Within Reason - #80 The Moustache,The Bible, and The Kalam - 850k QnA

Episode Date: August 25, 2024

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850,000 subscribers. Let's do some questions. And by the way, I will at some point soon be doing a private Q&A for my supporters on Substack. You can find my substack at Alex O'Connor.com. If a mysterious stranger offered you a chance to play this game, would you? If you agree to play, he will flip a coin. If the coin lands on heads, you'll go to heaven forever, which is as awesome as you could possibly want. If it lands on tails, you will go to hell, where you will be tortured maximally for the rest of time. If you choose not to play, you will live until the end of your natural life, and then your consciousness will cease to exist forever. Okay, so if we don't play a tool, there's nothing, no afterlife whatsoever.

If we choose to play, we flip the coin, and there's 50% chance of infinite good, essentially, and 50% chance of infinite bad. On face value, it seems like we should treat these equally and be indifferent, because infinity one way, infinity, the other way, 50-50% chance, that should sort of cancel out in terms of expected value to zero, and on the other side you have literally zero. So maybe we should be indifferent. But that doesn't feel right. I mean, the difference between choosing a kind of existence

whose expected value is something like zero, but will in fact always be infinitely good or infinitely bad. Seems very different from like no experience whatsoever. More importantly, however, consider a point that I first learned from David Benatar, who is the author of Better Never to Have Been and a somewhat famous antinatelist. Beneter makes the case that suffering counts for more than pleasure does. And the way he does this is, he asks a question. He says, would you take

30 seconds of the worst imaginable pain, just complete torture, if afterwards you were granted 30 seconds of the greatest joy and pleasure that you could imagine? Maybe you would say yes. Intuitively, I just say no. By intuitively, of course, I mean nothing more than my hunch, but I feel my emotions. I feel like I wouldn't take that offer. And I can't really explain why. like it wouldn't be worth it, because something about the suffering seems worse than the pleasure seems good, if you know what I mean. So if we follow that intuition and think that it's correct, then applied to this case, 50% chance in either direction, the 50% chance of eternal suffering is actually much worse than the 50% chance of infinite good is good, if you know what

I mean. I mean, it's not literally infinite, that's an unhelpful terminology, but like maximally good and maximally bad, the bad would be more bad than the good is good. And so in that case, I probably would rather not flip the coin. Having said that, the questioner adds, if you wouldn't play, imagine he started haggling with you and offering you better odds than a coin flip. How good would the odds have to be

in favour of heaven at a minimum before you agreed to play? The problem is it's very difficult to quantify this difference between suffering and pleasure that I sort of intuitively feel, but I imagine that if you gave me like, even like a 75% chance, I don't know if that's worth running the risk of a term.

torture forever. I mean, even if you're doing this at the cost of potentially getting something great, eternal suffering forever is like the worst thing that I can imagine. It's almost infinitely bad. I mean, it seems to be potentially infinitely bad because it goes on forever. And so compared to like the nothingness of not flipping the coin, even that like tiny chance of the worst possible thing forever, I think probably just outweighs it. So I still think I probably wouldn't flip the coin. Maybe if there was like a 99.99% chance, then I would flip the coin, which seems ludicrous, but like, I'm just so put off by hell that I wouldn't want to take that chance. Even then, with those kinds of odds, I think I'd still hesitate and ultimately maybe be too scared to flip the coin. So I'm not sure that there would be odds that you could offer me when the alternative is like definitely not suffering forever.

Describe a day in your life now versus five years ago. Okay, so five years ago, it would have been 2019. I would have still been at university. And so a day probably would have looked like rolling out of bed in the afternoon, doing some reading, not as much as I should be doing, not going to lectures that I should be going to, and showing up for tutorials and arguing with my tutor for an hour or so. Mostly, I would have been spending my time writing essays, as that's what my sort of weekly to-do item was at university. We'd write one or two essays every single week. discussing with the tutor. Outside of that, I would have been trying to socialize, going to the pub, etc., which I still do today, but it's much more sort of exploratory at university. You know, you're going out with the hopes that you're going to meet new people and you're going to form new connections, whereas now I'm still love doing that, but it's sort of less expected. As far as work goes, at the time, I would have been making videos sort of on the side of university, probably like one video every like month or two months. I was really, really

infrequent with producing videos because I just felt like I was too busy at university and wanted to enjoy the experience. But it would have meant that I sort of got in a taxi and went to this like small office that I'd hired to film videos in where I'd shoot the occasional podcast when I was doing podcast episodes like once every few months, just whenever I felt like it. And I still edited everything myself. I was still a one man team. These days I have a sort of team of people. I have an editor and video guy called Alex, who's been incredibly helpful in keeping up the frequency of the podcast. I still do edit video essays myself, which, by the way, for those asking, is why they are still quite infrequent. Videos that aren't podcasts, I sort of think about them, I script them, I edit them

myself, I do everything because I want that full editorial control. So they're much harder to produce. I do hope to be making more of them, but they do take a bit longer, which is why you don't get quite as many as you do podcasts, which still require preparation, and you still need to figure out how to ask the right questions, but in terms of like editing and in terms of the scheduling, it's just so much easier to get them out on a regular basis. I also have people who help with managing advertisements. I have somebody helping with doing the timestamps for the video that you're watching right now. I have a bunch of different people that help with lots of different things. And so it feels like the cogs are sort of more in motion, whereas before

it was all down to me and I sort of made videos when I felt like it, when I had the time, and I I might have filmed something and then edited it like a week later when I found the time. Now it's much more like, where's the episode this week? I have to send it to my editor so that he can put it out. So things feel a little bit more like they're in constant motion, but there's still a lot of work to do in that respect. If I eat a blue M&M and a yellow M&M, is it the same thing as eating a single green M&M? Interesting question. Of course, it's not literally the same thing because there's just more mass.

There's more M&M. So it's going to be like a bigger M&M at least. But I think the question you're really asking is about the colour. I was actually having an argument about this, just like yesterday with someone, the nature of color. If you think of something red, where is the redness? Is the redness in the object? That doesn't seem quite right. It seems like the redness is something more like the wavelength that's coming off the object.

But then it's not really the wavelength either. It's something more like the brain's perception of the wavelength. And so maybe the redness is sort of in the brain. If it's in the brain, then like it's kind of difficult to say what the color of an M&M would be once you swallowed it because it's in complete darkness. And even if it is something like the wavelength bouncing off an object, the same thing's true. Like once you've eaten that M&M, it's in pitch black. Like there's no light waves coming off it. And so what does it mean to say something has a color if there's no wavelengths coming off it? I mean, surely color can only

be something like those wavelengths or the brain's perception of those wavelengths. And so once it's inside of you, they sort of have no color. But then that doesn't seem quite right because it would imply that if I take like a blue t-shirt and then put a jumper over it so that you can't see it anymore, that that t-shirt is no longer blue, I don't know the answer to that question, but I would say it's definitely at least not the same as having a single green M&M, you might essentially transform those two M&Ms into this colorless mush that's sort of making its way down to your stomach. If determinism is false and can be shown to be a self-defeating belief, would that prove theism is true, or do you think atheism and free will are compatible? And this question

rules out compatibilityism as a theory, since that's just a word game. It's either free will or determinism is true. I do think that compatibilityism is essentially just a word game. I don't like compatibilityism. I've made a video about why that's the case in the past, but I don't think it's true that it's either free will or determinism, because of course there could be randomness in the universe. It might be that everything isn't determined because, I don't know, at the quantum level or whatever, there is randomness. The thing about randomness is that by definition, you're not in control of it. If you have some kind of control over something, it's not random.

You're controlling it. You're influencing it, at least slightly. And so whether there's a universe that's fully determined or whether there's some randomness, the interesting question is whether you're in control of it. So I wouldn't say it's determinism or free will. I'd say that if determinism is true, there's definitely no free will. But even if there's randomness, you're not in control of that either. If somehow you could show, again, not that determinism is false,

because I think it might well be false because of the randomness, if you could show that, like, free will existed, which I think is maybe what you kind of mean, would that prove to me that God exists? I don't think it would like establish that. It would probably make it more likely for me because free will just seems like something that kind of can't exist. And so if it did exist, it would have to exist in like a really spooky, probably like non-material way, which would probably raise my credence in God's existence. But the thing about my belief on free will is that I don't think it doesn't exist, I think it can't exist. And I don't think that introducing God actually solves that problem at all. I think that things are either determined or they're not. I'll give you the sort of the short version. Things are either determined or they're not. Those are the only two options. It's the law of the excluded middle. P is either true or not true. This will apply to mental events as well. And so of any kind of mental event, it's either true that it's determined or it's not. If it's determined by something, then you have to figure out what it's determined by, and you end up with a chain that either terminates in randomness, somewhere in your brain, which you're not in control of, or the line of determination sort of goes outside of your brain into something external, which means you're not ultimately a control either.

So it's either determined, in which case you get that problem, or it's not determined. And if the mental event is not determined by anything, that means that it's random, and you're also not in control of that. Of course, there's a lot more to say on this. You might have responses. I wrote a substack article on this topic. It's called everything I didn't say to Ben Shapiro, and I cover the subject in a bit more detail. But basically, I don't think a free will can exist. I'm sort of basing this argument on a law of logic. And so introducing God, I don't think actually solves the problem in any way, shape, or form. So if for some reason free will can exist in some weird way that I probably wouldn't be capable of fully understanding, maybe it would just increase my credence in God's existence because it would just mean that, like, weird stuff exists.

there's like more inexplicable weirdness that maybe would be helped by positing that there's this like super powerful god who can kind of do whatever he wants. But it wouldn't do so significantly, I think. Is the glass half full or half empty? I can do one better. The glass does not exist. Myriological nihilism, baby. If someone is a moral relativist, how can they argue that some actions are wrong or that

they should be avoided? I've been struggling with this one for a while. It kind of depends what you mean by moral relativism. In, like, the political space, people throw this term around to basically mean anyone who doesn't believe morality is objective. Colloquially, therefore, it's used to just mean anyone who's not a moral realist. In philosophy, however, moral relativism means something a bit more specific. It means that moral claims can be true or false, but that they're true or false relative to something, relative to a culture or a person or a society. So, for example, you might think about some people trying to paint rooms in their house.

There's a bunch of different people trying to figure out what color to paint a room or something. If you happen to live in a room where everybody in the room prefers the color blue, everyone just loves the color blue. It's like their favorite color. Then, like, relative to that society, it can just be true for the relativist that blue is the best color to paint the wall. Again, there are sort of complicated holes to pick in this kind of thinking, but it's, something a bit like that. It's the idea that like, whereas it makes sense for people in that room, in that culture of sort of blue files, it would make sense to say, yeah, it's true that blue is the best color. Somebody in the next room over who lived in a sort of group of people

who really love the color red wouldn't think that that's the right thing to do for them. They could even look at the people in the blue room and say, yeah, it's right for them to paint the walls blue, but it's not right for us to do the same thing. For us, it is true that red is the best color. For them, it is true that blue is the best color. But that's because the truth or falsity of like this kind of semi-moral claim about what you should do when it comes to painting the wall is relative to the society. And so you can kind of say that things are right and wrong as long as you recognize that they're right and wrong relative to some kind of assumption. Over the last decade, what have you changed your mind about the most and what are you more

convinced about than ever before? Good question. You said over the last decade. So 10, years ago, I would have been 14 and probably still very wrapped up in the whole new atheism thing. I would have been like at the start of that journey. And so I will have read the God delusion, or at least listen to Richard Dawkins giving talks and thought, yeah, religion is super terrible and evil. I guess I just think that that's quite a simplistic claim. I've said before that saying religion is bad as a group is like saying politics is bad. It kind of makes sense. Like politics has caused so many wars and people fall out over politics and people use politics to justify killing each other. It's like, yeah, they do. But that doesn't rule

out the idea that like there is a correct political position or a good political position. And it certainly doesn't mean that like politics is something we shouldn't engage in or shouldn't have a position on. So I guess, whereas before I would have said like religion is bad and evil, I just think that's way too simplistic now. And so that's a significant change that I've had. Although that probably doesn't come as a surprise to anybody who's been listening to my show or my content for a while. In terms of what I'm more convinced about than ever, I think everybody likes to say that they recognize how little they know. And I'm not trying to do the sort of Socratic look how genius I am because I know that I know nothing. But like especially doing the podcast, the kinds of research that I'm doing, the kind of things that I'm learning, the kind of questions that I'm asking that I genuinely don't know the answer to on the show.

show and the amount that I'm learning on a weekly basis now from all kinds of different areas, it just smacks you in the face every single week with how little you know, even about your own special subject. Like, for me, my favorite subjects are things like philosophy of religion, biblical studies, this kind of stuff. And every single day, I'm just struck with something that makes me realize there's just this wealth of knowledge to be gained every single day. it will just never end. And so, you know, everybody knows that there are things they don't know and there's lots that they don't know and they will never be able to properly master, you know, something

to the fullest extent that's conceivably possible. But I think I really, like, feel that in my bones now. So I would say that I'm more convinced of that than anything. What is a position or opinion people might assume you hold deeply, but are actually not currently confident in? I'm sort of known as the atheist guy and one of the important. implications of that is that people assume that I'm this like ardent materialist. I'm not like committed to materialism. I mean, I'm still an atheist. I don't believe in God. I'm at least an agnostic atheist, I mean. But there are mysteries like consciousness, which do just make me wonder how on earth materialism could be true. Of course, there are problems in both directions. I've talked about consciousness a fair bit now, but like, given that there is conscious experience, given that you can close your eyes and sort of picture a triangle and ask, where that triangle is. It's a bit like the colour thing, like where is redness? Where is that

triangle that you can see in your head, or that at least most people can see in their heads? You might want to say, well, it's just in your brain, but I can't like cut open your brain and find a triangle in there, you know? Like it seems to sort of exist immaterially. And for the materialist, that makes for a very large problem. How can there be this immaterial triangle that sort of exists somewhere sort of when you close your eyes and use your mind to picture it? That doesn't make very much sense. Having said that, of course, if you are an immaterial, about the mind at least, then you have all kinds of other problems. And I think the biggest one is the so-called interaction problem. How does that immaterial mind interact with the brain?

And why does it? I mean, I can't seem to affect the mind at all without first or also affecting the brain. And similarly, I can affect people's minds by affecting their brain. And so they seem to be at least connected in some way. And if the mind is not just the brain, that seems like a great mystery too. And so I certainly wouldn't say that I'm like a dualist. or that I believe in immaterial things, I just think that there are so many mysteries surrounding consciousness in particular that it makes me hesitant to say, yeah, I'm a materialist. So if somebody invites me for a debate and they say, will you debate, you know, atheism makes more sense than theism. I'm like, yeah, sure, I can do that? But if somebody says, you know, can you debate,

materialism is true, like maybe I could, I could represent that position, but it's not like a hill that I would die on. Looking at the common 66 books of the canonical Bible, which one would you say has the wisest characters or impart the most wisdom, which would you call a favourite? And why for both questions? In terms of wisdom, I mean, I hate to be a bit sort of trivial, but Jesus Christ is probably the best character in terms of moral wisdom. And there's just so much of his story and what he said and what he did that there's just like a lot to take away there. So like easily, I think he's the person you're going to get like the most wisdom from, the most sort of wealth of wisdom. It's not like my favorite characters other than like Jesus. I've always been attracted to

the character of Job. I think that a lot of atheists are attracted to Job because he's sort of the one that really like wrestles with God. He really battles with God. And it's also sort of the atheist book in many ways because God is like the bad guy. God takes this bet with the devil and allows the devil to start like attacking Job, which makes him sort of seem a bit evil or malicious or at least apathetic and so there's a lot of interest in that story. I mean, for me, part of the interest is given that this is a story of God just saying, yeah, sure, like do what you want Satan. Like, how does this fit into the scriptural tradition? How do we sort of reconcile this vision of a God who's willing to do that and willing to be so blasé about just giving this power to Satan?

How can we reconcile that with this idea of the all loving God is manifested in someone like Jesus. So I find the character, and at least the story, really interesting for that reason. The wisdom literature as a whole is fascinating. Ecclesiastes also comes to mind. We don't know who wrote it, but it's essentially this nihilistic outpouring, which again is quite a strange thing to find in the biblical canon. I mean, it's not strange when you consider that religion is intimately tied up to nihilism. And whereas most people see nihilism as like a criticism of religion, like the problem of evil and suffering and meaninglessness is a criticism of religion. I often have said that I see it the other way around. I see religion as a response to the problem

of suffering and nihilism and evil. And so it actually makes a lot of sense. But if your only knowledge of the Bible is that it's this kind of nice story about God who sort of sends down his son to be killed for our sins and you kind of know that there's some dodgier stuff in the Old Testament, you know, wars and slavery and stuff, you might be surprised to find this entire chapter of somebody just saying how meaningless life is. And the biggest mystery of all is that at the end of this text, it says that the teacher, who's the author of most of the text, the person who's sort of speaking throughout Ecclesiastes and doing this nihilistic outpouring, you know, tide goes in, tide goes out every day, nothing changes, there's nothing new under

the sun, all of this kind of stuff. And then at the end, there's a different speaker, the sort of narrator of the book, who says that what the teacher said was something like upright and true. He basically says that everything that this guy had been saying was true, was correct, which is weird because he was basically being a massive nihilist. So the Bible seems to be indicating that nihilism is true. It may be because throughout that text, when the nihilist character is talking about how meaningless everything is, he uses the phrase under the sun. Like, everything under the sun is meaningless. There's nothing new under the sun. And it sounds like that could just be a turn of phrase, as in there is nothing that's new. There is

nothing that's meaningful. But he could also mean like under the sun in the sense that the only thing that is meaningful and the only thing that helps you escape this nihilism is something which is like above and transcends, which is God. I don't think that's a totally natural reading of the text, but it's basically this huge mystery, why at the end of this huge nihilistic tome, the author of the text just says, and what the teacher said was true. He says, what's the conclusion of the matter? The conclusion of the matter is fear God and keep his commandments. It's really strange. Nileism followed by, yeah, everything he said is true and the conclusion is fear God and keep his commandments. That's a great old mystery. I find that very interesting. Where do you tend

to lean these days on consciousness? Property dualist, substance dualist, panpsychist, type A, physicalist, type B, etc. I don't really have a fleshed out view on consciousness. I know we were just talking about consciousness, like me using the royal we. I know I was just talking about consciousness, but I really don't know what I think. And I hope that sort of came through in the previous question where I spoke about this. I mean, it does seem to me that saying that the consciousness just sort of is the brain, that the brain is just the same thing as the mind, just doesn't capture that immaterial element. I don't know if that makes me a dualist. I don't know what kind of dualist that would make me if it does. I don't think I'm a panpsychist.

I had Philip Goff on the show to talk about panpsychism, and I find it really interesting, but I'm not convinced by it. I think ultimately I have to remain like super agnostic. on consciousness. Important question, Alex, is a meal deal really a deal if you can buy the ingredients for cheaper? The purpose of a meal deal is not just about sort of saving money on ingredients, but saving you some time. Also, I think the point is that although you could buy the ingredients for cheaper, if you were to buy the sandwich and the drink and the snack from that shop, those things individually would add up to be more expensive than the deal is. However, I have grown very cynical of these kinds of supermarket tactics, in part, thanks

to Rory Sutherland, who I just had on the show in a rather chaotic but really cool episode. He's sort of a marketing expert, and he points out that what a shop might often do. I can't say that they do this, we don't know, but they might decide that, you know, let's say a sandwich is worth two pounds, a drink is worth two pounds, and a snack is worth one pound. So together, it costs five pounds. What they'll do is they'll individually price those items slightly higher, so they'll charge £2, £2, £2, £1, £1,000, but then they'll say, if you buy them all together, you can get them for five pounds. So it seems like you're getting money off when you buy them together,

but actually they might just be adding money on when you buy them separately. Again, I don't know if there are any supermarkets in the UK or elsewhere that do this, but it wouldn't surprise me if those kinds of tactics are involved. But also, what do you mean you can buy the ingredients for cheaper? Can you? I mean, if you really wanted to buy the ingredients from scratch, there's a YouTuber called Andy George. The channel is called How to Make Everything. And he tried making a sandwich from scratch. And I mean, from scratch, he like flew to the ocean to get some salt water to isolate the salt. He sort of grew the wheat and made the bread. He went and killed the chicken. He went and milked the cow, as in he really made that sandwich from scratch. It took him six months

and cost him $15,000 for a sandwich that actually didn't taste that great at all. It's not bad. It's about it. It's not bad. So maybe the mill deal is actually quite good after all. Everything that has a beginning has a cause and the universe had a beginning, therefore there must be a cause. Please respond to this. This is known as the Calam cosmological argument, and I've talked about it a great deal in the past, but briefly, the premises are one. Everything which begins to exist has a cause. Premise two, the universe began to exist, conclusion, therefore the universe has a cause. Many people point out that this cause could be anything. Doesn't have to be God, doesn't have to be an agent. Well, I think that's probably true.

doesn't really matter. The only purpose of the argument is to establish that the universe has a cause. It sort of doesn't go infinitely back into the past. Okay, so premise one, everything which begins to exist has a cause. When have you ever seen something begin to exist? Okay, well, maybe you've seen a sandwich begin to exist. But you haven't really seen that. What you've seen is a bunch of ingredients being rearranged and then called a sandwich. There's no like new material. Didn't begin to exist. It's just been rearranged and given a new name. It turns out that's basically true of everything in the material world. When someone builds a car, there's no new material. They just take a bunch of metal and plastic and glass and stuff and arrange it in a particular way and cool it a car. So that never actually began to exist. And if that is the kind of beginning to exist that you're talking about,

if you're allowing that kind of beginning to exist to be to counters beginning to exist, then when you say, you know, everything which begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist. maybe the universe began to exist out of some pre-existing matter. And then you've sort of got the question of where that came from. So the argument actually wouldn't be particularly helpful then. No, when you say the universe began to exist, you tend to mean, or at least the person putting forward this argument, tends to mean, that it began to exist out of nothing.

When have you ever seen that happen? I don't think you mean that. At least when people put forward this argument, they don't tend to mean that the universe began to exist in that way. They mean that it began to exist out of nothing. And so if when you're talking about a car or a sandwich or a chair, they didn't really begin to exist out of nothing, they're just rearrangements, then the only time something truly began to exist out of nothing would have been like the origin of all the matter that we're now like rearranging, which is to say the beginning of the universe. And so when that first premise says everything which begins to exist out of nothing has a cause, it's just saying that the universe had a cause because the universe is the only thing that began to exist. out of nothing. But if the first premise, everything which begins to exist has a cause,

is just the universe has a cause, because everything which begins to exist is just the universe, then the first premise has become identical to the conclusion, which is that the universe has a cause, which doesn't make the argument false, but it does make it circular. If there's a US state you would move to, which one would it be? Probably either New York, like potentially California, but also Texas. Austin, Texas seems to become a bit of a podcasting hotspot. It's where Joe Rogan is. It's where Lex Reedman is. It's where Chris Williamson is. And I suspect that it will continue to move in that direction. Favorite Jordan Peterson's suit. Jordan Peterson gets a lot of flat for some of the suits that he wears. He was wearing this really cool, like, religious artwork suit when I met him. And I get why people would say it looks a bit ridiculous, but I just think it looks quite cool. And I also really respect his ability. to obviously notice that people are saying mean things about his suits some of the time and just be like, I think it's cool, I don't care. You know, he's got his style and he's sticking with it.

I don't know if I could pull it off, but then I don't know if anyone could pull it off. And that's part of the reason why I think I like it so much. I think his heaven and hell suit, I think it's like blue on one side and red on the other. I think it's pretty cool. So I would say either one of those two. Is there something you passionately hate but wish you didn't? I don't know about hate. I try not to hate.

I mean, it's easier said than done, but really, if I catch myself with such a fervent hatred for something that it's really beginning to bother me, then I basically do everything I can to talk myself out of that. And a lot of that has to do, especially when, like, people are involved with reminding myself that, but for the grace of God, there go I. If I had their genes and their upbringing, and I was in the same position as they were and had the same environment that they did, I probably would have done the same thing. and so it's very difficult. It's tied up with the free will thing. It's kind of difficult for me to

retain a level of hatred. If I do hate something or someone, it tends to be like that initial animalistic urge that quells after a little bit of time. So there's nothing or no one that I really passionately hate, but something that does come to mind is reading. Again, not passionate hatred, but I don't like reading. I made a video a while back about like how to read more and how I think to read most effectively. And I'll say now what I said then. I don't like reading. I like having read things. And in fact, I find the process of reading quite laborious. I kind of see it like going to the gym or something. They say you never regret going to the gym. You rarely regret reading a book as long as it's like a good book, especially if you're like reading for educational

purposes, if it's nonfiction and it's giving you some information. You know, you're not going to regret putting in the time to do that, but it is a bit of a chore, at least for me. So I wish I enjoyed reading, because I'd probably get a lot more of it done in the same way that I wish I'd like loved going to the gym, because then I would be in much better shape. Is from aught? Not a question, but I'll allow it. Okay, famously, it's impossible to get an aught from an is, at least. That's what Hume claimed and many philosophers, including myself, after him.

But can you get an is from an ought? Can you do it the other way around? Well, it does seem that any ought statement sort of contains an is. If I say, you ought to eat the apple, that seems to contain the statement, there is an apple. It can't be true, at least, that you ought to eat the apple if the apple doesn't exist. And so, weirdly, I guess it does seem to be the case that you can derive some kind of is from an ought. But I still don't think you can derive an ought from an is. This is interesting, though, because, of course, when people talk about the is-a-a-a-prop problem, they say, like, this is just like a category distinction.

You just can't get an aught from an is because it's just a different kind of thing and they are like not connected. You know, they're totally different entities. But if you can get an is from an a ought, if you can do it the other way around, it seems wrong to say that something's a category error if it's only a category error in like one direction. So I think that's quite interesting. But I suppose you could get an is from an or, yeah. What was the first cause of everything? I don't know. But if I find out, I'll let you know.

What would you say to your hypothetical children about their agency? brackets, no free will, and morality, brackets, not real, if they asked you about it. This is a really interesting question because, of course, it's easy enough to say, yeah, whatever, there's no free will, yeah, whatever, like emotivism. But when you're talking about raising your children and wanting them to be societally integrated and wanting them to be like good people or whatever, you're faced with a bit of a dilemma, like, you know, is it going to be deleterious to their ethical standing as a human being if they don't believe immorality, I'm going to take a policy on this, I think, that's going to be

similar to questions about, like, God's existence, which is just to emphasize that I don't have the answers, that I don't know, that of course I have my views, and I don't know quite when I would share my views about, like, emotivism and the Fregea Geach problem with, like, my four-year-old kid or whatever, one day. But at least at the start, when I begin to sort of put forward these ideas and say, well, you know, Daddy doesn't believe in free will, whenever that happened, which hopefully would be a bit later on in life, I would try to do so always with a recognition that I don't have all of the answers. You know, does God exist? Um, you know, son, I don't know, I think not maybe for this reason and that reason, but here's someone who thinks that God does

exist, and this is why they think God does exist. What do you think? You know, I think I would have to remain in appearance as agnostic as possible in order to help that child come to their own conclusions. Was the dress black and blue or white and gold? Black and blue? Not only is that the objectively correct answer, as in it literally was black and blue. That is also just how I saw it. I love these kinds of things. I spoke to Anil Seth on my podcast a while back about a different kind of illusion, which is quite similar. The brainstorm green needle thing, you might have come across this before. The reason I like the Brainstorm Green Needle one is because there's more like agency involved. With the dress, you see it and you either see black and blue or you see

white and gold. You can't really like choose which one you see. But take a listen to this audio. Listen to this audio that I'm about to play and listen for the word brainstorm. Okay, now I'm going to play the exact same audio. I promise you I haven't changed it. But this time, listen for the words Green Needle. It sounds completely different. It's really weird. It's one of my favorite illusions that exists on the planet. And like I say, the reason for that is because you get to choose. You choose which one you hear. And we sort of extrapolated from this. We used it as an analogy to point out that what you expect to observe in the world will influence what you see in the world.

If you walk through the world thinking that everything is going to be miserable and disappointing and depressing, then you're probably going to find that. Like, you will always be right. You know, if you expect the world to be brilliant and awesome, then, of course, it's not quite as simple as this. There are going to be things that, like, confront you, but you're more likely to sort of overall experience a world that has more of that in it. Similarly, if you expect to find evidence of God's existence everywhere, if you, like,

go looking for it, you'll find it. And so in the same way that you can change how you hear this sound based on what you expect to hear, I think at least to like some degree, of course, let's not like lose our minds here and think that we can actually change the makeup of the universe or anything. But in terms of the way that you interact with the world, what you expect to find in the world, I think will at least to some degree, affect what you actually observe in it. So actually serious philosophical question. What's first? The milk or the cereal? And the questioner has helpfully added after the bowl. So no bowl is first fallacy. I actually don't have milk when I have

cereal. So maybe that's even worse than the bowl first fallacy. I don't know. But yeah, I don't have milk. I like to, I like it raw. After your conversation with Sam Harris, where exactly on this thesis laid out in the moral landscape do you get off the ride? I think specifically it's where Sam makes the jump between saying that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad to sort of associating the concept of badness with the concept of suffering. Sam basically says, like, look, the worst possible misery for everyone. Like, every single person experiencing the worst conceivable misery they possibly could is bad. It's just bad. And he says, like, if you doubt this, I just don't think you know what you mean by the terms. Like,

if you doubt that suffering is bad, go and put your hand on a hot stove and you will be rebuked by the actions of your own arm, you know? And I sort of get what he's saying, but the problem is, at best, what he's doing is showing that if there is this thing called badness, then suffering is an example of one of the things that's bad. It might be the only thing that is bad, but saying suffering is bad

might be like saying the telephone box is red. It's true, but the telephone box is red just means that red is like a property of the telephone box. It doesn't mean that the telephone box and red mean the same thing. Like those concepts are interchangeable, right? And so when he says the worst possible suffering for everyone is bad, then somebody could go, yeah, sure, like that you're right, that's totally indisputable. But that doesn't mean that they are conceptually the same thing. It might just mean that badness is a property, like undeniably, of the worst possible misery for everyone. So

I think when he makes that like identification, he doesn't just say that suffering is bad, as in badness is one of its properties. It means like they mean the same thing, essentially. I think that's where I jump off the train. Having said that, of course, that's only my understanding. I might be misrepresenting him, yada, yada, etc. Go and read the book, or listen to my three-hour conversation with Sam Harris on this exact subject, if you've got the time and the effort. Thoughts on Plantinger's Ian. Of course, Ian here stands for the evolutionary argument against naturalism. I think it's a wonderful argument. If you're unfamiliar, basically it goes something like this. Suppose you're a materialist, so you don't believe in God.

And you also believe in evolution by natural selection. You believe that it's true, that that's like how we got here. What does that mean? Well, what does natural selection select for? Selects for survivability, which means that the things which develop develop because they are beneficial to our survival. We have five fingers or four fingers and one thumb or eight fingers and two thumbs because it's beneficial to our survival. It's not because it's like true to have four fingers or to have three or whatever. it's just beneficial. If you're a materialist, then that means that every single thing about you

evolved in this way, including your brain, including your rational faculty, which means that the faculty you're using to reason evolved, not to be sensitive to what's true, but just to what's going to make you more likely to survive, which means that when you think two plus two is four is true, it could just be the case, that believing two plus two is four is true, is beneficial to our survival. And so everyone who didn't believe this, like, died off, and those who did believe this remained. That would mean that it's not necessarily true that 2 plus 2 2 is 4. It just means that believing it's true is beneficial. Of course, this doesn't prove that 2 plus 2 equals 4 is false. It just undercuts the reason that we have to believe that it's true,

because the reasoning faculty we're using is not sensitive's truth. It's sensitive to survivability. And so Plantinger specifically points out your belief in evolution by natural selection. He says that, like, why do you believe in evolution? Oh, because you've looked at the evidence and you've reasoned a conclusion based on the evidence. The thing is, the truth of evolution undermines the reasoning faculty that you used to get to the truth of evolution. Because you can't really say that that belief is true. You can only say that believing it's true is beneficial to your survival because that's what your reasoning faculty is. It's just something that helps you to survive.

it's not nothing to do with truth. And so it's sort of an undercutting argument. It's not trying to say that evolution is false. It's not trying to say that there is no truth. It's not trying to say anything like that. What it's trying to say is that if you believe that reasoning leads to truth, then you have to account for the fact that if you're a materialist, your reasoning faculty didn't evolve sensitive to truth. It evolved sensitive to survivability, which is a different thing. Now, of course, many people immediately respond, well, hold on, like surely believing true things is beneficial to survival. Like, if we believed a bunch of false facts about the world, then we just wouldn't survive. And so, yeah, sure, like the reasoning faculty evolved for survivability,

but true things, believing true things, makes us more likely to survive. So what's the problem? The problem is that there are at least some cases in which we can conceive of believing something false being beneficial to our survival. So a common example is to say, well, think about when somebody scares you. If I went into a restaurant or something and just like, you know, popped a really loud balloon or screeched an air horn. Everybody would jump, you know, they would tense up, they'd look around, they'd be scared for at least a second before they realized what had happened. Now, is it like true that every time you hear a loud bang, it's a threat? No. But clearly, at least for that first little moment, believing that it's a threat,

even just instinctively, believing that it's a threat is beneficial to your survival. Because if it's not a threat, like who cares, whatever, you just flinched. But if it is, then you're tensed up and you're ready to go. You're ready for the fight or fly. And so although it's not true that every bang is a threat, it's beneficial to sort of act as though it is. Plantinger points out that a bit like how our bodies just flinch and we kind of can't stop it, even though it's not really sensitive to truth. Maybe our reasoning faculties just think that 2 plus 2 equals 4. We kind of can't help it, even though that's not actually sensitive to truth at all. Of course, we'd never be able to know.

We can't step outside our own reasoning faculties, right? It's the very thing that I'm using to have this dialogue with you. And by dialogue, I mean responding to your comments on Twitter. But so you might be tempted to say, yeah, sure. I mean, I get the flinching thing, but like, two plus two just is four. Like, I can't concede, like, you can't conceive of anything else. But Plantinga's point is that that's because your reasoning faculty is telling you this is how it has to be. But if that reasoning faculty has evolved not to be sensitive to truth, then how can you possibly know that the things it delivers to you, like these answers, two plus two is four, are true.

And I actually think this is a genius argument. I think it's fun. I think it's fascinating. And I think it at the very least means that we need to confront our idea about what truth is and how we can be confident that we have any access to whatever that truth is. I think it demonstrates to us the potential limitations of our brains if they are in fact unguided and the result of evolutionary pressures. And I think it puts up a real challenge for people who want to be like realists about truth to say like how we have any epistemic access to that. Where are the drawers? Watch this space. Million subscribers, I'll bring them back. Drop the beard care routine. Get a razor, shave it off into a controversial mustache that I'm still keeping, in part, due to the fact that so many people seem not to like it.

Gay mustache? No, yes. If you weren't a human, what would you want to be? If I weren't a human, I would want to be a human. When are you releasing a book? To be honest, it will probably be a while. I want to wait until I've got, you know, like the big thesis to give to the world. I have spoken to publishers and literary agents and I'm really excited about the prospect,

but I don't want to write a book just because like the opportunities there. Oh, well, I've got an audience and I've got people who would be willing to, you know, publish the book potentially. Those aren't good reasons to write a book. The only good reason to write a book would be one that I would have. even if I didn't have a YouTube channel and even if I didn't know any literary agents or publishers or anything like that. Although, you know, there's lots of things that I like to write about. I don't know if I would be like, this is the book. This is what I need to write. This is what I want to get out into the world. And so I'm probably going to wait until I have that feeling, at least to write like a nonfiction book, including some kind of thesis about, you know, how I think the world should work or whatever. A different kind of book might be possible, but nothing has sort of inspired me enough to the extent that I've been like, yes, I want to write this book. I want to get it out into the world. And so I suppose I'll just have to wait until that happens. I do love writing though. And so I now write a monthly piece for Unheard. I'll leave a

link in the description. I also just recently launched a substack where you can go and support the channel. If you're a paid member, you get early access, add free to videos and stuff like that. But also I write on there for free. There's lots that you can read on there for free. And if you're interested in reading something that I've written, that would be the place to go, these for now. Maybe one day I'll write a book, but for now, most of my writing is going to be found there at AlexoConnor.com. What are your thoughts on alcohol? Usually pretty mangled and unfocused, but more interesting and creative. Is Minty the opposite of spicy? Yes. Okay, I had such a controversy. I made a video called philosophical hot takes or rating your philosophical

hot takes, where I came up with a scale to rate your philosophical hot takes. And it started with like spicy and then above spicy was Indian spicy. So I saw that on. a menu once. Underneath that was like mild and then the very bottom was minty because minty is the opposite of spicy. Oh Lord, was I not ready for the comments that came through. Apparently the hottest take in the entire video was that take. Say what you want about opposites. True opposites just like don't exist and I will die on this hill. Like, okay, consider the opposite of white. What's the opposite of white? That's black. Is it? I mean, whites are color. So surely the opposite of white would have to be something that's not a color. White is also visible. And so the true

opposite of white would have to be something that's not visible, right? Like, white has being. It exists. So surely the thing that's truly opposite to white wouldn't exist. Oh, look, turns out its opposite doesn't exist. And look, I'm not just being facetious here. Clearly, when you're talking about opposites, there has to be some metric which you sort of keep as a control. So, okay, the opposite of white, assuming that we want it to be another color that exists is going to be black. Right. So you sort of keep something the same. So it's not like a true opposite. You keep one thing the same and say what's the opposite of that thing within that boundary. So now consider the video that I was making. I'm talking about spice, right? And so what I

want is something that's like the opposite of a hot take. So it's like a cold take, but it's still like in this context of spice. So like what is spicy but cold? So the opposite of like Indian spicy that is like really, really hot spicy food, you know, the true opposite of that doesn't exist. So I'm saying, like, within the context of, you know, ranking spiciness of takes, what's the opposite of that? Well, okay, if you want to keep it spicy, but you also want to keep it cold, I can't think of anything else other than, like, Minty. So, yes, minty is the opposite of spicy.

I mean, minty is like the anti-spice, right? Like, it's so, like, not spicy that it's, like, anti-spicy. It's, like, spicy in the other direction. And like, minty is the only thing that's spicy and cold. So, yeah, I stand by it. I stood by it then. I stand by it now. And I suspect, as with my moustache, that I will continue, despite what you have to say about it in the comments, to stand by it in the future.

Biggest Christianity, L and W. And for those over 30, L and W mean loss and win in this context, something like failure and success. The biggest Christian dub, in my view, probably, is the adulterous woman, who the family, who the family, Pharisees bring to Jesus and say, Jesus, this woman has committed adultery. And the law clearly states that we should stone her to death. So what are you going to do, Mr. Teacher, Mr. Moral Teacher, Mr. Pacifist, even though it's debatable as to whether Jesus was a pacifist. It's a test. They say, what are you going to do? And Jesus is just like drawing in the dust or something for some reason. And they ask him, you know, what are we going to do with this woman? And finally, Jesus responds to them and says, fine, but let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And I just think this is like a summary of the Christian ethos. It doesn't undermine the Old Testament law, but at the same time, it sort of gives us a new way of thinking about it. It makes us confront our own sinful nature.

It makes us sort of confront the idea of judging people when we're apt to be judged ourselves. Like, if you're looking for sort of a summary of like what Christianity is all about, this story is a good place to start. Unfortunately, this story does not appear in our earliest manuscripts of John's Gospel. And so it was likely a later interpolation, even later than the rest of John's Gospel. And so almost certainly did not actually happen. As for the biggest L, probably Christianity's attachment to the Old Testament. Stories like the one I just recounted only really even need to exist because there seems to be this huge moral problem that, like, yeah, you've got like gentle Jesus meek and mild, but he's quoting the prophets and venerating the law that says that if you commit adultery, you should be stoned to death, that homosexuals should be killed.

It's a set of laws which condones slavery and seems to condone genocide and some, let's just say, questionable practices of war. Again, some people will want to debate this. I had a podcast with William Lane Craig talking about the slaughter of the Canaanites, whether it was a genocide or not. You can go and listen to that if you want to hear a bit of back and forth on that subject. But the fact that this kind of stuff exists is this huge problem for Christianity, as represented in the sort of much more peaceful figure of Jesus Christ. And that's probably why the very first attempt at putting together a Christian canon, that is like the first set of texts that put together as this is the new scripture, was conducted by Marcian, and completely excluded the entirety of the Old Testament. Marcian's canon had one gospel, which is like the gospel of Luke, but with some bits missing, some but not all of Paul's letters, and that's it. That's all that was in there. And part of the reason for this is that this God of the Old Testament just seems completely unrecognizable when compared to the God of Paul's letters.

of what became the New Testament. Why do you let fundamentalist Christians use you to politically promote their cause? I don't think that I do. I mean, maybe I do by accident. There are Christians that I've had on my podcast who I have gone kind of easy on and I've watched back and thought, yeah, I should have pressed a bit harder, but I don't think they were fundamentalists and I don't think they were talking about politics. We were probably talking about like the resurrection of Jesus. I mean, my podcast with William Lane Craig on that subject, I think it was like pretty straightforward. I didn't offer a ton of pushback. I let him speak his mind. And the episode ended. And a lot of people said, you should have pushed him harder. But he's just arguing that

Jesus rose from the dead. It's not a fundamentalist Christian position. And I tried to make up for it with the Canaanites episode, and hopefully I did. If you look at when Dinesh de Sousa, in my recent debate with him, for example, started to talk about Genesis as if it was a scientific text, I'm not saying that he's a fundamentalist. I don't really know what he believes. But at least this element, you know, the Genesis as science thing, I didn't. exactly go easy on him. I don't think I was like offering him a platform to promote some kind of fundamentalist Christian message. I think I was challenging him and doing so hopefully quite effectively. There are probably other times where I've debated more like fundamentalist Christians,

maybe even on like more political issues, but like I can't think of one off the top of my head who's a fundamentalist and certainly not one that I've just like promoted and gone easy on. And I think that if I'm having a debate with a Christian fundamentalist, yeah, sure, like you know, you're giving them a platform or whatever, but that's why you do encourage you to try and do a good job. But but it's not like I'm promoting that cause, you know? So, like, maybe there's someone I'm missing. Maybe there's someone you're talking about in particular. It's not coming to mind.

But if there is, like, let me know. What was your first job? My Twitter bio, I think, used to say ex-professional coffee and tea expert. Expert might have been a bit of hyperbole, but my first job was as a coffee and tea merchant. That's not selling tea and coffee to drink, but selling, like, loose coffee beans and loose tea leaves and ground coffee that you can take home and make yourself. It was a wonderful job. It was at a place called

Carjews, which is in the covered market in Oxford. I worked there for a number of years. I think I started when I was like 14 years old and I had a great time. It was such a wonderful place to work, a great environment, great people, and left me stinking of coffee, which, well, there are worse things to smell of in this world. Anyway, I think that will do for now. Remember that if you're a paid subscriber on Substack, then I'll be doing a further private Q&A at some point. soon and you can sign up at Alex O'Connor.com if you haven't already, but you can also sign up for free where you will get access to my writings. If you do become a paid member, you'll also get early access, add free to videos and episodes, and of course, you'll be supporting the show at the same time.

Thank you for watching. Thank you, of course, for 850,000 subscribers, and I'll see you in the next one.