Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Miniature Mouse.
Hi.
Tweet, tweet. Returning guest, but first time in person. I think it was a Zoomie.
He was Zoomie, yeah.
He had the Zoomies. But he's here in person. He's wearing a very cute sweater. And it was very fun to have him in 3D. Michael Pollan, an award-winning author and journalist. How to change your mind. A movement. A sociological phenomenon.
Yeah, changed people's minds.
That's right. This is your mind on plants. I think that's what we spoke to him about. The Omnivore's Dilemma, another big, huge hit in defense of food. And his new book, which is the trippiest by far. I enjoyed the hell out of it. A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness. Please enjoy Michael Pollan. He's an object expert.
How are you? Welcome. Thank you.
Happy to have you.
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Chapter 2: How does Michael Pollan define consciousness?
And I don't know that it travels up as much as we think. Explain reductiveness. I think that's really important. The idea of reductive science is that complex phenomenon can be reduced to simpler phenomenon. So everything eventually can be reduced to matter and energy. And they can be reduced to each other, thanks to Einstein. This works for all sorts of things.
It's given us the technological revolutions we've seen. What they've done in astronomy is unimaginable when you know about the universe from inside of it. Exactly. You don't predict where things are and when stars will die. And the rate of expansion and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, it's mind-blowing. Yeah, but... Consciousness has so far resisted that reductive approach.
It's not at all clear it can be reduced to matter and energy. It may yet. Some people think if you introduce a third term, information, and some physicists think that's what the world consists of is information. Maybe that would help us unlock consciousness. They haven't gotten very far with that, but that's a suggestive avenue of exploration.
There's an irony here, though, which is the conscious strives for homeostasis. And one of the great enemies of homeostasis is uncertainty. So we're drawn to things that are certain. And our best certainties have been these advances in science. So I don't even know that the scientists recognize they too are in great desire of certainty. To a blinding degree. Yeah.
Although a lot of them, when you talk to them, are much more candid about what they don't know and about their uncertainty. In the papers, you know, with the little abstract, it's always declarative and they've nailed it down. And I think from a career point of view, you have to sort of have that kind of confidence.
But I always find that scientists are a lot more willing to talk about gray areas and what they don't know if you talk to them one-on-one. And boy, with consciousness, they'll definitely admit that they're kind of lost in many respects. So I found them pretty candid about that. We would argue sometimes, but they would finally admit there's a gulf.
We can take it this far, but how you get to the conscious subject, we don't know yet. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart. Not checking which platform you watch that new show on, so frustrating.
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Within physics, too, there's these great mysteries. We had this wonderful physicist and oncologist, Neil Thiessen, and he was explaining to us self-organizing complex systems. It was one of the best episodes we've ever had. And he uses the big flock of swallows, right? At first, it appears to be this, but we go closer. Oh, no, it's made up of individual swallows. Oh, but we go closer.
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Chapter 3: What is the 'hard problem' of consciousness?
He knows so many different fields. Yeah, he's a polymath. He ran the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle for years. He's worked with neurons and probing them and giving them electric shocks and all this kind of stuff. And he was the quintessential brain guy. But over the years, he's kind of come to realize that approach is not going to explain subjective experience. And we have to look beyond.
What's admirable about him is he's changed his mind several times. Most recently... He went to Brazil and had five ayahuasca trips. This is how open-minded he is. A lot of scientists don't mess around with psychedelics because they think they don't want to screw up their brains. Their moneymaker? The moneymaker.
But actually, quite a few of the consciousness researchers are messing around with psychedelics just to get their head out of the box. Anyway, Christoph comes back from this experience in which he saw what he called mind at large, which is to say consciousness outside of his head. It's the same insight that Aldous Huxley had in The Doors of Perception.
You know, he talked about connecting to this universal mind and that the brain kind of channels it and we get a little bit of it in normal consciousness. On psychedelics, the valve opens wide and you get a lot more of it. Christoph had a very similar experience and it gave him a crisis. He was crying to his wife. Where does he go with this? And I said, well, why'd you believe it?
Because I had my same experience with the plants. And he said, well, it was as real as anything. I've ever experienced.
Yeah.
And I would never doubt it. So he's exploring idealism, this idea that consciousness precedes matter. I admire him because normally science changes, as they say, one funeral at a time. People hold on to their ideas till they die. But he's changed two or three times in his career. So scientific materialism has been this paradigm for like 400 years. It's been very powerful. It's given us a lot.
But consciousness may kind of have reached the edge of it. And I talked to some other biologists too who are considering alternatives to it. And we're probably not designed for these concepts to be intuitive. So I think it's a great time to introduce what was probably the hardest concept of the book. Is it the second law of thermodynamics? Yeah. Entropy.
So in a nutshell, correct me if I'm wrong, all matter in the universe, we have this enormous big bang and everything's been dissipating since. And so all matter will lose its energy. The best analogy is a drop of ink in water. And you watch it ripple out and then eventually it turns to nothing. And that's what everything in the universe is on course to do.
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Chapter 4: What insights does Michael Pollan share about solitude in a cave?
And I think instead of talking to me, you should go live in the cave for a few days. The cave. And she has this place, this piece of land 50 miles north of Santa Fe in the mountains at like 14,000 feet. She and her monks have dug a cave into the side of a south-facing hillside. And she said, why don't you just be there for a while and think about these questions yourself?
I had the most amazing three days in the cave. No media, obviously. There were not even electromagnetic waves there. It was so remote. No power and no water. And I got into this ritual where I would meditate for a few hours a day, which I've never been able to do before. I'd hike and I'd chop wood and sweep.
Chapter 5: How does extreme solitude affect our sense of self?
And it's very interesting to watch what happens to yourself when you have such extreme solitude. And you realize our sense of self is a social construct that we're each reinforcing each other's selves as we talk. And if you're not with anyone, it sort of softens. The border we were talking about just kind of really goes soft.
Really interesting thoughts that you said, like even the notion that no one's going to come. That's a very abstract. You're always kind of waiting or preparing for the arrival or departure of someone. Exactly. And just like taking that off the table, I really was taken by that. Animals might find me, but no one was going to find me. You're not going to be disturbed.
There was a great freedom in that. You can really let your mind go. And what I came out of it with was this idea that I'd been so focused on this problem-solution frame And that if I let myself go into not knowing, we were talking about earlier, it opened me up to being present. And I realized how much of the time we're not present.
And, you know, we think we're more conscious than animals, but actually animals have to be more conscious. Because... If they're not present to their environment, to what's going on right now, they can be eaten. They can't afford to be lost in a memory from three years ago where they were shame ridden. Exactly.
The construct of civilization and technology has allowed us to get kind of lazy about presence and consciousness. And that came back to me. I really felt it. And I realized this is something that distinguishes humans, that we have the freedom to not be here. And sometimes that's great. And it allows for some human achievement that we can imagine an alternative world.
But day to day, we're giving up something really precious. I think a lot of people have the same reaction I had. Like, I'm going through it with you. She marches you up here and like, okay, you're going to be here for a few days.
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Chapter 6: What lessons does Pollan learn about presence and consciousness?
And my first thought is, I'm going to be so uncomfortable with my thoughts. It's going to be maddening. And I love she explained everyone... We'll go through this. You'll ruminate and you'll ruminate and you'll ruminate. And finally, you'll be blessed with boredom. You'll be so fucking bored. And I was like, I can imagine that state. You're like, I can't bear to watch this fucking movie again.
Yeah, the reruns. The reruns. Yeah. Interesting. So like that happened to you. Yeah, I got there. And that happens in her retreat center. She said people meditate for two weeks and then they drop in. But a couple things lead to that. Because I asked her, how do you destroy selves or undermine self? And she said, well, first, no eye contact and no speaking.
So even if you're with other people, they're not reinforcing your sense of self. The other thing is ritualized. All your behavior becomes ritualized. And you have to do this. You have to serve food in a certain way. You have to walk in a certain way. And ritual relieves you of individual volition. You're following a script in a way. You don't have to evaluate either of what you're doing.
Just what we do. Yeah. Time's a big element too, right? That really stuck with me. That was something that occurred to me when I was out in the cave, which is I was very present. I was in the moment a lot of the day doing my chores. You would sleep.
Chapter 7: How does the discussion on consciousness relate to personal experiences?
I would sleep. You'd cut wood. Yeah, dug pit toilets in the woods and cut wood. I'd make a cup of tea now and then out of a little camp stove. You realize that ourselves are constructed out of our memories and our future goals. And without that timeline, poof, we're gone. And there are people, you know, who can't remember anything and they have no sense of self.
So our sense of self is a very interesting concept. construct. It's tenuous. It's very tenuous. And our attitude to it is so paradoxical because we want our kids to have self-esteem and self-confidence is important and self-assurance. Yet we spend a lot of time trying to escape it in meditation, in experiences of awe, in nature, in psychedelics.
Transcending self, these are some of the high points of a life. And it's interesting that both are true and selves are useful. We need our ego, but the ego builds walls. And when the walls come down, you can really connect to something larger than yourself. I was imagining that
When you saw this herd of elk come eat in the meadow after this kind of deconstruction and the loss of time, and I was thinking that had to be so pleasurable. And exciting. And exciting. Like you reset your baseline from all this incredible, exciting noise we're surrounded by. And I can imagine after like two days of abject boredom going like, oh. Oh, yes. This is the show of the century.
What a lovely thing to be experiencing joy and pleasure from. It was great because nothing was happening. And then suddenly there they were. So the only part where I thought, how could this have happened to you? is the writer part.
As much as you were shaking all this stuff, you had to be aware of that you were also needing to commit the experience to memory so that you could later write about it. What was that tension like? I didn't take any notes. I just wanted to experience it. And at the time, I didn't know I was experiencing the ending of my book. I mean, I have a lot of experience. Another stop. Yeah.
So much happened to me in the last five years that isn't in the book. I didn't realize its significance until some time later. And with the help of my editor, by the way, that passage was going to be the end of the self chapter. And then I realized, no, this is the end of the book.
I mean, I do lots of things in full knowledge that I'm going to write about it, including some of the psychedelic experiences I had. But in this case, it was possible, but I didn't like document it. I have a couple pictures. That was the only documentation of the cave.
It's funny, the cave almost sounds like prison. And again, circling back to, like, you get to make the choice. You get to make the choice whether that's a pleasurable or meaningful experience.
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