Michael Pollan

Feelings bear more thought in that, you know, where do they come from?

How can they be simulated?

Feelings and bodies bear more thought.

This is something that... Embodiment.

That consciousness is an embodied phenomenon.

And that the brain in a vat, right, meme, just no.

It just doesn't work.

Ditto the downloading of consciousness onto a machine.

You know, the dream of the transhumanists.

You're not going to have a body?

Yeah, and we misinterpret them.

I mean, think about, you've got young kids.

When they're hungry, they will misinterpret that as frustration or anger, and you realize, oh, they just need to eat, and then they'll be fine.

So we do go through a process of learning how to interpret what our body is telling us.

But it's true, as adults, where do you go to learn that?

I mean, meditation a little bit, doing body scans and things like that.

I've done meditation practices where...

The focus is very much on the body and what's going on in every different part of the body.

But I think we would be wiser if we learned how to do this and paid better attention to our bodies.

And I also think, I mean, in a way, this is the lesson of Antonio Damasio's first book in 1994, Descartes' Error, it was called.