Michael Pollan

I appreciate when people troll each other in ways that laymen don't even—I was like, that seems fine.

Okay, so they're plant dorks.

Let me hold you on that, because as I understand the Thomas Nagel essay, it's that it is like something to the organism.

Yes, it's internal.

And so you could imagine a situation where a world in which

It is not like anything for the plant to be awake.

You give actually an example related to this in the book where you say, when you plug a toaster in, you can toast with it.

But when you plug it out, we don't think it is awake.

Like something different or unlike something for the toaster to be turned off.

I don't think it's like anything to be a toaster.

In either state.

The fact that something has response to stimuli doesn't necessarily imply it has a subjective experience.

You're a gardener.

Yeah.

Do you think you're causing plants pain by pruning them?

It's a grim way to put it.

Yeah, but if you... You say it'll make you crazy, but I actually, people know we're causing pain to cows and pigs and chickens and just don't think about it.

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.