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

Was philosophy always meant to be practically applicable, or is that some modern reinterpretation?

Oh, that's a Joe question.

Oh, well, I mean, I suppose one of the differences between, like very broadly speaking, between something like

ancient Greek philosophy, say, and the way that we conceive of philosophy today is that, you know, philosophy today is largely thought of in terms of different fields.

You've got your kind of epistemologists who discuss questions like, you know, what is knowledge and, you know, more importantly,

how do we attain knowledge?

What are the kinds of systems and processes that produce reliable knowledge that kind of stuff and then there are kind of ethicists talking about you know what is the good life you know vitally important question also you know what are what are the right things to do and then you've got kind of logicians talking about um you do do a lot of proofs and try to often model uh ordinary things um using formal mathematical or at least semi-mathematical systems.

You've got philosophers of language, philosophers of science.

But certainly

in the ancient world, these weren't as differentiated, certainly, as they are today.

And so,

you know, Aristotle wrote different treatises on these different topics, but

even in his philosophy, everything is so interlinked.

And if you go, you know, back before Aristotle, it's very, very hard to separate these.

So, for example, the Stoics,

although, you know, you know, in kind of popular discourse around Stoicism today, we talk a lot about Stoic ethics,

the Stoics thought that their ethics fell out of their metaphysics and their logic, which was their word for what we would call today things like logic and epistemology.

And

so I think

that's one major difference.

In terms of practicality, I mean, yeah,

a lot of ancient philosophy is incredibly practical.

You know, these are, especially, you know, one of the paramount

questions that are asked, that's asked by almost every ancient philosopher is, you know, how to live a good life.

The first philosopher

received wisdom is Thales.

He's a kind of ancient Greek philosopher.

But before that, there are lots of kind of, we have scraps of like ancient Egyptian philosophies and things like that.

And they're often concerned with, you know, what's the good life?

How do we live it?

So yeah, I think philosophy is eminently practical.

I also think, you know, maybe this is just my own bias showing.

I think that today, philosophy at its best is often very practical.

How.

Has something gone awry?

Is there some sense that modern philosophy, a lot of that is kind of like string theory and physics, where there's not much progress being made in quite the same way for people's practical applicability?

We're trying to do the ethics without the metaphysics.

As Joe just said, like, a lot of these ancient philosophers in particular are remembered for their ethical teachings.

The Stoics, you might know what a Stoic is.

It's someone who sort of is resistant to suffering and pleasure and is sort of neutral.

But why?

Because of their metaphysics, because of what they believed was true about the world.

Same thing with Epicureanism.

People might know that Epicurus, for example, thought that you shouldn't worry about death.

You know, like death is nothing to us.

He said, literally nothing to us, because when you're alive, it's not with you.

And when it's with you, there's no you.

That stems out of the Epicurean tradition of materialism.

They were staunch materialists.

They believed that everything, including the human soul, was made up of matter.

So that when that goes, there's nothing left.

And

it seems like they really thought that these metaphysical commitments were what led to these ethical commitments.

And so if all you have are the ethical commitments now, that there isn't really a way to make progress because ethics is kind of conjectural if it doesn't have a metaphysical grounding.

It's just like, you know, what feels like it works, what feels like it vibes with your worldview.

I mean, I think a lot of people approach these philosophies now.

They'll look at Stoicism and Epicureanism, utilitarianism, emotivism, and they'll sort of think,

Which of these do I like?

Yeah, that makes sense to me.

And they sort of adopt it.

So all that's really being done by reading these philosophies is some ancient guy elucidating something you already kind of believe.

So you're not going to make much progress in terms of actually developing your thought unless you believe something new that's true about the world that will cause you to commit to something else.

You know what I mean?

So it's like, you know, if you ask someone what Stoicism is on the street or indeed in a podcast, they would list, you know, 50 different things before they told you anything about their metaphysical claims, about what they actually thought the world was made of.

It'd all be about, you know, how to live your life.

Oh, Oh, sorry, no.

In Stoics, for, you know, the kind of one of the reasons why Stoics are so big on acceptance and accepting things, things that happen to you and accepting the kind of state of the world in kind of very, very broad strokes is that the Stoics were big believers in what today we would recognize as something like divine providence.

You know, they had a real kind of teleological view of reality.

So

they thought that the universe was inherently rational, inherently reasonable.

And as a result, this whatever is happening is in accordance with the rationale will of the universe.

So it's kind of, you know, it's sort of a, you know, in modern Stoicism, people tend not to have that assumption baked in.

But this is a huge part of ancient Stoicism.

And it's actually interesting to the kind of, we see, you know, we're talking about kind of how things get stripped away over time, even in the difference between Greek and Roman Stoicism.

You already see less emphasis placed on Stoic logic, for example.

Chrysippus, I have no idea if I'm pronounced that correctly, but he wrote, wrote reams and reams of parchment on Stoic logical systems.

And

you don't even see that in my favorite Stoic philosopher, Epictetus.

He's not that concerned with Stoic logic.

And I think he's the goat of Roman Stoicism.

And so it's not necessarily just a modern thing of this, of stripping back aspects of philosophies.

But of course, there is an argument to be made that this is part of what development consists of.

Although I do think it's sometimes worth going back and revisiting some of the assumptions that maybe we ought to reconsider.

Is it fair to say, well, I guess, at least for me, good avatar for the lay person.

When you think about development, you think about sort of refining over time, about becoming sort of more accurate, more detailed, seeing things with a higher resolution.

How fair is it to say that modern philosophy is more sort of concerned with intellectual masturbation than it is teaching people fundamental questions about themselves and the world.

Very fair indeed.

I think that philosophy doesn't develop in the way that something like physics does.

The idea with something like physics is that

you're born into a world with a particular understanding.

You develop that understanding, you learn new things, you maybe dig a bit further down into an atom and you find out what it's made of.

And then you have children.

And you tell those children as a starting point, this is what atoms are made of.

And then they're off to the races is trying to go even further.

Philosophy, I don't think, quite works in the same way.

You might disagree with this, I don't know.

I think it's instead of something which you sort of go from ignorance to knowledge over the course of 20 generations,

you go from ignorance to knowledge over the course of one generation, and everybody has to sort of start afresh, which is why you find that these ancient philosophers and early modern philosophers and modern philosophers and guaranteed future philosophers too are all essentially saying the same thing.

You know, if you read

if you read

Epicurean philosophy, it's kind of very similar to utilitarianism.

It's got a very sort of similar thread.

At the very least, it seems to be based on similar intuitions.

So

you might sort of think that philosophy is a bit stagnant, that it hasn't actually progressed anywhere, but that's maybe not kind of what it's supposed to do.

You know, you're supposed to do that throughout

your own life.

Somebody asked ChatGPT what it's like to be itself.

I imagine you've probably done this.

You've done everything with ChatGPT.

Everything within reason.

Not everything.

Not everything.

Everything within reason.

Within reason.

Yeah, yeah.

Subscribe.

He said it.

And one of the things that it said was:

imagine basically every time that you had a conversation, your memory of the last one was wiped.

Each new context window is a brand new.

So it makes me think about what you're talking about here.

This generation needs to rediscover, or it tries to answer the same questions over and over and over again.

Because the important stuff with philosophy is probably the way that it allows you to live live a good life or a life that you see fit or to console you in some regard.

And that is something that will happen over the course of an individual life.

I would take what ChatGPT says with a pinch of salt

because, of course, it probably is not in fact conscious.

But it does give us an interesting sort of like

in for thinking about what it might be like to be such a creature.

What would it be like, not only

to have your memory wiped every time you started a new day or conversation, but also to kind of be one thing with many avatars.

You know, like ChatGPT is one thing.

We're speaking about it as one entity, but you could have a conversation on your phone.

I could have a conversation on my phone with it.

And it's this sort of one thing, but having two distinct and separable.

And I think that

a lot of philosophies kind of view human beings in the same way.

You know, this is how this is how an ancient

Indian philosopher, like who's reading or indeed composing the Upanishads, might think about human consciousness, that it's sort of all one one consciousness, that

somehow the localizing of individual selves is kind of an illusion and it's all just sort of one big thing.

And we're probably somehow restricted in the sense that we have our like memories and our localized experiences.

But if we knew the truth, if we could somehow step outside of that, we'd recognize that we're all actually just one big thing.

So I imagine if Jat GPT was conscious, it would probably be a little bit like that.

It would be this sort of illusory individuation

across different computers and things, which is what a lot of philosophers think is going on in human beings.

It's interesting to talk about kind of, because there are clearly elements to how,

you know, people kind of go on their own,

have to wrestle with the questions of what makes a good life for themselves.

I do have a thing that, you know,

we can chart progress in certain philosophical problems and it's more nebulous than others.

One of the

one of philosophy's historic successes is just creating lots of new fields.

So, of course, so

you know, something like something like that.

Philosophers are good at making jobs for philosophers.

Philosophers are good at making jobs for

other academics.

So, you know, like originally, maths was inseparable from philosophy.

And then, you know, that becomes its own field of study.

And, you know, physics is originally rolled into philosophy and it becomes its own field of study.

Economics is another one that stems from philosophy.

I mean, you know, something like

psychoanalytic theory or psychology, you know, this, this comes from

partly from Freud.

Freud is, although he denies ever reading Nietzsche, his theories are so incredibly influenced by Nietzsche and by earlier philosophical thinkers.

So I do think that

it's very easy to hide some of philosophy's successes, partly because quite a lot of the time they are hidden away, they're handed off to other fields.

I think this is a point that Bertram Russell made, was this idea that

one of the measures of philosophy's efficacy is just in giving birth to other fields.

Linguistics is another one.

Very sort of philanthropic

field in that way.

I mean, you could also argue that it's taking credit for other people's work further down the line.

Okay.

That's one thing.

That sounds like Alex, actually.

So

you mentioned Stoicism there.

Are there some ancient schools that you think have been most unfairly ignored?

You know,

if you were to ask any person about, give me some ancient schools of philosophy, Stoicism would be up top.

Maybe they'd think Buddhism, Taoism or something, They'd go, oh, I'm going to be like real

a different approach to this.

I'm going to go to the other side of the planet.

But beyond that, we're probably really bouncing off the limit of most people's knowledge.

Are there some schools that you think

you should have got a little bit more time at the table?

I think, well, yeah, I mean, you're quite right to point out that certainly any Western thinker is probably going to have neglected Eastern philosophy to a significant degree.

But even within so-called Western thought,

yeah, I suppose suppose one thing that jumped out at me while you were speaking is not so much a school, but an idea, which is like,

I've been thinking a lot about like Aristotelian metaphysics, so from Aristotle, right?

And when I ask people about cause and effect, like what causes particular things to occur, Aristotle famously, one of the foundational like

doctrines of his of his metaphysics is that there are four kinds of causation that go into any anything.

Like, why is this beautiful and tasty can of Newtonic on the table?

Well, it's got four different kinds of explanations.

There is its formal cause, which is sort of the shape that it takes.

There's its material cause, which is the stuff that it's made out of, right?

We don't think of the stuff that's made out of, strictly speaking, as a cause, but it's clearly part of the causal story that puts this on the table.

There is the efficient cause, which is like who actually made it, right?

You put this together, somebody put it in a can, I put it on the table.

And finally, there is the final cause, which is what it was done for, what it's going towards, the teleological cause.

In the modern era, we essentially, when we talk about causation, we just talk about the efficient cause.

If I say, like, why is that on the table?

And you say, well, because I put it there, question is answered.

But I think that neglects a lot of really important questions.

about like the nature of the thing itself, why it's there in that particular time slice, taking that shape with that particular form.

I think we neglect that.

And I think that modern science is lacking in that it only seems to

concern itself ultimately with efficient causes and maybe a little bit of the material cause too, in that like if you ask a scientist in a laboratory, in a laboratory,

you know, why is that shuttle like flying and escaping the atmosphere?

They'll say, oh, because it has an escape velocity and the thrust of the rockets.

But if you ask the same scientist at the pub, they'll say, because we wanted to go to the moon.

And suddenly they become an Aristotelian again.

And I think that

the influence of these other kinds of causation isn't really there.

The only other thing that came to mind is

potentially the pre-Socratics.

And Joe already said that the sort of first philosopher, as it was,

as it were, was Thales.

But people might have thought when he went to say that, well, the first philosopher that people generally think of is Socrates.

If you ask somebody who was the first philosopher, they'll say Socrates.

But there's, you know, Socrates didn't just spring up ex nielo.

You know, he's he's working in sometimes, and him and Aristotle and Plato, they're working sometimes in response to, but certainly after and contemporary with, other thinkers too, who a lot of the time their ideas just, you know, because they weren't particularly popular or didn't win the war of ideas, we don't even know about.

Parmenides didn't think that change could occur.

In fact, you've heard of Zeno's paradoxes.

So Zeno had these wonderful paradoxes of motion where like, I can't clap my hands because first I'd have to half the distance, then half the distance, then half the distance, and you can't complete an infinite series of tasks, so I can't clap my hands.

Everybody knows about Zeno's paradoxes, but do they know that the reason he came up with them is because he was following in the school of Parmenides, who believed that change was literally impossible, and these were paradoxes which were kind of supposed to demonstrate the paradoxical nature of change for that reason.

Like, again,

we've got the conclusion that we haven't got the working, and sometimes the working is the most interesting stuff, you know?

Yeah.

I definitely concur with the kind of neglect of aspects of Aristotle's thought.

I mean, especially really with regards to something like Aristotle's ethics, you know,

Aristotle's book, The Nicomachean Ethics, is, I would say, you know, even after over 2,000 years, the most useful book of philosophy for anyone to read.

I would say, you know, go on and get yourself a copy.

They're great.

There are some excellent translations.

And

the most recent Penguin one is an excellent translation.

And Aristotle's ethics is, I think, one of its real strengths is that it's incredibly realistic.

So he's very, very concerned with virtues.

But as opposed to, say,

someone like certain Stoic thinkers and also the cynics,

Aristotle denies that virtue is sufficient for a good or flourishing life.

He's very

when he, you know, he's very good at getting down to brass tacks.

You know, he kind of at one point during the Nicomachean ethics, he basically says, you know, like, there is no philosophy that's going to make you happy on the rack.

You know,

you always need certain minimal levels of your physical needs fulfilled in order to just like calm down the bestial part of you that recognizes that you need to eat and breathe and sleep in order to live.

And I think that, you know, and again, Aristotle has a number of incredibly,

I think still incredibly insightful ethical insights that sometimes sound obvious when you say them out loud, but we're talking before we started filming about

the idea that actually sometimes

Very, very obvious things bear repeating because we just forget them very, very easily.

I mean, you know, this is, again, a point that Tolstoy made where he talks about that idea of loving your neighbor as yourself.

And Tolstoy basically basically says, yeah, like that sounds trite, but have we ever got round to doing that?

And he argues that we haven't, and I'll probably concur.

And one of Aristotle's ideas here is,

I'll just focus on two.

One of them is the idea of a golden bean.

So

his idea that virtue lies between the poles of two vices.

Being brave is in between being cowardly and being reckless.

Being generous is in between being profligate and being miserly.

And he has, and I think that that's a very useful framework.

It sounds almost like common sense when you say it out loud, but actually attempting to think in these terms can be incredibly useful.

And the other thing that Aristotle really, that I'm so bullish on

with regards to Aristotle is he's got an incredibly well-worked out theory of friendship.

It's in two books, book eight and nine of the Nicomachean Ethics.

And it's some of the

best writing on friendship, I think, there's ever been.

Aristotle,

in some ways, following in the footsteps of

some of you was thinking, like Epicurus was a very, very big fan of friendship.

Actually, I've got my time, ice confused there.

But either way, you know, Aristotle is incredibly, he thinks that having a group of friends and moreover, friends that you're

that are friendships of virtue.

So friends that you're not just you're not just there because you enjoy their company.

You're not just there because

they have something that you want and you're trying to get at, you know, in the way that someone might schmooze up to their boss or just you're friends with somebody simply because you enjoy their company.

These are friends who are sort of getting together in order to make one another more virtuous and moreover hold like duties and loyalties to one another.

You know, Aristotle thinks that these are enormously contributive factors to your life.

You owe them things.

You know, this is a, I think, can be a real antidote to the sort of, you know, ah, nobody owes anyone anything anymore.

You know, that, that kind of, that, that approach to life, which I think is sort of, can be very unhelpfully individualistic.

And yeah, I think that sometimes stepping into the footsteps of an ancient thinker like Aristotle

is one way to sort of, you know, get a bit of, get a bit of distance from the way that we might currently live.

I think that books eight and nine of the Nicomache Ethics, where he so clearly thinks, you know, groups of friends, these are, this is, you know, halfway to the good life, effectively,

is an insight that we could really use.

You know, everyone thinks friendship is important, right?

It's very easy to say.

But like, culturally, we place significantly less emphasis on friendship than at almost any other point in Western history.

This is like, you know, think about, I don't know if you've, you know, ever read through sort of like letters from the World Wars or or from like the Crimean Wars or

even Napoleonic Wars.

These are people writing to their friends and the way that they talk about their friends is amazing.

It's sort of more passionate.

Passionate.

Passionate and sort of vulnerable.

And

it's just very clear that friendship is a huge part of the way that they organize their lives.

You know, like, like we, you know, the kind of sound of way of, I suppose, of organizing your adult life now is to organize it around a romantic partner.

And, you know, I think there's an awful lot to be said for romance.

I just think that there's also an awful lot lot to be said for friendship and it very much gets overshadowed like when was the last time or if we were to compare the amount of great films that view that are that are about you know two people getting together versus two great friends i mean you know films about two great friends what like bill and ted you know harold and kumar got the watches

yeah harold and kumar got the munchies you know these are i mean fake films at all but you know it's it's completely outmoded and i think i think you know that's why that's why i'm very bullish on aristotle books eight and nine of the nickel in ethics uh-huh yeah i

I wonder what it is about Stoicism.

I guess just very good PR and branding kind of suits the modern world, a time when people are a little bit lost.

They're unsure.

I've never been super attracted to it on that level.

It's really popular as,

I guess, kind of a means of consolation and way of sort of structuring your life.

But I sort of, I don't know.

I guess people who are suffering are always looking for alleviation from that suffering.

And traditionally, it's come with a lot of metaphysical baggage,

be that religious or be it not.

And I suppose it offers people a way of seemingly achieving that without the metaphysical baggage.

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You are somebody who tried nihilism as a life philosophy.

Yes, I suppose.

Look, the thing, nihilism, man, it...

Here we go.

Bull case for nihilism.

Nihilism is often thought of as a synonym for all things depressing and upsetting, and in many cases it is.

But nihilism just means there's sort of no purpose to it all.

There's no...

It's It's a difficult thing to define in analytic terms.

That's why it's generally in the wheelhouse of like existential philosophers who tell stories to try and sort of grasp at a feeling.

But in theory, you know, if you're, if it's not just that you're suffering, you could be suffering, but not be a nihilist.

It's if you're suffering and suffering all the more because you think you're suffering without reason.

That makes you a nihilist.

But I think you could just as easily be having a wonderful time and think, there is no rhyme or reason to this.

I'm having a great time, but there's absolutely no purpose to this.

And you'd still be a nihilist because you think that there's no purpose behind it all, but it doesn't mean you have to have a bad time doing so.

So I think it is worth, if you are somebody who wants to toy with the idea that there is no meaning, like try it on, see how it fits.

That's what you've got to do with all philosophies.

You know, if something seems like it sort of chimes with you a little bit, like live in accordance with it for like a week.

And a lot of the time it will be way too hard, but sometimes it will teach you something.

There's a lot of memes about philosophy making people depressed.

Yeah.

That the more that you learn, the worse that you see the world.

What's the darkest philosophies that you guys have been exposed to?

Turan?

I mean, I love Turan.

I think that Turan is a Turan is an incredibly underrated, kind of Romanian stroke French, wrote lots of his work in French, but it was Romanian, kind of adopted France

in his later years.

Well, that'll make you depressed straight off the bat.

Well, potentially.

And Turan,

comma Emile, Emile Turan.

Yes, Emile Turan, writes these incredibly pessimistic tracts of philosophy.

One's called The Trouble Trouble with Being Born, another's called A Short History of Decay.

And he is kind of incredibly love him already.

Sure, he's not British.

Well, it's, I don't know if it's just because I'm British that it kind of I like it so much.

You know, on his first book is called On the Heights of Despair.

It's, you know, truly melodramatic.

Sanguine shit, yeah.

One of the things that I find very interesting about

philosophies that are supposedly dark, and I'm specifically thinking of the pessimistic philosophies here, people like Schopenhauer and Choran, and maybe to a lesser extent, someone like Philip Mainlander.

It's, I mean,

this is something I think Choran Sharon is so good at, is that oftentimes when you're reading him, he's very good at

subtly shifting the scope.

So that you're reading him, and you know, he's complaining about life.

You know, his view on life is far more pessimistic than my view on life is kind of the characteristic property of life as suffering for a variety of reasons.

But he occasionally just, this kind of dark pessimistic outlook breaks through into a kind of natural lightheartedness that I think is absolutely amazing.

So one of the things that,

one of the things that is

interesting, I say, about reading a pessimistic philosopher is that if, and I think that nihilism to a certain extent shares this, provided that it's kind of framed in a certain way, is that

if

you're not expecting things to go very well, and if you think the characteristic property of the world is meaningless suffering, well, then to a certain extent, the stakes are kind of lowered.

It's very similar, I suppose, to that advice that Seneca gave in one of his letters, which is to kind of imagine how things are going to go horribly wrong so that you feel much better when it comes to it.

Low expectations.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

And I think that on a kind of existential level, reading an incredibly darkly pessimistic philosopher,

sort of, as I say,

there is sometimes a moment where it breaks through.

I suppose the only way I could kind of try and contextualize this is like, have you ever had an astonishingly bad day, just like a comedically bad day?

And I do mean like comedic, you know, and you get to like five o'clock and, you know, you've been mugged seven times and a car drives by and it kicks up a puddle of dog shit over your nice suit or whatever.

And you can't help but just laugh.

Because at that point, it's like, oh, wow, like this is, this has become funny.

And I think that's something that Taran is very, very good at.

And that's why, you know, I often talk about him as one of the darkest philosophers of all time.

He's also one of the funniest, one of the few philosophers where you can read him and laugh out loud.

It is hilarious that suffering is dose-dependent in that way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like your response to it, a U-shaped curve.

Yeah.

Too little,

everything's probably probably okay.

A bit, oh, God, this sucks.

And then too much, and it's okay again.

It always leads to frivolity, right?

And that

makes it livable.

I do think sometimes the more pessimistic philosophers can be a little bit self-indulgent.

It's a bit sort of, you know, woe is me.

Oh, like, because, you know, I don't know.

How sophisticated my thoughts, how deep my engagement with the world is.

When actually you just like, you know, you got dumped by your girlfriend and now you're writing about how terrible life is.

I mean, look, I asked Joe this the last time that we sat down.

I

often think philosophy is just clever branding for depressive thoughts.

It often is, but it's also often just clever branding for like any kind of thought.

I think it's like you literally just have a thought and you try to systematize it, right?

This is why the greatest philosophers, another thing we said before we started, tell you something you already know.

If you open Wittgenstein's Tractus, the first line of the introduction is something like, I don't think this book will be useful except to anybody who's already like in agreement with the things that it says.

It's just supposed to be sort of elucidating an idea.

And so, yeah, a lot of the time it is just sort of

feeling out a vibe, finding someone who puts it into good words and saying, oh, I think that person's very...

I feel less alone.

By the way, is why when people ask me for like a recommendation of what philosophy to read or something, if someone says, you know, where should I start with philosophy?

You might be tempted to say, okay, well, let's start with Plato, read about Socrates and Aristotle, then do a bit of existentialist philosophy.

I just tell people, just literally read what you've heard of.

And the reason for that is because these people will have come up in contexts that are relevant to you or of interest to you.

So if you've heard Nietzsche mentioned a bunch of times, because you're a big Jordan Peterson fan, like if you like Jordan Peterson, and Jordan Peterson obviously likes Nietzsche quite a lot and finds a lot of use in him, you're probably going to find some use in him.

Whereas if you just randomly pick one of the great philosophers, like if you just pick up Sartre, as I did the other day, I told you this, and read

Existentialism is a humanism and think this is complete nonsense.

That was a complete waste of time because you're not going to resonate with it.

It's not going to, strictly speaking, convince you unless I think you've already got sort of one foot in the boat.

I did think on the pessimistic philosophers, or you said the darkest philosophers, which doesn't necessarily

mean pessimistic, right?

Dark philosophy, pessimistic philosophy, what do you mean?

I think Schopenhauer comes to mind.

He's writing his On the Sufferings of the World.

That's your sort of indulgent pessimist.

I think he had trouble with women for some of his life, and he's got this infamous essay on women, which

would read like a comedy.

In fact, one version of his essays I have in the introduction or the preface, the translator says, by the way, the essay on women isn't a joke.

He's not being sarcastic.

This is what he actually thought.

He comes to mind.

It's an irony disclaimer.

Yeah.

But in order to sort of avoid that, I think that a good example of a potentially non-self-indulgent pessimistic philosophy that seems genuinely just philosophical might be something like antinatalism, the view that it is immoral to have children.

David Benatar is the sort of superstar of antinatalism.

He wrote a book called Better Never to Have Been, which sounds like one of these sort of, you know,

I'm about to write about how terrible, how terrible life is, you know, I wish I was never born, but it's not.

It's like philosophically speaking, he tries to make a case that it's just better for no one to be born.

Even if their life is filled with more pleasure than suffering, he thinks that it's still immoral to bring them into existence.

It's an interesting, it's an interesting take.

A debate about this five years ago in the Barbican.

That sounds about right.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When we first met.

Like canteen at the barbican, and we were having the conversation, and people came, tried to be social,

listened for five minutes, and then left.

And there was just this sort of steady cycle of people coming and going.

This doesn't sound very nice at all.

So, yeah, Benatar actually probably does fit.

A good example of why you might find it dark.

I mean, I call it dark if you like.

I mean, for an antinatalist, they'll say, no,

the darkness is that you're

unconsciously bringing people into suffering.

You know, that's the representation of.

But in terms of how it's perceived, I think that as far as pessimism goes, the idea that it's immoral to have children.

I mean, you've heard of like the pro-life and the pro-choice crowd.

Benatar and his crew are like anti-life.

It's like this sort of third option that everybody forgets about.

He's got some wonderful sort of...

little tidbits in there.

He takes a divergence into the philosophy of disability for a time, sort of making a case that in principle we are all disabled in some philosophical sense.

Are we all disabled?

It's been a while since I've read it, but I think he sort of imagines, so one way of thinking about this would be like,

imagine if everybody

whose legs worked suddenly just died, and the only people left on planet Earth don't have functioning legs.

Maybe not instantly, because people would have memory, but after not very long, it just wouldn't be considered a disability to not have legs, because that's just how everybody is.

And Benita sort of imagines, in principle, the things that we could have that we don't, which means that in principle we are disabled in the same way.

We do know why.

So they're exactly, so there are all kinds of sufferings that come about in our life, like having to climb the stairs, which we don't even notice as sufferings.

And if you add all of these up, they become pretty significant.

It's a bit of a trip, but really interesting.

And I think probably

dark.

The other thing that's quite nice about Benatar, I said it was sort of dry earlier, and I did mean that as a compliment, sorry.

You know, it's still like frilly.

Yes, yeah, yeah, is that Benatar is very, he gives a very logical argument.

As in, you know,

I would say there are problems with the argument, but

it's very clearly laid out in a way that quite a lot of pessimistic philosophers write in sort of semi-poetry.

Benatar, if you're a hardcore analytic fan, he's probably

the pessimistic philosopher.

It seems that way, I suppose.

You did speak to him, right?

I did.

I had him on my show.

He doesn't show his face.

Yeah, he doesn't.

I actually don't know if he uses his real name, but he doesn't show his face.

So there is also that added element that

he doesn't want to be seen.

Oh, so he's the sleep token of the philosophy world.

Oh, are are they the mask-wearing slip-knots?

Yes, Joe Donald.

Don't make that face.

No, no, no.

Sorry, no.

I don't think that's

very, very cool, very popular.

You know, when you guys start telling me about, you know, Anesthetus of Ancient City, and I go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I need to nod along like this.

This is your turn.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

There we are.

Thank you.

Very good.

What's the philosophy of sleep token?

If you go on the Reddit, really deep.

Really, really, really deep.

The law goes hard.

The law goes hard on on many subreddits I have a subreddit too which which has some interesting laws of its own I've seen them I think yeah I've seen them yeah you're you've got canon yeah apparently apparently apparently so um

okay so Benatar's got this I remember you

his whole thing is this balance between suffering and pleasure yeah is that even a tiny microcosm of suffering yeah is so great that it doesn't it outweighs any amount of pain he calls it like an asymmetry argument between pleasure and pain.

So a lot of I've just pulled that out of a five-year, five-and-a-half-year-old Kantine concert.

You've got a memory on you.

Thank you.

This is why that's not a great advert for a tasty drink.

Yes.

Zero calorie.

Some 3 million dollars.

And he remembers.

I think when a lot of people would consider, is life worth living, one crude way of working it out is adding up the pleasure, minusing the pain, and sort of seeing what you're left over with.

You know, is it worth living overall?

Bennisa thinks that

crucially, before you exist,

the potential pleasure that you might experience if you come into existence doesn't matter one, like one jot.

It's literally irrelevant.

But the potential pain that you would avoid does matter.

And he tries to prove this through some sort of intuitive thought experiments.

For example, there are no conscious beings on Mars, right?

We don't really think that it's a bad thing

that all this pleasure that could be on Mars is being missed out on.

We don't think, what a tragedy, that all of the potential pleasure that could exist on Mars isn't actually happening.

But we might think that it is a good thing that there's no suffering up there.

And some people hear that kind of example and go, yeah, that makes sense.

Some people go, well, no, I am.

I am.

I am sad that there's no pleasure on Mars.

It's sort of an intuitive thing.

He also

one other way of thinking about this, at least for the imbalance, might be a question, which is, would you take five minutes of the worst worst imaginable, conceivable suffering that you could experience if afterwards you got to have five minutes of the best possible bliss?

I mean, I don't know what you guys would do.

You wouldn't take it?

No, thank you.

I don't think I take five minutes of the best possible bliss anyway.

The rest of your life, it was the rest of your life.

Expectation.

Yeah, you'd just be completely, you'd just feel empty.

Well, I mean, that's another asymmetry.

Yeah.

That's an additional asymmetry.

And that actually might be just a sort of good response to this kind of thought experiment.

Because what Bennett was is trying to say is that most people would say no.

And so crudely, it seems like the suffering kind of counts for more.

But as so much of philosophy does, it kind of relies on intuitive, your sort of feeling of a sense of negativity bias and loss of business.

Another way he talks about, and crucially, this is only before you exist, right?

Once you exist, your pleasure is good for you and your suffering is bad for you.

But before you exist, which in fact other people have a choice about whether you do or don't.

Yeah, before you exist, for someone who doesn't exist, them not experiencing pleasure is not bad, but them not experiencing suffering is good.

And so before you're born, the only moral calculus is the goodness that you're not suffering.

And so that's all that should be taken into account.

It's good that you're not suffering.

Let's not bring that into existence.

Another sort of line of reasoning he goes down is a kind of like a rights-based approach, where he says, suppose, for example, that if I were to like break your arm, you would get an encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy or something.

You might, if I gave you that option, you might think to yourself, like, you know what, I think that's, that's worth it.

Probably, it'd definitely be worth it for me.

I take that.

However, even if I would actually prefer that, if you didn't ask me first, if you just did it, like, you don't have the right to do that to me, right?

If, if I found you in need of an ambulance and the only way to save your life somehow was to break your arm, then I think most people say you should do it.

But if by causing you suffering, I can not save you from worse suffering, but bring you something good, most people think that I don't have the right to inflict that suffering on you, you, even if it would be ultimately worth it.

So for Benatar, same thing before you're born, right?

You're allowed to inflict suffering to prevent worse suffering, but you're not allowed to inflict suffering on the promise that there'll be some good that comes out of it, unconsensually.

Because what you're essentially doing is causing a bunch of people to unconsensually experience masses of suffering that they had no say in.

Some people have actually tried to sue their parents for wrongful birth because they

it's actually that has actually happened if you're Benatar pilled.

Yeah, exactly.

So the asymmetry thing is quite important to Benatar's flavor of antinatalism.

You can have antinatalism without it.

You can just say that life consists in more suffering.

And if you think it consists in more pleasure, you've fallen for the Pollyanna principle, as I think they call it, which is the idea that we tend to remember the good stuff more than the bad stuff, the sort of rose-tinted view of the past.

Most people, says Benatar,

like vastly underestimate the extent to which their lives are going terribly.

They like sort of in retrospect think, oh, you know, it's all good, but if you actually were to live through it again, you'd realize that at every moment it was going very badly.

He then, after, after convincing, after convincing you that you're,

he sort of says, like, you know, it doesn't matter how much you suffer or experience pleasure in life, it's immoral to bring people into existence.

And then after convincing you of that, he then says, but just so you know, life

does actually contain a lot more suffering.

And this

detour into disability ethics or metaphysics, I suppose, is sort of part of this case.

You know, these menial sufferings that you don't even notice.

It's not, you shouldn't have been here.

You should be upset that you are here.

And by the way, the fact that you are here also is a reason for regret.

Yeah, it gets a little bit tricky because like once you're here, I mean, the inevitable question for David Benatar is, then why don't you just think we should kill ourselves?

And David Benatar, in a footnote, compares this to going to a movie.

And when you're about halfway through, thinking like, this is kind of a crap film.

It's not bad enough that I'm going to leave now that I'm here, but I kind of wish I'd never come in the first place.

That's sort of his position on life.

He's.

How robust do you think that is as an answer to why shouldn't I just kill myself?

I think

it doesn't really work very well because I am quite suspicious of the asymmetry argument, like anyway.

So I think that a case that sort of makes life not worth living and therefore not worth beginning will inevitably create a powerful argument for not continuing life.

Bennett, like, is, as far as I can remember, quite sort of staunchly not that.

But I'm not so sure that they can be so definitively separated.

Has someone taken that?

Is there a suicide cult philosophy?

There have been examples.

I think Camus talks about a few examples of the beginning of the Myth of Sisyphus, doesn't he?

He sort of mentions, I think, like one or two examples of some philosophers who wrote a tract.

He mentioned, I can't remember who it was.

He mentions who wrote a tract and then killed himself in order to bring attention to his work.

But it didn't work because no one liked the work anyway.

Philip Mainlander killed himself.

But I don't know if that, I can't remember if that's what he's talking about.

I can't remember who's who Camus talking about.

But no, you tend to find that people who are genuinely committed.

I mean, Camus says in the Myth of Sisyphus, for the man who does not cheat, what he determines to be true must determine his action.

So if you become convinced that life is not worth living and you're certain.

enough of that in order to kill yourself, then you're probably not going to sit around writing a book first.

So

it's sort of like self-selecting.

There's an interesting sort of evolutionary deselection for views like this and for views like antinatalism.

And again, Bennetter addresses this.

It doesn't affect the truth of the claim, but it means it will never take off.

Memantically, it's cancerous.

Exactly, yeah.

Which in reverse is the explanation, I think, for the general optimism that sort of

just

pools exactly to some degree.

I mean, there are people who are not optimists, but they're not quite pessimistic enough to fully commit to the bit, as it were.

And if they are, then they select themselves out of the the meme pool.

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I had a conversation with a gentleman who his entire theory of human evolution,

human cultural evolution, is that human culture is almost expressly built around helping people to not take their own lives and that our system is too.

And we got halfway through the episode and he, it's the only time this has ever happened.

He bailed out of the episode partway through, had had a bad night's sleep and wasn't, he felt like he wasn't making a.

And I thought, well, that's kind of on brand for somebody who had this sort of a worldview that everything is about avoiding things going badly, that partway through an episode about it, he decided that it was going so badly that he didn't want to continue.

Yeah, yeah.

Another thing Camus says is that the meaning of life is literally whatever is keeping you from killing yourself.

Yes.

You know, and I think that's more or less true.

Yeah, why don't you kill yourself?

Yeah, and I think that there are

most people

who engage with that topic do so on an emotional level, and that's the motivation for these kinds of thoughts.

There are people who are just like intellectually interested in the worthiness of life, like whether it's worth worth living.

But that very rarely is actually

what's going on, I think, when people are seriously struggling with this.

And so, I don't know, it makes it a sort of difficult philosophical terrain.

But I think that people who are just interested in it intellectually often will appreciate someone who can just forthrightly discuss it.

Because a lot of the time it's like, you know, you open a...

open a YouTube video that's going to discuss abstractly the philosophy of suicide and it opens with a helpline.

It's like way to give away your position.

I think people will like loads of ideological bias in the suicide discussion.

But I think people want to feel like they're being taken seriously, right?

And if you come

with a philosophical or emotional conviction to the table and someone before you even get started says, hey, just so you know, like, you know,

we're going to move towards this direction, I think a lot of people would...

appreciate like a forthright direct approach, which is why so many people are attracted to the myth of Sisyphus by Camus, because it sort of

starkly opens with that,

you know there is but one serious philosophical question and that is suicide and it captures a lot of people's attention because even people who aren't feeling suicidal are like whoa yeah that's interesting you know and they just want to read about it in a in a position in a relatively straightforward way I unfortunately think it's pretty overhyped the myth of Sisyphus

why do you not like the myth of Sisyphus I

I sort of I don't have an aversion to existentialist philosophy sort of generally but it it sort of doesn't really capture me Like, I think that

I don't know.

I mean, I don't know if Camus like sufficiently answers the question.

His famous conclusion is: imagining Sisyphus happy, right?

And I just, I don't know if that's like a satisfying thought to me.

For some, it might be, but, but for me, it's, it's not.

It's just as, as meaningless as the situation that we, that we began with, you know, this, this sort of happy pushing of the boulder.

Um, I don't know.

Joe, you can probably make it.

Is there a bull case for,

well, just imagine this thing to be different.

Just play pretend until you believe.

It's like an act of rebellion for Camus.

It's almost like an existential irony, right?

Like he's sort of, you're just going to

enjoy the thing.

It's interesting, so I find the development of Camus' thought over time very interesting for this, because the myth of Sisyphus is often, you know, the thing that people take away is, of course, you know, imagining Sisyphus happy is such a famous image.

But a lot of the myth of Sisyphus is significantly more,

I don't know what the right word is, like more

intuitively abhorrent than that, if that makes sense.

And even to Camus.

So Camus writes The Myth of Sisyphus.

He paints a bunch of characters who are meant to be like absurd men.

And some of them are like really awful people, you know, like kind of philanderers.

Or, you know, one of them is kind of, you know, the actor who never becomes themselves and is just playing characters all the time.

And

there, and he has this idea of like, okay,

well, if you're an absurdist and

you think there's no objective or, you know, no way to say that one aspect of life is better than any other, you're kind of trying to live out valuelessness.

Well, then, in that case, Camus thinks, well, if you decided not to kill yourself, the only value that you're at least enacting is that life is better than no life.

And so you should value the quantity of life over the quality of life.

Now, of course, although that's not existential nihilism, that's pretty close to moral nihilism.

And Camus clearly is troubled by this because one of the next things he writes is a play called Caligula, which which is all about the Roman Emperor, a kind of fictionalized version of the Roman Emperor Caligula, going absolutely batching and killing lots of people.

And, you know, there are various analyses you can make of this.

When I read that,

I think, yeah, this is Camus wrestling with his own philosophy, and he's got it.

He's painted himself into a corner whereby you can only value the quantity of life and not the quality of life.

And then he's teasing out some of the...

The consequences of that.

And he's clearly not happy because he then writes books that are ostensibly attempting to go, no, hang on a sec.

We can't...

there are,

there are further things that we can do with absurdism that you can.

That wasn't definitive.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

And we just, you know, the Myth of Sisphus is one of the first things that Camus writes, along with The Stranger.

Oh, it's the difficult first album or something.

It's a second application of the outside album.

And it's it's and it is, you know, I like the myth of sisphus partly because it's so counterintuitive.

But some of his later works, things like The Plague.

The Plague is an amazing novel.

It's sort of it's it became like a bestseller with COVID for obvious obvious reasons.

And it's about a kind of a plague hitting the town of Oran in, I think it's, you know, in French Algeria, what was then French Algeria, and how people cope with that.

And

people are given various different analogical readings for this.

So one is to read it as an analogy for the Nazi occupation of France.

Another is to,

but part of the kind of

tying this back to the development of Camus' thought from the mythosisyphus, one way of looking at it is to say, well, these are lots of things that Camus thinks when the chips are down, people turn to.

One of them is friendship.

I'm very bullish on friendship generally.

But, you know, another one is kind of this kind of shared struggle.

There are bits in

the plague where they sort of say, okay, yeah, we're fighting a kind of nigh-omnipotent disease, but

we're going to fight it because that's the way that we're...

coping almost, you know,

in a time of kind of abhorrent struggle and people are dying around them all.

It feels like the human centipede of philosophical arguments.

A little bit, yeah.

And then Camus Writes The Rebel, which is

one of his later works, which is, again, discussing, you know, what can an absurdist coherently value without simply falling back onto a kind of leap of faith or something.

And I...

I really like those later works.

I'm not convinced that they actually are consistent with this earlier position he has of like kind of hardcore absurdism, but I do think they're still worth reading.

The thing that's actually like understated in a great deal of like philosophers who are now dead is like what they thought.

As if they just

lived for one year, wrote everything down and stayed the same.

We forget that people, like, you know, if you've ever thought about writing a book, and I'm sure we all at this table probably have at some point, one of the thoughts you have is like, you know, am I ready?

You know, is this the right time?

Because you recognize that whatever you write now in 20 years, at least some of it, you're going to want to revise or you're going to have changed your mind about.

And you're also going to have to answer to.

Exactly.

And it's, you know, you're going to have your your name in a bookstore and you have to grimace every time you walk past it i would probably be driven mad i'd like pull it off the shelf and scribble out the the paragraphs by hand yeah um

and this is is what humans do right and so when we talk about what camus thought as if his life consists of actually just that day when he finally said and done yes yeah yeah yeah it's like he's just had a he's just had a fantastically bad day and the car is just and he thought you know what Fuck it.

Let's go for it.

Yeah, like David Hume writes the, what's the first one?

The treatise concerning human nature.

And it's like this.

Did he spell human

with an E.

Because that would have been fucking brilliant.

It would have been, would have been properly bad.

Well, he didn't know much about PR because the book didn't sell.

And he later sort of revises his thoughts into the much shorter inquiry concerning human understanding.

The same kind of thoughts revisited.

And it's posited as like a sort of like an update.

And he tells people not to read the other one but some people think it's just because the first one kind of wasn't selling and in fact when I went to university they made us study the treatise because it's more like fleshed out but he literally like writes the kind of same thing again in different form later in his life and so there is always sort of development of thought with philosophers and we only tend to be aware of it when it's grand and dramatic when someone converts from one side to another when Anthony Flew becomes a theist or something but it happens throughout the history of thought too so like when you're reading a text by somebody, like if you're interested in their thought, like try to keep in mind some chronology of like when it was when it was written, because otherwise you might be reading, you know, The Goblet of Fire before you read The Chamber of Secrets and you're probably going to get the wrong kind of idea.

Sorry.

No, no, that's good.

Even someone like...

Plato, who we quite often think of as having a very strong, stable, consistent set of things.

Literally made out of marble.

One of his earlier works, which is both a kind of political treatise, treatise, but also a theory of the human mind, is called The Republic.

And then later, he writes a book that's also a political work called The Laws.

And you can see the development of his thoughts.

In The Republic, he's very focused on what makes a good ruler.

And in The Laws, he's very focused on, okay,

he'd had a quite a disillusioning experience with a tyrant called Dionysus, I think.

Cool, yeah.

In Syracuse, where he tried to...

Dionysus had invited him over twice, actually, and both times it went terribly.

And said yeah yeah like i'm really interested in being in being like a one of your like philosopher kings yeah like this sounds really cool you can help me rule better and then he shows up and and dionysus is just like drinking himself silly and um and and plato's like look like one of the really big things about being a kind of philosopher king is like temperance and and and and you know not gorging yourself and kind of staying because other how are you going to make like really good decisions if you're drunk all the time and dionysus kind of goes look i'm going to stop you right there like you don't understand i'm i'm in charge And like, you do what I say.

It's very unnatural.

And so Plato, and he basically kind of imprisons Plato for a bit.

And he eventually gets free.

And then he goes back.

And same thing happens.

And he flees.

And disillusioned by this, Plato writes the laws, which are much less concerned with what makes a good ruler and are much more concerned with if, you know, rulers come and go, how are you going to keep everyone in check?

These philosophers often have like extraordinary lives.

Why does Thomas Hobbes write the Leviathan?

Because he had to flee, him being a royalist during the English Civil War.

He has to flee to France because of the English Civil War.

And he writes this tract about how we should all submit to an authoritarian dictator, essentially, and who should be able to dictate everything with full submission, including religious affairs.

You've got to be aware not only of the chronology, but also the context.

Personal motivation.

And also, one other thing on this thread is beware that sometimes when you're reading people,

they're writing under the laws of a country.

Dostoevsky, his Notes from the Underground, one of the most famous of his books because it's so short and easy to read, originally contained a chapter which essentially argued for the necessity of Christianity as Dostoevsky saw it, but it was censored and taken out.

And so you end up with this sort of quite fully nihilistic tract.

But I think a lot of that is also going on historically too.

So beware that

these are human beings with developing thoughts and political considerations inspiring their writing.

When it comes to history of thought, is there someone that you think changed thinking forever, but was sort of useless in practice?

Like someone who contributed to moving thought forward most without having any real life applicability?

That's a tricky question.

I'm tempted to say in a non-insulting way, theologians, only because

only because,

like, obviously, if you're a believer in God, the nature of God will greatly affect some practical things in your life, the way that you worship.

You know, should you worship the saints or not?

Are you worshiping a tripartite, you know, God or a singular unity?

That kind of stuff will be important to your daily practice.

But if you're talking about in practice, like for society, as it were, then it's probably not particularly relevant to anyone who doesn't care about that kind of stuff.

So that sort of springs to mind.

But outside of that, I don't know, maybe some of the more abstract...

The name that actually sprung to mind was Bertrand Russell, which you might jump down my throat for.

But was he actually a practical philosopher?

Everything he tried to write in practice was awful.

Bertram Mussel is very, I suppose it depends on being by practical.

Bertsmaster was very important in the kind of history of studies of the foundations of mathematics and stuff like that.

And although

he wrote a three-volume insane project,

is it two or three volumes?

I always get confused.

Nobody's read the whole thing.

This is like, because it's deeply impenetrable.

It takes him like, what, 300 pages to prove that one add one is two?

Yes, it might, yes.

It's like, I think around a 200-page mark.

Which is quite a thing to do from first principles.

It's a a real battle of attrition.

It's a difficult, yeah, yeah.

But you know, but certainly.

It's like the terms and conditions of philosophy.

It's like no one actually reads it, but you kind of need it to be there because it's important.

And he writes that with Alfred North White Whitehead.

That's very influential.

Even though the grand project failed, there were some operators they coined that are very important.

Things like there exists a unique object such that, which is now very helpful in areas of maths.

So

not kind of helpful on an everyday level.

But a lot of Russell's academic writing is very much in philosophy of language, philosophy of maths,

foundations of mathematics, logic, you know, these which I think are very handy.

But, you know, it's not necessarily like you're going to read his theory of descriptions and then just be out and about being like, oh, yeah, like.

My life is so much better.

Okay.

So I guess even broader than that, are there some branches of philosophy that should be just jettisoned?

Entirely?

Any bits that are just intellectual cosplay, dead ends?

No, because

philosophy, if you find a philosophy useful, then it is useful.

That's kind of what is there.

It's like asking the question of sort of, you know, are there any music genres that you think

should get in the bin?

And the answer is no, because somebody's enjoying that, right?

Like, I'm sure it's useful to somebody.

But, you know, if we had to get rid of one of them, I don't know.

Maybe.

Pure logic puzzles?

Philosophy of mind?

Philosophy of mind is way too important.

A philosophy of mind is the next big thing.

It's excruciatingly boring for a lot of people.

I mean, we've talked about how it's quite difficult

to talk about it in a concrete way that you're not.

No one on YouTube likes it, and I can't work out whether it's because it's hard or because it's pointless.

You know, my audience have quite taken to the philosophy of mind.

I think because I have too, and so I've got this enthusiasm for it.

I think it's really important.

And I think, like, watch this space.

Sell me on philosophy of mind.

Just watch this space, as it were.

Sell me on it.

People are beginning to realize that consciousness, it's always been like, you know, you'll have someone and they'll say, like, consciousness, it's just such a mystery.

And like, you know, it's like trying to view the window pane through the window pane because we experience the whole world through consciousness.

That's interesting, but everybody kind of already knows that.

That's why we're at the table having the conversation.

There is a stark increase happening in the view that consciousness is, so to speak, fundamental.

Here's the interesting thing.

Yeah, so panpsychism, right?

And here's one interesting observation, which is that there are these clichés that crop up basically everywhere you look, right?

If you look at ancient vedic literature if you look uh at

a meditative monk who achieves enlightenment in the forest somewhere if you look at joe bloggs who took lsd last week and had like this insane experience at the peak of his hero dose they will say similar things which is this sort of cliché of everything is one, I am one with the universe, the ego death, the disillusion

of self-defense.

Exactly.

And this kind of stuff has been has been present

in

these philosophical traditions

from the beginning of history.

The pre-Socratics talk about it a little bit too.

And I think that we're beginning, like people are beginning to become much more open to the idea that there is something true about that.

And there's a reason why that keeps coming about.

Panpsychism is growing in popularity because the problem is, like, we believe that there is a world of matter and we know that we are conscious.

And you've got a few options available to you.

Either the consciousness is like a totally separate thing from the material, which makes it seem really weird.

Why does it interact with me?

If consciousness is literally immaterial, if it's not made of matter that like my brain and my body is, then it is a complete mystery how it would interact with my physical body.

It's not like it's floating around out there.

It has no spatial dimension.

It's not material.

It's another piece of matter that is not matter.

So the idea is some other kind of matter.

It is as mysterious that my mind would interact with my brain as it is, as it would be if my mind suddenly started interacting with your brain, or with that can of tasty new tonic on the table.

Like, it would just be like, what are you talking about?

If these are two separate kinds of things, you're talking about like taking the number two,

adding in a chair, and like getting, you know, the color orange.

It's just like just categories of different things that seem like they shouldn't be able to interact.

Okay, so then maybe...

the mind is just made out of material.

But then you run into some intuitive problems about the nature of thoughts.

You know, people keep coming at me because I like to sort of frough at the mouth over the thought of closing my eyes and imagining a triangle and asking where on earth that triangle is.

There are true facts about that triangle.

It's got three sides, right?

That's true.

It's really like, I can see it in my head.

It's true that it's got three sides.

But where is that triangle?

It's not just made up of the matter of my brain.

If I cut open your brain, I'm not going to find a triangle in there.

It's,

you can sort of find the material activity that's correlated with the experience of the triangle.

That's not the same thing as the triangle.

So you've sort of got this sort of barrier problem of where you get from this material stuff to this non-material stuff.

And the panpsychist says there is no barrier.

But instead of saying everything's made out of material and so is consciousness, they just say that everything is consciousness from the get-go and therefore you get consciousness.

The biggest myth for the panpsychist and other related schools in consciousness is that complexity is required for consciousness.

That might be the big myth that needs to dissipate.

And that argument that because the brain is the most complex thing, we know it's the one that's got the most consciousness.

It's got, it,

the things that we think consciousness is,

are actually sometimes just what consciousness does.

Okay, let me, let me, let me,

I'll explain it this way, right?

So, so if consciousness just means like some kind of experience, some kind of awareness, right?

When we talk about what makes somebody conscious, we might talk about things like

memory,

first person conscious experience, awareness, these kinds of things.

But like rudimentary consciousness on its own wouldn't necessarily require any of those things.

Imagine for a moment that you had no memory.

I don't mean like you forget what happened yesterday, like you've got dementia.

I mean literally no memory laid down in any instant.

What would that be like?

It's kind of impossible to imagine.

Imagine you were falling through the air and no memory was being laid down at any instant.

Would you even know that you were falling?

You'd have no sort of instant before to compare yourself with.

You wouldn't even know that you were a being.

You wouldn't know that your feet are part of you.

You wouldn't have, there's no time for that to happen.

You would literally like, it's impossible to even conceive of what the content of your thoughts would be.

They'd be the simplest possible thing that consciousness could experience.

And yet it would still be conscious and aware.

And so this, this

Like the laying down of memory is something that consciousness can do, which gives rise to more complex conscious behaviors, like our conversations and me knowing that, you know, we're in a building and that this is a microphone and that kind of stuff.

But that is not consciousness.

That's just one thing that consciousness does when it's complexly arranged.

So when we look at like a...

a rock and say there's no consciousness and look at a brain and say there is and it's because oh the brain is complicated the panpsychist says no consciousness is at the foundation of all of it you've just got more complicated consciousness which does things like memory and self-awareness and communication and you've got less complex consciousness, which just sort of, at the atomic level, just sits there and sort of fizzes around, right?

The analogy I sometimes give to explain this is imagine comparing the rock to the empire state building.

And we said, look at the empire state building with its complexity, with its elevators and cache machines, and it's got like light switches and electricity.

And you kind of think it's this, it can't be made of matter.

you know, because like a rock is made of matter.

No, it is still made of matter.

It's just arranged in a more complex way and so doing much more interesting things.

And our brains are like the empire state building of, you know, fundamental consciousness, which is you arrange it in a particular way, and suddenly it can do all these magical things, like have conversations and talk to each other.

But the panpsychus thinks that at root, it's consciousness.

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What do you make of panpsychism, Joe?

I like it in the sense that I think that it's kind of satisfyingly empirical, which sounds a very strange thing to say.

But, you know, ultimately, it's somebody saying, okay, we've got matter and mind.

It's very difficult to reduce mind to matter.

We can't deny that mind exists because it is in some sense the precondition for thinking thinking that everything else exists.

And so, right, if we can't reduce the two, we'll just have to make mind, you know, and matter play together.

So, I'm sympathetic in that sense.

I think that

for me, the aspect of the panpsychist approach that will probably need to be worked out in more detail.

Somebody probably has, because I'm not that well-read regarding panpsychism, is a kind of detailed account of what complexity amounts to.

So, like, you know, for example, you know,

we can arrange the brain brain and, you know, we have brains, they're arranged in a certain way.

You can arrange, you know, a series of rocks in that way.

You could try and simulate it with a kind of similar aspects of the mind with a binary gate system, stuff like that.

Like in what

I think that that kind of,

I worry that sometimes

a lot of the work is then being thrown at this notion of complexity, and that I sometimes think that the plausibility of the panpsychist program is going to rest on how that idea of complexity is cached out.

This may just be,

however, a neurological, a neuroscientific problem.

There's a guy called, a neuroscientist called

either Francisco or Francisco, I don't know, Francisco Varela, who his whole project is, okay, I want to try and contribute

to solving the hard problem of consciousness, which is the idea of, you know,

bridging the gap between the material world and felt experience.

And so he's going to try and do that by, and has been trying to do that, by charting as many possible neurological correlates as you can between phenomenologically reported experience and stuff going on in the brain.

And that's his whole, and he just kind of, and I have a lot of, I have a lot of sympathy for that,

partly because I think that, you know, no matter what your philosophical stance is, you're clearly going to have to deal with these findings.

You know, this, whether you think, as Varela does, that this will actually allow you to bridge the hard problem of consciousness eventually and that you'll be able to reduce mind to matter, or whether you're a panpsychist and this will help you with your, fleshing out your account of complexity.

I think that, you know, this is one of the reasons why the philosophy of mind, I think, is

in such a boom period, academic-wise, is because it's, I often think that philosophy is most helpful when it's interdisciplinary.

I really like, for example, the intersection between philosophy and linguistics, because I think that there's a real strength in taking empirical results from linguistics and empirical results from neuroscience and from psychology and looking at it through a philosophical lens, you know, trying to, you know, in very broad terms, I suppose, trying to see what it means and then applying it to different things.

You know, this is, I think that a lot of the best philosophy work occurs at the intersection of philosophy in different fields.

And specifically, I think philosophy and neuroscience is a very promising one.

And I think there's a lot of very good work being done there.

What else is that?

Because it felt to me,

when I say I started learning about panpsychism, who's the dude from Durham University?

Philip Goff.

Thank you.

So Philip is the first guy I had an entire conversation with about, and that was on his first book, 2019?

Yeah.

Long Galileo's era.

Yes.

And then he was the only one.

Panpsychist.

So that was was it.

But before then, I'd sort of

seen it, had a bit of an understanding about what it was.

Annika has done two books on it now, I think.

Something like that.

Annika, the way she conveyed it to me was like,

the only conclusion I can draw from my interviews on consciousness is that I have to take seriously the idea that consciousness is fundamental.

Not quite sure what that means.

And it sounds like

the theory of mind world.

Yeah, and she's totally materialistic and she's like, look, it sounds totally insane, but bear with me.

And she does this like, you know, 12-part documentary interviewing all these people and thinking, actually, there is something very, very strange going on.

The biggest problem for panpsychism is the so-called combination problem.

That's like the actual biggest critique that a panpsychist would recognize, which is

crucially, panpsychists don't really think that like everything is conscious.

They don't necessarily think this can is conscious as a unified entity.

They think that it's made out of consciousness.

The consciousness is the stuff of the universe out of which things are made.

You know, like calling this a can, this is an artifact.

We've put this together as human beings.

We've taken materials and arranged them.

So it's like there's nothing to say that it would get this unified center of consciousness.

That would be kind of weird, right?

If we took a bunch of consciousness and just put it together in this shape and suddenly it had a unified sense of consciousness.

That would be strange.

But that's what happens in the brain, according to the panpsychist.

Right.

So it's like if one person is in a field and a ton of other people are in different fields, and then you put them all together in the same field and

that's what's in one brain.

Exactly.

Like

Why does my consciousness, if my brain is made up of consciousness, then why, when it's arranged in a particular way, do I get this singular unified sense of self?

And why is it not that all three of our brains have a singular sense of consciousness?

And if we got close enough together, which we're not going to do,

then it would happen.

They call it the combination problem because it's like, how do they combine?

And interestingly,

maybe,

right?

Like, I don't know if you've come across these split brain patients.

I talk about these all the time.

We've got some evidence to suggest that you kind of

have two consciousnesses that are battling out with each other inside your very own brain.

So that's the interdisciplinary thing, like a lot of scientific research into the way that the brain works in weird cases like split brain patients.

Look into it, ladies and gentlemen.

It is freaky what your brain can do, like the two hemispheres of what they can do with it.

What's your favorite examples of this?

My favorite example of this are, so your brain, the two hemispheres of your brain are connected by the

corpus callosum, right?

It's the connective tissue, which actually does more to inhibit communication communication than facilitate communication.

There seems to be an evolutionary advantage to keeping them separate, right?

Some people, as a severe treatment for epilepsy, would undergo a corpus callosotomy, where you sever it, right?

This is what a split brain patient is.

It's someone who has the connective tissue severed.

They can still communicate through other means a little bit, but basically the communication is...

It's like a vertical decapitation.

Exactly.

Now, most people know that the left hemisphere governs broadly like the right visual field, and the right hemisphere broadly the left visual field.

Also, the right hemisphere is supposed to be the kind of like creative one

and the left one is the sort of rational mathsy one, bit of an oversimplification.

But take a split brain patient whose hemispheres aren't communicating properly.

You can show them something just in their right visual field.

So you like block off the rest of their view and you just show them something to the left hemisphere and vice versa.

So they've done some experiments on such people where they will, for example, show them a picture of an apple and they'll say, what can you see?

And they'll say, I don't know.

don't know what you're talking about and then you ask them to draw a picture of something and they'll draw an apple because part of their brain has seen it but part of it hasn't you will uh you will find

those kinds of cases but the most interesting to me I needed to say that to set it up

is a study that was done I can't remember what it was Anika writes about this

where they took a split brain patient and they showed one hemisphere of the brain an instruction.

It's an experiment, so you're ready to do an instruction, and the instruction just says something like, get up and walk over there.

So the person reads it, they get up, they walk over to the wall, and then you ask them verbally, why did you just walk over to the other side of the room?

And do you know what they say?

It would be weird if they said, I don't know, wouldn't it?

But they don't.

They give a reason.

They confabulate.

But they're not making it up.

They're not lying.

They're not like, oh,

they believe it.

They're like, oh,

I was trying to get some air.

It's kind of warm in here.

And they believe it.

So there's this idea that one hemisphere of your brain is the so-called interpreter, and that you've essentially got your brain working on

doing particular things.

Like you can imagine working on your emotive impulses.

You just do something because you just impulsively want to or instinctively feel it's the right thing.

And then your left brain comes in and retrospectively says, oh, no, no, no, this is the reason why I did that.

I've got good reason for that.

And you've kind of got these two parts of your brain governing different parts of your activity.

What's the implication of that, philosophically?

The implication of that is that consciousness might not be so unified as our sort of present experience leads us to believe.

You know, that the sort of unity of self might not actually be sort of what's going on in reality.

I have a pet theory that a lot of the reason why we feel like we're in our brains, it is the sort of center of our neural activity, of course, but I feel like the reason why we really experience ourselves as up here is because it's where our senses are, where our eyes are and our ears are.

I kind of imagine that if our eyes were like on our hips, we might sort of, and our ears were down there too.

We might sort of feel as though we were located in this.

Because that is where everything is being fed through.

Exactly.

It sort of feels like you're up here because that's where the information is.

A lot of weird, weird stuff to think about, this so-called combination problem.

I mean, there's a lot of weird stuff in experience.

Like, if I pinch myself in the hand, I feel it in my hand.

I'm told that it's my brain that's doing the experiencing, but I really feel it in my hand.

You know, it's very strange.

I think that poses a good analogy for those people who think that there is one consciousness or one like one self, like At-Man, which we're all sort of avatars of.

It's like the left hand, if I pinch it, my right hand doesn't feel it, but it is.

And that's within something that is supposed to be discreetly kind of its own

localized.

We are one thing, but I can get this localized pain in my left hand that my right hand doesn't feel like it.

So let's just scale that across the one thing that is everything.

Yeah.

I mean, people say, like, well, my consciousness can't be the same as yours because I don't have access to your thoughts and you don't have access to mine.

So they're separate minds, right?

But when you're asleep, you don't have access to your waking thoughts, but it's still the same mind, right?

There are a lot of like weird avenues to explore this unity of consciousness as this sort of fundamental

principle of the universe.

One of the interesting kind of correlates that, I mean, one thing that I find very interesting about

that kind of, you know, one part of

a lot of our conscious reporting is the kind of PR brain, so to speak, is that it reminds me me a lot of

kind of Nietzsche's picture of the will and of the mind, which is broadly speaking, that we kind of have a parliament of different drives and that

those drives

do what they will, so to speak.

There's not one will.

There's all of these forces pulling in different directions.

And then

once we've won out on a course of action,

we then justify that.

At least that's part of what Nietzsche thinks is going on.

I'm always reminded of that kind of split brain, going over to the other side of the room and saying, oh yeah, I went here because, you know, I want to look out the window or something.

It's like, yeah,

it's quite a surprisingly Nietzschean picture.

The other

part of having a picture of consciousness that is in some way combinatoric, so functionalism works like this, as does panpsychism,

is that in theory, you can start scaling things up quite extremely.

So

there's the,

it's known as the China brain experiment.

You actually need far more people.

It's just because China is the most populous country, but you need far more people than the amount of people in China to do this.

And the thought experiment goes that, say, you had billions and billions and billions of people, if you made them all behave like neurons, kind of, you know, they all had walkie-talkies or phones or something, and they were, you know, they'd say, you know, they'd give a code to someone else and they'd relay information that way, exactly like a brain would, would that give rise to a consciousness?

And I know, I think that's, that's a fascinating, partly because, you know, it may, it sounds crazy.

Well, there's a lot of complexity.

There's a lot of complexity.

It sounds absolutely insane, but also why not?

Isn't it just as insane that you can do it with atoms and get yourself a brain?

And also, you know,

we talk about things like hive minds and insects and things like that.

And we kind of, you know, it's, you know, you can say that's just a metaphor, but a lot of the time, you know, you describe it as if it's in some sense, you know, sharing a consciousness.

You had Peter Godfrey Smith on recently.

And something he says in his book is that

in an octopus, a huge amount of its neurons are in its arms.

So

I don't even mention this in the podcast.

I'm so sorry.

I haven't seen it yet.

But

one thing he says is he ponders

when an octopus gives an instruction to its arm, it kind of gives it the general vibe, and then the arm works out the details.

Because

what if the arm does it itself?

It seems like the arm sometimes is sort of feel it, and then sort of like, oh, what's that?

But interestingly, they sort of seem to be able to act independently in that way, but when they need to, they suddenly become unified.

When there's a predator, they can suddenly shoot together and swim off as fast as they can.

So it's like, it's separable when it needs to be, but unified when it doesn't.

And our brains probably do the same thing.

Why do we have two hemispheres?

And also, you know, just...

Because there's some utility in it.

And to build on that point, you know,

if we're scaling up to the idea, we talk about, or at least we're used to it.

It's kind of fallout of fashion.

But

a lot of the, you know, 19th century writing, not necessarily philosophy, just writers, very keen on the idea of spirits of nations and things like that.

You know,

Stondahl, the French author, travels around Europe and in his little notes he talks about like, oh yeah, the spirits of the German, you know, this bit of Germany and the spirit of Italy and, you know, that kind of, of, the spirit of the different regions, obviously not nations at that point, but the different regions that he's visiting.

And, you know, we think that's kind of quaint now and a bit funny.

It's, you know, it feels like, you know, largely it's kind of a collection of stereotypes.

It's kind of amusing to read.

But

the idea of, you know, having groups of people having animating principles and treating them metaphorically as bits of mind is, you know, is

a metaphor.

The idea that

groups of minds can coalesce to form something analogous to a mind, If you believe in that, that makes that metaphor a lot more substantial.

I mean, you know,

but then, you know, the further you go down this rabbit hole, the more interesting the questions become.

You know, could a bunch of people simulating a mind have a conscious experience?

You know, we think about it, you know, we think about the mind as having,

it's much easier to think about, you know, a group of, you know, 10 billion people having a thought or an idea than it is the idea of 10 billion people in this neurological configuration.

It's a unification theory issue.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

But like, I know, I think, you know,

the more emotion-based you ask those questions,

the less intuitive it becomes.

What I like about this as an example is that you can bring this down to your own experience.

It scales in that way, because is it,

can you make one of your neurons have a thought?

Yeah.

Like, can that localized part of this localized part feel anything?

Because you can, kind of.

Yeah.

Okay.

But what about if you do individual nodes nodes and then you think well if we scale it up where is and this makes sense with the the combination problem it's a little bit weird to think about right and interestingly david hume maybe this isn't as boring as you as i accused it of being david hume didn't think that you would know like hume the famous empiricist um

like yeah there's a lot to say about hume but he he thought for example if you had no experience with the world if you just you know had a pain in your big toe or something and you'd had no experience before, you wouldn't know it was in your big toe.

It's like it's a really weird sort of implication of Hume's view, which I think is ridiculous.

It's one of the many things that Hume says, which is completely ridiculous.

He thinks that you essentially need to have this experience, which you then know, you realize has been due to something happening in my finger.

And that allows you to draw that memory.

I think memory is the key to a lot of this consciousness.

Memory is.

It allows you to string this sequence.

Yeah, and when we think about memory, again, we think about it in terms of like remembering what you did yesterday, but I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about remembering, like, remembering the instant before this instant.

which when you start thinking about it in those terms it becomes revolutionary if if you imagine yourself falling as we were picturing earlier with no memory you'd probably act and and according to the panpsychist experience the world a lot like the can would that not

but would that not preclude a boltzmann brain Would it preclude a Boltzmann brain?

Yeah, just that if they coalesce into this single form for such a short space of time, how is it if it didn't exist prior to that?

Oh, their argument would be the neurons are created in such a way that as if you had memories prior to that.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Right.

Okay.

So you understand what I meant by that.

Like if it's so transient then but encoded in its transient

fake memory.

Yeah, exactly.

I want to point out that we're talking about this in the context of like panpsychism and this all of it sort of woo-woo and people are like, this is totally crazy.

But the kind of like the example Joe just gave of the, what do you call it, the China problem?

It's called the China brain.

Like we brought this up in the context of panpsychism, but most people listening to this are probably materialists to some degree about consciousness.

They will probably think, you know, I think that consciousness is just emergent of material, a bit like how, you know, zeros and ones become a picture on a screen, something like that.

This example kind of poses a challenge to that because it's like, if you believe that you can just take atoms, put them in a particular order and get a unified conscious experience of pain,

then why can't I do that with individual brains, put them together in a particular way and get a unified experience?

In the same way that you can make a triangle out of wood or out of stone or out of metal.

You know, if you define something relationally, what you're making it out of ceases to be as important.

Exactly.

If consciousness is just an arrangement of atoms, then you should be able to get consciousness out of an arrangement of atoms in other ways.

And if you think that's not true, then you either have to explain why it's different

or, I suppose, abandon materialism or abandon the view that consciousness is in fact emergent and is not somehow fundamental.

Maybe this is...

It might just be the messenger.

It might have been the messenger so far.

Sorry to everyone that's done theory of mind that's come on my podcast because it's like five or ten people.

I think it might actually be like the next sort of big thing.

I'm excited about this idea.

I think it's fun.

I mean, I think

there's a lot to dislike about it too, of course, but like it's exciting and I think people are interested in it.

Well, the

first thing that it gives everybody is I have always had questions about my own experience.

Everyone is always kind of narcissistic when it comes to that.

And this is the most direct you're ever going.

Why am I a thing?

Why do I feel anything at all?

Why do I sort of exist in that way?

The other thing that I'm very interested in, which is one of your pet theories, is emotivism.

Can you explain emotivism to me like M12?

So emotivism is a kind of a theory about ethics and a theory about language.

We've been talking so far about sort of what stuff is made out of.

And there's lots more to be said about that, by the way, like why everything is.

made out of consciousness and how we even get there.

That's like a kind of metaphysical question.

In the realm of ethics, like what's good, what's bad, what should you do, what shouldn't you do, everyone's familiar with that kind of language.

If I say like, you know, it's bad for you to

kick a homeless person on the street, you kind of understand what I'm saying.

You get what I mean.

But a philosopher will hear that statement and try to break it down.

What literally do we mean?

What does this word like bad mean?

The ethical emotivist is someone who thinks that ethical statements are just expressions of emotion.

It means that when you say something is good or bad or that you should or shouldn't do something, all of that moral language is a kind of emotional expression.

A big confusion about this

is that

suppose I think that, suppose I just don't like murder.

I just don't like it, right?

Ethical subjectivism says that when I say murder is wrong, I mean to say something like, I don't like murder.

That is a reporting of my mental state that I don't like it.

Ethical emotivism is not a reporting of your emotional state.

It is the expression of the emotion itself.

So it's the difference between saying, I don't like murder and going like, ugh, murder.

Like literally expressing it.

Because when I say I don't like murder, that's a claim that you can investigate.

Is that true?

Is it true that I don't like murder?

Maybe I'm lying to you.

Maybe it's false, right?

So it's sort of, it can be true, it can be false, it's a fact about my psychology.

Whereas the expression of distaste for murder, just going, as it famously has been, boo, murder, is not the kind of thing that can be true or false.

You can't really like like debate it exactly.

It's just an expression.

And the emotivist thinks that that's what's going on with ethics.

So A.J.

Ayer is kind of the father of this emotivist theory in the 20th century.

And

it's only one part of his philosophy, but it's probably what he's most remembered for.

And so he compares saying, like, the difference between saying murder and saying murder is wrong.

is a bit like the difference between saying murder and then saying murder with an angry emoji and three exclamation marks.

It's It's just this like emphasis on something.

So, okay, why think this, right?

Like why, why would you, why would you believe this?

Well, pay attention to what your brain is doing when it moralizes.

If I walk down the street and I kick a homeless person, you will notice a fact about the world, which is that I have just kicked a homeless person.

And you could be completely, like, morally, emotionally detached from that.

You could just report as a fact, if you were like a robot, it's a true fact.

Alex just kicked a homeless person, right?

But if you think that it's wrong,

there's something more going on.

You think Alex just kicked a homeless person and

what's the extra thing?

What is that extra thing that makes you say that it's wrong?

Well, I think that if you pay attention to what your brain is doing in those instances, it's something that belongs in the category of emotion rather than that kind of rational thought.

Like that extra bit that's making you say it's wrong versus just reporting it.

Is that extra bit more like, you know, when you burn your hand and take it away or when you get angry at someone for doing something?

Or is it more like two plus two is four and the sky is blue?

Like, which of those is it more like?

I think it much more strongly belongs in the category of emotion.

And so that the actual isolated moral element of the statement, it's wrong to kick a homeless person, is an ethical expression.

Okay.

An emotional expression.

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If emotivism is true,

does that mean that morality is just vibes?

More or less, yeah.

Although Sport, I think that the one thing's worth noting is that even if you put forward this emotivist thesis, it doesn't necessarily mean that anything goes.

So

we're very quick to say that.

Yeah, because that's an obvious sort of follow-on.

Well, just because we're very quick to generally say, okay, something is, I'll say subjective

in the sense that, you know, I say it's different from subjectivism, but

somebody can say boo and another person can say yay, at least in theory.

But of course, there are constraints on this.

I think that sometimes we get very caught up in ideas about objectivity and subjectivity.

And actually, sometimes

I think what we're actually often getting at is the difference between stability and instability.

So,

like, most people think that beauty is subjective in some way, right?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, famously.

And there are people that dispute that, but that's a pretty majority view.

It doesn't follow from that that you can, in fact, find anything beautiful.

You just like try.

If you try and look at a dog turd on the street and just be like, there's so many more analogies than dog turd related, but

a dog turd on the street and just try and find it beautiful.

And you'll find that you can't.

And so.

Plausibly, there are still restrictions on the kind of things that people can and in fact do find beautiful.

And so you kind of say, it doesn't follow just from, yeah, if you're an emotivist, it doesn't follow just from the fact that,

or the idea putting forward that all ethical statements are emotional expressions, that this means that we're going to have total chaos and that everyone's going to value different things.

There are plausibly just pragmatic constraints on the kind of things that people feel moral disgust about.

Which is going to cause some kind of consensus.

Yeah, so I mean, you know, the class, I mean, one, I mean, one way of looking at it is the

tribe of 150 people that say yay murder aren't going to be, they're not going to last very long.

They're going to to be out-computed by people who are very boomer.

Cancerous memes here.

Yeah.

These kinds of responses function in a similar way to ethical subjectivism, which like most people are familiar with this idea that some people think that ethics is real.

Maybe it's given by God.

Maybe it's inscribed into the foundation of the universe.

And some people think, no, we essentially kind of make it up.

And the debate is always this practical one.

Like, well, then, you know, how can you say that this was wrong?

How can you say that that was right?

Some people just say, well, you can't.

So one thing to note is that it may be true that if we all became became emotivists, the world would become a complete disaster and people would just start being self-indulgent.

That wouldn't make it untrue.

It would just make it not very practical to believe.

And therefore, maybe, you know, we should cut this segment and not let anyone hear about it, right?

But if you're asking what is true.

By coding human work.

What is true?

It will evolutionarily self-deselect.

So

it's not...

If it were actually a bad thing to believe, that doesn't mean that it's not.

It's fault if they've had a lot of emotivists' ancestors, but they maybe didn't stick about.

Yeah, or like if it is, in fact, something that would lead to this sort of, this arbitrary disaster.

Do you think it does?

No, for a few reasons.

Partly because I agree with you.

I mean, people will be listening to this going like, well, I think I could see a dog shit as beautiful in the right sort of context.

And I think that's true.

But the point remains that there are things that you find beautiful that you can't just choose to not.

And there are things that you don't find beautiful that you can't just choose to become beautiful.

I think there is a degree on fundamental matters of like

somewhat universal agreement in the same way that we kind of broadly agree on many artistic points.

Right.

We might have, you know, I don't like impressionism and I think Van Gogh is overrated, but broadly speaking, we have an idea of one piece of art being like, you know, a good, beautiful piece of art and one thing like not really being a piece of art at all.

But of course, there's so much room for subjectivity there that on the moral particulars, you run into a problem.

How do I think this can be addressed?

Well, one important thing to note is that A.J.

Ayer talks about this.

Most moral debate, because this is the thing that you undercut, the ability to debate morals, to say, I think I'm right and you're wrong.

If it's all just feeling, you can't do that.

You're just feeling.

So you can't morally debate.

Aya points out that the vast majority of moral debate that you hear on a regular basis is not actually moral debate.

It's debate about facts, which then inform your moral view.

So imagine you're having a debate about gun violence in America.

The debate might sound something like, you know, did you know that,

you know, if we criminalized guns, then gun-related deaths would drop by 10,000 every year.

Oh, but, you know, having a swimming pool is more dangerous than having a gun.

These are factual claims that you can test.

You can run statistics and you can find out whether they're true or false.

And a lot of the debate consists in that sort of factual disagreement.

But the actual moral element isn't actually being brushed up against.

What people are trying to do there, which would, I guess, at least reinforce the emotivism view, is get further up the stack from someone's emotive outburst and say, well, actually, the facts that your emotions are based on are different.

Let me change those facts and see what happens.

Exactly.

And it would just bring about a new emotional state.

Because suppose you were like, you, you were, you were really scared of getting on a train, and I said to you right now, oh, we're going to go to Edinburgh, and you felt an emotion of fear, and then I just told you a fact, which is, oh, we're going to get the plane instead.

Your emotion would change.

I haven't like convinced you on an emotional level.

I haven't like changed your emotions exactly.

I've changed facts, which then dictate what your emotional state is.

Presumably you could also teach me some things about the safety record of that.

That's also true, which would change your emotional state without just you saying, I'm scared of trains and me being like, no, you're not.

And then we have a debate.

That doesn't make any sense, right?

That's not actually how it goes.

And that's actually not how it goes in morality a lot of the time.

Because if you find two people who are debating about guns, and one says that, you know, if we have guns on the streets, then, you know, people are going to get attacked.

And another person says, yeah, but when somebody's attacked, like, do you only want the bad guys to have guns?

Don't you want good people to be able to defend them?

What's the like moral boo and yay there?

It's something like, you know, boo, innocent people dying, you know?

Like, they probably agree on that.

And then it's just sort of a factual dispute of what will sort of bring about that, that innocent people dying.

So does that suggest that people's moralities aren't actually as divergent as we think they are?

That most people agree on most things when it comes to morality?

Not necessarily.

It's actually a very difficult question to answer.

The thing I'm intending to get across here is that if it is the case that there is this big problem with something like emotivism, that it doesn't allow us to have these debates and say that people are wrong, I think that it would be much more restricted than people would first imagine.

Because you first think, gosh, I can't say, you know, I can't say that you're wrong to do it.

I can't say that you're wrong to steal that apple from the store.

I can't say that you're, you know, it's a good thing to, you know, walk your wife home or something.

You know what I mean?

Like, that's not the case.

If there were some kind of disagreement that we were unable to resolve, it would be much more foundational and much more broad.

That might exist.

It might not.

Our evolutionary psychology might be such that we, on the most fundamental levels, like basically are made of the same stuff.

But it does seem plausible to me that there could be genuinely irresoluble, like, foundational value complex.

I suppose one potential candidate for that would be the notion of rights versus consequences, which is a sort of, you know, so.

Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.

One way, one way of, you know, a lot of

is say I'm having an argument with someone about, I don't know, let's do the gun control example.

I know nothing about the facts on the ground about gun control.

But one thing somebody might say is just, no, I have a right to this.

And

that would be an ethical statement and thus an expression.

But people do use that in a kind of load-bearing, justificatory way.

I think that would be one example of a...

of a type of moral disagreement that emotivism would struggle to accommodate.

You might be able to get it in someone's.

I would find that it would break down.

Because I agree with you.

You break it down to like, you know, someone ultimately isn't just going, boo, innocent people dying, dying, because that's a sort of consequentialist view.

Like, innocent people dying, that's a bad consequence, boo.

Another person might be like, boo, taking my rights away.

And that would actually conflict.

However, I think that's one person's priority and another person's priority and who trumps.

But I do think that both of these, in fact, are not actually foundational, right?

Because you've got to break down this concept.

You say, boo, innocent people dying.

And I can think of 10 examples off the top of my head where you'd be okay with an innocent person dying.

And likewise, boo rights are notoriously difficult to actually justify or ground.

So if you had further conversation with these people, you might find that the emotional motivation that has led one person to innocent people dying is bad and another person to, you know, rights being violated is bad is actually the same wellspring, as it were.

And if that's the case, then this problem goes away.

It might not be the case, though.

And then you are left with this problem of like value conflicts that can't be resolved, but it's much more restricted and would probably operate on the level of like societies rather than individuals.

Which guess what?

it does and we kind of like just accept that some societies have different morals and some some don't

i suppose the other at least on the particulars the other

the cannibals we we don't well the the other the other the other um potential issue you might find is is that

it it is entirely possible that we just have a non-foundationalist moral psychology so on that we've kind of said oh well you know maybe we won't end up disagreeing because we'll get down to fundamentals but i would potentially you know it's certainly a possibility that that we have just loose branches of moral statements you know like i was thinking about you know um that's a good example so

like the the example that was it did i think this in jonathan height's book uses the example of he takes a bunch of consequentialists and then um asks them about like con like the kind of theoretical consequence-free incest scenario yes where um where you know which basically just never exists in real life but in this kind of lab laboratory setting he kind of posits it and he often finds that you know that that's that's a kind of, that's something that people will condemn regardless of the foundation, their stated foundation to morality.

So that's, that's one potential

counter.

You talked to Simon Blackburn recently.

Is he still calling himself a quasi-realist?

He actually regrets inventing that term.

Okay, what does he call himself now?

I'm not sure what he actually calls himself now.

I think he's still a non-cognitivist.

Blackburn is a is a

is a non-cognitivist of a kind of emotivist.

He's got a lot of interesting things to say about that.

I just did a whole episode with him, so you know, watch it.

I think what you just said, what did you just say?

Was a realist before that?

Oh, about the idea of

it's possible that our the ethical statements that we will boo and hooray at are

not a foundational structure.

Oh, yeah, indeed.

In emotivism, we would we might expect that to also be the case in emotivism.

Because whereas

whereas in a kind of standard cognitivist picture of ethics, we come to our ethical propositions through having a kind of base level set of ethical principles that we believe are true and then derive our ethics from that.

And emotivist kind of throws out that picture entirely.

So another

explanatory problem you might posit for ethic, for emotivism in ethics, which is basically a variant on Frege Gietsch, which would be like, oh, well, we have this whole inferential setup for our...

ethical propositions that we don't for emotions.

You know, do

it doesn't, you know,

I don't get angry because I've inferred anger from some kind of previous emotional principle.

I might get angry because somebody does something that I perceive to be an injustice, but

that's going from a thing that I believe to be true.

And that kind of this whole inferential structure that our ethics seems to follow.

And at the very least, we want our ethics to follow as an ideal.

We hold people being ethically inconsistent as a bad thing, seems to rely on some kind of underlying intuitive cognitivism.

So there are like...

There are different problems you can have with emotivism and non-cognitivism and ethics more generally, but there are responses to those problems.

And I think some of them are.

One good proof of emotivism might just be the incest question.

It's famously difficult for people to deal with incest, and it's always funny watching people sort of wriggle, thinkers on stage, when somebody's brave enough to ask the question, why it's wrong.

Consequentialists are notoriously bad at justifying this, and they'll say things like, well, because, you know, incest leads to having disabled children.

In response to which there are a few questions.

Firstly, what's wrong with having disabled children?

Secondly, you know, obviously, what about the, like, in cases where procreation is not going to be possible?

That's obviously like a side issue.

We can obviously correct, oh, well, there's like a power imbalance between, okay, we can obviously just like just answer the question, right?

You know what I'm asking you, and people can't do it.

The emotivist, but bear in mind, this is one of the most universal taboos in the world, is the incest taboo.

It's like everywhere.

Interestingly, some societies have variant forms where it's like it's okay to marry your older sister, but not your younger sister, stuff like that.

It's kind of weird.

I mean, famously, cousins were in the royal family, were they?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I mean, cousins have always been a sort of

a sort of

stick in the mud for this.

Like people don't seem to care so much about cousins historically, but quite clearly like they're the Goldilocks zone of familial relationship.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

For keeping it in the family.

Yeah, you know, they're close enough that you know them.

You don't have to actually go that hard looking.

Exactly.

You end up with these 15th century monarchs with chins out.

It's true, it's true.

So they say.

But clearly, there is this universal taboo, and most people just instinctively think it is just

Well, what's the word?

Realistically, what's the word?

It's something like it's just gross, man.

It's just

it's not the emotivist says, yeah,

that's what's going on, right?

And so the wrongness of incest, when you recognize how difficult it is for people of a non-just prescriptivist moral theory, like if you're if you're a believer in God who thinks that it's just revealed that it's the wrong thing to do, then fine.

That still doesn't actually explain why it's wrong, just tells you that it's wrong.

But for any secular ethicist, it's notoriously notoriously difficult when you select out those other factors.

And so if I ask you, Chris, like, if you think incest is wrong, I don't know what you would say.

I'm an only child, so it's actually really difficult to difficult to...

I've thought about this

a little bit.

It was you that first taught me about the incest question, and then Jonathan Haidt kind of, like, I read it in full.

Two things.

First off,

the reason that humans feel incest aversion is because of something called the Westermark window.

Familiar with this?

Okay, so the Westermark effect is

young children that are raised together that spend sort of infant and young child years in close proximity, especially if they see their mother raising another child.

They have sexual aversion to them.

This is adaptive, right?

You do not know who your sister is.

You don't know who that person is.

What you do know is that that particular individual was fed and cared for by your mother and you played with them and they were around between zero and 10 years old.

This leads to some pretty difficult situations.

If you have twins or brother and sister that are separated at birth, they've missed this Westermark window.

They do not have sexual revulsion.

Now, cognitively, they might, but that like ick that apparently people who have brothers and sisters, I don't have a brother or a sister.

So I don't like to me, that innate sense, when you do this, anytime that you do the incest question, people's faces start to sort of squeeze a little there is

I feel this is the one time in my life that I feel like a psychopath for you the incest question is just intellectual masturbation precisely specifically intellectual

but there's no

not to get not to get like I don't like to make the examples like this personal but I mean you have parents you know like that's true surely the thought of

without going any further with that sentence you you get what I'm driving at like there is a there is there is I can map that on but there's something you can that's true.

But anyway, Western Mark window, really interesting.

So if you have a brother and sister, or specifically the classic sort of daddy issues thing, daughter and father, dad beat dad, dad leaves, dad comes back in.

Oh, right, now.

Sometimes this happens and they don't even know, you know, adoptive kids, so on and so forth.

And

you end up finding, because there is a kind of resonance that's in that.

You think, wow, like this person just seems so like me.

And it's like, yeah, they share quite a lot of your genetics.

Well, look, but the thing is, like, I think there are all kinds of explanations you can give for, like, why this taboo has emerged.

But, like, there are explanations for things that

do not

equate to justifications for things.

You know, I could explain why human beings have an inherent racial bias, you know, because when you're living in tribes, it makes sense to be suspicious of other people.

So I can explain evolutionarily why somebody might be a bit racist.

But most people think, actually, that's wrong.

Like, we don't want to do that.

So it's not a justification for it.

It's an explanation for why it exists in the human psychology.

So you can explain why the incest taboo exists in the human psychology and why it cropped up in some areas and not others.

But if you think it's wrong, I'm going to ask you why.

And as an emotivist, I can, I can, if someone says, well, I just think it's, I've had this conversation with people in the pub and they say, they give me an emotivist answer.

They say, but it's just, it's, it's just disgust.

It's disgusting.

That's your brother.

You know, that's just, it's just, I'm like, yeah, exactly.

And it's, it's like one of the most, I think, compelling cases for emotivism.

Everybody's laughing as an emotivist when it comes to to the incest question.

Or rather, they're LARPing as something else until it comes to the emotivist.

Yeah, so much of it actually breaks down to emotion.

There are lots of reasons for that.

So you mean you identify as this?

An emotivist, to be clear.

Yes.

Yeah, not that.

Yeah, I think so.

I find it.

Have you got some sort of qualifier, quasi?

I've got kind of philosophical commitment issues.

I find it very difficult to call myself anything, really.

You're sort of philosophically non-monogamous.

Yeah, not just because, not, not just on a practical level of like, oh, you'll be held to it and people will, but just because, like, you know, who, who bloody knows, man?

Like, realistically, who because we like to put labels on things.

Yeah, that's right.

Um, like, we like to put labels on emotions, such as good and bad.

I mean, I think one way I've, I've tried to explain this, and why I do call myself an emotivist, and say, yes, I am one, but, like, you know, pending corrections, as it were,

I would, you know, drop it in a moment if there were sort of good evidence against

agnostic.

Yeah, like,

emotivist with a degree of

confidence.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think if you imagine what it would be like if we didn't have a word for anxiety, just like there was no word for it, right?

And you were feeling anxious, you would try to describe your feeling to me by using other emotional terms.

You'd say like, oh, well, I feel a bit, it's sort of like sadness, but I'm like excited.

I don't really know how.

And so you isolate that feeling, give it its own word.

So if I ask you, in that kicking the homeless person case, what is the extra thing you're feeling other than just the knowledge of the descriptive fact that I kicked the homeless person?

You'd be like, well, it's something like

no or something like stop or don't or do or gross.

And it's none of those things, but it's something a bit like that.

So we sort of put a box around this feeling and give it a label.

And I think we've done that.

And that label is bad.

And so

you

kind of, it belongs in that category.

One big mistake people make, I think, with emotivism is that you say that ethics is an expression of emotion.

I don't mean that bad or shouldn't maps on to pre-existing emotions that we know of like you know boo and anger and frustration.

It's its own unique emotion.

Those are just like in that it belongs in that category, right?

People often think that an emotivist thinks that murder is wrong means something like expressing anger or distaste or disgust.

It's not.

It's its own unique thing.

It's expressing wrongness, which is its own thing distinct from those things, but it belongs in that category.

It's a kind of emotion.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, I do.

I do.

I'm interested.

Is there a philosophy of influence?

Because you two are both influential, study this stuff.

Do you have a responsibility that is philosophically interesting, given that you are supposed to be at least in some way sources of insight around the study of ethics, the study of logic, the study of philosophy?

Is there an additional level of responsibility that you have as the closer to the source of where this comes from to be extra highly scrutinous with the way that you sort of put ideas across and what you talk about?

I suppose.

I mean,

I suppose there's a base level of trying to be accurate, right?

You know, you try and get things right.

Inevitably, you sometimes get things wrong, but you try and get things right.

I think that,

you know, I think that's...

I think another thing that

I'm very keen on when presenting philosophies is to try and get across that

this is only really a starting point, right?

This isn't me from your computer screen telling you what's definitely true about the nature of the life and the universe that being ridiculous.

But that hopefully, if you find some of this helpful or you find some of this insightful, it will be kind of gristed for the mill of your own thinking.

I'm very like, I think that,

I think this about a lot of,

you know, people quite often talk about things like videos on YouTube or podcasts or various different types of just disseminating media

will sort of react with a little bit of skepticism.

People do this about news articles and journalisms,

where they sort of say something like, oh yeah, but

you know,

there are flaws within this medium.

You know, your errors will creep in, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And they're certainly right.

And I think that the

one of the

one of the appropriate responses that I feel to that is to is to

try and front load a kind of

a statement of your own fallibility so that inevitably like you get things wrong.

We all get things wrong.

This is a justice privilege thing that we were talking about.

Yes, yeah.

And I think it's important to say that because quite a lot of,

you know, you're on...

you're on, you know, you're on YouTube, you're at the very least presenting yourself as knowing more than the viewer about something.

And so it's very easy.

All of the kind of implicit signals there are saying,

I know, I am right.

Listen to me, position of authority.

I am authority.

And I think that it's, I think that it's, if in order to kind of

do what I want to do, which is to largely get people doing this philosophy for themselves, and for this to just be something that they look back on in five years and think, oh, yeah, that was a kind of quaint starting point, but now I'm much further along than that.

I don't need this anymore.

Part of doing that is to front-load the idea that you're wrong, you don't have the fight, you might be wrong, you don't have the final word, this is just a smattering of the literature, et cetera.

So you see yourself as kind of the the child's hulk hogan play set of lifting weights before someone actually goes and gets a gym membership well i suppose the thing is that you know you're never going to be able to get you're never going to be able to like

compress all of the complexity of even a single philosopher into like a 30-minute youtube video um it's just not possible there's just they're all very complicated but

you might be able to give people a general idea and also hopefully put them in a position whereby if they choose to go and look at that philosopher or that philosophy or that philosophical question for themselves they are then slightly better equipped to do that.

And, you know, hopefully if they find some of it helpful, it helps them in their everyday life.

It might do it, it might not.

But

that's what I tend to think.

I think that

no medium of communicating any kind of information is perfect.

And I think that a lot of the way that I like to react to that is to just front-load the flaws if they're not obvious.

I mean, you know, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.

Yeah, like,

you know, public debates are a bit like that.

You know, the public debates have numerous flaws, right?

They are

oftentimes people be persuaded by emotional rhetoric rather than strict logical reasoning because that's just part of how we're wired.

I don't think that that's necessarily a problem until we start pretending that public debate is something that it's not.

As long as we bear that in mind.

Some unique insight into wisdom and accuracy.

Yes, exactly.

As long as we're not watching.

God's the guy who does debate very regularly.

But I think you pretty much shared my view on this as well.

There's nothing wrong with theater, you know, but you've got to know that that's what you're doing.

What's your thoughts on this?

You know, if we're moving into a world with philosophers as influencers, surely the platform comes with a huge ethical duty not to mislead, given that ethics is part of the source code of what you guys, at least in part, are supposed to do or be remotely educated in.

Yeah, I mean, look, we find it interesting and fun, and there's a kind of academic

duty to not mislead, not misrepresent people's opinions and that kind of stuff.

If you're going to reduce this down to do as I say, not as I do.

No, no, no.

It's the reason I trip over myself

to indicate my agnosticism, even about things I believe.

It doesn't mean I don't have an opinion, but it means that I could be talked out of it at any moment.

I do that with something as inert as like meta-ethics, because earlier today we spoke for five or ten minutes about suicide.

And there's somebody listening to this podcast for whom that's going to be the most significant discourse that they've heard on the subject, possibly in their life, probably in the past.

few days and you know past month or year or so um if somebody's thinking about that a

you might have some influence over their thoughts on an issue as important as that that's not something to just sort of piss about with you know um it's serious this stuff matters to people and it's worth remembering that

sometimes philosophy is just people in this sort of intellectual playground having a bit of fun and there's nothing wrong with that but it's not always that and if it is always that then you're kind of probably wasting your time in idle leisure and you should do something more constructive um

You always end up castigating, you always end up sort of finger wagging after a little while.

Yeah, but you've asked me to reflect upon my own sense of duty and I think that you need to wag your own finger in the mirror every now and again and remember that like it's great fun and I love what I do and it's it's it's an amazing thrill and beautiful opportunity to be able to make a living doing things like this.

But it's not all fun and games.

Like it does come with a kind of a duty and a responsibility that it's easy to forget about because here we are having a conversation.

We talk about this stuff all the time.

We're We're going to, you know, go off to the pub and forget about it later on today.

But

that's not the case

for everyone.

Do you think of philosophy?

Do you think of certain areas of philosophy, or maybe

most areas of philosophy, as kind of like information hazards in that way?

I think that information hazards are a bit of a.

I mean, we were talking about

the concept of overrated philosophical ideas or ideas that should, you know,

get in the bin.

And I kind of think information hazards are one example.

Oh, nice.

I think

it's sort of part of this whole AI hype that a lot of it is just sort of sensationalist and I think doesn't have a very good grounding.

You know the analogy that I mean, though, like a high-potent cognitive specifically not a, not

a, not an information hazard in that literal sense, but yeah, like there are, maybe there are things that are sort of not worth knowing or not worth exploring, right?

There are topic areas which just aren't worth

sort of getting into.

But that's sort of for you to decide whether you find it interesting, whether you find it worthwhile.

I don't know.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, as it were, as Newton said, in that I've seen myself as a communicator of ideas.

I don't really say anything genuinely novel or unique.

There's nothing new under the sun.

I'm just trying to communicate other people's ideas.

So my principal responsibility is trying to do so in a way that makes sense.

Like, why am I talking to people about this?

There must be some application for why I'm doing it.

But I think, yeah, being a communicator rather than somebody who's trying to put a steadfast view into the world makes it a little easier.

Is that just a very slippery way of never having to actually stand your ground?

Maybe.

But if

in order to be successful in any field, including my own, I would have to plant my feet firmly in the ground and say, this is what I believe, and I don't think that I'm wrong about it, then I'd probably give up and go home, at least for now.

I mean, maybe I'll feel that way one day, but for now at least.

I mean, you know, the idea that

the idea that a 26-year-old philosophy YouTuber would like

know anything significant with a level of certainty that is immune to a healthy dose of agnosticism is completely batshit insane.

There's just no way that's ever going to be true, you know, or justified as well.

Even on the incest question.

Even

especially on the incest question.

Yeah.

Gentlemen, I appreciate both of you very much.

I wish that we could keep going for longer, but this location is going to kick us out at some point.

It looks like it's literally about to collapse in on us.

Yeah, perhaps.

Look, I genuinely appreciate both of you.

I think it's so cool that we've got two British guys leading,

contributing to leading forth philosophical influence,

unsolicited advice, and Alex O'Connor within reason.

You don't have a podcast, do you, Joe?

I don't.

I'm going to start interviewing a few people.

I've got a a few people lined up.

I told him what to call it.

You know what he should call it?

Solicited advice.

Solicited advice.

Oh,

it's right there in front of you.

Boys, thank you very much for coming through.

You got it, man.

Thank you for having me.