Why Atheists Keep Finding God (in everything) - Alex O’Connor (4K)

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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 It would be foolish To think that my confidence should approximate anything like a closeness to truth that warrants a kind of forthright Exposition maybe militant sort of fervor 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 an eternal life in This country. 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 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 Two million people behind you 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 I 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 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 Why just because it happens it happens so regularly now what do you think it is that's that's happening there 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 a theist belief. Is that the suggestion? 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 communities named Joe Schmidt and he just suddenly came out 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 the Christian on that debate and you performed so badly? But he's now taking it down because he's worried that people are considered that that's you. Yeah your inverse that I think I'm kind of like a bit of a barrister, right? I'm like a barrister for different positions in some ways when And that makes it sound flippant. Like I do actually care about the subject matter yeah, but I mean to say that even if I were to become 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 gonna 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 It's because you were told so I like NASA and your teachers That's actually a pretty bad reason to believe the earth is a globe now, even if it's true. 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 oblique spheroid, but you get the picture. I've seen that Lidar adjacent image floating around of just how not round. Yeah Like if you were to give it a roll it would it wouldn't be pretty 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 actually like egg-shaped. I also I'm a geocentrist I think of 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 I Read a really interesting sub stack 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 yeah, but that 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. Yeah, you're some Insane number of millions of miles only a couple of days later because everything is moving so much in that Um, do you remember Oumuamua? Do you remember that oblong shaped? Asteroid it was what RV lobe Talked about a good bit look like a cigar and it was an asteroid that was sort of shooting through the solar system Yeah, and because the likelihood of this very unique like sausage is a big sausage Mm-hmm big sausage shape flying through the the solar system the likelihood of the shape existing. It seems quite unlikely Yeah, things will be more round, right? So maybe it's being 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 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 Mm-hmm 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 but all motion is relative and that's why when you think about You know, okay. I'm gonna time-travel and I'm gonna 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 still that it's not like there's some Real perspective against which we can compare ours that there's just relative motion Carlo Rovelli It 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 speed am I moving? You might say I'm moving X many kilometers per hour 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's the least arbitrary place from which to measure, you know, 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 but I digress and the reason I brought up the fat 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 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 But does it make it so much more less likely than the evidence for God like the fine-tuning all this kind? 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 studies into the arguments for God's existence and against and stuff is that there's a reason why 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 as a 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 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's 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 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 Hmm 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. It's most profound and confident expressions have been in the form of Experience and mysticism does that not make the entire debate about it completely pointless kind of but it depends why you're doing it, right? So 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 is to color a faith that already exists So you believe in God and now you want to know now you want to understand? They want to sort of get to grips with what God why like exactly right and so His ontological argument for example, which people talk about all the time was actually a prayer The proslogy and 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 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 Yeah, I think eight eight years now. It's a long time like that. It's a very long time and you have been An interesting canary in the coal mine kind of like a weather vane of Theological weather vane 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 gonna 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 tuss I think and and and Prickly and then you told me a story in Austin three years ago about I and her CLE explaining about how she had been suicidal very upset and As what who would have been the fifth horseman? Yes But she was late or wasn't able to make it. Yeah might have been the five pillars in that case, I think So Someone that was very central to kind of the new atheist world you 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 I'd lost all hope and I was considering doing something pretty kinetic about it and then 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 something like after the applause of half of the room, Richard just goes... But do you believe that Jesus was born of aversions? Do you believe that? Do you believe that the tomb of Aramea really was moved out of the way? That to me kind of shows, and maybe we're in 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 tenuous that we bristle a little bit more at someone reacting in quite a sterile, pernickety way to what is evidently someone struggling with a situation which lots of other people either do or hear that other people do. That story sticks to me so much, 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. I was there 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, Christianity makes substantive truth claims about the world. 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. It makes historical claims about the exodus from Egypt and all this stuff, and I think totally fair enough to want to know an answer to those questions. It's also fair enough to say, look, 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 onto that. That's fine. I think both are okay, but I feel like you can't really critique one with the other. If somebody is making a skeptical historical case about Jesus, 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 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 to you, but I just can't. Someone says, yeah, but I'm pretty sure that the Gospel of John has some later editions and that our earliest manuscripts aren't entirely lining up with each other. It's sort of talking past each other. Remember that religion is, I sound like one of these sort of insufferable scholar types. Religion is a modern concept. It's one of my least favorite things. Everyone's gotten so careful in scholarship that if you read scholarship from the 1800s or something, people are like, this is the truth about the world, and I'm going to tell you why. You read 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, we kind of have family and work and religion and their little boxes, and we sort of keep them separate and we tuck them away. Sometimes they talk to each other. In the ancient world in particular, religion is just like the ocean that you're swimming in. There is no religion. It's just how you live your life. It's just the things that you do. Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. They'll talk about it. They'll insult their friends about it, but they don't actually know what theirs are. What if I told you there was a solution, something that identifies low T faster than a high school bully, and it won't cost you all of your lunch money? That is where function comes in. It gives you access to over 160 advanced lab tests, including a deep dive into your full hormone panel. Every result is reviewed by clinicians and anything out of range is flagged. 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I imagine that there were lots of personifications and narrative explanations for why the sky was angry today, the fact that there was lightning over the far side of the horizon or that the crops didn't get rain this year. I guess we wouldn't have even had crops. 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 experience? Will Barron 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. We typically observe some kind of religious impulse as a universal… Convergent cultural evolution. Yeah, exactly, right? 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? It's an accurate representation. That's always the problem with so much of these religious discussions is that the data can sometimes be predicted by both. I'm sort of looking at the problem of divine hiddenness, which is why if God exists, he's not obvious to people. John Hick, a great theologian, writes that 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 the world must in some way be as if it were if there were no God. I think, great, fair enough, but 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 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. 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 gods, small g gods are like characters within the created order. They move around, they talk to each other, they communicate, they interact. They're 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. These are expressions or persons of one unified God. So to the extent that people were going around sort of seeing the world as enchanted, you know, the spirits in the forest and the god of thunder 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 our human experiences, but it's not the same thing as belief in this singular wellspring from which everything comes. 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, it goes as far back as Aristotle who, I mean, his conception 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 super transcendent kind of thing. But it's like, I don't know, it sort of develops over time. So it kind 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. It's some sense in which the boundary between myself and God disappear. Meister Eckhart says, the same ground that is God's ground is also my ground. And there's a famous Sufi mystic. I'm blanking on his name, but he famously spins around and says, Anna al-Haq, I am the truth. And al-Haq is one of the names for God in the Quran. So it's extremely blasphemous, but he's saying he felt this connection, right? And it's difficult to feel that connection with particularly the God of the green forest, you know what I mean? Or with like Wotan. That doesn't happen, right? You might feel sort of connected to nature in a broad sense, but you don't feel as though you are now tethered to ultimate reality experientially. So this idea of 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 different 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, did the Greeks believe they're 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 ever seen in the history of at least the Western tradition. And what they believed that if you went up the mountain, you'd find like Zeus sat there on a throne or something. They actually believed that Athena was going around doing stuff. It's like, really? It's actually not entirely clear. It might be more of a kind of a narrative device. It's kind of actually hard to get to grips with. Obviously, they didn't believe in it 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. Obviously, it's not a real like, you know, dog or whatever. But it would be like super blasphemous to address that fact. You know, you refer to the dog as him and you sort of interact with it as if it's a real thing because you're sort of playing this game that's supposed to personify this creature. And if you were to address the fact that it was just a stuffed animal and material object, it would be like horrifying. But both of you know that it's just a material artifact. I feel like something like that could have been going on when we talk about like the God of Thunder. We still talk today in terms of like fate. And we still talk today in terms of, we use like narrative terms. But it's the story of fate. No, I just mean like, you know, you might say like that's fate or you might say like that fate brings you together. Ah, but what's the etymology? Where does that come from? I don't know. I don't know about the etymology of the word fate. I'm just imagining 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, 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, to- Tonic could be divine. Slightly animate the universe. I feel like maybe that was what was going on with the Greek gods. Very cool. But the foundation of reality is not some narrative character that we use to explain where the thunder comes from. It's the foundation of reality. 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. Is consciousness one of the biggest holes in the atheist worldview? 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 like to talk about. I don't think it matters whether you're an atheist or whether you're a theist. Because a lot of believers in God also think that there is a material universe and somehow consciousness is this separate thing, which you've got like an immaterial soul, which interacts with your physical body. That's super problematic. For an atheist, you can also believe that 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, 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. It's always mediated through experience. It's impossible to just directly interact with this thing we call the table. It's only how it looks, how it feels, how it sounds, how it tastes, if you want to give it a lick. There's no other way to access it. 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, 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? It sounds a bit weird to say, but 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 feel it and you'd listen to it but if you took away this the sense of touch and then the sense 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 it 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 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 why because 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. So 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 that's what a cup is. That's what a that's what a table is That's what metal is through experience through your experience at the world in the same way that You can talk about yellow But you can you can tell me that 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 could you literally couldn't define the word Red you couldn't do it So when it comes to defining consciousness, what do we do? Well, we want to kind of point to consciousness We want to say here's consciousness. Like let's let's point a 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 Nagel's from the 70s 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. There's nothing it's like to be a rock Okay, and that's what consciousness is fair enough That's already a very functional like definition something it is like to be like that's not very exhaustive We don't know quite what that means except through examples, right? I know Seth sometimes says that consciousness is the thing which goes away when you go under general anesthetic Great, and it goes away when you go to a deep dream of 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 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 have no conception of that because your only conception of the table is from within that conscious 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 Does that suggest that science will never explain consciousness? 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 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 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 that is a mathematical equation if you look at the the Newton's theory of gravity for example 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 did 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 Because 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 I'm saying like 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 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 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 routed to the earth? Ten five it's like ninety nine point nine percent. Yeah, they're like this close to the earth gravity Doesn't just switch off like that hmm. 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 is 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 kind of new tonic, 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 gonna like fall down faster than me or what it's just like if I'm falling 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 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 it's so like you know It's not angels pushing around the planets and said it's like the same thing that makes objects fall to the ground great and then he mathematically described it with his theory of Gravity which is like It's got a bunch of letters and an equal 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 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 at 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 like the appendix to The book in which he published this print could be a mathematica. He explicitly addresses the question okay, but as for what gravity actually is Like why things are actually formed 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 in terms of atoms It takes the atoms and it describes in terms of electrons and and and so on right, but it's always description at a more fundamental level That's what explanation kind of is its 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 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 because people people think that we're sort of gonna We're going to 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 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 because 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 Consciousness is the subjective like experience of the world and so The more that 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 I've spent the last month sleeping on a tour bus and hotel beds and I've taken one of these Every single night nightly sleep by momentous have saved my sleep and they are now formulated even better and $50 cheaper than they were previously imagine that better and Significantly more affordable didn't know that you could still do that in 2026 the brand-new triple action formula combines magnesium Bisglycinate with apogenin and l-theanine to help you wind down fall asleep and stay asleep. 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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's why it sounds weird 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 a wrench that just like helps you fix every single thing in the world every there's nothing in the world That can't be fixed by this brilliant wrench that you've created and then you 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's it's not something that you would you would be able to do. Does that mean studying consciousness has made atheism harder to defend? I Think it's made Materialism harder to defend and you again 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 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? 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? 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 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. Newton's laws of motion describe how they move when they're put in motion. You know what I mean? And so I think that trying to explain the nature of fundamental reality, what it is, with science, which is fundamentally an enterprise of describing how things behave, it's like behaviouralism about atoms, is a mistake in the same way that if a carpenter was trying to work out what to build a little king piece out of, they studied the rules of chess to find out. It's like a totally different enterprise. I don't think that they can do that. So then what actually is the foundational stuff of reality? Maybe the only answer is like, we don't know. There's no way to access that. 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 science will not tell you what the foundational nature, the substance of reality is. And most scientists, by the way, just agree with this. They're like, yeah, but why should it? There only is what it does. That's all there is. I think that's a bit weird, but maybe it's true. Matthew Feeney There only is what it does. Matthew Feeney Exactly, because then it's like, well, what is the thing that's doing the thing? It's like, what are you even talking about? That's what Carlo Rovelli has probably the best defense of this in recent publications. He just put out a book that I think defends this view 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. What's its substance? And yet when you break it down, it's 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 the view just sounds really weird because you're saying that the only thing that exists is behavior, but there's no thing doing the behaving. It'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. 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 critique of science. This is just 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. It's not an insult to the method of science to say that it will never tell you about the substance of what's in it. 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. If anybody thinks that, then I think that they're fooling themselves. Science can explain everything, can science explain its own presuppositions. No method can be self-explaining in that respect. There are always going to be things that are inaccessible to science. I mean, trivially, there are things that are inaccessible to science. The foundational laws of logic are not scientifically provable. You can't scientifically prove that other minds exist. You can't scientifically prove 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. It's fine. Do that if you want, but don't claim that that's something that you've 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 emptiness at the bottom of reality, and some philosophers believe that reality is literally empty in that way. 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 interactions. It's all a bit weird. But if you think there is something there, like I do, there's something in the world, there's a real isness of the business, then the mystery is, okay, well, what is it? The critic might say, okay, Alex, but how would you like explain the isness? What method could you use to describe or explain the nature of something? Because anytime you're using language, anytime you're trying to explain a concept, you're sort of talking about it. If the nature of reality is this irreducible substance, how are you going to explain it? 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. If the universe is fundamentally experience, fundamentally experiential, how different is that from saying it's God? It depends on how you cash it out, as philosophers like to say. 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. 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 pointless? 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 everything's normal, and you're just chatting to God. You feel this sense in which you are connected to this divinity. You're some kind of expression of this divinity. I think that if you believe that what we call God is best described as the foundational consciousness of the universe, then you're kind of an expression of that consciousness. This is where Indian traditions better capture this kind of thought. Their view of Brahman, which is their word for ultimate reality, which sometimes is thought of as equivalent to the word God, but it's not quite like that. They don't think of it as this being who exists and creates the universe with agency. They just think that Brahman is just the big ocean in which we're all swimming, and they use these kinds of analogies all the time. They say that what you are, 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 doing something, but it's just an expression of this big ocean. It's not separable from the ocean. You can't pick it up out of the ocean and move it somewhere else, right? It's one way in which this ocean is expressing itself. 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 a manifestation of consciousness. So, the religious experience on their interpretation would be like a realisation 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, what does that mean I'm one with everything? What on earth can that possibly mean? I'm the same thing as that tree over there. It's absolutely ridiculous, unless you consider it on the level of we are both expressions of the same thing, in the same way that all of the leaves of the tree might be able to look at each other and go, oh look, we're all one great big organism. I think that's kind of what's being driven at. So, in a religious context, it would be like we are expressions of foundational consciousness. The primary thinker in the Western tradition for this is Spinoza. A lot of people say, I believe in Spinoza's God, right? What they mean by that is, I'm an atheist and I love science, right? People have this idea that what Spinoza did was just sort of take this idea of God and drag it down to nature. You say, I just think nature is God. Spinoza elevated nature to the level of divinity. Spinoza thinks that there's one ultimate substance, and he famously refers to it as what would it be, deus, siva, natura, God or nature. He doesn't really care what you call it, but he says that it's this foundational thing in which we all sort of move. Question. You, not necessarily famously, but at least publicly, have a strained relationship with meditation. I think someone tried to get you to do it at some point. You had a relatively unenjoyable experience. I've never really enjoyed meditation. 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 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. 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 very rare, but evenly distributed across people from different cultures in different times using different processes and different techniques. Have you considered what's going on there? I mean, it seems to me that 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. 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. The way that that works is it gets rid of your concepts and the way in which you perceive the world. I think Joe Rogan talked about this idea, or someone on his show talked about a sled going down the ice or the snow. He was like, you know, you've been riding on this sled that just goes down the hill and what psychedelics do is 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 concepts and you can just see the world for what it is, or for how it presents itself to you naively. I imagine that meditators manage to kind of do the same thing. The biggest thing that gets in the way of 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 our concepts. It's the way we like to box things in. It's the fact that when I see the table, I'm convinced that I'm just seeing the table, that my eyes are like these transparent windows into the world, that I'm literally just experiencing the world as it is. For me, philosophically, I need to remind myself, I am not experiencing the world as it is. I'm experiencing it from a perspective. It's being translated by my brain into a way that I can understand. This table appears to me to be one colour. Even though there are loads of different colours 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 colour? Can you believe it? The reason they work is because your brain is hardwired to tell you a story about reality. This square is actually this colour, but you perceive it as a different colour 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 what it really is. You're like the painter who, when you see the blue sky, you actually realise that, well, there's a bit of green and a bit of purple. Actually, there's a bit of white, you know, where the sun reflects off the water. It's actually pure white, and there's a bit of orange and this kind of stuff. Painters are masters at this. That's why it's so difficult to paint, because when I look at a table, I think it's brown. But dude, if you look at the colours on this table, there's blues and there's white somewhere in the middle. I think that something like that is going on with these meditative experiences. Psychedelics are a bit of a shortcut to the same thing, which is that the concepts get turned off, which is probably the reason why when you look at the table in psychedelics, you're like, whoa, so cool, because actually it is so cool. This table is swimming with texture and colour and 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. If only you were able to see it without your presupposition. Exactly, but your brain is telling you, no, it's just a table. Yeah, because it's less effective for you to be in awe of every single square centimetre that you look at or sound that you hear or smell that you breathe in. I feel like what meditation does, if you get this, I don't know much about, I've never tried this kind of thing, but people do mantras. They just sit there and they just say the same word over and over and over and over again. I think part of the idea is that when you start thinking about what you're doing, when you think about it, you try to get rid of those thoughts and pull yourself right back to this state so that all of these intellectual ideas, the concepts, the ideas of this is what I'm doing, this is where I am, 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. When we started Newtonic, we wanted to create a drink that people loved. Becoming experts in online checkouts and inventory management wasn't a part of that ambition, which is why we use Shopify. It is the platform behind our online store. So when I recommend it, I'm actually recommending something that I rely on to run my business. Gymshark, Skims, Allo use it too, along with 10% of all e-commerce companies in the United States, and that's because Shopify helps turn browsers into buyers. Their checkout converts 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. ShopPay boosts conversions by up to 50% plus they've got a support team that's there to help you when you need it, making sure that everything is working well. All that you need is the idea, Shopify will handle the rest. Right now, you can start your free trial today by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom. Are they perceiving reality more accurately, more plainly than other people? It's impossible to say, right? Because there is only how you perceive the world. It's like there's no sort of objective world we can access to which we can compare your experience and my experience. 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 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 breeding colony thing where you were able from birth to kind of prescribe the most de-patterned perspective possible. Because no human, even going back to proto-humans, even going back to primates, everyone has been influenced by that that came before in the lessons. 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. Well, you might like this. Some people who are born blind, 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. Imagine you're born blind. You've never seen anything but you've experienced the world through touch and sound and stuff. You know what a cube is and you know what a sphere is, for example. Imagine that I then fix your eyesight and suddenly you can see for the first time and in front of you is a cube and a sphere. You know what those objects are 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? I'd suspect so. So funnily enough, it seems like people actually can't, which is shocking, right? I mean, that's just shocking. Being able to feel something doesn't translate to being able to touch it. One of them's pointy, one of them's smooth, yeah, but you don't know what that means. Pointy? What is pointy? What is smooth? You've never connected those two experiences in your mind and I think that experiments like that really go to show the extent to which our understanding of the world is just the way that our different senses sort of interact with each other. We only have our senses. We only have our experience and by the way, a lot of people call themselves empiricists, which is a very sort of science-y sounding, 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. It's like a bit of a horseshoe where the empiricist and the idealist or the consciousness first person are 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 real and accurate 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 prove this. We can't experience infrared radiation, you know, we can't see it. If we could, the world would just look different. You know, birds can navigate by using the magnetic field of the earth, like another sense. You can see an ultraviolet. Exactly. Thomas Nagel, where he gave this famous definition I gave earlier, 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 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. So I was thinking about this, and this might sound really weird, but 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, we sometimes feel as though we can explain our sensory interactions with the world in objective terms. So 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, so smell. If I want to explain what's happening with smell, what would I do? If I asked you, like, if your kid comes up to you and says, what's going on when I smell? How does my nose smell things? What might you tell them? Like, what would you tell them? Little particles enter into the two holes in the front of your face, and there are sensors inside. Exactly, right? Great. So you're talking about these little particles, and you're talking about the nose and the holes. Okay. In a very real sense, that's kind of just what it looks like, right? You're describing to me, if I took a microscope and looked at the particles of air, then I'd find these little particles, and then if I look at your nose, or maybe if I'm blind, I could touch your nose, and I'd know what a hole is. You know what I mean? So 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 the holes in your nose 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 no sense at all. Like, why is it that when I explain what it smells like in terms of what it looks like, I've thereby reduced it any more than if you wanted to know, 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 how or why that's happening? And I would go, oh, it's the smell of lavender. That's what's happening. You're just explaining one sense in terms of another. We prioritise sight, I think, in the sciences 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, the table looks to me like a table, but if I look at it more closely through a microscope, like an electron microscope, then I'll see it. It will appear to me as these things called atoms. If I look even deeper, it will appear to me as an electron and whatnot. You never actually get inside. You never actually get further than how it appears to you. This was the big Kantian distinction that Manuel Kant famously distinguishes between what he calls the phenomena and the noumena. The phenomena, as in phenomenal, is like how the world appears. It's how the world appears in your awareness. But there's also this thing, the noumena, 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, you just have no access to the noumena. You just never will. You will only ever know how things appear to you. And Arthur Schopenhauer comes along afterwards, sees himself as a kind of continuation of Kant, and says, actually, yeah, you never have access to the noumena of anything around you. I only have access to the phenomenon of the table, the 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. 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. But it also, at the same time, presents itself internally to me. I know what it feels like to have a hand. If I look at myself in a mirror, I will appear in my vision, just as you appear in 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. And so Schopenhauer's like, look, from the outside, it looks like a finger. From the inside, it feels like a finger. And that, for him, was the key to this phenomena, a noumena 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 noumena of the finger is how it feels from the inside. And then Schopenhauer's 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 I'm the only thing in the universe that has that. Most people find that quite unlikely. I think that you're conscious. I think that other humans are conscious. So I say, actually, maybe your noumena is the same as mine, that what's going on inside of you is something similar, this kind of awareness, consciousness, will. And then he's like, well, maybe it's only humans that have this noumena. And everything else in the universe has a noumena, we just never know what it is. Maybe it's just the same thing. Maybe the most parsimonious explanation is that 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 internal sense of will that he has for himself into other humans, then to animals, then to plants, then to just 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 very basic blind will. It's just like a very, very rudimentary thing. Consciousness is not complex in my view. 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. I sometimes compare a rock to the Empire State Building. And I imagine telling somebody like, look at the difference here. 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. 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 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 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, straight experience of blueness. That'd be a very simple kind of existence. But there would be awareness happening. There'd be awareness of the blueness, but it'd be very, very rudimentary. So there's this idea that will kind of just pervades 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 in 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. If you were living in a forest and we just sat looking around, this is why people enjoy doing psychedelics in nature, right? Because it's much easier to sort of look around you and go like, oh, there's some kind of animation happening. There's some kind of intrinsic motion. Michael Pollan's recent book is brilliant, talking about watching time lapses of plants growing and watching how they move and being like, dude, these things, 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 dead like rocks. 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 mixed it into alloys and constructed these objects, which don't seem to behave in that way. Because they don't, because we sort of force 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 broken and turned into an artefact. So I think it would sound a lot less crazy if we were having this conversation in the forest, if you know what I mean. You know what I'm saying, though? It's like you've got to remember that you interact with artefacts all day long. Everything you interact with is an artefact. It's something that somebody has, like, an artefact is an artificially created- Much more sterile environment. Yeah, and again, I'm just representing this for you because I think it's fun, but if you're someone who thinks that the universe is made out of consciousness and electrons are conscious or something weird's going on there, yeah, it's not going to manifest itself at the level of a pop filter for a microphone. But what the defender of this view would say is, yeah, but just zoom in for a second, and even the scientists will tell you that if you zoom in far enough, it's crazy what's going on down there. Physicists will say, but bear in mind, of course, 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 some of the, I guess, implications of a conscious foundation for the universe. I haven't really made the argument. But for people who think 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 more widely accepted. 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. 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 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. We live in trillions and trillions of new realities are created every single second. This is the Everettian many-world 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 of reality. And everyone goes, that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. You know what I mean? It seems a bit unfair, at least prima facie, to the consciousness foundational position. Because people will say, oh yeah, Alex, okay, all very interesting or maybe not very interesting, but dude, consciousness clearly just emerges. It's 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. It just emerges. It's sort of like how zeros and ones create an image on a computer screen, or how no individual atom is hot, but if you put them all together, you get this emergent thing called heat. Except there are a few problems with that. One is just instinctively, 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 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 a single molecule of 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 things. 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 matter together, and you get thoughts. How? Why? Why on earth would that happen? I've compared it before to like, we're talking about 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. 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 in so far as you then look at it. 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, it 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 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 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 they're interested in is, no, no, no, because when you put them together, 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 this thing called temperature, called heat? What is it? That's when you touch it and it goes out. That's when you get near and you can feel the temperature. 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 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 traveling through the air. There's no yellowness 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 scientifically measurable stuff. That is light waves and photons. The thing that's interesting is how they sort of emerge. It's how it 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 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 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 essentially implying that the only thing in the universe which emerges is consciousness. I just don't think that's true. Before we continue, most non-alcoholic drinks feel like you're settling. They're flat, forgettable, and you end up wishing that you'd ordered something else. That's why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. Their non-alcoholic brews taste just as good as the real thing. They've got IPAs, Hazies, Goldens. They're so good that you'll forget there's no alcohol in them until you wake up the next day feeling fantastic. That means that you can enjoy the ritual without the wreckage. No hangover, no 3 a.m. panic, no wasted Sundays, and that is why I partnered with them. You can find Athletic Brewing Co.'s best-selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you, or best option, get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door. Right now, get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's athleticbrewing.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Nearby, terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Co., fit for all times. What's the connection between consciousness and religion? For some people, 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 what I'm saying is true about emergence that–and by the way, people distinguish between strong and weak emergence. So if anyone's listening and is like, oh, but doesn't a family emerge out of its members, or doesn't an ecosystem emerge out of its 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 weakly emergent thing called an ecosystem would behave. The thing about consciousness is I could describe all of the brain activity and still be completely at a loss and never expect or predict that it will come along with experience. So people say if this is right, if consciousness cannot be emergent, but we know consciousness exists because we're having it right now, that means that somehow consciousness must be at the foundation of stuff. 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 accurate. Others say, oh, maybe we sort of exist in one great big mind. This is idealism, and kind of the view that Spinoza had as well. But a traditional monotheist would just say, no, no, no, what's really going on there is there's 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. It's just emergent from matter. That doesn't make any sense. 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. There's this 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, 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 the totality of everything we exist in, or there being some kind of consciousness which is in control of the universe and can kind of plop it in here and there where it feels like it. That's kind of the monotheistic view, and I think that that's not super parsimonious. 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 view that there is kind of one great big mind and everything exists in consciousness somehow, which sounds really weird, and it's difficult to put into words. You start to get really sympathetic with some of the philosophical traditions that always speak in analogies, and they're always talking about waves and whirlpools and stuff, which is really annoying if you're an analytic philosopher and you want to know what's really going on. I start to get a bit more sympathetic to that because it's difficult to quite put into words, but I think 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, and I think with consciousness, it's probably the latter. I prefer to think that if this view has any legs, as it were, it would be a view pointing to something called idealism, that there's kind of a great big mental substance and we are all 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 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. 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. I might say, okay, so how big was the room? You say, well, in my dream, the room was pretty big. It was pretty wide. It's like, yeah, but how big was it actually? In the substance of real reality, how big was the room? 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 something which existed inside of a mind. Idealists sort of view the world as a bit like that. They see all of it as an expression of a great big mind, which sounds super wacky, but no more wacky than the idea that there's some omnipotent creative deity who goes zap and creates the universe, right? That actually sounds a bit more weird to me. 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 ensouled, retroactively validating their prayers, aiming to spend 60 years in purgatory tops. What do you reckon? It's pretty good. It's one way to hedge your bets, right? Pascal's agent wager. Yeah, I think that's funny, but the problem is, of course, that he's not serious, right? But I like to kill the frog, as it were, and to try and find out why something is funny, right? 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? But I think the thing about prayer is interesting, right? Because a lot of atheists critique religion in this way, which is to say, what's the point in prayer? Why do people pray? If you pray and say, please, Father, look after my friend who's in the hospital, it's like, okay, do you think he wasn't going to do that 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? 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, right? It seems extremely weird. Why would you ask the omniscient creator of the universe to do something? You know what I mean? But of course, people aren't stupid, okay? So 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? Prayer is an opportunity to align yourself with the will of God, and it doesn't matter what your views about fundamental reality are here. 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, 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 aligning your own will. You're reminding yourself that that's something you should care about. I'm saying it would be less likely for people to be doing prayers to say, I really hope that Alex O'Connor trips over today, but it's like doing mean things. Yeah, I mean, because you could pray for that, right? People do pray for that kind of stuff. They probably pray all the time for stuff that actually, you know, please, Lord, let me get the new iPhone before anyone else, you know? I always stood in the queue for the Apple Store for the iPhone during that, I was praying, you know, which obviously God isn't going to answer those prayers. 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 referred to as the agony in the garden. It's a huge motif in religious art, Jesus weeping in the garden being like, please don't make me do this, essentially, can you take this away from me? But then he says, but your will, not mine. 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. It's the same reason why people pray. I mean, when you pray before eating dinner, when you say grace, what are you actually doing? Who's that for? Is this for you? You know, 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. You can direct it to God, you can not. It 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's 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, then that prayer will be good for them. But I'm not sure it will do very much for that guy's salvation. All right, I want to see how philosophically consistent you are. So I've 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? Maybe, right? Maybe it is, but I think most people at least want to live in a culture where 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, like 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 or hold it for you in the same way, you know what I mean? Because we've got this intuition 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. I 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. Yeah, maybe. I mean, it might well, but I mean, I share all of the fears that this is kind of, in an ineffable and indescribable way, that you know, the first step on the road to hell. GLPs are the first step on the road to hell. Well, this idea of like, you know, custom athletics 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 bad. People have that feeling about AI at the moment, right? Like when you sort of see something it can do and you just go, yeah, I don't like this and I don't know exactly why and I can't quite justify it. But 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... Proclivity to want to be educated. Exactly, right. 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. An interesting one around embryo selection. I think genetic engineering, for me, actually ethically is different to embryo selection. You already do embryo selection when you do IVF. You can have a question about whether or not IVF should be done, but anchoring bias is a hell of a drug. When the eggs are fertilized, the doctor, the fertility specialist goes and looks through a microscope and goes, oh, those two, nice and round, they look pretty good. Those are A's. Those three, they're B's. We don't need to talk about those. You're already doing a ranking grading system. It's just that now companies like Heracite, 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, likelihood of criminality, for lots of things. Now, given that we already, for quite a long time, have said something to the effect of, if you are from a community where there are quite high risks of genetic combination that can lead to pretty undesirable traits, not only undesirable for society at large, but also probably maybe even for the person that's born, Huntington's, etc., etc., I think Iceland has managed to completely eliminate Down syndrome because of the level of scrutiny that they put pregnant women through. It means that you are able to select against negative things, 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 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? Well, 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 problems of being a perfectionist, right, and how it's something masquerading as something else or whatever it is you say. What is it? Very good. Procrastination is perfectionism, masquerading as quality control. Right, okay, maybe I'm getting that mixed up then, but perfectionism is usually used in a negative sense, right, because there's no end, there's always something you can tweak, there's always something you can do, and it's like, I kind of don't want to be doing that without children. Because, yeah, okay, fair enough, my child's gonna be born without any legs and I can press this button and they have legs, great. Okay, but I could also make them a bit 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 get obsessed with Botox or cosmetic surgery, and it begins with the kind of like, 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 look like a plastic doll, and it's like crazy, and everyone's like they've got a mental illness, right? That's what we'll be doing to our children if we're not careful, because there's no point at which it stops. It was an interesting conversation I had actually with Finn Taylor. We did his show on the same day, 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. 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. That's another one of those things where I can't quite describe exactly why, but I think there's something evil about that. Have you heard of the non-identity problem? 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. 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. There just seems to be an ethical difference between harming or benefiting a creature that already exists, or choosing a benefited or harmed individual over the other. So imagine that there's two different closely related conditions for pregnant women. I'm going to butcher this. I'll try and do it from memory, or something similar to this. Condition A is such that 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 child's legs and they'll 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 be born with functioning legs. So now you can imagine 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. 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 centre of attention, and that child gets born and it's a horribly immoral, evil thing to do. And then part of it'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 right now, because I want to be the centre 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. And both of them seem to have acted wrongly in the same way, right? They both seem to have done 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 had this condition, that wouldn't make any sense. Provided their life is worth living overall. I mean, some people have such negative experiences that they say, you know, I wish I'd never been born. And some people have actually tried to sue their parents for like wrongful birth. Yeah, which is kind of an insane, not necessarily philosophically insane, but just like, it's crazy that that's happening, right? But I mean, basic point is that although you could say to this child who's like really annoyed at 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? 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. No, 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 doesn't seem fair. That doesn't seem right. We don't have obligations to non-existent creatures. But it also seems fair, says Parfitt, 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 how? Because who has 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, 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? All right, another one. If cheating is wrong because it violates trust, is secretly fantasizing about someone else morally different from cheating or just technologically limited cheating? Well, he who looks upon a woman with lust has committed adultery in his heart, said Jesus the Nazarene. But that's secretly fantasizing. Yeah, well, the thing about fantasizing is that it's proactive, right? Like people criticize this Christian notion of lust being punishable, or not punishable even, just like negative, because 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 a thought creeping into your mind. It seems to be an entertaining thought. You go on to engage with that thought. And yeah, I think the thing that's wrong with cheating 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 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? 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, hadn't cheated on his wife with her friend. Is that like a good show of character? 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? 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 what's going on in your subconscious. And so, that really reveals who you truly are. So, I'd be quite happy to experience such a dream because I think it would sort of reveal that actually 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 you wake up and you're like, you know, none of that is real, right? So, I don't think it's a wise idea. idea. But I do think that the proactive element 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 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 and 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? 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 volition and the desire and the volition, yeah? It's just hard to measure that like internally within someone's head even for themselves, 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 that's the sort of the really sort of harmful part of adultery and cheating. It's not the physical action because you can isolate the physical action in a way that you 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 and people say that's thought crime. It's like no he's just saying that like don't entertain that thought and I think he's probably right about that, right? I mean is there is there an argument against that? Is there a reason to think that actually it's fine? I remember speaking to Arthur Brooks maybe? 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. Because it is a new environment where people who work together a lot and may have some like latent eroticism burbling 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, you shouldn't do it because it regularly is the moment where people let their holiday romance plus latent office romance stuff converge and stuff goes badly. So 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. Ideally you should be able to do that right and I think the thought is well no but like that's you can't control the extent to which you're like meant to. It's actually maybe you kind of can like maybe you can condition yourself. I mean we talk all the time about like you know physical conditioning so you know people who like smack their knees into poles so that they you know strengthen themselves to do UFC or whatever. You're saying that I should expose myself to as many naked women as possible and build up my resilience? 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 like the that's the that's the name of the game. Does that not make me more fragile? If it does then maybe that's just a good thing. And like I want strong knees but in order to have strong knees I'll never hit them against anything? Yeah I don't know I mean I think you should be able to like I think you should just be able to say no and if you can't if you're telling me it's 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... But you work on your mental conditioning by not being around an attractive naked woman? Yeah I mean that's interesting thought is right maybe the best thing you can do is to but then like yeah I mean maybe maybe... Run the other side of a glass screen? Like maybe maybe but 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 resist these kinds of things and maybe oh maybe it makes exposure to it is required. I think the evidence seems to show the opposite right like people who regularly watch pornography are much more likely to objectify women and... Much more likely to cheat. 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 it'll count as cheating. You can say you're allowed to sleep with anyone except Ben and then only Ben becomes cheating right so like 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 gonna 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 then when that naked woman presents herself on the table and says oh you know you're coming to cheat on your wife you'll be like you know get away from it. You'd be like Thomas Aquinas whose family got so worried about his theological dedication that they really started to worry about him because he got obsessive over theology and in the medieval period he was living in this in this castle they kind of locked away and 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 think that's that's you know not exactly what I would advise people do 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 all 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. Especially bad for women if you're chasing them down the street with a stick that's on fire. That's also true but it's bad for women in so many respects. 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 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 again this is what I think Jesus was getting at was not like if you find a woman attractive you should be bestowed for adultery. It's like don't engage in these sorts don't indulge these sorts because you're doing something that's spiritually damaging 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 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 don't go away on a company retreat yeah but that's the thing that's a kind of that's a kind of sort of that's a kind of safety measure right and I think you can put safety measures in 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 into say your Instagram feed like 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 I mean I still I still doomscroll right but I was really trying to prevent against getting addicted to just like random content just it just pulls you in right AI dogs talking about Aquinas or hot chicks giving you cunts yeah it's still it's it's still um you know you still end up doing 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 problem isn't it's not like you you want to get rid of it so you want everyone to get rid of it 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 co-worker 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 because 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 Alex O'Connor ladies and gentlemen dude you rule I appreciate you where should people go you got a tour coming up what else you doing yeah I do have a tour I'm doing six shows across North America and one show in Canada in November so extremely soon which is gonna 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 apart from that where do people get tickets they via the link in the description Chris what right okay you go to Alex O'Connor comm forward slash tour and the tickets will be available we're doing New York and LA you're doing the Town Hall in New York that's right which is where I played last year San Francisco sold out and very cool in Toronto doing they don't like it they don't like you calling it Toronto it's Toronto Toronto yeah you you drop the tea you have to do a glottal stop like sure yeah yeah Toronto they do share a lot of like British sort of ways of speaking right it's a little in Toronto it's like it's really weird it's like an American trying to do British slang some of the time especially like in a rap culture it's very strange but I'm excited to experience the first hand I've never been to Canada so that is great the Ontario are you doing Vancouver as well and no no just just to run the shows in Canada sell out so fast it's very yeah I got to check that out and 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 very fun cool what else working on some projects that I can't talk about yet which is gonna be really fun but hopefully if people watch this back in a year or two they'll know what I'm talking about they might already and then hoping 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 director camera stuff I've been doing a lot of interviews and conversations and that they miss when I just sort of do like video essay style stuff I want to do more of that I haven't at the time recently they take a lot longer than a podcast like practically to to film and edX 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 okay appreciate you man until next time always hey a quick note one thing that we've been told by a lot of our subscribers is on Apple podcast Spotify and YouTube they've been unsubscribed or unfollowed even though they press 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 those here you know when a song leaves that breath in the beginning or you hear that bit of feedback right at the end those details are what make the song the song with Bose you'll hear everyone your music deserves Bose