Michael Pollan

So, I'm going to back up a little bit to make sense of this idea.

One of the big questions is your brain...

at least 90% of what it's doing, you're not aware of.

It's doing all this work, monitoring your body, maintaining homeostasis, perceiving things in your environment without you being consciously aware of it.

Peripheral vision, smell, scent, touch, all these kinds of things, temperature.

So the question then becomes, if this automatic machine is so good at what it does, why does any of it become conscious?

That's part of the hard problem of consciousness.

Why aren't we just zombies?

Wouldn't that have been simpler?

The reasons, and to some extent these are evolutionary, just those stories, but they're persuasive, that basically you can automate things until you get to a level of complexity.

For us, it's our social lives.

The fact that we are fundamentally social beings, absolutely dependent on other people.

With a long period of complete dependence for babies and children compared to other species, social life cannot be automated.

It's just too complex.

So you need to be able to anticipate what I'm likely to say, how a remark is going to land.

We call it theory of mind, this idea that we can imagine our way into other people, basis of compassion and things like that.

So once we entered this realm of great complexity, automating our responses just wasn't going to work.

And the creatures that had consciousness that could imagine what was going on in another human's head did better than people who didn't and failed to imagine what was going on in someone else's head.

I find that a pretty persuasive theory.

Yeah.