#1012 - Alex O’Connor & Joe Folley - Is Being Smart Worth the Depression?

25:07So you're reading him and he's complaining about life. His view on life is far more pessimistic than my life's view on life. There's kind of the characteristic property of life as suffering for a variety of reasons. But he occasionally just this kind of dark, pessimistic outlook breaks through into a kind of natural lightheartedness that I think is It's absolutely amazing. So one of the things that is interesting, I say, about reading a pessimistic philosopher is that if, and I think that nihilism to a certain extent shares this, provided that it's kind of framed in a certain way, is that if you're not expecting things to go very well, and if you think the characteristic property of the world is meaningless suffering, well then, to a certain extent, the stakes are kind of lowered.

25:53It's very similar, I suppose, to that advice that Seneca gave in one of his letters, which is to kind of imagine how things are going to go horribly wrong so that you feel much better when it comes to it. Low expectations. Yes. Yeah. And I think that on a kind of existential level, reading an incredibly darkly pessimistic philosopher, sort of, as I say, there is sometimes a moment where it breaks through. I suppose the only way I could kind of try and contextualize this is like, have you ever had an astonishingly bad day? Just like a comedically bad day. And I do mean like comedic, you know, and you get to like five o 'clock and you've been mugged seven times and a car drives spine, it kicks up a puddle of dog shit over your nice suit or whatever.

26:34And you can't help but just laugh. Because at that point, it's like, oh, wow, this has become funny. And I think that's something that Turan is very, very good at. And that's why I often talk about him as one of the darkest philosophers of all time. He's also one of the funniest, one of the few philosophers where you can read him and laugh out loud. It is hilarious that suffering is dose dependent in that way. Like your response to it, a U-shaped curve. It's like, too little, everything's probably okay. A bit, oh God, this sucks. And then too much, it's okay again. It was at least a frivolity, right?

27:06And that makes it livable. I do think sometimes the more pessimistic philosophers can be a little bit self-indulgent. It's a bit sort of, you know, woe is me. Oh, like, because, you know, I don't know. How sophisticated my thoughts, how deep my engagement with the world is. When actually you just like, you know, you got dumped by your girlfriend and now you're writing about how terrible life is. I asked Joe this the last time that we sat down. I often think philosophy is just clever branding for depressive thoughts. It often is, but it's also often just clever branding for like any kind of thought.

27:42I think it's like you literally just have a thought and you try to systematize it, right? This is why the greatest philosophers, another thing we said before we started, tell you something you already know. If you open Wittgenstein's Tractus, the first line of the introduction is something like, I don't think this book will be useful except to anybody who's already in agreement with the things that it says. It's just supposed to be sort of elucidating an idea. And so, yeah, a lot of the time it is just sort of feeling out a vibe, finding someone who puts it into good words and saying, oh, I think that person's very smart.

28:13That resonates with me. I feel less alone. By the way, it's why when people ask me for a recommendation of what philosophy to read or something, if someone says, where should I start with philosophy? You might be tempted to say, okay, well, let's start with Plato, read about Socrates and Aristotle, then do a bit of existentialist for, I just tell people, just literally read what you've heard of. And the reason for that is because these people will have come up in contexts that are relevant to you or of interest to you. So if you've heard Nietzsche mentioned a bunch of times, because you're a big Jordan Peterson fan, like if you like Jordan Peterson, and Jordan Peterson obviously likes Nietzsche quite a lot and finds a lot of use in him, you're probably going to find some use in him.

28:47Whereas if you just randomly pick one of the great philosophers, like if you just pick up Sartre as I did the other day, I told you this, and read existentialism as a humanism and think, this is complete nonsense, that was a complete waste of time. Because you're not going to resonate with it. It's not going to, strictly speaking, convince you unless I think you've already got one foot in the boat. I did think on the pessimistic philosophers, or you said the darkest philosophers, which doesn't necessarily just mean pessimistic, right? Dark philosophy, pessimistic philosophy, what do you mean? I think Schopenhauer comes to mind.

29:20He's writing his On the Sufferings of the World. That's your sort of indulgent pessimist. I think he had trouble with women for some of his life, and he's got this infamous essay on women, which would read like a comedy. In fact, one version of his essays I have in the introduction or the preface, the translator says, by the way, the essay on women isn't a joke. He's not being sarcastic. This is what he actually thought. He comes to mind. It's an irony disclaimer. Yeah. But in order to avoid that, I think that a good example of a potentially non-self-indulgent, pessimistic philosophy that seems genuinely just philosophical might be something like antinatalism, the view that it is immoral to have children.

29:57David Benatar is the superstar of antinatalism. He wrote a book called Better Never to Have Been, which sounds like one of these sort of, I'm about to write about how terrible life is, I wish I was never born. But it's not. It's like philosophically speaking, he tries to make a case that it's just better for no one to be born. Even if their life is filled with more pleasure than suffering, he thinks that it's still immoral to bring them into existence. It's an interesting take. We had a debate about this five years ago in the Barbican. That sounds about right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When we first met.

30:29Like canteen at the Barbican. And we were having the conversation and people came, tried to be social, listened for five minutes and then left. And it was just this sort of steady cycle of people coming and going, this doesn't sound very nice at all. So yeah, Benatar actually probably does fit. A good example of why you might find it dark. I mean, I call it dark if you like. I mean, for an anti-natalist, they'll say, no, the darkness is that you're, you know, unconsensibly bringing people into suffering. But in terms of how it's perceived, I think that as far as pessimism goes, the idea that it's immoral to have children.

31:07I mean, you've heard of like the pro-life and the pro-choice crowd, Benatar and his crew are like anti-life. It's like this sort of third option that everybody forgets about. He's got some wonderful sort of little tidbits in there. He takes a divergence into the philosophy of disability for a time, sort of making a case that in principle, we are all disabled in some philosophical sense. It's been a while since I've read it, but I think he's sort of imagined. So one way of thinking about this would be like, imagine if everybody whose legs worked suddenly just died, and the only people left on planet Earth don't have functioning legs.

31:45Maybe not instantly, because people would have memory, but after not very long, it just wouldn't be considered a disability to not have legs, because that's just how everybody is. And Benatar sort of imagines in principle the things that we could have that we don't, which means that in principle, we are disabled in the same way. We just can't fly. Exactly. So there are all kinds of sufferings that come about in our life, like having to climb the stairs, which we don't even notice as sufferings. And if you add all of these up, they become pretty significant. It's a bit of a trip, but really interesting.

32:11And I think probably dark for that reason. The other thing that's quite nice about Benatar, I said it was sort of dry earlier, and I did mean that as a compliment, sorry. As opposed to like frilly. Yes, yeah, yeah. It's that Benatar, he gives a very logical argument. I would say there are problems with the argument but you know there's in like it's very clearly laid out in a way that quite a lot of pessimistic philosophers write in sort of semi-poetry um benatar if you if you're a hardcore analytic fan he's probably he's probably the pessimistic seems that way uh i suppose he also spoke to him right i did i had him on my show um he doesn't show his face yeah he doesn't i i actually don't know if he uses his real name um but he doesn't show his face so there is also that added element that you you he doesn't want to be seen oh so he's the sleep token of the philosophy world oh are they the they mask wearing slipknot yes don't make that face no no no sorry no it's and i i don't it's very very cool very popular about this you know like you know when you guys start telling me about you know anesthetists of ancient city oh yeah yeah yeah and i need to nod along like this this is your turn oh yeah okay there we are thank you very good what's the philosophy of sleep token um if you go on the reddit really deep really really really deep the law goes hard.

33:28The law goes hard on many subreddits. I have a subreddit too, which has some interesting laws of its own. I've seen them. I've seen them. Yeah. You've got canon. Yeah. Apparently, apparently, apparently so. Okay. So Benatar's got this. I remember you, his whole thing is this balance between suffering and pleasure. Yeah. Is that even a tiny microcosm of suffering is so great that it doesn't it outweighs any amount of pleasure like an asymmetry argument between pleasure and pain so a lot of just pulled that out of a five year five and a half year old canteen conversation got a memory on you thank you i mean this is if that's not a great advert for a tasty drink yes zero calorie some three million subscribers later modern wisdom i don't know what it is and he remembers um it's i think when a lot of people would consider, is life worth living?

34:20One crude way of working it out is adding up the pleasure, minusing the pain, and sort of seeing what you're left over with. Is it worth living overall? Beneter thinks that, crucially, before you exist, the potential pleasure that you might experience if you come into existence doesn't matter one job. It's literally irrelevant. But the potential pain that you would avoid does matter. And he tries to prove this through some sort of intuitive thought experiments. For example, there are no conscious beings on Mars, right? We don't really think that it's a bad thing that all this pleasure that could be on Mars is being missed out on.

35:00We don't think what a tragedy that all of the potential pleasure that could exist on Mars isn't actually happening. But we might think that it is a good thing that there's no suffering up there. And some people hear that kind of example and go, yeah, that makes sense. Some people go, well no i am i am i am sad that there's no pleasure it's sort of an intuitive thing um he also one other way of thinking about this at least for the imbalance might be a question which is would you take five minutes of the worst imaginable conceivable suffering that you could experience if afterwards you got to have five minutes of the best possible bliss i mean i don't know what you guys would do you wouldn't take it no thank you i think that's i I don't think I'd take five minutes of the best possible bliss anyway.

35:43The rest of your life. It was the rest of your life where you just be - Expectation. Yeah, you'd just be complete. You'd just feel empty. Well, I mean, that's another asymmetry. Yeah. That's an additional asymmetry. And that actually might be just a sort of good response to this kind of thought experiment. Because what Beneteau is trying to say is that most people would say no. And so crudely, it seems like the suffering kind of counts for more. but as so much philosophy does it kind of relies on intuitive that you're sort of feeling of a sense of negativity bias another way he talks about and crucially this is only before you exist right once you exist your your pleasure is good for you and your suffering is bad for you but before you exist other people have a choice about whether you do or don't yeah before you for someone who doesn't exist then not experiencing pleasure is not bad but then not experiencing suffering is good.

36:32And so before you're born, the only moral calculus is the goodness that you're not suffering. And so that's all that should be taken into account. It's good that you're not suffering. Let's not bring that into existence. Another sort of line of reasoning he goes down is kind of like a rights-based approach where he says, suppose, for example, that if I were to break your arm, you would get an encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy or something. If I gave you that option, you might think to yourself, you know what, I think that's worth it. It'd definitely be worth it for me. I'd take that. However, even if I would actually prefer that, if you didn't ask me first, if you just did it, you don't have the right to do that to me.

37:12If I found you in need of an ambulance and the only way to save your life somehow was to break your arm, then I think most people say you should do it. But if by causing you suffering, I can not save you from worse suffering, but bring you something good, most people think that I don't have the right to inflict that suffering on you, even if it would be ultimately worth it. So for Benatar, same thing before you're born, right? You're allowed to inflict suffering to prevent worse suffering, but you're not allowed to inflict suffering on the promise that there'll be some good that comes out of it unconsensually.

37:42Because what you're essentially doing is causing a bunch of people to unconsensually experience masses of suffering that they had no say in. Some people have actually tried to sue their parents for wrongful birth because that has actually happened. If you're Benatar-pilled. Yeah, exactly. So the asymmetry thing is quite important to Benatar's flavour of antinatalism. You can have antinatalism without it. You can just say that life consists in more suffering. And if you think it's consistent in more pleasure, you've fallen for the Pollyanna principle, as I think they call it, which is the idea that we tend to remember the good stuff more than the bad stuff, the sort of rose-tinted view of the past.

38:19Most people, says Benatar, vastly underestimate the extent to which their lives are going terribly. They sort of, in retrospect, think, oh, you know, it's all good. But if you actually were to live through it again, you'd realize that at every moment it was going very badly. He then, after convincing you that you're... He sort of says, it doesn't matter how much you suffer or experience pleasure in life, it's immoral to bring people into existence. And then after convincing you of that, he then says, but just so you know, life does actually contain a lot more suffering. And this detour into disability ethics, or metaphysics, I suppose, is sort of part of this case.

38:57You know, these menial sufferings that you don't even notice. It's not, you shouldn't have been here. You should be upset that you are here. And by the way, the fact that you are here also is a reason for regret. Yeah, it gets a little bit tricky because like once you're here, I mean, the inevitable question for David Benatar is, then why don't you just think we should kill ourselves? And David Benatar in a footnote compares this to going to a movie and when you're about halfway through thinking like this is kind of a crap film um it's not bad enough that i'm gonna leave now that i'm here but i kind of wish i'd never come in the first place that's sort of his position on on life he's he's he's how robust do you think that is as an answer to why shouldn't i just kill myself i think it it doesn't really work very well because i'm quite suspicious of the the asymmetry argument like anyway um so i think that a case that that sort of makes life not worth living and therefore not worth beginning will inevitably create a powerful argument for not continuing life.

39:57Benetit is, as far as I can remember, quite sort of staunchly not that. But I'm not so sure that they can be so definitively separated. Has someone taken that? Is there a suicide cult philosophy? There have been examples. I think Camus talks about a few examples at the beginning of the myth of Sisyphus, doesn't he? He sort of mentions, I think, one or two examples of some philosophers who wrote a tract. I can't remember who it was. He mentions who wrote a tract and then killed himself in order to bring attention to his work. But it didn't work because no one liked the work anyway. Philip Mainlander killed himself.

40:33But I don't know if that... I can't remember if that's what he's talking about. I can't remember who Camus is talking about. But no, you tend to find that people who are genuinely committed... I mean, Camus says in the myth of Sisyphus, for the man who does not cheat, what he determines to be true must determine his action. So if you become convinced that life is not worth living and you're certain enough of that in order to kill yourself, then you're probably not going to sit around writing a book first. So it's sort of like self-selecting. And there's an interesting evolutionary de-selection for views like this and for views like anti-naturalism.

41:03And again, Benatar addresses this. It doesn't affect the truth of the claim, but it means it will never take off. Because - Genetically, it's cancerous. Exactly. Yeah. Which in reverse is the explanation, I think, for the general optimism that sort of just... Only the optimistic people left. ...seeps throughout all, exactly, to some degree. I mean, there are people who are not optimists, but they're not quite pessimistic enough to fully commit to the bit, as it were. And if they are, then they select themselves out of the mean pool. If you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function.

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42:07And right now they're giving a thousand Modern Wisdom listeners another$100 off, bringing it down to$399. So just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. I had a conversation with a gentleman who his entire theory of human evolution, human cultural evolution is that human culture is almost expressly built around helping people to not take their own lives and that our system is too. And we got halfway through the episode and it's the only time this has ever happened. He bailed out of the episode partway through, had a bad night's sleep and he felt like he wasn't making it.

42:49And I thought, well, that's kind of on brand for somebody who had this sort of a worldview that everything is about avoiding things going badly, that partway through an episode about it, he decided that it was going so badly that he didn't want to continue. Yeah, yeah. Another thing Camus says is that the meaning of life is literally whatever is keeping you from killing yourself. Yes. you know, and I think that's more or less true. Why don't you kill yourself? Yeah, and I think that most people who engage with that topic do so on an emotional level, and that's the motivation for these kinds of thoughts.

43:25There are people who are just like intellectually interested in the worthiness of life, like whether it's worth living. But that very rarely is actually what's going on, I think, when people are seriously struggling with this and so i don't know it makes it a sort of difficult philosophical terrain but i think that people who are just interested in it intellectually often will appreciate someone who can just forthrightly discuss it you know because a lot of the time it's like you know you you open a open a youtube video that's going to discuss abstractly the philosophy of suicide it opens with a helpline it's like way to give away your position you know like i think people will like like loads of ideological bias in the suicide discussion.

44:05I think people want to feel like they're being taken seriously, right? And if you come with a philosophical or emotional conviction to the table, and someone before you even get started says, hey, just so you know, we're going to move towards this direction, I think a lot of people would appreciate a forthright direct approach, which is why so many people are attracted to the myth of Sisyphus by Camus, because it starkly opens with that. There is but one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. And it captures a lot of people's attention because even people who aren't feeling suicidal are like, whoa, yeah, that's interesting.

44:40And they just want to read about it in a relatively straightforward way. I unfortunately think it's pretty overhyped, the myth of Sisyphus. Why? Why do you not like the myth of Sisyphus? I don't have an aversion to existentialist philosophy generally, generally but it sort of doesn't really capture me like i think that i don't know i mean i don't know if camus like sufficiently answers the question his his famous conclusion is imagining syphus happy right and i just i don't know if that's like a satisfying thought to me for some it might be but but for me it's it's not it's just as as meaningless as the situation that we that we began with you know this this sort of happy pushing of the boulder um i don't know Joe, you can probably make a case or something like that.

45:25Is there a bull case for, well, just imagine this thing to be different? Just play pretend until you believe the theory? It's like an act of rebellion for Camus. It's almost like an existential irony, right? Like he's sort of, you're just going to enjoy the thing. It's interesting because I find the development of Camus' thought over time very interesting for this because the myth of Cisphus is often, you know, So the thing that people take away is, of course, you know, imagining Sisyphus happy. It's such a famous image. But a lot of the myth of Sisyphus is significantly more, I don't know what the right word is, like more intuitively abhorrent than that, if that makes sense.

46:08And even to Camus. So Camus writes the myth of Sisyphus. He paints a bunch of characters who are meant to be like absurd men. And some of them are like really awful people, you know, like kind of philanderers or, you know, one of them is kind of, you know, the actor who never becomes themselves and is just playing characters all the time. And he has this idea of like, okay, well, if you're an absurdist and you think there's no objective or no way to say that one aspect of life is better than any other, you're kind of trying to live out valuelessness. Well, then, in that case, Camus thinks, well, if you decided not to kill yourself, the only value that you're at least enacting is that life is better than no life.

46:46And so you should value the quantity of life over the quality of life. Now, of course, although that's not existential nihilism, that's pretty close to moral nihilism. And Camus clearly is troubled by this because one of the next things he writes is a play called Caligula, which is all about the Roman emperor, a kind of fictionalized version of the Roman emperor Caligula, going absolutely batshit and killing lots of people. and you know there are various analyses you can make of this when I read that I think yeah this is Camus wrestling with his own philosophy and he's got it he's painted himself into a corner whereby you can only value the quantity of life and not the quality of life and then he's teasing out some of the the consequences of that he's clearly not happy because he then writes books that are ostensibly attempting to go no hang on a sec we can't there are there are further things that we can do with absurdism That wasn't definitive.

47:36Yes, yeah, yeah. And we used to, you know, The Myth of Cisphus is one of the first things that Camus writes along with The Stranger. Oh, it's the difficult first album. It seems like an explication of The Outsider. And it is, you know, I like The Myth of Cisphus partly because it's so counterintuitive, but some of his later works, things like The Plague. The Plague is an amazing novel. It became like a bestseller during COVID for obvious reasons. And it's about a kind of a plague hitting the town of Orar. in French Algeria, what was then French Algeria, and how people cope with that. And people are given various different analogical readings for this.

48:15So one is to read it as an analogy for the Nazi occupation of France. Another is to, but part of the kind of tying this back to the developments of Camus' thought from the mythosysphus, one way of looking at it is to say, well, these are lots of things that Camus thinks when the chips are down, people turn to. One of them is friendship. I'm very bullish on friendship generally. But another one is this kind of shared struggle. There are bits in the plague where they sort of say, okay, yeah, we're fighting a kind of nigh omnipotent disease, but we're going to fight it because that's the way that we're coping almost in a time of kind of abhorrent struggle and people are dying around them all.

48:59It feels like the human centipede of philosophical argument a little bit yeah as in like as in it's and so you know and then camu writes the rebel which is one of his one of his later um works which is again discussing you know what can an absurdist coherently value without simply falling back onto a kind of leap of faith or something and i i really like those later works i'm not convinced that they actually are consistent with this earlier position he has of like kind of hardcore absurdism but i do think they're still they're still worth reading there's actually like understated in a great deal of like philosophers who are now dead is like what they thought as if they just like lived for one year wrote everything down and stayed the same you know like we sort of we forget that people like you know if you've ever thought about writing a book and i'm sure we all at this table probably have at some point one of the thoughts you have is like you know am i am i ready you know is this the right time because you recognize that whatever you write now in 20 years at least some of it you're going to want to revise or you're going to change your mind about and you're also going to have to answer to exactly and it's you know you're gonna have your your name in a bookstore and you have to grimace every time you walk past it i would probably be driven mad i'd like pull it off the shelf and scribble out the the paragraphs by yeah yeah um and this is is what humans do right and so when we talk about what camu thought as if his life was actually just that day when he finally said and done yes yeah yeah yeah like he's just had a he's just had a fantastically bad day and the car is just and he thought you know what fuck it yeah like david hume writes the the what's the first one the treaties concerning human nature and it's like did he spell human with with an e because that would have been fucking brilliant it would have been would have been properly bad well he didn't know much about pr because the book didn't sell and he later sort of revises his thoughts into the much shorter inquiry concerning human understanding.

50:54The same kind of thoughts revisited. And it's posited as like an update. And he tells people not to read the other one. But some people think it's just because the first one kind of wasn't selling. And in fact, when I went to university, they made a study of the treaties because it's more like fleshed out. But he literally writes the kind of same thing again in different form later in his life. And so there is always sort of development of thought with philosophers. And we only tend to be aware of it when it's grand and dramatic, when someone converts from one side to another when anthony flew becomes a theist or something but it happens throughout the history of thought too so like when you're reading a text by somebody like if you're interested in their thought like try to keep in mind some chronology of like when it was when it was written because otherwise you might be reading you know the goblet of fire before you read the chamber of secrets and you're probably going to get the wrong kind of idea i'm sorry no no it's good even even someone like plato who we quite often think of as having a a very strong, stable, consistent set of principles.

51:53Literally made out of marble. Well, he's one of his earlier works, which is both a kind of political treatise, but also a theory of the human mind is called The Republic. And then later, he writes a book that's also a political work called The Laws. And you can see the development of his thoughts. In The Republic, he's very focused on what makes a good ruler. And in The Laws, he's very focused on, okay, he'd had a quite a disillusioning experience with a tyrant called Dionysus, I think. Cool. Yeah. In Syracuse, where he tried to, Dionysus had invited him over twice, actually. And both times it went terribly.

52:29And said, yeah, yeah, like I'm really interested in being like one of your philosopher kings. Yeah, this sounds really cool. You can help me rule better. And then he shows up and Dionysus is just like drinking himself silly. And Plato So it's like, look, like one of the really big things about being a kind of philosopher king is like temperance and, you know, not gorging yourself and kind of staying. Because how are you going to make like really good decisions if you're drunk all the time? And Dionysus kind of goes, look, I'm going to stop you right there. Like, you don't understand. I'm in charge.

53:00And like, you do what I say. It's very on brand. And he basically kind of imprisons Plato for a bit. And he eventually gets free. And then he goes back. Same thing happens. flees. And disillusioned by this, Plato writes the laws, which are much less concerned with what makes a good ruler, and are much more concerned with if rulers come and go, how are you going to keep everyone in check? These philosophers often have extraordinary lives. Why does Thomas Hobbes write the Leviathan? Because he had to flee him being a royalist during the English Civil War. He has to flee to France because of the English Civil War.

53:30And he writes this tract about how we should all submit to an authoritarian dictator, essentially, who should be able to dictate everything with full submission, including religious affairs. You've got to be aware, not only of the chronology, but also the context. Some personal motivation. And also, one other thing on this thread is beware that sometimes when you're reading people, they're writing under the laws of a country. Dostoevsky, his Notes from the Underground, one of the most famous of his books, because it's so short and easy to read, originally contained a chapter which essentially argued for the necessity of Christianity, as Dostoevsky saw it, but it was censored and taken out.

54:07And so you end up with this sort of quite fully nihilistic tract. But I think a lot of that is also going on historically too. So beware that these are human beings with developing thoughts and political considerations inspiring their writing. When it comes to history of thought, is there someone that you think changed thinking forever, but was sort of useless in practice? Like someone who contributed to moving thought forward most without having any real life applicability? That's a tricky question. I'm tempted to say in a non-insulting way, theologians, only because, like obviously, if you're a believer in God, the nature of God will greatly affect some practical things in your life, the way that you worship, you know, should you worship the saints or not are you worshipping a tripartite you know god or a singular unity you know that kind of stuff will be important to your daily practice but if you're talking about in practice like for society as it were then it's probably not particularly relevant to anyone who doesn't care about that kind of stuff so that sort of springs to mind um but outside of that i don't know um maybe some of the more abstracts i mean the name that actually sprung to mind was bertrand Russell, which you might jump down my throat for.

55:24But was he actually a practical philosopher? Everything he tried to write in practice was awful. Bertram Russell is very, it's supposed to depend on me by practical. Bertram Russell is very important in the kind of history of studies of the foundations of mathematics and stuff like that. And although he wrote a three volume insane project, is it two or three volumes? I always get too confused. Nobody's read the whole thing. This is like, because it's deeply impenetrable. It takes him like, what, 300 pages to prove that one add one is two? Yes, it might. Yeah, it's like, I think, around a 200-page mark.

55:58Which is quite a thing to do from first principles. It's a real battle of attrition. Is it difficult? Yeah, yeah. But, you know, but... It's like the terms and conditions of philosophy. It's like no one actually reads it, but you kind of need it to be there. It's important. And he writes that with Alfred North Whitehead. And that's very influential, you know. Even though the grand project failed, there were some operators they coined that are very important. Things like there exists a unique object such that, which is now very helpful in areas of maths. So, you know, not kind of helpful on an everyday level.

56:29But a lot of Russell's academic writing is very much in philosophy of language, philosophy of maths, foundations of mathematics, logic. You know, which I think are very happy. But, you know, it's not necessarily like you're going to read his theory of descriptions and then just be out and about being like, oh, yeah. My life is so much better. Okay. Okay. So I guess even broader than that, are there some branches of philosophy that should be just jettisoned entirely? Any bits that are just intellectual cosplay dead ends? No, because philosophy, if you find a philosophy useful, then it is useful.

57:06That's kind of what it's there for. It's like asking the question of are there any music genres that you think should get in the bin? And the answer is no, because somebody's enjoying that, right? I'm sure it's useful to somebody. But if we had to get rid of one of them, I don't know. Pure logic puzzles? Philosophy of mind? Philosophy of mind is way too important. Philosophy of mind is the next big thing. It's excruciatingly boring for a lot of people. I mean, we've talked about how it's quite difficult to talk about it in a concrete way that's of interest to an audience. No one on YouTube likes it, and I can't work out whether it's because it's hard or because it's pointless.

57:42You know, my audience have quite taken to the philosophy of mind. I think because I have too, and so I've got this enthusiasm point. I think it's really important. And I think like watch this space, as it were. I think people are beginning to realize that consciousness, it's always been like, you know, you'll have someone and they'll say like, consciousness, it's just such a mystery. And like, you know, it's like trying to view the windowpane through the windowpane, because we experienced the whole world through consciousness. That's interesting, but everybody kind of already knows that. That's why we're at the table having the conversation.

58:12there is a there is a stark increase happening in the view that consciousness is so to speak fundamental here's the interesting thing yeah so panzykism right and here's one interesting observation which is that there are these cliches that crop up basically everywhere you look right if you look at ancient um vedic literature if you look uh at a meditative monk who achieves enlightenment in the forest somewhere if you look at joe blogs who took lsd last week and had like this insane experience at the peak of his hero dose they will say similar things which is this sort of cliche of everything is one i am one with the universe the ego death the disillusion of exactly and this kind of stuff has been has been present in in in these philosophical traditions like from the beginning of history.

59:06The pre-Socratics talk about it a little bit too. And I think that we're beginning, like people are beginning to become much more open to the idea that there is something true about that. And there's a reason why that keeps coming about. Panpsychism is growing in popularity because the problem is like, we believe that there is a world of matter and we know that we are conscious. And you've got a few options available to you. Either the consciousness is like a totally separate thing from the material, which makes it seem really weird, and why does it interact with me? If consciousness is literally immaterial, if it's not made of matter that my brain and my body is, then it is a complete mystery how it would interact with my physical body.

59:46It's not like it's floating around out there. It has no spatial dimension. It's not material. It's another piece of matter that is not matter, but it must be some other kind of matter. It is as mysterious that my mind would interact with my brain as it would be if my mind suddenly started interacting with your brain. Or with that can of tasty new tonic on the table. It would just be like, what are you talking about? If these are two separate kinds of things, you're talking about taking the number two, adding in a chair, and getting the color orange. It's just categories of different things that seem like they shouldn't be able to interact.

1:00:22Okay, so then maybe the mind is just made out of material. But then you run into some intuitive problems about the nature of thoughts. you know people keep coming at me because i like to sort of froth at the mouth over the thought of closing my eyes and imagining a triangle and asking where on earth that triangle is there are true facts about that triangle it's got three sides right that's true it's really like i can see it in my head it's true that it's got three sides but where is that triangle it's not just made up of the matter of my brain if i cut open your brain i'm not going to find a triangle in there it's you can sort of find the the material activity that's correlated with the experience of the triangle.

1:00:57That's not the same thing as the triangle. So you've sort of got this sort of barrier problem of where you get from this material stuff to this non-material stuff. And the panpsychist says there is no barrier. But instead of saying everything's made out of material and so is consciousness, they just say that everything is consciousness from the get-go and therefore you get consciousness. The biggest myth for the panpsychist and other related schools in consciousness is that complexity is required for consciousness. That might be the big myth that needs to dissipate. So is there argument that because the brain is the most complex thing, we know it's the one that's got the most consciousness?

1:01:37It's got... The things that we think consciousness is are actually sometimes just what consciousness does. Okay, let me... What the fuck does that? I'll explain it this way, right? So if consciousness just means some kind of experience, some kind of awareness, right? When we talk about what makes somebody conscious, we might talk about things like memory, first person conscious experience, awareness, these kinds of things. But rudimentary consciousness on its own wouldn't necessarily require any of those things. Imagine for a moment that you had no memory. I don't mean like you forget what happened yesterday like you've got dementia I mean literally no memory laid down in any instant, what would that be like?

1:02:24It's kind of impossible to imagine. Imagine you were falling through the air and no memory was being laid down at any instant. Would you even know that you were falling? You'd have no sort of instant before to compare yourself with. You wouldn't even know that you were a being. You wouldn't know that your feet are part of you. There's no time for that to happen. It's impossible to even conceive of what the content of your thoughts would be. They'd be the simplest possible thing that consciousness could experience. And yet it would still be conscious and aware. And so the laying down of memory is something that consciousness can do, which gives rise to more complex conscious behaviors, like our conversations and me knowing that we're in a building and that this is a microphone and that kind of stuff.

1:03:07But that is not consciousness. That's just one thing that consciousness does when it's complexly arranged. So when we look at a rock and say there's no consciousness, and look at a brain and say there is, and it's because, oh, the brain is complicated. The panpsychist says, no, consciousness is at the foundation of all of it. You've just got more complicated consciousness, which does things like memory and self-awareness and communication, and you've got less complex consciousness, which just sort of, at the atomic level, just sits there and sort of fizzes around, right? The analogy I sometimes give to explain this is imagine comparing the rock to the Empire State Building.

1:03:40And we said, look at the Empire State Building with its complexity, with its elevators and cash machines and it's got like light switches and electricity and you kind of think it can't be made of matter, you know, because like a rock is made of matter. No, it is still made of matter. It's just arranged in a more complex way and so doing much more interesting things. And our brains are like the empire state building of, you know, fundamental consciousness, which is you arrange it in a particular way and suddenly it can do all these magical things like have conversations and talk to each other. But the panpsychist thinks that at root it's consciousness.

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1:05:39What do you make of panpsychism, Joe? I like it in the sense that I think that it's kind of satisfyingly empirical, which sounds a very strange thing to say. But ultimately, it's somebody saying, okay, we've got matter and mind. It's very difficult to reduce mind to matter. We can't deny that mind exists because it is in some sense the precondition for thinking that everything else exists. and so right if we can't reduce the two we'll just have to make mind you know and matter play together so i'm sympathetic in that sense i think that i think that um for me the aspect of the panpsychist approach that will probably need to be worked out in more detail somebody probably has because i've not that well read regarding panpsychism is a kind of detailed account of what complexity amounts to so like you know for example uh you know the the we we can arrange the brain and you know we we have brains they're arranged a certain way you can arrange you know a series of rocks in that way you could try and simulate it with a kind of similar aspects of the mind with a binary gate system stuff like that like in what i think that that kind of i worry that sometimes a lot of the work is then being thrown at this notion of complexity and that i sometimes think that the plausibility of the panpsychus program is going to rest on how that idea of complexity is cashed out.

1:06:58This may just be, however, a neurological or a neuroscientific problem. There's a guy called, a neuroscientist called either Francisco or Francisco, I don't know, Francisco Varela, who his whole project is, okay, I want to try and contribute to solving the hard problem of consciousness, which is the idea of bridging the gap between the material world and felt experience. And so he's going to try and do that by, and has been trying to do that, by charting as many possible neurological correlates as you can between phenomenologically reported experience and stuff going on in the brain. And he just kind of, and I have a lot of sympathy for that.

1:07:39Partly because I think that, you know, no matter what your philosophical stance is, you're clearly going to have to deal with these findings. Whether you think, as Varela does, that this will actually allow you to bridge the hard problem of consciousness eventually, and that you'll be able to reduce mind to matter, or whether you're a panpsychist, and this will help you with your fleshing out your account of complexity. I think that this is one of the reasons why the philosophy of mind, I think, is in such a boom period, academic-wise, is because I often think that philosophy is most helpful when it's interdisciplinary.

1:08:11I really like, for example, the intersection between philosophy and linguistics, because I think that there's a real strength in taking empirical results from linguistics and empirical results from neuroscience and from psychology and looking at it through a philosophical lens, you know, trying to, you know, in very broad terms, I suppose, trying to see what it means and then applying it to different things. You know, this is, I think that a lot of the best philosophy work occurs at the intersection of philosophy in different fields. And specifically, I think philosophy and neuroscience is a very promising one.

1:08:38I think there's a lot of very good work being done there. What else is there? Because it felt to me, when I started learning about panpsychism who's the dude from durham university philip goff thank you so philip was the first guy i had an entire conversation with about and that was on his first book 2019 yeah galileo's era yes and then he's done a new one um so that was it but before then i'd sort of seen it had a bit of an understanding about what it was yeah uh annika has done two books on it now i think something like that well it was she she annika the way she conveyed it to me was like the only conclusion I can draw from my interviews on consciousness is that I have to take seriously the idea that consciousness is fundamental.

1:09:21Not quite sure what that means. And it sounds like it's totally insane. It's sort of the agnostic of the theory of mind world. Yeah. And she's totally materialistic and she's like, look, it sounds totally insane, but bear with me. And she does this 12-part documentary interviewing all these people and thinking, actually, there is something very, very strange going on. The biggest problem for panpsychism is the so-called combination problem. That's like the actual biggest critique that a panpsychists would recognize, which is, crucially, panpsychists don't really think that everything is conscious.

1:09:49They don't necessarily think this can is conscious as a unified entity. They think that it's made out of consciousness. The consciousness is the stuff of the universe out of which things are made. Calling this a can, this is an artifact. We've put this together as human beings. We've taken materials and arranged them. So it's like, there's nothing to say that it would get this unified center of consciousness. That would be kind of weird, right? If we took a bunch of consciousness and just put it together in this shape and suddenly it had a unified sense of consciousness that would be strange but that's what happens in the brain according to the panpsychist right so it's like if one person is in a field and turn up other people are in different fields and then you put them all together in the same field suddenly you get one one brain exactly like why why does my why does my consciousness if my brain is made up of consciousness then why when it's arranged in a particular way do i get this singular unified sense of self?

1:10:37And why is it not that all three of our brains have a singular sense of consciousness? And if we got close enough together, which we're not going to do, then it would happen. They call it the combination problem because it's like, how do they combine? And interestingly, maybe, right? I don't know if you've come across these split brain patients. I talk about these all the time. We've got some evidence to suggest that you kind of have two consciousnesses that are battling out with each other inside your very own brain. So that's the interdisciplinary thing, like a lot of scientific research into the way that the brain works in weird cases like split brain patients.

1:11:11Look into it, ladies and gentlemen. It is freaky what your brain can do, like the two hemispheres, what they can do. What's your favorite examples? My favorite example of this are, so your brain, the two hemispheres of your brain are connected by the - Corpus callosum. Corpus callosum, right? It's the connective tissue, which actually does more to inhibit communication than facilitate communication. There seems to be an evolutionary advantage to keeping them separate. Some people, as a severe treatment for epilepsy, would undergo a corpus callisotomy where you sever it. This is what a split brain patient is.

1:11:44It's someone who has the connective tissue severed. They can still communicate through other means a little bit, but basically the communication is kind of off. It's like a vertical decapitation. Exactly. Now, most people know that the left hemisphere governs broadly the right visual field and the right hemisphere broadly the left visual field. Also, the right hemisphere is supposed to be the kind of like creative one. And the left one is the sort of rational mathsy one, bit of an oversimplification. But take a split brain patient whose hemispheres aren't communicating properly. You can show them something just in their right visual field.

1:12:14So you like block off the rest of their view and you just show them something to the left hemisphere and vice versa. So they've done some experiments on such people where they will, for example, show them a picture of an apple and they'll say, what can you see? And they'll say, I don't know. I don't know what you're talking about. And then you ask them to draw a picture of something and they'll draw an apple because part of their brain has seen it, but part of it hasn't. You will find those kinds of cases. But the most interesting to me, I needed to say that to set it up, is a study that was done.

1:12:48I can't remember what it was. Annika writes about this, where they took a split brain patient and And they showed one hemisphere of the brain, an instruction. It's an experiment, so you're ready to do an instruction. And the instruction just says something like, get up and walk over there. So the person reads it, they get up, they walk over to the wall. And then you ask them verbally, why did you just walk over to the other side of the room? And do you know what they say? It would be weird if they said, I don't know, wouldn't it? But they don't. They give a reason. They confabulate. But they're not making it up.

1:13:24They're not lying. They're not like, oh, they believe it. They're like, oh, I was trying to get some air. It's kind of warm in here. And they believe it. So there's this idea that one hemisphere of your brain is the so-called interpreter, and that you've essentially got your brain working on doing particular things. You can imagine working on your emotive impulses. You just do something because you just impulsively want to, or instinctively feel it's the right thing. And then your left brain comes in and retrospectively says, oh, no, no, no, this is the reason why I did that. I've got good reason for that.

1:13:56And you've kind of got these two parts of your brain governing different parts of your activity. What's the implication of that philosophically? The implication of that is that consciousness might not be so unified as our sort of present experience leads us to believe. The unity of self might not actually be what's going on in reality. I have a pet theory that a lot of the reason why we feel like we're in our brains, it is the center of our neural activity, of course, but I feel like the reason why we really experience ourselves as up here is because it's where our senses are, where our eyes are and our ears are.

1:14:35I imagine that if our eyes were on our hips and our ears were down there too, we might sort of feel as though we were located because that is where everything is being fed through exactly it sort of feels like you're up here because that's where the that's where the information is um a lot of a lot of weird weird stuff to think about this so-called combination problem i mean there's a lot of weird stuff and experience like if i pinch myself in the hand i feel it in my hand i'm told that it's my brain that's doing the experiencing but i really feel it in my hand you know it's it's very strange i think that poses a good analogy for those people who think that like there is one consciousness or one like oneself like at man which we're all sort of avatars of.

1:15:10It's like the left hand, if I pinch it, my right hand doesn't feel it. But it is - And that's within something that is supposed to be discreetly kind of its own localized We are one thing, but I can get this localized pain in my left hand that my right hand doesn't So let's just scale that across the one thing that is everything. Yeah. I mean, people say like, well, my consciousness can't be the same as yours because I don't have access to your thoughts and you don't have access to mine. So they're separate minds, right? But when you're asleep, you don't have access to your waking thoughts, but it's still the same mind right there are a lot of like weird avenues to explore this this unity of consciousness as this sort of fundamental uh the um principle of the universe one of the interesting uh kind of correlates i mean one thing that i find very interesting about about that kind of you know one part of our a lot of our conscious reporting is the kind of pr brain so to speak is that it reminds me a lot of um of of kind of nietzsche's picture of the will and of the mind, which is broadly speaking that we kind of have a parliament of different drives and that, you know, those drives do what they will, so to speak.

1:16:13You know, there's not one will, there's all of these forces pulling in different directions. And then once we've won out on a course of action, we then justify that, you know, at least that's part of what Nietzsche thinks is going on. I'm always reminded of that kind of split brain going over to the other side of the room and saying, oh yeah, I went here because, you know, I want to look out the window or something. It's like, yeah, it's quite a surprisingly Nietzschean picture. The other part of having a picture of consciousness that is in some way combinatoric. So functionalism works like this, as does panpsychism, is that in theory, you can start scaling things up quite extreme.

1:16:51So it's known as the China brain experiment. You actually need far more people. It's just because China is the most populous country, but you need far more people than the amount of people in China to do this. And the thought experiment goes that say you had billions and billions and billions of people. If you made them all behave like neurons, kind of, you know, they all had walkie talkies or phones or something. And they were, you know, they say, you know, they give a code to someone else and they relay information that way, exactly like a brain would, would that give rise to a consciousness?

1:17:19And I know, I think that's a fascinating, partly because, you know, it sounds crazy. Well, there's a lot of complexity. Yeah, I mean, it sounds absolutely insane, but why not? Isn't it just as insane that you can do it with atoms and get yourself a brain. And also, you know, we talk about things like hive minds and insects and things like that. And we kind of, you know, you can say that's just a metaphor, but a lot of the time, you know, you describe it as if it's in some sense, you know, sharing a conscience. You had Peter Godfrey Smith on recently. And something he says in his book is that in an octopus, a huge amount of its neurons are in its arms.

1:17:52So I don't even mention this in the podcast i'm so sorry i haven't seen it yet but the um but but um one one thing that he might uh one thing he says is he ponders whether uh when an octopus gives an instruction to its arm it kind of gives it the general vibe and then the arm works out the details because what if the what if the arm does it itself it seems like the arm sometimes is sort of feel it and then sort of like oh what's that like then the but interestingly they sort of seem to be able to act independently in that way but when they need to they suddenly become unified when there's a when there's a predator, they can suddenly shoot together and swim off as fast as they can.

1:18:24So it's like, it's separable when it needs to be, but unified when it doesn't. And our brains probably do the same thing. Why do we have two hemispheres? Because there's some utility in it. And to build on that point, if we're scaling up to the idea, we talk about, or at least we're used to it, this kind of fallout fashion. But a lot of the 19th century writing, not necessarily philosophy, just writers, very keen on the idea of spirits of nations and things like that. You know, Stendhal, the French author, travels around Europe. And in his little notes, he talks about like, oh, yeah, the spirit of the German, you know, this bit of Germany and the spirit of Italy and, you know, that kind of the spirit of the different regions.

1:19:01It's not nations at that point, but the different regions that he's visiting. And, you know, we think that's kind of quaint now and a bit funny. You know, it feels like, you know, largely it's kind of a collection of stereotypes. It's kind of amusing to read. But the idea of having groups of people having animating principles and treating them metaphorically as bits of mind is a metaphor. The idea that groups of minds can coalesce to form something analogous to a mind, if you believe in that, that makes that metaphor a lot more substantial. But then the further you go down this rabbit hole, the more interesting the questions have come.

1:19:39Could a bunch of people simulating a mind have a conscious experience? We think about it. We think about the mind as having... It's much easier to think about a group of 10 billion people having a thought or an idea than it is the idea of 10 billion people in this neurologically configurated way of feeling it. So it's a unificationary issue. Yes. Yeah. But I think the more emotion-based you ask those questions, the less intuitive it becomes. What I like about this as an example is that you can bring this down to your own experience. It scales in that way. Because can you make one of your neurons have a thought?

1:20:21Can that localized part of this localized part feel anything? Because you can, kind of. Yeah. Okay. But what about if you do individual nodes and then you think, well, if we scale it up, where is, and this makes sense with the combination problem. It's a little bit weird to think about, right? Interestingly, David Hume. Maybe this isn't as boring as I accused it of being. David Hume didn't think that you would know. Hume, the famous empiricist, there's a lot to say about Hume, but he thought, for example, if you had no experience with the world, if you just had a pain in your big toe or something, and you'd had no experience before, you wouldn't know it was in your big toe.

1:20:57It's a really weird sort of implication of Hume's view, which I think is ridiculous. It's one of the many things that Hume says, which is completely ridiculous. He thinks that you essentially need to have this experience, which you then know, you realize has been due to something happening in my finger. And that allows you to draw that memory. I think memory is the key to a lot of this. Memory allows you to string this sequence. When we think about memory, again, we think about it in terms of like remembering what you did yesterday. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about remembering, like remembering the instant before this instant, which when you start thinking about it in those terms, it becomes revolutionary.

1:21:33If you imagine yourself falling, as we were picturing earlier, with no memory, you'd probably act and, according to the panpsychist, experience the world a lot like the can falling through the air. Would that not preclude a Boltzmann brain? Would it preclude a Boltzmann brain? Yeah, just that if they coalesce into this single form for such a short space of time, how is it if it didn't exist prior to that? Oh, their argument would be the neurons are created in such a way as if you had memories prior to that. Yeah, exactly. Right, okay. You understand what I meant by that? If it's so transient, but encoded in its transient is the...

1:22:06The fake memory. Yeah, exactly. I want to point out that we're talking about this in the context of panpsychism, and it's all a bit sort of woo-woo, and people are like, this is totally crazy. But the example Joe just gave of the China problem, the China brain experiment, we brought this up in the context of panpsychism, but most people listening to this are probably materialists to some degree about consciousness. They will probably think, you know, I think that consciousness is just emergent of material, a bit like how, you know, zeros and ones become a picture on a screen or something like that.

1:22:36This example kind of poses a challenge to that because it's like, if you believe that you can just take atoms, put them in a particular order and get a unified conscious experience of pain, then why can't I do that with individual brains, put them together in a particular way and get a unified experience? In the same way that you can make a triangle out of wood or out of stone or out of metal. If you define something relationally, what you're making it out of ceases to be as important. Exactly. If consciousness is just an arrangement of atoms, then you should be able to get consciousness out of an arrangement of atoms in other ways.

1:23:08And if you think that's not true, then you either have to explain why it's different, or I suppose abandon materialism, or abandon the view that consciousness is in fact emergent and is not somehow fundamental. It's wacky, right? It's weird. Maybe this is, it might just be the messenger. It might have been the messenger so far sorry to everyone that's done theory of mine let's come on my podcast because it's like five or ten people i think it might actually be like the next sort of big thing i'm i'm excited about this idea i think it's fun i mean i think there's there's a lot to there's a lot to dislike about it too of course but like it's exciting and i think people are interested in it and well it the first thing that it gives everybody is i have always had questions about my own experience everyone is always kind of narcissistic when it comes to that and this is the most direct you're ever going why am i a thing why do i feel anything at all yeah why do i sort of exist in that way but the other thing that i'm very interested in which is your one of your pet theories is emotivism can you explain emotivism to me like i'm 12 so emotivism is a kind of a theory about ethics and a theory about language um we've been talking so far about sort of what stuff is made out of um and there's lots more to be said about that by the way like why everything is made out of consciousness and how we even get there.

1:24:24That's like a kind of metaphysical question. In the realm of ethics, like what's good, what's bad, what should you do, what shouldn't you do, everyone's familiar with that kind of language. If I say like, you know, it's bad for you to kick a homeless person on the street, you kind of understand what I'm saying. You get what I mean. But a philosopher will hear that statement and try to break it down. What literally do we mean? What does this word like bad mean? The ethical emotivist is someone who thinks that ethical statements are just expressions of emotion. It means that when you say something is good or bad or that you should or shouldn't do something, all of that moral language is a kind of emotional expression.

1:25:04A big confusion about this is that suppose I think that, suppose I just don't like murder. I just don't like it. Ethical subjectivism says that when I say murder is wrong, I mean to say something like, I don't like murder. That is a reporting of my mental state, that I don't like it. Ethical emotivism is not a reporting of your emotional state. It is the expression of the emotion itself. So it's the difference between saying, I don't like murder and going like, ugh, murder, like literally expressing it. Because when I say, I don't like murder, that's a claim that you can investigate. Is that true?

1:25:40Is it true that I don't like murder? Maybe I'm lying to you. Maybe it's false, right? So it can be true. It can be false. It's a fact about my psychology. Whereas the expression of distaste for murder, just going as it famously has been, boo, murder, is not the kind of thing that can be true or false. You can't really debate it exactly. It's just an expression. The emotivist thinks that that's what's going on with ethics. So, A.J. Ayer is kind of the father of this emotivist theory in the 20th century. And it's only one part of his philosophy, but it's probably what he's most remembered for. And so, he compares saying, like the difference between saying murder and saying murder is wrong is a bit like the difference between saying murder and then saying murder with an angry emoji and three exclamation marks.

1:26:29It's just this like emphasis on something. So, okay, why think this, right? Why would you believe this? Well, pay attention to what your brain is doing when it moralizes. If I walk down the street and I kick a homeless person, you will notice a fact about the world, which is that I have just kicked a homeless person. And you could be completely morally, emotionally detached from that. You could just report as a fact, if you were like a robot, it's a true fact, Alex just kicked a homeless person, right? But if you think that it's wrong, there's something more going on. You think Alex just kicked a homeless person and...

1:27:03And what's the extra thing? What is that extra thing that makes you say that it's wrong? Well, I think that if you pay attention to what your brain is doing in those instances, it's something that belongs in the category of emotion rather than that kind of rational thought. Like that extra bit that's making you say it's wrong versus just reporting it, is that extra bit more like, you know, when you burn your hand and take it away or when you get angry at someone for doing something? Or is it more like two plus two is four and the sky is blue? Like which of those is it more like? I think it much more strongly belongs in the category of emotion.

1:27:38And so that the actual isolated moral element of the statement, it's wrong to kick a homeless person is an ethical expression. Okay. An emotional expression. You've probably heard me talk about element before. Come on. Frankly, that's because I'm dependent on it. And it's how I've started every morning for the last three years. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mixed with everything that you need and nothing that you don't eat. Grab and go stick pack contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, or any other junk.

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1:28:46Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. And right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. If emotivism is true, does that mean that morality is just vibes? More or less, yeah. Although I think that the one thing's worth noting is that even if you put forward this emotivist thesis, it doesn't necessarily mean that anything goes. So we're very quick to - Yeah, because that's an obvious sort of follow-on. Well, just because we're very quick to generally say, okay, something is, I'll say subjective in the sense that, you know, I say it's different from subjectivism, but, you know, somebody can say boo and another person can say yay, at least in theory.

1:29:34But of course, there are constraints on this. I think that sometimes we get very caught up in ideas about objectivity and subjectivity. And actually, sometimes I think what we're actually often getting at is the difference between stability and instability. So, like, most people think that beauty is subjective in some way, right? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, famously. And there are people that dispute that, but that's a pretty majority view. It doesn't follow from that that you can, in fact, find anything beautiful. You just, like, try. Like, if you try and, you know, look at a dog turd on the street and just be like, there's so many of my analogies in dog turd related.

1:30:09But, you know, a dog turn on the street and just try and find it beautiful. You'll find that you can't. And so, plausibly, there are still restrictions on the kind of things that people can and in fact do find beautiful. And so you kind of say it doesn't follow just from, if you were a motivist, it doesn't follow just from the fact that or the idea putting forward that all ethical statements are emotional expressions, that this means that we're going to have total chaos and everyone's going to value different things. There are plausibly just pragmatic constraints on the kind of things that people feel moral disgust about.

1:30:45Which is going to cause some kind of consensus. Yeah. So, I mean, one way of looking at it is the tribe of 150 people that say yay murder, they're not going to last very long. They're going to be outcomputed by people who are very boomer. Cancerous memes here. Yeah. These kinds of responses function in a similar way to ethical subjectivism, which most people are familiar with this idea that some people think that ethics is real. Maybe it's given by God. Maybe it's inscribed into the foundation of the universe. And some people think, no, we essentially kind of make it up. And the debate is always this practical one.

1:31:21Well, then, how can you say that this was wrong? How can you say that that was right? Some people just say, well, you can't. So one thing to note is that it may be true that if we all became emotivists, the world would become a complete disaster, and people would just start being self-indulgent. That wouldn't make it untrue. It would just make it not very practical to believe. And therefore, maybe we should cut this segment and not let anyone hear about it, right? But if you're asking what is true, it will evolutionarily self-deselect. So if it were actually a bad thing to believe, that doesn't mean that it's a false thing to believe.

1:31:50We could have had a lot of emotivists' ancestors, but they maybe didn't stick about yeah well like if it is in fact something that would lead to this sort of this arbitrary disaster do you think it does um no for a few reasons partly because i agree with you i mean people will be listening to this going like well i think i could see a dog shit as beautiful in the right sort of context and i think that's true but the point remains that there are things that you find beautiful that you can't just choose to not and there are things that you don't find beautiful that you can't just choose to become beautiful um i think there is a degree on fundamental matters of somewhat universal agreement in the same way that we kind of broadly agree on many artistic points.

1:32:28We might have, I don't like impressionism and I think Van Gogh is overrated, but broadly speaking, we have an idea of one piece of art being a good, beautiful piece of art and one thing not really being a piece of art at all. But of course, there's so much room for subjectivity there that on the moral particulars, you run into a problem. How do I think this can be addressed? Well, one important thing to note is that A.J. Ayer talks about this. Most moral debate, because this is the thing that you undercut, the ability to debate morals, to say, I think I'm right and you're wrong. If it's all just feeling, you can't do that.

1:33:03You're just feeling. So you can't morally debate. Ayer points out that the vast majority of moral debate that you hear on a regular basis is not actually moral debate. It's debate about facts, which then inform your moral view. So imagine you're having a debate about gun violence in America. The debate might sound something like, did you know that if we criminalized guns, then gun-related deaths would drop by 10 ,000 every year? Oh, but having a swimming pool is more dangerous than having a gun. These are factual claims that you can test, you can run statistics, and you can find out whether they're true or false and a lot of the debate consists in that sort of factual disagreement but the actual moral element isn't actually being crossed up against what people are trying to do there which would i guess at least reinforce the emotivism view is get further up the stack from someone's emotive outburst yeah and say well actually the fact that your emotions are based on are different let me change those facts and see exactly and it would just it would just bring about a new emotional state because suppose you were like you you were you were really scared of getting on a train and i said to you right now we're going to go to edinburgh and you felt an emotion of fear and then i just told you a fact which is oh we're going to get the plane instead you your emotion would change i haven't like convinced you on an emotional level i haven't like changed your emotions exactly i've changed facts which then dictate what your emotional state is presumably you could also teach me some things about the safety record of that's also true which would change your emotional state without just you saying, I'm scared of trains and me being like, no, you're not.

1:34:40And then we have debate. That doesn't make any sense. That's not actually how it goes. And that's actually not how it goes in morality a lot of the time. Because if you find two people who are debating about guns and one says that if we have guns on the streets, then people are going to get attacked. And another person says, yeah, but when somebody's attacked, do you only want the bad guys to have guns? Don't you want good people to be able to defend them? What's the moral boo and yay there? It's something like, boo, innocent people dying. They probably agree on that. And then it's just sort of a factual dispute of what will sort of bring about that innocent people dying.

1:35:13Does that suggest that people's moralities aren't actually as divergent as we think they are? That most people agree on most things when it comes to morality? Not necessarily. It's actually a very difficult question to answer. The thing I'm intending to get across here is that if it is the case that there is this big problem with something like emotivism, that it doesn't allow us to have these debates and say that people are wrong, I think that it would be much more restricted than people would first imagine. Because you first think, gosh, I can't say that you're wrong to steal that apple from the store.

1:35:48I can't say that it's a good thing to walk your wife home or something. You know what I mean? That's not the case. if there were some kind of disagreement that we were unable to resolve, it would be much more foundational and much more broad. That might exist. It might not. Our evolutionary psychology might be such that we, on the most fundamental levels, basically are made of the same stuff. But it does seem plausible to me that there could be genuinely irresoluble foundational value complex. I suppose one essential candidate for that would be the notion of rights versus consequences, which is a sort of, you know, so - Oh yeah, that's interesting.

1:36:24You know, as in that's like one way of, you know, a lot of, say I'm having an argument with someone about, I don't know, let's do the gun control example. I know nothing about the facts on the ground about gun control, but one thing somebody might say is just, no, I have a right to this. And that would be an ethical statement and thus an expression, but people do use that in a kind of load-bearing, justificatory way. I think that would be one example of a type of moral disagreement that emotivism would struggle to accommodate. You might be able to get it in some way. You might find that it would break down.

1:36:54Because I agree with you, you'd break it down to someone ultimately isn't just going, boo, innocent people dying, because that's the consequentialist view. Innocent people dying, that's a bad consequence, boo. Another person might be like, boo, taking my rights away. And that would actually conflict. One person's priority and another person's priority and who trumps. But I do think that both of these, in fact, are not actually foundational, right? Because you've got to break down this con you say boo innocent people dying and like i can think of 10 examples off the top of my head where you'd be okay with an innocent person dying right and likewise you know boo rights are notoriously difficult to actually justify or ground so if you had further conversation with these people you might find that the emotional motivation that has led one person to innocent people dying is bad and another person to you know rights being being violated is bad is actually the same wellspring, as it were.

1:37:47And if that's the case, then this problem goes away. It might not be the case, though. And then you are left with this problem of value conflicts that can't be resolved, but it's much more restricted and would probably operate on the level of societies rather than individuals, which, guess what? It does. And we kind of just accept that some societies have different morals and some don't. That's a good point. I suppose the other... At least on the particulars. The other potential... The cannibals, we don't... Well, the other potential issue you might find is that it is entirely possible that we just have a non-foundationalist moral psychology.

1:38:20So on that, we've kind of said, oh, well, you know, maybe we won't end up disagreeing because we'll get down to fundamentals. But I would potentially, you know, it's certainly a possibility that we have just loose branches of moral statements. You know, like, there's something about, you know, that's a good example. So, like, the example that was, I think this is in Jonathan Haidt's book. He uses the example of he takes a bunch of consequentialists and then asks them about, like, the kind of theoretical consequence-free incest scenario. Yes, yes, yes. Which basically just never exists in real life.

1:38:54But in this kind of laboratory setting, he kind of posits it. And he often finds that, you know, that's a kind of, that's something that people will condemn regardless of the foundation, their stated foundation to morality. I suppose that's one potential counter. You talked to Simon Blackburn recently. Yes. Is he still calling himself a quasi-realist? He actually regrets inventing that term. Okay. What does he call himself now? I'm not sure what he actually calls himself now. I think he's still a non-cognitivist. Blackburn is a non-cognitivist, a kind of a motivist. He's got a lot of interesting things to say about that.

1:39:26I just did a whole episode with him. So, you know, watch it. I think what you just said. What did you just say? Quasi-realist. Before that. Oh, about the idea of it's possible that the ethical statements that we will boo and hooray at are not a foundational structure. Oh, yeah. In emotivism, we might expect that to more so be the case in emotivism. Yeah, exactly. Whereas in a kind of standard cognitivist picture of ethics, we come to our ethical propositions through having a kind of base level set of ethical principles that we believe are true and then derive our ethics from that. and emotivist kind of throws out that picture entirely.

1:40:04So another explanatory problem you might posit for ethic, for emotivism in ethics, which is basically a variant on Fregegeach, which would be like, oh, well, we have this whole inferential setup for our ethical propositions that we don't for emotions. I don't get angry because I've inferred anger from some kind of previous emotional principle. I might get angry because somebody does something that I perceive to be an injustice, but that's going from a thing that I believe to be true. And that kind of, this whole inferential structure that our ethics seems to follow. And at the very least, we want our ethics to follow as an ideal.

1:40:44We hold people being ethically inconsistent as a bad thing seems to rely on some kind of underlying intuitive cognitivism. So there are different problems you can have with emotivism and non-cognitivism and ethics more generally, but there are responses to those problems. And I think there are some of them. One good proof of emotivism might just be the incest question. It's famously difficult for people to deal with incest. And it's always funny watching people sort of wriggle thinkers on stage when somebody's brave enough to ask the question why it's wrong. Consequentialists are notoriously bad at justifying this.

1:41:16And they'll say things like, well, because incest leads to having disabled children. In response to which there are a few questions. Firstly, what's wrong with having disabled children. Secondly, you know, obviously, what about the like cases where procreation is not going to be possible? That's obviously like a side issue. We can obviously correct. Oh, well, there's like a power imbalance between. Okay, we can obviously just like just answer the question, right? You know what I'm asking you and people can't do it. The emotivist, but bear in mind, this is one of the most universal taboos in the world is the incest taboo.

1:41:46It's like everywhere. Interestingly, some societies have variant forms where it's like, it's okay to marry your older sister, but not your younger sister, stuff like that. It's kind of weird. I mean, famously, cousins were in the royal family. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, cousins have always been a sort of stick in the mud for this. People don't seem to care so much about cousins historically, but quite clearly - They're the Goldilocks zone familial relation. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. For keeping it in the family, but not so much. Yeah. Well, you know, they're close enough that you know them. You don't have to actually go that hard-looking exactly you end up with these 15th century monarchs chins out it's it's true it's true so they say um but clearly there is this universal taboo and most people just instinctively think it is just well what's the word realistically what's the word it's something like it's just gross man it's just oh it's just it's not the emotivist says yeah that that's what that's what's going on right and so the the wrongness of incest when you when you recognize how difficult it is for people of a non-prescriptivist moral theory.

1:42:48If you're a believer in God who thinks that it's just revealed that it's the wrong thing to do, then fine. That still doesn't actually explain why it's wrong, just tells you that it's wrong. But for any secular ethicist, it's notoriously difficult when you select out those other factors. And so if I ask you, Chris, if you think incest is wrong, I don't know what you would say. Well, I'm an only child, so it's actually really - Difficult to - I've thought about this at least a little bit. It was you that first taught me about the incest question and then Jonathan Haidt kind of like I read it in full two things first off the reason that humans uh feel incest aversion is because of something called the Westermark window familiar with this okay so the Westermark effect is um young children that are raised together that spend sort of infant and young child years in close proximity especially if they see their mother raising another child, they have sexual aversion to them.

1:43:45This is adaptive, right? You do not know who your sister is. You don't know who that person is. What you do know is that that particular individual was fed and cared for by your mother and you played with them and they were around between zero and 10 years old. This leads to some pretty difficult situations. if you have twins or brother and sister that are separated at birth they've missed this westermark window they do not have sexual revulsion now cognitively they might but that like ick that apparently people who have brothers and sisters i don't have a brother brother or sister so i don't like to me that innate sense when you do this anytime that you do the incest question yeah people's faces start to sort of squeeze a little there is i feel this is the one time in my life that I feel like a psychopath.

1:44:36For you, the incest question is just intellectual masturbation. Specifically intellectual. There's no sense. Not to get, like, I don't like to make the examples like this personal, but I mean, you have parents, you know, like, surely the thought of, without going any further with that sentence, you get what I'm driving at. I can map that on. There's something you can. That's true. But anyway, Western Mark window, really interesting. So if you have a brother and sister or uh specifically the classic sort of daddy issues thing daughter and father deadbeat dad dad leaves dad comes back in oh right now sometimes this happens and they don't even know you know adopted kids so on and so forth and uh you end up finding because there is a kind of resonance that's in that you think wow like this person just seems so like me and he's like yeah they share quite a lot of your genetics well look the thing is like i think there are all kinds of explanations you can give for why this taboo has emerged.

1:45:34But there are explanations for things that do not equate to justifications for things. I could explain why human beings have an inherent racial bias, because when you're living in tribes, it makes sense to be suspicious of other... So I can explain evolutionarily why somebody might be a bit racist. But most people think, actually, that's wrong. We don't want to do that. So it's not a justification for it. It's an explanation for why it exists in the human psychology. So you can explain why the incest taboo exists in the human psychology and why it crops up in some areas and not others. But if you think it's wrong, I'm going to ask you why.

1:46:09And as an emotivist, if someone says, well, I've had this conversation with people in the pub and they give me an emotivist answer. They say, but it's just disgusting. That's your brother. That's your sister. I'm like, yeah, exactly. And it's like one of the most, I think, compelling cases for emotivism. everybody's larping as an emotivist when it comes to the incest question or rather they're larping as something else until it comes to the emotivist around every question okay yeah so much of it actually breaks down to to emotion there are there are lots of reasons you do identify as this an emotivist to be clear yes yeah not that yeah um yeah i think i think so um i find it i'm i've got some sort of qualifier quasi i've got kind of philosophical commitment issues you know I find it very difficult to call myself anything, really.

1:46:59You're sort of philosophically non-monogamous. Yeah, not just on a practical level of like, oh, you'll be held to it and people will. But just because, you know, who bloody knows, man? Like, realistically, who knows? Because we like to put labels on things. Yeah, that's right. Like, we like to put labels on emotions, such as good and bad. I mean, I think one way I've tried to explain this, and why I do call myself an emotivist, and say, yes, I am one, but like, you know, pending corrections, as it were. I would drop it in a moment if there were sort of good evidence against. Emotivist agnostic.

1:47:29Yeah. Like emotivist with a degree of - Emotivist curious. Confidence. Yeah. I think if you imagine what it would be like if we didn't have a word for anxiety, just like there was no word for it, right? And you were feeling anxious. You would try to describe your feeling to me by using other emotional terms. You'd say like, oh, well, I feel a bit, it's sort of like sadness, but I'm like excited. and everyone had and so you isolate that feeling give it its own word so if i ask you in that kicking the homeless person case what is the extra thing you're feeling other than just the the knowledge of the descriptive fact that i picked i'm sorry well it's something like no or something like stop or don't or boo or gross and it's none of those things but it's something a bit like that so we sort of put a put a box around this this this feeling and give it a label.

1:48:20And I think we've done that and that label is bad. And so it belongs in that category. One big mistake people make, I think, with emotivism is that you say that ethics is an expression of emotion. I don't mean that bad or shouldn't maps on to pre-existing emotions that we know of, like boo and anger and frustration. It's its own unique emotion. It belongs in that category. People often think that an emotivist thinks that murder is wrong means something like expressing anger or distaste or disgust. It's not. It's its own unique thing. It's expressing wrongness, which is its own thing distinct from those things.

1:49:01But it belongs in that category. It's a kind of emotion. You know what I mean? Yeah, I do. I do. I'm interested. Is there a philosophy of influence? Because you two are both influential, study this stuff. do you have a responsibility that is philosophically interesting, given that you are supposed to be at least in some way sources of insight around the study of ethics, the study of logic, the study of philosophy? Is there an additional level of responsibility that you have as the closer to the source of where this comes from to be extra highly scrutinous with the way that you sort of put ideas across and what you talk about?

1:49:37I suppose, I mean, I suppose there's the base level of trying to be accurate right like you know you try and get things right and inevitably you sometimes get things wrong but you know you try and get things right i think that um you know i think that's i think another thing that um i'm very keen on when presenting philosophies is to try and get across that this is only really a starting point right this isn't this isn't um me from your computer screen telling you what's definitely true about the nature of the life and the universe that being ridiculous but that hopefully if you find some of this helpful or you find some of this insightful it will be kind of grist for the middle of your own thinking i'm i'm very like i i think that i i think this about a lot of um you know people quite often talk about things like um videos on youtube or podcasts or or various different types of just disseminating media um will sort of react with a little bit of skepticism and people do this about news articles and journalism, where they sort of say something like, oh, yeah, but there are flaws within this medium.

1:50:45Your errors will creep in, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they're suddenly right. I think that one of the appropriate responses that I feel to that is to try and front load a kind of a statement of your own fallibility so that inevitably you'll get things wrong. We all get things wrong. This is a justice privilege thing that we were talking about. Yes. Yeah. And I think it's important to say that because quite a lot of, you know, you're on YouTube, you're at the very least presenting yourself as knowing more than the viewer about something. And so it's very easy. All of the kind of implicit signals there are saying, I know I am right.

1:51:30Listen to me, position of authority. I am authority. And I think that it's, I think that it's in order to kind of do what I want to do, which is to largely get people doing this philosophy for themselves. And for this to just be something that they look back on in five years and think, oh yeah, that was a kind of quaint starting point. But now I'm much further along than that. I don't need this anymore. Part of doing that is to front load the idea that you're wrong. You might be wrong. You don't have the final word. This is just a smattering of the literature, et cetera, et cetera. Joe, you see yourself as kind of the child's Hulk Hogan play set of lifting weights before someone actually goes and gets a gym membership.

1:52:05Well, I suppose the thing is that, you know, you're never going to be able to get, you're never going to be able to like compress all of the complexity of even a single philosopher into like a 30 minute YouTube video. It's just not possible. There's just, they're all very complicated, but you might be able to give people a general idea and also hopefully put them in a position whereby if they choose to go and look at that philosopher or that philosophy or that philosophical question for themselves, they are then slightly better equipped to do that. And, you know, hopefully if they find something helpful, it helps them in their everyday life.

1:52:36It might do, it might not. But that's what I tend to think. I think that, you know, no medium of communicating any kind of information is perfect. And I think that a lot of the way that I like to react to that is to just front load the flaws if they're not obvious. I mean, you know, I think... Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Yeah, like, you know, public debates are a bit like that. You know, public debates have numerous flaws, right? They are oftentimes people be persuaded by emotional rhetoric rather than, you know, strict logical reasoning, because that's just part of how we're wired. I don't think that that's necessarily a problem until we start pretending that public debate is something that it's not.

1:53:13As long as we bear that in mind. Some unique insight into wisdom and accuracy. Yes, exactly. As long as we're not watching, you know. Nods the guy who does debate very regularly. I think you pretty much shared my view on this as well. There's nothing wrong with theater, you know, but you've got to know that that's what you're doing. What's your thoughts on this? You know, if we're moving into a world with philosophers as influencers, surely the platform comes with a huge ethical duty not to mislead given that ethics is part of the source code of what you guys at least in part are supposed to do or be remotely educated in.

1:53:41Yeah. I mean, look, we find it interesting and fun and there's a kind of academic duty to not mislead, not misrepresent people's opinions and that kind of stuff. If you're going to reduce this sound to do as I say, not as I do. No, no, no, no. It's the reason I trip over myself to indicate my agnosticism, even about things I believe. It doesn't mean I don't have an opinion, but it means that I could be talked out of it at any moment. I do that with something as inert as meta-ethics. Because earlier today, we spoke for five or 10 minutes about suicide. And there's somebody listening to this podcast for whom that's going to be the most significant discourse that they've heard on the subject, project, possibly in their life, probably in the past few days and past month or year or so.

1:54:27If somebody's thinking about that a lot, you might have some influence over their thoughts on an issue as important as that. That's not something to just piss about with. It's serious. This stuff matters to people. And it's worth remembering that sometimes philosophy is just people in this intellectual playground having a bit of fun. And there's nothing wrong with that but it's not always that and if it is always that then you're kind of probably wasting your time in idle leisure and you should do something more constructive um you always end up castigating you always end up sort of finger wagging after a little while yeah but it's you've asked me to reflect upon my own sense of duty and i think that you need to wag your own finger in the mirror every now and again and remember that like it's great fun and I love what I do and it's an amazing thrill and beautiful opportunity to be able to make a living doing things like this.

1:55:21But it's not all fun and games. It does come with a kind of a duty and a responsibility that it's easy to forget about. Because here we are having a conversation we talk about this stuff all the time. We're going to go off to the pub and forget about it later on today. But that's not the case for everyone. Do you think of certain areas of philosophy or maybe even most areas of philosophy is kind of like information hazards in that way i think that information hazards are a bit of a i mean we were we were talking about like the concept of overrated philosophical ideas or ideas that should you know get in the bin get in the bin and i kind of think information hazards are are one example oh nice i think it's sort of part of this whole ai hype that that a lot of it is just sort of sensationalist and and i think doesn't have a very good good grounding you know the analogy that i mean though like a high potent cognitive specifically not a not a not an information hazard in that literal sense but but yeah like there are maybe there are things that are sort of not worth knowing um or not worth exploring right there are there are topic areas which which just aren't worth the price of entry is too high getting into um but that's sort of for you to decide whether you whether you find it interesting whether you find it find it worthwhile um i don't know i i sort of we we stand on the shoulders of giants as it were, as Newton said, in that I've seen myself as a communicator of ideas.

1:56:42I don't really say anything genuinely novel or unique. There's nothing new under the sun. I'm just trying to communicate other people's ideas. So my principal responsibility is trying to do so in a way that makes sense. Like, why am I talking to people about this? There must be some application for why I'm doing it. But I think, yeah, being a communicator rather than somebody who's trying to put a steadfast view into the world. Makes it a little easier. Is that just a very slippery way of never having to actually stand your ground? Maybe. But if in order to be successful in any field, including my own, I would have to plant my feet firmly in the ground and say, this is what I believe, and I don't think that I'm wrong about it, then I'd probably give up and go home.

1:57:31At least for now. I mean, maybe I'll feel that way one day. But for now, at least, I mean, you know, the idea that a 26-year-old philosophy YouTuber would like know anything significant with a level of certainty that is immune to a healthy dose of agnosticism is completely batshit insane. There's just no way that's ever going to be true, you know, or justified. Even on the incest question. Even, especially on the incest question. Yeah, yeah. Gentlemen, I appreciate both of you very much. I wish that we could keep going for longer but this location is going to kick us out it looks like it's literally about to collapse in on us yeah perhaps look I genuinely appreciate both of you I think it's so cool that we've got two British guys leading contributing to leading forth philosophical influence unsolicited advice and Alex O 'Connor within reason you don't have a podcast do you Joe I don't I'm going to start interviewing a few people I've got a few people lined up I told him what to call it you know what he should call it solicited advice it's right there in front of you boys thank you very much for coming through you got it man thanks for having me if you're wanting to read more you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out and that is why I made the modern wisdom reading list a list of 100 of the best books the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found fiction and non-fiction and there's real life stories and there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it and it's completely free.

1:59:08You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.