The Existential Crisis Iceberg - [Alex O'Connor]

Philosophy
1

One YouTube video leads to another and then there was, The Existential Crisis Iceberg - Alex O’Connor

I let him reel me in, wound up writing up a few comments, considering if it was worth pursuing. We’ll see, but for now figure I might as well add these thoughts and see if anyone else wants to discuss it or any other part of this exposition.

0:00 The Existential Crisis Iceberg
00:23 Everyone Has Their Own Complex Life
1:13 Worry About Future
1:35 Simulation Theory
3:47 Why Does Anything Exist?
4:59 Acknowledgement of Death
6:13 Sympathy is Created by Self-Pity
6:54 Last Thursdayism
9:53 You Are Alone in Your Brain
11:00 We Are Not Alone
11:26 Afterlife Skepticism
12:05 Nihilism
12:57 We Are Alone
14:14 Being Born Before Immortality
15:30 Dual Consciousness Theory
18:29 Observation Creates the Universe
20:21 Mystery of Consciousness
21:05 Past and Future Exist Simultaneously
22:40 Superdeterminism
25:19 Human Life is a Momentary Universal Anomaly
26:03 The Brain Creates the Flow of Time
26:22 Boltzmann Brain
30:45 Quantum Immortality

It’s the talk of the town, so ya can’t blame a chap for tossing in his two cents worth.

20:21 Mystery of Consciousness

With respect, I needed to call out Alex O’Connor for misrepresenting the state of the science. Evolutionary biology and modern neurobiology and physiology all lead to one conclusion, consciousness is an internal reflection of our living body communicating with itself. All the evidence (and there’s libraries full) points to that reality, and there are no alternate contenders. The same theme also runs through all other creatures throughout Earth’s evolution.

Chalmers’ hard problem is an intellectual contrivance, more hubris than science. Why?
Because it expects a level of resolution and understanding that scientists simply don’t yet possess - and dismisses all they’ve learned as inadequate for his idealistic standards. The thing is, that all the evidence scientists are collecting points at the same conclusion with a consilience that can be trusted. (It isn’t like electricity has given up all it’s all secrets either, impossible expectations comes to mind.)

Heck it wasn’t until fairly recently that the significant roll of connective tissue in so far as the body knowing what the body is doing was recognized. Totally new subtle layers of bodily communication are still being discovered. Still we can draw some firm basic common sense conclusions based on all the accumulated evidence at hand.

Namely the mystery of our consciousness has been resolved to a great extent. Fundamentally, all the thoughts in our minds, including thoughts of God, are created from within ourselves, interacting with life.

We don’t create the world, we perceive the world according to our particular body-plan.

That is simple, rational, evidence based. I submit objections are limited to theological philosophical expectations. To my sensibilities, intellectual entertainment - compared to the work and findings of the likes of Solms, Damasio, Sapolsky, and many others.

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So it’s unresolved, because science can’t address the complexity. That’s not the same as saying what we know is inadequate.

If “to a great extent” was where you left it, that would be fine. But you don’t. You go on to say we know where thought comes from. I look forward to your peer-reviewed paper and saying that, “I knew you when.”

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But the part of it coming from inside of us IS resolved.

Just like the example - that at the root of global warming is massively increasing greenhouse gases - this is settled beyond doubt - yet, yet, we still have people screaming with every contrived argument they can dream up that we don’t know it for sure, and there’s not enough evidence and without everything single last kink in this infinitely complex system is ironed out we can pretend that AGW isn’t settled yet - it the same dynamic. But humans never know everything - but that is the standard we’ve decided to impose on these particular topics.

Scientists are addressing the complexity, and the complexity IS within our human body - not out there somewhere. It’s within the layers we do understand. But we’d rather dream that it must be out there somewhere, yada, yada, yada

Although the questions we ask, and the foundational theological/philosophical mindset we approach the problem with doesn’t more to obscure than clarify.

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Plus you are totally ignoring the reason I keep talking about it is because I know that absorbing that realization, opens up entirely new avenues for better understanding oneself and my impulses and behaviors and feeling and interactions.

Knowing one’s place in the world, rather than the nonstop angst so many embrace.

It places me on the same level with the rest of this miracle planet and the creatures that inhabit it. For me that’s a good thing.

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You said, “Because it expects a level of resolution and understanding that scientists simply don’t yet possess”

Now you are saying it’s resolved. Come back when you are coherent.

[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:3, topic:11770”]

out there somewhere

[/quote]

Something I’ve never said or advocated on this forum. I only refer to it when I’m talking about something someone else said. I don’t know why that is so confusing for you.

I didn’t ignore that. I’ve worked at reflecting it and understanding it. It just makes you mad that I don’t use your exact words or say “you’re right”. I don’t think it’s as powerful of a realization, or framing, as you say. That shouldn’t be that difficult to hear.

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Now you are playing silly. I’ll have to get back to this.

You say you are reflecting on it,

Like the rock becomes mind???

I don’t buy it, in this context your words rarely reflect anything I can recognize . . .

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Your trolling I’ve answered this 3 different ways and you have ignored me

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Don’t toss the trolling label on me, when you can’t even afford me the courtesy of including my complete quote - and confront that - instead you slice and dice and discarding the important parts.

You have not justified reducing our mind to a FarSide cartoon.

I suggest there’s no way, given what evidence we currently have, that the origin of our consciousness can exist anywhere other than within our body. Following a fairly simple formula, where yes the devil is in the detail, still the basic formula hold firm

Body + Brain + Interaction (interior & exterior) = Consciousness (Mind)

It’s a formula that is consist throughout the animal kingdom and keeps everything within the reality of our physical evolved biological world.

Chalmers says that’s not enough. He dreamed a so-called Hard Problem, which is" to explain how and why physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience."

The full spectrum of coordinated biological complexity (that science has yet to fully plumb the depth of) isn’t enough for him - he must logic it out within his mind. And if the physical reality doesn’t totally conform to Chalmer’s imagined hard problem, then nature is to blame and must prove itself to him - so he feels the justified to introduce metaphysical skyhooks - to patch up our incomplete biological understanding.

As if the universe were on my side, look’s like Ethan Siegal has published a spot-on article, to highlight the difference between getting trapped within one’s mindscape - or taking the responsibility to respect the Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide and philosophically working out the implications - while we leave the scientist to keep homing on the utter saturated dynamic coordinated complexity that is our biological reality, our true self - (for those still searching).

Yes, reductionism can explain everything in the whole Universe

The whole isn’t greater than the sum of its parts; that’s a flaw in our thinking. Non-reductionism requires magic, not merely science.

Ethan Siegel - October 23, 2025, Medium.com

This simple idea — that all phenomena in the Universe are fundamentally physical phenomena — is known as reductionism. In many places, includingright here on Big Think, reductionism is treated as though it’s not the taken-for-granted default position about how the Universe works.
The alternative proposition is emergence, which states that qualitatively novel properties are found in more complex systems that can never, even in principle, be derived or computed from fundamental laws, principles, and entities.
While it’s true that many phenomena are not obviously emergent from the behavior of their constituent parts, reductionism should be the default position (or null hypothesis) for any interpretation of reality. Anything else should be treated as the equivalent of the God-of-the-gaps argument, and what follows is an explanation as to why. …

Chalmers may be a born genius, but he’s reduced himself to magic man, which is why I feel such distain for his game, because it resembles simple provocative crazy making for fun and profit - as opposed to simple constructive science.

Besides much of this essay reinforcing my own thinking, I see that my understanding of “Emergence” is on the simplistic side, so need to dig into that a bit.

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Yeah, yeah, so before someone calls me on it - in prechordates, it’s not a “brain”, it’s a variety of central processing nods, neural nets and whatnot, that stuff would eventually evolve into the brain, in more complex creatures.

Rock evolution happened billion of years before that.

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Exactly what I said. You demand that I repeat your words.

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What I expect is that you address them instead of disappearing them - and pretending the ideas aren’t out there.

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I don’t disappear anything and I have given my perspective on the impact very specifically by addressing how the ideas are integrated into current thinking. Unlike you who dismisses anything that looks at all like philosophy.