Michael Pollan

So it turns out it does not make human beings crazy to cause mass pain to living things on an industrial scale.

Anyway, I think here's my suspicion about that, because I do think it is possible we're going to make sentient machines, machines that have some experience of what it is like to be a machine.

And I think that you will find there's a lot of concern about that until the moment it turns out to be against anybody's interest.

You would have to do anything about it.

One of the things that has struck me, and it's a theme of your book, is our ability as human beings to wall off.

our experience from that of everything else in the world.

I forget the great philosopher you're quoting here, but there is one of them who just doesn't believe animals can feel pain, sees them as functionally robotic.

Well, Descartes.

Descartes.

It is Descartes.

Yeah.

And that is in part helping to justify vivisections of live animals in that era.

And it's just like, I have two dogs.

I've been around some rabbits.

The idea that you would believe those animals are not feeling pain, it actually raises a pretty profound for me question about human consciousness.

And our ability to interpret what we are seeing around what we would like it to be as opposed to what it is.

There is also another more complex way plants are operating on this book, which is that some of this book is motivated by experiences you've had with psychedelic mushrooms.

And you have an experience there that I have heard from many others, which is...

a kind of openness to animism.

Yes.