Michael Pollan

So, something...

I have noticed from psychedelic circles, which I'm much less plugged into than you are, is people who work with plant psychedelics over long periods of time tend to find themselves or believe themselves into as working with plant or spiritual intelligences.

People who do mushrooms or iboga or ayahuasca, right?

There's a sense of there being something on the other side in a way that

artificial psychedelics, ketamine, LSD, people do not sort of leave believing there's like an LSD spirit on the other end of the phone.

And just as somebody who's, you know, one of your previous books was on psychedelics and doing this book, that the reason I think people get pushed towards animism

isn't necessarily the more narrow question of what happens when you anesthetize a plant, but people having some kind of experience there where they feel there are plant intelligences communicating to them.

Especially on ayahuasca.

So you don't buy the shamans who tell you, we were told this by the plants.

So certainly the mainstream interpretation of what consciousness is, is that as life becomes more complex, as unlike plants, we're moving around, that you have an escalating complexity in conscious experience in order to achieve goals in the world.

That consciousness is being created through evolutionary pressure.

It's adaptive.

It's adaptive.

One thing you do is go through a couple of the ideas of what it could be adaptive towards.

I guess one question it raises is you look at a baby or a one-year-old, they are very, very socially dependent.

And I think they are clearly having a very intense experience of consciousness, a more intense one than I have.

My consciousness is much better at filtering out information than theirs is.

You have spotlight consciousness.

I have spotlight consciousness.

So I'm curious to hear you talk a bit about that because on the one hand, it feels like that idea would imply consciousness becomes richer as you become more goal-directed.