Ezra Klein

It's a big price to pay for your theory that you're adding something completely new to the stock of reality, but it solves the problem of where consciousness comes from.

It comes from everywhere.

It was already here.

When I first learned about them, I thought these are crazy.

But then you realize that materialism has kind of hit a wall with consciousness studies and that there is this gap that we can't seem to cross from a very good theory like workspace theory to, well, wait a minute.

When you say you're broadcasting to the whole brain, who's receiving that broadcast?

And then you have other people saying, well, consciousness is just an illusion.

But an illusion is a conscious experience, right?

So what about the subject?

And that's where everybody starts waving their hands.

I have to say, I don't know.

You know, it's weird to spend five years on a book and come to an answer like that.

But, you know, as I said at one point, this is a book where you may know less at the end than you do at the beginning.

But you'll know a lot of other things.

Well, I think that the interest in psychedelics is partly an interest in taking back our consciousness and exploring it.

Because one of the things that happens, you know,

The day you do a psychedelic is not a day you're looking at your phone.

It's a day that you've put a fence around if you're doing it right and not just walking around the streets of Manhattan tripping, but you're doing it with some intention and you reclaim your mind for a period of time and you explore it.

This idea of expanding consciousness, there's a line in Aldous Huxley that I've always really liked.

He believed in this transmission theory of consciousness.