Michael Pollan

There's something between us and the world, and it could be different than it is.

And that's a very common, I think, perception of people on psychedelics.

But that really got me thinking and made me realize that for my next project, I really wanted to dig in because I realized I didn't know much about consciousness.

Yeah, it's slippery in one way and it's obvious in another.

I mean, there's nothing any of us know with more certainty than the fact that we are conscious.

It's immediately available to us.

It's the voice in our head.

But the definitions that I like are, one is simply subjective experience, or you could even just say experience.

You know, toasters are not capable of experience, but we and a bunch of other animals and possibly plants are.

Another definition I really like was put forward by a philosopher named Thomas Nagel back in the 70s.

He wrote an essay called What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

And basically he argued that if it is like anything to be a creature, if it feels like something, then that creature is conscious.

I think that's a pretty handy way to look at it.

Yeah, so back several centuries ago, Galileo kind of made a decision to bifurcate the world that science would study.

And he basically said, and he did this for very pragmatic reasons because the church was very suspicious of science, but he said science should simply concentrate on the objective, measurable, quantifiable aspects of reality.

and leave subjectivity, which at the time was thought of as the soul, to the church.

And this kept science from intruding on the church's territory, probably kept several scientists from getting burned at the stake.

He knew subjectivity was interesting and worth studying, but he just said, we're going to leave it aside.

And indeed, we did leave it aside for hundreds of years.

And it was a good call, but it also led to science forgetting for a period of time that there were these subjective experiences and that they might be worth studying.