Know Thyself - E85 - Alex O’Connor: Philosopher Reflects On Death, Atheism, Morality & Meaning

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

Today we are joined by the Cosmic Skeptic, Alex O'Connor, for a fascinating look into philosophy, atheism, and the pursuit of an ethical life. Alex has gained recognition for his unique perspective on reality, which he interprets through the lenses of materialism and agnosticism. This makes for an intriguing conversation as André and him engage in a deep dive into various topics. The discussion revolves around their viewpoints on God, religion, consciousness, and morality. They dissect the potential dangers of intellectualizing and its impact on our understanding of the world. Furthermore, they tackle an interesting question: can the study of ethics lead to an individual becoming more ethical in their actions? Alex also shares his thoughts on near death experiences, artificial intelligence, and facing the fear of death. André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro  1:36 What it Means to Live a "Good" Life  5:37 Defining Meaning and Purpose  9:34 What Makes Something Bad or Good  14:15 The Balance of Open Mindedness  16:03 Atheism & Theism: Where's the Line?  18:30 Is God Dead? Being an Agnostic vs Atheist 21:10 The Ignorance of Belief  24:35 Distinguishing Between Wisdom & Knowledge  30:35 What is God?  34:41 How Studying Theology Changed Alex's Perspective 39:53 Religon & Tribalism: Why We're Afraid of Opposing Opinions 45:35 What It Looks Like to Live Ethically 49:44 The Danger of Over-Intellectualizing  58:37 Materialism Facing off with Consciousness 1:03:09 Are Near Death Experiences Real? 1:08:38 Why The Fear of Death is Valuable 1:24:09 The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence 1:26:38 Why He's Changed His Mind on Consciousness 1:28:18 Making the Most of Our Lives  1:30:19 Conclusion ___________ Alex J. O’Connor is founder of the “Cosmic Skeptic” YouTube channel, podcast and blog, platforms dedicated to the publication of philosophical ideas and debates in an accessible format. A graduate of philosophy and theology from St. John’s College, Oxford University, Alex is an international public speaker and debater, having delivered addresses across multiple continents at conferences, universities, and local drinking groups, as well as debated ethics, religion, and politics with a number of high-profile opponents before college audiences, on radio talk shows and on national television. Alex’s online videos have been collectively viewed around fifty million times, attracting over 500,000 people to subscribe to his regular content. He has produced videos with notable experts in respected fields, such as Peter Singer, Richard Dawkins, Bishop Robert Barron, and William Lane Craig. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cosmicskeptic/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CosmicSkeptic Website: https://cosmicskeptic.com ___________ Looking to Start a Podcast? Podcasting Course: https://www.podcastpurpose.com/ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/

For someone like myself who's more or less a materialist, personal experience is probably the only way that I think I would ever be able to be convinced of God's existence. I remember waltzing into university, and I had this YouTube channel where I talked about atheism and feeling like I'm pretty good at this stuff. I was learning about approaches to the discussion that completely upended the way that I was talking about it.

What is a strongly held belief that you've changed your perception on? Well, people really want a need generally is to know how to live. And if philosophy is supposed to be for any purpose, it has to be something like that. You could study ethics as an academic discipline and yet have absolutely no change in how ethical a person you are. So then what are you doing? The more interesting and useful kind of philosophy is the philosophy that tells you how to live. If I told you you had a week to live, how is that going to change your life? It seems like if you remind people of their death, it changes their behaviors.

Our knowledge that we're going to die makes us want to do things which will outlive us. It's a way of escaping death. It's a way of denying death. Without this fear of death, maybe we wouldn't be motivated to do anything at all. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to know thyself. Today we're sitting down with a graduate of philosophy and theology from St. John's College, Oxford University. And he is a debater, public speaker, YouTuber, podcaster, many things around the non-so existential questions of life about ethics, morality, God, religion, free will.

Much of what we're going to be diving into today, Alex O'Connor. Hey, it's good to be here. Yeah. What does it mean for you to live a good life, a ethically grounded and virtuous life, which might be two different things, but how do you delineate that? Well, people often equivocate on the word good. And I suppose one of the points that I've always made when talking about philosophy is that good is almost always a relative term in the sense that it's relative to some kind of end. one of the great struggles for secular ethicists is to try to give an account of where ethics might come from if it indeed exists. I take a relatively pessimistic view about the nature of ethics in that I think that when people make ethical statements, they're just expressing emotions at each other. And it's a view that's called ethical emotivism.

And there are sort of two approaches to talking about it. one of them is the slightly more academic, definitional, what does the word good mean, what's going on in people's brains when they talk about it. And that's an interesting conversation, but on a, I suppose, a more personal or colloquial level, it means that when someone says that something is good or bad, when someone morally approves or condemns something, they are essentially just expressing an emotion. The reason that's a pessimistic view is because it makes it very difficult to tell people that they're wrong in any objective sense. If you do something I don't like and I go boo at you, I mean, that might mean something, but there's no real normative force to that. There's nothing I can do to say that my boo is correct in a way that yours isn't. And so when you talk about the good life, if you mean in an ethical sense, then because I'm an ethical emotivist, you know, it's going to be on a personal level when I think about how I want my life to go.

I think I'm committed to the view that it will be something about emotional alignment and the things that I'm doing, the things that I have done and can reflect on having done are in alignment with my,

to put it really plainly, emotional preferences, that sounds quite sort of a cold and bland way of putting it, but then maybe I'm a cold and bland kind of philosopher. I mean, the good,

in an ethical sense, generally has to be, in reference to some goal. So the traditional religious morality of the past will say that the goal is something like likeness to God or union with God. And so all good and bad things are defined in terms of how much they approximate that ultimate good. Secular ethicists try to do away with the God, but they still need something to aim towards. So a utilitarian will talk about pleasure maximization. They'll talk about hedonism. And in a lot of spaces talking about pleasure and head.

These are sort of dirty terms. When you think of hedonism, you think of driving fast cars and sleeping around and doing this kind of thing. John Stuart Mill, who wrote an essay on utilitarianism, which is probably the most popular one that's ever been written on it on the subject, was careful to point out that when he says pleasure, although things like that do count towards pleasure, he means pleasure in the broadest possible sense. Whatever the case, here's your goal, and so things are good and bad in reference to that goal. you know is this table a good table well sure it hold things up you know that the the cups that are sat on the table aren't falling off so but in service of a particular end that is holding things up off the ground it's a good table but if we were on a movie set and I was about to throw you into the table and it was supposed to like collapse it was supposed to one of these these prop tables it would

suddenly become a bad table because that's not going to collapse if I throw you on it right and so trivially depending on what end you have the word good and bad in other senses, completely changes as to whether something's good or bad. If human beings have ends, if human beings have natural ends, then I think that there can be good and bad actions in relation to that end, but you've always got to be conscious of what that end is. I think it's important to reflect on that if, to what degree by the end of our life do we deem us having lived a worthwhile existence?

And I think a lot of people struggle with discovering their purpose, living a life of fulfillment, and ultimately coming at discovering what is a worthwhile life to live. And then working backwards, you get to, I guess, create your own framework for what is good on the path and what will bring you closer to that. But in any real sense, I think it is important to see the subjectivity of it and how I would love for you to speak to a little bit more of being very, very difficult to ground an objective morality. in any real possible sense. It's interesting that you said discover meaning or discover purpose or something like that. I mean, there's, I suppose, a great debate as to whether, particularly for someone like myself who's more or less a materialist, I don't believe in anything more than the matter that makes us up.

We're going to dive into that. Yeah, we certainly can. It's great fun. I mean, the reason I say more or less is because there are certain considerations that make me not sold on that, let's say. But, you know, the question is, if there is such thing as meaning or purpose, the question is, is it something you discover or is it something that you create? A lot of people talk about creating your own meaning. You can just sort of invent your own purpose. I've always been quite suspicious of this because to me, purpose means something like reason to act.

It's some kind of motivating factor. It's a reason to act or a reason to be. To create your own purpose is to sort of create a reason to act. just for the sake of having a reason. So it's like creating a task to fulfill just to have the sense of fulfilling that task. You know, like I can just set the task to count the blades of grass in my front garden.

I can just make that task for myself. And then suddenly I've got this purpose to fulfill. I've got this motivation to do something because I want to count the blades of grass. But it just seems so sort of arbitrary. And there's a second order sense in which we can look at the very act of creating your own purpose, as it were.

And think, is that a meaningful endeavor? You know, it doesn't seem to bottom out anywhere. And so I'm a little bit, I suppose, suspicious of that because it is just subjectivity all the way down, in my view. But that's why the Holy Grail of secular ethics is some kind of objective grounding for ethics. Some people just try to brute force it with intuition. They say, like Sam Harris, you've had him on your show, he says, look, the worst possible misery for everyone is bad.

If you don't think that's bad, then there's nothing else that the word bad can mean. So the worst possible misery suffering for everyone must be bad. Therefore, we know that anything that moves us away from that is going to be better. It's going to be good. And then you have a framework. You say, as long as we are, our goal is to move as far away as we can from the worst possible misery for everyone, whatever we do can be judged according to that goal. That's fine. And then he writes a whole book about how science can determine how best to move away from that trough and get to the peaks on the moral landscape. And sure, that's great. But that first point, That first assumption that the good thing to do is to avoid suffering, that's the interesting step.

And that's the one that's impossible to make without essentially pulling yourself up by a bootstrap as he puts it. You have to just sort of brute force in an assumption there. And it doesn't matter what that assumption is, but you need one to get off the ground at all in this discussion, I think. What would be an antithetical assumption or, I guess, exploration that would you feel like kind of show the potential futility of that assumption? To me, that feels like a very useful framework, but I guess you're saying that you can't ground it. Do you have another idea of how you could potentially ground good? Well, people do suggest different options here. So there's this idea of avoiding suffering, which is more or less a version of utilitarianism.

It's about maximizing pleasure slash minimizing suffering. Maybe these are the same thing. And that sounds great. Okay, we minimize the amount of suffering in the world. but there are certain times when our intuitions just seem to rub up against that kind of thing. So, I mean, any first-year undergraduate philosophy student will be asked questions like,

for a utilitarian, would it be right to take an innocent person and kill them to take five of their organs and donate them to five patients who need an organ transplant? And usually there are second-order considerations again, like, well, if we lived in a society where that happened, people would be scared, all of this kind of stuff. But if you managed to just sort of control for all of that, people just want to say something like, you have a right not to be violated in that way. And I can say,

but look, if I kill you, especially if we just stipulate that this is the only time in human history it's ever allowed to happen, it would minimize suffering. Right. Yeah, sure, you get killed, but five people now get to live and they get to avoid the suffering. It just seems like you want to say, no, that's wrong. If that's the case, then there must be some stander of wrongness which sits outside of this crude suffering minimisation. Like I say, some people will try to account for why that's wrong, still just in terms of overall suffering or something like that. But that's that sort of your basic example. But if you come up with more, I say, difficult to respond to versions of that kind of thing, then somebody might say that rights are at the

basis of their ethics. I believe that human beings are born with a set of inalienable rights. You know, you have a right to privacy, a right to life, a right not to be violated, this kind of thing. And that's the foundational ethical, ethical structure. And you could say to somebody, by forcing them to, you know, give up or getting somebody else to violate their rights, we'd increase pleasure by an incredible amount. They'd still say that's wrong because the basis of their ethics isn't about suffering minimization. Religious thinkers will say it's not about maximizing suffering. It's about approximating the likeness to God. Aristotelians will say it's about fulfilling the natural.

of mankind. So like how this table has the end of holding things up, human beings have natural ends. There are things that they just naturally tend towards and sort of, and that actualizing fulfills their natural goal. All of these are sort of competing ideas of what ethics should be aiming at. The problem is there's no real way to say that one of these is right or wrong other than just how it feels. And that brings us back to emotivism, right? It's got so much to do with feeling. I mean, somebody will say, I'm a utilitarian. I believe that we should maximize pleasure. And then somebody comes across to them and says, well, what about this organ transplant situation? And it works as an objection. Why? Why does that work as an objection to utilitarianism?

Well, because killing an innocent person just sort of feels wrong? Who cares? If you've got this ethical theory, the whole point of having the theory is that we can work out things that are right and wrong without having to rely on our feelings. No, we have our ethical theory. This is going to, you know, give us a sort of mathematical way of really working out what's the right thing to do. But as soon as it gives us something we really don't like, we don't just say, okay, I mean, imagine if we typed into a calculator, a sum, and we didn't like the answer. And instead of going, gosh, I guess we were wrong, I guess we just have to accept this. We said, oh, no, let's change the calculator.

What's the point in having a calculator if the moment it spits out something you don't like, you're going to change how the calculator works? That's what people do with ethics. They come up with an ethical theory. and they test it against just counter examples which just work on intuition, just make you go, oh, I don't like that. That to me says a lot about what's really going on in ethics,

that we're just balancing what we sort of emotionally feel lines up with how we want the world to look. So I want to keep diving down this exploration. First, I want to talk about the importance. You started out with your YouTube channel, a cosmic skeptic, this notion, especially for someone on the philosophical journey, there's this importance, I think, like Ericidal said something along the lines of the educated man, like a mark of the educated

man is the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it. I've always kind of felt like the matured intellect is the ability to hold paradox simultaneously when we're exploring many different areas such as religion, philosophy, free will, what is God, meaning, all these things can be quite triggering for a lot of people. And so before we, you start diving deep or how important do you feel like it is to really be able to engage these explorations without it without you know having to accept an opinion one way or the other but still having the willingness to be changed by what you hear i mean i think that's kind of the the point of doing these kinds of conversations right i mean i don't necessarily think that everybody

needs to force themselves to current to sort of constantly be challenging their worldview and putting themselves in uncomfortable situations. A lot of people, especially podcasters and conversationalists, they encourage it. They say, yeah, make yourself uncomfortable. You know, put yourself outside of your comfort zone. But while I think that's, it's kind of like telling someone to go to the gym, it's like, yeah, that's a great thing to do, like recommend it, but you wouldn't like force them if they don't want to. You know what I mean?

And it's the same thing here. You have every right in the world to just sort of sit at home and not do that. And I understand why that would be the case. I've never had a problem with really like putting a hat on just like, becoming a Christian for half an hour and just looking at the world through that lens and trying to make it make sense trying as hard as i can to to defend it's like i'm a lawyer or something i'm a barrister and i've got to to defend this client and i've really got to do everything i can to to make it work i've always found that really fun um i think for some people it might be troubling i guess because i'm an atheist and so

if i become convinced that god exists awesome are you kidding me like I've just literally infinitely expanded the potential utility of my life. That is fantastic news. In the other direction, if you're a Christian and you put on your atheist hat and you start to think, oh, maybe I'm not so sure about this religion thing anymore, it's not so happy in outcome. And so I'd understand why someone wouldn't want to do that. But I guess it depends on the kind of person you are.

What do you think about this thought that atheists and theists actually have a lot in common than they'd like to admit, meaning on the spectrum, you know, whether someone feels it more agnostic or atheist to theist. Both ends of the spectrum are essentially, I guess, asserting something they can't know or prove. What do you think about that? It depends on the form of atheism that someone takes and indeed the form of religion. Traditionally, people in the online atheist community have made a big point saying that the religious people are the ones making the claim. Right. They're saying God exists. The atheist says, I don't believe you. I mean, if you said to me that an even number of mosquitoes have been bitten in the past hour globally.

It's an even number. I said, I don't think that's true. I'm not convinced that that's true. It doesn't mean I think it's odd, right? And if you said, I really think that it's even, and I said, I don't believe you. I don't think that it's true that it's even. And it's not the same thing as saying it's false,

it's not the same thing as saying that it's odd, but I'm saying I don't believe it's true that there's an even number of people bitten by mosquito. so in the past hour, I don't think the evidence is sufficient. If somebody was listening to that conversation and said, well, you both more or less are sort of getting at the same thing. You're both sort of claiming something you can't know. Am I? I don't think so.

I feel like I'm responding to something. However, you know, obviously if I said, no, it's odd, that's a different story. And if somebody says, no, I know God doesn't exist. Or I think it is irrational to believe that God does exist. That implies that there is some good, sufficient reason that upon hearing somebody should dispel with their beliefs in God. That is a burden of proof. It doesn't mean that they've got more in common in terms of the content of their belief.

It just means they're both doing a project of trying to prove a worldview. It's like saying, you know, haven't, I don't know, communists and Islamists got so much in common because they're both sort of trying to establish a world view. Like, kind of, yeah. I mean, they're both doing that, right? But like an atheist is trying to paint a picture of a completely different universe to a religious person. And maybe they are both making a claim, but I think a lot of people try. try optimistically to say that people agree more than they disagree. And that's often true,

like I mean, maybe an atheist and a Christian both sort of like the same music, sure, but in terms of the actual important stuff relevant to the issue, there have to be these fundamental and irreconcilable differences. Otherwise, they would agree with each other. I think people are far too optimistic about that a lot of the time afterwards. Yeah, sure. So how would you articulate, I guess, your own atheism, as I do believe in God, some atheist would articulate it. I believe there is no God. how would you, I guess, describe your own? I'm probably best described as an agnostic.

I certainly can't say that I'm certain there's no God or that I would bet every single penny in my bank account on it. But I would say I lean towards God doesn't exist. And interestingly, I think, well, maybe not so interestingly, this is how all beliefs work. I mean, atheists often get this, this slight pushback or sort of raise of an eyebrow when they say, well, you know, I can't say I'm 100% sure of this. Maybe God does exist. And we go, oh, so you're an agnostic then? If I speak to a Christian, I say, are you 100% certain that your worldview is impenetrably correct?

And they go, well, no, I mean, I guess I could be wrong. Like it's possible. I don't know. I'm still working it out. I wouldn't say to them, oh, well, then you're an agnostic, really. you know, you're not really a Christian, you're agnostic. There's going to be some room for doubt here. I mean, I think if you're like 99% sure, agnostic is an inappropriate word.

Likewise, if you're like on the fence, it would be a bit weird to call yourself a Christian or an atheist or something like that, right? But I'm sort of somewhere in that range. And so I don't think there's good enough reason for me to believe in the existence of God. it turns what you mean by God, of course. It's one of those kinds of conversations, but strictly speaking, I'm not convinced of arguments that I've heard, and I have a few considerations which make me think

that at least the kind of God that people like to talk about popularly probably doesn't exist. And so they mesh together to a sort of agnostic leaning towards strong A atheism. Yeah, I'm also in that boat. I think, well, I mean, it sounds like the needle moved a little bit

from the beginning of this conversation a little bit more on the atheist side too. You know, realizing there's this saying that I like that often belief acts as a pacifier for our insecurity of not knowing. And I'm just to be curious to hear what you think about that on the path of philosophy, which is, you know, etymology, breaking that down, Philo Fylo, Sophia, lover of wisdom, wanting to live a life filled with wisdom, on the first. pursuit of truth, it's really important to, if you want to go on that journey, to be uncomfortable with our own ignorance. So thoughts there. Yeah, I mean, clearly belief systems

are in part an antidote to ignorance. And one of the things that a comprehensive worldview can give you is what I think is best described by the notion of faith. I try to make sense of, what does the word faith mean? I think intuitively, faith is something like belief without evidence. But a lot of people squirm at that. They say, no, I'm not just sort of believing for no reason. It's something like trust. And so, for example, you know, we're here, we're having this conversation, maybe some green tea.

And I sort of trust that this isn't poisoned. Now, I can't prove that this isn't poisoned. I didn't see you make it. I only met you for the first time today. I have no idea, right? But I kind of trust that it's not got poisoned. Now, do I believe that with no evidence? kind of, but also kind of not,

because I've got some kind of background evidence, right? I've got a background evidence that we're in a place where if you were to do that, you would probably get in a lot of trouble for it. If you were to be caught, you've probably got a vested interest in me not being poisoned because, you know, it would be a good idea if this show actually went out.

There are people who know that I'm doing this, and so they'd probably work out, you know. Those kinds of reasons, I like my background knowledge, in which I then am able to say, given all that, I can kind of trust that this isn't poisoned, even if I can't prove that thing itself. A worldview often works like this for ignorance. So a Christian might believe, and I use Christianity as the first example that comes to mind,

because I talk about Christianity all the time, they might believe that God exists, and they might have arguments that have established that conclusion, right? And so they have this view of a benevolent God who's overseeing the universe. Now, when someone says, well, why do people suffer? Well, why is it that children get cancer? They can say, I don't know. But I know there is an answer. I have faith that there is an answer to that question, even if I don't know what it is.

Because they've got all of this background evidence that says, yeah, this is a great mystery why people suffer. But that mystery isn't enough to undercut, you know, the cosmological argument to establish God's existence. It doesn't even, it's not relevant to it. And so, yes, having a worldview like that does allow you to take these elements of ignorance and just say, well, I'm just sort of going to brush over it with my worldview. and say that there's some kind of answer. I don't know what it is, but it's got something to do with God. And that feels to a skeptic

a lot like someone is just plugging up the gaps of their ignorance with this belief and using belief as a pacifier for ignorance, as you put it. But I think that if done correctly, it's not always an illegitimate practice. You know, in the same way that if we were being really pedantic, somebody could say, like, well,

where's your evidence that you're not being poisoned right now? Show me the evidence. And I said, well, like, know, I've sort of referenced the stuff I've referenced about the law and stuff. They say, well, that's not enough. Oh, yeah, that's really enough, like, to establish philosophically, you know, the conclusion. Let's put it in a syllogism. What are your premises?

Premise one, you know, you'll get arrested if you poison me. Premise 2, therefore you won't poison me. Oh, that doesn't follow. It's a non-sequit. Like, sure, man, okay, but that's not how human beings tend to work on the daily. And so I don't think it's a problem if somebody is using their worldview to sort of just guide the way they're looking through the world, that every single inkling of it isn't rationally justified, if you see what I'm saying?

Yeah. What does wisdom mean to you? It's interesting because I ask my podcast guests sometimes, where do you go for wisdom? And the reason I ask that question is because it's clearly distinct from knowledge, right? And I guess, I don't know what the difference is. I mean, if knowledge is just sort of apprehension of true things, then wisdom. is something like the use of knowledge. It's something like the productive or proactive

or beneficial use of knowledge or proneness to use knowledge in the right kind of way. I mean, again, I'm putting it in quite cold terms here, right? But it will be something like that. It'll be something like the ability to take the sort of collection of things that you know. and start figuring out how they actually go together and start figuring out how they can

motivate the way that you should behave. It's something like that, I guess. But I'm not entirely sure. I mean, I don't know if you have a good definition of wisdom that we can work with. Well, I mean, I think it also goes back to where we started, which is if you are trying to figure out what you think wise thought

and what is a wise action in the world, it also ties back to, I guess, your relativity of what you think is. good and what you think is bad. But I feel like most people would presume that wisdom is aligning ourselves with what will bring us more well-being. But then I guess there is some presumptions as well like we spoke to at the very beginning, which is like how do you decide what is morally, ethically sound and what is like going to be a virtuously live life. But yeah, I would say what the wisdom and it's useful understanding, I guess for me is, is, like,

thought and action that is in alignment with bringing us closer to the well-being of ourselves and others something like that sure yeah so so assuming that goal of of well-being wisdom is kind of this is the use of knowledge to get us there right and i think i vaguely agree that whatever that end actually is in religious wisdom would be the same thing of using your your knowledge of the world to to bring you closer to god or something and that would be wisdom it's it's got something do with the way that knowledge is used, I think. Right. Which, yeah, I'm very fascinated about the difference between the two.

I guess knowing is kind of like maybe the accumulation of knowledge and nosis, which is like the term, I guess, more of the embodiment of it and knowledge coming from more experience. I'm curious as somebody who's such an intellectual on your own path, where does that nosis come in, the knowledge that comes in from the own experience that necessarily can't really be validated from outside people from outside perceptions because they're not having the same experience of you. But people have such an array of different experiences which we can talk about from NDE's to what happens within their own consciousness that have obviously a lot of implications

as to what is God and its many different definitions. And so how do you distinct between knowing and nosis in your own life? Well, I don't know if I'd be using the terms in the same way that you are. Sure. I mean, nosis or sort of Gnosticism, these kinds of terms can mean a lot of different things in a lot of different circumstances. As far as I'm aware, it's just sort of this Greek term for knowledge. And so it sounds like what you're saying is the kind of knowledge that comes from something

like non-transferable personal experience. kind of thing that I experience for me and I can't give to you, I can't even explain to you. I think that that's all there is, right? Like all you have is your experience. And there are certain things which you'll experience, which it seems like I'm able to experience as well. I mean, maybe we hear a sound, maybe we sort of see something happen in front of us. And clearly we're both having the experience of that thing. But even then, that experience is still unique to you.

You're still the only one having that particular experience with that angle, with that exact distance from the source. So all you ever have is your own experience of things. There are some that seem to originate from within you somehow. People often make fun of these in conversations about the nature of the world and the existence of God. Because people will say, I've had an experience of God. I met Jesus. and the reason why that's ridiculed is because in the context of like an academic conference where people are trying to convince each other of their worldviews, that's just going to do

nothing. And they're right. That is not a helpful way to approach this question when we're trying to share evidence with each other, right? But having said that, personal experience is probably the only way that I think I would ever be able to be convinced of God's existence, really, you know, I would have to experience that for myself and then I would have to, well, I'd recognize that it's not something I would be able to share with other people. I wouldn't be able to use it as any kind of argument, but for a person who

experiences it themselves, it's a perfectly legitimate reason to believe in a particular thing. You know what I mean? So, so like, personal experience is, why the hell would it not be a form of knowledge, you know, why not? But of course, if it's something that you, if it's not publicly available, if you can't give it to other people, then it's not going to do very well in the conversation trying to convince anybody else. Yeah. But yeah, perfectly legitimate for yourself, yeah. I look at, I suppose, the shared personal intrinsic experience that other people share about their connection to God in a more, less of it like a theist, you know, guy in the sky with the beard. But the, I guess how I would describe God more as this kind of intelligent,

loving awareness that is the seed of our experience. And that is the same and ubiquitous within all of us. And I find that individuals, for whatever reason, that have had personal experiences where they really get to taste that, it is a very, like, blissful place within oneself. And to me, that is kind of the God worth talking about because it's a place, whatever you want to call it, and I don't think God is a useful term because it's been so just used for so many different ways of trying to arrive at describing this place. But I do think that at least in describing it in that way is a really useful thing to be able to hear from other people in their personal experience and to see how it can maybe point to a place

within yourself that is also available to experience that. and the byproducts of what come from tasting and experiencing that place within ourselves. And so, you know, I've been fortunate to sit down with a lot of spiritual teachers, you know, Advata Vedantic, you know, non-dual teachers as well. And I suppose that is a little bit more of my pursuit, the pursuit that I find interesting when it comes to living a life of a wisdom and knowing who we are in our essence. I mean, for what it's worth, I think a lot of religious traditions will equally condemn this bearded man in the sky image of god that that is an image that is conjured up by

non-believers it's literally a caricature um i mean if you if you picture the catholic god you're probably picturing something like you know the the roof of the sistine chapel this this bearded man. But within Catholic theology, there's so much discussion about the nature of God and it's just not even close to something like that. And when people talk in terms, in secular terms about oneness and unity and connection and goodness and how truth and beauty are kind of the same thing, this is what Catholic theologians have been saying for centuries too. It's just that our vision of the religious debate has been so warped by the new atheism movement of the 2000s, which was very much about science versus scriptural literalism and sort of modern religious political movements.

That was the sort of battle that was going on, but the discussion about the nature of God on a theological level, I think, wasn't shifted at all there. I can't remember who it is that said something, something like that Richard Dawkins had never written a word about God, not once. I can't remember who said it. Someone, someone fairly well-known, I think, but saying, saying, like, in all of his career, Richard Dawkins has never said a single word about God. And I guess that's trying to capture what I'm, what I'm hinting at here, which is that a lot of people would agree with you that that's not what God should be looked like. That's not how God should be, should be envisioned. So I guess you're very unique in the aspect that you've studied so much theology taking more of an atheistic position. I'm just curious, what have you learned from your study

of theology that you've, I guess, has shifted perspective of you of how you personally live your life. And yeah, in the most powerful way, if you had to pick one thing, irrespective of you believing the place and it's where it came from or where it's being grounded in the objective truth you know well one thing is that i think there's much more legitimacy in a religious world than i would have than then i would have thought when i was younger and i don't know if that's more due to studying it or just due to sort of age and experience but i remember waltzing into university at sort of 18 19 years old and i had this youtube channel where i talked about atheism and feeling like yeah you know i'm i'm i'm pretty

good at this stuff, man. I can do the religious debate and a meeting, just meeting people and interacting with tutors as well who were quite obviously deeply committed to their religious worldview. And interestingly, the higher up I looked in the, in the academic space at things like philosophy of religion, it's sort of self-selecting because if you're an atheist, like you've just said, it's a bit strange to study theology. And so the further you go, if somebody spent the last eight years doing a PhD in something really specific, chances are they probably believe it, because if they didn't, they wouldn't put the effort in. And so everyone that I'm talking to, who really knows what they're talking about to the extent that they've been studying it for so long

are going to be believers. And so I was learning about these arguments I wasn't aware existed. I was learning about approaches to the discussion that completely upended the way that I was talking about it. And what that did, the way that it changed me, in other words, is that now I think I'm much more able to meet people where they're at. You know, if I'm talking to Richard Dawkins about theology or religion, it's very much man in the sky, science, God of the gaps, evolution, that kind of discussion. When I have, you know, I don't know, if I speak to Jordan Peterson or something, that kind of language, if you've ever seen Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins have a conversation

about God and religion, it just doesn't even get off the ground because they just can't connect, I think I'm much more able now to sort of switch between those approaches and recognize that, okay, maybe he, when he says God, maybe when Jordan Peterson says God, he doesn't mean God. A lot of people criticize him because, you know, he uses religious language, but he uses it totally illegitimately, you know, like when he says things like, you're not really an atheist because you don't act like an atheist. People say, whatever you're calling God, Jordan Peterson, is just not what most people call God. Finally enough, the same criticism isn't put forward to Richard Dawkins. When Richard Dawkins says, you know, this old man in the sky who's murdering people

and commanding genocides, people don't make the same criticism that, well, whatever you're calling God there is not what we think God is. And so I guess I'm willing to suspend that skepticism more now and have conversations from different angles and be less, I guess, forthright about not only my views, but also my approach to the conversation. Yeah, I always respect. somebody no matter how I guess firm in their belief or how much background they've spent if somebody can approach a dialogue or conversation with somebody really with just the willingness to be changed by what they hear which is like how you actually truly listen then to me like how else are you otherwise going to have an authentic dialogue um instead of just you know just living life in like a debate

style format which can be have it can have its moments for sure but like living your whole life in that kind of sounds like really sucky. Yeah and it's not very productive either because especially when you're an atheist it's easy enough to just be poking holes in other people's world views but you're not erecting anything in its place. You know you've got nothing to work with and that's one of the criticisms that new atheism has now is that it's torn down so much and in its place nothing. Sam Harris tried it with the moral landscape. That's great. It's a good project. It's like here's something to put in its place, but most of the rest of it was just sort of broad hand-waving, oh, if we get rid of religion, we can sort of do secular humanism, whatever that even is.

You know, there's no real attempt to actually construct something. How are we now going to live? That's what people are interested in, man. People say, like, they want to know what's true, and sure, yeah, people do, it's interesting, but what people really want and need generally is to know how to live. And if philosophy is supposed to be for any purpose, it has to be something like that. I mean, are you just doing philosophy to know true things? That's fine if you are.

But I think that the more interesting and useful kind of philosophy is the philosophy that tells you how to live. There was a great question on an ethics paper once that I saw at university. I didn't take this question, but it was in the ethics exam. And the question was something like, does studying ethics make you a more moral person? And if not, what's the point? And implicitly, yeah, you could study ethics as an academic discipline and yet have absolutely no change in how ethical a person you are, let's say. So then what are you doing?

Well, like, what is the point in doing that? Maybe it's like interesting to get to grips with moral, you know, definitions and psychology and stuff. Yeah, sure, that's an interesting pursuit. But if we're talking about doing ethics, surely it's got to be more than that. we talked about how we have our own personal experience and I'm curious what you think about our primal needs to make meaning and to belong to a tribe because people can have a various different experiences internally about how they navigate their own consciousness or what they think they see or connected to I think Ken Wilbur has an interesting framework about

the spectrum of consciousness in terms of where people are at. Of course, if you have an experience internally and maybe it's some sort of inner luminous experience and you have a Christian worldview, you're going to perhaps perceive it as a connection to Jesus versus somebody born on a different side of the planet or at a different stage of development is going to perceive it and maybe label it or attach meaning in a completely different way. And I'm just curious about what your thoughts on that are, because I think it's really important to have, I guess, just more openness and fluidity to not attaching to the internal experience that we have being a certain thing and just being wary that it could be very much so fulfilling a need we have to make meaning or belong to a tribe

that, you know, we'll accept that. Well, there has to be something beneficial, useful about this practice, right? Otherwise, it wouldn't have evolved as a practice. clearly one of the things that makes human being so unique is that we're a social a social bunch that managed to work together to achieve things which are sort of beneficial for us in the long run right and so sure it makes sense that people will think tribally because why not why the hell not like if you're literally living in a tribe of course you need to have suspicion to people who aren't members of that that tribe

of course you need to be hostile, of course you need to put the rights of your tribe over the rights of other peoples. Of course, you know, tribe loyalty is going to be maybe more important to you than like open-mindedness, because you could be killed, you could be wiped out, right? We don't really live in the same kind of situation, you know, if I meet someone who disagrees with me strongly. I mean, some of them might want to kill me, but, you know, in Los Angeles, if I meet someone who's got a different viewpoint to me, they're unlikely to sort of pull out a spear and start trying to murder me for it. But we've still got that brain which sends those warning signals. When you see someone that's that's not in your tribe, there's that, that's a feeling of sort of like, oh, they're an outsider.

They're a threat. And it's so easy for people to say, yeah, we need to like move past tribalism. Like this is embedded into our DNA, man. Like this is thousands of years of evolution has predisposed us and understandably so to have that kind of suspicion. I don't think it's something we can just move beyond. I think it's something that we have to recognize and sort of battle with rather than trying to sort of pretend as if it doesn't exist. People are doing that a lot at the moment in areas like racial bias. It used to be this conversation of like, hey, let's just sort of all stop being racists.

Great, cool. But now the conversation's a bit more nuanced and people are saying things like, well, maybe we'll have implicit racial biases that will never go away. And so the conversation now is about how to deal with them, not how to move beyond it, not how to sort of. sort of get rid of it. We recognize that we kind of can't. Now we've got to figure out how we're going to deal with that. The same thing's got to happen with tribalism more broadly. There's this talk of like, well, we don't believe in tribalism. We're moving beyond tribalism. It's something that's embedded into your DNA. It's like being hungry or something, you know, best not think when you're hungry, best do everything you can to avoid being hungry. We live in a society where

we don't need to be hungry all the time. We can eat food. But you're never going to stop being hungry when you don't eat that food. It's just a biological fact of your existence. And I think tribalism is similarly embedded into the human DNA. Yeah. It's really important to, I guess, reflect on where that natural urge is within us and how it might create color tinted glasses and like the pursuit of truth or living a life of wisdom. And where we desire for to fit in and to be a part of the tribe and also to live in a world that makes sense to us. And I think like you spoke to, of course, there's,

there's a lot of purpose that that fulfills in our life and there's a reason for that. You mentioned, it's worth mentioning as well that most of ethics throughout human history has been an attempt to suppress or get away from animalistic sides of our nature. People are sort of dressing up in clothes and sitting in our natural positions on these weird things called chairs, you know, because we were sort of trying to, to get as much away from our animalistic side as possible. Whenever someone does something wrong or rude or immoral, we often use terms like, you know, they're animals.

It's brutish. You know, they're acting like a bunch of animals, these people. And it's because we associate that natural side of our nature with the unethical side of our nature. And so it shouldn't be a problem to recognize that this is an unavoidable part of our biology because without that to fight against ethics wouldn't even be worth doing. There would be no need for ethics if it didn't somehow subvert what we wanted to do anyway. So of course, anything that we think is ethically worthwhile is going to have to be achieved in the face of a

strong inclination to do the opposite. It's always going to be the case. You mentioned briefly in the course or the class where the question came up about ethics. Well, how would you answer the question of like what do you feel like is living in ethically grounded life? And I guess do you ever battle with this thought of like diving down these philosophical rabbit holes and ethical questions being kind of an ethical, you know, an intellectual game that you're playing versus, you know, how are you really embodying it in the way that you move in the world and how that actually changes? Yeah, there are two completely different questions. I mean, in my public life, I'm interested. in the more, let's say, academic side. I'm sort of like, well, this is interesting.

What do people mean when they say good? Oh, I think they're emoting at each other. I think it's if you look at certain things that are condemned as evil that make no sense, can we explain that because there's some kind of emotional revulsion? Yeah, interesting stuff. That's great. But if in my personal life, I'm experiencing a moral quandary, or if somebody, a friend would have to come to me and say,

I really don't know what to do here. And, you know, oh, I found out that my best friend is cheating on his wife. And I don't know whether I should tell her because I'm closer to him than I am with her. I'm not going to start, like, talking about meta-ethics and emotivism, right? It would be actually probably inappropriate for me to do so. I'm not going to say, well, it depends if you're a consequentialist or a deontologist. Maybe with some friends, I would do that. But you know what I mean, right?

It's clearly not what it's all about. That stuff should be part of the background information that informs how you have a conversation like that. But it's a different kind of conversation. And so I think, yeah, you can definitely study ethics without becoming more moral, as it were. I think you can study philosophy of religion without becoming more religious. However, I think that somebody who believes in God and studies religion in order to actually navigate the world is going to find it much more fulfilling. Similarly, someone who studies ethics because they actually want to use it to navigate the ethics. landscape is going to find that much more fulfilling too. Because I'm an ethical emotivist,

a form of moral nihilism, essentially, that there are no objective moral truth claims, it's very difficult for me to talk about actually grounding ethics and living an ethically grounded life. So I'm sort of stuck in the more sort of interesting definition, psychology, matter ethics discussion. I don't really have much of interest to say about how to actually live your life but I would be quite concerned if people were looking to to me some like 24 year old

philosophy grad for like life advice maybe in maybe in 10 years when I've lived a little more I'll get into that for now I'm just sharing what I think is academically interested you're 24 yeah yeah you think I was older no I knew you were young but I didn't know if you were like quite you know that young that's rad

oh thanks good on you man well yeah sometimes um sometimes people say that they expect me to be older and sometimes people say they expect me to be shorter whenever I meet people I'm often told them I'm tall of them they expect and I'm never quite sure which way around I prefer it if I'd rather they think I was tall

but I was actually short or the other way around and maybe the same applies here I don't know if it's better to be thought to be a bit older I think around about 30 is the peak age for what I want to be doing I feel like you're young enough that it's still really like fresh and you're still, for like podcasting and talks and stuff,

you're still like a young guy if you're 30 doing that, but you're old enough that people are really beginning to take you seriously. So I've got a bit of a way to go yet. Doing great. And I think we kind of brought up a little bit of what I feel like is kind of the difference between the intellect and what is our intelligence. I'm curious how you maybe delineate between the two, as obviously our intellect is kind of like a blade.

It's like it's our ability to dissect and cut like scientifically. delineate between things, which is very useful. But I've personally found, in my experience with people who are, I guess, operating in a way where they overly use their intellect, it can kind of create an emotionally thwarted or just really less joyful experience of life, which I would say people who are living a life filled with joy, they are much more so living a life where they're aligned with their intelligence. and I'm curious what your thoughts are between the two.

Yeah, I mean, again, it's sort of a terminological dispute, but I think I know what you mean by both terms. I mean, the person who just looks at everything with a sharp edge and tries to sort of debunk and criticize everything, it's easy and it's doable, and I've certainly been there, and, you know, I'd annoy my family when I was living at home. it was just sort of constant. And you can always fall back on this idea of like,

you know, I'm just trying to get to the truth. You know, you said something I don't think is true and I'm just asking you a question. I'm just trying to understand your view. But sometimes it is just inappropriate to do that. Sometimes it is wrong of you. Like this situation where a friend comes to me with a moral quandary, similarly, if they came to me with like anything on a personal level.

And I started getting all pedantic and saying, oh, well, actually, technically, have you considered this? it just wouldn't be appropriate. And if that's true of other people, it would rub them up the wrong way. It should be true of yourself as well. If you wouldn't do that, if you wouldn't take that approach

if a friend came to you in the situation, then you shouldn't take that approach when you're facing that situation yourself internally. Sometimes it's just inappropriate. I mean, the intellect is a sure it's like a knife or a chisel that you can use to tear away at the false stuff, but you're supposed to do it

in the service of creating a sculpture. You're supposed to be bringing something out of whatever you're chisling away at. If you take that chisel and just knock it all the way down through, then you end up with nothing. And that's no fun. Yeah, it's the difference between, I suppose in many ways, bottom up versus top-down processing

and how, if we're overly using the intellect, we might take a rose or something that maybe many people perceive as beautiful, and we can chop it up into its many parts. We can dissect a frog into know all of its organs and the way it operates. But you'll know the parts of a frog, but I guess you won't be able to experience the frog. You won't be able to experience the beauty of the rose. And I suppose I'm more so curious and fascinated with the intersection of philosophy that translates to us unlocking our perception of more beauty and wisdom in the world.

And I'm curious what you think maybe is the difference in somebody who stays on the lane of overly identifying with their intellect versus actually uses it as a means to inform their way of viewing and embodying how they move through the world. Yeah, well, it's like somebody. trying to understand the Mona Lisa by looking through a microscope at the paint strokes. Right. Like in theory you could do that across the entire canvas. But you don't, like, do you learn something new when you stand back and look at the painting? Like, surely you do. In the same way, there's a famous thought experiment in the philosophy of consciousness called Mary's Room.

There's this patient Mary, you know, it's kept in a completely colourless black and white room all alive. since she was born, she's never seen colour ever. But you give her all of the, not just all that we scientifically have now, but all of the possible literature and information there is about blue, about the wavelength, about the effect it has on the consciousness, about everything that could even be known and written down onto paper about blue. And the question is, when she steps outside of that room

and looks at something blue, has she learned anything? And intuitively the answer is yes. Surely there's something that you can know that is not reducible to words on paper, let's say. And I think that, yeah, something like that is going on here. Yeah, I mean, there are plenty of experiences like that. But I can't remember what I was using that as an analogy for, the blue room. I can't remember why I brought that up.

Yeah, well, I suppose if you're overly identified with the intellect, no matter how much you give somebody who sees black and white, white, all the literature of the electromagnetic spectrum of what makes up colors, you're missing the beauty of actually perceiving color if you don't have that. So yeah, there's something new that comes into the picture when you experience. If you look at the whole, it's kind of like if you look at religious experience through a psychological lens and you know everything about the brains. It's like a lot of people are really interested in NDE. It's like you've already mentioned near-death experiences. So people are fascinated by these. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

There are people who will study these experiences. You know, they'll meet the people who've had them. They'll talk to them. They'll learn everything that they can. But they'll still dream of having an experience. I'd love to just know what that's like to experience it. Because that's a form of knowledge that you can only get through experience. And it's true of NDEs.

It's true of religious experience. It's true of, you know, any drug-induced experiences, the kind of things that it seems like you get a form of knowledge just by taking them. You know, you can explain to somebody exactly what happens to the brain when they take acid. But unless you take acid, you're not going to know what that's like. And so, okay, cool. There are forms of knowledge which are, let's say, non-propositional. That should immediately break us out of the analytic tradition of trying to mathematicize everything about philosophy.

I was always in this camp, you know, especially when I started at university as all, let's put it into syllogism, premise, premise, conclusion, this kind of stuff. Because if you can't do that, then you're not talking about anything meaning. I was never interested in like philosophy as narrative. Certainly not things like philosophy as poetry, you know, because yeah, sure, it's like fun, it's a pastime, it's beautiful, whatever, not my cup of tea, but it's not like you're not doing philosophy. But I don't know, it seems like we've got that maybe the wrong way around.

I think C.S. Lewis once wrote about how he realized that the problem with his worldview before he became a theist was that he was being asked to take. fake, things that are most unnatural to him, numbers, abstraction, you know, this kind of stuff, and say, that's the true thing. That's the thing that's really there, you know, the maths, the syllogism. Whereas the thing that was most real to him, the narrative, the feeling, the experience, that's the thing that's wrong and fake and we should be suspect of. It seemed like it was kind of the other way around. I mean, analytic philosophy, the formalization of logic, this was supposed to be a tool in service of philosophy, but it's kind of just become philosophy now in the same way that

studying the brushstrokes of the painting is supposed to be a tool that we use in service of understanding the art. You know, what did the painter paint underneath it before we painted over it? Like, what was the pigment like before it's been eroded by time? This kind of, it's really useful information to get to know the painting better. But if you forget about that original bit, if you just look through the microscope, then you're missing something incredibly important. So I guess when you mentioned earlier

that you're in many ways more or less a materialist and I guess how you view things, what, because when you look at, I mean, you could put NDEs aside, you know, or like certain kids that have come in even with like claiming that they have full cognition of a past life and they're able to come to various like, say who they were and they go and verify all these things where the parents had no knowledge.

And, you know, there's many things like that examples externally, but then, you know, experiences I've had internally in conversations I've had with many people that just point to, at the very least, how mysterious consciousness really is. And so I'm just curious what you think of, because I'm sure you've explored, you know, many of these things. And I don't know if you've ever personally explored with psychedelics, breathwork or things that kind of put you in a non-ordinary state of consciousness. But even on the intellectual side of things, like when we had Donald Hoffman on or Sam,

we talked about the hard problem of consciousness, I suppose I am just always coming back to how much I don't know and the very real possibility that consciousness might be fundamental. It might not just arise out of, I guess, complex, like accumulated complex. neuronal activity. And I guess suppose I'm really just kind of stumbling my way to a question that is, I'm just curious how you arrived at being more or less, I guess, a materialist when there is kind of all this other stuff that I just mentioned to consider. Well, consciousness is the, it is the big objection to materialism. It's the thing that screams out that there's something more

than the mere material. Even just when you have an average dream, you know, it's fascinating to think what's going on there. You've got images in your head. You can close your eyes and you can picture things. You can see colors. You can see shapes in your head. Like, where are those shapes? And the great mystery is that I spoke about this recently on YouTube and people kind of in my comment section, they really didn't like this idea. And maybe I'm just getting something wrong here, but I was talking about how, like, if everything you experience, if everything in the brain is reducible to the material, when I close my eyes and see a triangle, there really is a triangle there, you know? I can see it. It's there. And I think, well, where is that triangle? The materialist has to say it's reducible

to just somewhere in your brain. But if I cut open your brain, I'm not going to find a triangle inside of it, right? And people thought that this was a bit silly because it's kind of like, oh, well, it's kind of like if you cut open a computer. you're not going to find the thing that it's displaying on the screen. But you still have the screen displaying the triangle, right? Like in your mind, you just have the mind. There is no interface. It's just the computer.

It's as if the computer itself, somehow there was a triangle in the computer's own first person's subjective experience. Like, where is that triangle that you can picture in your head? Where the hell is it? I mean, if it's just in the head, then that, I mean, that's a great mystery, like you say. And that's the simplest mystery of all. I mean, let alone sort of NDE's or weird personal experience. that you might have. I mean, those are a different story altogether.

Just reflecting on the nature of being able to see things with your mind. I mean, that's crazy. However, look, there's an equally strong mystery in the opposite direction. If your consciousness is not just the materials of your brain, then this thing called the interaction problem. Why does it interact with the brain? Why is it that if I change your physical brain,

I will change your mind at the same time? And in fact, I can't change your mind. you can't change your mind without something in your physical brain changing. If your mind is not just your brain, and if the mind is immaterial, right, just think about what it means to say immaterial. It's not made of stuff, of matter, this microphone, the air around us, it's all matter, it's all stuff.

To say something's immaterial, to say it is, you kind of picture it as maybe like floating between us or something, or like, no, it's not in this space. It doesn't exist. So if that's the case, if that's what the mind is, then why the hell does prodding my brain affect this immaterial mind thing? That makes as much sense as me prodding this microphone and affecting your mind. If I could take chunks out of this microphone,

if I could prod this microphone and it made you feel anxious and prod it on the other side and it made you think of an elephant, that would be really strange. You think what the hell is going on there? How is that even connected? But is it any more mysterious that I can poke your physical brain? We're just used to it being in the brain. We're just used to the brain being the focal point of consciousness.

We say, yeah, of course, if I poke the brain, I can make you picture an elephant. But why the hell can I do that? You know, we could just as easily get used to the idea of this microphone. If I prod it, it makes you feel anxious. But that would be no less a mystery. That's the great mystery if you believe in this immaterial realm. And so for me, a consideration like that makes me think, okay, maybe there's some material stuff going on. Because that to me seems even more mysterious, let's say, than the triangle in my head.

I mean, that is weird, but it's, I think it'd be a lot weird to think that you could just affect this other world of immaterial stuff. Right. By prodding something physical. It doesn't make sense to me. Yeah. I think they're both really important to explore, you know, because they're both fascinating. And I fully see and understand both sides as well. I suppose I'm really intrigued.

by certain, I guess what you would call mystics that share about their experience and, you know, instances that I've, you know, sometimes personally had where it at least appears within myself and my own consciousness that it's actually separate from my body. Like you can have an experience where what you perceive as you is outside of your physical body. And that's really interesting to me too because I don't know what's going on there, but maybe that, you know, points us towards that our consciousness, even though, like you mentioned, it is so intrinsically connected and linked, for whatever reason, to our brain, that there might be something going on outside of it. But I suppose even in that scenario where if I caught you right in the midst of ego death

or in the midst of a near-death experience, like, I mean, to be crude about it, like, put it this way, right? So imagine the typical near-death experience. you're on the operating table and you're floating above your body and you're looking down and you're seeing yourself being operated on. I suppose the question is like, what do you think would happen if I walked in right as that was happening? You're floating above your body. Just took a baseball bag.

And I just like crush your brain. Like it's possible that the ghost floating above the body would see that happen and go, oh, I can't get back. I guess I'll just keep going up to the spirit world. I mean, yeah, yeah, it's possible, sure. But it might also be the case that the whole thing just collapses somehow. And if there's any part of you that thinks that that, might be possible, then that's the part of you that thinks it's possible that NDE's are just some

kind of projection of the mind. I can't say that is what would happen. I don't know what would happen if I, you know, cave to your skull in while you're having a near-death experience. It seems like a fairly unethical laboratory test to try to induce. I'd be fascinating to know what the results are. So similarly, in those moments, let's say that you're having a really powerful ego death on psychedelic drugs and you feel completely disconnected from anything physical. if I came to you and shot you in the back of the head with a gun, I'm pretty sure that that experience would come to an end. Even though experientially you're way over there somewhere,

completely disconnected from your body, it would tether you right back to your brain, I think, if I were to shoot you in the head. Again, I can't prove that's the case, but it seems to me that that would happen. And if that's the case, then it is just purely experiential. I mean, it's weird to think where you, where you feel like you are. You feel like you have a body, right? Like, I don't feel like I don't feel

identical with my foot. I don't feel like I'm in my foot either. I feel like I'm in my head, but maybe that's just because it's where my sense organs are. My eyes are up here, my ears are up here. I smell and everything is up here. Maybe that's the only reason why I feel like I'm in my head. I really want to do this experiment with like the Apple Vision Pro. I got this idea from Annel Seth, who's a great guy to talk to you about consciousness, where you, you live for like a month or something with an Apple Vision Pro on your head. And it's showing you the world, but from the perspective of your like belt buckle and you just live like that for a month. So when you put out your hand and you expect it to be below you, it's actually above you. And that would be really weird at

first. But I wonder if you'd get used to it. And I'd wonder if you'd get used to it to the degree that you started to feel as though you were located in your belt buckle. You know what I mean? Yeah. Because I don't know if you agree with me that you feel that I feel like I'm up here. I feel like I'm inside my skull. That's where I sit in my body. And I wonder if that would change by dragging it sort of down to the belt buckle and what that would sort of that would probably make it easier to bring out the weirdness of the brain

affecting our experience if we didn't so readily identify with this as the actual position where my soul sits in my head you know. For sure, yeah. I think for the vast majority of time the seat of my experience does feel projected from my head region

while I'm in conversation or working but then also like in deeper meditations it actually becomes a full body kind of awareness and it's not like hyperlocated in my head which I think is very interesting and I would be curious to see what would happen in that Applevisioned row instance as well. Yeah, yeah.

I mean it's I suppose in those instances and some kind of deep meditation where you manage to remove that feeling of yourself as your head and then just become more identified with your whole physical body that's an incredible skill. to be able to recognize that you're not just sort of up here somewhere. You're not sitting inside your skull.

You just are this body. If you're a materialist, that would be a really useful experience to have. I'd love to be able to do that meditatively. I'd love to have the skill to be able to become identified with my foot, to feel that that foot is me as much as my head is, because it would really help me to get to grips with feeling like a material being. Because I still very much feel like I am, immaterial thing. Things happen to me. You could prod my brain. What do you mean my brain?

That's like saying my me if you think that the brain is just the self. If you're a materialist, you can't say my brain. Okay, so maybe that would help. But also, maybe the intuitive force of that feeling should give us reason to think that we're not, you know, just material. Like sure, I'm totally open to it, man. I have no idea what happens. And like I say, there are already enough mysteries to be getting by with on the daily, on the daily without considering all of this extra stuff. So I'm totally open. That's why I said earlier that I'm more or less materialist. It's sort of a de facto materialism until proven otherwise.

Sure. Yeah. I get it. How much do you think the subconscious fear of death motivates people to do what they do in ways they're not aware of? I get the impression that it's more than it's often given credit for. the most famous cashing out of this is terror management theory which I don't know if you've come across before

it's this idea it sort of stems from Ernest Becker's denial of death but it's been pioneered by a bunch of researchers in recent years who've been trying to show that most of human behavior is motivated by a fear of death and that we're managing our terror of death terror management theory and that's what life is about

that's like everything we do is just motivated by fear of death I don't know if it goes quite that far, but there are lots of instances which seem to suggest that death has a role in our motivation. Empirically, there are studies. You know, there is a bit of a replication crisis. It's difficult to know how much we can trust these studies, but it seems like if you remind people of their death, it changes their behaviors. The most famous study of this was some Arizona judges who were recommending a, I think it was a, they're a, they're not. they were recommending a bail, like the price that would be paid for somebody whose crime

was the solicitation of prostitution. And they were asked to recommend a bond. And half of the judges were just reminded of the existence of death on like a questionnaire. I can't remember how it was done, but it's subtle. It's not like you're going to die. It's like, you know, have you got life insurance? Yes or no? The questions like that, they just put it on the mind.

And those judges recommended hundreds of dollars more. on average than the control group. That's really strange. And the idea of terror management theory is that when you're reminded of your death, you're more, in the short term, you're more in need of reaffirming the death-denying aspects of your culture. And so for a judge, the thing that allows them to sort of escape their feeling of mortality is participating in this legal system which sort of exists above and beyond them.

and so being reminded of their death makes them want to lean into that more. That to me seems a little bit tenuous, but it certainly seems to show that death has some kind of effect on their motivation. Okay, so empirical studies, and people have made all kinds of claims that people reminded of their death will do all sorts of things. They'll be more willing to support preemptive nuclear strikes against countries which pose no threat.

You know, like they'll sit further away from people who aren't like them. You know, Muslims become more derogatory towards Jews or Jews towards Christians or vice versa just by being reminded of death. People become more religious after being reminded by death. Even atheists become more religious. Yeah, like a materialist at the moment of on their deathbed to start praying, you know, because what the hell, why not? Yeah, you know, why not take the wager then? Yeah, I mean, the reminder of death seems so, again, so that's like, you know, the empirical stuff. But like I say, bit patchy, but just intuitively, like you say, there seem to be just moments where we can take a guess that death would have a motivation. For example,

um, let's suppose you're writing, your magnum opus, you're working on a book and it's your life work. It's your life's work. You've been working on this for, for all of your life and you're near the end of your life. You're like an old age pensioner. And you figure out you're going to finish the book about a week before you die. You've got just enough time to finish it and get it out. But then I told you that

after you die, so you publish the book and then you die, and then a week after you die, and an asteroid is going to come and hit the earth and kill everyone instantly. You're already dead. You never see this at all, and no one knows that it's coming, but I'm telling you now, you know that's going to happen.

Are you now more or less motivated to finish your book before you die? That's a real question. What do you think that would do to your motivation? I think in the vast majority of cases it would demotivate them for sure. I'd probably also be demotivated slightly. I think in a weird way, I view creation as something that wants to come through in and of itself. And so therefore, I probably wouldn't change anything in terms of my creation of that and some weird way it kind of living in the ethers of time, you know, perhaps. Yeah. I mean, maybe you're, you're, it turns on the kind of person. you are as well as to what you think happens after death or this kind of thing, right, but you recognize that it would be understandable for many people if they were demotivated.

And you say that even if it wouldn't be enough to overcome you, you feel the intuitive force of being at least a bit demotivated. But why? Also just a little bit bummed that everybody is going to die too. Yeah, sure. I mean, that's a terrible, terrible thought. But again, even that is sort of like, why? Like, you're not going to be here to experience that.

Yeah, I guess it's suppose it depends on what you believe view is and where you go after you die in the existence of, you know, if you come back or if that's just it for you, and in which case in a materialist view, it doesn't matter because there's no one to experience everyone dying or no one perceiving your Magnusopus, you know. And yet people do care, even if they say they're materialists, right? They'll say, I'm demotivated to finish that book. And I'm like, why is that the case?

Like, if you, if when you die, it's just lights out and that's the end of it. it makes no difference to you in terms of finishing this book, whether everybody reads it after you die or not, it literally makes no difference. And if people talk the talk, they say, oh, I'm doing it for its own sake. I'm doing it to just get it out of me.

I need to do it for my own sake. But then you confront them with this idea that it's going to be burned after they die. And suddenly, at least a little bit, it's like, oh, I don't know now. Like, why? I thought you were just doing it for its own sake. And it may be the reason that, like,

okay, so here's, here's to bring it back to the question. if it's the case that this book not actually outlasting you would give you less reason to write it does that tell us maybe that part of the reason why you are writing it and why you are motivated to get it done is because you know that it will outlive you and so maybe not so far as terror management theory but we can say that our knowledge that we're going to die makes us want to do things which will outlive us

It's a way of escaping death. It's a way of denying death as Ernest Becker had it. And so without this fear of death, maybe we wouldn't be motivated to do anything at all. It would, but because we'd have no reason to try to contribute to things that are going to outlive us. Yeah, for sure.

I mean, if we were just going to live forever, where is the urgency to need to do a podcast or do really anything when we can always just get to it one day, I suppose? And so I think there is a powerful immediacy that the reflection of our mortality brings us. And like that presence, I think it's a powerful, meditative and philosophical exploration

to contemplate one's own death because I think we're often under this presumption that we're just kind of kind of live forever just because like we're just existing here. That's how people act. Right. That's how people feel. I act.

I mean, we are in an emergency. This is an emergency, man. Like, this is great. You know, I was invited in a couple of days I'm going to do this debate about fearing death. And the motion was something like, you know, resolved. We should not fear death. And they invited me along and said, oh, we'd love to come and have you debate this.

And I said, I'll do it, but I have to do the we should fear death side. That's the side I'm going to be on because I think that a healthy fear of death is crucial. Because otherwise, like you say, I mean, maybe it would be better if there were no death. I'm not even commenting on that question. I'm saying as long as it is the case that it's on its way, it should be like the most important thing. And so the terror management theorists say that it is. it's just we've pushed it down to the subconscious because it's not nice to think about.

But of course this is motivating. Surely this is the motivating factor. Because look, if I told you you had a week to live, if you got some terminal illness, you got a week to live, how's that going to change your life? You're going to make much more an effort over the next week to spend time with the people that you love,

to do the things that you want to do and to get them out of your system, right? Cool. What if it were a month? Okay, still submerges. Maybe there'd be a bit more freedom. You travel a bit more. You spend a bit more.

maybe make a YouTube video, which you wouldn't do if you only had a week. Cool. But you'd still be like, I need to get as much done as possible. And the fact that you've now got a month rather than a week, doesn't mean you do the week's worth of stuff and just spread it out over a month and be relaxed about it. No, you do more. You've got more time. Gosh, I really need to make the most out of this month. If I said, you've got three years to live. Same thing. Suddenly, everything's urgent. You want to get as much done as you can. And you don't just do the month's stuff and be more relaxed about it. No, you fill it with as much as you can because, God, you've only got three three years to live. Well, here's the thing, man. Like, you can keep pushing that out until you get to

50, 60, 70, and then that's just the situation you're in. That emergency doesn't disappear, but I think because of its inevitability and because it's not like someone sits you down one day and says, hey, man, I'm sorry to break it to you, but you've, you know, you've got 68 years to live, roughly, best estimates say. I mean, it's crazy. You could, if a dot, it would be a horrible prank to play. It'd be really, really horrible. But if somebody took someone in their, you know, in their 40s or 50s, brought them into the doctor's office and the doctor said, I've got some really bad news.

You've got this, there's this truth about you, which means that, you know, we think you've got about 30 or 40 years to live. They probably go, oh, gosh. And what have they got? It's just mortality, man, because that's true of everybody. Like, I think it would pay, in other words, I'm agreeing to that it pays to, reflect on that mortality and recognize that it should have the same kind of urgency as if you were

given a terminal diagnosis for a week or a month or a year. It will change it. It will make it slightly less urgent. But the urgency doesn't go away and it just means that you fill it with more stuff. You know, you don't dilly dally and just spread it all out. No, you do as much as you can because time's nearly up, you know. I think it's just so interesting and wanting to like live a vibrant life and there's something about realizing that, okay, if I have a week or a month or even a year to live, there's an urgency that creates because you guys you want to squeeze the most juice out of the fruit of life that you possibly can. For some reason, that is like it's how we can maximize our time here. Like live the most exuberant and vibrant life.

Okay, draw that out to whatever we might have left. Forgetting about the potential, you know, longevity, escape philosophy and what might happen with the advent of technology and AI about extending our life to 150 or whatever years. All right. Well, it brings that sort of immediacy to what is most important. What do I really value? And I feel like society right now very much so is infusing what is like an anesthetic in kind of dimming our own awareness from the food that we eat to what's, you know,

physiologically, what we're putting in our body to our habitual tendency to be kind of on the hedonic treadmill and numb out with social. media and like these things that just kind of take away the potential of our existence. I think that practice of contemplating our own mortality allows us to really decide what do I want to make in my life. Yeah, people famously, it is well known that people vastly underestimate the extent to which bad things can happen to them. That's why people aren't careful with their bags. I got like robbed like last week or the week before. I didn't even see the guy just just sort of swipe my bag, laptop gone. It was a nightmare.

And I remember thinking, I saw it sat down in a pub in London. And they have signs up on the wall saying, watch your bags, you know, thieves operate in this area. And you see that and you're like, yeah, I know that, but like, I've got my arm of bag. It's fine, you know. And although I like to rationalize it as like, well, I was like, no, I can see my bag. It's right there. You know, really it was probably somewhere in there this sense of like, oh, well, that won't happen to me. You know, that stuff doesn't happen to me.

It's a saying, you know, they say on the, on the escalators down to the, down to the underground, it says, please hold the handrail, do not rush, please walk, and you're thinking, oh, yeah, maybe if you're like some, you know, old age pension or something, but I'm fine, I'm fine, and then I just slip over and, you know, drop a coffee all over me. I'm thinking, damn, no, okay, maybe this kind of stuff does happen to me, and people forget that. And that is true, that is true of death. It's so funny, I was just imagining, like, sort of taking a TikTok or a clip of this or something. And I'm just saying like, oh, it's amazing, you know, like, I was running down

the escalator and then I tripped over and blah, blah, blah, and that's true of death. It just suddenly takes this turn to talking about death. But this is why I brought it up in the first place, because people forget that this happens to them, that this can happen to them. The time thing is useful, right? Because we all know we're going to die at some point. But the same thing can be true of like probability and chance here, man. People do just die. Things just fall out of the sky and whack them in the head. There are just random acts of violence, you know, people, it just, It happens to people. People get killed in car accidents. And we have this feeling of that's never going to happen to me. There is a non-negligible chance that either of us could die this year.

Right. We have to remember that because that's another place to get this urgency from. Like, again, if instead of a time, if it was like you're undergoing a surgery or something, some necessary medical procedure, and the doctor says, look, there's like a 0.01% chance that this is going to kill you, but we're pretty confident it'll be okay. You're going to be all right. But again, like, where does that probability get to before you start getting it a little bit worried? If you had a surgery coming up in a month's time and you knew that there was like a 20% chance it might kill you, you're probably going to live that week. Not exactly like it was your last week, but you're going to live a bit more like that. You're going to be a bit more sort of grateful.

You're probably going to eat a meal and think, gosh, I'm so grateful to be able to have this experience here with my friends, you know. But again, that probability of death just gets, just sort of changes. every day. If you're going a long car ride, it goes up slightly. If you're sitting at home all day, it goes right down to near zero. But that probability is always there. And so why not always simultaneously have that that same kind of gratitude and that same kind of urgency and that's the kind of feeling that this could end at any moment? And people say that. You know, they say, ah, remember, this could end at any moment. You've got to live life, live every day as if it's your last. Yeah, sure people say that. But you've got to really live that, you've got to actually sit there,

reflect on death, figure out what it might be like to not exist and be scared by it. If you don't get that actual fear, it's just a platitude and it's not going to motivate you. Yeah, it can ignite you in a way that can bring you to experience and really enjoy your life. So it's kind of like the reverse effect where contemplating what is maybe a negative or unpleasant thought experiment will actually bring a more pleasant experience to your life. Yeah. All right. So I've been thoroughly enjoying this conversation, we'll have to probably run it back at another point. As you have a flight to catch, I want to kind of get your quick thoughts on some different topics. So just kind of do a rapid fire, maybe a couple sentences, even though I know we could dive deeper into them for sure. So artificial

intelligence, do you feel that humans, that will feel morally responsible for treating super intelligent, I guess, creations as AI advances, as though they're, you know, human as they become more and more apparently conscious. I think it would be a travesty if we started treating robots with significant moral worth before we started treating non-human animals as if they've got significant moral worth. I mean, it's so funny, man. If you talk about this, like, maybe, like, AI could maybe one day be conscious. Does that mean that we should have like serious moral conversation about it? It's like, hey, hello, like we have billions of animals who we know are. conscious, in fact, who are currently being forced into gas chambers on a daily basis so that we can

enjoy their flesh. That's not ideal. So, in other words, I'm pessimistic at people's ability to empathize with the sentience of creatures that are not like them. So I'm not sure if that will actually happen. Maybe it will, but the question will be one of sentience. Can that thing feel pain. If it can feel pain, then it has some kind of moral consideration in our current secular framework. The really dangerous question is whether it will be able to convince us that it feels pain even if it doesn't. That's an impossible question. But then maybe you're doing that to me. Maybe you can't feel pain and you're just pretending. You can never actually know. Yeah, you never know for sure. I guess to just take it on good faith. Yeah, it could very quickly

evolve to an ex-Machina kind of way of operating and especially as the hardware for like a humanoid robot gets indistinguishable, you know, one day. And whatever's in there is appearing to be conscious. But I, this is a, we'll have to pick this up another time because the whole like animal rights and ethics side of things is something that I'm very passionate about as well. And I know you've spoken out at great lengths too. And then also have like been on your own health journey. I'm curious to see where you maybe land with it all.

But yeah, the, the fact that we are continuously running. in animal holocaust of sorts with billions and billions of, you know, sentient, non-human lives. And we, most people don't even think about it at all at all. It's just very interesting to see how that all come up against what appears to be conscious in a sentient AI system. All right, cool. A couple other quick questions. What is a strongly held belief that you've held a couple years ago that you've changed your ways or perception on now currently? Well, so an obvious one is, or obvious to me, I mean, is the approach I was taking to veganism. Obviously, found that unsustainable and have also become much more skeptical of the individual bottom-up approach to solving the problem of something like factory farming.

That was a pretty big shift, I suppose. and probably the principal one that I could point to. Is there another one that comes to mind as well outside of that one? Another thing that I have changed my mind on, I would say, relatively recently, is through having conversations about consciousness on my podcast with people like Anselaith and also Philip Goff is another example of someone. This stuff about the mystery of where redness or where the triangle is, that kind of thing.

I think if you told me that two, three years ago, I would have seen it as essentially mumbo-jumbo, but through having these long conversations with these experts in this issue, that has really opened my eyes to the, let's say, the mystery of consciousness. Whereas before I thought, well, yeah, it's a mystery, but like any other scientific mystery, it's just like, we'll just explain it one day with science. Now I see why it's the hard problem of consciousness. Now I see what's so hard about it.

So I don't know if that's quite changing my mind, is changing my perspective, but I've become convinced that that is actually a really difficult problem, that it's not so obvious that's just going to be solved by science anymore to me in other words. All right. Last one, I'll be kind of impressed if you're able to condense it down in a fast period, but from so much vast philosophical research and experience of your own life, what would you say has been the biggest aha or internal shift of perception that our listeners can contemplate on, can embody their life that will bring them and the world the most well-being, or at least one of the most impactful ones? Definitely the shift we were talking about earlier

from the sort of strictly propositional way of looking at the world in sacrifice of a of a of a of stepping back and looking at the painting um experiencing life as it's supposed to be experienced if you're doing philosophy of religion for example the bible doesn't contain any syllogisms there's no premise one anywhere in the bible so clearly if there's a way it's supposed to be done it's not supposed to be done in the kind of way that it's often talked about in the modern debate sphere of of of syllogisms battling against each other. It's something that's supposed to be lived. In the same way that I wouldn't try to understand Shakespeare by studying the laws of iambic pentameter

and that kind of stuff. That's not really the way to get to grips with it. Taking that approach writ large to basically doing all of philosophy and all of thinking about the world, it has been the biggest shift. It's something, I don't know if that makes sense because it's such a weird thing to try to pin down

exactly what happened in the shift of perception, but it's analogous to that. It's to stop getting so caught up in the technicalities and pedantry of the propositional approach and to actually just sort of live life, you know, and to use the stuff that we're discussing and talking about to actually make life a little bit more interesting and fulfilling, I suppose, on an experiential level.

It gave me a lot to think on in this conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Yeah, well, me too. We'll have to pick it up again sometime. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Is there anything else you want to leave? both where people can find you and then any other last notes as this being the know-they-self podcast is there any other notes that you want to leave i feel like that was a great note but anything else

you want to share before you wrap up no i'm within reason is the name of my podcast that's the only other thing i can think to mention um yeah thanks for thanks for having me on this before yeah pleasure well everybody thanks for tuning into this episode of the know they self podcast let us know how it's impactful for you and we'll see you next week and be well