes, people will be persuaded by emotional rhetoric rather than, you know, strict logical reasoning, because that's just part of how we're wired. I don't think that that's necessarily a problem until we start pretending that public debate is something that it's not, as long as we bear that in mind.

• 1:53:14Chris Williamson?

  Some unique insight into wisdom and accuracy.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, as long as we're not watching, you know.

• 1:53:19Chris Williamson?

  Nod's the guy who does debate very regularly.

• 1:53:21Speaker 01

  I think you pretty much shared my view on this as well.

• 1:53:23Alex O'Connor?

  There's nothing wrong with theatre, you know, but you've got to know that that's what you're doing.

• 1:53:27Chris Williamson?

  What's your thoughts on this? You know, if we're moving into a world with philosophers as influences, surely the platform comes with a huge ethical duty not to mislead, given that ethics is part of the source code of what you guys, at least in part, are supposed to do or be remotely educated in.

• 1:53:41Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I mean, like, we find it interesting and fun, and there's a kind of academic duty to not mislead, not misrepresent people's opinions and that kind of stuff.

• 1:53:52Chris Williamson?

  If you're going to reduce this down to do as I say, not as I do.

• 1:53:55Alex O'Connor?

  No, no, no, no, it's the reason I trip over myself to indicate my agnosticism even about things I believe. Doesn't mean I don't have an opinion, but it means that I could be talked out of it at any moment. I do that with something as inert as like metaethics, because, you know, earlier today, we spoke for five or 10 minutes about suicide, and there's somebody listening to this podcast for whom that's going to be the most significant discourse that they've heard on the subject, possibly in their life, probably in the past few days and, you know, past month or year or so. If somebody's thinking about that a lot, you might have some influence over their thoughts on an issue as important as that. That's not something to just sort of piss about with, you know, it's serious.

• 1:54:38Alex O'Connor?

  This stuff matters to people, and it's worth remembering that sometimes philosophy is just people in this sort of intellectual playground having a bit of fun, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not always that. And if it is always that, then you're kind of probably wasting your time in idle leisure, and you should do something more constructive.

• 1:55:00Chris Williamson?

  You always end up castigating. You always end up sort of finger wagging after a little while.

• 1:55:04Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, but you've asked me to reflect upon my own sense of duty. And I think that you need to wag your own finger in the mirror every now and again. And remember that it's great fun and I love what I do. And it's an amazing thrill and beautiful opportunity to be able to make a living doing things like this. But it's not all fun and games. It does come with a duty and a responsibility that it's easy to forget about. Because here we are having a conversation. We talk about this stuff all the time. We're gonna go off to the pub and forget about it later on today. But that's not the case for everyone.

• 1:55:37Chris Williamson?

  Do you think of certain areas of philosophy, or maybe even most areas of philosophy, as kind of like information hazards in that way?

• 1:55:46Alex O'Connor?

  I think that information hazards are a bit of a... I mean, we were talking about the concept of overrated philosophical ideas or ideas that should, you know...

• 1:55:56Chris Williamson?

  Get in the bin.

• 1:55:57Alex O'Connor?

  Get in the bin. And I kind of think information hazards are one example of that.

• 1:56:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, nice. Of course Basilisk can talk off.

• 1:56:02Alex O'Connor?

  It's sort of part of this whole AI hype that a lot of it is just sort of sensationalist and I think doesn't have a very good grounding.

• 1:56:08Chris Williamson?

  You know the analogy that I mean, though, like a high potent cognitive pathogen?

• 1:56:12Alex O'Connor?

  Specifically, not an information hazard in that literal sense. But yeah, like maybe there are things that are sort of not worth knowing or not worth exploring, right? There are topic areas which just aren't worth...

• 1:56:25Chris Williamson?

  The price of entry is too high.

• 1:56:26Alex O'Connor?

  Getting into. But that's sort of for you to decide, whether you find it interesting, whether you find it worthwhile. I don't know. We stand on the shoulders of giants, as Newton said, in that I've seen myself as a communicator of ideas. I don't really say anything genuinely novel or unique. There's nothing new under the sun. I'm just trying to communicate other people's ideas. So my principal responsibility is trying to do so in a way that makes sense. Like, why am I talking to people about this? There must be some application for why I'm doing it.

• 1:57:01Alex O'Connor?

  But I think, yeah, being a communicator, rather than somebody who's trying to put a steadfast view into the world, makes it a little easier.

• 1:57:11Chris Williamson?

  Is that just a very slippery way of never having to actually stand your ground?

• 1:57:16Alex O'Connor?

  Maybe. But if...

• 1:57:19Alex O'Connor?

  In order to be successful in any field, including my own, I would have to plant my feet firmly in the ground and say, this is what I believe and I don't think that I'm wrong about it, then I'd probably give up and go home, at least for now. I mean, maybe I'll feel that way one day, but for now at least. I mean, you know, the idea that the idea that a 26 year old philosophy YouTuber would like know anything significant with a level of certainty that is immune to a healthy dose of agnosticism is completely batshit insane. There's just no way that's ever going to be true, you know, or justified.

• 1:57:55Chris Williamson?

  Even on the incest question.

• 1:57:57Alex O'Connor?

  Even, especially, especially on the incest question.

• 1:57:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Gentlemen, I appreciate both of you very much. I wish that we could keep going for longer, but this location is going to kick us out.

• 1:58:06Alex O'Connor?

  It's, it's, it's, it's looks like it's literally about to collapse in on us.

• 1:58:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, perhaps. Um, look, I, I genuinely appreciate both of you. I think it's so cool that we've got two British guys leading, contributing to leading forth philosophical influence, unsolicited advice and Alex O'Connor, within reason. You don't have a podcast, do you, Joe?

• 1:58:27Alex O'Connor?

  I don't. I want to, I'm going to start interviewing a few people. I've got a few people lined up. I told him what to call it. You know what he should call it?

• 1:58:33Chris Williamson?

  Solicited advice.

• 1:58:34Alex O'Connor?

  Solicited advice. It's right there in front of you.

• 1:58:37Chris Williamson?

  Uh, boys, thank you very much for coming through.

• 1:58:39Alex O'Connor?

  You got it, man. Thanks for having me.

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