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's one thing to experience the world.
It's one thing to be, it's another thing to be aware that you're experiencing it.
Josh Rasmussen once said, there's a difference between noticing a tree and noticing that you've noticed a tree.
We have this sort of second order abstraction that we can do.
So we know that
Death is coming, for example, and death makes a mockery of everything that we do.
It seems to just obliterate any sense of purpose or meaning because anything that we're building will ultimately, as far as we're concerned, be gone.
And that may well be unique to human beings.
And so I'm not the first to suggest that the...
principal motivating factor behind meaning-infused activities that humans do is an engagement in death denial or some kind of immortality project.
People literally, for fear of, as a result of the knowledge that this will come to an end, engage in what we might call immortality projects.
They engage in things which will outlast themselves
which give them a sense of escaping this death.
The most obvious example is in religious traditions, which literally promise immortality for your own soul.
But if you look just practically at where people subjectively report finding meaning, they find it in their children.
They might find it in their job, but they're unlikely to find it in their job if they're doing something they don't really care about.
They'll find it in their job.
Maybe they're like a barrister and they find a lot of meaning in bringing justice into the world because they're participating in a system which they believe will outlast them and is bigger than them.
So when people talk about meaning, we talk about transcendence, something being above and beyond their own sort of material situation.
And I think religion is the archetypal example of this, and I think it's why it evolves in the first place.
Showing 1261–1280 of 2,073 · page 64 of 104
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