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
The Master and His Emissary.
And the idea is that the right brain does stuff and the left brain is the emissary, but there's some kind of myth or story where an emissary thinks that he can do the job of the master, so he kills the master and then ends up doing a terrible job.
And he kind of thinks that's what's happened with our left brain.
So the reason that I brought that up is because when you asked like, how do you sort of navigate the world not having a certain philosophy?
I think we all navigate the world extremely intuitively.
And when we come up with reasons and explanations for our behaviors, a lot of the time those are like post hoc rationalizations without us even realizing it.
It also has profound implications for free will, of course, because we think you know why you performed a particular action, but is that just because your brain has convinced you that that's why you did it, when it's not the real reason?
At the very least, whatever the reason is, it's something that the left brain might not be able to communicate because it might be a very right brain kind of thing.
Yeah, these split brain patients.
I mean, I don't know if you agree.
I think that it's one of the most significant facts in the world because also it might interest you if you're interested in the Indian traditions that we were talking about earlier.
Like the concept of the self, right?
Once you have experimental evidence that an individual self can both see something and not see it at the same time.
I think that has profound implications for the idea of the unity of personhood.
Like how many people are there there?
If you want to say there's only one person, you have to admit a literal contradiction, that it is both true and false that they saw it, which you can't do.
There has to be like a part of them which saw it.
At the very least, you have to say part of them saw it and part of them didn't.
And immediately, at the very least, what you've done is you've said that the self can be split into parts.
That's hugely profound.
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