Alex O’Connor: #1 Shift That Stops Endless Overthinking (FINALLY Get Unstuck)

16:06Alex O'Connor:I'm afraid it's going to be boring in the sense that it is definitely going to be something biblical. Like there's no question about that. Really? No question. Any time? There are certain things which it might be sort of interesting to see. I'd love to see Stonehenge getting built. I'd love to see the pyramids be built, that kind of stuff. But when I came back and said, you know, it turns out they used a pulley system and everyone goes like, oh, cool. It's not the most profound thing in the world. For me, my line of work is so much engaged in worldview. And the worldview that I'm mostly engaged in talking about is Christianity.

16:36Alex O'Connor:And some of the biggest mysteries about the Christian religion are about specifically the kinds of things that Jesus actually said and did, as opposed to what Orthodox Christians believe he did. The resurrection is an obvious example. Stand outside the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and see if somebody gets up and walks out. but also the baptism i'd love to see the baptism of jesus because i want to know why was jesus being baptized who was john the baptist why did jesus seem to be some kind i mean historically some people think he might have been a disciple of john the baptist which christians won't want to accept but i'd love to know that fact it's the moment where jesus's ministry really begins and the gospels tell us that the heavens open and there's this voice from heaven and that this is where jesus sort of picks up some of his initial disciples from as well i would love to see what happened there.

17:23Alex O'Connor:Because if I showed up and John the Baptist said, behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, and I would say, gosh, okay, Christianity has maybe got something going for it. But if he showed up and Jesus bowed down and said, master, you know, then I think it would totally upset Orthodox Christianity. And I think that's like a really important question. What's the relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist? So I'd love to see them meet. But it's hard to know. I mean, you've surely got an answer for this question yourself.

17:51Jay Shetty:Sometimes I find myself being fascinated by so many moments in history, and mainly it's about human decision-making. So I don't know if you saw this movie recently, it's called Nuremberg. I haven't seen it. It's all about the Nuremberg trials and post-World War II, how we make decisions on morality, how we make decisions on how we evaluate what the Germans did. And you've got Goering, who is leading the Germans on behalf of Hitler versus his therapist played by Rami Malek, who's unbelievable in the movie. But I look at a moment like that and I go, wow, like humans had to really sit down and think about, because for the first time ever, how do you truly go to court for post-World War II and the actions that were taken against the Jews?

18:36Jay Shetty:And I'm like, that's a fascinating moment to be a part of. Now that's not that long ago. So then you go, okay, where were those other moments in history where big decisions were made by groups of human beings after groups of human beings went through certain amount of suffering turmoil or subjugation and when you don't have documents

18:54Alex O'Connor:i mean because when history is recent enough you can kind of put yourself there by reading the books obviously there's going to be bias and misreporting and stuff like that and you've got to be careful but like if you go far back enough especially into ancient history you've got like one little shred some of our most well-known famous historical figures from antiquity we only know they exist from like maybe one maybe two sources it's like a scrap of papyrus somewhere with a name scribbled on it and yet these people were so important so i think it would have to be it would have to be an ancient yes yes yeah i'd go back i would genuinely want to go back to

19:29Jay Shetty:the point at which the bhagad-gita was spoken which has always been my fascination and my form of study. But being at that, I wouldn't want to be on the battlefield because I couldn't handle myself. I'll tell you that.

19:40Alex O'Connor:I'd fell miserably at archery or anything like that. Do you think if you went back, you would find Arjuna on a literal battlefield being advised by an actual deity?

19:51Jay Shetty:I would hope so. I mean, the place Kurukshetra exists, it's believed that that is where the battle took place. And so to me, I would hope, I would definitely hope so that I would get to experience it as it's told, in the way it's told, as a historic piece.

20:03Alex O'Connor:If you went back and you found there were no such historical event, or maybe there were a historical battle, but the conversation that's had throughout the Bhagavad Gita is a fictional one, would that trouble you? Because for me, I'd still quite like the Bhagavad Gita. I'd find it worth reading.

20:21Jay Shetty:I think I'd find the text still fascinating. I think you'd feel slightly misled in the fact that you were told it was historical. So I think I wouldn't have an issue with what's in the book. and the conversation because I find great value and meaning in that, but I would feel misled that I'd been told this was historic and it wasn't actually historic.

20:42Alex O'Connor:It's so important what the claim that's being made by particular religious traditions. For example, for many Christians, if it turns out that the resurrection of Jesus is not a literal event that happened in history, but instead some kind of later mythologizing, the religion falls apart. It grounds itself on a very specific historical claim. It can't just be, oh I'm a bit annoyed that my pastor told me that this really happened but I guess this is fine. It would be like this has completely upended everything that I believe about the universe. That's one of the reasons why when you ask what historical event would I see, the key moment in the world's most popular religion seems to be quite an important one to me.

21:19Alex O'Connor:Suppose you went and found out that Jesus didn't rise from the dead or you found out that Muhammad was a false prophet. What are you going to do? Come back to London and go right here ye, here ye. I've got to tell you guys something. I'd rather not know because I'd be terrified to let people know what I'd seen.

21:34Jay Shetty:Yeah. And no one would believe you anyway. Exactly. Yeah. Or you'd start developing a following on YouTube. Yeah. You'd be able to create your own cult. Talk to me about what reading you have done in Eastern traditions. It sounds like you have done a bit of exploration that I probably haven't heard about before.

21:49Alex O'Connor:Basically, it's really funny because I talk about religion all the time, particularly Christianity. People say things like, hey man, you should talk about Hinduism. and i'm like okay i i get why you're saying that that's fair i'd love to but it's not quite as simple as that of course not you know what i mean it's a really even when it comes to like people say well you should you should have you should have a hindu on your show to talk to them and i'm like even that is tricky because firstly i prepare as hard as i can for every guest that comes on my show i can't learn hinduism and even so it's not like you can just have a hindu on the show and that become like oh you've done you've done hinduism now it took me a long time like even sort of finding my feet as to like where to start looking for interesting stuff and my way in ultimately came through my study of consciousness i'm fascinated by the philosophy of mind and of course the indian tradition has this amazing content essentially on the philosophy of mind that i hadn't really encountered before becoming convinced of some weird views about consciousness about how it's not reducible to material and how it's not as simple as saying that brains just produce consciousness, that kind of stuff, sort of led me into learning about specifically the Advaita Vedanta tradition.

23:05Alex O'Connor:Advaita Vedanta meaning like the Vedas are part of the Hindu scriptural canon. They're like the oldest religious scriptures in the world. I think like anta means, I think it's the addendum anta means like end. So you get like end of the Vedas, meaning like the latter part of the Vedas, which collectively are known as the Upanishad, and Advaita meaning like a, like non, and Advaita meaning dual. So in the philosophy of mind, I think in philosophy generally, one of the biggest questions is how many types of stuff are there? Because there's this really weird sort of division of reality where we're conscious, we have subjectivity, like inner thoughts, and this mug over here doesn't.

23:47Alex O'Connor:So there seems to be two different kinds of things. You've basically got three options when it comes to explaining that. One is that there are just two types of things in the universe. There's mind and there's body. There's mental and there's physical. And they are just separate kinds of things. And somehow they interact with each other. Another way is to say, actually, there's only one type of stuff. And that type of stuff is the dead stuff. It's the matter, the atoms. This is the most popular view in the West today. The only stuff that exists is atoms that are dead. And it's just that if you put them together in the right way, you get this thing called consciousness, but really it's kind of just a manifestation of the atoms.

24:21Alex O'Connor:There's a third option, which is there is only one type of stuff, and it's the mental stuff. And what we call physical, what we call the physical world around us, is a manifestation of mental stuff, which sounds super hippy-dippy, but that's only because we're not used to it. I mean, the idea that people think that, you know, they're just happy to accept that if you put physical matter together in the right order, it will produce thoughts. That is as weird to me as saying that if you put thoughts together in the right order, you could produce some physical matter. It seems like a sort of category mistake, right?

24:55Alex O'Connor:But I think there's only one type of stuff. So there's this view, which in the Western tradition is called idealism, which is kind of the view that everything exists as mental stuff. Some people have said that everything is kind of an idea in the mind of God. some people think that nothing exists except insofar as it's being perceived it's a very sort of complicated and quite deep philosophical tradition but it's something that the Advaita Vedanta tradition had been banging on about for thousands of years prior to its development in the western canon the reason it's Vedanta is because the Upanishads are like particularly interested in the idea that kind of division is a is a is an illusion and unity is real and it heavily implies that consciousness or like the soul the kind of stuff that makes you yourself is kind of one thing with everybody else's self and that all of that consciousness is kind of the same thing as the universe that there's this great big sort of unity of stuff i thought that was really cool so it's a bit of a sort of long-winded way to say that i started looking into that and And then I had Swami Sava Priyananda, he's the head of the Vedanta Society of New York, or whatever it's called, on my show.

26:08Alex O'Connor:And we talked about Advaita Vedanta. We talked about consciousness. We didn't talk about the Hindu pantheon of gods. I still don't understand how Brahman manifests in hundreds of different deities. I still don't really get that at all. I don't know about the different traditions who see different deities as their main gods and stuff like that. I don't really understand that. But I understand the philosophy of consciousness. We were able to have a great conversation about this particular Indian tradition. but the thing about Dvaita Vedanta is it's not really a religious tradition it's a philosophical tradition that comes from India so when I do this show yeah I'm speaking to a Hindu and people say great you're talking about Hinduism for the first time it's like no I'm not really I'm talking about a philosophical school that comes from India yeah which is not the same thing I mean the word Hindu is very unhelpful anyway because it's it's what's called an exonant which is a word which is applied from the outside people didn't call themselves Hindus it's sort of got etymological roots with like the indus river valley which is where a particular people were just doing their thing just going about their business and europeans sort of label these people hindus but it sort of refers to the geography someone saying like have a hindu on it's kind of a little bit like someone saying like have a european on so i can get why somebody if you'd never spoke to a european would want me to speak to a european because there is a different flavor of thought that goes on there but it's it's such a rich and varied sort of culture no i appreciate the way you're looking at it you just can't do that so when someone says like like you ask you know what's your engagement with the indian tradition it's sort of like somebody saying what's your engagement in the western philosophical canon it's like that's a big question i've got to say i'm much more specific you know yeah i'm interested in this person or that person or this school and so for me the stuff that i love from the indian tradition is is their views on consciousness which i think predates the the Western stuff and does it a lot more sort of intuitively.

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31:02Jay Shetty:are there a lot of new age atheists that are also fascinated in that way is that common or is that quite rare i don't think new atheists because the new atheist movement was

31:13Alex O'Connor:was a very and it's interesting how we talk about it in the past tense now like it doesn't really exist anymore yeah it was a very sort of prickly kind of criticism and it's indebted to the so-called four horsemen mostly richard dawkins christopher hitchens and sam harris daniel dennett wasn't quite as fierce you know but these guys you've got a biologist an evolutionary biologist and richard dawkins a journalist and christopher hitchens a neuroscientist although i don't know if he did anything further than his studies, Sam Harris. And then you've got the philosopher, Daniel Dennett, and notice that the philosopher is the one who's the least critical in that regard and outgoing.

31:52Alex O'Connor:Although he had a lot to say about religion. The reason why these guys in other disciplines were getting involved is because Richard Dawkins was annoyed that young earth creationists were saying you can't teach evolution in schools. Christopher Hitchens was getting annoyed that religious justifications were being used for geopolitical terrorism. That was their kind of line of attack. And so to think that they would be talking about that kind of stuff, that Hitchens would be sort of standing up and complaining about the sort of the messianic undertones of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and then suddenly start going, but you know, I think that Brahman and Atman are maybe the same thing, but I want to critique that idea by, you know, appealing to the rival school.

32:35Alex O'Connor:It just seems ridiculous to me. So I think new atheism, no. But that's because within Eastern religions, you have the same kind of conflicts going on, which I don't think that West knows as much about. But also the kind of engagement I have is not about that. Like I say, I'm not interested so much in the deities and the gods and the sect. I'm interested in the philosophical traditions. And I don't think the new atheists were even interested in the Western philosophical traditions. They were interested in the practical reality of religion. Religion is a force for evil. Religion causes wars and that kind of stuff.

33:05Alex O'Connor:That's all very well and good. But to me, I've always compared that to saying like, it's like saying politics is bad. Sure, you know, politics causes wars and politics drives families. It's like, that's true. But that doesn't mean we should be an anarchist. Maybe we should, but it doesn't guarantee it. It doesn't mean there isn't a correct political position. And critiquing that kind of stuff doesn't mean that you know anything about political philosophy. You might not know anything about theories of justification of the state or whatever it is that political philosophers sit around talking about.

33:39Alex O'Connor:And I think the same thing's going on with New Atheism. They couldn't recite Thomas Aquinas' causal arguments for God if you paid them to. Richard Dawkins does so in The God Delusion. He responds to Thomas Aquinas directly. Thomas Aquinas, the most celebrated Christian metaphysician in history, and he responds to Thomas Aquinas in about two pages. It takes more than two pages even to explain the terminology that Thomas Aquinas is using, let alone to list, explain, and then debunk. I think we have some evidence that there's just not this engagement with the philosophical tradition. I don't mean to insult these people.

34:12Alex O'Connor:I like Richard. Richard's a friend of mine. I think he knows that I disagree with his philosophical musings. And he himself just admits. He says that he's just not interested in theology and philosophy. It's just not what he wants to do. He wants to do science. I think fair enough. But then maybe don't write a book with a chapter called Why There Almost Certainly Is No God. But he did it because he cared about science. He doesn't care about the kalam cosmological argument or whatever. He cares about evolution being taught in schools and that kind of stuff. And so the idea that someone who cares about that and that's their way in is suddenly going to become interested in the, even in philosophy in the West, is not very popular.

34:50Alex O'Connor:The idea that these guys are going to engage with that, I think is untrue. And And so that funnels down to the modern day, the sort of teenage atheists like me on YouTube making videos. It took me years before I even encountered Indian philosophy. And that only came after I sort of calmed down a bit.

35:06Jay Shetty:Everyone's almost arguing something from their very, I don't know, maybe it narrows the wrong word, but everyone's looking at something through their lens. And of course, preaching or sharing whatever that may be, whether you're religious or whether you're an atheist or whether you're agnostic. and it applies to everything in the same way as you could talk about entrepreneurship and someone could say, hey, if you don't know how to sell, then you can't be an entrepreneur. And then someone else is over there going, if you don't know how to negotiate, you don't know how to be an entrepreneur. It's almost impossible to get a 360 degree view on a belief and idea because there's so many different thoughts and ideas.

35:40Jay Shetty:How would you explain your worldview to a 10 year old so that they simply understood it.

35:46Alex O'Connor:I would probably wait until this child was taking an interest in such things. And I might ask them, I mean, it might be a bit young, 10, to start talking about consciousness. But at some point, I might sort of say, don't you think it's weird that you are conscious, you have thoughts and feelings, you have an inner sense of self? I'd use different words because they're 10. And this mug and this table and this chair don't. And depending on what they'd say, you'd ask a further question. So if they say, yeah, no, I guess so. But that's because, you know, you've got a brain. And then you might start asking about what they think the brain is and how.

36:19Alex O'Connor:So you'd sort of ask questions. And in my view, I think we have just sort of swallowed wholesale this idea that everything can be reduced to scientific explanation. At least everything that is true about the universe can be scientifically explained. And I just don't think that's true. And I think it's like trivially untrue. I'm not making some profound, what about love, man? You can't scientifically... It's like, no, you can explain the chemicals that are firing it. I mean something a bit more specific, which is that science isn't really in the business of explaining things. I'm no longer talking to the 10-year-old, by the way.

36:55Alex O'Connor:Science is not in the business of explaining things. It's in the business of describing things mathematically. Galileo famously says that mathematics is the language of the universe. Fair enough. But maths on its own doesn't do anything. Maths just describes. All mathematical equations have an equal sign, and it describes some sort of fact about reality. It doesn't cause anything. Newton's laws of motion don't cause objects to move. They describe how objects move when they're in motion. Similarly, the example I love to give, because it's so explicit, is Newton's discovery of gravity. What did Newton actually discover when he discovered gravity?

37:34Alex O'Connor:What's the thing that he actually figured out. We had known for a very long time that objects fall to the ground, right? What's the thing that he realized? Well, Newton asked an interesting question. He looks up at the moon and he asks, like, why isn't the moon falling towards the earth? And his sort of profound realization is that the moon is falling towards the earth all the time. It's just that if something falls towards my hand, it'll hit my hand. But if I knock it to the side a little bit, then it'll kind of do this. It'll kind of miss the earth a bit and then crash into the side. if i knock it a little bit further to the side it will sort of miss it even more maybe crash into the bottom eventually and if you knock it just the right speed to the side it will keep falling towards the earth but keep missing it and that's what we call orbit and newton realized that the same thing that makes objects fall to the ground keeps the planets in circulation which is a profound realization and then he took to the task of mathematically describing it calculus inverse square law.

38:30Alex O'Connor:So he figures out that the distance between two things, if you square that distance, that is how much weaker the force of gravity is. So if something is two times further away, it's four times less attractive. And he does all of this, and it's brilliant in the Principia Mathematica. But then there remains this question, like why? Not how do objects fall to the ground, not what mathematical rules do they sort of do it by, but why do they fall to the ground? And in the scolium, which is like an addendum to the Principia Mathematica, where Newton published these findings, he answers this explicitly.

39:04Alex O'Connor:You can read this online. He says, as to what gravity actually is, as to why this stuff is happening, he writes hypothesis non fingo. It's in Latin. It means I frame no hypothesis. He doesn't know. And he says it's also not the kind of question that science should be engaged in, because it can't answer that kind of question. In other words, Newton has described brilliantly planets, orbits, objects falling to the ground, this force which he calls gravity. And it's sort of a placeholder. It's like the word gravity is just a word for whatever is the thing that's making this happen. But he doesn't know what's making it happen.

39:40Alex O'Connor:And it's so funny to me when people look into the past and they say, how silly are the beliefs that people used to have? They used to believe in animism. They used to believe in spirits. they used to believe that you know angels were pushing around planets and stuff but no no since the scientific revolution we're much more intelligent because we explain things in terms of

40:05Alex O'Connor:forces forces i think about that word for a minute you know what i mean like we're so used to hearing it but that's it and if you ask a scientist what a force is yeah they'll either have to tell you that a force is just a mathematical description of regularities that we've observed or they'll have to say unjustifiably, well, it's the thing that makes things fall to the ground. But what is it? You don't know that. You don't know why that's happening. Now, to be clear, some people will say, okay, fair enough with Newton. I pick Newton because he says it explicitly. This isn't an insult to science.

40:35Alex O'Connor:It's not insulting to say that it's not really interested in the why question. It's interested in the how question. Some people think the why question just shouldn't exist. That's fine to say. But science itself is definitely in the business of describing. Scientists will happily tell you that anything which is true about physics can be described mathematically. But if you think about what maths is, it's equations. They don't do anything. Stephen Hawking, at the end of A Brief History of Time, quite famously, I wish I could recite it from memory. It's so beautiful. He writes about how he hopes that maybe one day our basic scientific theories will condense into one great big theory of everything.

41:08Alex O'Connor:That there'll be one beautiful equation that sort of governs everything about the universe. But he says we'll still be left with the question of what breathes fire into the equations. Equations don't make things move. They describe how things move when they're in motion, right? So we're left with this great big explanatory gap. If people are in any doubt about this, there's a wonderful clip of Richard Feynman. There's a BBC interviewer asking him about magnets. He says, you know, when I push two magnets together, they repel each other. What's going on there? And Feynman's like, well, you know, the magnets are repelling each other.

41:40Alex O'Connor:And he goes, yeah, no, but you know, what's happening there? And Feynman's like, what do you mean what's happening there? And there's a sort of moment of confusion. And the interviewer says, I've got to say, I think this is a reasonable question. And Bynum goes, oh, no, no, it's a very reasonable question. But what do you mean? Because if you ask a question like, why? Well, depends on your level of explanation. Like, why is Aunt Marie in the hospital? Well, because she slipped and fell on the ice. For most people, that would satisfy. But if you were like an alien who didn't know anything, you'd need to know why slipping on ice sends you to a hospital.

42:11Alex O'Connor:So you'd have to explain that. And then you'd have to explain, like, why is ice slippery? Well, because when you step on ice, it evaporates the top level, which turns into water. Notice we're just describing what's happening. Okay, but so why does that happen? Well, now we're talking about the molecular composition of water and it's in its sort of chemical interactions. But why does that happen? Feynman's just basically pointing out that if you ask the why question, you are sent into this regress, down into the most fundamental questions of reality. And in fact, Feynman then says, and if you want to know why Aunt Marie fell over, you'd have to know about gravity.

42:45Alex O'Connor:And why does gravity work? And that's where we just were a second ago, right? This thing, gravity, which science will describe, but never explain why it's occurring. And Feynman sort of comes back to magnets and says, so for now, it will have to be enough just to say that they are repelling each other. And that's fair enough, but I think that's what's going on. Science describes, like physics is the description of and the theory of physical matter and its relations. It therefore presupposes the existence of matter and its relations. One of the foundational questions I don't think science will answer is where that physical matter came from.

43:20Alex O'Connor:It seems plausible. We say, look at the progress we've made. We used to think that we couldn't explain biological complexity, but now we have. We used to think that we couldn't explain why objects fall, but now we have. I want to point out that firstly, what we've actually done is describe those processes. But also, I think there's a categorical difference between explaining some kind of physical interaction at a deeper level and explaining the origin of physical matter and its interactions. I don't think you will mathematically describe the origin of the stuff which the mathematical descriptions apply to.

43:52Alex O'Connor:Given what I've just said about how what scientific laws are, are observations of stuff that happens in the universe and then mathematically describing how they regularly like occur. I've sometimes compared this, it's a bit of a crude analogy, but it gets across the point to discovering a book of Shakespeare's sonnets. If we came across a book of Shakespeare's sonnets and we didn't know what they were, then we might start studying them. And suppose that you were really, really smart and you said, okay, well, I've noticed that each of these letters comes in two kinds. There's a big one and a small one.

44:24Alex O'Connor:And whenever there's a new line, they use the big one. That's interesting. And you call that the law of capitalization. And then you notice that there are all of these little symbols, unlike the letters little dots and squiggles and you realize that they show up in predictable ways and and you call that the law of punctuation and you're able to predict if you're really clever you might notice that if you say it out loud it follows a particular rhythm dun dun dun dun dun and you call that the law of iambic pentameter because you're getting really clever now and you can predict that if i turn over the page i'm going to see something that follows these rules what you're discovering of course are the laws of literacy and then suppose i came along after all of that and said, okay, so where do you think the book came from?

45:06Alex O'Connor:And you said, well, we don't know yet, but look at all the progress we're making with the laws that we've discovered. I'm sure that one day these laws of literacy will explain where the book came from. You'd be making a category error. And I think the physicist does the same thing in saying that physics will one day explain the origin of physical matter because physics is the study of physical matter and therefore presupposes its existence. A question like that I don't think can be answered by science. I'm really not talking to the 10-year-old anymore.

45:31Jay Shetty:I was about to say, your 10-year-old is going to be really, really smart.

45:35Alex O'Connor:Okay, Dad, can I get a bed now? Yeah, go ahead. But the reason I bring that up, it's to say, I mean, I remember I was kind of talking about consciousness, and it's all related because people have a similar view of consciousness. They think that science will one day explain what consciousness is.

45:48Jay Shetty:You're trying to encourage your child to ask questions that I guess are maybe not comprehensively answered simply by science.

45:57Alex O'Connor:Yeah, and also, I want to be very clear here. lots of people will use this line of thought to try to sort of smuggle God in. It's like a God of the gaps. They'll say, okay, so science can't explain it, so God must do so. That is categorically not what I'm doing here. All I'm saying is that the lexicon of science cannot describe the origin of the universe and the nature of consciousness. Those are the two things I think that science definitely can't describe. That is not to say, therefore, God. There might be some kind of what we might call naturalistic explanation, it's just not one that can be mathematized and therefore not sort of appropriate to use the lexicon of science to describe.

46:37Alex O'Connor:That's fine. No problem with that. Of course, we still have this question. We still want to know why is there something rather than nothing? What is the nature of consciousness? But I want to be very clear that this isn't some kind of underhanded way to, like motivated reasoning to leave room for God. It's just to say that when people have this sort of confidence that the scientific method will explain everything because it's made such progress in the past. Notice the precise nature of the progress it's made. It's explained things, but only at a sort of deeper level of resolution. It has described the mechanism, take natural selection, brilliantly, like Darwin figures out the mechanism by which organisms diversify and become complex.

47:18Alex O'Connor:And that's great. But it is a description. It's a description of what happens. And as Feynman says, if you really do keep following that why question, you'll get down to some quite foundational questions, which it's less controversial to say science will not be able to explain.

47:32Jay Shetty:When you put it that way, and you look at both sides, it seems to be more of a human mind's desire for certainty and completeness in thought, which is why we end up on either side of the spectrum without the ability to navigate the messy middle, right? Specifically in this case, it's almost like I either have to believe everything this book says is absolutely correct without any openness for questioning, thought, or reflection. Or I have to believe this book that I learned, that this textbook at school, everything it says must be correct without any reflection, thought, or need for debate. And so it's almost like, how do we get to a point where the human mind, we allow it to have the ability to question our worldview and thoughts without losing all sense of certainty and stability?

48:18Jay Shetty:Because it seems as humans, when people watch a debate, nine out of 10 times, people are just watching it to confirm their bias. So they're already on one side, you're going to watch the debate and you're going to go, yeah, you know what? I'm fully with Alex. You know, we don't know if God exists, but we definitely know science can't answer all the questions. Or on the other side, someone's like, well, I'm from that religion and that religious person is obviously spot on. So even when we watch a debate, we don't really ever come away from it going, you know what? I just couldn't believe that he said that because we're just going there to confirm our beliefs.

48:48Jay Shetty:So I guess my question is, would you even encourage people to live in the messy middle of not being certain about their ideas? Does that create a better human? I think that's where they do live. You think so? I mean, there are very few things that people can be certain of. In the sense of, I would argue that most of the people you debate with, or most religious or scientific people in the world, at least in the form of how they live, are trying to live based on their belief. They have a very strong confidence.

49:17Alex O'Connor:Confidence meaning with faith. Certainty, yeah. Confide, the Latin faith. I think if you speak to most of those people, they will at least ostensibly say, but I'm open to having my mind changed. Particularly scientists. I mean, the whole thing about science is that it's open for correction. No scientist believes that we've completed science.

49:34Jay Shetty:Yeah, of course.

49:35Alex O'Connor:Scientists are very much like, one day they hope that Einstein will be proved completely wrong, because it's exciting and it would sharpen what we understand about the universe you know what i mean and so like i don't think anybody has that kind of confidence that they've got it all correct but i think there is a confidence in the method and fair enough have a confidence in the scientific method because it's great and again i love science i'm not trying to insult it or anything i'm just saying be very precise about what it's doing and what it's not and i think we could avoid a lot of needless debate if we understand exactly the parameters of like each of our disciplines disciplines like interact and they merge and stuff but like if you're talking about mathematical models there are things that mathematical models just can't do and if you're talking about like thought experiments and philosophy there are things that thought experiments can't do they cannot provide empirical proof of various phenomena they can't provide scientific evidence for the big bang that kind of stuff but likewise i think that the scientific method can't describe certain foundational aspects of reality and instead presuppose them.

50:38Alex O'Connor:I would, of course, encourage people to recognize there's lots of room to maneuver here. I think that's one of the things that I'm trying to do. It kind of splits people, especially when I talk about either consciousness or I talk about the nature of science. It splits people. There's kind of three responses to the science stuff. Some people go, that's a load of nonsense. Of course, science explains things. Then I have to spend a bit of time really drilling down what they mean by explain in the Feynman sense. Other people say, this is really interesting yeah cool i'd never thought about it that way that's great that's exciting and some people sort of say yeah science doesn't explain in that sense like description is the same thing as they just sort of say it's like trivially true it's not a very profound observation but it has sort of some profound implications if it is true that science only describes then as long as you have an explanatory question left it's one that science is not going to be able to answer so i sort of encourage people to at least explore that thought it's totally fine to have confidence in your conclusions but like recognize it's about the method it's this optimism about the progress of science because of what it's done in the past which is great but you have to be very precise about exactly what it's done in the past and what it might therefore mimic in the future and answering foundational metaphysical questions about the nature of matter why it exists in the first place that kind of stuff i i just don't think it's it's an appropriate tool and people will be thinking in their heads but hold on what about like you know there are theories that what about like string theory?

52:01Alex O'Connor:What about the... I'm telling you that if you investigate these closely enough, you will realise that these are proposed descriptions of the nature of reality. They're proposed descriptions of what's going on. They don't answer the why question. And I think you're left with two options. One is to say the why question is bogus. Some people think that.

52:16Jay Shetty:And that's fair.

52:17Alex O'Connor:Richard Dawkins has said like, if you ask a question like, what is the colour of jealousy? It makes grammatical sense, but it's a meaningless question. And the why question might be the same. Why do things exist? If that's the case, maybe there is no why. Maybe there are only descriptions. In that case, I would slightly alter my thesis to say, maybe philosophy is description. When a Christian says that God is a trinity, they're just describing the nature of God. They're not explaining why he's a trinity. Fair enough. But they would not do so in mathematical language. You can't run the ontological argument for God's existence as a series of mathematical equations.

52:51Alex O'Connor:It's just a different kind of language that's being used. I would just say that the scientific language will not describe the things which some other philosophical languages can describe and that's not a problem that's great it's actually not that profound yeah so many scientists just are like yeah i mean you could call it like functionalism or descriptivism about science that what's going on is we're just describing reality and that's great and it's really useful but i'd encourage people to just like reflect on what that means and what it should do to their confidence that science will answer these foundational questions yeah i started talking about the origin of the universe because it's helpful when thinking about like Newton and Einstein to get across what I'm saying about science.

53:28Alex O'Connor:But really, when you ask about what my worldview is, the reason I would bring that up is to talk about consciousness and in a similar way say that science will not explain or at least will not tell us the nature of consciousness. For me, consciousness is the most foundational mystery. It's probably the foundational fact of reality. it's the kind of thing which science can't approach because science sort of describes relations between things science uses the language of mathematics it's like quantifying consciousness is a quality it's qualitative not the kind of thing that science can talk about i did a panel not long ago that was hosted by brian cox it was with some neuroscientists one of whom was annal seth a good friend of mine and the other two whose names i've forgotten i'd only met them that one time and they invited me because there was a show called a question of science and they did all of these episodes on different scientific topics and they did one on consciousness and i think they wanted somebody who like wasn't i guess like a neuroscientist they wanted like a philosophical perspective and i remember thinking okay sure i'll i'll do this i'm very grateful to be here if you really think that i'm i'm an appropriate person and i thought well what i can do is i can i can come along and i can talk about some philosophical perspectives I can talk about panpsychism.

54:43Alex O'Connor:I can talk about other traditions and stuff. And I remember before we started, Brian sort of looked at the questions that had been submitted by the audience and was kind of wanting to get rid of some of them because he was like, well, you know, like this stuff about like panpsychism and whatnot, I don't think we should really be spending any time on this kind of nonsense. And I was there. It was really awkward for me because I suddenly had to be like, oh, that's actually kind of what I'm here to do. We had this sort of slightly awkward conversation where I was a bit like, well, you know, I'm probably going to mention it.

55:13Alex O'Connor:And he's like, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's good to, good to at least, you know, hear the view, I suppose, kind of that kind of thing. And then the show started and look, I love these guys, you know, and, and, and they're obviously geniuses and I know nothing about neuroscience. Well, not nothing, but you know, I, I'm not a neuroscientist, but it struck me. If you watch the first bit of this, the first question is, what do we think consciousness is? Very difficult thing to define. I think it's impossible to precisely define, but a famous definition was given by Thomas Nagel in the 70s. To be conscious means there's something it is like to be you.

55:41Alex O'Connor:There's something it is like to be this thing, therefore it's conscious. It's like an inward sense of subjectivity. And we went around the panel and everyone agreed. Everyone was like, yeah, yeah, that's a great definition. I agree with that. That's fair enough. And the first question came, can we see consciousness in the brain? Great question. And one by one, each of the neuroscientists said some really interesting things but i felt just hadn't answered the question and it actually said at one point you know we can kind of put this question of like consciousness like to the to the side or on the shelf or something like that and we can talk about like the brain activity that's going on when the conscious experience happens and there was someone else who was talking about um how when people have like hallucinations it's like although to them they feel as real as as actual site, different brain activity is happening when they think they see something versus when they do.

56:34Alex O'Connor:That's really interesting. That's great. This is all really interesting stuff about neuroscience. But it got around to me and I turned to the question and I was like, I think the answer is no. And I think what we've just heard has kind of proved that. Because what you're doing is you're talking about brain chemistry. You're talking about neurons. You're talking about the neural correlates of consciousness. You're not talking about consciousness itself. And I remember sitting there thinking like, this is sort of quite strange to me because a lot of the sort of running threads throughout this when I said, but like, what about the nature of what consciousness actually is?

57:02Alex O'Connor:What about the explanation of like why we're conscious? There's sometimes this feeling of like, well, that's not really, really a legitimate question. It's enough to just describe the neural correlates. It's enough to just describe the brain activity. And I'm like, that's fair enough. If that's what you think, if you don't think that's an interesting question, then fine. But then why are we here at an event called what is consciousness it would sort of be like if we were at an event that was like talking about like football and somebody asked about why the offside rule exists and somebody started talking about how like well you know it's a bit like in basketball where this how it's a bit like in cricket or it's a bit like and then i said but hold on like i i want to talk

57:41Jay Shetty:about like actually football people might think i'm being a little unfair i'd encourage them to

57:46Alex O'Connor:watch it themselves. I don't mean to disparage these people. As I say, they are geniuses and they do very important work. But I think it's quite clear to me that when we're talking about what consciousness is, we're just not talking about the same thing. I'm talking about the experience. I'm talking about the redness of red. I'm talking about the feeling of cold on your skin. I'm not talking about a neuron firing. And I don't think those are the same thing. So the common view amongst materialists is that experiences are just the same thing as brain activity. And I understand that thought, but they can't literally be the same thing.

58:19Alex O'Connor:I'll tell you why. There's a law, it's called Leibniz's law, which says that if two things are identical, they share precisely the same properties. If X and Y are identical, that is, they are the same thing, then all of the properties of X are shared by Y. You can't say that two things are the same, and I don't mean the same kind of thing, I mean literally the same thing, but one of them is red and one of them is blue or one of them is five-sided and one of them is two-sided that would mean that they're different things even spatial location they have all the same properties except this one's in china and this one's in france that means they're not identical yeah let's think about the content of your like mental experience right you can imagine a triangle in your head i'm told that the triangle that i can literally see in my head right now is the same thing the same thing as some neurons firing?

59:07Alex O'Connor:I don't think so, because they don't have the same properties. The triangle has three sides. That's a fact about the triangle in my head. The neurons firing that correlate with my experience of that triangle don't have three sides, meaning that you've got two sort of things with different sets of properties, meaning they can't literally be identical. Maybe one causes the other. Maybe one emerges from the other. Maybe. That's fine. We're not saying anything too crazy at the moment, but the idea that they are literally the same thing, I think just doesn't make much sense.

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1:02:28Jay Shetty:With everything you just mentioned, how do you then explain what is a good life to a 10-year-old?

1:02:35Alex O'Connor:I think one of the reasons why I wouldn't have a child at the moment is because I don't know how to answer that question.

1:02:42Jay Shetty:Love that answer, yeah.

1:02:43Alex O'Connor:It's a very serious question. If you don't have an idea of what makes the good life, then it's going to be very difficult to raise a child. I mean people say that when you choose your life partner who's going to be the other parent to your child so the mother or father of your child depending on who you are one of the most important things is that you're aligned on like core values and stuff why because when it comes to raising children you'll have to have the same idea of what a good life is right so in the same way why you might not want to get married and have children with someone with whom you haven't aligned your fundamental values.

1:03:15Alex O'Connor:I almost sort of am not married to myself in that way because there's too much internal conflict. I disagree with myself too much to have a good answer to that question. But also, I'm not confident that I ever will. And so I think ultimately what people typically say is either they have a particular worldview and they say, well, son, the good life is to do what God commands. And that's kind of fair enough as well, because that still leaves room for the kid to go and work out who is God and what does God command, right? It's actually quite broad. But I think if I were forced to say something, I would ask what they mean by good.

1:03:49Alex O'Connor:I'm not sure if this is the kid asking me, but the word good is a difficult thing to unpack. There's morally good or there's good in the sense that this is a good table because it holds things up. And some people think that's the same thing. But I think there are probably indicators of a good life that include contentment and calm and lack of stress and that kind of stuff, confidence in the decisions that you've made. But I find it a very difficult question to answer.

1:04:15Jay Shetty:Do you find that the way you think about life and the world stops you from living practically or can, or how do you balance the two? How do you allow yourself to be someone who, because that's what I was trying to get at earlier is that when you have even somewhat of a false conviction in your belief, whatever that may be, life somewhat is easier to live because you just get on with it. And I consider myself to be someone who lives more in the middle and thinks things through too. But I realized that that comes with a lot of uncertainty in the sense that you could totally have a 180 spin moment in your life because you're like, oh, well, wait a minute, I kind of believe that's true.

1:04:53Jay Shetty:And that's kind of not. Now I prefer living like that because I think it leads to new learning and curiosity and change and transformation, which I think are actually better than just pretending to agree with something. But I guess, where does your philosophy fail you in practical life i think that most people don't live strictly

1:05:11Alex O'Connor:according to philosophical principles i think they develop philosophical principles based on how they live i think it's kind of the other way i like that yeah i like that and i think that the best so ludwig wittgenstein in his tractatus which is like a a sort of very sort of mathematical quite short work has this introduction and the first words he writes are this book may only be of use to people who already agree with its contents and i think that's so fair enough this might seem like a weird thing to say in response to your question but like i don't think people just read like a philosophy and become convinced by it i think they hear somebody put something they already kind of think in the right words and they go yes hey i like that yeah that's what i that's what i think which is why i think people are sometimes a little bit confused if they want to get into philosophy they look up the hundred best philosophers and they think okay let's go and learn about it and just out of the blue it says oh you should go and read like jean-paul sartre it's okay so they pick it up and they read it and they're like i'm not i don't really get this you know oh this doesn't make much sense to me they read spinoza and they're like what are you talking about i don't it's a bit mathsy i don't really understand right and it's because that's not how philosophy is supposed to be done people sometimes ask me where would you recommend i start have you got any recommendations for like how to get into philosophy and my advice is always very simple just read whatever you've heard of and the reason for that is because if you've heard of someone it means you've been in contexts where they have come up right like if you listen to loads of jordan peterson you'll have heard him talk about nietzsche now you might never have read nietzsche but the fact that you are so attracted to peterson and the fact that he's so attracted to nietzsche means it's likely if you read nietzsche you're going to find something that you like in there, right?

1:06:55Alex O'Connor:Likewise, if you listen to Christian apologists on YouTube, you might have heard them talk about the church fathers or Augustine or people like this. And in which case, just read that because there's a reason why you're attracted to the people who are attracted to those bits of content, right? Because to some degree, you can read a philosophy and go, that's an interesting argument, that makes sense, but you're not going to read it and it sort of wash over you with this wave of conviction, I think, unless you've already got one foot in that worldview. And it's just somebody has finally put into words what you were thinking this whole time.

1:07:25Alex O'Connor:And so I think that we're very intuitive creatures. And I think that our philosophizing often gets in the way. I think that we act according to our intuition and our emotional impulses all the time. And then we rationalize them after the fact. And then we debate about who was right and wrong. And there's so much to be said about this. For example, ethics, really important branch of philosophy. What is right? What is wrong? You've got meta ethics, which is like defining what goodness is. You've got practical ethics, which is like particular case studies. What do we do in the case of abortion, euthanasia, that kind of stuff.

1:07:59Alex O'Connor:And if you look at how people do ethics, it's extremely interesting. They'll come up with a theory, say utilitarianism. The right thing to do is to bring about the least suffering for the least number or the most pleasure for the most people, the fewest number, I should say. And someone says, okay, that sounds good. And then how would you test that theory? Well, you'd think of a scenario. Okay, but hold on. What if there was a healthy person who walked into a hospital and there were five people who needed organ transplants and you could kill that innocent person, steal their organs, and most people go, no, no, no, that would be wrong.

1:08:38Alex O'Connor:Okay, then we need to go back and revise our theory. Hold on. Why? I thought the whole point of having an ethical theory was to tell us what right and wrong are. But now you're saying if you don't like the conclusion, you just go back and edit the theory? What's going on there? It's because we already have intuitions about the outcome. And we have certain intuitions about the input. It's not as simple as like we're going to rationally work out what the standard of ethics is, and then that will tell us what to do. It's like we're going to come up with a kind of theory that captures how we already behave.

1:09:09Alex O'Connor:And if it doesn't capture how we already behave, then we're going to edit it slightly. And so the process of meta-ethics or practical ethics coming up with these theories is in many cases actually just working out what we already believe, but doing it precisely. It's like, you know, most people care about animals. They love animals, but then they pay for factory farming. Okay. And you could have a discussion about this and you could say, well, actually, you know, I'm not sure. So their theory might be, I think you should not cause unnecessary harm. And then you say, yeah, but you're harming animals in factory farms.

1:09:37Alex O'Connor:Okay. Maybe then we shouldn't. And they'll go and edit the theory. Because what you're doing is you're precisely working out what you already believe.

1:09:44Jay Shetty:Well, you're protecting your worldview.

1:09:45Alex O'Connor:You're allowed to have your versions. But it's not just a case. You're not just like protecting it defensively. You're just like, no, this is what I believe. And so I'm going to edit the theory. John Rawls, the political philosopher, had this concept of the reflective equilibrium. So he thought that what happened, you can sort of imagine this like machine, right? And we have inputs, which are our theories about what's right and wrong. And those theories give us outputs. So we've input a theory which sounds plausible. we should minimize suffering. And it gives us an output, like, well, then you should kill everyone instantly.

1:10:16Alex O'Connor:And actually, don't hold on, that's not quite right. So then you sort of you adapt the it's like, okay, we actually need to minimize suffering without killing people or also, you know, have some kind of pleasure. And then it puts out other outcomes. And you sort of got this back and forth. And the machine in the middle, like, you know, mixes it all up and gives you the output. And rules kind of says that the way this works is you come at it from like both sides. You've got intuitive outcomes and you've got intuitive theoretical suggestions, and you sort of do this back and forth, this tug of war between them until they kind of balance out a bit and you get this reflective equilibrium.

1:10:49Alex O'Connor:And that's what we're doing when we're coming up with theories. It is never as simple as somebody writing a book and saying, right, I'm going to prove to you from first principles that abortion is wrong specifically from the eighth week. That's never going to happen, ever. They're going to rely on intuitions that you already have about people and the worth of humans and bodily autonomy and they're going to convince you that way so if you become really learned in the traditions of philosophy that can be really interesting but you'll notice that a lot of philosophers can talk about these big ideas with absolutely no personal investment in them they'd be like oh you know like so nietzsche thought that god was dead and that this was a great tragedy and they're sort of talking it as this historical artifact they've got zero personal sort of input in there and so they're obviously not going to use that to like guide their life in any way and if they did it would just lead to confusion there's like a skit i saw once i think like someone's on an airplane and they've they're dying and you know they're like is there a doctor on board and someone shows up and says i'm a doctor i'm a doctor of philosophy and they're like well what should we do we need to save this man and it's like well you know the utilitarian would say that we should take resources from other people but then the deontologists would say that that would that would upset their rights and then well if you're a christian maybe we should go and then they just die right because you're spending too much time sort of going back and forth.

1:12:02Alex O'Connor:I don't think that's how people actually behave. And I think there's some neurological evidence for this to do with the two hemispheres of your brain, which is another thing I'm fascinated by. I think the most significant fact perhaps in the world is that your brain is divided into two hemispheres.

1:12:19Jay Shetty:Why do you think that's the most significant fact in the world?

1:12:21Alex O'Connor:Because if you are essentially your brain, which I don't think consciousness is the same thing as the brain, but they're clearly connected, right? And the thing that at least gives you selfhood i don't think it produces consciousness just to be crystal clear but i think selfhood the thing that gives you your unified sense of self is essentially your brain and maybe the rest of your sort of neural system and the fact that everywhere we look every neural system we find there's some kind of asymmetrical division in the brain there's some evolutionarily strong reason to keep two separate hemispheres has to be super significant that's like the nature of you right That's your nature.

1:12:57Alex O'Connor:Your nature is fundamentally lateralized. Your two hemispheres are kind of involved in different ways of thinking. It's never quite as simple as people think. I mean, Ian McGilchrist is the person to read on this. In culture, it's like the right brain is creative and intuitive and the left brain is mathsy and rational. It's not as simple as that. McGilchrist likes to say that the two hemispheres sort of attend to the world in different ways. the left brain is about sort of manipulation and the right brain is more like big picture right and we know that this is this is the case i mean mcgillcriss theory is that the reason this occurs is because as an organism you need to be simultaneously looking out for like prey you need to be manipulating your environment while looking out for predators at the same time and there's some evidence to suggest that this is the case uh birds have eyes on either side of their head or lizards which have eyes on the sides of their head are really useful because the right eye feeds the left hemisphere and the left eye feeds the right hemisphere.

1:13:54Alex O'Connor:With us, it's complicated because they're on the front. So with animals on the side, it's much easier. And there's evidence of birds, for example, if they're like building a nest, they will favor using their right eye, even when it makes it more difficult because the left brain is engaged in the manipulation stuff. And likewise, you could put a lizard in a room and put a predator and it will look at the predator with its left eye. Even if you cover up its left eye, it will still try to look at it with the left eye right so there's some evidence to suggest this is the case and the same kind of thing is going on with us we've got these two brains and they kind of do different things and so have you ever come across split brain patients this was my favorite thing to discover ever in history is really famous um within like brain science i suppose the two hemispheres are connected by this tissue called the corpus callosum this uh sort of bundle of tissues.

1:14:48Alex O'Connor:There used to be this treatment for extreme cases of epilepsy called a corpus callosotomy, which is where the connection is severed. Epilepsy is like an electrical storm in the brain. And so one way to try to minimize it was literally just to cut the two hemispheres at their connective tissue. And so people who've had this operation done were known as split brain patients because the hemispheres have been disconnected. They can still communicate slightly through other means, but their main source of communication is inhibited. If you met one of these people, you wouldn't know. They're just perfectly normal.

1:15:20Alex O'Connor:They'll speak to you like I'm speaking to you now. Everything's totally fine. But in experimental conditions, you can prove some really weird things. For example, speech and language of communication is broadly speaking governed by the front left part of your brain, left hemisphere. Remember, the left hemisphere controls like the right hand side of your body and the right hemisphere controls the left hand side of your body. so with humans because our eyes are on the front our right visual field goes to the left brain and our left visual field goes to the right brain so in a split brain patient they look at a screen you can watch this experiment on youtube by the way they're looking at a screen and on the right hand side of the screen it'll flash a word so it goes to their left hemisphere and it will say umbrella and they'll say umbrella car car chair chair then they'll flash a word on the left hand side of the screen so just the right hemisphere and it will say cowboy hat and they'll say i didn't see anything I didn't see anything.

1:16:12Alex O'Connor:I don't know what you're talking about. And then the experimenter gives them a pencil in their left hand and tells them to draw something. And they draw a cowboy hat because the right hemisphere saw it. And so the left hand can draw it. But if you ask them, they'll say that they didn't see it. Because the left hemisphere, which controls speech broadly, that's a bit of an oversimplification, but broadly speaking, didn't see it. And so they can't tell you that they saw it. So they saw it and they didn't see it at the same time. So fascinating, right? It means you've kind of got these two brains that are both doing different things.

1:16:44Alex O'Connor:And I think the most significant experiment of this kind is where, and bear in mind, these people are agreeing, and thankfully so. They've already been through a traumatic experience, and now they're agreeing to do these experiments. They're waiting instructions, right? So you can flash an instruction to the right hemisphere of the brain. And the instruction will say something like, get up and walk over to the window. So the patient stands up, and they walk over to the window. And then the instructor says, why did you just do that? And you know what they say? It would be weird enough if they said, I don't know, right?

1:17:15Alex O'Connor:But they don't. They make something up and they believe it. It's called confabulation, right? Like they say something like, oh, I was getting a bit warm and I just wanted some fresh air. We know that's not why they did it. But their left brain has convinced them that that is why they did it. Now, the reason I'm talking about all of this is because this has given rise to the idea that the left brain is the so-called interpreter. That the right brain kind of intuitively does stuff, and then the left brain retrospectively sort of rationalizes and justifies that behavior. In split brain patients, you can prove it experimentally.

1:17:50Alex O'Connor:But the idea is that in healthy brains, you couldn't prove it, but the same thing might be going on. So you know when you see someone who like, they're arguing with a taxi driver, and you're like, why are you shouting at that guy? And they're like, because, you know, he didn't give me my change. And you're like, well, actually, the reason you're shouting at him is because your dog died yesterday. That's the real reason that you're shouting at him. Like, we know that this kind of thing happens all the time, but I think it happens like literally all the time. I think like so much of our decision-making, we just intuitively move throughout the world.

1:18:16Alex O'Connor:And then our left brain interprets what we've done and rationalizes it after the fact. And I think that so much of our philosophizing is like this is very like left brain dominant. And Ian McGilchrist says that one of the problems that we face as a sort of society is that we've become too left brain dominant in our thinking. Everything is sort of hyper-rationalized and discrete, sort of abstracted, and none of it is intuitive, none of it is flux, none of it is continuous, but that is the nature of reality. So Iamagocra's first book was called The Master and His Emissary. The Master and His Emissary.

1:18:51Alex O'Connor:And the idea is that the right brain does stuff and the left brain is the emissary, but there's some kind of myth or story where an emissary thinks that he can do the job of the master, so he kills the master and then ends up doing a terrible job. And he kind of thinks that's what's happened with our left brain. So the reason that I brought that up is because when you asked how do you navigate the world not having a certain philosophy, I think we all navigate the world extremely intuitively. And when we come up with reasons and explanations for our behaviors, a lot of the time those are like post hoc rationalizations without us even realizing it.

1:19:23Alex O'Connor:It also has profound implications for free will, of course, because we think you know why you performed a particular action, but is that just because your brain has convinced you that that's why you did it, when it's not the real reason? At the very least, whatever the reason is, it's something that the left brain might not be able to communicate, because it might be a very right brain kind of thing. But yeah, these split brain patients, I mean, I don't know if you agree, I think that it's one of the most significant facts in the world, because also it might interest you if you're interested in the Indian traditions that we were talking about earlier, like the concept of the self, right?

1:19:53Alex O'Connor:Once you have experimental evidence that an individual self can both see something and not see it at the same time, I think that has profound implications for the idea of the unity of personhood. Like how many people are there there? If you want to say there's only one person, you have to admit a literal contradiction, that it is both true and false that they saw it, which you can't do. There has to be like a part of them which saw it. At the very least, you have to say part of them saw it and part of them didn't. And immediately at the very least, what you've done is you've said that the self can be split into parts.

1:20:24Alex O'Connor:That's hugely profound. Because if your left brain and your right brain can have independent sort of centers of awareness, and yet somehow are also part of this one connective thing, I think that has some profound implications for the fact that I've got a brain and you've got a brain, but there are a great many philosophical traditions who think that we're all sort of part of one great big thing. it at least opens a door to all kinds of interesting and it's sort of like when i tell people this if they haven't heard about split brain patients they're sort of like what really i'm like yeah like this stuff is way more complicated and way more weird than i think a

1:20:58Jay Shetty:lot of people realize is there anything that we can do to activate our right brain more that's a

1:21:02Alex O'Connor:question for ian mcgillcrist but i mean i i don't know but i would guess that like tuning in to the way that the right brain is supposed to attend to the world and read mcgillcrist on this and just try to tune into that part of yourself to try to recognize that there is a part of reality that consists in that kind of stuff that escapes the sort of hyper rationalization of left brain ways of thinking and i think a lot of that comes through like people are said to be a bit more left-brained or a bit more right-brained and in culture that that tends to manifest as like if you're right-brained you like sort of music and art and poetry left-handedness was associated with creativity for a long time.

1:21:41Alex O'Connor:Although that would be a quite fun fact. I think that's actually not true. That's not connected in that way. But like culturally, we have these sort of associations and I think that they don't give you a tool, a very good picture of what's actually happening with the brain. But I think it can be a sort of good way of thinking about the kinds of practices and ways of thinking that you might want to engage with to stop being so hyper-rational. And also pay attention when you are convinced that you know why you're doing something. Just step back and really think about what might be going into it.

1:22:08Alex O'Connor:It's literally what I said at the beginning of this conversation when I said, you know, why are you an atheist? It's because the contingency argument for God's existence is unsound. Or it's because my parents divorced when I was nine. The first of those is a very left-brained answer. The second of those is a very right-brained answer. And so if you're having an argument with your wife, you know, C.S. Lewis in the Screwtape Letters, which is a wonderful little novel where there's this like demonic undersecretary, like this sort of a demonic civil service. And this demon has been tasked with a particular human who he's trying to make into an atheist.

1:22:40Alex O'Connor:And one of the instructions that he has is like, when this person has an argument with his wife, convince him that they're arguing about the dishes when they're not really. Because he's going to come home and he's going to say, you know, his wife's going to say, you didn't do the dishes today. And he's going to go, for goodness sake, I've had a long day at work. And she's going to go, yeah, but you never do the bloody... And he's going to really, you're going to raise your voice to me right now because I didn't do the dishes this morning. Because it's not about the dishes. She's not saying you didn't do the dishes.

1:23:06Alex O'Connor:She's saying, I feel like you don't pull your weight around the house and you don't listen to me and I don't feel heard. Now, this is very sort of like self-helpy type stuff. You know, you sit on podcasts like this and you sort of go like, you know, and like, really you need to like listen to your, but like, I think very specifically, we are literally becoming convinced that like, we know why we are acting and behaving in particular ways when we're not because our left brain is rationalizing things for us. So just take a step back, think a bit more intuitively intelligibly about like what's going on in a very sort of non-rational abstracted kind of way don't try to think about this individual case and go okay let's let's trace the logic just like step back and like feel for a minute you know like like reintegrate feeling into your life that's that's probably a helpful starting point

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1:26:36Jay Shetty:Alex, thank you so much. What a joy talking to you. I feel like I've totally had my mind expanded today and stretched in so many different directions. Yeah, both sides. I wanted to end with you on what we do on the show called the final five, but I've kind of edited it for you because I felt there were a few more questions I wanted to sneak in there. So it might end up being a final 10. These questions have to be answered in one sentence maximum. Sure, okay, that's fun. And so Alex O 'Connor, these are your final 10 only made for you, brought to you by State Farm. What's the hardest question you've ever asked yourself?

1:27:08Jay Shetty:what is consciousness? If you're wrong about everything you believe, which belief would hurt most?

1:27:15Alex O'Connor:That my friends and family love me.

1:27:19Jay Shetty:Great answer. What do you think is the most dangerous idea people believe without questioning?

1:27:26Alex O'Connor:That we can have certainty about the will of the creator of the universe, and that it's engaged in the peculiarities of human affairs and human political affairs. Is that one sentence?

1:27:43Jay Shetty:That counts. That counts. You got it all out in one breath. That counts. What do you think people are most afraid to admit about life?

1:27:50Alex O'Connor:That it comes to an end.

1:27:52Jay Shetty:I wanted to talk to you about that as a final theme. Why does death feel so unnatural? You've talked about consciousness. What have you learned about death?

1:28:00Alex O'Connor:Well, there are a few answers to that. You said, why does death feel so unnatural? Which is a weird way of putting it. But I think like... You think it's a weird way. For many people, death is a part of nature. But it's interesting to hear you say unnatural, because there are philosophical traditions. If you're someone who believes that life exists after death, you'll either believe that because you think that we're going to heaven, and this mortal realm is sort of a purgatory realm of sorts. Or maybe you think that we're all made of consciousness and we're all going to sort of reintegrate into brahman you know either way that would mean that our true nature is brahman for want of a better term right now and that the divided physical biological selves that we currently inhabit are not our real selves right this is one of the the biggest teachings of advaita vedanta is that your your self is an illusion.

1:28:55Alex O'Connor:There is one self, the Atman, it's one self, and that Atman is the same thing as Brahman. There's just one great big thing, such that the thing that comes to an end when you die is not yourself, or rather it's the illusion of yourself, but it's not the self. The self persists, the self is eternal. It's another sort of huge theme of the Hindu scriptures. And so to hear you describe death as unnatural is kind of interesting, because these people would say that's because it's not natural, because your true nature is eternal. The self is eternal. and what you're calling yourself is actually unnatural.

1:29:28Alex O'Connor:And that's the thing that will come to an end. So some people might answer that. For me, like death is terrifying and it can be terrifying for two reasons. One is that you think it's lights off and everything comes to an end. The other is that you think there is something after death and it's bad, right? People are genuinely terrified of concepts of hell and divine torment for the behaviors that they engaged in while they were alive. And a lot of that comes from like religious upbringings, in particular doctrines about the nature of hell, which I think are not very biblical, to say the least. But there's sort of two flavors of fear there.

1:30:03Alex O'Connor:On the hell stuff, it requires essentially a metaphysical investigation into the nature of God and whether that God would allow such suffering for finite crimes. But with the lights off kind of thing, which I think more people are kind of freaked out by, you know, some people say, oh, but it's, you know, it's like before I was born, you know, like I was dead for thousands of years before I was born and it never bothered me. That helps some people because it at least makes you realize that you're not going to experience it, you know, if the lights really go off. And Epicurus famously said, you know, like if, like when is death bad?

1:30:34Alex O'Connor:It can't be bad now because I'm not dead. And it can't be bad for me when I'm dead because there's no me. So there's no point at which it can be true. Like Epicurus kind of wants to say, if something is true, there has to be a time at which it's true. There has to be some time at which this fact is true. So if the fact is death is bad for me, my death is bad for me, when is that fact true? Can't be true now because I'm not dead. Can't be true later because there's no me. And people hear that and they go, oh, very clever. But it doesn't really do much, right? Because again, that's a very left-wing way of thinking.

1:31:02Alex O'Connor:It's very clever, but I'm still kind of concerned, right? because of my convictions about the nature of consciousness, I'm at least agnostic enough about sort of experiences, by which I mean like experiences with an apostrophe, experiences connection to physicality. I'm agnostic enough about that, that I'm kind of not super worried about the death of my physical body. I have no idea what's going to happen. I do know that if I, if I do die and it all just sort of shuts off, then I won't be around to worry about it. And i'm only around to worry about it now but i you know i think about it like like everybody does but in some way that i can't quite explain and it's a reason why i wouldn't really talk about it except to sort of hinted it in a situation like this is to say that these investigations into the nature of consciousness and the nature of the brain and split brain stuff in some way i can't quite describe just has consoled me a little bit about the fact that one day my physical brain is going to like end you know because i don't know if if that's quite the same thing as what as what i am exactly you know well it is the same thing as what i am as a self and i am worried about the self coming to an end but i guess one way of thinking about it as well is that like the thing that's scary about death is not the succession of biological like function right you could have a biological machine that has no consciousness it's not worried about death the thing that death really people think about death in terms of the end of life but really death is kind of the end of consciousness.

1:32:24Alex O'Connor:That's what people are scared about. Maybe consciousness has to manifest physically, in which case, when you die, your consciousness sort of ends and that's a bad thing, right? What's really ending there is not your biological makeup. It's not the fact that your leg and your arm start disintegrating. It's the fact that your experience, your unified sense of self has come to an end. And one slightly naive approach to this might be to say that I'm not convinced that the self exists not just because of the sort of weird esoteric you know indian philosophy and stuff but also because of the split brain stuff i think all of this kind of stuff points to the idea that the idea of the self as we commonly understand it is a bit of an illusion and it is interesting to me that this is the same kind of truth that is discovered by ancient authors of the apanishads and like a modern teenager who's never read a word of sanskrit who takes lst and they sort of have these similar, I think that might have something to do with the usage of psychedelics in the formulation of the Vedas.

1:33:24Alex O'Connor:That's a whole other subject with soma, the mysterious substance that brings all of these profound spiritual truths that are uncannily similar to the profound spiritual truths that people find today when they take psychedelic drugs. But one of the foundational things that people discover in this regard is that the self is an illusion. The self does not exist. Even Sam Harris, the new atheist, doesn't believe in the self. And so if death is not just about biological function. It's the cessation of the self. There's something about the fact that I don't think the self exists even now that gives me some consolation.

1:33:55Alex O'Connor:If the fear is what happens when the self comes to an end, the self never came to a beginning. So I don't even know how to answer that question. But I don't say that's not going to help people. I was asked about this recently at one of these schools I was talking about as well. This kid sort of asked me, and I can always tell sometimes when people ask certain questions, they mean different things. like if someone says should we be afraid of hell i can tell in their face they're asking that because they're interested in the philosophy they want to hear about epicurus or they're asking that because they're scared of death somebody asks me do you think hell is biblical they're either asking that because they're interested in new testament studies or because they're staying up at night and afraid of death and afraid of hell to the person who's afraid i find it quite difficult to approach except to say take heart that there are philosophical schools available to you that you should look at at least first before you sort of lose your mind by worry.

1:34:44Alex O'Connor:If I'm not trying to help other people and I'm just telling you about myself, like, yeah, it opens up this world. But I think it's funny, like, I would encourage people to investigate some of the Indian philosophical traditions, not because there's this kind of idea in like Western thought that there's this sort of spiritual kind of thing over there. It's this kind of like cool mystical thing and like, oh, there's all these profound truths. It's like, actually, they're talking about the same stuff that we're talking about. They're just doing it in a different way that might make things click a little bit.

1:35:10Alex O'Connor:And also talking about the Indian school of philosophy is like talking about the Western canon of philosophy. The Western canon is like Kant or maybe John Stuart Mill and people. And it's not like all Westerners are running around in accordance with those principles. But I do think it's uncanny that somebody will say to me, I've looked everywhere I can. I've studied philosophy. I've looked at religious traditions and I've prayed and I've gone to church and I still don't have these answers and I'm still afraid of death. And it's like, okay, hear me out. Have you ever tried reading a word of any kind of non-Western philosophical canon?

1:35:47Alex O'Connor:And if the answer is no, I'm not promising you're going to find it there, but I'm saying there is so much more for you to do before you can confidently have even a view, I think, on the nature of the self, the nature of death, because most of our philosophical convictions are so culturally embedded with it without us realizing it that if you don't step outside of that for a moment you might just be following a thread that you are not the author of and so I'd recommend stepping outside of that and I'm not just saying that I think people have noticed that over the course of my recent trajectory and the things that I'm talking about this is just something that I've done there's a lot to say about that I spoke to a guy called Thomas Metzinger on my show about this and so people want to kind of really know what I'm talking about when I say all that I'd recommend they go and watch that.

1:36:28Alex O'Connor:If you're worried about it, also just realize that you're not alone. This is like the foundational question of human existence. I think it's weird not to be worried about it. It's sort of strange to me that people aren't talking about it all the time. We also have a sort of cultural reticence to talk about death. You know, death used to be much more present. Dead bodies in the street, plagues, all this kind of stuff. COVID sort of brought that back into sharp focus for a lot of people. But death is a bit of a taboo, and we don't really like to talk about it in polite society and i think maybe that's also part of the problem yeah last three uh one sentence that was more than one sentence no no but i asked you yeah okay yeah

1:37:02Jay Shetty:no no no i i knew i was doing i asked you all right last three one sentence we asked this to every guest who's ever been on the show what is the best advice you've ever heard or received

1:37:11Alex O'Connor:enjoy it simple well like there have been contexts in which i've been so caught up i remember like the first time i did a big cinema podcast shoot where i had like a whole camera crew and a big guest and i was really excited about it and i i was like reading this guest's books i was looking at criticism i was like obsessive over preparing i was so ready and i spoke to a friend of mine who's in the same industry and i just asked him because he'd done this kind of stuff before and i said like you've got any advice but any last minute advice and he just said enjoy it and i was like huh yeah good point yeah we're so we're so often just like not present i think anytime anyone's about to do something important if someone's about to like play their first gig or they're about to do some big career move that they've been waiting for for a long time or about to get married or something and they're sort of so in their head about it and they're like they're living in the future and then suddenly they're living in the past it's just it's you know it's the sort of be way of feet are like live in the present kind of thing but but specifically like enjoy it take a moment to look around and be like yeah this is this is cool yeah i love that

1:38:19Jay Shetty:uh two more questions uh we talked about this earlier why have you stopped saying yes to as many debates they're about ego oh that was your reason too interesting well i mean if you want

1:38:32Alex O'Connor:one sentence that's what i would say and it's not always about my ego it's not always about their ego it's either the case that you've got one person who just wants to prove a point and one person who wants to get to truth, in which case the egotistical one is going to probably trounce them and it's going to be a bit unfair. Or you've got two people who both are egotistically trying to prove a point, in which case it becomes a mess and a shouting match. If you have two people that everyone has ego, everyone. But if you have two people who recognize that, try to mitigate it and try to give it a backseat to having a good conversation, it's kind of just no longer a debate, almost by definition.

1:39:10Jay Shetty:So no one wants to do that anymore?

1:39:12Alex O'Connor:Well, people do. And I do debate sometimes, but I don't enjoy them. They're also extremely expensive time-wise because you have to prepare. It's like preparing for an exam. You don't know what's going to come up. If they score a point that you weren't ready for, it's going to be embarrassing. And that is fun. It's sport. And look, there is nothing wrong with sport. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it. It's fun, but you have to know that that's what you're doing. Debates are like boxing matches, you know. They will sometimes tell you who the better boxer is. They might not even tell you who the better boxer is.

1:39:44Alex O'Connor:They'll tell you who boxed better in that match. But it won't tell you who the better boxer is overall. And it definitely won't tell you who the better fighter is. You have no idea what would happen if they met in a bar, no holds barred, and they were able to use intelligence and weapons and call their friends and stuff like that. You have no idea what would happen. Similarly, somebody in a debate, it's like a sparring match. You're going to see who's better at that particular dance. but you have no idea what would happen if you gave them a week to think about your point, consult their resources and respond to you properly.

1:40:12Alex O'Connor:And so I think that the sweet spot is somewhere in between those. Let's not take a week to respond, but let's not be like snapping back with quips. But having said that, a lot of people are quick to say like, oh, like I don't do debates because they're not about getting to truth. Like I do debate sometimes because they're fun. They're fun and they are interesting and you do bring up interesting points and they do become these spectacles and they do bring people into like thinking about these issues and that's quite fun but you have to recognize that that's what you're doing such that afterwards if it goes really well you go great oh cool fun i won but it's like if you win a chess match or something and oh sweet cool anyway like let's play again sometime you know and you might lose next time that's the attitude you have to have if you become convinced that you're like magnus carlson because you won one chess match even if you are magnus carlson like that only means you're good

1:40:56Jay Shetty:at chess you know yeah well said uh fifth and final question we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow

1:41:05Alex O'Connor:what would it be no playing pop music in like fancy restaurants what should they play instead anything else something that's suitable to the environment i wrote a piece on this recently it's my least favorite thing about the world is the fact that it's not just fancy restaurants it's like you go into like a nice cafe or you go into even like a hotel lobby or something and you think about how much effort has been put into designing every single aspect which chairs have more feng shui you know which which wallpaper is going to sort of bring about the particular mood that we're trying to and then they just decide to just they put zero thought into the music you know i've left restaurants before because if you're going to a restaurant you know it's it's a big deal you're spending money it might be you might not be able to do that very often and you go maybe you're on eight or something the air is polluted with like Dua Lipa don't get me wrong I like Dua Lipa I actually do I really do but just not there you know and it's become such an epidemic it's like it's difficult to go I can't go to Green King pubs because all of them are playing pop music and these pubs are like the most they're beautiful like these these Victorian like wooden like ancient they've got these histories about them on the menus they're boasting about how like you know there's like the I think it's called the Salisbury which I wrote about in in central london which has this famous history it's where someone proposed to someone or other it's got all this stuff and you look at the images and it's this ornate beautiful chandelier type stuff and if i showed you the image and said now just what music do you imagine is playing yeah you know somebody walks into a restaurant like that and says you know what this really needs is like when i went in there they were playing kids by robbie williams and kylie minogue and i'm just like seriously you know it really gets my nerves so i would i would probably do that that's one of my

1:42:55Jay Shetty:favorite answers. Alex, thank you so much. Such a treat. Appreciate you, mate. Thanks. That's been fun. If you loved this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain. They don't do things until someone's mad at them to get it done. They need stress in order to get stuff done. And that just makes everybody around them stressed. Lately, I've been trying to be more intentional, even with small decisions, like cooking at home instead of ordering out. It's simple, but it helps me save for things that truly matter. That's why I love the State Farm Personal Price Plan.

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