Michael Pollan
speaker
2,844 appearances
8 recordings
8 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 28 May
Michael Pollan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And his test for consciousness is if it is like anything to be a creature, that creature then is conscious.
So it is like one thing when the plants are awake, and it is like something else when they're not, or it's no longer like anything.
But the switch in state is very much like consciousness.
Right.
That's true.
The difference between plants and toasters...
is complicated, but living things have a sense of purpose.
They have directionality.
They have good and bad.
Any kind of things like that we give to like a thermostat is really just us giving those qualities to the thermostat.
The thermostat doesn't care on its own whether it's 70 degrees or 65 degrees.
So I don't think it's proof of consciousness, but it's really spooky and interesting.
And this researcher in question, his name is Stefano Mancuso.
He's an Italian researcher at the University of Florence.
He's also shown how plants sleep.
There are these characteristics that mark a creature's ability to sleep, which we thought only belonged to higher mammals, I guess, or no, birds sleep too.
But we didn't think really simple creatures slept.
It turns out even insects sleep.
And Giulio Tononi is the scientist who came up with these criteria for sleep.
And plants meet, I think, all of them, which is interesting.
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