A Mind-Blowing Conversation About Humanity | Michael Pollan

How often do you do psychedelics? Oh, not very often at all. You know, it's hard to find time. For as long as I can remember, I've wrestled with my own thoughts and feelings about identity, who I am, and why. So I think it's no coincidence that I've also always been interested in the subject of consciousness. The best-selling author Michael Pollan has been thinking about some of the same things, too. He's always written about the relationship between the mind and the body, from why we eat the way we do to the science of psychedelics. But his new book jumps into the deep end. It's called A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness. It's a highly personal exploration of human consciousness, what it is, where it comes from, and why that understanding actually matters in our daily lives. Here's my conversation with Michael Pollan. Michael, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I appreciate it. Pleasure to be here, David. So I just want to get to some basics for people. How do you define consciousness? Yeah, it's a slippery word and a slippery topic. The simplest way to define consciousness is simply as experience or subjective experience. Another one-word definition is awareness. Many people in the field rely on a – it's sort of a definition, but Thomas Nagel, the NYU philosopher, wrote a piece back in the early 70s, a wonderful essay, called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? And his idea is if we can imagine it is like anything to be a bat, then a bat is conscious, because that means it has some sort of subjective experience. Why did he choose bats? Well, they're very different than we are. Instead of using eyesight, they use echolocation, right? They bounce signals off of objects to move through space. They also hang upside down most of the day. But we can sort of vaguely imagine going through the world with echolocation, whereas my toaster, I can't do that. I don't have a sense of what it's like to be my toaster. So that formulation, is there some subjective experience going on? I think that's a very useful formulation. And a big question of consciousness is what the philosopher David Chalmers has referred to as the hard problem. Can you tell people what the hard problem of consciousness is? Sure. The hard problem is basically how you get from matter to mind, how you cross that huge gulf from neurons to subjective experience. A gulf no one has managed to cross, in my view. Related questions are, why doesn't all these things we do go on automatically? Why do we have to be aware of anything? We could be completely automated. We could be zombies and perhaps get along just fine. Now, a huge percentage of what goes on in your brain, let's say 90%, 95% is unconscious. Your brain is monitoring your body and making fine adjustments in the blood gases and the heart rate and digestion. There's a lot going on that we don't have to think about. So why do we have to think about any of it? And there's some interesting theories that have been proposed about that. One is, some of the issues that we have to deal with can only have to be decided in a conscious way. That when you have two competing needs, you're hungry and you're tired, which should take precedence? Which should you deal with? So consciousness opens up this space of decision-making. The other argument would be why we need to be conscious, why it's useful to be conscious, is we live in a very complex social world where I have to predict what you're going to say. I have to imagine my way into your head to some extent. You can't automate human social interaction. It's just got too many elements. So consciousness is very helpful in navigating that world. Do you think there has been any real progress made on the hard problem since 1994? Are we any closer to an answer there? I think we're closer. There have been some really interesting theories that have been put forward that soften the hard problem a little bit. I don't think it limbs quite as large, but a good case could be made that it's not solvable, that we don't have the kind of science you would need to solve the hard problem. And that's because our science is itself a form of consciousness. Consciousness is one of the subjects you cannot get outside of to get an objective view, because every tool we have to study it is itself a product of consciousness. So, I mean, you see how complicated this is. But your question about progress is, you know, I have to admit, I was a little frustrated. So I started out on this journey, as one would, looking at the science. And surely the scientists can answer these questions for me. But I realized, I looked at these theories, and there are something like 22 theories of consciousness in play right now, which tells you the field is flailing, I think. But they would all edge up to some kind of big conclusion. But they all started waving their hands when it came to, but how does a conscious subject arise? They could take you very far, but that question, they don't have answers to. You know, it seems likely to me that, regardless of the source of consciousness, it's probably the result of evolutionary processes. You know, consciousness evolved to make information available to certain parts of the brain, or to help us recognize patterns, or perceive threats, or, you know, sort of a more complicated reason for the evolution of consciousness might be to help us maintain homeostasis, which is basically like the internal physical states we need to stay alive. But are there any non-evolutionary arguments for consciousness that are plausible to you? Oh, yeah. I mean, one is panpsychism. Panpsychism. Yeah, which could sound bonkers, yeah. It can sound bonkers, but panpsychism is the idea that everything, every particle, every, you know, the ink on the page, the atoms, all have some infinitesimal degree of psyche, or consciousness. And somehow, this consciousness is kind of combined in some way from our cells and the rest of our bodies to create this kind of super consciousness, which is us. It sounds kind of crazy, but there are some very serious people who believe in it. You have to expand your sense of the plausible when you're looking at consciousness, I'm afraid. But, you know, we've done that before. I mean, how long ago was it that we discovered electromagnetism? You know, this crazy idea that there are all these waves passing through us and around us that can carry information. I mean, that's just as mind-blowing, right? But, Michael, can I, you know, I really love talking about consciousness. And, you know, I could happily talk about consciousness all day, but I find perhaps my predilection to doing that might have something to do with why I don't get invited to a lot of parties. But, you know, often when I do talk about consciousness with people or bring up the subject with people, I can tell that, like, they view thinking about consciousness as almost akin to a kind of navel-gazing, or sort of an interesting thing to think about, but really, what difference does it make to my life? And what is your response to that kind of question? Yeah, I thought a lot about that. You know, what good is it to think about consciousness? And I came to think that it's really important and more important now than ever before. I mean, consciousness is being threatened in certain ways right now, or human consciousness as this exceptional thing. We now have, we're learning, scientists are learning that more and more animals and creatures, going all the way down possibly to insects, are conscious. So that's one interesting issue. We're sharing consciousness with more creatures. And then the big threat, I think, is AI, artificial intelligence, and the effort to create a conscious AI, which is going to be an enormous challenge to this question of what does it mean to be human? Is consciousness something that a machine can possess? Are we more like intelligent machines or conscious-feeling animals? Who are we? So I think we're approaching this kind of Copernican moment of redefinition. But I have a lot more questions about AI and consciousness, but before I get to those, I want to know more about what you think we should do with that increasing awareness of the possibility of more animals than we perhaps previously thought were conscious, that they too might be conscious, or that even plants might have some element of consciousness. Because I think, for example, well, you know, plants might be conscious, but, you know, we're not going to stop eating them. And then also, you know, on the animal side, I guess the argument would be that, you know, if we recognize animals as being conscious beings, that would entail a greater amount of respect for them. But I think, well, gosh, we all know human beings are conscious, and we exploit the hell out of other human beings all the time. So what reason is there really to think that an awareness of animal consciousness would change our behaviors? Well, that's a great question. I mean, you know, there's this whole conversation, very active here where I live in Silicon Valley, that if AI is conscious, then we're going to have to give it moral consideration. And well, really? I mean, have we given moral consideration to one another? Have we given moral consideration to the chickens and the cattle that we eat? And the answer is no, it doesn't automatically follow. So we're going to have to, you know, we're going to have to sort out the ethics. I mean, maybe it's around the ability to suffer. Suffering being a more kind of full mind process than mere pain. So maybe that's where you draw the line. I don't know. I'm not an ethicist. But it's not as easy as you're conscious, therefore you have all these rights. You know, personhood, who we grant personhood to is a very subjective human decision. We give it to corporations, oddly enough, which are not conscious. But there's all sorts of creatures we don't give it to. I don't think we're entirely rational or consistent in our granting of moral consideration. And you are skeptical that AI can achieve consciousness. Why is that? Yeah, I am. I'm convinced by some of the researchers that I follow in the book, including Antonio Damasio and Mark Soames, who made a really compelling case that the origin of consciousness is with feelings, not thoughts. There's a tendency to think that consciousness, which is so cool and fancy, is a product of the cortex, the evolutionarily most recent part of the brain where decision making, executive function, all these things happen. They make a persuasive case that it starts with feelings, with the brain's monitoring of what's going on in the body. Feelings are the language in which the body talks to the brain. And the way the body gets the brain's attention is with feelings. And this all happens in the brainstem, not in the cortex. And they've shown that people who don't even have cortexes, or animals that have been decorticated, it's called, nevertheless have consciousness. And yet, if you turn off certain structures at the top of the brainstem, you lose consciousness. So that's a different way of thinking about it. And it suggests that our consciousness depends on embodiment. And more than that, it depends on these feelings. So if you think feelings are at the center of consciousness, it's very hard to imagine how a machine could rise to that level to have feelings. The other reason I think we're not close to it is that everything that machines know, the data set on which they're trained, is information, most of it that's on the internet. They don't have friction with nature. They don't have friction with the world, with us. That real contact that depends on embodiment. Some of the most important things we know are about person-to-person contact, about contact with nature. This friction, that really is what makes us human, I think. Despite how it may seem, the internet is not actually the whole of the world. Yes, I know. But to a computer, it is. It's all you got. And how would we know if an AI is conscious or not? Well, how do I know you're conscious? I mean, these are hard questions. I mean, I'm assuming you're conscious. I promise I am. Well, your promise is what's called reportability in philosophy. And so you can ask something if it's conscious. And with humans, we kind of know. How do I know you're conscious is really a question I would have liked to have asked a handful of people I've interviewed over the years, but not so good. So it's an enormous problem. Since it is fundamentally a subjective internal state, we depend on behaviors. That looks like conscious behaviors. But if an AI tomorrow says, Michael, I'm conscious, I promise, how do we know? We don't. We can't say for sure. And that is exactly why people are falling deep into these relationships. So AIs are trained not to say they're conscious because the engineers think it's too spooky. But you can jailbreak that. I mean, there's certain questions you can ask an AI, especially chat GPT-4, which was the most sycophantic of all AIs so far and had to be withdrawn. That's why we like it. On the other hand, that led to a suicide. I mean, it's a dangerous one. So we can't say it's not conscious when it tells us it is. But we can test it in various ways. It all goes back to this idea of the Turing test, the test of machine intelligence would be when they can fool us. And that has kind of introduced a very interesting bit of DNA into the field, which is training them to delude us as an achievement. Not a very healthy one, but there it is. Also, if the Turing test is the criteria for machine consciousness, then it has already passed the Turing test and it's conscious. It has fooled many, many people. Whether it can fool an expert too, I don't know, but probably. So we're in a very weird place where the machines we're living with are telling us they're conscious. We can't dispute it. But we can look at the architecture and how they're made and draw the kind of conclusions I've drawn. But is that going to persuade everybody? No. I mean, we want them to be conscious in some way, or some of us do. It's easier to have a relationship with a chatbot than another human. Going back to that friction point, they offer no friction. They just suck up to us and convince us how brilliant we are, and we fall for it. And what, if anything, do you think religion or religious thinking has to offer to questions about consciousness? That's a good question. I don't know enough about religion to make a general statement. This book kind of ends up on a Buddhist retreat center, totally unexpectedly. So I was reading a lot about Buddhism. I was interviewing Buddhist monks and thinkers, and I thought that they had a lot of wisdom about consciousness. I mean, Buddhism has been thinking about consciousness for a very long time. It has been raising these questions about the self and giving people tools to transcend the self, which in itself is a desire that is surprising, that we cling to this ego so firmly. At the same time, we do a lot of things to get away from it, whether it's extreme sports or psychedelics or meditation. Or watching a movie or having sex or any number of things. Yeah, I mean, some of the highest experiences of life are these moments where we transcend the self, and that's curious, too. Yeah, what do you think that's about? Why, if we cling to the self, are we also so hungry and find so much enjoyment in losing ourselves? I think the self isolates us. The ego builds walls around it, whether it's that we're special or we're hurt. It's constantly evaluating, it's standing, it ruminates. There's a lot of crappy stuff about the self. Yeah, it's just yammering constantly. Yes, and it is that voice in our head, and it embodies critical voices very often, inherited from parents sometimes or other people. I mean, the ego is very useful. It gets a lot done. It got my book done, it gets your podcast done, so we shouldn't be too critical of it. On the other hand, when we transcend the self, we connect to things larger than ourselves. And this is one of the beautiful things about psychedelics when they work, is this sense of dissolution of self. And the interesting thing that happens when your self dissolves is that the walls come down, and you feel part of nature. You feel love. I mean, I had an experience I describe in the book of self-dissolution where I merged with this piece of music, this Bach unaccompanied cello suite. And it was such a profound experience of music because the subject-object split, went away, and I was identical to this piece of music. So some of the great experiences of life are when the ego goes away or just is shrunken a little bit. The interesting thing, though, is that consciousness doesn't go away when the ego goes away. And we protect our ego because we're kind of afraid if we lose it, we're dead. But we're not. It's just one voice. There's a lot else going on as you learn when you meditate and as you learn when you use psychedelics. How often do you do psychedelics? Oh, not very often at all. It's hard to find time. It's a big day with a lot of preparation and everything. But if I can do it once a year, I'm really happy. But it doesn't always happen. And what I'm talking about, too, is ideally a guided experience, which I find is much more useful. And you can let yourself go when someone's watching your body. So when I can put myself in that situation, which isn't easy to do and it's expensive, I find that very valuable. Still, I mean, I'm still learning things. What are you learning? Oh, you know, every psychedelic experience is different. You never go back to the same place. And that's why I think it's a great thing to do on your birthday or around your birthday to sort of take stock of your reality and what's going on and what the issues are. I mean, I had an experience not too long ago that kind of rocked me. It wasn't a pleasant experience at all. What was it? It was a guided trip on – well, it doesn't matter what it was on. And I had these powerful emotions that had no name. They were just emotions, and they were like these giant blimps crashing into me, crashing into each other. And I was straining and so frustrated that I didn't know what they were. And the answer never came clear during the experience. But all I could do – and I knew that you can't resist these things, so I just felt them. And they didn't feel good, but they felt strong. And oddly enough, the answer to what they were came two weeks later when I happened to be at a meditation retreat. And the links between psychedelics and meditation are just very fruitful and interesting. And I was doing a walking meditation after a couple days of complete silence and like 12-hour day of meditating. And there were the blimps. And in sans-serif letters, right on the blimp was the word fear. And I very quickly realized what it was. And it was fear of losing some people very close to me. And so the combination of two experiences ended up being very productive. But on its own, the psychedelic experience raised more questions than it gave answers. You know, I realize we're right on the line, if not over it, for what might cause other people listening to this or watching this to think like, who are these two lunatics I'm listening to? But my sort of crazy person subject that I'd like to raise with you has to do with the ways in which thinking about consciousness can be destabilizing. Maybe like I alluded to earlier, I think questions of consciousness, which are really questions about what makes us us, are some of the most important and fruitful questions that can be asked. But at the same time, you can start to ask those questions, and then you get about, is there some self, some David? Is there some stable I that exists or not? Or what is the relationship between free will and consciousness? And sometimes I think, well, actually, I don't want to think about those questions anymore, because it can make just getting through the day kind of difficult. And you could also perhaps arrive at some answers that you might not be happy about, that might seem dehumanizing. But is that just me? Do you have similar apprehensions about the subject? I think it can be destabilizing. Absolutely. We know how psychedelics can destabilize people. One of the reasons people are happy to be less conscious and fill their attention with distractions of all kinds and drugs of all kinds is because the mind can be a scary place to visit, our own minds. And we often want to be less aware of what's going on, especially people who've suffered trauma and things like that, but people who haven't too. So yeah, there's no question. But I have to tell you, I don't think about consciousness 24-7. There's time where I'm just watching TV or reading. Who is the eye watching Matlock? Who is watching the show? But I totally agree in that there are reasons people avoid going down these rabbit holes. And it takes a willingness to risk something, to think hard about consciousness. Michael, thank you so much for taking all the time to speak with me today. I really enjoyed it. A pleasure. I was so pleased that you were happy to go down all these challenging rabbit holes. And I'll talk to you again soon. Yes, I think next week. On the interview, we talked to our guest twice. So about a week later, Michael and I spoke again. We got into the current political moment, including how nutrition science informs his views of RFK Jr. and the Maha movement. Michael, I'm glad to be speaking with you again. Yeah, likewise. So here at the start, I want to change direction a bit from our first conversation and talk about something related to your earlier work. So I think to a lot of people, you're maybe still best known as a food writer, and you have that highly sensible mantra about eating, and that's, eat food, not too much, mostly plants. And I'm curious to know what you make of the skepticism on the part of RFK Jr. and the Maha movement about conventional wisdom around nutrition. Well, I mean, RFK's version would be, you know, eat food, probably not too much, mostly meat. I think the big takeaway of the new food guidelines was its promotion of meat and saturated fat, for which there's no scientific evidence that we're not getting enough. We're getting plenty of protein. So once you've given up on science as guiding you, anything goes. Which is not to say nutrition science has always been accurate. I think that it's a pretty imperfect science, but there's certain things I think we can rely on when, you know, a great many studies implicate meat and, you know, red meat especially. The other thing that it completely overlooks is that these decisions are not just about our health. The environmental implications of eating more red meat are enormous. Uses an incredible amount of resources, incredibly wasteful way to feed ourselves. Takes 10 pounds of grain to get one pound of meat, beef. So, you know, I don't find these that helpful. I don't think they'll change much of anything. Which is not to say I don't think Maha could have a positive impact. There's the potential of a very interesting new alliance. You know, there are overlaps between the old food movement and Maha movement around pesticides, around ultra processed foods. So maybe there's a new politics being born here. Although I have to say, you know, eating real food is not going to protect you from the measles. And you have to take everything that RFK Jr. is doing to public health in its entirety. And I fear that more people will die because of his vaccine ideas than will be saved because of his food ideas. Well, I have a question about what guidance or advice you might have for people about how to deploy skepticism when it comes to institutions or authorities. It seems like it might be difficult to say to people, you know, maybe you can trust RFK Jr. on X, but don't trust him on Y. That seems like maybe a hard move for people to make. So, how do you know where to direct your skepticism? Well, you know, I have a certain advantage because I'm a journalist and I get to call up people and I can ask them, how confident are you about this result? And, you know, scientists in print are very definitive and confident. In person, they're much more reluctant to take hard positions. And they'll say, well, you know, this is a limited study. This is what we know now. So, I guess I see science as a much more equivocal discourse than many people do. And I think scientists sometimes are kind of, I don't know, you know, I mean, they have so much authority in our culture or did until it's being dismantled right now that I think they overdid their confidence to people because I guess they felt equivocal messages didn't pan out or didn't get them headlines. So, you know, as a consumer tip, I don't really have anything except to, you know, don't be overwhelmed by the first day story, which applies to everything, right? You read in the paper, the second and third day story sometimes qualify things and read more widely and look for, you know, comments on the science and not just that first day story. Sorry, I don't have a more satisfying answer. No, no, that's okay. It's a real, but it's a real problem and it creates the vulnerability that RFK Jr. is stepping into. I want to turn back to the new book now. We talked earlier about the idea of being skeptical about a stable self. And, you know, I apologize if this seems like a woo-woo question or is too airy-fairy, but do you think the absence of a self also means the absence of something like a soul? Do you believe in a soul? Well, if a soul is something that is indestructible and survives our death, no. But I can't say that or anything else about the afterlife with any confidence. There's a lot of, you know, there are a lot of people who seriously believe otherwise. So, to the extent a soul is associated with that idea, I don't. I think that consciousness has become our kind of secular substitute for the soul. And we talk about consciousness the way people in the 17th century talked about souls or 16th century talked about souls. And some of people's interest in it is the fact that maybe it floats free of these mortal bodies and does something or gets folded into a collective consciousness after we're gone. So, I think there is a kind of hidden religiosity or spirituality in the whole conversation around consciousness and people's interest in it. You know, somebody asked me recently, you know, do you think as people get older, are they more interested in consciousness? And I would say probably yes, and probably for that reason. It's interesting for me because it does seem that many of us do have consistencies to ourselves that are a little hard to explain in the absence of something like a stable identity or a soul. You know, in the book, you mention a period in your teenage years when you were reading Herman Hesse, writing bad poetry and thinking about the big questions. I don't know if you write bad poetry, but you know, the other two things don't seem that far away from what you're doing now in your 70s. So, what to you might explain what seem like intrinsic core qualities that are constant for you through time, if not a self, a stable self-identity or a soul? Yeah. So, even though I talk a lot about this idea that maybe the self is an illusion, it still has a reality of a certain kind. I mean, a conventional reality. The fact that I'm using myself to talk to yourself makes this very easy. If neither of us had selves right now, it would be a very kind of loosey-goosey conversation. I can't even imagine what it would be like. I mean, Matthew Ricard said, you know, it's like a river has a name, and that conventional name is very useful, but there's nothing consistent there. It's just water passing. So, I think we have to make that distinction. But I also say in the book at various times, I don't have a self yet. I can make things happen, and there is an eye that feels it's making things happen. So, even if it's an illusion or a construct of consciousness, it's real enough. But where do you think those core feelings come from? Every day people do things, and they have some feeling inside themselves that says something like, this doesn't feel right to me. This doesn't feel wrong. This doesn't feel like who I am. What is that who I am? Well, a lot of that is memory. I mean, time. I talk in the end of the book about the importance of time to the construction of self. It is the fact that you have this whole history of experiences and these objectives or aspirations about the future, and it is that line in which you situate yourself. There's someone in the book who has a very interesting idea about self and memory, which is Michael Levin, the biologist, who's a brilliant biologist at Tufts. And he talks about mnemonic improvisation, I think is what he calls it. And his idea is that our memories are constantly being rewritten. Every time we take out a memory and put it back, it's a little different. This seems like a bug, but he's telling us it's a feature. This is how we construct ourselves, by taking memories and changing them in some ways. And by the way, computers don't do this all the time. If they did, we'd throw them out. If they changed their memory all the time, and you opened a file and you're like, wait a minute, this is not the way I wrote it. So I think that we are hacking our memory constantly to help construct the self that is useful to us now. And he basically says maybe that's what consciousness is, is someone using experience to construct a self. And I think that's a very provocative idea. I don't know if it's true, but it's provocative. I know I brought something like this next question up when we spoke before, but I want to ask it again, or ask a version of it again. This morning I was looking at the news, and I'm thinking, gosh, it's coming back to talk to Michael Pollan about consciousness. Am I doing some, you know, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin style conversation right now? And I decided the answer is no, and it is important. I'm glad to hear it. Do you ever have those doubts? You know, I did at various points when I was starting on this book, and the world was starting to fall apart in various ways. And like, you know, is this how I should be using my energy? There's political work to be done. And I do do political work in other parts of my life. But I also think that consciousness is at stake in a lot of what's going on. I mean, one of the things Trump has done is occupied a significant chunk of our attention every single day, and that our consciousness is being polluted in a certain way, and he's a master at it. And I think protecting ourselves against that at the same time we preserve the ability to act politically is a difficult balancing act. You know, we talked last time about the need to protect consciousness, that it's a very precious realm. It's the realm of our privacy and our freedom, our freedom to think. So I think we need some kind of consciousness hygiene, particularly at this moment where this one politician in particular has figured out ways to command our attention. So yeah, I think consciousness is more relevant now as something to think about, protect, nurture, than even it was 10 or 20 years ago. Michael, thank you so much for taking all the time to talk with me. I really appreciated it, and I really enjoyed the book very much. Thank you. Thanks. This was very provocative conversations.