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
It's processing information, taking in sensory data all the time and making changes, running homeostasis, keeping your body in the right temperature and blood gases and all this kind of stuff.
So why should any of it be conscious?
Why don't we automate everything?
Why aren't we zombies?
I think that's a kind of subset of the hard problem.
And you can construct a good evolutionary story that would explain why it would be useful.
And the best one I heard was from Carl Friston, who's a English neuroscientist.
And I put this question to him.
What good is it?
What good is consciousness?
And he said that for us, creatures who are fundamentally social beings, who depend on other people to survive,
who have a long childhood where we're utterly dependent, much longer than any other mammal, consciousness allows us to navigate social life, which is too complex and changeable to program.
You couldn't hardwire everything you have to know to succeed in a human social context.
Having the ability to predict what the other person is going to say or do, to imagine your way into their point of view, these are all highly adaptive skills.
You can easily imagine a couple of proto humans, some of whom have that imaginary ability,
call it theory of mind or something that, you know, proto theory of mind and are very good students of the other person and can read facial expressions and figure out what's going to happen next, compare that to someone who's kind of dense and doesn't pick up on social signals, who's more likely to make a good bond and reproduce.
So, you know, who knows if that's true, but that would create a pressure for something like consciousness to emerge from unconscious or from sentience, say.
I don't know, you buy it?
We already believe they're conscious and they will convince us they're conscious.
It's in their interest to convince us they're conscious.
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