The Best Ideas I've Found This Year - Alex O'Connor

Añadido: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]What do you think on your estimation is the best idea that you encountered in the last year?

[00:00:06]Um gosh, man. The best the best idea that I've encountered in the last year.

[00:00:12]I mean, okay. Um Okay. So, I I want to say like split brain stuff. I've actually been thinking about split brain stuff for longer than a year. Um, but in the past year, I've really begun to try to consider the implications of the the hemispheric like lateral divide of the brain for sensuses of self, for personhood, for consciousness, for that kind of stuff. Uh, I can't exactly give you an idea there. like I'm working my way through McGillchrist's The Matter with Things and his his sort of magnum opus two volume three-part uh philosophy and he sort of says like look I can't really tell you what I think. I kind of just have to take you with me. We're just going to sort of walk through some stuff. We're going to stop here and there to look from some vantage points and hopefully by the end you'll kind of get what I'm driving at. I think he's driving at something really important.

[00:01:12]So the significance of the hemispheric divide which is got I mean if if most people agree that our brains are like the center of our of our conscious experiences >> whether the brain produces consciousness or not you know the brain is like where it all happens. The brain is where sort of we if we are anyway where seem to sit and the fact that there are like two of them like consistently that every single nervous study we've ever studied has an asymmetrical divide. Even like nematodes with like 308 neurons have an asymmetry in them. There seems to be some deep deep evolutionary reason to keep them separate to the extent that when the brain grows the corpus colossum doesn't grow. So the corpus colossum actually relatively speaking shrinks as the brain evolves. Like it seems like that there's a really good reason to keep them apart.

[00:02:02]Mammals are the are the only creatures that have corpus colossums. Other animals just don't even have that connective tissue.

[00:02:09]That's got to mean something. And the fact that the brain is like the center of like everything we ever experience ever, the center of thought, of experience, of love, of passion, of art, of music, the fact that there are two of them that seem to be in like this kind of symbiotic relationship where sometimes they rub up against each other and sometimes they work together, that's got to be like so significant, right? that the fact that like our very center of experience is is like dualistic is like is like there's like this duality of the way that we attend to the world that's got to mean something and I I the reason I I want to work through the rest of the matter with things is because I want to try and unlock what that significance is. So there's that. Um, outside of that, I think Castro's attack on materialism was quite important to me. The view that like phenomenological stuff comes first. Like I've got a book, This is Waking Up by Sam Harris cuz I just had him back on my show.

[00:03:09]>> Mhm.

[00:03:09]>> And like I have an experience of it. I I see it.

[00:03:13]I touch it. I hear it. Right. It's all experiential states. And I've got an AirPods case here. And I can like be like, "Oh, this one feels like it's got kind of more it's harder to to move than this one." And you know, this one appears to me it takes up more of my visual field than this one does. And these are all experiences, but then we start mathematizing them. We start putting labels on these experiences. So I call that thing, I call it weight, >> and I I give it the mathematical uh uh language of like kilograms. you know, I I measure the phenomenological experience in kilograms. So kilograms is a quantification of the quality of how I'm experiencing the world. And yeah, like this one like it looks it's got sort of this thing which I'm going to call length. I'm going to call it centime. I'm going to, you know, and so we start with the experience and then we put mathematical labels on them. And then for some reason what we've done is we've like said actually at some point we just suddenly flipped and we're like no the thing that really exists the thing that's foundational is the label is the is the maths is the kilograms the the centimeters all of that kind of stuff that's the stuff that really exists and my experience of it is somehow like emergent of it like what I mean if you actually track the likely historical story the mathematical description of the world is emergent of the experience that you're having, you know. And so Castro thinks that we sort of flipped it on its head.

[00:04:37]And I think that's a really interesting idea. Like he says that we we're sort of we're drawing a map of a mountain range and like clearly we're just trying to like describe the mountain range in a useful way. And then at some point we've just suddenly decided that actually the thing that really exists is the map. And the mountain range must somehow emerge out of the map. And you're saying that while you're stood on top of a mountain, >> it just I don't know. I think there's there's something in there. I mean, we didn't get into that. We said we might talk about that, but I mean >> I think that's interesting. Not to say it's, you know, full proof or anything, but I can't remember the exact nature of your question, but whether it's the most interesting or important or whatever, but that's been, >> you know, earthshattering to me is to just try to really get to grips with what it means to be experiencing the world phenomenologically first. Um, those are two things that come to mind, I think.

[00:05:31]>> Fantastic.