Michael Pollan

He knew subjectivity was interesting and worth studying, but he just said, we're going to leave it aside.

And indeed, we did leave it aside for hundreds of years.

And it was a good call, but it also led to science forgetting for a period of time that there were these subjective experiences and that they might be worth studying.

I suggest at one point – consciousness has kind of become the secular substitute for the soul.

It deals with something that as far as we know seems to be immaterial and for many people has a kind of spiritual dimension to it.

Whether it really does or not is an open question.

Yeah, they bring this framework, problem-solution.

There is what is called the hard problem of consciousness, which is basically how do you get from matter to mind?

And how does three pounds of this tofu-like substance between your ears generate subjective experience?

Nobody knows the answer to that question, and that is the hard problem.

Uh, scientists, many of them will say it's, oh, it's just a matter of time.

Uh, we'll figure it out.

And, you know, they're very cocky sometimes.

Um, I think there's a real question whether they can figure it out.

Um, because we may not have the right kind of science to study consciousness.

You know, when, when Galileo said, let's leave subjectivity aside, science focused on, uh,

all the qualities that aren't very good for explaining consciousness, the quantifiable, the objective.

But if you think about it, consciousness is a uniquely difficult problem because the only thing we have with which to understand consciousness is consciousness.

Everything we perceive is through the screen of consciousness.

Science itself is a highly refined version of consciousness.