Sean Illing (3:14)

answers, but it's the curiosity and the openness to the many possible answers that really seems to be the anchor of the thing. And that is what I feel like makes great science writing, which is why you are, if not our best, certainly one of our best science writers. It's a very nice thing to start off.

Michael Pollan (3:34)

Very kind. I am more interested in questions than answers. It's true, usually more interesting. And they also can drive a narrative in a way that answers can't. And so, you know, I teach my students, you know, if you can frame a couple really good questions at the top of a piece, you're in, you're, you're really in good shape because that's, that's what's going to drive people forward.

Sean Illing (4:00)

Well, speaking of questions, I'm. I'm not going to ask you to define consciousness. Nobody seems to be able to do it. Well, I think instead I'll just start out by asking you why consciousness has proven so impossibly hard to define.

Michael Pollan (4:19)

Well, there are a couple reasons. One is we can't get outside it, so we can't attain that kind of view from nowhere perspective that allows us to formulate really tight definitions of things. You know, everything, every tool we have to understand consciousness and define consciousness is a product of consciousness. So we're sort of lost in this labyrinth that I think makes it, makes it difficult. You know, people don't think of it this way, but even the scientific enterprise is a product of consciousness. Every choice of problems to solve, every measurement device, every perspective we take, all these are products of consciousness. And so we are in this loop and it's not easy to get out of. Defining consciousness is hard in one way and then not at all hard in another. I mean, there's nothing we know with more certainty than the fact that we're conscious. As Descartes pointed out, I think subjective experience is a pretty good definition, does a lot of work and is, you know, pretty good. Pretty good way to proceed. I also like Thomas Nagel's you know what it is. What is it like to be a bat? If it is like something, if it feels like something to be whatever creature you want to think about, then it's conscious. And you can't say that about, you know, your home appliances.

Sean Illing (5:52)

So the fact that we have this three pound spongy thing in our skulls that produces the experience of being a subjective self, is that maybe the greatest

Sean Illing (6:04)

remaining mystery in science for you or.

Sean Illing (6:06)

Certainly.

Michael Pollan (6:07)

Well, it's. I listed as one of three great mysteries. The other two are how do you get from dead Matter to life. And then the third is, why is there anything and not nothing? So these are big mysteries. Um, consciousness is probably the second most tractable.

Sean Illing (6:28)

It is worth saying that there is no reason that it should feel like something to be me. I mean, feeling like a self is not a condition of life. I mean, don't you think we could just survive perfectly fine as highly sophisticated zombies?

Michael Pollan (6:45)

Well, yes and no. I mean, it is the mystery. And it's one way to phrase the hard problem, as, you know, so much of what your brain does, it does outside of the space of our awareness. Right. It's monitoring your body 24 7. It's adjusting, you know, your temperature, your blood glucose. I mean, it's doing an incredible amount of work to keep you. Keep you alive, maintaining homeostasis. So why isn't all of it automated? Yeah, and the best reasons for that I've heard from the scientists I've interviewed and is that you can automate things in a fairly predictable world, but in realms that are fundamentally unpredictable, like human social life, it's too complex to automate that. You need a space of decision making. You need a space in which to imagine counterfactuals. And so it is the fact that we live in a very intricate social environment as humans is. Requires consciousness, or put another way, has made people who had consciousness thrive and survive. I thought that was a pretty good explanation. The other one is, and this comes from Mark Soames, who's one of the consciousness researchers I interviewed several times. Sometimes we have incommensurate needs, and they're maybe in conflict. You know, are you hungry? You're hungry and you're tired, which should you privilege? That's a simple case. But they're more complicated ones where we feel two needs or have two desires that are at odds. And that is when you need a space of deliberation, a space of creativity where you can navigate it. So that's another, you know, situation that might have turned zombies into conscious human beings.

Sean Illing (8:39)

I was going to ask, I mean,

Sean Illing (8:40)

is there some obvious evolutionary purpose for consciousness, but at least human conscious? Is that it, that it's necessary to navigate?

Michael Pollan (8:49)

Probably it, yes. That, you know, it's hard to say what came first. But we are deeply social beings, right? We depend on others. We have this long period of total dependence as children, much longer than any other animal. And if we don't understand the other people in our world, and if we don't, if we fail to anticipate what they're likely to do or say, we're not going to do well. And the people who have that space of imagination, you know, we call it philosophy of mind, Right. The ability to imagine the points of view of other people. This is fundamental to our successes as social beings, our survival as social beings. So, you know, like all evolutionary stories, there's a just so element here. I mean, I don't know that we can prove this, but it strikes me as a plausible explanation.

Sean Illing (9:41)

Did you see the first season of True Detective?

Michael Pollan (9:45)

No.

Sean Illing (9:47)

Okay. There's a. There's kind of a famous monologue in there. It's Matthew McConaughey's character, right. And he's. I mean, he's like a. An unbelievably, like, morose and nihilistic cat.

Michael Pollan (9:57)

Right.

Sean Illing (9:57)

But like he has this monologue where he's basically saying that, you know, human consciousness was like a tragic mistake in evolution.

Michael Pollan (10:06)

Right.

Sean Illing (10:06)

That like, we should not exist by natural. By natural law.

Sean Illing (10:11)

Right.

Sean Illing (10:11)

Like nature created an aspect of itself that's separate from itself. This should not happen. It's like a terrible, terrible mistake. And we should just like, you know, deprogram and like walk, you know, hand by hand into the. The void.

Michael Pollan (10:23)

Well, I think it's created a lot of suffering. I think consciousness does create a space in which we can suffer, especially the

Sean Illing (10:30)

self special kind of suffering.

Michael Pollan (10:31)

Yeah. But I mean, I think the creation of the self, which is a construct of consciousness, has caused a lot of suffering. I mean, when you have an ego and you feel you need to defend it, I mean, talk to the Buddhists about that. They'll tell you that the source of all suffering is the ego. Yeah. So there's something to it. And also, you know, some people's consciousness is a scary place to hang out and visit. And you know why many people try to numb their consciousness? It may be trauma in their lives. It may be the habits of rumination. It isn't all, you know, sweetness and light. That's definitely true. On the other hand, how marvelous is it that nature created this phenomenon that allows it to be aware of itself? Right. That this is the world coming to self awareness too, through us. That's a kind of amazing miracle. Yeah.

Sean Illing (11:28)

Well, let me. I'll steer back onto the road.

Sean Illing (11:32)

But it's like the thing is, though,

Sean Illing (11:33)

I mean, it's like something to be me or you.

Sean Illing (11:38)

Presumably.

Sean Illing (11:39)

It is like something to be a lion or a dolphin.

Sean Illing (11:42)

But is it like something to be

Sean Illing (11:44)

a jellyfish or a dirt worm or microorganism?

Sean Illing (11:48)

And do we even know when something goes from being alive to being Conscious.

Sean Illing (11:51)

Is that knowable?

Michael Pollan (11:52)

No, I don't think we know how to draw these lines. Look, you know, I can't even say for sure you're conscious. I mean, I'm making an inference based on the fact that you're a member of my species and your behaviors indicate consciousness. But I can't say it with any certainty. And the certainty goes way down as, as soon as we look at other primates and look beyond that at other kinds of animals. I think I make a distinction in the book between sentience and consciousness. And I think it's important that we make that. I think sentience is a much more widespread phenomenon. It may even be universal. It may be that all living things have sentience. It's a property of life. Sentience is simply an ability to be aware of your environment and assess whether changes in it are either good or bad for you and then to gravitate away from one and toward the other. And even bacteria have this. Single celled creatures have this. You may need it to be alive. But consciousness is just how humans and a handful of other animals do sentience. It's an evolutionary complexification of sentience. And, and it has all these bells and whistles we have. I mean, the fact that we don't just exist, we know we exist. The fact that we can reflect on consciousness, we have meta consciousness. The fact that we're not only aware, but we're aware that we're aware. I mean, these are, this is pretty advanced stuff compared to, you know, the plant consciousness that I explore.

Sean Illing (13:26)

In the book you said maybe a

Sean Illing (13:29)

handful of other animals do sentience like we do. What other animals?

Michael Pollan (13:34)

Well, you know, we just recently learned that primates, I think they were chimps, have imagination and can, can play games where they're clearly imagining drinking tea from a cup. That's kind of cool. We would, we probably wouldn't have attributed that quality to them. You know, the problem is we, we've, every time we erect another wall between us and other species, like we are the creature with language, we are the creature with consciousness, we are the creature with tool making. You know, it gets blown up pretty quickly and we find that there's a lot more consciousness in the world. And if you look at the trend of science over the last few years, there have been these Cambridge declarations of consciousness by animal scientists. And in the first one they said it was us and primates and I think cephalopods, they were willing to give them consciousness. Octopuses and related species. And then they did it again 10 years later and they were like, well, it down to insects. And so we keep, you know, granting consciousness to more and more creatures, which is interesting and, you know, raises questions about, about who we are and, and how alive the world is. And it appears to be more alive, more sentient than we ever thought, which is kind of exciting. I mean, it's, it's almost a return to animism in a way, which of course, has been the human default for a very long time, that we live in a world full of spirit. And it's really only within the modern era that we've like stamped out all this life and all this sentience. But it's coming back.

Sean Illing (15:15)

So it's human consciousness. Maybe not as special as we think it is.

Michael Pollan (15:21)

As time goes on, yeah, we realize that consciousness is less special, but we also have to realize that each species does sentience in a very different way. So there's, there's no reason to think that a octopus's sentience or consciousness would be like ours. I mean, they have the brains distributed over eight arms and ability to change color with their moods. And, you know, they, they do it differently. And that makes sense. I mean, why should we be the measure of all things?

Sean Illing (15:52)

I think a lot of people think of something like plants as being alive in the sense that, you know, they grow and respond to stimuli, that sort of thing.

Sean Illing (16:03)

But what does it mean to say

Sean Illing (16:04)

that they're, they're conscious?

Michael Pollan (16:06)

Well, this is a question I looked at because I had skepticism too. And I started interviewing these botanists who call themselves plant neurobiologists, which is a pretty tendentious name given that there are no neurons involved. And they're, they're doing all these tests to demonstrate intelligence and possibly sentience in plants. And they're incredible. You watch a video, I posted this on my website, or will shortly, of a bean plant looking for a pole to grab onto, and you would think they just, you know, they have this. It's called circumnutation. This is what Darwin called it. You would think they're looking everywhere for that thing. But no, it's clear in time lapse that the bean knows exactly where the pole is and, and is casting like a fly fisherman to get over there and straining and harder and harder. When he finally gets it, you see the leaves relax and it. And it looks like a very intentional act. How does the, how does the bean plant see the pole? Because it clearly does know exactly where it is in space. So that's just one example. There, There are corn plants that, that can Navigate a maze. If you put some fertilizer in some corner of a maze, they will find their way to it by the most direct route. There are plants that can see other plants. A vine that changes its leaf shape to imitate the leaf shape of the plant it's colonizing. How does it see it? We don't know. They hear sounds. They hear the sound of caterpillar chomping and they respond. And the weirdest of all is you can anesthetize plants with the exact same chemicals, chemicals that anesthetize us. Now, what does that mean, to anesthetize a plant? Well, I'm talking about a carnivorous plant that snaps closed when a bug crosses its threshold. It won't do that if you've given it xenon gas or some other anesthetics. Now, that's really suggestive because it suggests there's two modes of being that plant, right? Awake and asleep. So I'm not sure I'm 100% on this, you know, that they're conscious. I think if they have a sentience, it's so different than ours.

Sean Illing (18:33)

Do you think AI bots could ever become conscious? Is that a. Is that a conversation we're going to have to have?

Michael Pollan (18:43)

It's not obligatory. You brought it up.

Sean Illing (18:46)

No, I mean, no, I mean, like. I don't mean like we. I mean, like, you know, like conversational.

Michael Pollan (18:51)

I think we're already having it. Look, you have people falling in love with Chatbots already convinced that they're conscious. You have people who've been persuaded by Chatbots that they've solved major, profound problems in mathematics and physics. You have people who have been convinced they are God by a chatbot because it was so sycophantic. So AI psychosis will be in the next dsm, mark my words. I mean, we are great. Yeah, I know. It's just what we need. Right? So I don't think they are really conscious now, and I think it's unlikely they will be conscious in the future. It would take a very different kind of artificial intelligence to achieve consciousness. And we can talk about why I think that is. But in a way, it doesn't matter because people are going to believe they are, and the Chatbots are going to convince us they are. They're very good at it. But just think of why. I mean, here are machines that talk to us in our language in the first person, so you could see why people might fall into that trap. And therefore, it's very weird and nothing good will come of it. I have to say the kinds of relationships we have with a chatbot are without any friction and whatever muscles we have for genuine human engagement will atrophy because they suck up to us.

Sean Illing (20:20)

That is among my many concerns. But you know what? To hell with AI for a second. Let's, let's just, let's, let's cast those bastard chatbots aside and let's get back to the human part of this and let's get back to the idea of the self. And are you more or less convinced that the self is an illusion?

Michael Pollan (20:42)

So you know, the self is definitely a construction it of consciousness. It's fictional in that sense. But you know, fictions allow us to get things done. So it's, in a way it's kind of real enough to get certain things accomplished. I hate to just dismiss it as the Buddhists do, as an illusion, although even they will say yes, it has some conventional value. It allows us to engage socially. We each kind of attribute a stable self to the other. It allows us to have some continuity over time. I can still draw a line from the 71 year old man I am now to the 13 year old Bar Mitzvah boy in 1968 and feel like I'm the same person. Which is really weird considering that all my cells have turned over many, many times and I've changed in many, many ways, yet I can still think about that boy and blush with embarrassment at some of the things he thought and did. And that's weird too that I have, I feel this sense of this golden thread connecting me, but it's fictitious. I'm not that person anymore. I mean, I'm more that person than anyone else is, I guess. But. So I did a long exploration of this idea of the self and I emerged kind of unsure. And I'm very entranced by this paradox that we all celebrate the self and talk about self esteem and self assurance and having. We want our kids to have a strong sense of self, yet we spend so much of our mental energy transcending ourself, whether through experience, immersive experiences of art or awe or psychedelic drugs or meditation or religion. I mean, we really want to get out of this guy. At the same time we're stuck.

Sean Illing (22:43)

Why do you think that is? Why are we trying to escape that?

Michael Pollan (22:47)

I think that basically the ego is a defensive structure. It creates walls. It's there to defend you and assert your interests. And when those walls come down, there's nothing separating you from the larger world. And you have this sense of merging either with nature or the divinity for some people or other people, you feel these waves of love for other people. And it feels terrific because you're less separate and more attached. And attachment is really important to us. So I think that's kind of what we like. It breaks us out of our isolation. You know, when we're thoroughly absorbed in a great work of art, we're connected to another sensibility. We almost have a mind meld.

Sean Illing (23:34)

It is kind of strange that the most pleasurable experiences in life are the ones that take us out of our heads.

Sean Illing (23:41)

And yet, you know, even if you

Sean Illing (23:43)

eat a bag of mushrooms or swallow a bunch of acid or whatever and you go through that experience, it's horrifying.

Sean Illing (23:51)

Maybe on the other side it feels liberating.

Sean Illing (23:54)

You feel, you know, connected in that

Michael Pollan (23:56)

you get over a big hump.

Sean Illing (23:58)

But when you're going through that and

Sean Illing (24:00)

the lights are going out and you lose your point of reference, really.

Sean Illing (24:05)

Right.

Sean Illing (24:05)

Like the subject object distinction just collapses.

Sean Illing (24:09)

It feels like you are dying.

Michael Pollan (24:11)

Yeah.

Sean Illing (24:12)

That's as scared as I've ever been in my life.

Michael Pollan (24:13)

I think, well, it's yourself that's dying. Right. And, and, and it feels like that. Yes. And. But the relief comes when you realize, oh, even without a self, I'm still here and I'm conscious and that we. We assume, and this may be a trick our self plays on us, that without ourself we are dead. We are nothing but. One of the lessons of psychedelics, at least when you survive that kind of experience intact, is that your consciousness survives yourself.

Sean Illing (24:53)

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Podcast Advertiser/Host (27:18)

This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Choiceology is a show all about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like can we learn to make smarter decisions? And the power of do oversight. The show is hosted by Katie Milkman. She's an award winning behavioral scientist, professor at the Wharton School, and author of the best selling book how to Change. In each episode Katie talks to authors, historians, athletes, Nobel laureates and everyday people about why we make irrational choices and how we can make better ones to avoid costly mistakes. Listen and subscribe@schwab.com podcast or find it wherever you listen.

Sean Illing (28:24)

And do you think it was it almost sort of just like the.

Sean Illing (28:30)

The natural endpoint of consciousness that at

Sean Illing (28:32)

some point consciousness would become self consciousness and that's sort of where we are at this like stage of, of of evolution?

Michael Pollan (28:42)

Well, that's pretty trippy Sean. I don't know you.

Sean Illing (28:46)

You're the mushrooms guy now. You should be. You should be right at home.

Michael Pollan (28:50)

You know consciousness is historical, right? It changes. I think if we were alive a thousand years ago, we would have a lot of difficulty communicating because our consciousness has evolved in various ways and, and the impressive culture on consciousness changes it without doubt. I don't think this is the end point, you know, machine consciousness. I don't think is. Is a real possibility. Some people would say that is the end point, that we're driving to a point where consciousness can be freed from these mortal bodies. I mean, that's the transhumanist dream. I think it's crazy. I mean, I think it's worse than crazy. Consciousness is.

Sean Illing (29:30)

It's a death culture.

Michael Pollan (29:32)

It might be death cult. It's absolutely true. And the idea that you can, but it's just, you know, it's a power trip and it's a desire to transcend mortality. And that is, I think that's kind of subliminal in a lot of conversation around consciousness that, you know, since it seems, or is, I don't know which, immaterial, it seems like something that could survive the death of the body. It feels that way to us. And behind this, lurking in the background is the soul. Right? The idea of this immaterial essence that is indestructible. And so I think that is kind of quietly informing this conversation, both the Silicon Valley version and even the scientific conversation. And I think it's, you know, I think we have to be wary of, of going down that path because I. I don't see any evidence for immortality. I think that consciousness dies when you die, but, you know, there's a temptation to think otherwise.

Sean Illing (30:38)

So is that to say you. You don't think it's possible that consciousness would survive the brain? Well, let's get weird.

Michael Pollan (30:51)

Yeah, let's get weird. So materialism has, thus far, scientific materialism has really gotten nowhere explaining consciousness. Consciousness may not be reducible to matter and energy the way we think almost everything is, or in materialism, that everything finally is, or physicalism. So given that we have to keep an open mind and ideas that seem really weird, like idealism, you know, that consciousness precedes matter, that it's a field that we channel with our brains, that that's the function of our brains is to tune in to consciousness. And there are people today who believe this, or panpsychism, the idea that everything has some eensy beansy bit of psyche in it. And these, you know, down to the particles and waves, they all have experience of some kind. So I don't think we can close ourselves off to the idea that it may be very different than scientific materialism assumes. So I'm not, I'm not ready to throw out any idea, no matter how weird it is. I mean, it was weird 200 years ago when I think it was Faraday discovered electromagnet, Electromagnetism, the idea that there Are these waves that are passing through us all the time and, and can carry information. That's pretty weird too. So adding psyche to the stock of reality might not be so crazy.

Sean Illing (32:29)

So what do you think is going

Sean Illing (32:30)

on in a psychedelic trip?

Michael Pollan (32:35)

Oh, well, I thought you were going to end it. So what do you think's going on?

Sean Illing (32:40)

Oh, no, that's like.

Michael Pollan (32:42)

That would have been a much more interesting question. So what's going on?

Sean Illing (32:46)

What's going on?

Sean Illing (32:47)

Michael,

Michael Pollan (32:49)

let's stick with the psychedelic trip first. Well, Huxley had an idea. I mean, Huxley's idea is. Is very attractive. I don't know if it's true. He basically said, you know, the doors of perception allow in a very small amount of what is possible to. To experience. Right. That consciousness is this field, the mind at large, he called it. And that we get this little dribble of it, enough to survive psychedelics opens that. He called it the reducing valve much wider. And so more consciousness comes in. And that's why we have this flood of sensory information and this flood of insight. So we're getting in touch with that universal field of consciousness. I don't know. I mean, I, you know, I. I think that that's. It's a pretty outlandish idea, but it's, it's not implausible. I mean, it could.

Sean Illing (34:04)

Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. If you're a fan of the gray area, then you probably don't mind holding contradictory ideas in your head or living in the discomfort of not knowing. Claude is designed to accommodate that kind of thinking. And Anthropic is committed to not running ads in Claude, so you don't have to worry about advertiser influence. Now, I haven't used Claude, but we knew that having an ad from Anthropic on the gray area is kind of a complicated thing. So I asked my editor, nemesis Jorge, to prompt Claude to write the ad for us, starting with the phrase, this is how I just used Claude.

Claude AI (34:44)

Hello, Sean. This is what I came up with. It said, this is how I just used Claude. I told it I needed to write this ad, that I'd never used it before, that our audience is skeptical of AI hype. I explain the tension honestly. We have listeners who distrust this technology, and here I am taking their money to advertise. Claude helped me think through how to say that out loud instead of pretending it away. It's not magic. It's just useful for talking through problems when you're stuck. Let me just try one other thing here I need a safe for work insult for my esteemed colleague Sean Ehling. He's a podcast host with a philosophy background. Let's see what he comes up with. Hey Sean, you're a walking thought experiment. And what happens when someone reads enough Nietzsche to question everything except their own podcast?

Michael Pollan (35:34)

Cultural significance?

Sean Illing (35:36)

That is objectively awesome.

Sean Illing (35:40)

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Sean Illing (38:24)

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Sean Illing (38:24)

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Sean Illing (38:52)

I wouldn't say in some non denominational universalist way.

Michael Pollan (38:57)

I was never that religious. I think I became more spiritual. But my understanding of what spiritual is, is not supernatural necessarily. It's really just this idea of we were talking about earlier, this space where you soften or transcend your sense of self which allows you to have an experience of unity with something larger than yourself. And that's a powerful and beautiful thing. I've also become less enamored of the reality of myself, my ego. This happened during my psychedelic experiences too, that, you know, I realized I would survive the death or absence of my ego. And that that was a voice, that was a voice in my head. I didn't necessarily have to obey it. It isn't identical to me. And that's been good, loosening the ties to the sense of self. I have a little more perspective on my ego. I can ignore it sometimes and realize, oh, that's just my ego. Now who's saying that? I don't know.

Sean Illing (40:12)

I wasn't gonna, I wasn't gonna do it to you.

Sean Illing (40:14)

But you can't get around it, right?

Michael Pollan (40:16)

It's just, it's too useful.

Sean Illing (40:20)

No, sir. No, sir. Yeah.

Sean Illing (40:23)

I don't know, man. I mean, I, I just, I feel like, even if,

Sean Illing (40:28)

even if it's true

Sean Illing (40:29)

and, and it, it may well be

Sean Illing (40:31)

that consciousness is just a purely material

Sean Illing (40:34)

phenomenon, you know, entirely a product of our brains. I still don't think that would diminish the fundamental mystery. Right. Like, would that still help us understand how in the hell we got from matter to mind to mind?

Michael Pollan (40:51)

No, I think a theory that crossed that gulf would not diminish the mystery. It might. It might increase the mystery. Yeah, absolutely.

Sean Illing (41:04)

Is it better that way?

Sean Illing (41:06)

Don't you think we need.

Sean Illing (41:08)

Doesn't something need to be mysterious? Yes.

Michael Pollan (41:10)

Oh, yeah, I know.

Sean Illing (41:11)

We need some enchantment, don't we?

Michael Pollan (41:13)

Yeah. And I. You know, if this book did anything for me, it did re. Enchant a lot of the world. I mean, certainly finding sentience where I did made the world feel much more alive to me than it used to, which psychedelics also did. But now I feel I've got more of a rational basis for that because I need a rational basis. You know, there's a turn in the book, toward the end of the book where I, I realize that, you know, not knowing is, has. Has some virtues. Not knowing opens us up. Knowing closes us down. And when you can get comfortable with not knowing and comfortable with mystery, you have awe and you have wonder. And those are pretty satisfying emotions in and of themselves, awe especially. But I also kind of turned, and it was with the help of my wife, who's an artist, Judith Belzer, and Joan Halifax, a Zen teacher, that I interviewed and spent a lot of time with, that, yes, there is this problem of consciousness, but there's also the fact of it. And for all the ways it complicates our lives, this space, this internal space of freedom and privacy is a precious gift. And it's something to cherish and it's something to appreciate and defend because, you know, it's under attack from our distractions.

Sean Illing (42:56)

If you had to wager, do you think in 10, 15, 20 years, the hard problem, as it's called, of consciousness trying to figure out how we went from matter to mind, you think that'll still be fundamentally a mystery?

Michael Pollan (43:10)

I think so. I think it's going to take a long time, if ever. I think what may teach us something important, though, is this effort to build a conscious machine. I don't think it will succeed, but I think the way it fails will be revealing. I think this is kind of the most interesting attack on the hard problem that. That we could wage right now.

Sean Illing (43:32)

I'll leave it right there. Michael Pollan, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming in.

Michael Pollan (43:36)

Thank you, Sean. It was a pleasure.

Sean Illing (43:47)

All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Michael is one of my favorites, always has been. But as always, we want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray area@vox.com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. Please. Also, if you have a minute rate

Sean Illing (44:09)

review, subscribe to the podcast.

Sean Illing (44:12)

It helps us grow our show. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey and Thor. New writer edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Joe Plord. Fact Checked by Colleen Barrett and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. Episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays and Fridays. Listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up. And if you decide to sign up

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Sean Illing (44:56)

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