Why Atheists Keep Finding God (in everything) - Alex O’Connor - #1175

Alex O’Connor is a YouTuber, writer and a podcaster. Expect to learn what shifts happened in Alex’s thinking these past few years, why you actually would ever want to time travel, why so many people are moving away from atheism, why consciousness is the biggest hole in the atheist argument, what meditation really does to your conscious mind, if there is a practical point to prayer, if watching porn is considered cheating, and much more... Sponsors: Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at ⁠https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom⁠ Get 35% off your first subscription to the best supplements from Momentous at ⁠https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom⁠ Sign up for a free trial from Shopify at ⁠https://shopify.com/modernwisdom⁠ Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at ⁠https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom⁠ See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠⁠ Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠⁠https://chatgpt.com⁠ Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Brand new Modern Wisdom Merch goes live this Friday. Look at this beautiful doing the thing angel. We've got our first ever death metal design sleeveless t-shirt and a hoodie. This awesome high country ranch thing that we've got. This snake design, which I love. Wisdom Nation World Tour, Wisdom Coffee and much more. Sign up at MWMerch.com now to be the first person to get access. We were talking about the arc from sometimes a sort of mean debate bro persona into something that's a little bit maybe softer, more empathetic, more understanding. Yeah. Where do you sort of come into land on like, these are the facts and I should just say them in this way. Versus I can still do that with a degree of like grace and compassion.

• 0:45Alex O'Connor?

  I get a lot of flack for this and I think it's because people enjoy seeing someone who has thought about a view, knows what they think and wants to defend it against, against critique. Especially when it's something that people consider important, like views on the existence of God or ethics or something like that. It's really important to people that there are people who are sort of strongly advocating for those positions. But I think that particularly when it comes to questions about God and questions about consciousness and foundational philosophy.

• 1:15Alex O'Connor?

  It would be foolish to think that my confidence should approximate anything like

• 1:23Alex O'Connor?

  a closeness to truth that warrants a kind of forthright exposition.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Militant sort of fervor.

• 1:31Alex O'Connor?

  Certainly militant. I mean, there's not much for me to be militant about. Even when I was an atheist, I prefer to call myself an agnostic now because it's very difficult to claim that the universe is made out of consciousness and sound like there isn't something a bit weird going on. But I used to think to myself like, you know, I'm not exactly celebrating the fact that, that people would become atheists because they're listening to me. I mean, I have always said that I'd love for Christianity to be true or, you know, I'd love for, for a number of religious traditions to be true. Or just the idea that there is a God and eternal life and this kind of stuff. I think that would be great, you know, that would be awesome. I'd love for that to, to happen and I'm totally open to it. It's difficult to say that at the same time as when someone comes up and says, "Hey man, I listened to your argument and it made me think that, you know, there's no God."

• 2:16Alex O'Connor?

  To go, "Yeah, hurrah, brilliant, awesome." You know, it's one thing to show up to the pearly gates and say, you know, "Sorry, Father, you didn't give me enough evidence," as Bertrand Russell would have said. It's another thing to show up with like, you know, 2 million people behind you who you've also turned into atheists. And be like, "Look, I can, I can explain." So I'm not celebrating that fact. But what I do celebrate is the fact that most of the time that's representative of the fact that somebody has questioned something that they wouldn't otherwise have questioned. Right? Because a lot of people speak to me and they say that they grew up in a religious community and they kind of didn't really have a, have a, it's not even that they didn't have the opportunity to think about this stuff. They just didn't have the impetus. No one had asked them questions about the relationship between God and the good or the transmission of scripture and whether it's accurate and this kind of stuff. And so that I'm extremely grateful for.

• 3:01Alex O'Connor?

  But just as many people come up to me who are religious and say, you know, "This is going to sound really strange, but you really helped me in my faith." And I'm like, it gets less and less strange every time I hear it, you know?

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Why?

• 3:14Alex O'Connor?

  Just because it happens, it happens so regularly now.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  What do you think it is that's, that's happening though? That you have provided, you in your decade-long journey to try and pick holes in arguments for the existence of God, have done such a bad job that you've managed to reinforce atheists' belief? Is that the suggestion?

• 3:35Alex O'Connor?

  That's, that's hilarious. You know, there's, there's this, there's this guy who just converted to Catholicism. Total shock, like in the sort of YouTube philosophy community. His name's Joe Schmidt and he just suddenly came out and said he was a Catholic. And I think he made some posts about how he removed a few of his older like discussions and debates. Because he used to host debates between religious and atheists, religious people and atheists. And he got sort of nervous that these would lead people into sin. So he like took some of them down. And it was a bit of a controversial move, but I can understand why he would do that if that's his conviction. But somebody tweeted in response, they were like, "Can you imagine if you were a Christian on that debate? And you performed so badly that he's now taking it down because he's worried that people are going to..."

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Considered that that's you, your inverse that.

• 4:18Alex O'Connor?

  I think I'm kind of like a bit of a barrister, right? I'm like a barrister for, for different positions in some ways. When, and that makes it sound flippant, like I do actually care about the subject matter. But I mean to say that even if I were to become a, a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu tomorrow and suddenly believed in God, I'd still have all of the same criticisms that I have today. It's not like I'm suddenly going to think that arguments that are unsound are now sound. And I think a lot of people believe for reasons that are not robust. We all believe in things for reasons that are not robust. That's why if you had a debate with a flat-earther, for example, you might lose. Because this person's thought about it loads and loads and loads. And if it turns out that actually really the reason you believe the earth is a globe

• 5:03Alex O'Connor?

  is because you were told so by like NASA and your teachers. That's actually a pretty bad reason to believe the earth is a globe.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Even if it's true?

• 5:10Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, exactly. Right? Now, don't get me wrong, right? It is true that the earth, well, it's not true that the earth is a globe. It's an obliques theroid, but you get the, the picture.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  I've seen that LIDAR adjacent image floating around of just how not round the world is. Like if you were to give it a roll, it would, it wouldn't be pretty...

• 5:27Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, there are lots of sort of trivial ways in which, in which you can sound like you're one of these conspiracy theorists. The earth is not a globe because it's actually like egg shaped. I also, I'm a geocentrist. I think that the earth is the center of the universe because all motion is relative. And so you can measure it from anywhere. And so you can actually have the earth as your center of, of...

• 5:46Speaker 00

  I read a really interesting Substack a couple of weeks ago about why you don't ever want to time travel. So time travel, being able to move you from here to a point either in the future or in the past.

• 5:58Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  But the, the position that the earth is, is always spinning. Even if it didn't go, you would end up on the other side. And also it's not, it's orbiting the sun and the sun is moving around the center of the galaxy and the galaxy is moving around. So you, you end up, I think for every, if you were to take like a, what would this even be called? Like a cosmically stable, like a, like geosynchronous, like a cosmically synchronous position.

• 6:28Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  You're some insane number of millions of miles only a couple of days later. Because everything is moving so much and that, um, do you remember Omuamua? Do you remember that oblong shaped asteroid? It was what Avi Loeb talked about a good bit. It looked like a cigar and it was an asteroid that was sort of shooting through the solar system.

• 6:51Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  And because the likelihood of this very unique like sausage, it was a big sausage, a big sausage shape flying through the, the solar system. The likelihood of this shape existing, it seems quite unlikely. Most things will be more round, right? So, oh, maybe it's been created or maybe it's like a satellite or it's a base or something else. One of the things that was interesting there was we, it, it moved through the solar system quite quickly. But if you were to actually place it relative to a lot of other objects outside of our solar system, it was relatively stationary. So we moved through it, kind of like a pedestrian on the side of the street as we drive past at 70 miles an hour. And you go, "Wow, he's going 70 miles an hour in that direction." Only if you didn't know that you were moving and not it.

• 7:36Alex O'Connor?

  But all motion is relative. And that's why when you think about, you know, "Okay, I'm going to time travel and I'm going to keep the, the universe sort of still and motionless." There's literally no way that you can make sense of that. It's not like, "Oh, isn't it interesting that from our perspective, you know, everything's moving, but from this other perspective, everything's still..." It's not like there's some real perspective against which we can compare ours. That there's just relative motion. Carlo Rabeli has a wonderful recent book on, on how this goes all the way down. He thinks that everything is relational foundationally. It's fascinating, but he's like, you know, if you're on a train and you ask yourself like, you know, "What, what speed am I moving?" You might say, "I'm moving X many kilometers per hour."

• 8:16Alex O'Connor?

  But if a parent says to the child on the train, like, you know, "Stop moving around." And they're not expecting the child to like jump out of the window, right? So that they say so relative to the ground. It's all completely relative, which is why I'm a geocentrist, because you can measure it from anywhere. And what, what's the least arbitrary place from which to measure, you know, the, the sort of stationary position? The reference frame, the least arbitrary reference frame is the one, the only one where there are any observers, which is the earth. Which means that technically you can see everything is moving around the earth.

• 8:45Alex O'Connor?

  But I digress.

• 8:48Alex O'Connor?

  The reason I brought up the flat earth thing is because people believe in things for bad reasons all the time. And this happens in religious philosophy all over the place. People believe in God because they were brought up to. People disbelieve in God because they think that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of God. You know, this kind of stuff. And I think a lot of these kind of viewpoints are just not very well thought out. Not as an insult to the people who think that way, but as in like they haven't, a lot of people just haven't bothered to think about that kind of stuff. And that's fine, you know, no obligation to, but if you want to, I'm here for you. Let's work it out. Okay, maybe evil isn't logically incompatible with God's existence, but it might make it less likely.

• 9:32Alex O'Connor?

  But does it make it so much more or less likely than the evidence for God, like the fine tuning and all this kind of? And you can start sort of balancing it out. But all of these arguments are riddled with problems. And that's why my ultimate conclusion of my, my studies into the arguments for God's existence and against and stuff is that there's a reason why...

• 9:52Alex O'Connor?

  We haven't, so to speak, worked it out. You know, it's not like physics. It's not like when you're a child, you learn the end of what you're, what the previous generation figured out and you start from there and you build on top of it. Everybody starts in the same place. We're battling with the exact same questions as Plato and the ancients. There's no progress to be made because philosophy is not about establishing consensus through arguments which cannot be refuted. It's an experiential phenomenon. It's about figuring out what your intuitions are, where they lie. And with religious philosophy, I think this is clear. You know, there are countless examples of famous philosophers of religion and theologians who had some kind of religious experience and just abandoned the philosophy thing altogether.

• 10:34Alex O'Connor?

  Thomas Aquinas leaves the Summa Theologica, one of the greatest contributions to religious philosophy in history, perhaps the best, unfinished on his deathbed because he had a religious experience while he was performing the Eucharist. Just a few seconds of mystical ecstasy and he just refused to finish it. And his sort of friend and colleague, Reginald, writes to him and says, Thomas, you've got to finish the Summa. And allegedly Thomas says, I can write no more. Everything is like straw compared to what I've seen. Likewise, Blaise Pascal, the great mathematician and inventor of the bus randomly. He has a religious experience in 1654 and writes down in his diary, fire, fire, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, God of Jesus Christ, not the God

• 11:18Alex O'Connor?

  of the philosophers and the intellectuals. And it just sort of jumps out of the page because although God is the, isn't religion the foundational philosophical question? Yeah, in a sense, but you also know exactly what he means when he says not the God of the philosophers. Because God is not some proposition to be discovered at the bottom of a microscope if you're clever enough. It's if God exists, it's something which is for the most, for the majority of religious history, its most profound and confident expressions have been in the form of experience and mysticism.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  Does that not make the entire debate about it completely pointless?

• 11:51Alex O'Connor?

  Kind of, but it depends why you're doing it, right? So for, for Anselm of Canterbury, the famous progenitor of the ontological argument for God's existence. The original title for his famous book was going to be Faith Seeking Understanding, which is to say, the point of all of this intellectualizing about God is not to prove God's existence to an atheist. It's to fill in, it's to color a faith that already exists. So you believe in God and now you want to know, now you want to understand, now you want to sort of get to grips with what God might be like.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  But why?

• 12:25Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly, right? And so his ontological argument, for example, which people talk about all the time, was actually a prayer. The Prologian, where it shows up, is a prayer. It's not like, you know, dear atheists, here's why you should believe in God. He's just reflecting on the nature of God. And so much of that is, is present in religious history, such that these arguments for God's existence, which we, we kind of call natural theology, this idea of like, looking at the world and observing things and constructing arguments for God's existence, only really shows up in like, the sort of, towards the end of the last millennium, which is a long time ago for us, but in the course of religious thought, it's relatively recent.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  What do you make of the even more recent, at least as far as I can see, pivot away from a more militant sort of mean spirited approach? Because I've been friends with you for, fuck bloody hell, I think eight, eight years now. It's a long time.

• 13:20Alex O'Connor?

  Something like that, yeah.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  It's a very long time. And you have been an interesting canary in the coal mine, kind of like a, a weather vein, a theological weather vein in some ways. I think a lot of people that are of my age and, and your age, grew up with the sort of four horsemen, four horsemen adjacent, like religion fucking sucks, man. And like, we're cool and like, we're going to see this thing. And like, the sort of dunking, the proto Ben Shapiro videos of like a Christopher Hitchens up against someone. And it's like, kind of terse, I think, and prickly.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  And then you told me a story in Austin, three years ago, about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, explaining about how she had been suicidal, very upset, and as what, who would have been the fifth horseman of the apocalypse. But she was late or wasn't able to make it for some reason.

• 14:20Alex O'Connor?

  Might have been the five pillars in that case, I think.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  So someone that was very central to kind of the new atheist world view for a long time, sits on stage with Richard Dawkins, who is one of the people who did manage to make the appointment, and tells this story. I was very depressed for a long time and I was, I was sort of despondent and I'd lost all hope and I was considering doing something pretty kinetic about it. And then I, I had some experiences and some realizations and now I sort of believe. And this very emotional, emotive story about what it meant to her. And I'm pretty sure that you said something like, after the applause of half of the room.

• 15:02Alex O'Connor?

  Then Richard just goes.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  But, but do you believe that, that Jesus was born of a virgin? You know, do, do, do you believe that?

• 15:09Alex O'Connor?

  I believe that the tomb of Aramea really was moved out of the way.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  And you're like, that to me kind of shows, and maybe, maybe we're in a, a culture and a world now where most people's attachment or grip on goodwill and something to be happy and feel fulfilled and find meaning in, has become so temuous that we bristle a little bit more at someone reacting in quite a sterile, pannicky way to what is evidently someone struggling with a situation which lots of other people either do or hear that other, other people do. And you've got this, that story sticks to me so much.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  And I think it really sort of defines, categorizes old criticism up against a more empathetic. If that had happened on stage, I imagine that your response would have been something much more courteous and empathetic.

• 16:16Alex O'Connor?

  Maybe. I was there, you know, when, when that conversation happened in Brooklyn. And I think both are legitimate. I think fair enough to someone like Richard, who's like, look, come on, like Christianity makes substantive truth claims about the world, right? It claims that there was a man who was born of a virgin. It claims that a man rose from the dead. It claims that miracles were performed, blah, blah, blah. Makes historical claims about the exodus from Egypt and all this stuff. And I think totally fair enough to want to know and answer that to those questions. It's also fair enough to say like, look, you know, I'm not really sure about all of that. All I know is that there's a moral message that I take from this scripture. Something's jumping out at me, the person of Jesus, and I've got this experience of God and I'm really clinging on to that. That's fine.

• 16:57Alex O'Connor?

  But I, I think both are okay, but you, I, I feel like you kind of can't really critique one with the other. Like if somebody is making a historical, a skeptical historical case about Jesus, you know, I don't believe that Jesus claims to be God. I don't believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead. And someone comes along and says, yeah, man, but like, I just feel, I just feel like it's true. That's going to sound stupid. But similarly, it's going to sound stupid if someone says, hey, I had this transformation of character through an ineffable experience that I wish I could communicate you, to you, but I just can't. And someone says, yeah, but I'm pretty sure that, you know, the Gospel of John has some like later additions and that our earliest manuscripts aren't entirely, you know, lining up with each other. You know, it, it's sort of talking past each other.

• 17:40Alex O'Connor?

  And religious life, remember that religion is a, I sound like one of these like, sort of insufferable scholar types, you know, religion is a, is a modern concept. Yeah. But you know, it's one of my least favorite things is that like, everyone's gotten so careful in scholarship, that if you read scholarship from like, the 1800s or something, people are like, this is the truth about the world and I'm going to, I'm going to tell you why. And you read a, a modern scholarly book and the first three chapters are about how you can't even define the subject that we're trying to talk about. It's kind of annoying actually, but I do think it's true that religion is a relatively modern concept. That is to say, like, if you were to, like, we, we kind of have like, you know, family and work and religion and their little boxes.

• 18:24Alex O'Connor?

  And we sort of, we sort of keep them separate and we tuck them away. And sometimes they talk to each other. But in the ancient world in particular, I mean, religion is just like the ocean that you're swimming in. There, there is no religion. It's just how you live your life. It's just the things that you do.

• 18:35Speaker 00

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• 19:19Speaker 00

  Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom, a modern wisdom at checkout. If I was to say, go back 150,000 years, do you think that?

• 19:39Alex O'Connor?

  Well, you'd be in space, wouldn't you? You'd suddenly.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  As if we're in the same place, you have somehow managed to tether yourself as your time machine goes back.

• 19:47Alex O'Connor?

  Yes.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  I imagine that there were lots of personifications and narrative explanations for why the sky was angry today, right? Either the, the fact that there was lightning over the far side of the horizon or that the crops didn't get rained, I guess we wouldn't have even had crop, like it was colder than usual over the last however long. What do you think is the likelihood that 150,000 years ago, early hunter gatherers were experiencing or had some form of religious, proto-religious?

• 20:21Speaker 00

  Experience.

• 20:21Alex O'Connor?

  I think it's highly possible, maybe probable, only because anthropologically, when we look at human societies, it's more difficult to do now because the world is so much more connected. But, you know, like, we typically observe some kind of religious impulse as a, as a universal.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  Convergent cultural evolution.

• 20:39Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, exactly, right. And there are two explanations for this. One is that there is something which evolutionarily selects for this numinous connection to divinity, and so therefore it evolves independently, or there just is this divinity. It's true, right?

• 20:54Speaker 00

  An accurate representation.

• 20:55Alex O'Connor?

  That's always, that's always the problem with so much of these, these religious discussions, is that the data can sometimes be predicted by both. Like, I'm sort of looking at the problem of divine hiddenness, which is why if God exists, he's not obvious to people. And John Hicke, a great theologian, writes that there are, God wants to keep a kind of epistemic distance from his creatures, so that they have freedom to act without feeling like they're being sort of hovered over all the time. There's a lot to say about this, but he says something like, he says, you know, "The world must in some way be as if it were if there were no God." And I think, you know, great, fair enough. But it, it seems like both theories now predict the data, which makes it a bit unhelpful. But yeah, it's clear that there's like a religious impulse that's somewhat intrinsic

• 21:38Alex O'Connor?

  to, to human beings. However, it might look a little bit different, because I think it's very unfortunate that we use the word "God" with capital G, and the word "Gods" with like a little g, so interchangeably. So you might have heard atheists say things like, you know, "Oh yeah, okay, well, I don't believe in your God, but you also don't believe in like Wotan and Thor and Zeus and these guys." Because these guys aren't a single, unified, immaterial, creative deity who is responsible for the existence of the universe. These, these gods, small g gods, are like characters within the, the created order. They, they move around, they talk to each other, they communicate, they interact. They're

• 22:20Alex O'Connor?

  like characters in a play. The conception of God that is at the heart of the monotheistic traditions, and I would say also, like, Hinduism is sometimes called polytheistic, but there's one ultimate foundational reality called Brahman, and all of these gods are just like expressions of it. It's no more polytheistic than Christianity is, because it has the trinity. You know, these are expressions of, or persons of, of one unified god. So to the extent that people were going around sort of seeing the world as enchanted, you know, the, the spirits in the forest and the, the, the god of thunder and the, and the sun god who they worshipped, that clearly points to some kind of supernatural instinct within human beings. There's something sort of funny going on that's transcendent of

• 23:03Alex O'Connor?

  our human experiences. But it's not the same thing as belief in this like singular wellspring from which everything comes, right? These are two different instincts. And I don't think we can really have a good idea of when the sort of monotheistic picture begins to develop. I mean, in philosophy, goes as far back as, as Aristotle, who, I mean, his conception of, of the foundational sort of actualizing principle of reality was this very impersonal creature who didn't care about human affairs, couldn't care about human affairs, because it's this sort of, you know, super transcendent kind of thing. But it's like, it's this, it, I don't know, it sort of develops over time. So it kind

• 23:44Alex O'Connor?

  of depends what you mean. I think that today, when a religious mystic experiences unity with the divine, it's very difficult to define mysticism as well, as the books will tell you. But one of the key sort of themes of mystical religious experience is some sense of unity with God, is some sense in which like the boundary between myself and God disappear. Meister Eckhart says, you know, "The same ground that is God's ground is also my ground." And there's a, there's a famous Sufi mystic, I'm blanking on his name, but he famously spins around and says, "Anna Alhak, I am the truth." And Alhak is one of the names for God in the Quran. So it's extremely blasphemous, but he's saying

• 24:26Alex O'Connor?

  he felt this connection, right? It's difficult to feel that connection with like, particularly like the god of the green forest, you know what I mean? Or with like Wotan. That, that doesn't happen, right? You might feel sort of connected to nature in a, in a broad sense, but you don't feel as though you are now tethered to ultimate reality experientially. So this idea of like religious pluralism, the reason I bring it up is because when you say 150,000 years ago, people imagine this animistic people who are seeing gods everywhere. But those gods are just completely different kinds of creatures to the god of monotheism or of sort of ultimate reality. I think we could do with a, with a different

• 25:09Alex O'Connor?

  word for them. David Bentley Hart's book, The Experience of God, is good on this. I think that when we're talking about those gods, we should use a different word to avoid confusion. Because after all, there's actually a bit of a debate as to whether like, you know, did the Greeks believe their gods? Did they believe in their gods? I mean, think about it for a second. These people were not stupid, right? In fact, they're some of the most intelligent philosophers that we've, we've ever seen in the history of at least the Western tradition. And what, they believed that if you like went up the mountain, you'd find like Zeus sat there on a throne or something. They, they actually believed that Athena was going around doing stuff, you know. It's like, really? It's, it's actually not entirely clear. It might be more of a kind of a narrative device. It's

• 25:51Alex O'Connor?

  kind of actually hard to get to grips with. Obviously, they didn't believe in it in, in this literal sense. So how did they believe in their gods? Probably in a very different kind of way to the way in which a Christian believes in God, or a Hindu believes in Brahman, or something like that. You know what I mean? Like, do you think they actually believed that these characters were real features of reality? I spent a long time thinking about this, and I have a feeling that what was going on was something like, the best analogy I've found for this is like, you know, if you've got like, imagine you've got like a stuffed animal, either with like a partner, or maybe with your kids or something, and it's like a stuffed animal, and both of you know that it's a stuffed animal. It's obviously, it's not a real like, you know, dog or whatever. But it would be like

• 26:31Alex O'Connor?

  super, like blasphemous to address that fact. You know, you, you refer to the dog as, as him, and then you sort of, you, you interact with it as if it's a real thing, because you're sort of playing this, this game that's supposed to personify this, this creature. And if you were to address the fact that it was just a stuffed animal, a material object, it would be like horrifying. But both of you know that it's just a material, like artifact. I feel like something that, like that could have been going on. We talk about like the god of, the god of thunder. We still talk today in terms of like fate, and we still talk today in terms, we, we use like narrative terms.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  What's the story of fate?

• 27:03Alex O'Connor?

  No, I just mean like, you know, you might, you might say like, that's fate, or you might say like, that fate brings you together.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  But what's the etymology? What's the, what's, where does that come from?

• 27:10Alex O'Connor?

  I don't know. I don't know about the etymology of the word fate. But I'm just imagining like, like things that we say in the modern day, which you might not recognize as such, where like, we could literally start this conversation, and I could say, you know, oh gosh, like, you know, we, I'm, I'm feeling so thirsty, and you just happen to have this wonderful caffeinated beverage, and you say, "Oh, it's fate," you know. You don't actually believe that. You don't believe that there's actually a rule embedded into the universe which dictated that this happened. You just kind of use it as a narrative device to,

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Tonic could be divine.

• 27:35Alex O'Connor?

  Slightly animate the universe. I feel like maybe that was what was going on with the Greek gods.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  Very cool.

• 27:39Alex O'Connor?

  But the foundation of reality is not some narrative character that we use to explain where the thunder comes from. It's, it's the foundation of reality. It's the, it's the thing in which we all move and have our being. It's the, it's the, the substance of the universe, you know.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  Is consciousness one of the biggest holes in the atheist worldview?

• 28:04Alex O'Connor?

  It's one of the biggest holes in, I think, basically every worldview. I don't think anybody has a, has a super comfortable, like, home for consciousness with the rest of their thought. Except maybe those philosophies which make it primary and foundational, which is typically associated with the Indian tradition. In Western philosophy, it's like this kind of really uncomfortable, strange facet of reality that doesn't neatly fit into anything else that we, that we like to talk about. I don't think it matters whether you're an atheist or whether you're a theist. Because a, a lot of believers in God also think that there is a material universe, and somehow consciousness is this separate thing, which

• 28:49Alex O'Connor?

  you've got like an immaterial soul, which like interacts with your physical body. That's super problematic. For an atheist, you can also believe that like consciousness is immaterial, and you can believe in souls and minds just without believing in God, right? It's not really about belief in God and atheism and theism. The question for me is, is the foundational question of philosophy, I think, is consciousness. Because everything comes through consciousness. Consciousness is the thing that you start with. You don't start with a table and a microphone and another person. You start with your experience of those things. And it's always, it's always mediated through experience. It's impossible to just directly interact with this thing we call the table. There's only how it looks, how it feels, how it sounds, how it tastes, if you want to just give it a lick. There's

• 29:33Alex O'Connor?

  no other way to access it. And the question, I suppose, is if we believe that there is a real thing out there, a thing in itself, as Kant would have said, but we can't access it directly, you know, where, where does that leave us? What is our actual knowledge of the universe? What is it based on? And what are we actually interacting with? You'll never, it, it sounds a bit weird to say, but you, you never interact, strictly speaking, with the table. You interact with how the table presents itself to you through consciousness, right? You get what I'm saying? Like, if you took away the way the table looked, if you were blind, you could still know what a table is, but you'd, you'd feel it and you'd listen to it. But if you took away the, the sense of touch, and then the sense

• 30:17Alex O'Connor?

  of hearing, and then sense of smell, and the sense of taste, what are you left with? How would you interact with this table? You literally would have no access to it, right? So we look through consciousness at everything else. And then everyone's like, "Okay, so we want to understand consciousness. We want to know what consciousness actually is. So we have to sort of look at consciousness." But there's no way to do that, because consciousness is the thing with which you look. It's like trying to point a flashlight at the flashlight. It's like trying to point at your own finger. It's not possible to do. And any kind of investigation into the nature of something firstly defines what it is, then compares it to things which, which it is not, and then tries to sort of figure out like maybe where it came from, or what its nature is, or something like that. But consciousness evades all of these kinds of investigations, because you can't point at it. You also can't

• 31:01Alex O'Connor?

  switch it off without sort of switching off the very mechanism by which you can do anything. It's also impossible to define. I think it's literally impossible to define.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Why?

• 31:10Alex O'Connor?

  Because.

• 31:12Alex O'Connor?

  Well, what is a definition? It's really interesting this, right? If you think about a dictionary, it's entirely self referential, right? Every word is defined in terms of another word. There's no like objective like basis from which it's all coming, right? It's all interrelated. And so the only way that can work then is when I define an object with words, you need to know what those words mean. And to define those words, you need to know what those words mean. And where does this all start? How do you start knowing what any words mean? Probably by experiencing the world, pointing at things and being told. So when you grow up, someone goes can, table, light, person, right? And they also go wood, metal, metal. And you start figuring out what these things have in common and what they don't. And you start to realize, ah, that's what a cup is. That's what a, that's what a table is.

• 31:57Alex O'Connor?

  That's what metal is through experience, through your experience of the world. In the same way that you can talk about yellow. But you can, you can tell me that a, a, a English phone box is red. And we can both know what that means. But only if we've at some point experienced red. If you'd never experienced red, if you were blind, you'd have literally no idea what it meant. And you, you literally couldn't define the word red. You couldn't do it.

• 32:23Alex O'Connor?

  So when it comes to defining consciousness, what do we do? Well, we want to kind of point at consciousness. We want to say, here's consciousness, like, let's, let's point at consciousness and, and, and see what it is. But there's, there's no way to do that because consciousness is the thing through which you observe everything else in the world. And if you look at people's attempts to define consciousness, it's always super foggy and super vague. Like the most famous definition is Thomas Nagels from the seventies, where he says that if something is conscious, there is something it is like to be that thing. And you get what he means? Yeah, there's something it's like to be you. There's something it's like to be probably a dog, but there's nothing it's like to be a rock. And that's what consciousness is. Fair enough, but that's already a very functional like definition.

• 33:07Alex O'Connor?

  Something it is like to be like, that's not very exhaustive. We don't know quite what that means, except through examples, right? And Al Seth sometimes says that consciousness is the thing which goes away when you go under general anesthetic. Great. And it, and it goes away when you go to a deep dreamless sleep. Yeah, and I understand that. And so I know what the kind of thing we're talking about, but it's not a precise definition. Because every single thing in the universe that you've ever experienced or encountered has been filtered through consciousness. So if you try to put a little boundary, a little box around it and say, this is what conscious experience is, and everything, everything outside of it is not, but what's outside of it? There's nothing outside of it. You could say, oh, well, the, you know, the, the table as it's not perceived is outside of that. But you, you have no conception of that because your only conception of the table is from within that conscious,

• 33:51Alex O'Connor?

  that conscious experience. So I think it's literally impossible to define for that reason. You can't point at it and you can't compare it to other things.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Does that suggest that science will never explain consciousness?

• 34:01Alex O'Connor?

  It doesn't suggest it. I think it entails it. I think the science is extremely good at doing what it does. But people are over optimistic about its, um, you know, possible extent. I mean, what, what does science do? Science, science describes regularities in the universe. And it breaks things down into more fundamental components and describes them more accurately that way. And it mathematizes. Everything in, in science is written in the language of mathematics. You know, Galileo famously says that mathematics is the language of the universe, right? Any physical law is like, is a mathematical equation. If you look at the, the Newton's theory of gravity, for example,

• 34:44Alex O'Connor?

  it's not an explanation for why objects fall to the ground. It's a description of how they fall to the ground. It's a description of how things move. I talk about this all the time, like when Newton discovered gravity, what did he actually discover? People knew that things fell to the ground, right? Everybody knew that already. What, what did Newton actually figure out that people before him hadn't figured out? He realized that the same thing that makes objects fall also keeps the planets in orbit. Cause he looked at the moon and was like, was the moon also falling towards the earth? And his revolutionary answer was yes, the moon is constantly falling towards the earth. It's just that it's also moving sideways, right? You know what I'm saying? Like if, if the moon just fell, it would crash into us. But if you knock it to the side, it would kind of do that. And if you knock it a bit further, it would kind of do that.

• 35:29Alex O'Connor?

  And if you get it at just the right speed, it will keep falling towards the earth, but also keep missing it. And that's what orbit is. And that's what's going on in the International Space Station right now. Yeah, a lot of people think that on the ISS, there's like zero gravity, you know, because they're like floating around. What percentage of gravity do you think those guys are feeling compared to us right now being rooted to the earth?

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Ten, five?

• 35:50Alex O'Connor?

  It's like 99.9%. Yeah, they're like this close to the earth. Gravity doesn't just switch off like that. They're being pulled right down to the earth just as fast as you and I are right now. But the difference is that they're also moving sideways. So they're just constantly falling towards the earth and just missing it. So, you know, if you were to, this was Einstein described this as his, as his happiest thought of his life. He imagined that somebody like fell off a building. Imagine you're falling off a building and you're holding this kind of, this can of Newtonic and you're falling through the air. And if I let go of the can, what happens? It just like stays in front of me, right? It's not going to like fall down faster than me or what? It's just like, if, if I'm falling and I'm holding a bunch of objects and I let go of them, they're all just falling next to me. And there's air, there's air resistance.

• 36:33Alex O'Connor?

  So, you know, there might be a bit of movement, but if I was just falling in, in a perfect vacuum, it would be indistinguishable from like floating in deep space. You know what I mean? Do you let go of something and it just stays there? And this was one of Einstein's sort of important realizations, but that's like on the ISS. The reason why when you let go of something on the ISS, it just floats is because you're both falling towards the earth at the same speed. But you're also like falling past the earth constantly. That's what orbit is, right? And Newton realized this and it was amazing. He's like, oh, so, so like, you know, it's not angels pushing around the planets. Instead, it's like the same thing that makes objects fall to the ground. Great. And then he mathematically described it with his theory of, of, um, gravity, which is like,

• 37:15Alex O'Connor?

  it's got a bunch of letters and an, and an equals symbol and, and things in the universe are represented by letters. So you've got F, the force of gravity, like the strength of it is equal to big G and then the, the masses of the two objects and then the distance between them, right? And all of those things, how they relate to each other, he mathematically describes it. And he works out that if something is two times further away, the gravity is four times weaker. And if it's four times further away, it's 16 times weaker, it's squared. And that's his theory of gravity. Wicked. So now he can describe the motions of the planets. But then in the scolium, the, in, in like the appendix to the book in which he published this, Principe of Mathematica, he explicitly addresses the question, okay,

• 37:57Alex O'Connor?

  but as for what gravity actually is, like why things are actually falling to the ground? He famously says hypothesis non finger, you know, he doesn't know. I frame no hypothesis, no idea, right? And he also says, and this isn't a question for natural philosophy, what we would now call science. He says, that's not the kind of question science can answer because of course it can't. Science like describes things mathematically, it describes regularities. And it tells you that it breaks one thing down to a, to a more fundamental level. It takes the table and it describes it in terms of atoms. It takes the atoms and it describes it in terms of electrons and, and so on, right? But it's always description at a more fundamental level. That's what explanation kind of is. It's description at a more fundamental level. And so then there's this idea that we'll be able to do the same thing with consciousness,

• 38:40Alex O'Connor?

  that we'll be able to like somehow explain where it comes from or turn it into like a mathematical formula or something like, there'll be some mathematical formula that will tell us what it is and why it's there, not just how it behaves. Don't get me wrong, you can explain brain activity extremely well. You know, you can describe the neuronal activity of the brain, but I could tell you everything about what's going on in your brain. And you'd still be left with the question of why you're experiencing any of it. Like I can, I can track every single neuronal activity. I can, I can talk about the structure of the brain. I can tell you what parts of the brain are lighting up, so to speak, when certain experiences are happening. But I have no idea why the experience is coming along with the, with the brain activity. So, so, I mean, like it's, it's, it's a, it's a bit controversial, right?

• 39:25Alex O'Connor?

  Cause people, people think that we're sort of gonna, we're gonna get there at some point, but think of it this way, right? Like imagine if you had access to all of the scientific information that could ever be accessed by anybody. Imagine you had a time machine and you went forward in time and you learn everything there is to know about the science of the eye of color. So you learn about wavelengths, you learn about the cultural connotations of things like blue and red and how red is bad. You learn all of this kind of stuff. But imagine that at the same time, you're blind. You've never actually seen any of these colors, but you learn everything that it's possible to reduce to like explanation in words or in maths or anything like that.

• 40:10Alex O'Connor?

  Do you think you'd understand what blue is at the end of that process? Do you think that if you, if you suddenly regained your sight and saw blue for the first time, would you learn something new? The answer seems to be yes. And if you do learn something new, that's the experience. That's what the conscious experience of blue is. And that's something which can never be written down. It can't be turned into a mathematical syllogism. It can't be communicated from one person to another. Cause the project of science is to move away from subjectivity and towards objectivity, right? That's literally what science is supposed to do. Like I, I see a world one way, you see a world another way. So let's investigate how it actually appears from this imaginary third person perspective, right? But consciousness is subjectivity. That's what consciousness is.

• 40:55Alex O'Connor?

  Consciousness is the, the subjective like experience of the world. And so the more, the, the less subjective you get and the more objective you get in your description, the further away you're getting from consciousness. And the closer you get to consciousness, the further away you can get from objective description.

• 41:11Speaker 00

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• 42:20Alex O'Connor?

  Swenched.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Are there any other areas that you think science will never be able to explain?

• 42:29Alex O'Connor?

  I'm not sure.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Wondering whether the category of consciousness is unique in itself.

• 42:34Alex O'Connor?

  I think it, I think it really is. I think consciousness is unlike anything else in the universe. And it, because it's not just another thing in the universe, right? It's not like you've got the table and the chair and you've got your ear and you've got your hand and then you've got consciousness. It's like all of the other stuff is, is seen through consciousness. So consciousness is not just like this, it, it's why it sounds weird to people. It's like, oh, you said, so you're telling me that science can explain this and explain that and explain that, but it won't explain this one thing. It's like, it's not just this one other thing that sits in the universe like everything else. It is the tool with which you are empirically investigating the world around you. It's like you've got this, this brilliant like tool, you've got like a wrench that just like helps you fix every single thing in the world.

• 43:16Alex O'Connor?

  Every, there's nothing in the world that can't be fixed by this brilliant wrench that you've created. And then your wrench breaks. You think, well, why don't we just fix the wrench with the wrench? You can't do it. It's the tool with which you are investigating the rest of the world. And that's what consciousness is. It's the thing with which turn off consciousness and try and do science. See how far you get. Try to investigate the world and run experiments and write things down and turn them into mathematical syllogisms without some kind of, with, whilst being an unconscious sort of agent. It, it's, it's not something that you would, you would be able to do.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Does that mean studying consciousness has made atheism harder to defend?

• 43:54Alex O'Connor?

  I think it's made materialism harder to defend.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Can you explain?

• 44:00Alex O'Connor?

  You can believe that consciousness is completely inexplicable. You can believe that consciousness is foundational. You can believe that consciousness is in tiny atoms. You could believe that consciousness is a complete illusion. None of that necessarily has any connection to whether or not you believe in God.

• 44:15Alex O'Connor?

  Like you don't need to believe in God to believe that the mind is immaterial. These two things aren't connected. But yeah, like materialism, which often goes alongside atheism, is, I think, pretty impossible to defend as a theory of the world. I mean, what is materialism? What does that actually mean? Well, the, the universe is made out of matter. Okay. What's matter? What is that? It's like atoms and stuff, right? Great. Okay. What's an atom? And this is, this is, this is an old thought, like Bertrand Russell had this problem. So, okay, well, what is an atom? Well, it's made out of protons and electrons. Okay, what's an electron?

• 44:48Alex O'Connor?

  It's a fundamentally, fundamental negative, negatively charged particle. Okay, what does, what does that mean? It means that if you bring it into contact with another negative particle, they'll repel each other, you know? Okay, that's what it does. But what is it? What's the substance? What's the actual nature of the thing that we're, we're interacting with? And that's a question which science can't answer because it's a descriptive enterprise. And that's not an insult to science. Of course it can't answer that question. It tells you how things behave. It tells you what things do. It doesn't tell you what they are. It doesn't give you a substantial understanding of anything. Any more than the rules of chess can give you a substantial understanding of what a chess piece is made out of. You know what I mean? It tells you how things behave in the universe. Objects don't move because of Newton's laws of motion.

• 45:31Alex O'Connor?

  Newton's laws of motion describe how they move when they're put in motion. You know what I mean? And so like, I think that trying to explain the nature of fundamental reality, what it is, with science, which is a, which is fundamentally an enterprise of describing how things behave. It's like behavioralism about atoms. Is a mistake in the same way that if a carpenter was trying to work out what to build a, a little, you know, king piece out of, that they studied the rules of chess to find out. It's like a totally different enterprise.

• 46:11Alex O'Connor?

  I don't think, I don't think that, that, that they can, they can do that. So, okay, so, so then what actually is the foundational stuff of reality? You know, like maybe the only answer is like, we don't know, you know? There's no way to access that. Like, I'm, I'm not trying to say that the only way to solve this problem is to have some crazy views about consciousness. I'm just trying to say that

• 46:28Alex O'Connor?

  science will not tell you what the foundational nature of substance of reality is. And most scientists, by the way, just agree with this. They're like, yeah, but you know, why should it? You know, there only is what it does. That's, that's all there is. I think that's a bit weird, but you know, maybe it's true.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  There only is what it does.

• 46:41Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly. Cause then it's like, well, what is the thing that's doing this? It's like, what are you even talking about? And that's what Carlo Rovelli has probably the best defense of this in, in recent publications. Like he just put out a book that I think defends us here quite well. But the point is that when someone says, I'm a materialist, I want to know what they mean. It seems like they're making a claim about what the universe is made out of. Not just how it behaves, not just what it does, but what it actually is, like what's its substance? And yet, when you break it down, it's like literally impossible to define. So maybe by a materialist, they really mean something like, well, I just don't believe that there's anything other than that which can be described by science. And that's fine. But then, then the view just sounds really weird because you're saying that the only thing that exists is behavior.

• 47:26Alex O'Connor?

  But there's no thing doing the behaving. There's got to be some substance. So for me, I find it kind of interesting that at the foundation of reality, literally, you don't have a ground to stand on. Like the substance of reality is completely impenetrable to science. And it's not something I think it will ever be able to answer. And again, I want to stress this. Scientists broadly agree with this. This isn't some controversial weird like critique of science. This is just a, a defining of the boundaries. It's just like, it's not an insult to the rules of chess to say that they'll never explain music theory. You know, it's not an insult to the method of science to say that it will never tell you about the substance of what's.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  I think the difference is that science hoped to be able to describe everything. That everything should be able to be described by the games of chess.

• 48:06Alex O'Connor?

  If anybody thinks that, then, then I think that they're fooling themselves. Science can explain everything. Can, can science explain its own presuppositions? Like, eh, nothing, nothing can be, can be, no, no method can be sort of self explaining in, in, in that respect, you know? There are always going to be things that are inaccessible to science. I mean, trivially, there are things that are inaccessible to science. The, the foundational laws of logic are not scientifically provable. You can't scientifically prove that other minds exist. You can't scientifically prove

• 48:34Alex O'Connor?

  that the external world exists. There's no way to scientifically prove that because the moment you start doing an observation, you're assuming that the external world exists. But yeah, it's fine. Do that if you want, but don't claim that that's something that you, you've like started with science. You don't start with science and then get experience. You start with experience through which you do science. Experience has to come first. So there's this kind of, is this kind of like

• 48:59Alex O'Connor?

  emptiness at the, at the bottom of reality. And some philosophers believe that reality is literally empty in that way. Like there's a school of, um, the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism has this famous concept of emptiness where they think that everything, there is no substance to the universe. There's only like interactions. It's all a bit weird. But if you think there is something there, like I do, there is, I'm really, there's something in the world. There's a real is-ness of the business. Then the mystery is, okay, well, what is it? And the critic might say, okay, Alex, but like, how would you like, explain the is-ness? Like, what, what, what method could you use to, to sort of describe or explain the nature of something? Because like anytime you're using language, anytime you're trying to explain a concept,

• 49:44Alex O'Connor?

  you're sort of talking about it. You're not, you're not, you know, if, if the, if the nature of reality is this irreducible substance, you know, how are you going to explain it? And I think, okay, good question. Well, what is the one thing in the universe that you just have direct access to? Not indirectly, but directly. You know exactly what it is without needing to be explained, without being even able to explain it to other people. You just know exactly what it is. And the answer is conscious experience. That's the one thing you directly experience.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  If the universe is fundamentally experience, fundamentally experiential, how different is that from saying it's God?

• 50:23Alex O'Connor?

  Depends on how you, how you cash it out, as philosophers like to say.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Well, so previously you mentioned a lot of people have these numinous experiences. This thing. And then this thing is critiqued and assessed using a bunch of tools, many of which are either squarely in the purview of or tangential to science. And if experience is what's being criticized, but you have said that the ability to describe and assess our experiential interpretation of the world is fundamentally outside of the purview of science. Does that not make the God experience assessment thing just kind of?

• 51:12Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I think this is why I think that the mystical traditions and the experiential traditions. Have this element of unity. It's not like communication. It's not like you have this experience where you feel like you're totally sort of, everything's normal and you're just like chatting to God. You feel this sense in which you are like, you are like connected to this divinity. You're like some kind of expression of this divinity.

• 51:37Alex O'Connor?

  And I think that if you believe that what we call God is best described as like the foundational consciousness of the universe, then you're kind of an expression of that consciousness. This is, this is where Indian traditions better capture this kind of thought. Like they, their view of Brahman, which is their word for ultimate reality, which sometimes is thought of as like equivalent to the word God, but it's not quite like that. They don't think of it as like this being who exists and creates the universe with agency. And they just think that Brahman is just the big ocean in which we're all swimming. And they use these kinds of, these kinds of analogies all the time. They say that what you is, what yourself is, is like a whirlpool in some water. It's like you can point at it. It's a distinct thing. It's, it's, it's doing something, but it's just an expression of this big ocean. It's not separable from the ocean. You can't like pick it

• 52:21Alex O'Connor?

  up out of the ocean and like move it somewhere else. Right? It's one way in which this ocean is expressing itself. So for, for idealists and panpsychists and people who believe that the universe is fundamentally conscious, they typically think of everything that exists in the world as like a manifestation of consciousness. And so the religious experience on their interpretation would be like a realization of this, a recognition of this. You know, when people take psychedelic drugs and they feel like they're sort of one with nature, they feel this connection. They start to feel as though like, I mean, what does that mean? I'm one with everything. What on earth can that possibly mean? You know, I'm the same thing as that tree over there. That's absolutely ridiculous. Unless you consider it on the level of like, you know, we are both expressions of the same thing, you know, in the same way that all of the leaves of the tree might be able to look at

• 53:05Alex O'Connor?

  each other and go, oh, like we're all one great big organism, you know? I think that's kind of what's being driven at. So in a religious context, it would be like, we are expressions of the foundational consciousness. And the, the primary thinker in the Western tradition for this is Spinoza. A lot of people say, I believe in Spinoza's God. Right? And what they mean by that is, I'm an atheist and I love science. Right? They, people have this idea that what Spinoza did was just sort of take this idea of God and drag it down to nature. And you say, I just think nature is God. No, Spinoza elevated nature to the level of divinity. Spinoza thinks that there's one ultimate substance. And he famously refers to it as, as what would it be? Deus vivit natura. God or nature. He doesn't really care what you call it, but he says that it's this foundational

• 53:49Alex O'Connor?

  thing in which we all sort of move.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Question.

• 53:53Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  You, not necessarily famously, but at least publicly have a strained relationship with meditation.

• 54:02Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  I think someone tried to get you to do it at some point. You had a

• 54:08Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I've had conversations about

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Relatively unenjoyable experience.

• 54:11Alex O'Connor?

  I've never, I've never really enjoyed meditation.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  So what do you think is happening? Or what is it about very, very deeply experienced meditators? Where they all seem to converge on some sort of non-dual awareness? Some would call it an awakening experience. Some would say enlightenment. Some would say sort of an awareness of the, the, the boundary of duality is kind of dissolved between them and the world around them. As you were talking about the tree thing, it sort of got me thinking about that. You know, we were talking about convergent cultural evolution of lots of different cultures sort of arriving at this. It seems like the experience of some sort of non-dual enlightenment moment is also relatively

• 54:57Speaker 00

  very rare, but evenly distributed across people from different cultures in different times, using different processes and different techniques. Have you ever considered what's going on there?

• 55:08Alex O'Connor?

  I mean, it seems to me that they're, they're probably apprehending a kind of truth, which I think what meditation probably does for people is it allows them to kind of step outside of their concepts. This is what people celebrate psychedelics for as well. It's like, it's not like, if you take a psychedelic drug and the world starts going all funky, sometimes the feeling is not so much, everything's really weird. It's rather, everything's always been like this and I'm only now just noticing. Right? And the way that that works is it, is it gets rid of your kind of, your concepts and your, your, the way in which you perceive the world. I think Joe Rogan talked about this idea of like a, or someone on his show talked about like a sled going down the, going down the, the ice or the, or the snow. He was like, you know, you've been riding on this sled that just goes

• 55:52Alex O'Connor?

  down the, goes down the hill. And what psychedelics do is, is they get rid of the, they get rid of the imprint in the sand. And now you can just sort of freely zip around. It's like you get rid of your concept and you can just see the world for what it is, or for how it presents itself to you like naively. And I imagine that meditators manage to kind of do the same thing. So the biggest thing that gets in the way of like, understanding the oneness of everything and the foundational nature of consciousness and all this kind of stuff, like all the weird and wacky stuff. The thing that gets in the way of that is, is like our, our concepts is the way we like to box things in is the fact that when I see the table, I'm convinced that I'm just seeing the table, that like my eyes are like these transparent windows into the world, that I'm, that I'm literally just experiencing the world as it is. And like, for me, philosophically, I need to remind myself, I am

• 56:35Alex O'Connor?

  not experiencing the world as it is. I'm experiencing it from a perspective, it's being translated, you know, by my brain into a way that I can understand. I like, this table appears to me to be like one color, even though there are loads of different colors bouncing off, my brain is translating. We know that our brain does that. Have you ever seen these optical illusions, like the Rubik's Cube illusion and stuff like that, where these two things are the same color? Can you believe it? The reason they work is because your brain is hardwired to like tell you a story about reality. This square is actually this color, but you perceive it as a different color because that's what helps you to make sense of reality. Right? Those kinds of concepts mean that when we look at objects, we're not really looking at the nature of reality. We're looking at how it presents itself to us. If we can somehow switch those off, then we start to see it for, for sort of what it really

• 57:19Alex O'Connor?

  is. You're like the, you're like the painter, who when you see the blue sky, you actually realize that, oh, there's a bit of green and a bit of purple. Actually, there's a bit of white, you know, where the, where the sun reflects off the water, it's actually pure white and there's a bit of orange and, you know, this kind of stuff, right? And painters are masters of this. That's why it's so difficult to paint, because like when I look at a table, I think it's brown. But dude, if you look at the colors on this table, there's blues and there's, there's whites somewhere in the middle and stuff. And I think that something like that is going on with these meditative experiences and psychedelics are a bit of a shortcut to the, to the same thing, which is that the concepts get turned off, which is probably the reason why when you look at the table and psychedelics, you're like, whoa.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  So cool.

• 58:00Alex O'Connor?

  Because actually it is so cool. Like this, this, this table is swimming with texture and color and like weirdness. And it's kind of warped because the bit that's closer to you is big and the bit that's further away is small.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  If only you were able to see it without your presuppositions.

• 58:13Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly. But your brain is telling you, no, it's just a table.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Because it's less effective for you to be in awe of every single square centimeter that you look at or sound that you hear or smell that you

• 58:25Alex O'Connor?

  And so I feel like what meditation does, like if you, if you get this like, man, I don't know much about, I've never tried this kind of thing, but like, you know, people do like mantras. They just sit there and they just say the same word over and over and over and over again. And I think part of the idea is that you sort of, when you start thinking about what you're doing, when you think about that, like you, you try to sort of get rid of those thoughts and pull yourself right back to this, this state so that all of these like intellectual ideas, the concepts, the ideas of this is what I'm doing, this is where I am, this is, they just start to fade away until at some point, they're so far like outside of your apprehension that you just start to feel like it's all just happening.

• 58:59Speaker 00

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• 59:42Speaker 00

  free trial today by going to the link in the description below or heading to Shopify.com/Modern Wisdom. That's Shopify.com/ModernWisdom. Would you say then that a very experienced meditator going through a non-dual awakening enlightenment experience, are they perceiving reality more accurately, more plainly than other people?

• 1:00:07Alex O'Connor?

  It's impossible to say, right? Because there is only how you perceive the world. It's like there's, there's no sort of objective world we can access to which we can compare your experience and my experience.

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  Let's say that I could give you the ethics board pass to be able to do this. Wouldn't it be a cool kind of experiment to run to maybe have a little microcosm of humans? What was that one? Was it Mother? Was that the movie where a baby was raised by a robot? This child was raised and raised and raised and raised and didn't realize that there was maybe other people out there, but learned to speak, but had none of the sort of cultural presuppositions about the world. How fascinating it would be and completely unethical to create a little community, little human

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  breeding colony thing, where you were able from birth to kind of prescribe a, the, the most de-patented perspective possible.

• 1:01:10Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Right? Because no human, even going back to proto-humans, even going back to primates, everyone has been influenced by that that came before and the lessons and the, you know, sort of even the genetic imbuing of this, some of the instinctual things that you do. But I don't know, maybe through some combination of genetic engineering.

• 1:01:27Alex O'Connor?

  Well, you might like this. I mean, some people who are born blind, like there are curable kinds of blindness. There are lots of different ways in which you can be blind and some of them are at least partly curable. And so imagine you're born blind, you've never seen anything, but you've experienced the world through touch and sound and stuff. And so you've, you know what it is, you know what a cube is and you know what a sphere is, for example. And imagine that I then like fix your eyesight, right? And suddenly you can see it for the first time. And in front of you is a cube and a sphere. And you know what those objects are from, from your touch of them, but you've never experienced the sight before. Do you suspect that if I turn on your eyesight and you looked at them, you'd be able to tell which is which?

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  I'd suspect so.

• 1:02:05Alex O'Connor?

  So funnily enough, it seems like people actually can't, which is shocking, right? I mean, that's just shocking. How, what would you

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  Being able to feel something that doesn't translate into being

• 1:02:14Alex O'Connor?

  One of them's pointy, one of them's sm- yeah, but you don't know what that means. You, you don't

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  Pointy. What is pointy?

• 1:02:19Alex O'Connor?

  You've never like connected those two experiences in your mind. And, and I think that like experiments like that, which, you know, it like really go to show the extent to which

• 1:02:34Alex O'Connor?

  Our, our understanding of the world is just the way that our different senses sort of interact with each other. You know, like we, we just, we only have our senses, we only have our experience. And by the way, like, a lot of people call themselves empiricists, which is a very sort of sciencey sounding, like, you know, rational minded approach, which is like, oh, I only believe in what I can observe and what I can test. And I'm like, yeah, me too, actually. Like, we're kind of, it's like a bit of a horseshoe where the empiricist and the, the idealist or the, the consciousness first person is saying the same thing, which is like, all of your knowledge comes through experience, all of it. It's just that the empiricist typically thinks that your experience is direct and

• 1:03:14Alex O'Connor?

  real and accurate and, and that you are literally just somehow interacting with reality as it really is. Whereas the consciousness person says, actually, you're interacting with how it appears to you. And I think that the stuff like the optical illusions and stuff kind of, kind of prove this. We can't experience infrared radiation, you know, we, we can't see it. If we could, the world would just look different. You know, birds can navigate with, um, by using the magnetic field of the earth, like another sense.

• 1:03:40Speaker 00

  The sense of seeing ultraviolet.

• 1:03:41Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly. Thomas Nagel, where he gave this famous definition, I gave earlier.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  What it's like to be a bat.

• 1:03:45Alex O'Connor?

  What it's like to be a bat. What is it like to be a bat? And he asks that question because he's like, okay, so the, the key question is not, can you, Chris, imagine yourself like hanging upside down for most of the day and having webbed like arms so you can fly around? That's what it would be like for you to act like a bat. The question is, what is it like to be a bat for the bat? And the conclusion of the essay, which I recommend everyone reads is like, there's no way to know that except from the inside. Because again, what could it even mean to give an objective description of the subjective experience? What does that even mean? The further away you move from subjectivity, like, the further away you're moving from consciousness.

• 1:04:26Alex O'Connor?

  So I, I was, I was thinking about this, and this might sound really weird, but I was reading, I was reading Merlin Sheldrake's book about mushrooms, which is really interesting. And he was talking about these amazing dogs that can go around sort of sniffing out truffles. And I thought, okay. Suddenly something kind of struck me, which is a bit weird about this, which is like,

• 1:04:46Alex O'Connor?

  we sometimes feel as though we can explain our sensory, like, interactions with the world in objective terms. So when I explain, when I want to know what's going on with sight, I explain it in terms of wavelengths and I explain it in terms of brain chemistry and what neurons are doing, right? If I want to explain hearing, it's like vibrations in the air and whatnot. And then I was like, okay, to smell, if I want to explain what's happening with smell, you know, what would I do? If, if I asked you like, you know, if, if like your kid comes up to you and says, you know, what, what's going on when I smell? How does my nose smell things? What might you tell them? Like, what, what would you tell them?

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  Little particles enter into the two holes in the front of your face and there are sensors inside.

• 1:05:27Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly, right? Great. So you're, you're talking about these little particles and you're talking about the nose and the holes and, okay. In, in, in a very real sense, that's kind of just what it looks like, right? You're, you're describing to me, if I took like a microscope and looked at the, the particles of air, then I'd find these little, these little particles. And then if I look at your nose, or maybe if I'm blind, I could touch your nose, I'd know what a hole is. You know what I mean? Like, there, there's no way for me to access what a nose is except how it looks and how it feels and whatnot. And so when I describe these particles attaching to, you know, the, the holes in your nose and what, and whatnot, I'm kind of describing what something smells like in terms of what it looks like. Do you get what I'm saying? There's, there's no sense of like, why is it that when I explain what it smells like in terms of what it looks like, I've thereby like reduced it?

• 1:06:13Alex O'Connor?

  Any more than if you wanted to know, if you saw, if you looked through a microscope and saw lots of little particles sort of attaching to my nose and you said, what's going on there? Can you explain like, can you explain how or why that's happening? And I would go, oh, it's, it's the smell of lavender, you know? That's what's happening. You're just explaining one sense in terms of another, you know, like we, we prioritize sight, I think, in the sciences over, over most other things. But you're kind of just describing how reality looks at a more fundamental level. When you describe the table in terms of atoms, you're just described, the table looks to me like a table, but if I look at it more closely through, through a microscope, like an electron microscope, then I'll, then I'll see it, it'll appear to me as, as these things called atoms. If I look even deeper, it'll appear to me as, as, as an electron and whatnot.

• 1:06:55Alex O'Connor?

  And you never actually get like inside, you never actually get further than, than how it appears to you. So the, I mean, this was the big canting distinction. Emmanuel Kant famously distinguishes between what he calls the phenomena and the numina. The phenomena, as in like phenomenal, is like how the world appears. It's how the world appears in your awareness. But there's also this thing, the numina, or as he would have said, the thing in itself, like the actual thing that is appearing to you. And Kant was basically like, look, um, you just have no access to the numina. You just never will. Like, you will only ever know how things appear to you.

• 1:07:34Alex O'Connor?

  And Arthur Schopenhauer comes along afterwards, sees himself as a kind of continuation of Kant and says, actually, um, yeah, and you, you never have access to the phenomena, to the numina of anything around you. I only have access to the phenomenon of the table, phenomenon of the cup, the phenomenon of the microphone. But there's one thing in the universe that appears to me in two different ways at the same time. And that's my own body, that's myself. Right? If I look at my own hand, it's just an object in the world. It's got shape and size and color and it reflects things and obeys the laws of physics. And if I flick it, it moves, you know? But it also at the same time presents itself internally to me. I know what it feels like to have a hand, right? If I look at myself in a mirror, I will appear in my vision, just as you appear in

• 1:08:18Alex O'Connor?

  my vision, it's just an object in the world. But I also have this internal sort of sense, like I'm appearing in two ways to my own understanding, right?

• 1:08:29Alex O'Connor?

  And so Schopenhauer was like, look, from the outside, it looks like a finger. From the inside, it feels like a finger, right? And that for him was the key to this phenomena and numina distinction. The phenomena of my finger is how it appears to you right now, which is the same as it looks to me. But the numina of the finger is like how it feels from the inside. And then Schopenhauer was like, okay, maybe I'm the only thing in the universe that has this particular internal awareness, which he called will, you could call it consciousness, whatever. Maybe like I'm the only thing in the universe that has that. And most people find that quite unlikely. Like, I think that you're conscious, I think that other humans are conscious, right? So I say, actually, maybe your numina is the same as mine, that what's going on inside of you is something similar, this kind of awareness, consciousness, will.

• 1:09:12Alex O'Connor?

  And then he's like, well, maybe it's only humans that have this numina. And everything else in the universe has a numina, we just never know what it is. Or maybe it's just the same thing. Maybe the most parsimonious explanation is that, you know, the one thing I know in the universe in itself, I do know the thing in itself, maybe everything has that same kind of nature. And he starts sort of expanding this, this internal sense of will that he has for himself into other humans, then to animals, then to plants, then to just the, the nature of the world itself. And he's not saying, I mean, consciousness is not this like complex thing of like awareness of the world and sights and sounds. For him, it's like this, this very basic blind will. It's just like a very, very rudimentary thing. Like consciousness is, is not complex, in my view.

• 1:09:57Alex O'Connor?

  It's one of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that consciousness requires complexity. I think consciousness itself is extremely simple. It's just awareness, it's just direct awareness. But it can sometimes complexly manifest. So you can have complex experiences in the same way that if I take some bricks, which are really simple building objects, I can build really complicated structures. Like, I, I sometimes, you know, compare a rock to the Empire State Building. And I imagine telling somebody like, look, look at the difference here. Like, look at how amazing this Empire State Building is. It's got elevators, it's got cash points, it's got automatic doors, it's got toilets with flushing systems, it's incredible. And look at this rock, it's just dead, inert, doing nothing. If I told someone, guess what? These are actually made out of the same stuff. Someone might go, what are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense.

• 1:10:42Alex O'Connor?

  It's like, yeah, because the stuff it's made out of is really simple. It's just arranged and expressing itself in a more complex fashion over there. So when we look at our own consciousness, that is memory and color perception and sense of self and worrying about our taxes and all of this kind of stuff and complex tastes and smells and whatnot, that doesn't indicate to me that consciousness is, is necessarily complex. It indicates to me that what we have is a very sort of complex kind of consciousness. But you could take that stuff away. You could just have, you could, you could conceive of some kind of being which just experiences blue surrounding it for all of eternity and nothing else, no sounds, no touch, just blueness, just straight experience of blueness. That'd be a very simple kind of existence, but there would be awareness happening, there'd

• 1:11:26Alex O'Connor?

  be awareness of the blueness, but it'd be very, very rudimentary.

• 1:11:30Alex O'Connor?

  So there's this idea that will kind of just pervade the universe. And I think the biggest roadblock that people have to accepting or entertaining the idea that consciousness is more foundational and rudimentary and maybe like sort of present in the universe and, and at least sort of embryonic form somewhere, is the fact that we are not surrounded by natural things anymore. We're surrounded by what a philosopher might call artifacts, which are essentially man-made objects. Like, everything I can see around me right now was constructed by a human being, except for you, right? And you're the only thing that seems conscious to me in this room. But like cameras and bricks and lights and heaters and plugs and wires and cables and all that, all of it is man-made.

• 1:12:12Alex O'Connor?

  If you were living in a forest and we were just sat looking around, this is why people enjoy doing psychedelics in nature, right? Because like,

• 1:12:20Alex O'Connor?

  It's much easier to sort of look around you and go like, oh, there's some kind of like animation happening. There's some kind of intrinsic motion. Michael Pollan's recent book is brilliant, talking about, you know, watching time lapses of plants growing and watching how they move and being like, dude, like these things, I don't, you know, I don't think they feel pain. I don't think they have a conscious awareness or anything, but there's something weird going on there, man. They're not, they're not dead like rocks. You know, there's something very strange going on. It's much easier to imagine that there's some kind of animating force behind the universe. But what we've done is we've taken all of that sort of natural motion and natural sort of behaviour and stuff, and we've sort of chopped it up and broken it and wedged it together and welded it and

• 1:13:02Alex O'Connor?

  mixed it into alloys and constructed these, these objects, which don't seem to behave in that way. Because they, because they don't, because they're, we've sort of forced them into a very unnatural organisation. It's complex, but it's unnatural. But if you actually look at the wood itself, if you zoom in to the level of the electron or whatever, suddenly again, it's this boiling, bubbling brew of activity and strangeness and whatnot, because that's the bit that humans haven't like broken and turned into an artefact. So I think it would be much, it would sound a lot less crazy if we were having this conversation in a forest, if you know what I mean. You know what I'm saying though? Like, it's like, it's, you've got to remember that you, you interact with artefacts all day long. Everything you interact with is an artefact. It's something that somebody has like, artefact is an artificially created.

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  Much more sterile environment.

• 1:13:45Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. And if you, if you go looking for, and, and again, I'm just representing this to you because I think it's fun, but like, if you're someone who thinks that the universe is made out of consciousness and like electrons are like, you know, conscious or something weird's going on there, like, yeah, it's not going to manifest itself at the level of a, of a pop filter for a, for a microphone. But what this, the defender of this view would say is like, yeah, but just zoom in for a second. And even the scientist will tell you that if you zoom in far enough, it's like, it's crazy what's going on down there. And, and physicists will say, and bear in mind, like, of course, I'm not, I'm not saying that anything I've said here should convince you that the universe is made out of consciousness. I actually kind of haven't made that argument. I've just explained why I think science has its limits and, and some of the, I guess, implications of a conscious foundation of the universe. I haven't really made the argument. But for people who think

• 1:14:28Alex O'Connor?

  that it just sounds stupid on the surface of it, I understand that. I thought that as well. But just bear in mind that nobody knows what's going on down at the foundations of reality. And some of the ideas that you hear are absolutely mental, but some of them are just like more widely accepted. Like, if you go into a physics seminar and ask world leading experts, what do you think an electron is? One of them will say, I think an electron is a cloud of mathematical probability, which when you observe it collapses into a definite position. And everyone goes, cool. It's the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. As I like to say, you can't spell Copenhagen interpretation without cope. Another physicist might say, okay, I think that when the electron has to make a decision,

• 1:15:12Alex O'Connor?

  when an electron has to make a decision, it kind of does both and like a new branch of reality is created such that every single time a quantum decision gets made, an entirely new universe is created. And we live in, and trillions and trillions of new realities are created every single second. This is the Everestian many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. And everyone goes, yeah, cool. That's really interesting. Yeah, let's look into that. And then somebody comes along and says, I think that this completely mysterious quality of consciousness that we cannot explain, try as we may, as emerging from foundational reality, which is not itself conscious, points to the fact that maybe there's some rudimentary level, rudimentary amount or level of consciousness at the foundations

• 1:15:57Alex O'Connor?

  of reality. And everyone goes, that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. You know what I mean? It seems like a bit unfair to the, to the, at least prima facie to the, to the consciousness foundational position. Because people will say, oh yeah, Alex, okay, like, oh, very interesting, or maybe not very interesting, but dude, like, consciousness clearly just like emerges, you know? Just like, you just put the brain together, the brain is a really complex organ. And if you put dead stuff together in the right order with the right complexity, it just produces thought, right? Just emerges, right? They say, it's sort of like how zeros and ones create an image on a computer screen. Yeah? Or how no individual atom is hot, but if you put them all together, you get this emergent

• 1:16:34Alex O'Connor?

  temperature called, thing called heat, right? Except, like, there are a few problems with that. One is just, just instinctively, right? People think that if you put matter together in the right order, with the right complexity, it will just produce thoughts, right? That's what, that's what a lot of people think. That's what the materialist believes. Okay, imagine I were to tell you, Chris, that I, right now, I'm going to think some thoughts, and I'm going to think really hard, and I'm going to think really complex thoughts in the right order and in the right way, and I'm going to produce some matter, just by thinking. I'm just going to produce a chair, or even like a single sort of molecule of

• 1:17:18Alex O'Connor?

  water. I'm just going to literally produce it out of nowhere by thinking the right thoughts in the right way. You'd think I'd gone crazy. And you wouldn't just say, well, that's really interesting. How are you going to do that? You'd say, that doesn't make sense. You're talking about two different kinds of thing. You can't produce matter by organising your thoughts in a complex fashion, right? Because there's this impenetrable division between the thought stuff and the physical stuff. And they might interact somehow, but you can't produce one out of the other. Okay. But when you flip it over, suddenly this is just like what everyone assumes about the nature of consciousness. Yeah, sure. Yeah, you put, you put matter together and you just, you get thoughts. How? Why? Why on earth would that happen? I've compared it before to like, I mean, we're talking about

• 1:17:59Alex O'Connor?

  two different kinds of things. It'd be like organising tangerines in the right way and somehow producing the concept of divorce, you know? Or like purple. It just doesn't make sense. And some people have said, oh yeah, but like, if you organise the tangerines to spell the word divorce, yeah, then it's like, yeah, okay. Only insofar as you then look at it. And, and so this is the other thing about emergence is that people give examples. What about the zeros and ones becoming an image on a screen? What about the temperature thing? And what people always miss about this is that every single example of emergence they ever give is something which emerges in conscious experience every single time. It's like, doesn't matter what example you're given. Firstly, notice that when someone says consciousness is emergent, they never tell you how it works. They never even try

• 1:18:44Alex O'Connor?

  to tell you how it works. They don't know how it works. Of course they don't. They just give you examples. They just say, oh, it emerges like this or like that. And every single example that they give, every single one of them is an example of something emerging in consciousness. So, take the temperature thing. Is an individual atom hot? Depends on what you mean by temperature, right? Because for a physicist, temperature is just the average vibrational sort of velocity of, of atoms, right? That's what temperature is made out of. An individual atom can have that. So an individual atom has this thing called temperature and so does lots of atoms put together. No problem. The thing that are interested in is, no, no, no, because when you put them together, there's, there's this extra new thing that comes about alongside just the vibrational stuff that you can predict with science. There's this like, well, there's this extra, what's the extra thing? What's

• 1:19:29Alex O'Connor?

  this thing called temperature called heat? What is it? That's when you touch it and it goes, ow. You know, it's when you get near it and you can feel the, that's the thing which emerges. And guess what? That's an experience. That's a kind of conscious experience. Right? Same thing with the computer and, and the image on the screen. The zeros and ones, really like transistors sort of on and off. They send electrical signals down cables and they connect to a monitor and the monitor lights up little LEDs, which causes electromagnetic waves to go out into the air and to touch your eye and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, cool. That's all just scientific. You can describe what's going on there. But what's the thing that you're interested in that emerges? Well, it emerges as like a picture of a daisy. Yeah. As long as you're looking at the screen. If there's no one looking at the screen, all there is is just electromagnetic radiation travelling

• 1:20:13Alex O'Connor?

  through the air. There's no yellowness, like in the universe. There's yellowness insofar as your brain translates electromagnetic radiation into yellowness. You know what I mean? So like, zeros and ones and transistors on a computer, all they actually produce is just more scientific, scientifically measurable stuff. That is light waves and photons. The thing that's interesting is how they sort of emerge, it's how emerges like an image, but an image is something that your eyes see. So in other words, it's like consciousness emerges just like X, Y and Z. But all of the examples of X, Y and Z are just like consciousness emerging. They're saying, oh, consciousness emerges just like all these other conscious experiences that emerge. You haven't told me anything. You've just

• 1:20:55Alex O'Connor?

  brute, like sort of forced this view that consciousness emerges. And because every example of emergence ever given is an example that emerges in consciousness, you're telling, you're essentially implying that the only thing in the universe which emerges is consciousness. I just, I just don't think that's true.

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• 1:21:55Speaker 00

  and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Near beer, terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company, fit for all times. What's the connection between consciousness and religion?

• 1:22:08Alex O'Connor?

  Well, for some people, they, they sort of use consciousness as an argument for the idea that there must be some kind of mind at the foundation of reality, right? Because if, if what I'm saying is true about emergence, that...

• 1:22:21Alex O'Connor?

  And by the way, people distinguish between strong and weak emergence. So if anyone's listening and is like, oh, but doesn't like a, doesn't like a family emerge out of its like members or doesn't like an ecosystem emerge out of its like individual organisms? Yes, but in a predictable way. In that if I know how all of those organisms are behaving, then I can predict at the larger scale, how this, what you're calling weekly emergent thing called an ecosystem would, would behave. The thing about consciousness is I could, I could sort of describe all of the brain activity and still be completely at a loss and never like expect or predict that it would come along with experience. Um, so people say, if this is right, if consciousness cannot be emergent, but we know

• 1:23:04Alex O'Connor?

  consciousness exists because we're having it right now, that means that somehow like consciousness must be like at the foundation of stuff. And there are a few ways of thinking about that. A panpsychist says, okay, great, that means atoms are conscious. It's a bit weird in my view. I don't really think that that's, that's accurate. Others say, oh, or maybe like, you know, we sort of exist in one great big mind. This is idealism. Um, and kind of the view that Spinoza had as well. Um, but a traditional monotheist would just say, no, no, no. What's really going on there is there's like a foundational conscious cause of consciousness. That there is a material world that exists and there's this thing called consciousness, which you can't explain as just emergent from matter. That doesn't make any sense.

• 1:23:44Alex O'Connor?

  Instead, they kind of imagine that matter is doing its thing and then it's sort of given this animation by a conscious agent. So there's this god, this is conscious mind that kind of breathes life into some of the material universe. So humans are conscious and animals are conscious, but tables are not, right? Either way, that the argument typically says something about the fact that you can't just get consciousness from matter. It's got to come from somewhere. So it can only come from consciousness being present in the really small stuff, consciousness being like the totality of everything we exist in, or there being some kind of consciousness which is like in control of the universe and can kind of like plop it in here and there where it feels like it. And that's kind of the monotheistic like view. And I think that that's not super parsimonious.

• 1:24:29Alex O'Connor?

  Like there's this god who kind of makes some things conscious and other things not. And there's a material world and the consciousness interacts with the material. Yeah, so it's kind of messy. I prefer the view that if anything, this view points to the, to the view that there is kind of one great big mind and everything exists in consciousness somehow. Um, which sounds really weird and it's difficult to put into words and you, and you start to get really sympathetic with, with the, with some of the philosophical traditions that always speak in analogies and they're always talking about waves and whirlpools and stuff, which is like really annoying if you're like an analytic philosopher and you want to know what's really going on. But I start to get a bit more sympathetic to that because it's, it's difficult to, to quite put into words.

• 1:25:09Alex O'Connor?

  Um, but I don't think, I, I think you, you don't need to account for the cake in terms of the crumbs. You can account for the crumbs in terms of the cake as well. Uh, and I think with consciousness, it's probably the latter. I prefer to think that if this view has any legs, as it were, um, it would, it would be a view pointing to something called idealism, but there's kind of a, a great big mental substance and we are all like expressions of it. And that what we call the physical world is actually kind of an expression of mental stuff and that extension and weight and space and all this kind of stuff and distance and whatnot, it's not, it's not like, it's not real. It's kind of an appearance. And the best way to understand what that means is to think about a dream and how if you have a dream, imagine this is a dream right now, right?

• 1:25:54Alex O'Connor?

  You, you wake up in five minutes and you remember that you were in a room and there was another person and there was a table and there was distance and there was, I might say like, okay, so how big was the room? And say, well, in my dream, the room was, it was pretty big. It was pretty, pretty wide. It's like, yeah, but how big was it actually? Like in, in the substance of like real, you know, reality, how big was the room? And you kind of realize that becomes a meaningless question because it was all existing inside of your mind. There was no distance. It was kind of an appearance. It was, it was something which, which existed inside of a mind. And so idealists, um, sort of view the world as a bit like that. They see all of it as like an expression of a, of a great big mind, which sounds super wacky, but no more wacky than the idea that there's some like omnipotent creative deity

• 1:26:38Alex O'Connor?

  who like goes zap and creates the universe, right? Like that's, that actually sounds a bit more weird to me.

• 1:26:42Speaker 00

  Speaking of that, I came across a tweet recently that I wanted to get your reaction to. So Spencer Greenberg asked a question for you. What's the most useful, non-obvious thing that you have AI agents do for you? And Reborn the Hunter replied and said, pray for my immortal soul. I have 75 intercessory agents pleading with God to spare me from eternal damnation at a rate of around about 500 hour fathers per minute. Eventually a pope will declare them unsold, retroactively validating their prayers, aiming to spend 60 years in purgatory tops. What do you reckon?

• 1:27:16Alex O'Connor?

  It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I mean, it's one way to hedge your bets, right?

• 1:27:21Speaker 00

  Pascal's agent wager.

• 1:27:23Alex O'Connor?

  Pascal's? Yeah. I think, I think that's, that's funny, but the, the problem is of course, that he's not serious, right? But I, I like to, to kill the frog, as it were, and to try and find out why something is funny, right? Like, why is that funny? Because it's so obviously ridiculous. And there are two things we can learn from that. One is that the concept of prayer is a bit weird. And second, that most people actually don't think that AI is or can be conscious. Right? Um, but I think the thing about prayer is interesting, right? Because a lot of atheists like critique religion in this way, which is to say, kind of what's the point in prayer? Why do people pray? You know, if you, if you pray and say like, oh, you know, please father, look after my friend who's in the hospital.

• 1:28:06Alex O'Connor?

  It's like, okay, do you think he wasn't going to do that like already? And if he was going to do that already, then there's no point. And if he's not going to do that already, then he must have some reason to. And you don't know better than God. So who are you to change his mind? Like, do you think you're going to pray and he's going to go like, oh yeah, Johnny in the hospital? Man, I nearly forgot. Thank you. It seems extremely weird. Like, why would you ask like the omniscient creator of the universe to do something? You know what I mean? Um, but of course, like, you know, people aren't stupid. Okay. So if, if it's obviously stupid, then there must be something else going on. So what's actually going on when you pray? Well, those kinds of prayers at least, I kind of suspect they're not for the person being prayed for. They're for you. Right?

• 1:28:49Alex O'Connor?

  Like prayer is an opportunity to align yourself with the will of God. Um, and it doesn't matter what your views about fundamental reality are here. Like if you believe that there's some kind of foundational agential being, foundational will, or like a god who creates the universe with a purpose, um, you're going to be constantly straying from that purpose. You know, you're not going to care about other people. You're going to walk past a homeless person on a street without looking twice. But if you say a prayer for them, you know, Lord, please, please protect them. What you're really doing is you're like aligning your own will. You're reminding yourself that that's something you should care about.

• 1:29:23Speaker 00

  Saying it would be less likely for people to be doing prayers to say, I really hope that Alex are kind of trips over today, which is like doing mean things.

• 1:29:30Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. I mean, because you could pray for that, right? People, people do pray for that kind of stuff. They probably pray all the time for stuff that actually, you know, oh, you know, please, Lord, let me, let me get the new iPhone like before anyone else, you know? And I was stood in the queue for the Apple store for the iPhone. You were doing that, praying, you know? Um, which obviously God isn't going to answer those, answer those prayers. And in fact, you know, people sometimes forget this, but Jesus prays in the gospels and God like says no. He's in the garden of Gethsemane and he says, you know, Lord, take this cup from me. He's just about to be crucified and it's, it's, it's referred to as the agony in the garden and it's, it's a huge motif in religious art. Jesus weeping in the, in the garden being like, please like, like, don't make me, don't make me do this essentially. Like, can you take this away from me? But then he says, but your will, not mine.

• 1:30:15Alex O'Connor?

  So it's like a prayer where he's sort of recognizing that he doesn't want to do it, but saying, but if this is your will, then I'm going to align my desire so that actually, yeah, I'm going to do that. So he prays for something and God says no, but it's still a very important moment where Jesus is clearly like, you know, just coming to terms with what's going on, right? And I feel like that's what prayer kind of does for people. Um, it's the same reason why people pray. I mean, when you pray before eating dinner, when you say grace, like, what are you actually doing? You know, like who's that for? Is this for you? You know, it's, it's just gratitude. That's why I'm a big fan of a secular grace. I love the idea of before you're about to eat some food, just take a minute and just be grateful for the fact that you are where you are. You know, people call it mindfulness, right? It's the same kind of thing that's going on.

• 1:30:58Alex O'Connor?

  Um, you can direct it to God, you cannot, doesn't really matter, but it's not for God. You're not giving anything. You can't give anything to God. God is an infinite substance. You can't add anything to God and you can't upset God by doing something that he doesn't like. So it can't be for him. And if you pray for somebody else and God was going to do what he was going to do anyway, then it can't be for them either. So it has to just be for you, which is why when this guy is like, you know, I've got 50 AI agents praying for me. It's like, well, maybe if the AI, you know, bots become conscious, um, then that prayer will be good for them. Um, but I'm not sure it'll do very much for, for that guy's salvation.

• 1:31:36Speaker 00

  All right. I want to see how philosophically consistent you are. So I've got some, got some questions to get your opinion on here. If someone could genetically engineer their child to be more attractive, intelligent and emotionally stable, is refusing to do so morally different from refusing them a good education?

• 1:31:53Alex O'Connor?

  Hmm. Um, maybe, right? Maybe it is, but I think most people at least want to live in a, in a culture where...

• 1:32:07Alex O'Connor?

  Education is valued and aesthetics are not. But then I think that the basis of that intuition is probably the fact that people are aware that you are sort of in control of your education in a way that you're not in control of your looks. So if you've got a new haircut, I might say to you, wow, your hair looks really nice. Well done. I'd like congratulate you on it. But if you just had like, you know, a funny shaped nose or something, I wouldn't like hold it against you, hold it for you in the same way. You know what I mean? Because we've got this situation that you can control it. So maybe if we really sort of, if we normalize the idea that you really can like, you know, custom build how someone looks, then it does become something that you're kind of in control of and you should give them the best.

• 1:32:48Speaker 00

  Wonder whether being overweight is going to be seen as more of a comment on who you are when GLPs make the process of losing weight more readily accessible.

• 1:32:57Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, maybe. I mean, it might well. But I, I mean, I share all of the fears that this is kind of in an ineffable and indescribable way, the, you know, the first step on the road to hell.

• 1:33:09Speaker 00

  GLPs are the first step on the road to hell.

• 1:33:10Alex O'Connor?

  Well, this idea of like, you know, custom aesthetics for your, for your children and stuff like that. I think in a way that I can't quite describe, sometimes we just have a gut feeling that something is, is, is bad. People have that feeling about AI at the moment, right? Like when, when you, when you sort of see something it can do and you just go, I don't like this and I don't know exactly why and I can't quite justify it. But I think, I think we should be resistant to that. But then I also think that we should resist the idea of holding people accountable for their lack of education, even if they had an opportunity to pursue an education and didn't take it up. I think there's some extent to which you don't get to control your.

• 1:33:48Speaker 00

  Proclivity to want to be educated.

• 1:33:50Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly, right.

• 1:33:51Speaker 00

  As if you take the behavioral genetics red pill, which is a few steps away from taking the determinism red pill, you end up basically excusing everything that everybody does.

• 1:34:02Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:03Speaker 00

  An interesting one around embryo selection. So no, I think genetically, genetic engineering for me actually ethically is different to embryo selection. So you already do embryo selection when you do IVF.

• 1:34:16Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  And you can have a question about whether or not IVF should be done, but anchoring bias is a hell of a drug. So yeah.

• 1:34:24Speaker 00

  When the eggs fertilized, the doctor fertility specialist goes and looks through a microscope and goes, oh, those two, nice and round. They look pretty good. Like those are As. Oh, those three, they're Bs. And then fuck it. Those, we don't need to talk about those. So you're already doing a ranking grading system. It's just that now companies like Harasite, which is sort of the best in the world at this, they are able to show what happens with IQ. It's predictive for IQ. It's predictive for height, for immune system, for externalizing behavior, like the art of criminality, for lots of things. Now, given that we already for quite a long time have said something to the effect of,

• 1:35:10Speaker 00

  if you're from a community where there are quite high risks of genetic combination that can lead to pretty undesirable traits, not only undesirable for sort of society at large, but also probably maybe even for the person that's born, Huntington's, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:35:28Speaker 00

  I think Iceland has managed to completely eliminate Down Syndrome because of the level of scrutiny that they put pregnant women through.

• 1:35:41Speaker 00

  It means that you are able to select against negative things.

• 1:35:44Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45Speaker 00

  And as soon as you accept, well, yeah, it's like to avoid people being born who've got Huntington's or like some other sort of affliction or challenge that makes life like kind of crappy for them. That's something that we should do. It becomes a very difficult position to hold that we shouldn't continue selecting against negative traits all the way into selecting for positive traits. Why wouldn't you make somebody's immune system more robust? Why wouldn't you give somebody a greater predictor for not being in jail? Why wouldn't you make somebody more pro-social, more understanding, better at being able to conceptualize themselves or contribute to society or not cheat on their spouse or whatever?

• 1:36:26Alex O'Connor?

  Well, one, one practical reason is that we've been quite lucky that in some cases, the arbitrariness and the randomness of life have prevented us from becoming obsessed with perfection, which has no end. I mean, you talk sometimes about the, the problems of being a perfectionist, right? And how it's something masquerading is something else or whatever it is you say. What is it?

• 1:36:48Speaker 00

  Very good. Procrastination is perfectionism, masquerading is quality control.

• 1:36:52Alex O'Connor?

  Right. Okay. Maybe I'm getting that mixed up then. But you know, like perfectionism is, is, it's usually used in a, in a negative sense, right? Because there's no end. There's always something you can tweak and always something you can do. And it's like, I kind of don't want to be doing that without, without children. Because yeah, okay, fair enough. You know, my, my child's going to be born without any legs and I can press this button and they have legs. Great. Okay. But I could also make them more attractive. I could make them even more attractive. You know what it makes me think of? It makes me think of those people who like get obsessed with Botox or, or, you know, like cosmetic surgery. And it begins with a kind of like, ah, you know, I just feel like I could just raise my eyebrows a little bit. And then inevitably they're on like this morning, sat on the sofa and they, and they look like a plastic doll. And it's like crazy. And everyone's like they've got a mental illness, right? That, that's what we'll be doing to our children if we're not careful, because there's no point at which it stops.

• 1:37:36Speaker 00

  It was an interesting conversation I had actually with Finn Taylor. We did his show on the same day.

• 1:37:41Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:41Speaker 00

  Like two years ago. And I was talking to him about this same thing and he's got, I think maybe two or three kids. And he mentioned that he thinks a lot of parents will have buyer's remorse, that when you have been influential in the selection of your kids, the likelihood of you somehow feeling culpable, regretful, or resentful, or prideful.

• 1:38:04Alex O'Connor?

  I think any technology or philosophy which leads to even the possibility of me looking at my own children and thinking of the two words buyer's remorse is something that I will resist with every single inch of my soul until the day I die. I mean that. I mean, that's another one of those things where I can't quite describe exactly why, but I just, I think there's something evil about that. Have you heard of the non-identity problem?

• 1:38:25Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. I spoke about this with Jonathan Anomaly, that if you, by choosing one person, another person, or by choosing one embryo, another embryo isn't born.

• 1:38:34Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, there seems to be an ethical difference. And it's actually a bit of a problem in philosophy. This was noticed by Derek Parfit, the great Oxford philosopher. Was he Oxford? I think he was Oxford.

• 1:38:47Alex O'Connor?

  And there just seems to be an ethical difference between kind of harming or benefiting a creature that already exists, or sort of choosing a benefited or harmed individual over the other, right? So like, imagine that there's, there's two different closely related conditions for pregnant women, right? I'm going to butcher this. I'll try and do it from memory, but like, you know, or something similar to this. So a condition A is such that you're, you're already pregnant and your child is going to be born, say, without functioning legs. And you just need to take a pill and it will sort of fix the, the child's legs and they'll

• 1:39:29Alex O'Connor?

  be born healthily, right? Condition B is before you're pregnant, it's a condition that you have where if you conceive a child now, they'll be born without legs. But if you wait a month for the condition to clear, then they'll, then they'll, you know, be born with functioning legs. And so now you can imagine, you know, two women, one of whom has condition A. So she's got a child growing inside of her that's going to have no legs and all she has to do is take a pill. And she says, no, thanks. I don't want to take the pill. And in fact, I kind of want to have a disabled child because I think it will make people more sympathetic to me and it will make me the, the center of attention. And that child gets born and it's a horribly immoral, evil thing to do. And then Parfit's like, okay, now imagine the second woman who has condition B, where she's told, if you conceive right now, you'll have a child with no legs. And if you wait, and she goes, no, I'm going to have a child

• 1:40:14Alex O'Connor?

  right now because I want to be the center of attention and I want people to be so sympathetic. Oh, poor you with your disabled child, right? So both of them end up having disabled children.

• 1:40:23Alex O'Connor?

  And both of them seem to have kind of acted wrongly in the same way, right? They both seem to have done something, something horrible. But who have they harmed? The first woman has definitely harmed her child because she's made it such that that child doesn't have any legs. But the second woman hasn't harmed her child. Because if she'd have waited and had a child a month later, it would have been a different child, right? It would have been the same child. So if the child's like, oh, I'm really annoyed that you chose to get pregnant when, you know, you had this condition, that wouldn't make any sense.

• 1:40:51Speaker 00

  The only way that you could have been.

• 1:40:52Alex O'Connor?

  Provided their life is worth living overall. I mean, some people are so, so have such negative experiences that they say, you know, I wish I'd have been born. And some people have actually tried to sue their parents for like wrongful.

• 1:41:01Speaker 00

  Birth.

• 1:41:02Alex O'Connor?

  Birth, yeah, which is kind of an insane.

• 1:41:06Alex O'Connor?

  Not necessarily philosophically insane, but just like it's crazy that that's happening, right? Um, but I mean, the basic point is that although you you could say to this child who's like really annoyed at their their mother. And they'd probably be like, actually, thinking about it, yeah, I'm quite glad that she had her kid when she did, because otherwise I wouldn't have existed at all. So the question is, who has actually been harmed? Like, who's been harmed? But you could say, oh, well, maybe the child who would have been born but didn't get to exist, they've kind of been harmed because they would have got to exist now they don't. Okay, but that's true of every single possible human being that could like you're harming people by not procreating right now, right? That that doesn't seem fair. That doesn't seem right. We don't have obligations to non-existent creatures.

• 1:41:47Alex O'Connor?

  But it also seems fair, says Parfit, to assume that in order for something to be like bad. It must leave some people worse off than they otherwise would have been. Otherwise, what does it mean for something to be bad or harmful? And so like, we think that that second mother has done something wrong. But but how, you know, because who is she harmed? She hasn't harmed anyone. No one is worse off. In fact, everyone involved, including the child, is better off than they would have been had she chosen differently. And yet we want to say she's done something wrong, right? So how do we make sense of that? What is it that makes her action wrong? Or do we just say, actually, no, it's fine? And if we say it's actually fine, then we open the door to sort of selective eugenics.

• 1:42:30Alex O'Connor?

  Where you're not allowed to edit the genes when they already exist, but you are allowed to like control for factors before the pregnancy begins, right?

• 1:42:37Speaker 00

  All right, another one. If cheating is wrong because it violates trust.

• 1:42:41Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:42Speaker 00

  Is secretly fantasizing about someone else morally different from cheating? Or just technologically limited cheating?

• 1:42:51Alex O'Connor?

  Well, um. He who looks upon a woman with lust has committed adultery in his heart. Said Jesus the Nazarene.

• 1:42:59Speaker 00

  That's secretly fantasizing.

• 1:43:01Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, well, the thing about fantasizing is that it's proactive, right? Like, people criticize this this Christian notion of of lust being punishable. Well, not punishable even, just like like negative. Because they they say it's like thought crime. They say, oh, even if you think the wrong thing, but it's not just thinking a thought. It's not like, you know, a thought creeping into your mind. It seems to be like an entertaining of that thought. You you go on to like engage with that thought.

• 1:43:26Alex O'Connor?

  And yeah, I think like the the thing that's wrong with cheating is is not the fact that you found another person attractive, right? Like, you can get into a relationship, you can be married, and you can sort of see someone else and notice that they're attractive. But then I think people who are who are good at marriage will essentially just shut down that thought. They'll just like look the other way, or they'll like get rid of that thought in the head. Or maybe they don't even have that thought in the first place because they're so committed to their wife, right?

• 1:43:51Speaker 00

  Let me give you another one, which I got from Mark on Schultz's show. He had had a dream, erotic dream, where one of his wife's friends had been in the dream with him. And he, in the dream, although it wasn't a lucid dream.

• 1:44:06Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:07Speaker 00

  Hadn't cheated on his wife with her friend.

• 1:44:12Alex O'Connor?

  Is that like a good show of character?

• 1:44:14Speaker 00

  Hadn't, he woke up and said, should I not get good boy points? Should I not be praised by my wife for involuntarily, unconsciously not cheating on her with her friend in my dream?

• 1:44:27Alex O'Connor?

  Only if you can also be held responsible for all of the bad things you've ever done in your dreams. Which maybe you kind of should be, because maybe what happens in your dreams are like these expressions of of what's going on in your subconscious. And so that really reveals who you truly are. So I'd be I'd be quite happy to experience such a dream, because I think it would sort of reveal that actually that is that is maybe who I am. But then we don't really know what dreams are all about. There could be like anything going on. I mean, sometimes you dream about the craziest things that that you wake up and you're like, you know, none of that is.

• 1:44:55Speaker 00

  Glad that no one could see that.

• 1:44:56Alex O'Connor?

  None of that is real, right? So I don't I don't think it's a it's it's a wise idea. But I do think that the the proactive element of of cheating is this giving in to attraction. And the easiest non arbitrary measure of that is whether you sort of physically go through with something, which is why people consider that so important. But you can separate these, right? Like, imagine you've you've got a wife or a partner, and there are two scenarios. One in which she really, really wants to sleep with someone. But like, maybe they say no. And so she goes away. In the other, she really, really doesn't want to sleep with them, but it somehow happens anyway, right? We would typically think that in that second case, she's a victim. I mean, she is a victim if that's in the way that I've described it, right?

• 1:45:41Alex O'Connor?

  It's a it's a horrible, terrible thing, and you would be there for your partner and you'd be. In the first case, though, if you found out that that was that was true, you'd be really upset. Because like, really, the thing that you care about is like the

• 1:45:51Speaker 00

  volition.

• 1:45:52Alex O'Connor?

  And the desire and the volition. Yeah, it's just hard to measure that like internally within someone's head, even even for themselves.

• 1:45:58Alex O'Connor?

  Which is why I think, yeah, like, I think if you want to be, if you're serious about a relationship. You should be shutting that kind of thing down. You shouldn't be watching pornography, you know, you shouldn't be indulging in that kind of stuff, because it's, that's the sort of, um, the really sort of harmful part of of adultery and cheating. It's it's not the physical action, because you can isolate the physical action in a way that you wouldn't that wouldn't find condemnable, quite the opposite. And that's what I think Jesus meant when he said that you shouldn't look upon another woman with lust. You've committed adultery in your heart. People say that's thought crime. It's like, no, he's just saying that like, don't entertain that thought.

• 1:46:33Alex O'Connor?

  And I think he's probably right about that, right? I mean, is there is there an argument against that? Is there is there a reason to think that actually it's fine?

• 1:46:37Speaker 00

  I remember speaking to Arthur Brooks, maybe? And he was explaining to me how you should never have, as an owner of a business. You should never have off sites or retreats where staff are allowed to go, but not bring partners, ever.

• 1:46:56Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:57Speaker 00

  Because it is a new environment where people who work together a lot and may have some like latent eroticism bubbling below the surface just due to proximity and the what's referred to as the office plus two effect. Which is however hot you are, if you work in the office with the person, if they're a plus two.

• 1:47:15Alex O'Connor?

  Right.

• 1:47:15Speaker 00

  You shouldn't do it because it regularly is the moment where people let their holiday romance plus latent office romance stuff converge. And and stuff goes badly. So you you can just construct. And maybe you would say, well, you know, if you were truly committed to your partner, you should be able to stare upon a woman naked on a table and not even touch her then you go.

• 1:47:40Alex O'Connor?

  Ideally, you should be able to do that, right? And I think, but I think the thought is, well, no, but like, that's that's that's really, because you can't control the extent to which you're like meant to. It's actually, maybe you kind of can, like, like, maybe you can condition yourself. I mean, we we talk all the time about like, you know, physical conditioning. So, you know, people who like smack their knees into into poles so that they, you know, strengthen themselves to do UFC or whatever.

• 1:48:02Speaker 00

  You're saying that I should expose myself to as many naked women as possible in order to build up my resilience?

• 1:48:06Alex O'Connor?

  I'm saying you should probably do the opposite. You should probably, anytime you have the opportunity, practice resistance, you know? Because of course you should. That's that's like the that's the that's the name of the game.

• 1:48:16Speaker 00

  Does that not make me more fragile?

• 1:48:20Alex O'Connor?

  If it does, then maybe that's just a good thing.

• 1:48:22Speaker 00

  And like, I want strong knees, but in order to have strong knees, I'll never hit them against anything.

• 1:48:27Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think you should be able to, like. I I I think you you should just be able to say no. And if you can't, if you're telling me is like, oh, yeah, but if there was like a really attractive naked woman in front of me, I just couldn't say no. Then I'm like, well, then you need to work on your mental conditioning. Like, clearly, that's like saying like.

• 1:48:42Speaker 00

  But you work on your mental conditioning by not being around attractive naked women.

• 1:48:46Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting thought, right? Maybe the best thing you can do is, but then like, yeah, but I mean, maybe, maybe.

• 1:48:50Speaker 00

  Or on the other side of a glass screen.

• 1:48:51Alex O'Connor?

  Like, maybe, maybe, but I I don't think that's, I don't think that's, that's, that's wise. Because I think I think I would actually imagine that the evidence suggests the opposite. I know it's reasonable to think that if I'm suggesting that you should be able to train yourself to to resist these kinds of things, then maybe, oh, maybe it makes.

• 1:49:05Speaker 00

  Exposure to it is required.

• 1:49:07Alex O'Connor?

  I think the evidence seems to show the opposite, right? Like, people who regularly watch pornography are much more likely to objectify women and to.

• 1:49:13Speaker 00

  Much more likely to cheat.

• 1:49:15Alex O'Connor?

  And much more likely to cheat, right? Because, I mean, in a way, pornography can be a form of cheating. I think cheating is sort of defined by the relationship you have with your partner, right? Like, you can decide that you can be polyamorous and not count as cheating. You can say you're allowed to sleep with anyone except Ben, and then only Ben becomes cheating, right? So like, um, it kind of, kind of depends. But yeah, I think the evidence shows the opposite, right? Which is that, like, if you stop allowing yourself to indulge in these thoughts. You're actually just less likely to objectify women. That is to say, it's not like you're building up a tolerance. It's just that if you if you watch a ton of porn, then you become more likely to objectify women. So if you see a naked woman, you're going to go, oh, gosh, you know, a sexual object, which is horrible and terrible. If you stop like indulging in those lustful thoughts and stop watching pornography.

• 1:49:56Alex O'Connor?

  Then when that naked woman presents herself on on the table and says, oh, you know, come and cheat on your wife, you'll be like, you know, get away from me. You'll be like Thomas Aquinas, whose family got so worried about his theological dedication. Like, they they really started to worry about him because he got obsessive over theology. And in in the medieval period, he was living in this in this castle that kind of locked away. And um, his family hired a prostitute to come and try and tempt him into sin, to try and sort of snap him out of his theological dedication. And it's said that he picked up a flaming stick from the fireplace and chased her out of the castle with it. Now, I, you know, I I think that's that's, you know, not exactly what I would advise people do.

• 1:50:39Alex O'Connor?

  Because of course, the the greatest victims of like the objectification of women are women, not men. That's always like lost from this conversation. People talk about, oh, the badness of pornography, because like, look how lustful it makes men. It's like, actually, porn's really bad for women. It's mostly bad for women.

• 1:50:54Speaker 00

  Especially bad for women if you're chasing them down the street with a stick that's on fire.

• 1:50:57Alex O'Connor?

  That's also true, but it's bad for women in so many respects. So that obviously the women in porn, like, have horrible experiences. But also, like, women who have nothing to do with porn have to deal with the effects of men who watch porn and then try to like strangle them the first time they sleep with them, even though that like wasn't something people were doing 50 years ago. And it's actually kind of insane, um, unless you like know someone really, really well. And even then, it's probably not particularly safe, you know? But like, all of this kind of stuff, like, women have to deal with this, that the fact that, as you say, the evidence suggests that people who I guess, like indulge in their lust. And and again, this is what I think Jesus was getting at, was not like, if you find a woman attractive, you should be stoned for adultery. It's like, don't engage in these thoughts, don't indulge these thoughts, because you're doing something that's spiritually damaging.

• 1:51:41Alex O'Connor?

  And I think the secular version of that is that actually, the evidence all suggests that it means that you're going to be more, you know, a world in which people are doing that more is a world in which there's more catcalling and more eyes that are uncomfortable and more you know, dodgy behavior that people think is kind of okay and normalized and that kind of stuff. And, you know, we can talk all day and people do on podcasts about how that's really bad for like male mental health and stuff. But I mean, like, primarily, it's just terrible for women. And so I think that's probably like the main reason that you should stop doing that. In the same reason why, you know, the main reason you should build up the mental resilience to to not cheat on your wife isn't, you know, for the sake of your stoic wisdom, but for the sake of your wife, who you ostensibly love and care about more than anyone else in the world. And I think that.

• 1:52:21Speaker 00

  Don't go away on a company retreat.

• 1:52:24Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, but that's the thing. That's a kind of, that's a kind of sort of.

• 1:52:30Alex O'Connor?

  That's a kind of safety measure, right? And I think you can put safety measures in your like sort of mental space, you know? In the same way that you have these rules about not going on the retreat. You can have these rules about not going on Instagram and not going on, certainly not going on pornographic websites. You know, if that's going to be a trigger for you, if you've got a, if you've got like a feed that's full of stuff that's going to tempt you into sin.

• 1:52:50Speaker 00

  What's your Instagram feed like?

• 1:52:52Alex O'Connor?

  Mine is mostly, it's mostly like biblical studies and also like music stuff. But did you know you can, you can sort of custom build your algorithm that you can go into the settings? And you can give it topics to give you, which is great. So mine is like intentionally kept like relatively, um, I mean, I still, I still doom scroll, right? But I was really trying to prevent against getting addicted to just like random content.

• 1:53:18Speaker 00

  Bullshit.

• 1:53:19Alex O'Connor?

  It just pulls you in, right?

• 1:53:19Speaker 00

  AI dogs talking about Aquinas or hot chicks giving you Kant's.

• 1:53:23Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's still, it's, it's still, um, you know, you still end up doom scrolling into, into random nonsense. But, but yeah, like I, I kind of want to get rid of social media altogether as everybody does. But it's that, that problem, isn't it? It's not like you, you want to get rid of it. It's like you want everyone to get rid of it.

• 1:53:40Alex O'Connor?

  But yeah, man, I don't think it's, it's, it's that much of an ethical dilemma, you know? It's just practically difficult to prove. If you were with someone and you found out for the past 10 years that they've been secretly really pining after their coworker, you could say in a sense that that's not their fault. Then maybe it is their fault that they didn't like reckon with that, address it and maybe let you know. Cause if you had known that, maybe you wouldn't want to be with them. Maybe you would, but that's your choice to make, you know? And then you should be aware of the, aware of the facts.

• 1:54:09Speaker 00

  Alex O'Connor, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, your rule, I appreciate you. Where should people go? You got a tour coming up? What else are you doing?

• 1:54:14Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I do have a tour. I'm doing six shows across North America and one show in Canada in November. So extremely soon, um, which is going to be really exciting. It's a kind of ask me anything type situation. So if you want to come and ask about consciousness or religion or my Instagram feed, you know, I'm an open book.

• 1:54:32Alex O'Connor?

  Apart from that.

• 1:54:34Speaker 00

  Where do people get tickets?

• 1:54:35Alex O'Connor?

  They, via the link in the description, Chris.

• 1:54:38Speaker 00

  Right, okay.

• 1:54:39Alex O'Connor?

  You go to alexo'connor.com/tour and the tickets will be available. We're doing New York and LA.

• 1:54:45Speaker 00

  You're doing the town hall in New York?

• 1:54:47Alex O'Connor?

  That's right.

• 1:54:47Speaker 00

  Which is where I played last year.

• 1:54:48Alex O'Connor?

  San Francisco sold out.

• 1:54:50Speaker 00

  Very cool.

• 1:54:50Alex O'Connor?

  We're doing Toronto, we're doing.

• 1:54:53Speaker 00

  They don't like it, they don't like you calling it Toronto, it's Toronto.

• 1:54:57Alex O'Connor?

  Toronto?

• 1:54:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, you, you.

• 1:54:58Alex O'Connor?

  You dropped the T.

• 1:54:59Speaker 00

  You have to do a glottal stop.

• 1:55:01Alex O'Connor?

  Like Toronto?

• 1:55:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, Toronto.

• 1:55:03Alex O'Connor?

  They do share a lot of like British sort of ways of speaking, right?

• 1:55:07Speaker 00

  I'll call it Toronto.

• 1:55:08Alex O'Connor?

  It's like, it's really weird. It's like an American trying to do British slang some of the time, especially like in the rap culture. It's very strange, but I'm excited to experience it firsthand. I've never been to Canada, so.

• 1:55:16Speaker 00

  Canada is great. The, uh, Ontario, are you doing Vancouver as well or no?

• 1:55:22Alex O'Connor?

  No, no, just, just Toronto.

• 1:55:24Speaker 00

  The shows in Canada sell out so fast, it's scary.

• 1:55:28Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I got to, got to check that out. I mean, I'm excited to go, but it's just a limited tour, just to sort of test the waters out there. But I'm sure we'll go back and do more.

• 1:55:36Speaker 00

  Pretty fun, cool. What else?

• 1:55:39Alex O'Connor?

  Working on some projects that I can't talk about yet, which are going to be really fun. But hopefully if people watch this back in a year or two, they'll, they'll know what I'm talking about.

• 1:55:48Alex O'Connor?

  They might already. And then hoping to, to get back on the ball with, with podcasts and video essays. You know, a lot of people say that I should do more like direct to camera stuff. I've been doing a lot of interviews and conversations and that they miss when I just sort of do like video essays style stuff. I want to do more of that. I haven't had the time recently. They take a lot longer than a podcast, like practically to, to film and edit. So I do all the editing myself and all that kind of stuff. But I'd like to do more of those. So people who've been asking for those, you know, watch this space.

• 1:56:16Speaker 00

  Okay, appreciate you, man. Until next time.

• 1:56:18Alex O'Connor?

  Always.

• 1:56:19Speaker 00

  Hey, a quick note, one thing that we've been told by a lot of our subscribers is on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube, they've been unsubscribed or unfollowed even though they pressed it. So just do me a favor and check below. If that has happened, it's happening to a lot of people, means that you get to find out about episodes before anybody else. And it supports the show and makes me very happy indeed. Just give it a little check, give it a little tap, all will be well. I thank you.