Ezra Klein

Yeah, and you're alluding to Christoph Koch, who is a very prominent consciousness researcher.

He was there at the beginning when he and Francis Crick began on this quest to understand consciousness in the late 80s, early 90s.

He's an exemplary scientist in that he's changed his mind in profound ways several times.

I find that doesn't usually happen among scientists, the saying that science changes one funeral at a time.

Not in his case.

He went to Brazil and had a series of ayahuasca experiences.

Now, this is the prototypical brain guy.

He ran the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle.

He's been messing around with neurons and electrodes for years and years and years.

and assumed that the source of consciousness was gonna be in the brain.

He has this experience of mind at large.

This is a term that comes from Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, that consciousness was outside of his brain.

And I challenged him on it, and I said, well, but it's a drug experience.

And he would not take that as disproof or even reason for skepticism.

And he used as an example a famous thought experiment, the Mary experiment.

You have this brilliant woman who is the world's expert on color, on vision.

And she knows everything there is to know about cones and rods and how the whole system works.

But she lives in a completely black and white world.

She steps out one day and has the experience of color.

What has she learned, right?