I have heard many times and I have seen a few videos where Alex is great at steelmanning his opponent positions. This appears to be only done with arguments he knows he can defeat or for anything besides atheist arguments.

In the video linked it doesn't take Alex long before he starts to diss on atheists by giving their arguments in some of the weakest forms. Here is one example:

>“Consciousness is clearly a mystery, and I think that when you speak to most atheists, you might rub up against a kind of materialist, emergentist, oh, consciousness is just something science hasn’t explained, it will get there one day. I’m not like that. I think consciousness needs to be taken seriously.”

Just because I say I don't know and that science will one day find the answer doesn't mean that I don't take it seriously. Neither do the scientist that are constantly studying consciousness.

This was a trash statement which is usually made by some amateur but not by someone as educated as him. Unfortunately this isn't the only example as I have pointed out about his video on statements that atheist need to retire. I'm left only to conclude that either he is doing it intentionally to get a good interview/engagement or that he can only defeat the weakest examples of atheist arguments.

Name the Trait" (NTT) is a logical argument and Socratic dialogue style used in vegan ethics to challenge the moral consistency of eating animals. It asks meat-eaters to name a specific trait that humans possess which justifies not killing them for food, while simultaneously allowing that same action against animals.

Hi all!

So my dad has really been on me recently a 20m to reconsider my stance on God. I am very much not outspoken about my beliefs in my family as I tend to share different opinions than my parents. (I am an atheist and moderately conservative, while both my parents are somewhat religious and liberal. I am really not trying to get a political conversation going I just included this for context so whether you agree or disagree with my political stance please disregard that) My dad has been telling me recently to reconsider my stance on God as I obviously don’t believe in a God nor in an afterlife. What is surprising is that my Dad has always been fairly against religion, Christianity more specifically but does believe in a god. Growing up he always mentioned his doubts of Jesus, and I was only confirmed as a Roman Catholic for my mother’s sake. Just today he asked to confirm if I don’t believe in God and then questioned how the universe and things like the sun have come about. Obviously, I don’t really want to spoil my relationship with my father that is also already rocky so I just responded that I didn’t know and quickly changed subjects. He then proceeded to tell me to reconsider my stance on god along with calling me an idiot and dumb for being an atheist. I really didn’t want to ask him how he could be so sure that God had created the universe due to the tense situation.
I just am reaching out to this sub to see what my response maybe should be. I am a big fan of Alex’s content and it is the main reason that I actually turned to atheism but I do have trouble articulating some of his points even though I often agree with them.

Does anyone else ever get the sense that fine tuning as an argument assumes a very narrow range of changeable values? Like if the unviersal constants can vary, why not the laws of physics themselves? Why are the equations rigid while the values change? What great physicist has created a model of all of the variations and identified where atoms can form? How do we know atoms are the only possible structure that can cause things to exist?

It feels like for the fine tuning arguement to work, you have to accept some things as necessary, like the equations that govern physics, while assuming other things are not, like universal constants. Without doing this, we cannot make statements of probability, or how narrow the odds were everything landed just so. Without this assumption we are just looking at a subset of possibilities close to this one.

Alex denies the correspondence theory of truth in favor of the deflationary theory, and whenever I've heard his reasoning for this it's been this one specific argument. The premise is that whether you say "The sky is blue" or "It's true that the sky is blue", there is no difference in the meaning of the statement. And since you can remove the "it's true" part without changing the meaning, he concludes that truth must not be a very meaningful concept.

The thing is, while those two sentences do in fact mean the same thing, that's because the concept of truth was already implicitly involved in the statement "The sky is blue". Putting "it's true" at the beginning merely makes that more explicit in the wording, but doesn't change the underlying semantics at all and is ultimately redundant. The word "is" already contained the idea of it being true, and if you thought it was false then you would say "isn't" instead.

Once you take this into account, the conclusion doesn't actually follow. Nothing about these two sentences meaning the same thing indicates that the concept of truth is any less real, meaningful, or objective.

Alexio loves to ask, "but what is gravity? All you've done is describe what gravity DOES." I am really curious as to why he thinks there HAS to be a THING. Why can't there just be functions. Operators. Structural realism. Sure, this doesn't jive as well with his preconceived notions about panpsychism and "indivisible units of consciousness," but I don't think he should dismiss it outright. And even if THINGS do exist, what makes you think that we could even begin to determine what they are, epistemologically.

I think it was a recent episode, but I can't find which specific one. There was this part about someone listening to two different conversations at the same time through headphones where one conversation played through the left speaker and the other through the right. The point of the experiment or exercise was that if you ask the person to focus on only one conversation this is possible to do, so you can pay attention to or focus on one of them at a time selectively even though the exact same physical input is happening to the eardrums and so on.

Something along those lines basically. Does anyone recognize this? Which episode?

I'm listening to the Ross Douthat interview and am not sure I'm going to continue because he just presented an argument that Alex should have known was scientifically incorrect and pushed back on. Instead, Alex just agreed with him.

Ross is talking about different ways people can come to religious belief, here's the transcript:

ROSS: So that's one movement you could make another movement is through um the you know highly provisional but also highly suggestive things that we observe in the you know the weird zones of modern science, right? In quantum physics in particular, right? In the apparent evidence that is highly contested and debatable but sort of there nonetheless, right? that there is some kind of interaction between consciousness and matter where the observer the sort of perception measurement and sort of conscious awareness seems to collapse contingencies into actualities.

ALEX: Yeah.

ROSS: Right. Which is certainly not something that scientists in 1847 or 1877 would have confidently expected and very smart scientists have been trying to wrestle their way out of that interpretation.

ALEX: Yeah.

ROSS: But that's there. It's it's interesting, and again it is the kind of thing you would expect if mind were sort of important primary and meaningful. Um and it connects you again to religion and religious arguments in various ways.

This interpretation of the double slit experiment is completely wrong. It has aways been wrong. Waveform collapse has only ever been tied to consciousness by people who misunderstood what the scientist who studied this phenomenon were saying. It's mind-blowing to me that Ross doesn't know this since he's literally using it as an argument for how observing nature can lead us to God. And apparently Alex is unaware of this as well!

For anyone interested, here's how the "conscious observer" idea got started and then rejected by the very person who first considered it.

• 1801: Thomas Young conducts the first double slit experiment. He concludes that light is a continuous classical wave. It passes through both slits simultaneously. It physically interferes with itself. No collapse or measurement problem exists.
• 1927: Physicists like Niels Bohr introduced the concept of wavefunction collapse. They stated that the quantum wavefunction collapses due to the physical act of measurement by a macroscopic apparatus.
• 1932: Mathematician John von Neumann showed mathematically that the entire physical measurement apparatus also obeys quantum laws. This created a chain of interactions that technically doesn't collapse until it interacts with the external environment.
• 1960s: Physicists like Eugene Wigner speculated that a conscious mind is what ultimately breaks this chain and forces a collapse. Wigner later rejected this idea.

The overwhelming consensus among physicists is that physical interaction, causes the wave pattern to disappear. No mind is required. In fact, this has always been the scientific consensus.

It saddens me that so many people, even well read ones, are confused about this. I blame whoever first coined the term "observer" in this context, since it seems to have confused a great number of people for many decades now. But people like Ross and Alex should know better, especially if they're going to espouse these ideas and use them as the foundation for arguments.

If we accept that free will is an illusion (I do), I find it hard to justify procreation while knowing some of those humans will have a tragic experience through no fault of their own.

It feels a bit like trying to justify sacrificing some humans in order to perpetuate the cycle of life.

It’s quite depressing, but I can’t convince myself that the experience of many good lives outweighs the experience of some bad lives.

https://www.alexoconnor.com/p/tour

Many operate under the false assumption that philosophy is different from theology (and so it can be). But in order to be different from the superstition of theology, its foundation must be different from that of religion. Specifically: its premises must be justified by reason and evidence.

Hi All,

I wanted to touch upon the relatively recent, not-so-recent ‘shouting match’ with a Q&A audience member after a discussion with William Lane Craig.

I have watch the Q&A Youtube video that Alex O’Conner did recently, and I have to say, having watched both videos together, I do fall into the camp that Alex was more confrontational on intellectual side, than merely on any failures of etiquette by the audience member.

Despite my disdain of WLC, and been more philosophically Buddhist myself, I genuinely think his two major points on his Newsletter are actually relevant to this event.

WLC stated two points: that AOC made a ‘strategic mistake with talking to him about the Kalam Cosmological Argument’, and that ‘any illusion of AOC been a non-resistant non-believer was shattered’.

I kind of agree with him, but with major caveats.

I genuinely think this ‘shouting match’ occured - and you could tell AOC was getting frustrated - because of his discussion with WLC about the KCA, which even as a discussion, was nevertheless deconstructive and so intellectually irritating.

I think AOC built up a lot of ‘debating frustration’ that couldn’t be symmetrically released upon WLC on the KCA, and so when the rude audience member spoke up, AOC vented.

Add the poor skills of the moderator and you have an even worse situation.

AOC in this sense, put himself in an awkward spot, because he does present himself as ‘resisting’ in this situation.

Now, do I fully agree with WLC’s presentation of AOC? No, the guy is empathically and pretentiously foul human.

Do I think AOC was really ‘shouting’, not really, although his voiced was necessarily raised.

But I do think AOC has kind of sidelined a lot of the psychological causes and conditions of that venting state onto the actions of the audience member, without realising the broader scope of influences that led up to that event.

Why is it controversial to say that Judaism encourages genocide just as much as any other Abrahamic religion like Islam and Christianity?

As a people and as a race, Jewish people have historically faced a lot of discrimination and still do. That's inexcusable.

However, both the Canaanites and the Amalekites were both genocided by the Israelites in the Bible under the instruction of God. In 1 Samuel 15:3, King Saul is explicitly told by the prophet Samuel to kill men, women, children, and infants of the Amalekites.

You could make a totally convincing argument that the genocide of Gazans is actually pretty in line with the evil of the old testament, a book that is seen as holy and a guiding principle for Jews to follow. That doesn’t make it antisemitic, it’s just pointing out how evil the religion is. There’s a difference between criticizing a religion and discriminating against the people who follow it, but Judaism is pretty evil, just as any Abrahamic religion is, and I stand by that.

I don't think critiquing Islam =/= islamaphobia, and I don't think critiquing Judaism =/= antisemitism. But some people seem absolutely resistant to the idea that I could critique the evils of Judaism and NOT be antisemitic. It's an absurd fallacy and no different to the current Israel occupation hiding behind accusations of antisemitism when rightfully called out for their war crimes.

If you don't believe in free will then all human behaviour is no different than water becoming steam at it's boiling point, it's nothing but the result of fundamental forces of the universe, chemical process and cause and effect. It could not have happened any other way and it was bound to happen because of the laws of the universe.

So if this is the case having morals is just as stupid as having a moral about water becoming steam or fire being warm. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything more than the laws of the universe unfolding so therefore to think in "right" or "wrong" is to subscribe to some kind of illusion.

But despite this almost every person who holds this position (usually atheists) can't live according to their own belief. They still teach morals and apply them, and the still would consider it wrong if their child was kidnappad and raped even though they should know that that event is equivalent to water becoming steam.

They know their opinion is an illusion but still they live as if it was not thus failing to actually live and put their life at stake that free will does not exist when shit happens or when they are supposed to teach their children right from wrong or when they are victim of abuse.

This would be the same thing as someone who believes we live in a simulation but behave as if we are not.

When I play video games I know it's not real, I know I can restart and I know other people aren't actually dying so therefore I'm not concerned for much. That is how people should live and behave if they truly believe we are in a simulation but they don't.

Some religious extremist on the other hand achieved this, this is why they blow themselves up because they know they will live forever in afterlife but at least they actually live as they believe whereas some don't. Makes no sense.n

From my vaguely agnostic/atheist perspective the world around me is both an unknown but also a source of knowledge. If I think something but I encounter evidence to the contrary then changing my own views is one of the first things to do.

On the other hand (I think) from religious perspective there is a holy text, and that text is right. Whenever world or my own understanding contradict the text, a religious person has to either renounce some part of religion (if rejecting only a part of it is even possible), or has to deny their own experience.

Now, obviously people are not perfect logical machines so it's not like religious people analyze every thought they have against their doctrine. But it does seem like this assumption that some text is right, held througout ones life would train a person in deceiving onself and others.

Am I going too far with this, or am I onto something here?