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
It can't be bad now because I'm not dead.
And it can't be bad for me when I'm dead because there's no me.
So there's no point at which it can be true.
Like Epicurus kind of wants to say, if something is true, there has to be a time at which it's true.
There has to be some time at which this fact is true.
So if the fact is death is bad for me, my death is bad for me, when is that fact true?
Can't be true now because I'm not dead.
Can't be true later because there's no me.
And people hear that and they go, oh, very clever.
But it doesn't really do much, right?
Because again, that's a very left-brain way of thinking.
It's like, yeah, very clever, but I'm still kind of concerned, right?
Because of my convictions about the nature of consciousness, I'm at least agnostic enough to...
about sort of experiences by which i mean like experiences with an apostrophe experiences connection to physicality i'm agnostic enough about that that i'm kind of not super worried about the death of my physical body i have no idea what's going to happen i do know that if i if i do die and it all just sort of shuts off then i won't be around to to worry about it and i'm only around to worry about it now but i you know i think about it like like everybody does
But in some way that I can't quite explain, and it's a reason why I wouldn't really talk about it except to sort of hinted it in a situation like this is to say that these investigations into the nature of consciousness and the nature of the brain and split brain and stuff in some way I can't quite describe just has consoled me a little bit about the fact that one day my physical brain is going to like end, you know, because I don't know if that's quite the same thing as what I am exactly, you know.
Well, it is the same thing as what I am as a self, and I am worried about the self coming to an end.
But I guess one way of thinking about it as well is that the thing that's scary about death is not the secession of biological function.
You could have a biological machine that has no consciousness,
It's not worried about death.
The thing that death really... People think about death in terms of the end of life, but really death is kind of the end of consciousness.
Showing 1081–1100 of 2,073 · page 55 of 104
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