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
Yeah, Neem Karoli Baba, yeah.
And just upping the dose, upping the dose, getting up to six or 700 micrograms and nothing happens.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then being in doubt as to whether or not he, uh, you know, had just palmed the, the, the, the medication and didn't take it.
And then, so then when he went back, he, he did it again and it worked the same way or didn't work.
So consciousness is the fact that it's like something to be us.
The fact that the lights are on.
And there is a deep intuition or dogma or expectation in biology, at least, that the explanation for this must be evolutionary in some sense, right?
Consciousness must have either evolved for some reason because certain things that are adaptive and indispensable for us can only occur in the light of consciousness.
Or I guess it could be an epiphenomenon, a view which sounds really counterintuitive to people, but which I've always thought had a lot going for it.
Famously, T.H.
Huxley, who was a great defender of Darwin's theory back in the day, said that consciousness was like the steam whistle on a train, right?
It's this super salient feature of the train's operation, but not at all integral to anything that's happening.
I don't think he used the word epiphenomenon, but
The concept of this is a phenomenon that rides alongside the thing you're interested in.
It seems to be part of it, but it's really doing absolutely nothing.
Tell me what you encountered when you asked people about the evolutionary role.
Well, that was a real question I had.
I mean, as you know, most of what the brain does, we're not aware of.
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