Alex O'Connor
speaker
2,073 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 May
Alex O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
In that case, I would slightly alter my thesis to say, maybe philosophy is description.
When a Christian says that God is a trinity, they're just describing the nature of God.
They're not explaining why he's a trinity.
Fair enough.
But they would not do so in mathematical language.
You can't run the ontological argument for God's existence as a series of mathematical equations.
It's just a different kind of language that's being used.
I would just say that the scientific language will not describe the things which some other philosophical languages can describe.
And that's not a problem.
That's great.
It's actually not that profound.
So many scientists just are like, yeah, I mean, you could call it like functionalism or descriptivism about science that what's going on is we're just describing reality.
And that's great.
And it's really useful.
But I'd encourage people to just like reflect on what that means and what it should do to their confidence that science will answer these foundational questions.
I started talking about the origin of the universe because it's helpful when thinking about like Newton and Einstein to get across what I'm saying about science.
But really, when you ask about what my worldview is, the reason I would bring that up is to talk about consciousness and in a similar way, say that science will not explain, or at least will not tell us the nature of consciousness.
For me, consciousness is the most foundational mystery.
It's probably the foundational fact of reality.
It's the kind of thing which science can't approach because science sort of describes relations between things.
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