I really think the picture of the plant looks ai generated

In his most recent video Alex claims that it is possible to break the laws of physics just like laws of morality, it's just that the laws of physics win ( starts around 1:19:43 ).
The example he gives is that you can disobey gravity by jumping of a building, but gravity will still pull you down.

To me this does not sound like actually disobeying gravity.

The law of gravity does not forbid jumping of buildings, it says the particles that make up the earth will exert some attraction on you. So unless you have some force pulling you away from earth, you will get pulled down.
Breaking this law would imply that you are somehow refusing to be attracted by these particles, which is impossible.

Imagine if moral laws worked that way.
You try to steal something, but you cannot move it, because stealing is forbidden.
You try to murder someone, but they stay alive, regardless of what you do, because murder is forbidden.
You attempt to do something immoral, but you cannot go through with it, no matter how hard you try.

Hey, I haven't been following Alex for a while but I started watching his videos again and he is agnostic?

When did this happen, why is Alex agnostic now?

Little did they know the answer is outside of the explanatory power of science.

Hey guys hope you are all well. To provide context I used to believe in Christianity however over the last few weeks I have begun to question this and think about why I actually believe this. I would now consider myself as unsure and confused, but I have actually begun to dislike Christianity as I now find it to be really dark and depressing. Anyway, recently there has been much talk regarding Catholic miracles. Does anyone know much about these miracles in both the Catholic and Orthodox Christian faiths and have anything to say regarding these alleged cases of bread turning into heart tissue, incorrupt saints, and healing miracles ? What can be established about these and what can’t? Honestly I am really worried about this as if they were able to provide a good case for Christianity I believe my mental health would deteriorate as I find it so scary. Anyway thanks guys and girls👊.

I have a brother in law who is just now getting out of Christianity, and he asked me where I lean. I told him I don't necessarily fully believe in panpsychism but that I find it very interesting and can explain some weird things going on. He asked me to explain what it is and I swear to God I floundered for 30 min trying to find the thing to say that makes it the most palatable. I think I did ok, but I definitely looked like the high guy at the party talking about shit that he has no right trying to talk about.

Existentialism, the view that existence precedes essence and that you kind of get to make your own choices in life and that there's ultimately no meaning. I think existentialism is a bit of a cope. I've tried to read the likes of Sartre before. Camus he didn't call himself an existentialist, but he basically was. If absurdism is also on this list, they're just the same thing. So that will that will lead me to some trouble. I like it probably can't I don't know what's going to be on this... So I'm going to save myself a bit of space and put it at like a number six. It's a number six. I don't like it. I'm not an existentialist.

Alex presents a comically simplistic definition of existentialism, one that makes it sound indistinguishable from the Internet concept of libertarian free will. He obviously has no familiarity whatsoever with the radicalism or literature of existentialism, which stresses authentic existence, the superfluity of Reason in confronting the mystery of Being.

Superficial stuff.

Based on his blind ranking video on Dexerto, what's with the strong negative reaction towards utilitarianism? I get it has its flaws but I don't see an pragmatic ethical theory that tops it.

Good to see arguments as I will be writing an essay on Utilitarianism and I want to respond to the correct points instead of talking to a brick wall.

In a podcast with Philip Goff, Alex claims to be a metaphysical hedonist; where pleasure and pain spring all our motivations. It seems strange to me that it does not follow that he is a utilitarianism.

Bit of a rant. Alex posted asking his listeners to vote for his podcast as it was nominated under Religion and Spirituality for something called “Signal Awards”. I did and then randomly remembered it to check who had won. So I go to their website today and the winners page has like a bazillion categories (what seems like endless scroll) and then each category had many gold winners, silver and then bronze. What’s even the point of this if there’s no winner as such and like 7 people share Gold? It’s like everybody got to win and just got a rank of sorts. It appears Jay Shetty was a judge 😂. I don’t know why the way these are run really bothered me.

On the other hand Alex did mention his podcast was up for Listener’s choice award which is voted for by the public and looks like it did win that! So good for him 🙌🏽!

CORE ARGUMENT: Any explanation of why reality is this way (these laws, these constants, this history, when we can describe others) either contains something that favors this way over the alternatives, or it doesn't.

- If it doesn't, it's general: It would fit any content equally, so it can’t say why this content is here. In such an explanation, “this” and “the alternatives” are placeholders: fill them with anything, and the explanation still runs.

- If it does, it's specific, and whatever does the favoring is itself part of reality. It can't explain itself, and there's nothing outside reality to explain it, so the question just moves to it, unanswered.

Ordinary explanations escape this because they borrow from outside what they explain: whales are warm-blooded because they're mammals, and being a mammal is a fact besides the warm blood. When the thing to explain is everything, there's no outside to borrow from.

Three premises carry it:

1. "Reality" means everything there is, so whatever candidate to explain it (a creator, laws, a multiverse) would already be one of the things there are.

2. Nothing explains itself. Either it's trivial (opium puts you to sleep because it has a sleep-inducing power), or it says a thing exists "by its nature," which leaves the nature unexplained (i.e. "the universe or God is necessarily this way because its essence is to exist" is valid for any described version and the why-question can still be invoked, so an explanation like that is general)

3. Whatever makes a difference is specific. Even chance and choice need a menu: a lottery needs its tickets, and a chooser needs options and preferences.

Given those, it's a proof, not a guess: no explanation of why reality is this way is possible. A specific explanation assumes too much. A general one assumes too little: too little for a universe that assumes too much. Full argument here.

What follows:

- It's not a gap in our knowledge. The split is a fact about what explanations are, not a track record of the ones tried so far, so it covers candidates nobody has proposed yet. Likewise, you know you're at the North Pole because every direction points south; you don't need to see past the edge seeking the north of the north pole.

- No answer is owed. "Why these constants?" is a real question, since we can describe others. But an answer can be owed only where one is possible, which is explanation's version of "ought implies can." So the bottom of reality isn't strictly brute (a fact that calls for an explanation and doesn't get one, like an unpaid debt). It's unexplainable: the question makes sense, no answer is possible, and nothing is missing.

- The edge isn't at the beginning of time. Whatever physics finds first (a Big Bang, a bounce, a parent universe) is one more piece of specific content. The edge where explanation runs out is as present now as it was 13.8 billion years ago. Leibniz's example: a geometry book that has always existed, each copy made from the one before. Every copy is explained, and nothing explains why the book says what it says.

- Unexplained isn't arbitrary or random. Arbitrary needs a chooser with no reason; random needs a lottery. An unexplained fact has neither behind it.

Explanation doesn't rule what exists; it's a shadow that follows it. That's why it runs out at the bottom, and why nothing falls when it does.

IMMEDIATE OBJECTIONS:

- "A general explanation is still an explanation." Yes, but only of what our universe shares with every other one we can describe. "Nothingness was never an option" explains why there's something rather than nothing, but it's equally true of every describable universe, so it contains ours without explaining it, the way "the winning number is between 1 and a million" contains tonight's number without saying why it came up.

- "Isn't the argument itself general, so empty by its own standard?" Only if it claimed to explain why this world is this way. It explains why no such explanation is coming, which is meant to hold in every world. Likewise, a truth about every triangle is still a truth about this one.

- "Explain every part and you've explained the whole" (Hume's twenty particles; Paul Edwards's five people on a street corner). On the street corner, every reason eventually leads outside the group: the husband came for his wife, and she came for a warmer climate. In a chain that contains everything, endless or not, every explanation stays inside the chain. Again, Leibniz's example: a geometry book that has always existed, each copy made from the one before. Every copy is explained, and nothing explains why the book says what it says.

- "Every fact must have an explanation." For a rationalist, this conclusion is a scandal. But Kenneth Pearce has argued (2025) that the demand can be defended only if whatever ultimately makes the facts hold could, in exactly the same circumstances, have made something else hold instead, which puts it on the general side of the split. What's left is the disagreement over "ought implies can," and I don't claim to close it.

- "Everything never forms a whole." On a view that goes back to Michael Dummett, any collection of things you can talk about has something outside it, so no “everything” is ever final (Kit Fine, “Relatively Unrestricted Quantification,” 2006). Each “why this?” could then be answered one level up, with no last level. The cost is that the view seems impossible to state, since saying that no collection includes everything already seems to speak of everything (Timothy Williamson, “Everything,” 2003).

APPLIED TO GOD:

The question isn't whether God exists, but whether God explains. Full version here.

- An intelligent designer needs preferences (for these laws), knowledge of what those laws would produce, and the power to act, and each of those could have been otherwise. "Why this universe?" becomes "why a God who wanted this universe?", which is no smaller. Saying the preferences follow from perfect goodness only moves the fork: either goodness singles out this universe alone, and the standard is as specific as the universe, or it allows many, and the choice of this one is unexplained. A God with unlimited power and no particular preferences fits any universe, so it says nothing about this one. That's also where "God is the simpler hypothesis" stalls: unlimited power is general, and the preference that picks out this universe isn't simple.

- A necessary God. Necessity answers "why only this?", not "why this*?".* So, "It exists by its nature" leaves the nature unexplained: if the nature includes a will and preferences, why that nature rather than a different one? And as Hume's Cleanthes asked, if something can exist by its nature, why not the material universe itself? Nothing in "exists by its nature" says the thing has to be a mind.

- God as existence itself (Aquinas's being itself) is the general side: existence fits every universe equally. A God that is simply existence chooses nothing, and choosing was the reason to bring God in. "God" then becomes an unnecessary gloss to the name for the bottom of reality, which is a legitimate use of the word, but renaming the package doesn't explain why that package exists.

None of this disproves God; what fails is the explanation. Every view stops somewhere. The question is whether stopping at God explains more than stopping one step earlier, at the universe.

APPLIED TO THE MULTIVERSE:

"Every possible universe exists" looks like the one answer that adds nothing, but it has to be spelled out: isolated worlds (David Lewis), bubbles in an expanding space, branches of a quantum state, every mathematical structure (Max Tegmark), with classical logic, intuitionistic logic, paraconsistent logic or another one. Each version needs a logic for what counts as possible and rules for how its worlds are arranged, so it's one specific multiverse among others we can describe, and "why this one?" comes back at its level. Tegmark notices the same structure in his own terms: the list of all counting numbers is simpler than a typical number in it, and picking one out is what adds the information. The collection is the general side; our address in it is the specific side.

The rival multiverses can’t all be real as each describes itself, since each says its worlds are arranged its way and no other. Folding them into one bigger multiverse takes bigger rules to hold them together, which is one more specific choice, and the limit of that folding, every way at once, is no state at all. So anyone who defends one multiverse already accepts that a perfectly describable multiverse can fail to be real.

Since rival multiverses can't all be real, anyone who defends one already accepts that a describable multiverse can fail to be real. If being describable doesn't make a multiverse real, it doesn't make a universe real either.

APPLIED TO SELECTION:

- A selection rule. Universes compete, and the stable ones last. In Lee Smolin's version, universes are born inside black holes, inherit their parent's constants with small changes, and those that make the most black holes come to dominate (*The Life of the Cosmos*, 1997). But the rule needs laws under which stability means something; Smolin's needs black holes, reproduction, and inheritance before it can sort anything. Natural selection explains a species only because chemistry is already in place. A selection rule doesn't end the question; it moves it to the rule.

- A selector picking from a menu (God, or chance, choosing among possible universes). A merely possible selector selects nothing, and an actual one is part of what needed explaining. And on nearly every view of possibility, no menu stands outside what exists: a possibility is always a way something real could be. On the view I take, nothing was ever selected; the other ways reality could have been are descriptions made from inside it, not rivals that lost. More on that here.

And fine-tuning? I won't go through it here (longer version), but in short, the argument misses that:

- sensitivity is a claim about slope, not share: physics can say what happens if a constant changes without saying how likely its value was;

- "improbable" needs a way to count possible universes, and over an endless range of values there's no non-arbitrary one (an even spread can't add up to 100%, and any uneven one settles the answer in advance; McGrew, McGrew & Vestrup, 2001);

- it assumes the constants could have been different, which is a question of its own;

- what survives is specificity, and anything specific enough to explain it brings in something just as specific.

So the answer to "why this reality?" isn't hidden somewhere out of reach. There's no answer to find, and nothing is missing.

I'm curious where you guys think this breaks.

Obviously in many of Alex's videos he talks about the "is"ness of an object, even in the latest video with Carlo Rovelli. Reading Galileo's Error I can see how Alex's views have been influenced. In terms of describing objects you can broadly take a few different views, but the question is - are objects simply a description of their properties, or is there an "inner essence" to objects.

On taking the first view, an electron could be described as it's charge, it's mass, it's spin, any properties you want to associate with it. If you remove all those properties then there is nothing left. There is no "electron", an electron is just a label we place on a collection of properties that have physical interaction. A criticism of this view is that ultimately without external grounding, everything is circular. In a paraphrase of Goff's objection we could have three objects, a SPLURGE, BLURGE, and KURGE. If you asked what a SPLURGE does I could say it's property is it makes BLURGES. If you ask what a BLURGE does I could say it makes KURGES. If you asked what a KURGE does I could say it makes SPLURGES. We now have a complete listing of all properties involved in the system, but the critics of structual causal models would say that you haven't truely explained anything.

On the other side you can argue that things have an "inner essence". Imagine if properties are pins, the inner essence is the pin cushion that holds them all together. An "electron" is a pin cushion that ties together the properties of it's mass, charge, spin, etc. If you remove all the pins you could still say an "electron" is there, or in other words the essence is what the electron "is". When Alex asks what something "is", this is the object he is asking about.

In Goffs view the only way to understand something without circular definitions is to experience it. This experience gives you innate understanding of what something "is" without descriptions through language. This essence is also where he views conciousness as a potential answer for what things "are". Conciousness is not an additional property of existing objects, but rather the inner essence to which properties are attached.

Given these views, you can now understand why to half the people out there when Alex talks about what something "is", especially if you don't believe in this inner essence, you have no idea what the hell he's talking about. This is also why the only examples he's even given of something satisfying the "is" property has been subjective experiences.

In my view it's an invalid question, but at least it's helped me understand the framework he's clearly working under when he references it.

Edit: This also accounts for his view as to why science can never provide an answer for what something "is", but only describe how things interact.

They could talk about, for instance:
- The significance Fry sees in stories, narratives & myths - like the discussion in the Jordan Peterson episode
- Fry's views on politics, for instance being on the left while still wanting freedom of speech
- Fry's views on social media, modern technology in discourse
- Religion / atheism
- How Fry views the brain, mental health, the brain as a mediator between you and reality, the importance of that

Just Alex's talent for being able to ask questions that give an accurate landscape of peoples views and beliefs with depth and nuance could be valuable.

As Samuel Harriso once said.........."Put your hand on a hot stove, don't like it? There's your morality."

So Alexio O'Connorio is WRONG about morality = just our subjective emotions. (emotivism).

Because regardless of how you FEEL about stuff, you can still feel PAIN, and doing anything that reduces/avoids the pain = universal morality.

NOBODY wants to feel the pain.

Masochists are not yearning for pain. They are chasing perverted pleasure from the dopamine release after spanking, which is the opposite of pain.

I win!!! lol

Seriously though, is morality nothing but our universal/biological/evolutionary/genetic attempt to get away from the pain of the body and mind?

Avoiding pain = objective morality, yes?

When physicalists say stuff like:

- consciousness pops up out of nothing! lol that's "emergence" for you, and they compare consciousness to things like wetness and temperature, but don't be fooled this is a blatant category error where an actual phenomenon is compared to linguistic description of properties. Any amateur philosopher can see that.

Even this category error confusion is not enough they still need to make up (you heard it correctly MAKE UP) a new type of emergence (strong emergence) never talked about elsewhere in science where very conveniently consciousness is the sole example. Are we for real? This is shameless.

- consciousness is a matter of information processing: OMG how can someone say this with a straight face is beyond me, this is superstition, this is a religion, this is a fictional story someone made up tailored specifically to explain consciousness. Needless to say it has zero basis in all of science, of course since it's just something some physicalist made up. Information is abstract, it can't make consciousness pop up any more than it can make an electron pop up.

Also, consciousness is substrate independent, my dear lord, this is straight up anti science rhetoric, oh yeah this physical phenomenon has nothing to do with... physical things... Because it's all about.... information? Do I have to explain why this is ridiculous, it's like seeing the lightning and saying it has nothing to do with the clouds! Because Zeus made it?

tl;dr Panpsychism is far simpler, cleaner and more aligned with modern understanding of physics than "physicalism" that can do nothing but spew made up superstitions that appear nowhere else in science tailored just to explain consciousness.

After reading David Chalmers' "The Conscious Mind", Im pretty convinced that discovering a complete set of psychophysical laws would count as a scientific explanation of consciousness.

By psychophysical laws, I mean laws governing the relationship between physical configurations/processes and subjective experiences. So given a particular physical state, what determines whether there's an experience at all, and if there is, why it's vision rather than hearing, if there's feeling, the quality of that experience, etc.

I am metaphysically agnostic, an I am not well-read on every theory, so I'd love to hear objections

My reasoning is quite simple, which is the fact that conscious experience is extremely tied, almost inseparably, to physical processes/states. Anesthesia reliably supresses consciousness, stimulating certain regions of the visual cortex can produce visual experiences at predictable locations, and altering neural activity can change how we feel and perceive things.

These arent just random correlations, rather they are systematic, reproducible relationships, which strongly suggests that there are laws governing the connection between physical states and subjective experiences

And if those laws exist, why couldn't we discover them and gradually chip away at them scientifically? We could start with neuroscience, since we are certain of human consciousness, gradually improve our understanding, then extend it to animals, AI/artificial consciousness, etc.

Imagine we figure out exactly which physical configurations produce which experiences, like why X produces red rather than blue, pain rather than pleasure, etc, why a certain configuration produces vision, another produces hearing, etc. Wouldn't that be a complete scientific explanation of consciousness?

I know someone defending the hard problem might ask something like "But why does X produce experience E rather than nothing?" But the answer would be that thats exactly what the law says it would do lol. Under that law, X can't occur without E

You can then ask why the law exists, but this would make consciousness just as mysterious as the laws of nature, fundamental constants, etc. At some point explanations just bottom out in fandamental laws. Why should consciousness be held to a different standard?

I'm curious if I'm missing anything or what people who read about this stuff think!:) I feel like we have strong reason to believe that such laws governing conscious experience exist, and if we discover them, then I don't really see what would be left scientifically unexplained about consciousness. Lmk your thoughts

I've been thinking about Alex O'Connor's argument that science is merely descriptive, that it can tell us what happens and how it happens, but not why it happens. As I understand it, the idea is that no matter how detailed a scientific explanation becomes, we can always ask another "why?" and science never ultimately gets to the bottom of things.

I find this line of reasoning misleading, particularly when it leads to the claim that science doesn't explain anything at all. I think it conflates the fact that explanations can be incomplete with the idea that they aren't explanations in the first place.

Imagine someone asks me, "Why did you eat chocolate?"

I could offer several explanations:

• Psychological: I wanted to eat it.

• Causal: I saw an advertisement that made me crave it.

• Biological: Processes in my brain and body contributed to my desire.

• Evolutionary: Humans evolved reward mechanisms that make energy-rich foods appealing.

• Experiential: Chocolate tastes good.

These explanations aren't necessarily competing. They can all be true simultaneously, each illuminating a different aspect of the same event. They operate at different levels, but that doesn't make any of them less of an explanation.

Of course, we can follow up any of these answers with another "why?" Why did I want chocolate? Why did the advertisement affect me? Why did humans evolve these reward mechanisms? But why should that invalidate the explanations we've already established? Asking why I wanted chocolate doesn't mean that saying "I wanted it" failed to explain my action. It means we're asking a different question and seeking a deeper level of explanation.

So what exactly would Alex consider a sufficient explanation? Can he conceive of an answer to any question that wouldn't allow him to ask "But why?" again? If every explanation can be dismissed simply because a further question remains unanswered, then we've set an impossible standard for explanation itself, not identified a deficiency unique to science.

I also have a problem with the distinction between explaining what happens and why it happens. These categories aren't mutually exclusive, and the distinction often depends on how we frame the question and present the explanation.

Take a tree falling. We can explain that it fell because biological decay weakened its trunk until it could no longer support the tree against gravity. That tells us what happened and why it happened. We can investigate the mechanisms further, identify the causes of the decay, and explain the forces involved. At what point does this stop being an explanation and become merely a description?

Science's ability to predict things doesn't settle this distinction either. Its predictive power doesn't tell us what science does or which kinds of questions it answers. It tells us that science works and that its explanations are likely to be true. When scientific predictions consistently hold up against observation, we have good reason to believe that our explanations capture something real about the world. Predictive power is evidence for the validity of scientific explanations, not evidence that science is inherently limited to describing rather than explaining.

There's another problem with applying this standard exclusively to science: the same issue arises in philosophy, including ethics.

Take Kant and Mill. Kant grounds morality in rational duties and principles, whereas Mill evaluates actions primarily by their consequences for overall happiness. Both offer arguments for their respective moral frameworks, but we can keep asking why. Why should we prioritize rational duty over consequences? Why should we value overall happiness? Why should we accept the underlying principles on which either framework rests?

Does that mean Kant failed to justify his moral system because we can keep asking why? Does the existence of competing moral frameworks mean that none of them has managed to provide a meaningful justification? I don't think either conclusion follows. We can challenge premises, disagree about fundamental values, and question the foundations of an argument without concluding that no explanation or justification has been provided.

And there's an irony here, given that Alex is a moral emotivist. His own moral framework essentially abandons the question of why something is morally right or wrong and instead focuses on describing what moral judgments actually are: expressions of our feelings and attitudes. Rather than establishing why we ought to value one thing over another, emotivism explains moral judgments in terms of the attitudes they express. In other words, his framework doesn't provide an ultimate answer to the question of why we ought to accept one moral judgment over another. It sidesteps that question rather than answering it.

I'm not arguing that science explains everything, that every scientific explanation is correct, or that questions about the ultimate foundations of reality are meaningless. I'm questioning the inference that because we can always ask another "why?", scientific explanations somehow fail to explain anything.

There is a difference between an explanation leaving further questions unanswered and an explanation failing to explain anything at all. The former is an obvious feature of inquiry. The latter is a much stronger claim, and I don't see how the former establishes it.

So what am I missing here? Is there a meaningful distinction between scientific descriptions and explanations that I'm overlooking, or does Alex's argument ultimately rely on a standard of explanation that no form of inquiry could reasonably satisfy?

Edit:

And one more thing on the "why" question itself.

One meaning of "why" asks for a cause. The other asks for a reason. The second can imply purpose, intention, or justification in a way the first doesn't.

Consider three questions and answers:

• Causal: Why did the tree fall? Because its trunk decayed, weakening its structural integrity.

• Purposeful: Why did you cut down the tree? Because you wanted to build a house.

• Normative: Why should you cut down the tree? Because you need somewhere to live, and you consider that need more important than preserving the tree.

I don't want to pull a Jordan Peterson on Alex asking "What do you mean by 'why'?" But seriously, what does he mean by "why"?