Michael Pollan
speaker
2,844 appearances
8 recordings
8 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 28 May
Michael Pollan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Nice.
Well, but I think many of us in this game eventually beat our heads against the wall long enough that we finally admit to ourselves that we're not going to solve the hard problem of consciousness.
Now, there are many people in your book who have not admitted that.
Spoiler alert for this podcast episode.
Yeah.
We'll talk about this.
But I mean, ultimately, there is something more to do or less to do than think about consciousness, which is to say, you can simply be consciousness more and more subtly and deeply and continuously.
And that's where things like meditation and psychedelics come in.
And so your book almost takes you full circle.
back to questions of being more than thinking, but the thinking is fascinating and we need to do it because we need to talk about it.
Let's just define our terms at the outset, which you do early in the book, but we should just distinguish a few concepts.
There's sentience, there's consciousness, there's
cognition, there's intelligence.
I mean, we'll talk about AI and intelligence is something that many people are thinking about now in its various instantiations.
How do you define or disambiguate these terms?
Yeah, so I made a distinction
It's not mine alone, but it's not always made, between sentience and consciousness.
And you see that coming up in the whole discussion about AI.
Some people use the word sentient to describe these machines that they think may be conscious.
Sentience is a more basic foundational term.
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