Michael Pollan

And so, you know, there's some description of, you know, the functional characteristics of a system or, you know, the way the neural correlates of consciousness are arranged.

And consciousness emerges from that, even if we had that description in hand,

The fact that that is the basis of consciousness, that first the lights are not on, then all of a sudden you change the wiring diagram ever so slightly and an inner world appears, that is just the, you know, it doesn't mean it's not true, but it would be totally non-explanatory.

There is this explanatory gap, and whatever the right answer is, it's still going to look like a miracle.

Yeah.

Well, Christoph Koch, who was involved at the very beginning of modern consciousness science, started out with Francis Crick, the great scientist who cracked inheritance when he discovered, co-discovered the double helix.

You know, they went looking for the neural correlates and they thought that would solve the problem.

They would find that group of neurons responsible for subjective experience.

And it was only a couple of years into that quest that

and by the way, that quest goes on, that Kristof realized that, oh, even if we found the neural correlates, it really wouldn't answer the question we're trying to answer.

How did that group of neurons, if there was such a group, produced this feeling of being me, this voice in my head?

And so he was, it was the first of several crises he's had along the way.

Well, like many of us, Christoph has done some drugs in the meantime.

That's given him another crisis, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the influence of psychedelics on this conversation is fascinating.

I mean, it's not surprising given what happened a generation and a half ago, but we had this hiatus in science where these drugs could not be experimented with.

And

But before we dive into consciousness, maybe just let's, let me just ask your, get your opinion on this.

I mean, how do you view the, almost the omnipresence of psychedelics now in the discussion here scientifically, but also in the culture?