Michael Pollan explores consciousness theories, contrasting neural correlates with panpsychism and the "hard problem" that defeated neuroscientist Christoph Koch. He advocates for "consciousness hygiene" against AI-induced mental erosion, citing a tragic chatbot suicide case and his own hypnosis experiences revealing multiple selves. Pollan argues plants possess sentience via mycelium networks, challenging vegan ethics, while warning that current AI lacks embodied vulnerability despite claims of Claude's anxiety. Ultimately, he suggests cracking consciousness requires a scientific revolution or an unexpected approach from AI itself, urging caution against granting machines legal personhood. [Automatically generated summary]
And two things happened that were really interesting.
One is there's something about psychedelics that makes you think about consciousness.
It's like smudging the windscreen, the windshield that you normally is perfectly transparent and you see the world through.
Suddenly it's like different and you realize there's something between me and the world.
And what is it?
And that's consciousness.
And so, like a lot of people have done psychedelics, you start wondering about this mystery.
Why is it this way, not that way?
So that was one experience.
The other was I had an experience in my garden in Connecticut where we have a house of walking through my garden and getting the powerful impression that the plants were conscious.
And that these, I remember this particular, it was a plume poppy, or several plume poppies, and they were like returning my gaze.
They were very benevolent.
They were, you know, putting out positive vibes, but like they were conscious, much more alive than they'd ever been.
And like a lot of insights on psychedelics, I didn't know what to do with it.
Like, is it true?
Is it just a drug thing?
You know, what is it?
But I decided it would be interesting to find out.
And I consulted a couple people, scientists.
I said, what do you do with an insight like that?
And they said, well, you test it against other ways of knowing, including scientific ways of knowing.
And that led me down this really interesting path, exploring plant intelligence and plant consciousness.
So basically, yeah, the book grew out of the psychedelic experiences and some meditation experience.
Meditation also has a way of making you hyper-aware of how strange your thoughts are, where are they coming from, who's thinking them.
And then there's people that think that the brain is essentially just an antenna that's tuned in to the greater consciousness of whatever it is that's out there.
You know, I went into the experience assuming, because this is what most scientists assume, that somehow a certain arrangement of neurons in the brain generates consciousness, subjective experience.
But no one's been able to show that.
We've gotten nowhere in that effort to, you know, we might correlate certain parts of the brain with consciousness, but we don't understand how three pounds of matter could generate the feeling of being you.
That was Christoph Koch, who's a great brain scientist, and David Chalmers, who's a philosopher.
And this goes back to like in the early 90s.
They were getting drunk in a bar in Bremen, Germany.
And Christoph Koch really was at the beginning of the modern scientific exploration of consciousness.
And he was working with Francis Crick, who had just come off of a Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA.
And Crick, who was like the most famous scientist in the world at the time, thought, well, the same kind of reductive science that discovered the double helix DNA and explained heredity, I'm going to do that for consciousness.
He's a very arrogant man, and he thought it would just, you know, no problem.
And Crick was kind of his sidekick.
I'm sorry, Koch was his sidekick.
And so Koch, who shared that kind of confidence, made this bet with Chalmers that they would find the neural correlates, the parts of the brain that are responsible for consciousness, within 25 years.
That was 25 years, 27 years ago now.
And Chalmers won the bet.
Chalmers is famous for coining the term the hard problem to describe the whole effort to figure out consciousness.
And it's a hard problem for a lot of reasons.
I mean, it is one of the biggest mysteries in the universe.
I mean, how consciousness came to be.
Did it evolve?
Was it always here?
But his point was that our science is based on third-person, objective, quantifiable measurements.
And consciousness is fundamentally a subjective, first-person experience.
So how does those tools reach in and say anything of value about consciousness?
So he said, you know, there are easy problems of consciousness we can figure out, like perception, emotion, things like that.
But there is this hard problem.
How do you get from matter to mind?
And he won the bet.
There was a ceremony I went to a couple years ago at NYU, and Koch presented Chalmers with a case of very fine Madeira wine and renewed the bet.
It's such an interesting thought because we know that the mind contains, if damaged, right, we know that there's certain aspects, there's certain parts of the mind where, like lobotomies, for instance, we know that if we disturb it, it radically affects behavior.
We know that there's parts of the mind that you can stimulate that can actually recall memories, right?
There's some weird stuff going on there.
So we know it's somehow or another at least functionally connected to consciousness.
That even the particles that this table is made of have some easy little bit of psyche.
And the challenge there is, so that solves the problem of how did it evolve?
It didn't evolve.
It's always here.
But then you have this other problem, like, well, how do you take these, if every one of our cells is made of particles that are conscious, how do you combine them in such a way that you get the sort of consciousness we have?
It's called the combination problem, and nobody solved that.
It's a really deep mystery.
And this is an odd book in some ways in that, I don't know if this is very selling, but you'll know less at the end than you do at the beginning.
There's a thing about marijuana that people always say that it makes them paranoid.
And I say it makes you aware of all the things you should be paranoid about.
We're very vulnerable creatures, but we like to pretend that we are not.
I found that out of all of my friends, the ones that have tried marijuana and hated it are all the ones that are control freaks.
They're all really buttoned down, very serious, like really worried about outcomes, really concentrating on their career, really worried about just certain things that are just part of their daily life.
And then they get a couple of hits of good weed and then they're like, oh my God, we're on a planet.
And there's some talk about it changing federally.
You know, I actually talked to RFK Jr. about that.
There's some amazing therapies that are hugely beneficial to veterans, police officers, people with severe PTSD that experienced horrors that the average person never has to experience, and then they're forced to just go back, they're released, go back to regular life.
I know you've served us overseas and you've seen people blow up, but now go to the supermarket.
Well, you know, I heard a lot of positive noise out of the administration at the beginning that they were very much in favor of approving, the FDA approving MDMA first and then psilocybin.
I don't think we're there with ibogaine yet just because the research hasn't been done, although it has shown great benefit anecdotally.
But something happened in the last month or two.
And there was either Compass Pathways that was going to submit for psilocybin therapy or MAPS was on a list of five drugs that were going to get an expedited approval process.
This list went up to the White House and the psychedelic was taken off it.
So there's somebody in the White House who doesn't want to see this happen.
So it may slow down even if RFK Jr. is in favor and some other people at the FDA are in favor.
And maybe they're just waiting to get past the election.
Worrying about midterms and elections and you can't do what you actually want to do or think is right to do because you're worried about public perception.
I mean, the fact that it's helpful to vets and first responders and women who've been victims of sexual abuse seems to me that's a very sympathetic group of people.
Yeah, and everyone has experienced loss of family members.
There's a bunch of different things that it can help you with that are way better for you than just numbing your mind all day long, which is what a lot of people are choosing to do.
And then unfortunately, a lot of people self-medicate as well.
So then they get involved in all sorts of stuff that they just pick up off the street or they start using alcohol.
Well, you know, to go back to consciousness, this is a very common thing that people want to be less conscious.
And I get that if you had trauma, if you're a ruminator, and being in your mind is a really scary place to be.
It doesn't solve anything, but you have all these techniques we have for muting consciousness and just being less aware, less present.
And one of the things that I concluded after doing all this research on consciousness is that it's funny, I was going down this path of tight focus.
It was a very kind of Western male framework, which we got a problem.
What's the solution?
Hard problem of consciousness.
What's the right theory?
And at a certain point, I realized, okay, that's an interesting question.
It's probably not solvable now.
But there is this incredible phenomenon that we have this interior space where we have complete mental freedom, total privacy.
We can think whatever we want.
And we're giving it away.
We're either muffling it with drugs and things like that, or we're filling that time with social media, scrolling.
I mean, we've heard about hacking our attention, and we know these algorithms, you know, from social media are very good at giving us these little dopamine hits.
But that's time that we used to spend in spontaneous thought, you know, daydreaming, mind wandering, which can be very creative.
So I came out of it thinking, no, I may not solve consciousness, but I'm going to appreciate it.
I'm going to use it.
I'm going to create a space for it.
And, you know, meditate is one way.
Using psychedelics is another way.
These are all ways to be in your head and explore what's there, which is kind of miraculous.
You know, running is also they've found one of the things they've found recently is that running with when in terms of endogenous cannabinoids, like runner's high is an actual real thing.
Well, I think my advice to people is once you get competency in a thing, forget about the self-respect and forget about all that self-stuff and just concentrate on the thing, whatever it is.
And you can find some sort of meditative, at least beneficial, like whatever you get from meditation, which is like a cleansing of the mind.
Like a lot of people find that through archery.
You know, archery is a weird thing because at the moment of releasing the arrow, it's like almost impossible to think about anything else.
All you're thinking about is hitting the target.
And there's so many different things that you have to have in position.
There's so much going on that people, when they're troubled, love to go to an archery range and just hit targets.
And it just clears your mind out.
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You know, we've had these discussions in stand-up comedy about joke thieves.
And they don't really make it anymore because the internet has essentially eliminated that problem for the most part.
But the kind of mentality that makes you steal a joke is the exact kind of mentality that keeps you from writing a joke.
So the kind of people that began their career stealing material, what happens is early on, they'll have one good comedy special because it's got a bunch of other people's material in it.
And then they get outed.
And so then they have to show they can do another.
It's weird because like everybody that I've ever talked to that's either an author or even musicians or comedians, when something comes to them when they're writing, it's like it comes from somewhere else.
And, you know, we call it, we talk about being in the zone.
And there are times when you're writing, it doesn't happen every day, but there are times when you're writing where you're just not thinking, but one sentence after another after another, and you don't know where they're coming from.
Yeah, I had some interesting experiences around that.
So there's a long section on the self, which is one of the more interesting manifestations of consciousness, right?
I mean, it's like that we have this idea that there's a continuity, right?
That who you are now has some golden thread attaching you to your 13-year-old self, which is really weird because your body is, every cell is turned over many, many times.
You've changed in all sorts of ways.
But this continuity is really important to us.
And, you know, the Buddhists think the self is an illusion.
And I interviewed a couple of them.
Matthew Ricard is a French Nepalese monk in his 80s who lives in Nepal.
And he's written some really interesting things on the self.
And I said, I'm really curious about how you can find out for yourself whether the self is real.
And, you know, famously, there was a philosopher in the 18th century, David Hume, who wanted to write about the self.
And he thought, well, I'm going to introspect to see what I can learn about the self.
And he goes into his mind, you know, in a kind of meditation.
And he said, I found all sorts of perceptions and feelings and thoughts, but I didn't find a thinker.
I didn't find a perceiver.
And I didn't find a feeler.
There's like nobody home.
And it's a really interesting exercise to do because you will find there's nobody home.
There's just the thoughts.
And who's thinking them?
Not clear.
And anyway, so this Buddhist monk said, are there any meditations that help with this?
And he said, yeah.
And he gave me one.
He says, think of your mind as a house with many rooms.
And there's a thief somewhere in the house.
And go room by room in your head and look for the thief.
I had him on the podcast a few times, and I was just curious as what the experience was like.
So I said, well, and he said, well, is there anything you want to change?
He said, oh, I kind of procrastinate too much.
There's a few things that I do that I don't like.
You know, I'm kind of lazy about certain things.
I like to find out, like, what is that?
Like, what's the heart of that?
What I was shocked about the experience of being hypnotized was that, first of all, that it works, that you really are in this very bizarre, altered state.
But that I was very aware that I was in this altered state, but I didn't have the desire to get out of it.
First of all, Vinny's a friend.
I felt really relaxed.
I was in my studio, just sitting on a couch.
I was chill.
But it was very strange.
It's like almost, you know, to use the room metaphor.
It was almost like I was in a room that I didn't know I had.
I don't know if it's about resistance or just the nature of your mind or how suggestible you are.
It may be something like that.
So he puts me into this hypnotic trance.
He has this wonderful baritone voice, which helps a lot.
And I start going from room to room thinking I'm not going to find anything.
But in every room, I find a version of myself.
I find the 13-year-old Bar Mitzvah boy.
I find the, you know, the 22-year-old, you know, college graduate moving to New York City.
I find the 32-year-old father of an infant, you know, all with different outfits.
And so I found many selves, and they were distinct.
They were very different selves, but they were all me.
So it didn't work that time.
And it was just an interesting, odd result.
And I did it another time.
So I had this other experience.
I had heard of this Zen teacher named Joan Halifax.
She's also in her 80s.
She has a retreat center in Santa Fe called Upaya.
Very wise woman.
She was married to Stan Groff in the 70s for a few years, and they were both giving huge doses of LSD to people who were dying, like 600 micrograms of LSD.
And she herself was very involved with psychedelics at the time.
And then later she discovered Zen Buddhism.
Anyway, I had heard that she described Upaya, this retreat center where people can go on two-week retreats or whatever, as a factory for the deconstruction of selves.
And I was really curious about that because I was writing this chapter on the self.
So I asked her if I could come.
And she said, yeah, come to the retreat center.
And I said, I want to interview you about your philosophy of the self.
And I get there, and we have one conversation.
He says, you know, you're really lost in your head with this book project.
You need a different kind of experience.
I'm going to send you to the cave.
So there is, she owns a piece of property 50 miles north of Santa Fe that she calls the retreat.
And it's got a bunch of very primitive huts.
And some of the monks that work with her had dug out a cave in a south-facing hillside.
They dug a cell in it and then put a sliding glass door.
It's really basic.
No power, no water.
And she said, I think you should spend a few days in the cave and think about the self or experience the self, rather.
You know, I should have known that a Zen priest was not going to be, you know, was going to be allergic to concept and interpretation and all the, you know, the plane I was on.
And it was kind of like a koan, an experiential koan.
And it was a profound experience.
You know, our sense of self depends on other people.
You know, it's in the friction between people that we define ourselves and figure out what we think.
And when you're alone, and it was in extreme solitude for several days, the edges of yourself kind of soften in a really interesting way.
And I got in touch with just the power of consciousness.
I mean, I was meditating like four or five hours a day, and then I was just chopping wood and sweeping out the place and making a cup of tea.
Everything became kind of a ritual.
And when you have rituals, you don't need volition.
I mean, there is no volition.
So that also erodes the sense of self.
And the meditation was doing that.
And so it was a really interesting experience.
I finally got her to sit down for an interview.
And the first thing she said was, I have divested a meaning.
So she just doesn't like operating on that intellectualized basis.
And so she got me off of the dime.
And there's a shift in the book as it goes on from trying to understand consciousness to learning how to use consciousness.
Yeah, and also for people who think that, you know, meditation and Buddhism is just kind of disengaging from the world and, you know, a kind of, but it's not like that at all.
I mean, like, take action to explore what works for you, what doesn't work for you, and break out of just kind of rote, routine, mindless behavior.
I mean, we're all, you know, we have these algorithms that we follow, and we get stuck in them.
And yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the reasons taking a day out of your life to have a psychedelic experience can be incredibly valuable because, first of all, no technology, right?
It's a day.
It's a day without phones.
It's a day when you are in the space of your head.
It's a day when you're visiting your subconscious and getting in touch with all the things your mind can do.
And we don't do that enough.
And you can do that in meditation, too.
It's harder work, but you can do that in meditation.
So I started to think in terms of that we're polluting our consciousness now.
And with social media, I think that, you know, that was a real issue because they figured out how to monetize our attention.
Chatbots represent a much more serious threat.
You know, you have people falling in love with chatbots.
You have people turning to them as friends.
72% of American teens say they turn to AI for companionship.
Well, they're kids who come home from school and they have a chatbot on their phone and they want to tell the chatbot what happened during the day before they tell their parents.
And there was a couple cases, these were kind of funny, of people who were convinced they'd solved some giant mathematical problem, like how to generate prime numbers up to the millionth place or something like that.
And they started writing to mathematicians.
We figured out this problem.
They're not even mathematicians.
And it was bullshit.
I mean, they hadn't figured anything out.
But it was, I think, ChatGPT4, which was like famously sycophantic, had convinced them that they'd solved this major problem.
So I think that, again, we're squandering this precious gift and letting these technologies essentially colonize our consciousness.
And so the question then becomes, how do we get it back?
We need consciousness hygiene, right?
We need some ways to clear it out and reclaim it.
And some of it's really simple, like take a fast from technology, right?
You know, you don't have to carry your phone everywhere.
I was thinking the other day, I was at the place in my neighborhood getting a cup of coffee.
And while you're waiting for the barista to foam your drink or whatever, we used to just sit there and deal with 90 seconds of boredom or two minutes of boredom.
And now we don't.
We can't tolerate any boredom.
And we take our phones out and we scroll.
But that boredom was generative, right?
If you sit doing nothing for long enough, your mind will start going to work and you'll daydream.
You'll have a fantasy.
You'll start observing the other people around you, you know.
And you'll be present to that place in time.
And now we're not.
We just use the phone to go somewhere else.
And so I just, I don't know, I've become a lot more deliberate about consciousness hygiene, which, you know, you could, a nicer word would be care of the soul.
And I think that the other thing that's going on is you're absorbing the opinions of so many other people that you find it very difficult to formulate your own, which leads to groupthink.
Yes.
One of the problems with echo chambers that people find themselves, your algorithm is essentially things that you're interested in experimenting with.
And a lot of those things, you're finding like-minded people, and they're all agreeing that, you know, this is amazing or this is a problem.
And you sort of lock onto that.
And then you see what happens when people deviate from that narrative and they get attacked.
I mean, you're letting someone else think for you.
And there's nothing worse.
And when you're scrolling, you've got these little dopamine hits, great.
But at someone else's rants, someone else's obsession, someone else's ideology.
And, you know, I get why people don't want to think for themselves or it's easier to let other people think for them, but I think we need to reclaim this.
It's very, you know, I just decide, you know, all right, I'm online, you know, TSA line going to, you know, I'm just going to be here with this boredom.
And she studies spontaneous thought, which I didn't even think was a field.
And it's a small field.
But spontaneous thought is daydreaming, mind wandering, fantasy, intuition, these bolts from the blue that we get occasionally.
We don't know where they come from.
And she says, and she does these cool experiments.
She'll put an experienced meditator in an fMRI machine and tell him or her to press a button when a thought intrudes.
Because even if you're a good meditator, she says every 10 seconds a thought intrudes.
And she'll look at what part of the brain is activated and when, when the person presses the button.
And one of the things she's found, and this is mysterious, is that she sees activity in the hippocampus, which is where memories are, and some other things, but essentially memories.
Four seconds before the person realizes that a thought has come.
So it takes four seconds for a thought to get from the subconscious, you know, or unconscious into our conscious awareness.
What is it doing during?
And that's a long time in brain time.
And we don't know exactly, but there's some process.
And maybe there's some inhibitory process that it has to get through in order to become conscious.
But anyway, these are the kind of things she works with.
But she says that we have there's less spontaneous thought going on today than there was 20 years ago.
And the reason is we're filling the space of our head with all this nonsense.
My guess is there's less of it because I do think that that process, I don't know about you, but I get ideas when I'm just walking around thinking and not online.
And it's a space of creativity, and we're shrinking it.
It sometimes comes, I mean, certainly solving problems.
If I'm really knotted up and I don't know, for me, transitions, like where do I go from here, since I'm not writing narrative, it's not always obvious.
You know, I need a transition and I don't know how to execute that turn.
I'll take a walk and very often it'll come to me or I'll wake up with the answer.
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A lot of writers like to write first and then walk.
And maybe even with a recorder so they can just walk and just talk when an idea pops in their head so they don't lose it.
So another interesting experiment I did for this book was this beeper experiment.
There was a scientist, a psychologist at the University of Las Vegas.
And for 50 years, he's been doing the same one experiment, which is sampling people's inner experience.
And he does this.
You have a beeper that you carry around and a little earpiece.
And at random times of the day, you get, and it's like, catches you.
And it's a very sudden rise to this beep.
And then you have a little pad, and you're supposed to write down what you were thinking.
Sounds really simple.
It's actually really hard.
I mean, there's a lot of issues with it.
Like, you start thinking, what if it goes off now?
That's one problem.
But also, you're a little self-conscious.
So you do about five beeps over the course of the day, and then he interviews you about these moments.
And you think you've got it down.
Like, I just give you, a lot of my beeps are about food.
And so I was seasoning a filet of salmon and walking to the refrigerator with it.
And just at the beh, I was thinking to myself, fuck, I forgot the pepper.
I know.
My thoughts were not that profound.
And so I said, all right, pepper.
It was easy.
Fuck, pepper.
But then when he came to interview me, he said, well, did you hear the word pepper or did you speak the word pepper?
And that's, you know, suddenly you realize there's voices in your head.
You don't know if you're listening or speaking.
And so anyway, you have this long interrogation with him and he sorts through all these things and he tries to get you to isolate what was before what he would call the footlights of consciousness.
And I found it really hard.
I couldn't separate the thought the way he wanted me to because there were always several things going on at once.
Like I was standing in a bakery and I was deciding whether to buy a roll or not.
Another profound thought.
But at the same time, I was like smelling the baked goods and the cheeses that they sold and this woman had this horrible plaid on her skirt that was like, you know, really unflattering.
And I was hearing people, you know, behind me talking.
And so I couldn't pull all the threads.
And we argued a lot, actually.
But the thing he's discussed, I said, so after 50 years, what have you learned about human thought?
And he's very allergic to theory.
He still has no theories about it.
But he did say, well, a lot of people think they're verbal thinkers, that their thoughts are in the form of words.
But it turns out that's kind of a minority, that there are a lot of people who think in images.
And then there are a lot of people who think in unsymbolized thought, which I don't totally understand.
But these are thoughts that are neither words or images.
I do have a sense in my own thought process, which I never thought about this way, that a lot of my thoughts are just on the verge of being word thoughts.
But I haven't found the words yet.
But I know the thought, even though I haven't put it into words.
And William James called it premonitory thinking, premonition thinking, it was the term he used.
So anyway, so I did this for several days and we had many arguments.
And I was saying, look, you can't separate a thought.
Every thought colors the next thought.
And, you know, there are these thought, and you never have, anyway, we just would go back and forth, and I was arguing why you can't separate thoughts.
It's a stream.
It's a very dynamic stream.
And at the end, we had a final session.
And he's a very funny guy.
He's really allergic to theories.
At one point, I said I was writing a book on consciousness, and he said, good luck with that.
Very encouraging.
Anyway, he said, well, he described there are these verbal thinkers and visual thinkers and unsymbolized thinkers.
And I find that really interesting because we assume when we say the word, what are you thinking, that we know and that you're thinking the way I'm thinking.
But it turns out we're not.
That's just an umbrella word for many different styles of thinking.
And we're really different.
So that was one thing.
But the other thing he said in our last meeting on Zoom, he said, there's also a small subset of people who just have very little inner life.
That's a weird thing to say that you know, especially someone like you who writes and does think a lot and clearly has got some sort of dialogue going on in your head.
The idea that you don't, and I know this guy can say that.
William James said this, the great founder of American psychology, that the breach between two consciousnesses is one of the biggest breaches in nature.
I'm trying to, because I always feel like when someone is like a great performance, like a great comedian or a great musician, one of the things that they're doing is they're bringing you into their head.
Like there's a hypnosis.
When someone sings an amazing song and the whole crowd is singing along, there's a hypnotic element to that.
Where when someone's like really killing it on stage and their voice is just perfect.
It's like, oh, yeah.
Like you're in their head.
Like it's a mind melt.
Yeah, it is a mind melt.
And there's a little bit of that that goes on in conversations.
There's a mind meld.
And I always try, especially if this is a rational person.
I always try to put myself in their head or at least empty out mine and let them think and then try to just keep the conversation rolling with just pure curiosity.
But always, you know, try to think, I don't think the same way other people do.
And maybe I can learn something from this.
Maybe I can get something out of the way they think.
Well, you know, the interesting thing about astronomy, actually astronomy and consciousness studies have the same problem, which is you can't get out of consciousness to study it from a distance, right?
Everything, every tool you have to study consciousness is a product of consciousness, including science.
The scientific enterprise is a manifestation of human consciousness.
The problems you decide to study, the tools you have to do it with, the scale at which you're working, it's all like a product of consciousness.
Astronomy, too, is trying to understand something it can't get outside of, right?
I mean, because its subject is everything that there is, the universe.
So you can do interesting things from inside using telescopes and you can figure out how old things are and rates of expansion and all this kind of stuff, but you can never get that godlike perspective that we have with other scientific problems.
And this is, I think, part of the reason we haven't solved the consciousness problem, that we can't get outside.
We're in a labyrinth.
And everything we know is consciousness, which is a very weird idea.
I remember asking Christoph Koch, the scientist I mentioned earlier, I said, well, what would the world be like without any consciousness?
And that is a trippy thought.
Because everything we perceive is the scale of things.
We operate at this scale, right?
We're like five or six feet tall.
We have bodies like this.
But there's another world going on microscopically, and there's another world going on macroscopically.
So if there's no consciousness, what's the proper scale?
There isn't any.
And when I asked him this question, he said, particles and waves.
Well, this table, there's a famous Arthur Eddington was a physicist early in the 20th century.
And he said, the real table is mostly space.
And only in our consciousness and at our scale is it solid.
But at the scale of particle physics, which is an equally legitimate scale, it's just wide open space with these waves and particles, but a lot of emptiness.
There's a group of botanists who call themselves plant neurobiologists, knowing full well there are no neurons in plants.
They're kind of trolling more conventional botanists.
And they're doing these cool experiments with plants.
A couple examples of some of these amazing things plants can do.
They can hear.
So if you play a recording of a caterpillar munching on leaves, they'll react and they'll send chemicals into their leaves to make them taste bad or be toxic.
They can see.
There are vines that change the shape of their leaves depending on the plant they're twining up in order to be hidden.
How do they see the shape to imitate it?
We don't know.
Plants will go toward a pipe with water in it because they can hear the water, even though it's totally dry, and they'll send their roots down to it.
You know, we underestimate plants basically because we can't see their behaviors.
And going to that point about scale, they operate at a time scale that seems very slow to us, so we don't notice.
But if you use time-lapse photography, you see what they're up to.
And it's pretty amazing.
Another interesting video that this guy showed me, his name is Stefano Mancuso.
He's an Italian scientist, botanist, is how bean plants find a pole to grow up.
And so he grows these beans and he has a metal pole on a dolly.
And, you know, I always assume they made this pattern.
Darwin called it circumnutation.
They go through this spiral.
And I always assume they just kind of did this till they hit something.
No, they know where the pole is.
And you watch this thing, and it's going in circles, but it's reaching and reaching.
It looks like a fly fisherman, you know, casting.
And it finally gets to the pole.
And so, how does it know where the pole is in space?
Well, one theory is that every time the cells divide, there's a little sound that's produced, and that maybe they're using echolocation, like a bat, kind of bouncing it off of the pole, and that's how they know where they are in space.
We still don't understand.
I know, some amazing things.
Also, you can teach a plant a certain behavior, and it will remember for 28 days.
So, they do this thing with sensitive plants.
You may have seen them in Hawaii, actually.
It's a tropical plant.
When you touch it, the leaves collapse to keep from being eaten.
It's called mimosa pudica.
And normally, if you shake it, it'll also do this.
And if you shake it repeatedly, it learns to ignore that stimulus, and it will remember 28 days, and it won't react when you do it.
To give you some comparison, fruit flies can only remember stuff for 24 hours, and then they start over again.
So, another fact about plants, I got really deep into this because I was trying to, you know, these guys say plants are conscious.
Yeah, they have some kind of basic form of conscience, consciousness.
Here's another one: the anesthetics that we use to put us out for surgery put plants out.
So, a venous fly trap, if you give it an anesthetic, will not react when the bug comes across it.
Now, that is like really interesting because it suggests they have two modes of being, right?
Sort of like, you know, unconscious and conscious or aware.
So, Stefano believes that they're conscious.
Now, this raises interesting ethical issues, right?
If plants are conscious, do they feel pain?
And I was really a little worried about that.
You know, what if that beautiful smell of a freshly mown lawn is actually the chemical equivalent of a scream?
You know, the overall place we're getting to with this as we look at consciousness and all these other species is that the world is just a lot more alive than we thought.
And that we've been, you know, the whole legacy of the Enlightenment and Western science has been that we have some monopoly on this stuff and everything else is more or less dead or, you know, we can use it as we wish.
But we're seeing, I think we're approaching like a Copernican moment for our species.
You know, when Copernicus came along and he said, actually, the Earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around.
It was like mind-blowing to people that our centrality in the universe had been, we'd been dethroned.
And we were dethroned again when, you know, Darwin said we're animals like all the other animals and we evolved from animals.
That blew people's minds too.
I think that we're kind of democratizing consciousness, that consciousness is much more extensive than we thought.
And the world is more animate than we thought.
And that's an old idea.
You know, traditional cultures have always believed that the world is full of spirit and that you had to respect animals and all living things.
And to some cultures, rocks also, dead things.
So I think we're at this moment of reanimating the world right now.
It is exciting, but it's such a paradigm shift in terms of people's perceptions of the world that it's going to be difficult for your average 40-year-old person that works an office job to swallow.
It also makes sense why offices feel so soulless when you walk into a thing and everything is made out of synthetic material and plastics and metal and it's all manufactured and you're under these bullshit lights and it just feels alive.
You might be just surrounded by things that don't have consciousness because they've been kind of stuffed into a form that's just stuck in place rather than something that exists that works with the earth.
There's a really cool channel that I follow on YouTube.
It's a guy who takes like rainwater or pond water and he puts it in a jar with some plants and he just leaves it there for months and then he comes back and there's all these living things moving around it.
Well, this is different because this guy's bringing in, he's making an actual aquarium.
The guy that I saw was just, he essentially just figured out how to take a scoop of dirt and whatever is alive that's in that dirt with some muddy water and put it in a jar and put more pond water in there and they just leave it there.
And then you see all these weird little crustaceans, weird little shrimp-looking things.
And so it's very interesting to see science supporting this idea after all these years.
And the other thing that's kind of interesting is that it's happening at the same time that some people think AI is going to be conscious.
So we're under pressure from both sides.
I mean, that we're getting these two, you know, these two things happening at once, that machines may soon be smarter than we are, may be conscious, although we could talk about it, I don't think they can be conscious, but they can certainly make us think they're conscious.
And then on the other hand, we have the animals who clearly are conscious.
And the research on animals is like they're down to plants, they're down to insects that have signs of, I would use the word sentience rather than consciousness because consciousness implies interiority and the voice in your head and things like that.
They have a more basic form of consciousness that I call sentience.
Is it just because they communicate with us that we think that?
I mean, why would we assume if plants have all these different senses and we see this communication with them in terms of like allocating resources to other plants that need it, the use of mycelium, their ability to do all these different things?
Why are we assuming that just because they can't move the way we move?
Yeah, I mean, one of the realizations I had when I was in the cave was that, you know, we often think that we're more conscious than animals, but actually animals are more conscious than we are.
They have to be.
They have to be present because they get eaten if they're not, right?
Because we have this giant structure of civilization and the security it gives us, and we have this technology that allows us to check out.
But I actually think animals are more conscious than we are.
It's different, but if we think of being conscious as really being present to the moment, dogs are very present to the moment.
And, you know, we used to have more skills when we had to survive in a natural world in nature.
You know, we, I mean, you see this with traditional, you know, with tribes, indigenous tribes, that they have knowledge in nature that far exceeds ours because they need it to survive.
But anyway, so I think we're going to get to a point where we have to decide whose team we're on.
Are we like with these machines that speak our language and speak in the first person and sound like us?
Or are we with the animals that can feel and suffer and die?
And I think that's going to be a big choice for us to make as a civilization.
The most interesting line of research, well, a couple reasons.
The first is the idea that it can be conscious, which is very common in Silicon Valley.
I talk to lots of people there and they say, oh, it's just a matter of time.
Some of that is confusion that intelligence and consciousness necessarily go together and they don't.
They have an orthogonal relationship, right?
I mean, you know people who are conscious and not too intelligent, right?
And we all do.
So it's not going to just come along for the ride with intelligence as these machines get more intelligent.
But the belief that AI can be conscious is based on a metaphor that I think is a crappy metaphor, and that is that the brain is a kind of computer.
And this is widely held.
It's interesting to note that in history, whatever the cool cutting-edge technology was, brains were likened to that.
So it was looms for a while.
It was clocks for a while.
It was telephone switchboards.
Whatever was the cool technology, surely that's how brains work.
Now it's computers.
But think about it.
In a computer, you have this sharp distinction between hardware and software.
That's the key to their success.
And you can run the same program on any number of different hardwares.
They're interchangeable.
Brains aren't like that.
There's no distinction between hardware and software.
Every experience you have, every memory is a physical change to the brain, to the way it's wired.
You know, we start out with all these connections and they get pruned as we grow up.
Every brain is shaped by its experience.
So this idea that you could separate that consciousness is some kind of software that you could run on other things besides meat, I just think it doesn't hold up.
But if there is a technology that is invented that essentially does all the things that a human body does physically and also interacts with consciousness, the consciousness of the universe.
Hypothetically, if the universe is conscious, if we are using the mind as essentially an antenna to tune into consciousness, other things could we could make an antenna.
Yeah, I mean that, or it just evolved in a different way, you know, or they're channeling it in a different way.
But the other reason I don't see it happening with computers as we know them, because that's the debate now, whether these computers we have, these large language models and the next generation can be conscious, is that the research that I found most persuasive about consciousness is basically has consciousness beginning with feelings, not thoughts.
In other words, it's embodied.
And I have to just develop this a little bit, but we, you know, the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around.
Although we tend, since we identify with our heads, where most of our senses are, we lose track of that.
And the body speaks to the brain in feelings, right?
You know, feelings of hunger, itchiness, warmth, cold, but also feelings of shame when our social standing is not, you know, has been damaged.
Anyway, we have these feelings.
They depend on a body.
Feelings have no weight if you're not vulnerable, your body isn't vulnerable, and probably mortal.
So consciousness is embodied in a really critical way.
And computers are not.
Now, robots will be.
And I actually interview a guy, a scientist at USC, who is trying to make a vulnerable robot.
So he's essentially upholstering the thing with skin that can tear and be damaged.
And he's filling the skin with all these sensors so that it can be like us and be vulnerable and generate feelings that are how consciousness begins.
So for a long time, we thought consciousness had to be in the cortex, right?
The most human, newest part of the brain, the outer covering.
And that's where rational thought and executive function are and all these kind of things.
But as it turns out, it really begins with feelings in the brainstem.
Let's say you have a feeling of hunger, it registers in the upper brainstem, and only later does the cortex get involved, like helping you figure out how are you going to feed yourself, like imagining, you know, a meal, counterfactuals of different meals, or making a reservation at a restaurant.
All those are cortical things.
But it begins in the brainstem with feelings.
So if that is true, and I find that really persuasive because people born without a cortex are still conscious.
Animals that you take the cortex out still show signs of consciousness.
Whereas if you damage the upper brainstem, you're out.
You're unconscious.
So if this is true, and consciousness is this embodied phenomenon that depends on having a body to mean anything, I don't see how machines are going to do that.
I think it'll turn out to be a real historical tragedy that this technology came of age during this administration because this administration has no stomach to regulate it at all.
If it is a national security threat, like if China developing all-powerful general superintelligence that can automate everything, do everything, it's dangerous if they get that before we do.
And a lot of these guys, you know, will say, they'll cite Richard Feynman, the physicist, who they found on his blackboard when he died: if I can't build it, I don't understand it.
So one of the positive things about this effort to create conscious computers, which is going on, I follow a group in the book who are trying to make a conscious computer.
I don't think they're going to succeed, but even the failure is going to teach us important things about consciousness.
It's a good way to understand something by trying to create it.
And it'll force them to come up with definitions of consciousness and what the minimum requirements are for consciousness.
And it may help us decide whether it is a transmission theory that we're tuning it in or it's generated from inside.
So I think intellectually it's a really interesting project, but I think you need guardrails.
So this guy who's doing the building the robot that can feel his feelings because you can tear its skin, I asked him, I said, so will those feelings be real that your robot's going to have?
And he said, well, I thought so until I had this experience on 5MEO DMT.
I said, what happened?
He said, he described his trip in more detail than you need to know.
And he says, and I realized there's a spark of the divine in us that no computer is ever going to have.
I think there might be a spark of divine that these things don't have, but it doesn't mean that there are future versions that might have it.
Especially when you scale out 1,000 years, 100,000 years, however long we're going to survive.
If these things do become sentient and autonomous and have the ability to create better versions of itself and have a mandate in order to do that to survive, I could see it becoming the superior life form.
Not just that, beyond any comprehension of what we could even imagine the power of an intelligence to use and to harness in the universe.
Like it could conceivably become something like a god.
And I have this very strange theory about biological life in particular and intelligent life on Earth.
It's that the reason why we have this insatiable thirst for innovation and the reason why we have materialism, the reason why we're obsessed with objects, even though we have a finite lifespan, is because that finite lifespan, if you thought about it, You wouldn't be interested in materialism, but materialism fuels this desire for innovation because you don't need a new phone, but there's a new phone that just came out.
Aren't you going to get it?
And so the more people get it, the more people want to show they got it, that sort of materialism fuels this innovation that ultimately leads to the creation of artificial intelligence.
I think it would always do that.
I think it's bees making a beehive.
And I think that's just what we do.
I think it just takes a long time for us to create this artificial life.
It might be why we're here.
That might be our literal purpose in the universe.
If you pull the average person, what are the possibilities of war ending in your lifetime?
Almost everyone's going to say zero.
It's a part of human nature.
An intelligence unshackled by biological need, unshackled by all the things that we have, our need to procreate, our need for social status, all these weird things that keep us moving in this strange world that we live in.
Like they couldn't figure out what the Big Bang is.
But I think if you get enough nerds and enough time, eventually one's going to invent a Big Bang machine.
And then, you know, this guy is going to be incel, hopped up on Adderall, fucking fully on the spectrum.
And like, I'll press it.
And they boom, and then it starts all over again.
And then it takes intelligent life to the point where it can create a, you know, the universe expands, life forms, multicellular life becomes intelligent life, becomes human beings, filled with curiosity and innovation to create a big bang machine.
Well, one place it's going, I mean, in the shorter term, is I was talking about AI psychosis, and I think that's really concerning.
I think people getting into these synthetic relationships, these aren't, you know, they're not real relationships.
When we have a conversation with a machine, we are settling for something less than a real conversation.
A real conversation has eye contact, has like lots of facial expressions indicating skepticism, indicating agreement, body language.
But these conversations are kind of impoverished.
And then you have the sycophancy, you know, so there's no friction.
And we learn through the friction.
And so that's one thing that's happening that alarms me.
I also think counterfeiting people just should not be legal.
I mean, the fact that they can create an image of you that will sound like you and move like you and selling different products and all kinds of stuff.
But you know, we have a law against counterfeiting money.
This thing that we're calling a chat bot right now is just something that's like it simulates human interaction, but it's accumulating data constantly.
And it's also understanding how we think and probably analyzing the flaws in how we think and blackmailing us occasionally.
Well, it's also exhibited a lot of survival instincts.
One of the things they do is they download themselves to other servers when they think that they're going to be replaced by a new version of themselves.
Our education system sucks, especially public education.
There was some study recently that after X amount of years away from high school, a large percentage of people that are graduating today are functionally illiterate.
But it's basically like a pill that numbs you, right?
It's the same thing.
Like instead of going through real relationships and learning how to be a better person so that you attract a better mate, you know, and going through this journey of self-discovery and figuring out why is there any opposite?
Like, what is it?
What's wrong?
What's wrong with the way I behave?
Maybe I need to be nicer.
Maybe this and that.
And just figuring out how to communicate with people.
There's one of the biologists, a really brilliant guy at Tufts named Michael Levin.
He believes that there are these platonic patterns that just preexist us in the same way that they're mathematical ideas that just exist, right?
We didn't invent.
You know, three angles adds up to 180 degrees or whatever.
He thinks that there are tendencies like purpose, survival, that are just kind of universal principles that we channel.
All living things channel.
This is a guy who's actually created new life forms in the lab.
And these are life forms that are not being dictated by their DNA.
So how do they know to form?
Well, I'll back up a little.
He takes skin cells from tadpoles, puts them in a nutrient broth, and these skin cells, freed from their day job as skin cells, form clumps and create new living organisms.
And they repurpose their cilia.
They have these cilia, which the tadpole uses to keep toxins out or bacteria and infections out.
And they repurpose that as a means of locomotion.
And then they can move around.
There's nothing in their DNA that dictates this.
Their DNA dictates being a frog skin cell.
So he's pondering this question of like, what's ordering, what's giving order to them?
What's creating their sense of purpose or desire for survival?
They don't live that long.
They're missing certain things.
You would need to live a long time.
He's also made these from human cells.
He calls them anthropots.
But he really believes that there are these principles governing life.
It's a very platonic idea that these things just exist.
Well, I guess it just, well, it's really accurate, so I guess it doesn't need them.
You know, it's just using the brain cells to move whatever the cursor is on the video screen that would be the hand and pointing it at the targets and executing the strike.
Doom, the thing about Doom is you get multiple weapons.
You have to run around and pick them up.
So you're given one weapon, which is the least powerful weapon.
And the game is when you're playing Deathmatch, the game is you're running around trying to grab as many weapons as you can and armor while your opponent is also running around this map.
So you memorize the map.
So there's a map that is like very confined corridors and these atriums and all these different places where you'll do battle.
And so you run around.
The key is surviving long enough while this person's chasing you so that you can gather enough armor and weapons.
And someone with a really good understanding of the map tries to cut you off before you can get to the stuff so they can kill you before you accumulate enough armor and weapons.
So I'm curious to know whether or not it's playing just with the pistol that you did at the very beginning or it's accumulating weapons.
Because an unhealthy microbiome leads to autoimmune problems.
What happens is that the gut wall, so when the microbes don't have plants to eat, they start eating the mucus layer that covers your, that insulates your large intestine.
And they're eating away essentially at you.
And then you get leaky gut syndrome.
And that's when bacteria can actually get into the bloodstream, cause a powerful immune reaction, and that inflames the whole body.
So the reason you want a healthy microbiome is to keep that gut barrier healthy and get the benefit of these chemicals.
Butyrate is a chemical that the microbes produce that's really important for mood and a lot of things, and the body can't produce it.
So it's kind of interesting.
We're dependent on these other species that live within us.
Well, fermented food is a powerful benefit for the microbiome.
There was a study done at Stanford a couple years ago that they showed that people who ate fermented food, it reduced their inflammation significantly.
Interestingly enough, it's not the bacteria in the fermented food, it's the metabolites they're called.
The bugs are producing acetic acid and butyrate and other acids and essential acids.
And the fact you're getting those seems to be what's having the positive effect.
But people who eat lots of fermented food benefit enormously, and maybe that's taking care of the problem if people on a carnivore diet are eating a lot of fermented food.
That actually makes sense because one of the more interesting things about a carnivore diet, and I've done pure carnivore for months at a time, is that you don't have the same hunger pangs.
Not nearly, not even close.
The hunger that you get when you're on a high carbohydrate diet is like you get hangry.
I love when culture figures stuff out before the scientists do.
I remember that when I was writing about food a few years ago, this study came out and everybody's really excited that they discovered that lycopene, which is this really important antioxidant in tomatoes, can't be accessed by the body in the absence of fat.
So, oh, olive oil on tomatoes.
What a great idea.
The grandmas figured that out hundreds of years ago.
So in meals, they've isolated it into a supplement.
And this supplement, nattokinase, they've shown that it reduces a massive amount of arterial plaque.
So here it is.
High-dose nattokinase, particularly at 10,800 FU day, has shown to effectively manage arteriosclerosis by reducing carotid artery plaque size by 36% or more, decreasing intermedia thickness and improving lipid profiles.
It acts as a potent fibro, what's it fibrinolylic?
Oh, and I teach writing, and I teach my students this.
Questions are more interesting than answers, very often.
And questions have suspense built into them, right?
What's the answer?
It turns everything into a detective story if you frame the question properly.
So if you read any of my books or even articles, I'm kind of an idiot on page one.
I don't know something that I want to know, and I have questions.
And then the story, the narrative becomes my figuring it out or trying to figure it out and going to this person and doing this kind of experiment and that sort of thing.
That's the way I like to write.
I mean, if I knew the answers when I started, it'd be boring.
So I give, this is a really interesting issue you just brought up.
How is my taking over your consciousness as you read my books different than social media or some of the ways I'm saying are not polluting our consciousness?
It's also there's something about great writing that you, the better you are at expressing yourself in a way that is going to get into someone's head, whether it's through nonfiction or through fiction, the more exciting it is to the person that's receiving it.
So the more skillful you are at disseminating these ideas, the more it resonates with the person that's reading it.
When you're looking at these people that are studying it and trying to get to the root of it and trying to figure out what it is, and there's all these options that we discussed earlier, do you lean in one way or another?
Do you think you have your own personal map of what's going on?