Your Brain Is Hiding the Truth From You (#314)
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What is consciousness and how does Michael Pollan define it?
A brain weighs just three pounds, yet it consumes a massive twenty percent of our metabolic energy. It generates only enough electricity to power a small light bulb. Yet it does something no light bulb, no supercomputer, and no chatbot has ever managed to do. It makes a world appear. Colors, sounds the feeling of being you. How does it do this? Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today I'm excited to be with Michael Pollan, a journalist, Harvard, and Berkeley professor, an author who spent his career following one deceptively simple question after another to their strangest, deepest roots.
In his new book, A World Appears, A Journey into Consciousness, he's chasing the biggest question of all, not what we think, but why we experience anything at all. Welcome, Michael, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today.
Thank you, Lynn. Good to be here.
Great to be with you. The word consciousness is not easy to define. Can you define it simply for us? What is consciousness?
I define it simply as subjective experience, which you could even shorten to experience. The fact that you have experience or awareness is another good definition. I also like the definition that Thomas Nagel, the NYU philosopher, put forward back in the seventies. He wrote a wonderful essay called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? And even though we don't know exactly what it's like to be a bat, to navigate the world using sonar rather than light. We know it's like something to do that. And so therefore we must concede the bad as conscious. Your toaster, on the other hand, does not have experience. There is nothing it is like to be your toaster, I'm pretty sure.
It is such an interesting framing. What is it like to be a bat?
Yeah, it is. He's a philosopher, but his definition has really caught on with a lot of the neuroscientists.
Why does the brain predict reality instead of merely recording it?
What are the major mysteries around consciousness and why aren't they easy to resolve?
The biggest mystery is why we have it. Our brain does a lot of work without our consciousness, without our awareness. It is working all the time to monitor what's going on in your body. It's taking in information from the environment and performing computations and making changes based on that information. It does so much without consciousness. So the question arises: why do we need it? Why isn't everything automated? Why aren't we more like zombies? We don't know the answer. I mean, you can point to some adaptive value in being conscious. One theory that I found compelling is that for humans who are profoundly social creatures, right, we depend on other people to survive. Need to navigate a very complex social reality where you need to be able to predict what other people are going to do, what they're going to say.
And that is so complex that you couldn't automate all the variables involved. So consciousness is necessitated by our identity as social beings. As to why it's so difficult to study, I think the big problem. The problem is that we can't step outside it. All our science, all our speculation, what we're doing now, all takes place within this bubble of consciousness. There is no ability to stand outside and acquire a kind of God's eye view or view from nowhere and really see it whole. So I think that that definitely complicates our efforts to understand consciousness. And we just may not be smart enough.
One leading theory says that consciousness is like a dark theater with a single spotlight stage, the global workspace. Can you explain that metaphor?
This is a very popular theory of consciousness. It's actually come up recently because Claude may have a global workspace. This is the chatbot at Anthropic. But the idea is that the way consciousness arises is you have all these brain networks that are doing different things, monitoring the environment, external, internal, perceiving the world, having thoughts.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is consciousness and how does Michael Pollan define it?
0:01–2:38
2
Why does the brain predict reality instead of merely recording it?
2:38–5:30
3
How does the ‘global workspace’ theory explain the emergence of conscious experience?
5:30–8:24
4
What evidence shows that perception is a controlled hallucination?
8:24–11:14
5
Why might evolution have shaped perception for usefulness rather than accuracy?
11:14–13:29
6
How do animals, plants, and AI challenge our ideas of consciousness?
13:29–16:08
7
What role do feelings and the body play in the origins of consciousness?
16:08–18:36
8
Why does Pollan say consciousness is precious, under siege, and worth defending?
18:36–20:52
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from 3 Takeaways™
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