#475 — The Hard Problem of Consciousness
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What is the hard problem of consciousness?
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I'm here with Michael Pollan. Michael, it's great to see you again. Yeah, great to be back, Sam. Or to see you for the first time. We were just talking about the fact that the last podcast, I think, was just audio, right? It was a phone call, effectively. Yeah, I actually remember the day really well. It was 2018, and I was in a hotel room in Portland, Oregon. Has that much time passed? Jesus, that's really depressing. Yeah, it was How to Change Your Mind had just come out. Yeah, wow. And we were talking about psychedelics. This must be a function of age, but when asked to estimate how much time has elapsed, I'm always off by a factor of at least two, if not three. I mean, and I'm always wrong in the direction of underestimating.
Yeah, it's been a while. Yeah. Well, it's great to see you. It's great to see that you have a new book and you have written a, not everyone does this, you have written a bestseller on the nature of consciousness. And the book is A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness, which is an all too natural follow on from your last book on psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind. Before we jump into the deep end of the pool, let's just have you connect that, those dots for me. How did you convince yourself that you wanted to go deeper in this direction? You know, I think it's a very common response to psychedelic experience. I had a series of experiences, research trips, if you will, from when I was working on How to Change Your Mind.
And one of the things psychedelics kind of reliably do for people is defamiliarize consciousness. You're suddenly made more aware of it. I describe it in the book as like smudging the windshield through which you normally perceive reality. And suddenly you realize, hey, there's a windshield. What is that about? Because most of the time it's utterly transparent. You can go a long time without thinking about consciousness. So that was, you know, so I'd put it in front of me as a set of questions. And of all the things, you know, whenever you finish a book, there's always a few threads that are left, you know, untied and, you know, curious paths. It's too late to go down. You're on the last chapter. And consciousness was definitely one of them.
So I thought, And I had a wonderful editor who was willing to support me on an expedition with a very uncertain destination. And because I set off on this really not knowing where I was going, what I was doing, and with no sense of what to expect. And, you know, God bless her. She's since passed and God offers her name. She's a wonderful editor. She said, yeah, you'll do something interesting with that. So I was off. Well, you have certainly done that. And we'll spend the next, I don't know, 90 minutes or so thinking about consciousness. But I think you arrive at a place that I've arrived. I don't know if it's stable in the end, but I seem to have occupied this spot for quite some time. Thinking about consciousness and specifically the hard problem of consciousness, which we'll talk about in a moment, is something that just utterly kind of subsumed my intellectual interests somewhere around the mid-90s and held them for quite some time.
And you wrote a really interesting book on it. I mean, it was about the self, but it was really about consciousness. Waking up had a big influence on me. Nice. Well, but I think many of us in this game eventually beat our heads against the wall long enough that we finally admit to ourselves that we're not going to solve the hard problem of consciousness. Now, there are many people in your book who have not admitted that. Spoiler alert for this podcast episode. Yeah. We'll talk about this.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the hard problem of consciousness?
0:02–5:04
2
How do psychedelics influence our understanding of consciousness?
5:04–12:15
3
What distinctions exist between sentience and consciousness?
12:15–17:51
4
How does consciousness relate to evolution and intelligence?
17:51–25:33
5
What are the implications of AI on consciousness?
25:33–25:46