Alex O’Connor: Why Consciousness Keeps the God Question Open

Alex O’Connor says disagreement over beliefs as important as God and ethics need not make compassion irrelevant. People have reason to advocate firmly, but also to recognize that an argument can challenge something another person uses to make sense of their life.

Although formerly known as an atheist, he now prefers agnostic. He says a universe grounded in consciousness makes the line between his position and some ideas of God harder to draw. Even when he was an atheist, he would have liked many religious hopes, including eternal life, to be true.

People raised in religious communities have told him they did not necessarily have the opportunity or motivation to examine what they were taught. O’Connor wants people to examine a belief without assuming that reflection must produce his own answer.

He describes philosopher Joe Schmid’s approach as advocating for positions like a barrister. Exploring arguments on different sides can strengthen thinking; a conclusion held for a weak reason is vulnerable even if it happens to be correct.

Williamson suggests everyone holds some beliefs for reasons they have not tested. O’Connor agrees that familiar descriptions can conceal imprecision, and their discussion turns to how language and perspective influence what seems obvious.

They joke about traveling through time and the need to account for Earth’s movement. O’Connor uses the question to introduce the idea that motion is measured relative to a frame of reference, rather than against an unquestionable stationary point.

They discuss an object moving through the solar system as an example of descriptions that change with the observer’s frame. O’Connor stresses that picking another reference point does not uncover a privileged perspective from which everything else is truly moving.

A parent on a train telling a child to stop moving expects the child to remain still relative to the carriage, not to halt relative to the Sun. Ordinary language leaves the frame implicit because the context normally makes it obvious.

O’Connor thinks religious arguments can similarly turn on words that participants use differently. He wants people to clarify what they mean before deciding that a disagreement is insoluble or assuming that the other side is being irrational.

Unlike a cumulative technical project, he suggests, each generation has to encounter existential questions for itself. Knowledge can be inherited, but the personal work of understanding why a belief matters does not simply transfer from parent to child.

O’Connor recounts traditions about Thomas Aquinas leaving his theological work unfinished after an overwhelming religious experience. He contrasts sustained philosophical argument with the possibility that a believer’s strongest conviction comes from experience instead.

He cites Blaise Pascal’s account of a religious experience and the contrast Pascal drew between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham. For O’Connor, such stories show that intellectual argument is only one part of religious life.

Williamson asks whether this makes debate pointless. O’Connor says philosophical reflection need not exist merely to convince an atheist: believers can use it to examine the implications and coherence of a commitment they already hold.

He distinguishes reflection on what God would be like from a proof that God exists. An exchange may miss its target when a critic treats an exercise in exploring a tradition as if it were offered as a historical demonstration.

Williamson asks about a change in the tone of public arguments during their years of friendship. They recall the appeal of older debate videos built around an opponent being defeated, and ask whether today’s conversations have become less combative.

Williamson recalls a story told by a woman who had been depressed and described a religious experience as restoring meaning. He contrasts the emotional significance of her account with a skeptical response that focused on evidence for the belief.

The host suggests a belief can support someone at a vulnerable moment, so a narrowly analytical reply may feel especially harsh. O’Connor nonetheless thinks both the individual’s experience and a critic’s concern for truth are legitimate things to discuss.

O’Connor distinguishes an experience that convinces the person who has it from a public historical claim, such as whether Jesus rose from the dead. Someone can acknowledge the importance of the former without accepting every claim associated with it.

He says that when one person talks about finding meaning in Jesus and another replies with arguments about manuscripts, they may be discussing different questions. The response can be relevant to a historical claim yet fail to engage the experience the first person wanted to share.

The conversation turns to the difficulty of defining religion itself. O’Connor contrasts confident public explanations with scholarship that first has to decide what the subject includes and what assumptions go into that definition.

Williamson asks whether humans 150,000 years ago would have had religion. O’Connor says the answer depends on the meaning of religion and on evidence that is difficult to recover; he considers how a religious impulse might have developed without presenting a precise date as known.

They consider whether similar beliefs across cultures come from a shared inherited tradition or from independent human tendencies. O’Connor notes that competing stories can be made to fit the same observations, making a confident reconstruction difficult.

He distinguishes gods depicted as powerful characters who move, speak and interact from a conception of God as the ultimate source of reality. He treats these as different ideas rather than assuming that a count of divine figures settles the whole question.

Because the categories differ, he says it is hard to identify when a specifically monotheistic understanding began. Traditions also contain a range of descriptions, and terms such as God can point beyond an imagined supernatural person.

O’Connor cites mystical language about the ground shared by God and the self, and a name for God associated with truth or reality. His point is that some believers discuss ultimate reality rather than picturing a large humanlike being somewhere in space.

The conversation returns to the difference between ultimate reality and the gods of stories. O’Connor questions whether ancient worshippers must have understood every myth as a literal report about a physical figure on a mountain.

He compares such stories to the way a child may relate to a stuffed animal: the interaction can carry feeling and meaning even when an adult’s description of the object would sound entirely different. He offers this as an analogy, not a verified account of ancient belief.

A shared imaginative relationship need not work like a factual assertion tested in isolation, he suggests. This leads him back to the thought that a god understood as the substance or foundation of reality belongs to a different category from a character in a story.

Consciousness is a difficult topic for Western philosophy, O’Connor says, because it does not sit neatly alongside the objects science describes. Yet, he argues, it is also the starting point: everything a person knows is encountered through experience.

He asks Williamson to imagine removing senses one at a time. The exercise is intended to separate whatever awareness itself is from the particular sights, sounds and other contents that normally fill it.

Even if each familiar sense disappeared, O’Connor suggests, the question of whether experience remained would not be answered by listing missing sensory inputs. He is trying to identify what is common to experiences rather than defining one experience by another.

He argues that consciousness is unusually difficult to define because a definition typically refers to something else. Definitions of ordinary objects can identify functions or physical properties, but the feeling of being aware seems harder to replace with external descriptions.

A table can be described by what it is made of and what it does. For subjective experience, O’Connor says, those descriptions leave the question of what it is like to be the subject having the experience.

He invokes Thomas Nagel’s formulation: a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being. The question is about the perspective from the inside, not just whether an observer can catalog an organism’s behavior.

O’Connor says attempts to explain experience by stepping outside it face a special problem, because the explanation is itself understood within awareness. This is a philosophical argument about the limits of a certain kind of description, rather than an experiment establishing an alternative theory.

He turns to mathematical laws: they can express reliable relationships and predict what things do. He asks whether a precise account of how objects behave also tells us what they are in themselves.

Gravity offers his example of the difference. A formula can predict motion extremely well while leaving a further question about why the world has those relationships in the first place.

He asks Williamson to imagine falling and releasing an object. In free fall, both fall together; he uses that common situation and an orbiting spacecraft to challenge the intuition that apparent weightlessness means gravity is absent.

The episode illustrates O’Connor’s broader point that identifying a pattern or a law is not the same question as explaining its deepest nature. Scientific predictions remain useful even when philosophical questions about what underlies them remain open.

He invokes Newton’s reluctance to invent a hypothesis about the underlying cause of gravity. O’Connor is interested in the distinction between establishing a law and claiming to know the ultimate nature of the phenomenon it describes.

The parallel with consciousness is that even a complete description of brain activity, he argues, would leave an explanatory question: why should that activity be accompanied by a felt experience at all?

He introduces the thought experiment of Mary, who learns all the physical information about color while never having seen it. When she finally sees a color, he asks, does she acquire a new kind of knowledge about what the experience is like?

For O’Connor, the example illustrates the gap he sees between a third-person account of wavelengths and neural activity and the first-person character of seeing. The conclusion depends on a contested interpretation of what Mary learns.

Asked whether there are other questions science will never explain, he describes science as a powerful tool designed for certain tasks. His concern is not that it cannot make progress, but that a method for measuring behavior may not settle every question about inner nature.

He compares expecting one method to solve every kind of problem to treating a tool as suitable for every job. An account of matter’s external relations, he argues, does not automatically tell us what matter is intrinsically.

O’Connor separates atheism from materialism: not believing in a god does not require believing that mind can be reduced to matter. He outlines possibilities including consciousness as fundamental, while distinguishing them from traditional belief in a personal creator.

A description of an atom in terms of its interactions and measurable effects, he says, tells us what it does. He asks whether the description answers the further question of what, if anything, it is like in itself.

He compares identifying pieces by their roles in chess with asking what they are made of. Knowing the rules that govern a piece tells a player how it functions, but does not by itself specify its material.

The discussion returns to the relationship between objective descriptions and subjective awareness. O’Connor thinks the strength of science at predicting behavior should not be confused with proof that behavior exhausts reality.

He says scientific work itself rests on assumptions about observation and a world that can be investigated. The fact that an assumption is practically indispensable does not, in his view, make it something the same method can independently establish without already using it.

The existence of an external world is his example: conducting observations normally assumes some stable setting in which observations are possible. He is not proposing that people stop using science, but drawing a boundary around what he thinks a method presupposes.

Williamson asks what kind of method could reach the nature of something beyond its observable behavior. O’Connor responds by returning to the one case in which he thinks a person has access from the inside: their own experience.

They consider whether consciousness supports the existence of God. O’Connor distinguishes several ways a mind-first view could be developed and says that accepting a problem for materialism would not, by itself, prove a particular religion.

He discusses a conception in which individual minds are related to a larger mental reality. Language about separate objects and communication becomes difficult, he suggests, when the underlying view treats apparent boundaries as expressions of something more unified.

Analogies such as waves or whirlpools can help convey this proposal without making it straightforward. O’Connor recognizes the frustration of using images when a listener wants a precise account of how the proposed relationship works.

He links this difficulty to religious and contemplative traditions that use figurative language about self and reality. The resemblance is a way to explore the ideas, not a claim that all traditions teach identical doctrines.

Williamson asks about meditation as a possible way of changing how experience is organized. O’Connor says he does not have extensive personal experience with it and is cautious about claiming to know what practitioners encounter.

They consider whether familiar concepts can filter experience so effectively that people ordinarily overlook what is directly present. On this account, contemplative practice might change the relationship between raw perception and the labels imposed on it.

O’Connor entertains the possibility that temporarily loosening conceptual categories changes how the world appears. He does not claim that this establishes that meditators see ultimate reality more accurately, or that the experience verifies a metaphysical theory.

The host and guest discuss how the brain translates sensory information. O’Connor’s philosophical question is whether the familiar world is encountered independently of that translation or always as it appears within experience.

They use the colors of objects in the room to explore how easily categories feel like features of the world itself. O’Connor suggests examining the immediate appearance rather than assuming that a word exhausts what is being perceived.

Repetition and meditation enter the conversation as possible ways to alter habitual attention. O’Connor remains tentative about mechanisms and emphasizes his limited firsthand experience.

Williamson proposes an explicitly unethical thought experiment: a community raised without ordinary cultural assumptions might offer a different perspective. O’Connor responds with a question about the relationship between sensory learning and what people take to be immediately obvious.

He asks whether someone blind from birth whose sight is restored could immediately distinguish a cube and a sphere by sight after knowing them by touch. Williamson expects they could; O’Connor says cases suggest that mapping the two senses is not necessarily immediate.

The example leads him to the interaction of the senses. He says even an empiricist who trusts observation receives information through experience, whereas a mind-first view emphasizes that appearances are not simply a transparent view from nowhere.

Different animals and instruments register different parts of the environment. O’Connor uses infrared, ultraviolet and magnetic sensing to argue that a creature’s world of appearances depends in part on the capacities through which it encounters the world.

Returning to Nagel’s bat, he distinguishes imagining oneself hanging upside down and flying from knowing what echolocation is like for a bat. His point is that the latter is a question about a perspective unavailable from an external description alone.

He uses smell to challenge the priority given to visual descriptions. Explaining odors with particles and receptors may describe mechanisms, he argues, while still leaving the distinctive character of a smell unexpressed.

Describing how molecules interact with a nose, he says, relies on what things look like or can be measured to do. Reversing the explanation—saying the physical process is what lavender smells like—shows him how different sensory accounts relate without obviously reducing one experience to another.

O’Connor describes Kant’s distinction between phenomena, the world as it appears, and things as they are in themselves. He says the point is that people do not simply step outside their own mode of experience to check appearances against an unmediated view.

In his account of Schopenhauer, the body appears in two ways: a hand can be observed as an object, and it is also felt from within. He says Schopenhauer treated this inner aspect as a clue to what might underlie appearances more generally.

O’Connor describes the proposed extension from one’s own inner life to other people, animals and ultimately nature. He distinguishes Schopenhauer’s basic, blind will from a claim that every object thinks or has a complex humanlike mental life.

He argues that consciousness itself could be simple even when human memories, senses and reflections are complex. A building and a rock, he suggests, can be arranged very differently despite being made from basic materials; complexity of organization need not imply complexity of every constituent.

An imagined being that experiences only a single color illustrates a minimal form of awareness for him. It would have far less varied content than a human mind, while still having something it is like to exist, if the thought experiment is coherent.

He suggests that a room full of manufactured objects makes a mind-like foundation of nature seem stranger than it might in a forest. He contrasts human artifacts with the movement and growth of living things, while not claiming that this comparison proves plants are conscious.

O’Connor explicitly says he has not established that the universe is made of consciousness. He has instead described why he sees a limit to external scientific accounts and tried to make one speculative alternative more intelligible.

He contrasts intuitive reactions to consciousness-first ideas with physicists’ competing interpretations of quantum mechanics. His point is about what people are willing to consider, not that quantum mechanics has demonstrated that electrons are conscious.

He challenges the idea that arranging nonconscious matter in a sufficiently complex way obviously produces experience. As a contrast, he asks whether merely organizing thoughts in the right way could produce a physical object; the proposed symmetry is an argument, not an experimental result.

Examples of emergence, such as heat or an image on a screen, do not settle the question for him. O’Connor argues that the vivid qualities used in those examples already depend on a conscious observer and therefore cannot alone explain the origin of experience.

He distinguishes an account of physical activity from the feeling of heat when someone touches something. His claim is that the felt quality is the very kind of first-person phenomenon that an appeal to emergence is supposed to explain.

A screen can be described in terms of signals and emitted light, but an image is also seen by a person. O’Connor says citing the image as an analogy for consciousness risks relying on consciousness in the explanation.

Asked how the argument relates to religion, he distinguishes predictable large-scale patterns from the stronger claim that subjective experience appears from wholly nonexperiential ingredients. He thinks the latter remains difficult to explain even with detailed knowledge of brain activity.

He outlines several positions: some versions of panpsychism locate rudimentary experience in basic constituents; idealism treats reality as fundamentally mental; and a traditional monotheistic view can posit a conscious creator distinct from the material world. These are his simplified sketches, not interchangeable claims.

O’Connor finds a single underlying mind more appealing than a model in which a deity adds consciousness to selected material objects. He frames this as his preference conditional on a mind-first picture, not a demonstration that the position is true.

He compares the apparent space within a dream to the proposed status of physical space in idealism: the distance is experienced, but the whole scene exists within a mind. He uses the dream as an analogy for the view, not as evidence that waking life is a dream.

Williamson reads a joke about AI agents praying at scale for someone’s soul. O’Connor treats the joke as a way into two questions: what prayer is supposed to accomplish, and whether an artificial agent could have an inner life.

A familiar skeptical objection asks why an all-knowing, benevolent God would need a person’s request before helping someone. If the deity already knows what is best, the purpose of asking for a change can seem unclear.

O’Connor suggests that at least some prayer changes the person praying: praying for another person may focus attention and align the worshipper’s intentions with what they believe is good. He presents this as an interpretation of the practice, not a claim that all prayers serve only one purpose.

He invokes Jesus praying in Gethsemane and accepting God’s will despite asking for the suffering to pass. On his reading, the prayer expresses fear and a willingness to align personal desire with a larger purpose.

Grace before a meal, he suggests, can cultivate gratitude, including in a secular form. Returning to the AI joke, he speculates that if an agent were conscious a prayer might matter to that agent, while questioning the idea that bulk requests would secure the user’s salvation.

Williamson asks whether declining to genetically engineer a child for attractiveness, intelligence or emotional stability differs morally from declining to provide a good education. O’Connor says the comparison raises questions about what people can control and what society chooses to value.

The host suggests that broader access to weight-loss drugs could change the way people assign responsibility for weight. O’Connor regards the wider prospect of designing children’s appearance with unease, while acknowledging that a gut reaction needs further thought.

He adds that even a person’s desire or ability to pursue education is not wholly chosen. The pair discuss how attention to inherited and environmental influences can complicate judgments about responsibility.

Williamson distinguishes embryo selection from genetic editing and describes existing IVF selection practices. He points to companies marketing predictions for complex traits and asks whether selecting against severe disease can be consistently separated from selecting for characteristics considered beneficial.

He argues that once selection to avoid a serious inherited condition seems acceptable, deciding where to stop becomes difficult. His examples of desired future traits are proposals in an ethical discussion, not established guarantees that selection can produce those outcomes.

O’Connor worries that choices could encourage endless perfectionism: parents might start by preventing a serious impairment, then feel pressure to keep adjusting appearance and other traits. He compares the open-ended pursuit of an ideal to a worry about repeated cosmetic procedures.

Williamson recalls another conversation about possible parental regret after selecting a child’s traits. O’Connor says he finds the idea of treating a child as a purchase that might produce buyer’s remorse deeply troubling, even as he searches for a precise explanation of that reaction.

They turn to philosopher Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem: choosing when or how to conceive can change which person comes into existence. That can make selecting among possible future people ethically different from altering the circumstances of an existing person.

O’Connor contrasts two imagined cases. In one, a pregnant woman could prevent a future impairment in the child she is carrying; in the other, waiting before conception would produce a different child. The examples ask how to assess choices made for self-serving reasons in each case.

If the second child’s life is worth living, O’Connor says, the child cannot straightforwardly say they would have been better off if their parent had waited: the alternative would have been a different person. Yet the decision may still strike people as wrong, which creates the philosophical puzzle.

The possibility that an unconceived person was harmed raises another difficulty, he says: it would imply obligations toward innumerable people who could have existed. The problem is how to explain a wrong choice if no particular person is made worse off than they otherwise would have been.

Williamson asks whether secretly fantasizing about another person is morally different from cheating or merely cheating constrained by technology. O’Connor references a saying attributed to Jesus and distinguishes an intrusive thought from choosing to dwell on it.

He says noticing another person’s attractiveness is different from deliberately cultivating the desire. In his view, fidelity concerns a person’s intentions as well as whether an external act occurs, although intentions are harder for another person to observe.

Williamson raises an anecdote about someone remaining faithful in an erotic dream and asks whether it deserves credit. O’Connor jokes about the implications for responsibility for bad dreams too, then says people do not really know enough about dreams to treat the scenario as a reliable moral test.

To distinguish intent from a physical event, O’Connor contrasts someone actively seeking an affair with a person who does not consent to sexual contact. He identifies the latter person as a victim; the example is meant to show why the physical act alone cannot determine moral responsibility.

O’Connor gives his view that partners should avoid deliberately indulging fantasies or pornography when those conflict with their commitments. He interprets the religious warning about lust as addressing cultivation of desire rather than involuntary recognition of attractiveness.

Williamson recalls advice attributed to a previous guest against work retreats that exclude partners, on the theory that unfamiliar settings can create opportunities for affairs. They consider whether avoiding temptation and strengthening self-control are competing strategies.

The host presses the question of whether deliberately avoiding temptation could make someone less resilient. O’Connor thinks practicing restraint matters, but concedes that the question of exposure is more complicated than his initial answer suggests.

He argues that pornography can encourage objectification and says what counts as cheating depends on a couple’s agreements. His statements about pornography and behavior are his interpretation of evidence, not causal findings established in the conversation.

O’Connor retells a story about Thomas Aquinas resisting a woman sent to tempt him. He rejects copying the story’s violent response and says discussions of objectification should pay attention to women who bear its consequences.

He argues that pornography can affect both performers and women outside the industry, and connects his concerns to consent and sexual expectations. He treats these as reasons for restraint, emphasizing care for a partner rather than moral self-image alone.

Williamson returns to safeguards such as avoiding work situations that invite temptation. O’Connor compares these to setting limits around social media feeds or websites when someone knows particular content is a trigger for them.

He describes curating his own social feeds around interests such as biblical studies and music, while acknowledging that he still scrolls more than he wants. He says wanting to leave social media is complicated when everyone else remains there.

For a partner secretly pining for a coworker over many years, O’Connor says the ethical question includes whether the person addressed the feelings and gave their partner information relevant to their own choice about the relationship.

O’Connor mentions upcoming live question-and-answer shows in North America and a planned return to more direct-to-camera video essays. He says editing those essays himself takes longer than recording a podcast, but he hopes to make more.