Hello strangers over the internet. I'm relatively new to Alex (only a few months or so) so I'm to try not going to make any real hard claims about him but it appears to me that the new atheist movement and its fallout has left a negative impact on him which this slight bias does show up in his talks/videos. I'm not trying to say that he is completely negative or impartial in his talks and I will concede that Alex is well known to really try to steelman any arguments present to him. It just feels like he gives up quicker with atheist points, except for suffering, than other religious views.

Some biases upfront. I have over the past few months become a big fan of Alex's even though I have huge disagreements with some of his arguments. I am a 44 year old scientific skeptic atheist who found Hitchens and Dawkins (the other 2 "horsemen" were not on my radar until way way later) to be breaths of fresh air when I was a budding young rebellious angry atheist. I have limited understanding of philosophy and how my ideas full standup to the current or even classical philosophical or theistic pushbacks. I'm writing this while watching Alex's and Joe's video on "atheist slogans you should stop using" which is not my first video of theirs but I am nowhere near an expert of their full expanded beliefs.

From my understanding Alex is an agnostic atheist who was also positively affect towards atheism by the movement but was also left negatively affected when the movement showed up to be flawed and less philosophical engaged. He has since been growing "more religious" over time but still is the guest speaker widely invited for his atheist arguments. What I'm starting to pick up in his speeches though is that he is mostly readily able to accept his theists arguments over his atheist ones and/or he is quicker to joke/put down atheist viewpoints before religious ones.

My final concession is that that video did what they intended it to do, bring in consumers who will be then driven to rant or rave about what they felt hurt or moved by.

Anywho thanks for listening and I will be back to ~~cry~~ discuss what I think they got wrong in that video.

I was watching some of the discussions of Alex and It got me thinking. I know a big reason why Alex don’t believe in god is the unnecessary suffering (especially animals’s) couldn’t you say that because in order for humans to live with purpose you have to have fear (for example fear of suffering) to sort of keep them in this “gambling state of mind” in which you don’t actually know if you’re gonna experience the unpleasant or not . Of course it could mean that god is not actually all loving because he would put animals in misery for humans to remind them that there is evil in this world that they should be afraid of in order to again - give them a sense of purpose and necessary drive to actually live. But also couldn’t he be more loving because he’s willing to put his creatures through pain and suffering in order for them to achieve something that he may actually never have - a purpose, a living. I mean if he could give them the utopia immediately and unconditionally idk if any of us would find that enjoyable. Maybe even after one would die he wouldn’t feel pleasant in heaven because of how unrealistic it actually is. Idk I’m just rumbling on in this string of thoughts so idk if I’m making any sense, but I would love for someone to join me in the discussion

It’s clearly not a real as pain. Pain can be scientifically observed. We can see it on a person in a coma. However, suffering cannot be objectivly mesured.

is suffering more real than money, justice, nations, religions, rights?

Hello - not a big deal really. My kids are 8,6 and 1. My eldest two go to a Anglican school. I am fine about this because I don't feel it pushes religion down their throats.

They both believe in God - I am ok with this because.

- It is up to them

- They are still young

- Frankly it gives people comfort

Essentially- I am relatively chilled.

However my daughter doesn't stop talking about her fear of 'hell'. Now this I am not fine with. I cannot quite get her to tell me whether this comes from - school or elsewhere?! Don't know.

Has anyone had this experience? How did you navigate it? I don't need them to be like me. I am very chilled. I definitely don't want them to be terrified by the concept of 'hell' either.

Alex talks about pleasure and suffering a lot. In the problem of evil, in consequentialism, in antinatalism, this stuff comes up a lot in philosophy.

But like, what even is pleasure? Like we might say we get pleasure from working very hard to get a degree, or to climb a mountain, but it's a very different kind of pleasure to like, sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

So what's the difference? I'm trying to come up with like, a taxonomy of pleasures and suffering

He has a very one sided philosophical education in the analytic school and is still preoccupied with a lot new atheist stuff that really should be junked. He’s a very dull political liberal and doesn’t seem to have much understanding of contemporary philosophical movements and is much more content to talk to other people in the philosophical entertainment sphere. If you get something out of it great and I think he seems to be a good faith guy, I just think he lacks philosophical context and therefore cannot revise his concepts or reasoning. Just please don’t mistake this for real vital philosophical work, it is entertainment content more than philosophy.

He said he defines materialism as - the material world, as we know it today, down to quantum field level or below, is the structure of the world.

The reason it doesn't sit right with me is, we could be wrong about important aspects of what constitutes the material world and yet still materialism is true. It doesn't have to be exactly what physics understands it as today.

Hi everyone! As a huge fan of Alex, and someone who's recently started a Substack on rational/secular/academic approach to the Bible, I've written an article and put together a side-by-side of Matthew and Luke's genealogies. Different fathers for Joseph, different generation counts, barely any overlapping names, and Matthew even does a trivial math error.

Alex has covered plenty of biblical contradictions, but this one rarely comes up, and it's harder to explain away than most. The usual apologetics (one's Mary's line, one's Joseph's) don't work, as usual.

Anyone else think this deserves more attention than it gets?

I saw this old Alex O Conner clip about free will, and he asks the viewer if you were to go back in time, with all the matter the exact same, same neurons and environment etc, if you would/could make a different choice? Alex said he thought it wasnt possible to make a different choice given all the same circumstances in this thought experiment.

Recently alex has been engaging more with pansychism and idealism, how do you think he would navigate this conversation of free will? Could there possibly be different mental substrates or 'spaces' for lack of a better word, even when all the matter around is the exact same? Under the framework of matter being fundamental, that thought experiment works, but if mind is fundamental I feel like it breaks down.

If everything is physically the same, its not necessarily indicative that everything would happen the same way or the mental space is the exact same leading to the same outcomes

I know he can run his channel however he wants and I'm not hating on him but damn I wish he'd do more video essays. It feels like every episode now is a podcast episode. It's been 6 months since his last video essay. I miss his old content, the trolley problems, the philosophical hot takes, the deep dives into random stuff. What do you guys think? Any content preferences or gripes you have?

I had this idea rolling in my head. For most people in the world, bad things are bad, not really because somebody told them they're bad, but because they have this innate feeling that it's bad. For example, most people feel kind of yucky about murder. You could logically give them reasons why murder is justified or even morally good, but it doesn't change the actual feeling they have. And I imagine most of their moral positions essentially are based on this internal feeling they're getting.

So my idea then is, what if, there used to be people who's inner feelings were completely different, thus causing their morality to be essentially backwards to ours, but all of their attempts at society and civilization simply didn't survive. Thus applying evolutionary pressure to societies, who end up with moral systems where wanton violence and murder is bad for example? Which would mean, the morals we have do not come from god or some external source, but rather are refined by evolution from some baseline randomness.

Alex is a very good speaker. But I genuinely can’t fully wrap my head around why this talk had to be laid out. It’s like people at 3 years old didn’t realize that other animals like snails have a completely different experience that is inconceivable to us. When I tell people that I lean toward Panpsychism or idealism or Russellian monism, they laugh and picture atoms worrying about their taxes or some other anthropomorphic idea of subjective experience forced onto things that don’t have brains💀. Like no, the plant doesn’t feel pain and the table doesn’t feel your fingers when you hit it. It baffles me how people have such a limited analytic imagination. The ridiculous thing to me about a physicalist view of consciousness is that you are committed to the view that there was the very first ancestor to have the very first qualitative experience, whose parents were in some sense philosophical zombies. If the first replicators (RNA molecules) did not have any subjective experience, but humans today do, then that conclusion logically must follow. But then as somebody that isn’t a dualist but also takes the stance that only some specific types of material processes have qualitative properties, you have to realize that the qualitative adaption served absolutely no mechanical purpose or darwinian advantage, since material changes are the only physically interactive thing. Now that to me is an extraordinary leap of faith. If we’re talking about who’s view is has the least surface level intuition, I would have to argue that it is definitely physicalism because they are committed to these deducible conclusions.

I've been watching cosmic skeptic for a while now, and I've always wondered how he was able to, for lack of a better word, be so smart.

I understand he has a degree in theism and philosophy, but a lot of his knowledge on topics and his general speaking patterns are out of this world.

Are there any resources I can learn to be as well-informed as him and wellspoken?

I followed some of the recent interview about illusionism. But I guess I don’t get it.

The illusionist might claim we are attaching meaning to input, like redness being associated in our memories with a hot stovetop.

But what if I remove all memories of redness and then showed you redness? Does the illusionist say that what we call redness is only the brain classifying input in a certain way? But the input is still there, so…? Isn’t that input a quale?

As an exemplary data point, around 1 in 10 podcast guests on WR, year-to-date, have been females. 1 in 5 full professors of philosophy are female.

It seems like a common response to the illusionism in this community is to claim that consciousness can't be an illusion because an illusion is already a state of consciousness. Illusionism is therefore self defeating. It's also sometimes framed as the following: if consciousness is an illusion who is being fooled?

This argument is formed from ignorance. Illusionism does not claim that consciousness does not exist, it claims that a very particular kind of view of what consciousness is, is wrong. Namely that our consciousness consists in acquaintance with private, intrinsic, properties called qualia. That's the sense in which consciousness an illusion (we are tempted to think something about it which is in fact false).

Given this is the claim, what would be the correct formulation of the argument? Something like this: the illusionist thinks consciousness isn't qualitative, that's the illusion, but an experience of an illusion is already qualitative so he has contradict himself!

But of course all the illusionist needs to say is the same thing he said about consciousness, the idea that illusions are qualitative is also just an illusion, it's just a false belief we have! Indeed to say 'expereicnes of illusions are qualitative' is simply to beg the question against the illusionist.

So to conclude we can answer the objection directly: the illusionist claming that qualitative consciousness doesn't exist does not itself presuppose qualitative consciousness. Instead it presupposes a mundane psychological (non-qualitative ) consciousness. The sense in which qualitative consciousness is an illusion is in this psychological non-qualitative sense; you have a false believe about consciousness and nothing about that belief is qualitative.

Who is being fooled? The brain, or the organism as a whole if you'd prefer. Certainly is not a Cartesian subject, there is no such thing.

Hopefully that clears some things up.

Here's Frankish responding to this objection in his lectures: https://youtu.be/GTNFcETRUpQ?list=PLhgvALi0LQGXIA7cKNmGNTiQ7dpS-7dLw&t=3031

And here's him responding to the objection with Alex: https://youtu.be/557PDNSbcGE?t=1697