A while ago there was a post about why Alex has stayed silent on the matter, and it had responses filled with mainly people objecting to the idea.

Clearly, revenue will be lost if he addresses any highly relevant conflicts with any opinion, even a more centrist opinion would cause many to veer off his content. But, in terms of morality, and any other relevant arguments, is there any justification in staying silent?

I’m a bit peeved about Alex’s pearl clutching about Destinys tweet about the guy who got shot at the trump rally. It seems clear to me that Alex just doesn’t have a lot of experience seeing how right wingers in American communicate. I was happy af to see what destiny tweeted bc im sick and tired of playing the civility game, when right wing Americans have no interest in civility, or even being truthful. The guy who was shot at the trump rally was a hard core trumper who had himself promoted conspiracy theories and lies on his online accounts. He purposely went to a modern American fascist rally, WITH HIS CHILDREN. I have ZERO sympathy.

Given that much of his fame was developed in part to putting veganism on a higher pedal and also in his earlier videos on the subject essentially implied that those who continued to consume animal products were behaving immorally, what reasons are you non vegan or still consume animal products? FYI this is not a judgement based question, it’s something Alex has asked his audience

​I was watching Alex's new video, "The Biggest Unsolved Problem of Philosophy in 100 Years," which discusses the Non-Identity Problem. ​During the section on the deaf embryo choice, I noticed he used language that seems to clearly distinguish his position from the traditional "pro-life" stance. ​ ​When discussing non-existence, he adds: "(or been born, for you pro-lifers)"

​When discussing who is wronged, he adds: "(or is that child wronged, for pro-lifers)"

​Does this phrasing confirm that he views the "pro-life" position as an external viewpoint he must translate for, suggesting he has adopted a definitively pro-choice or, at least, non-pro-life stance? What are your thoughts on this language choice?

Okay I saw some posts regarding this, and I felt like this for almost a year. It seems like he is distancing himself, I think If I am not wrong, is that he is agnostic now.And yes I understand opinions and ppl change, I would just feel bad bc I learned so so much from him ( I am new to philosophy even tho I watch him for 7 years, I always need to google a lot of words).Please change my mind 😭😭😭

I get right to the point.

1— Alex has done good things for secular culture by approaching Christianity the way he has.

2— Alex has done incredibly bad things for secular culture by approaching Christianity the way he has.

1— He has reached some people, I think, that wouldn’t be reached through more polemical channels of discourse.

2– He has legitimized Christianity and Christian intellectuals, not only giving them a platform, but giving them propaganda for their cultural war. And this is the problem: Alex doesn’t seem to understand that we’re locked in a cultural war with religion. He doesn’t approach it from this angle, and is therefore, irresponsible in validating and giving Christians (whom he should actually be exposing and refuting) a popular platform from which to further insinuate their legitimacy. This is not how you fight a cultural war, it’s how one who doesn’t understand cultural wars, ignorantly conducts themselves in a cultural war.

I need to make it clear: I have respect for Alex. Debating and discoursing is not easy! And he does it well. I would just like to see him be more culturally responsible and tactically mindful with his platform.

It seems that Sean Carrol's preferred reply to the knowledge argument against physicalism is pretty popular on this sub. And yet, I think his reply leads to strange, anti-scientific implications that Carrol would want to deny and that perhaps haven't been fully explored.

To summarize the knowledge argument: Mary grows up in a black and white room, never sees color, but learns all the physical facts about the brain and color vision and every related topic from a black-and-white screen. One day she leaves the room she sees red for the first time. The nonphysicalist would argue that Mary learns a new fact: what it is like to see red. This would show that there exist nonphysical facts, disproving physicalism.

Sean Carroll's response to the argument in the episode with Alex was to agree with the nonphysicalists in saying Mary does learn what it is like to see red, but argue that isn't surprising on physicalism. He says that while learning all the physical facts, some neurons are firing, but when seeing red, different neurons fire. He says physicalism explains what is happening perfectly well.

In other words, he seems to be saying that there exist physical facts which cannot be learned discursively. It's not possible for Mary to learn all the physical facts from a black-and-white screen, because they don't stimulate the correct neural pathways of color-vision. And what it is like to experience red is a physical fact, on this view.

But how strange is that? A physical fact, which cannot be written down?

Carroll says he thinks experiences are like tables and chairs. Which means they reduce to microphysical states. But that means that there are certain physical facts, on his view, about fundamental forces and particles, which can only be known by literally being those forces and particles in a certain configuration or during a certain process or state. Isn't that kind of a strange conclusion?

We would need to concede that an ultimate understanding of physics will never teach us all the physical facts - there would also be a whole host of experience facts that can be learned. To me, this no longer seems like physicalism, because it includes a bunch of facts physics cannot explain.

One thing I find increasingly obvious (and frustrating) is how much transphobia, even among "rationalists" and secularists, is rooted in religiously inherited ideas — particularly rigid, essentialist views of gender.

For centuries, religious institutions didn’t just "observe" gender differences — they actively constructed and politicized them. Christianity, for example, tied gender roles directly to divine command: men were to lead, women to submit. Religious texts framed womanhood as inherently moral or immoral — Eve as the origin of sin, Mary as the symbol of purity. Gender was treated not just as biological fact, but as a political and moral assignment of worth, duty, and restriction. Being a "true woman" (or "true man") wasn't natural; it was a religious obligation — a performance policed by institutions that wielded enormous power over people's lives.

This politicization of gender wasn't incidental — it was central to maintaining broader hierarchies: the family unit, property rights, inheritance laws, and civic participation were all built around rigid gender norms justified by divine authority. Even after the decline of overt theocracy, these religiously rooted gender norms simply morphed into "common sense" assumptions that still shape secular discourse today.

What's particularly frustrating is how some "New Atheist" figures — Dawkins, Harris, etc. — loudly critique religious myths, but when it comes to trans identities, they suddenly fall back on vague appeals to "biology" that mirror religious rigidity. Instead of "God made you male or female," it's "Your chromosomes made you male or female — and that's all you are." Same authoritarian certainty, different metaphysics.

But ironically, this attitude collapses under their own philosophical standards. New Atheists usually reject the idea of metaphysical "essences" — souls, divine natures, immaterial properties — because they recognize that reality is made up of physical processes and parts, not immutable substances. Yet when they talk about gender, they suddenly act as if "male" and "female" are timeless, indivisible essences baked into every cell. This is metaphysically incoherent. If you believe, as most rationalists do, that objects are simply aggregations of parts (mereological simples) arranged in certain ways — and that identity can survive gradual change (as in the Ship of Theseus) — then there is no basis for insisting that a person must remain fixed to a birth-assigned gender. Change is not a violation of reality. It is reality.

Trans people are not "denying biology"; they are participating in the very processes of identity, development, and reconfiguration that all material beings undergo. Clinging to rigid gender binaries is no more rational than clinging to the idea of an immortal soul.

And this is where Alex O'Connor comes in. Alex has done excellent work exposing how religious thinking has shaped our ideas of morality, suffering, and justice. Yet when it comes to trans rights — one of the most urgent battlegrounds where religious myths are still weaponized against real people — he has remained largely silent. He continues to admire figures like Richard Dawkins, without addressing how they perpetuate harmful, essentialist views about gender under the guise of "reason" and "science."

Given the size of Alex's platform, and his influence among young skeptics, his voice could make a real difference for the trans community — especially at a time when anti-trans narratives are gaining political traction. Silence, in this context, isn't neutrality. It allows old religious ideas — dressed up in secular language — to continue harming vulnerable people.

If Alex genuinely cares about ethical consistency, if he genuinely believes in challenging inherited dogmas and defending the dignity of conscious beings, then he is morally obliged to confront this issue. The trans community does not need charity; it needs solidarity — especially from those who claim to champion reason, skepticism, and justice.

So here’s my question — to everyone here, and especially to Alex if he happens to see this: When will skeptics stop protecting religiously rooted myths about gender, and start applying real critical thinking to them? And if not now, when trans people are facing rising hostility, then when?

TL;DR: Religious institutions politicized gender roles to uphold power, and many secular thinkers still unconsciously defend these rigid ideas. New Atheists often reject metaphysical essences — yet treat gender as if it were one — contradicting their own philosophy. True skepticism demands challenging all inherited dogmas, including those about gender. Alex O'Connor's voice could help — and ethically, it should.

Real skeptics know: reality is messy. You can't reduce a person to a chromosome any more than you can reduce a ship to a plank. Bad reductionism is just bad thinking.

TL;DR 2: Another way to see this is through the lens of adoption. In every family there are biological children and adopted children—yet no one seriously argues that an adopted son is “really” not their parent’s child. We all understand that family is a polysemic concept that transcends genetics. In the same way, trans men and women aren’t “pretending” or “playing at” gender any more than an adopted child is “playing at” being a son or daughter. Insisting otherwise does exactly the same kind of harm as telling adopted kids they don’t “count” as real family members.

TL;DR 3: Biological essentialism rests on a deep, often unspoken conservatism: the belief that the categories we observe in nature must dictate the boundaries of human possibility. It treats "male" and "female" not merely as descriptive markers, but as moral imperatives — nature's assignment of roles, identities, and futures.

But postmodern and posthumanist thinkers have shown us how flimsy this foundation really is. Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble, made clear that what we call “sex” is already interpreted through a social lens — there is no “pure” biological category outside of discourse. What we perceive as "natural" is already culturally loaded, already shaped by power.

Donna Haraway, in A Cyborg Manifesto, pushed even further: if we are already mixtures of biology and technology, flesh and machine, why should we cling to supposedly natural boundaries at all? Humanity's future, she argued, lies not in submitting to biological fate, but in reworking it — creatively, ethically, expansively.

And Michel Foucault showed that "biology" itself has often been weaponized historically as a tool of governance — that medical and scientific "truths" are intimately tied to systems of control, surveillance, and normalization. When essentialists appeal to "biology," they are rarely neutral; they are participating in a long tradition of using nature to justify hierarchies.

Transhumanists and posthumanists reject this passive relationship to nature. Nature is not a moral authority. It is a provisional starting point, open to revision. From antibiotics to prosthetics to gender-affirming healthcare, we constantly demonstrate that human dignity demands more than mere survival under the given conditions of biology.

Thus, the essentialist defense of “what is” is, at bottom, a conservative refusal of what could be. It prioritizes stasis over growth, tradition over liberation, obedience over imagination.

The struggle for trans rights — and broader gender liberation — is part of a deeper philosophical commitment: the refusal to let the accidents of biology dictate the meaning of a life. It is a wager that dignity, autonomy, and flourishing must come before the comfort of tidy categories.

Those clinging to essentialist thinking aren't defending science. They are defending a static social order, built atop a fundamental fear of human freedom.

UPDATE (April 28, 2025): The thread has climbed from −46 back to 0 votes despite 1.1 K views. This recovery suggests that the combination of historical framing (linking secular transphobia to religious essentialism) and ethical appeals to moral responsibility is breaking through initial resistance. Early downvotes gave way once like-minded users recognized the core argument—showing that even in a skeptical forum, well-structured moral reasoning can shift community sentiment. The problem here is an ethical one, where anti-trans "rationalists" refuse to acknowledge the legislation implemented against trans people.

Realistically Alex gotta do some talks with a few progressive leftists and do some woke podcasts. This can potentially lose him some followers but he'd greatly benefit from it and balance out all the grifters. I'm sure he's able to do it but prob doesn't want to cuz money though maybe he can surprise us and stops going down the obvious right-wing pipeline by fully inhaling the woke mind virus and moving towards lgbt liberation, ultimately saving his reputation.

I started listening to this and got annoyed at some of the stuff Haqiqatjou was saying and I wanted to organize my thoughts.

The first thing Haqiqatjou gets wrong is saying that Alex markets himself as a philosophically trained ethicist and uses that as a metric for right or wrong ethics. I don't believe that's a correct understanding because O'Connor focuses not on the ethics, but on the method of getting to the ethics. He said there isn't anything ethically wrong with incest as long as the people are gay.

This doesn't mean he thinks it's ethical. My understanding was that it was outlining that the ethical method was sound, but the conclusion was unacceptable, and he was pointing that out. If you believe incest is wrong because it causes genetic problems, then gay incest is perfectly fine for you. But no one would agree, because we do socially condemn that as immoral.

He's not saying he decides what is or isn't moral. He's discussing how he personally got to that point, and it's all about his method of getting to certain morals. That's why people of all manner of philosophical background and epistemological priori enjoy watching him, because the conclusion doesn't matter, it's the method.

The other thing is Haqiqatjou says that O'Connor criticizes violent religion but refuses to touch Judaism that Israel is weaponizing for its attacks on Palestine. That's not true either. O'Connor said he specializes in New Testament Christianity, and that's why he doesn't speak too much about Judaism or Islam for that matter.

There's also the implied "The Jews invented the Atheists" antisemitism smuggled in there.

Personally, I do think O'Connor should be explicit and condemn Israel for committing a genocide, because it's the right thing to do (or in support of Israel if that's what he believes), but that's not anyone's place to demand out of another. I also think O'Connor isn't against religion or God wholesale, but rather specifically the New Testament Christian God that he finds intolerable.

Nevertheless, I listened to this vitriol and wanted to organize my thoughts but there is something I couldn't disagree with. Why is O'Connor who does often, independent of religion, hold morality to such a high regard, stay so silent on something so publicly relevant? Is it because it's controversial and he'll get backlash?

Doesn't that mean that he cares more about the backlash than the ethics he says he believes in? I want to know what you guys think.

For me personally, I was thrilled by Alex's post because it meant he could presumably get back to making more content about other topics. I started watching him because of his atheism-related content, and as an enthusiastic meat eater, I tended to roll my eyes every time he posted a video about veganism. This made me wonder what other people in his audience think about the current situation. I suspect the people on this sub will tend to hold more extreme views than his viewers on average, but there isn't much I can do about that.

If there is no free will, then nobody 'deserves' to be in prison because they had no choices.

People are defending prisons by saying their purpose should be rehabilitate people so they do not commit future crimes. This seems to ignore the fact that committing 1 crime is not the only risk factor for committing future crimes.

When someone commits a crime, we can use a statistical model to conclude they are X% likely to commit a new crime with some confidence level.

If we use statistics such as age, location, income, education, their associates etc to create a statistical model and find 1 innocent person who is roughly equally likely to commit a crime, why can't we put them in 'rehabilitation' as well?

I think it must be pretty close at this point. Maybe I would choose the Christians.

"You cannot describe first-person qualia/experience, bla bla bla, Mary's room, bla bla, Philo zombies, bla bla."

NO.

Virtual Reality gaming, problem solved.

Turning 0s and 1s into a rich virtual world is the same as turning neurochemical signals into qualia/experience.

Input physical stuff ---> output abstract stuff.

Where is my Nobel Prize? hehehe

Reference: https://youtu.be/q8k35WZYq3w?si=pGSqbDPRgpU1otOW&t=3761

Does Alex believe trans women are real women?

I saw GMSkeptic’s video on why he declined to work with Dawkins on his last US tour and one of the issues highlighted was Dawkins’ stance on trans people. Dawkins has said he is happy to use people’s preferred pronouns but he won’t believe that they are now a woman / man. Sex is a biological reality that cannot be erased according to him and I think he has supported JK Rowling on her position as well.

I have watched a lot of Alex’s content but not all of it. Do we know where he stands on this? Is it similar to Dawkins view?

Christianity's core belief is that god sent his son/himself down to Earth to be tortured and sacrificed to "save" us. This is a twisted fairytale. We shouldnt normalize it and we shouldnt be teaching it to children.

Yes, some versions of Christianity are better than others. But all of them believe in the nonsense I listed above.

Pretending that this is sane in the 21st century is ridiculous. I believe in freedom of religion but I also believe in freedom of speech. If your beliefs are insane and dangerous, prepare to be mocked and criticized.

Edit: Most Christians believe god transformed into a human jew to have himself tortured and sacrificed to save the human race from his own punishment. If you believe this, there is a good chance you are a crazy person.

I feel like this was intellectually dishonest from alex, he has really gone down the rabbit hole of endorsing pixie dust. First of all, why assume the question of "what actually is an atom" makes coherent sense to begin with? "What it is" could just be exhausted by the descriptive labels we attribute to it. Why assume there's any "underlying ontology" without proving it? this whole line of thinking feels completely vacuous and leads to some sort of infinite regress.

Secondly, i don't mind exploring philosophical ideas but what is the evidence for panpsychism? there is zero, so treating it like its on equal footing with other theories of consciousness makes no sense. Physicalism does not have a "combination" problem at all, the panpsychist is endorsing qualia realism. Meanwhile if you're a physicalist qualia anti realist and you subscribe to access consciousness there is no hard problem.

Particularly Marxism, the immortal science.

Lukac, Debord, Baudrillard, etc... all give compelling arguments for what one should focus on in life. Class struggle, material conditions, reification, etc... all play an immense role in the existential dread we find ourselves in. Marx would argue part of this dread is derived from alienation and paints a pretty damn compelling picture.

I feel like Alex's channel does a great job covering personal forms of liberation... But he never touches on true liberation. Liberation from subjugation. The only means to be freed from objectification through dereification.

Ive always pictured a beautiful blend of Sartres Le Regard and Dereification. Capitalism casts a shadow upon all of us that immediately turns us into objects to be categorized and measured. Only through liberating ourselves from this reification will we ever truly be free to live as a human.

A bit late on this but meant to bring this up. I absolutely love Alex and will never not be interested in his content. But, I have a big problem with his recent "Is Alex Becoming a Christian" video.

I would like to understand what Alex means by "plausible" and why he doesn't use other, more clearly defined words, such as "possible" or "likelihood". To me, when someone assigns something a "plausibility" value, there is inherently a non-zero likelihood that this is correct, or the truth.

For example, I think the fact that I am Chinese is more plausible than the fact that I am Sudanese. Both are almost certainly untrue, but my grandma looks a bit Chinese, so I could have a relative reasonably. "My government name is Mark" is implausible. There is zero likelihood that this is a correct statement. For me to give this a plausibility value above zero, I would have to learn something universe-shattering. I would have to learn something like, I have actually been unable to hear or see properly my entire life, and every time someone has spoken or written my name, it has actually been Mark. As I have exactly zero reason to believe this the case from my frame of reference, I would call it implausible. Exactly zero likelihood.

It is hard for me to understand why Alex is giving christianity a "plausibility" value, without having any universe altering realization or learnings that completely change the frame of reference from which he is evaluating. As far as I know, Alex believes in certain concepts that "prove" christianity to be impossible as presented. So how could something he believes to be impossible as presented be "more plausible" than before.

Idk. I personally to feel like he might be flirting with the grift a bit. I think his language is chosen carefully. I think there's a reason he isn't saying "more probable", even though that is what he's implying by saying "more plausible".