Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: How do psychedelics influence our understanding of consciousness?
And you see that coming up in the whole discussion about AI. Some people use the word sentient to describe these machines that they think may be conscious. Sentience is a more basic foundational term. It involves ability to sense your changes in your environment, assess whether they're good or bad, and allow you to move toward one and away from the other. It may be a property of life.
Single-celled creatures, you know, bacteria have chemotaxis, so they can distinguish between molecules that are good food and ones that'll kill them and act accordingly. So sentience is kind of very basic, perhaps permeates all of life. I can't be sure about that. Consciousness is a more elaborate form of sentience that involves other things such as a sense of awareness, feelings.
In the case of humans, not only awareness, but awareness we're aware, we layer it. And so human consciousness is just how we do sentience. And every creature that is conscious does it in a slightly different way, presumably. Reflecting their sensorium, their body type, the scale at which they operate, all these kind of things. Intelligence and consciousness are not on a spectrum or together.
They're orthogonal, I think, their relationship. Intelligence is, I define pretty much as problem-solving ability. And so that's quite a part. I mean, we all know people who are conscious and not intelligent. I mean, they don't necessarily go together. Cognition is the taking in and processing of information from the world. I think that's kind of how I define it. Yeah.
And consciousness, I define simply as experience or subjective experience. Pretty simple. You don't have to include things like self-consciousness or meta-consciousness in it. Those are kind of bells and whistles that humans have added. I doubt many animals have them.
Yeah, so consciousness is the fact that the lights are on, and it's synonymous with the fact of experience, whatever we're experientially aware of altogether, I guess. So sentience still can be described, I mean, I guess the crucial line for me, and for many people who think about this, is that
things like life, things like sentience can be given a description from the outside in terms of their functional characteristics. I mean, does something reproduce? Does it, you know, metabolize? Does it grow, et cetera? These are characteristics of life. And then, you know, the boundary conditions can be somewhat diffuse.
And so it can be hard to say whether, you know, a virus is alive in the way that, you know, a bacterium is alive, et cetera. But And so it is, I think, with sentience, at least under the definition you gave it. But consciousness is the fact that it's like something, to use Nagel's now immortal phrase, to be what we are.
And if it's like something to be a bat, well, then that would be consciousness in the case of a bat. And that's obviously his famous example from his essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? And this disgorges...
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Chapter 3: What distinctions exist between sentience and consciousness?
Well, like many of us, Christoph has done some drugs in the meantime. That's given him another crisis, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the influence of psychedelics on this conversation is fascinating. I mean, it's not surprising given what happened a generation and a half ago, but we had this hiatus in science where these drugs could not be experimented with. And
But before we dive into consciousness, maybe just let's, let me just ask your, get your opinion on this. I mean, how do you view the, almost the omnipresence of psychedelics now in the discussion here scientifically, but also in the culture?
I mean, are you at all worried that we're on the verge of recapitulating some of the errors of the 60s where we just, we get a little too fast and loose with these drugs and there's a, We invite some kind of backlash or how are you feeling about the psychedelic part of this conversation? Yeah. I mean, well, first to go back a little bit, it was a real surprise.
I thought I would mention psychedelics in the introduction of this book as something that inspired it and set me on this path and that would be it. And there would be no psychedelics in the book, but they kept popping up and I wasn't bringing them up. It was the scientists working on the problem who are partly because they're stuck, partly because they're very open-minded to
using any tools at hand. Many of them, you know, would talk to me unbidden about their experience with psychedelics and how, in many cases, it had influenced them. They're not doing studies. They're not involved in the various university studies, but they're personally using them and... in some cases, getting insights that they think are really important.
In other cases, not sure what exactly to do with them. But it just kind of was this, it became this motif in the book of scientists telling me about their psychedelic experiences and how it had affected their work. So I thought that was really interesting. You know, The whole issue of psychedelics has changed a lot since 2018.
I mean, it is, first of all, more acceptable for us to have a conversation about it. I think in waking up, you were kind of ahead of the curve in your willingness to talk about your own experiences. Many people regarded it as a reputational risk back then. What year was Waking Up published? 2014. Yeah. So that was early.
That was before this science at Johns Hopkins had gotten a lot of publicity and suddenly we were taking psychedelics seriously as a therapeutic modality. I think we're in a very different moment than the 60s. I think there was a lot of careless use of psychedelics. Things went wrong and psychedelics also got really entangled in the counterculture. And that was part of the backlash.
I mean, Nixon targeted psychedelics because he thought it was one of the reasons that American boys were refusing to fight in Vietnam. And he may well have been right. Well, we should say that people, some people like Timothy Leary, perhaps most notably, made that connection, that political connection explicit. Right. It's like, you know. Yeah. But so did Nixon.
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Chapter 4: How does consciousness relate to evolution and intelligence?
Yeah. Well, it's especially obvious in AI at the moment. We'll talk about the implications there. I mean, one concern I have about the influence of psychedelics on this conversation is that there's some... There's some way in which I think that the psychedelic experience, to speak generically, can be indispensable but also misleading.
I mean, it certainly can be with respect to the goal of meditation and what there is to recognize about the nature of consciousness there that is liberative or worth paying attention to. There's something that I think the...
the experiences, the peak experiences people have on psychedelics while they advertise to them the possibility of living a very different kind of life in the world, they also can give the false impression that freedom is a matter of radically changing the contents of consciousness, radically expanding it and achieving something, some kind of permanent state that is analogous to what you enjoyed on the peak of whatever it was, you know, acid, psilocybin, MDMA, DMT, whatever your
whatever your moment was. And so anyway, we'll talk about that because I think the- Yeah, no, and I think that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the mystical experiences, which is what, you know, how people kind of assess these experiences. That a mystical experience that was permanent would probably be schizophrenia. It's something in the context of everyday life.
It's a period of transcendence, but it's not something you sustain. And you know this history well, but many of the Americans who brought Buddhism to America started with psychedelics and then had a similar realization to what you're talking about, which is that it's not a practice. It's not something you can sustain day after day.
And they moved into meditation, which was a place you could have a practice, obviously. But the links are very interesting. And I think psychedelics may be a very good way to start a meditation practice.
I'm always taken with the fact that most of the experience is not the profound climax, but this long tail, which can go on for hours and is a meditation and often a very good meditation in that you're totally undistracted and you can go really deep, but you still have some control over your mind. So I think the links are very interesting.
And I do think psychedelics are a legitimate tool for the study of consciousness, the scientific study of consciousness. You know, the first big study that was done at Johns Hopkins by Roland Griffith was of mystical experience. That's a very interesting aspect of human consciousness.
And the fact that we have a tool that can pretty reliably induce it opens up all sorts of experimental possibilities. Yeah, I mean, the reliability, apart from the tiny percentage of people who seem impervious to psychedelics for reasons that, I don't know whether they've been explained at the level of their 5-HT2A receptors or not, but I mean, some people apparently, I never believe this.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of AI on consciousness?
It's in their interest to convince us they're conscious. We could inadvertently build conscious machines that can suffer and be immiserated. And we will have just built them like black boxes. Then we'll have no sense that, you know, we have just created hell and populated it.