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
If X and Y are identical, that is, they are the same thing, then all of the properties of X are shared by Y. You can't say that two things are the same, and I don't mean the same kind of thing, I mean literally the same thing, but one of them is red and one of them is blue.
or one of them is five-sided and one of them is two-sided, that would mean that they're different things.
Even spatial location, they have all the same properties except this one's in China and this one's in France.
That means they're not identical.
Let's think about the content of your mental experience.
You can imagine a triangle in your head.
I'm told that the triangle that I can literally see in my head right now is the same thing as some neurons firing.
I don't think so, because they don't have the same properties.
The triangle has three sides.
That's a fact about the triangle in my head.
The neurons firing that correlate with my experience of that triangle don't have three sides, meaning that you've got two sort of things with different sets of properties, meaning they can't literally be identical.
Maybe one causes the other.
Maybe one emerges from the other.
Maybe.
That's fine.
We're not saying anything too crazy at the moment.
But the idea that they are literally the same thing, I think, just doesn't make much sense.
I think one of the reasons why I wouldn't have a child at the moment is because I don't know how to answer that question.
It's a very serious question.
If you don't have an idea of what makes the good life, then it's going to be very difficult to raise a child.
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