Speaker 1: Pushkin in retrospect, it seems absolutely crazy that I thought
Speaker 1: I had any qualification to write a book about consciousness.
Speaker 1: It's a really difficult topic. People have been cracking their
Speaker 1: head on it for thousands of years. But I figured, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a curious human who happens to be conscious,
Speaker 1: and I'm pretty good at explaining things, So I went
Speaker 1: ahead and took the plunge.
Speaker 2: That's renowned author Michael Pollan, not quite giving himself the
Speaker 2: credit he deserves. Michael's written half a dozen bestsellers that
Speaker 2: have reshaped our understanding of everything from food to psychedelics.
Speaker 2: His latest book is called A World Appears. It tackles
Speaker 2: the complex subject of consciousness, which he defines simply as
Speaker 2: subjective experience.
Speaker 1: It is kind of a mind blowing idea, Wow, there's
Speaker 1: something mediating my relationship to reality. What is it? And
Speaker 1: why is it that way and not this way?
Speaker 2: On today's show, an awe inspiring, brain tickling exploration of
Speaker 2: human consciousness. I'm maya Schunker, a scientist who studies human behavior,
Speaker 2: and this is a slight change of plans, a show
Speaker 2: about who we are and who we become in the
Speaker 2: face of a big change when Michael and I last
Speaker 2: spoke on a slight change of plans, he had just
Speaker 2: written a book about the science of psychedelics and how
Speaker 2: they can change our minds. It was a delightful and
Speaker 2: philosophically rich conversation, and so when he asked me to
Speaker 2: moderate a live event celebrating his new book, A World
Speaker 2: of I was thrilled. Michael, I wanted to just share
Speaker 2: a quick story to kick this off. So back in
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen, I had just met this guy named Jimmy,
Speaker 2: and I had a pretty big crush on him. And
Speaker 2: I remember we were walking in DC and we were
Speaker 2: on our way to dinner and I was weighing the
Speaker 2: menu options in my head.
Speaker 3: I was like, should I get poster or the sue
Speaker 3: for the salad?
Speaker 2: I don't know, maybe both, And all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: Jimmy suddenly stops in his tracks and he looks at
Speaker 2: me and he goes, man, MAYA, isn't consciousness so great?
Speaker 2: I was like, I don't know what's up with this guy,
Speaker 2: but he seems to be a life lover, and so
Speaker 2: maybe I hitched myself to his wagon. Life's gonna be
Speaker 2: great forever. Anyway, We're married, he's in the front row.
Speaker 2: It all worked out. But needless to say, it is
Speaker 2: such an honor for me to be in conversation with
Speaker 2: you about a world appears. But I am getting so
Speaker 2: many brownie points from Jimmy to do this with you tonight,
Speaker 2: So thank you for that marital gift. The last time
Speaker 2: I interviewed you for my podcast, The Slight Change of Plans,
Speaker 2: you had just written a book on psychedelics and your
Speaker 2: personal experience with psychedelics, and I know that that was
Speaker 2: one of the big inspirations for you to explore consciousness.
Speaker 3: Can you tell me about that experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So there's a funny way in which one book
Speaker 1: kind of has the sour dough starter you carry through
Speaker 1: to the next one. And I very often we'll look
Speaker 1: at a book and see whether it or along the
Speaker 1: way of writing it that there's some germ that needs
Speaker 1: to be or seed that needs to grow. And with psychedelics,
Speaker 1: there were two things that happened that stuck with me
Speaker 1: after I'd finished the book, and one was this experience
Speaker 1: I had in my garden on psilocybin and getting the
Speaker 1: distinct impression, overwhelming impression that the plants in my garden
Speaker 1: were conscious. I know it was. I was tripping and
Speaker 1: they were kind of like returning my gaze, and they
Speaker 1: they were very benevolent. They seem to like me. I
Speaker 1: was their gardener, of course, and you know, you come
Speaker 1: out of an experience like that, it's like, well, what's
Speaker 1: the truth value of an insight you have on psychedelics.
Speaker 1: It's really questionable. So that was one data point, and
Speaker 1: the other data point was more generally about consciousness and
Speaker 1: that psychedelics have. And I'm not the first person this
Speaker 1: has happened to by any means, but they have a
Speaker 1: way of kind of, as I put in the book,
Speaker 1: smudging the windshield through which we experience reality. And most
Speaker 1: of the time that windshield is like perfectly transparent. But
Speaker 1: psychedelics and meditation has a way of calling attention to
Speaker 1: the pane of glass and you're suddenly like, wow, there's
Speaker 1: something mediating my relationship to reality. What is it? And
Speaker 1: why is it that way and not this way? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So these two thoughts just kind of stuck with me
Speaker 1: for a while and I realized, well, yeah, I should
Speaker 1: look into that. In retrospect, it seems absolutely crazy that
Speaker 1: I thought I had any qualification to write a book
Speaker 1: about consciousness. It's a really difficult topic. People have been
Speaker 1: cracking their head on it for thousands of years. But
Speaker 1: I figured, well, you know, I'm a curious human who
Speaker 1: happens to be conscious, and I'm pretty good at explaining things.
Speaker 1: So I went ahead and took the plunge.
Speaker 2: I was so moved by the metaphor of the smudge
Speaker 2: on the windshield and the recognition that there is a
Speaker 2: windshield at all, right, that there's some mediator between us
Speaker 2: and our perception of reality. And I still remember. I
Speaker 2: think I had two kind of similar moments. The first
Speaker 2: is when I was in undergrad studying cognitive science, and
Speaker 2: I first learned that there's a blind spot on our
Speaker 2: eyes where all the nerves kind of there's like a
Speaker 2: little bundling right right, and we just fill in that
Speaker 2: blind spot effortlessly all the time. I'm looking now, there's
Speaker 2: no I don't see a little black spot when I'm
Speaker 2: looking here, I'm not, Oh my god, I'm trying to trick.
Speaker 2: My brain figures it out no matter where I look,
Speaker 2: however quickly I look.
Speaker 3: It's truly extraordinary.
Speaker 2: And another moment was when I just had a regular
Speaker 2: eye exam, and the doctor said, oh, wow, you kind
Speaker 2: of see things in sepia And I was like, whoa,
Speaker 2: I'm an og Instagram filter.
Speaker 3: Okay, but I had no idea that was a thing.
Speaker 2: He's like, yeah, typically we see this in older populations,
Speaker 2: but it seems like you were just born with this
Speaker 2: sepia lens. And that was another recognition. Wow, it didn't
Speaker 2: have to be this way. The way that I see
Speaker 2: it is not a vertical representation necessarily of the world
Speaker 2: around me, right, And I sort of had that all inspiring.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a mind blowing idea. I mean, the
Speaker 1: extent to which what we perceive is actually a prediction,
Speaker 1: not a literal transcription or taking in of the world,
Speaker 1: and that the brain is guessing and then using senses
Speaker 1: to error correct essentially. Yeah, it's not like we're creating
Speaker 1: a whole new picture of reality from all our senses
Speaker 1: all the time.
Speaker 2: I want to start by establishing some of the basics,
Speaker 2: because lots of things come to mind when we hear
Speaker 2: the word consciousness. Right, what is the working definition that
Speaker 2: you had when writing A world appears?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny. It's a universal phenomenon that people still
Speaker 1: struggle to define, and I think it's because they're different.
Speaker 1: Layers of consciousness is part of it, but at the
Speaker 1: most simple level, it's subjective experience. You have subjective experience
Speaker 1: of the world, and your appliances don't have that. They
Speaker 1: don't have any experience. So that's one definition. Another is
Speaker 1: Thomas Nagel, the philosopher wrote a famous essay called what
Speaker 1: Is It Like to Be a Bat? So bats are
Speaker 1: very different than we are. They don't have a visual system,
Speaker 1: they have zonar. Basically they navigate the world through echolocation.
Speaker 1: And he said, I if it is like something to
Speaker 1: be a bat, then about is conscious? And we can
Speaker 1: kind of guess using our imagination and there's no other
Speaker 1: way to do it. What it would be like to
Speaker 1: go through life using echoes rather than reflections of light
Speaker 1: to see where we are? So is it like something?
Speaker 1: Does it feel like something to be any animal or
Speaker 1: a plant? And then if that's true, then it is conscious.
Speaker 1: And that's been a pretty handy I don't know if
Speaker 1: it's a definition exactly, but kind of framing of the
Speaker 1: problem that has been accepted by a lot of the
Speaker 1: scientists who are working on it. There are other levels
Speaker 1: to consciousness though in humans, I mean, there is the
Speaker 1: fact that we are not just aware, but we're aware.
Speaker 1: We're aware, and that's pretty wild. We have you know,
Speaker 1: meta consciousness. That's when it gets a little complicated, and
Speaker 1: we have voices in our head which you know, you
Speaker 1: don't need to be conscious, but that's the way we
Speaker 1: do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would love to take a moment to just
Speaker 2: marvel at the fact that we do have consciousness, because
Speaker 2: it is something that many of us take for granted.
Speaker 2: I feel like the first time I thought about consciousness
Speaker 2: was when I was literally just in a class called
Speaker 2: intro to cognitive science, and that was when I was
Speaker 2: a college student. I'd kind of gone the whole rest
Speaker 2: of my life taking this incredible thing for granted. And
Speaker 2: you know, there's a counterfactual world that's easy to conjure
Speaker 2: up in which we humans engaged in all the behaviors
Speaker 2: that we engage in, have all the intelligence that we have,
Speaker 2: and yet we do lack this inner experience, right the
Speaker 2: lights aren't on.
Speaker 1: So to speak, zombie thought experience.
Speaker 3: Exactly, the philosophical zombie.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's one of the interesting phenomena
Speaker 1: of consciousness that most of what your brain does you're
Speaker 1: not aware of. Right, your brain is regulating your body
Speaker 1: twenty four to seven heart rate, blood pressure, all this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff, plus processing lots of information from the environment,
Speaker 1: and it's all automatic. So the question is, why is
Speaker 1: any of it not automatic? Why don't we automate everything?
Speaker 1: And the best theory I think explain this, and it's
Speaker 1: an evolutionary theory, is that for social beings, navigating social
Speaker 1: reality is key, and what other people are going to
Speaker 1: do is very unpredictable. So you need consciousness to be
Speaker 1: able to imagine your way into other people's heads. You
Speaker 1: could imagine two different types of people, one who doesn't
Speaker 1: really think that you have consciousness or you have a
Speaker 1: point of view, versus someone who has that ability to
Speaker 1: create a space in their head where they can imagine
Speaker 1: what's going on in your head. That that would be
Speaker 1: a big survival advantage, that you would be more likely
Speaker 1: to be able to form bonds with other people because
Speaker 1: of that. So consciousness creates a space for decision making
Speaker 1: a space for imagination, and I think that that has
Speaker 1: a real evolutionary utility for a social species like us.
Speaker 2: Another thing that's astonishing is just that when physical stuff.
Speaker 2: You know, in this case, the neurons in our brains
Speaker 2: get organized a certain way in inner experience emerges at all.
Speaker 1: That is the hard problem.
Speaker 2: This is the hard problem of consciousness. So can you
Speaker 2: define the hard problem and then share what theories are
Speaker 2: floating around that have helped to explain the hard problem?
Speaker 1: Well, there are two hundred theories.
Speaker 2: If you could just name each of them, Michael, that
Speaker 2: would be really please be comprehensive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, the hard problem is basically, how do you
Speaker 1: get from matter to mind? How do you get from
Speaker 1: a certain organization of neurons presumably because we don't know
Speaker 1: that for a fact, and how does consciousness emerge from that?
Speaker 1: So that's the hard problem. Why isn't it all automated?
Speaker 1: Also as part of the hard problem, and David Chalmers
Speaker 1: is the philosopher who came up with that term for it,
Speaker 1: you know, just to give you an example of a
Speaker 1: theory or two, there's something called global neuronal workspace theory.
Speaker 1: And that's the idea that you have all these modules
Speaker 1: in your brain that are competing for the attention of
Speaker 1: the whole and when the most salient information gets into
Speaker 1: the workspace, it's broadcast to the whole brain and becomes conscious,
Speaker 1: so the whole brain can work on it and deal
Speaker 1: with it. So that's interesting. I mean, it still doesn't
Speaker 1: answer like, well, who's the conscious subject that is receiving
Speaker 1: that broadcast? And that's where everybody falls down and starts
Speaker 1: waving their hands. And part of that is the problem
Speaker 1: that our science is based on third person, objective, quantifiable
Speaker 1: you know, ever since Galileo. That's what science is, physical
Speaker 1: science anyway, and we're talking about a subjective phenomenon, so
Speaker 1: there's no traction. How do you get how do you
Speaker 1: get in? How do you and you know Galileo left
Speaker 1: all that to the church, you know, that was the soul, subjectivity,
Speaker 1: qualitative experience, and he knew what he was doing. He
Speaker 1: was protecting science from the church, which otherwise would have
Speaker 1: crushed it, and did try to crush it. You know,
Speaker 1: this idea that you take a complex phenomenon and you
Speaker 1: reduce it to you know, matter and energy, it just
Speaker 1: doesn't work for consciousness, and it may never work for consciousness.
Speaker 1: We may need a different kind of science. So that's
Speaker 1: a brain based theory. But there are others that are
Speaker 1: not brain based, and they strike us as really out there,
Speaker 1: but there's no reason to dismiss them. I don't think.
Speaker 1: One is panpsychism, which is that everything that consciousness didn't
Speaker 1: have to evolve, It was always here. Every every particle
Speaker 1: in this table has some weensy little bit of psyche
Speaker 1: and somehow it gets combined to form larger consciousnesses like
Speaker 1: our own. That's a high price to pay, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean to change the nature of matter, you know,
Speaker 1: to accommodate your theory. But we've done that before. You know,
Speaker 1: two hundred years ago Faraday discovered that they are electromagnetic
Speaker 1: waves all over this room right now, and we didn't
Speaker 1: know about that.
Speaker 2: So you're telling me you believe in panpsychism.
Speaker 3: I know you don't.
Speaker 1: No, I don't, but I don't not believe in it either.
Speaker 3: Okay, just because we don't know, I don't.
Speaker 2: Can I just just quibble with one piece of it,
Speaker 2: which is and then I understand. I'll have said all
Speaker 2: the pan psychist supporters out there, but it's not just
Speaker 2: it feels it's probably a.
Speaker 3: Very small constituency.
Speaker 2: But it feels like with panpsychism that yes, you've eliminated
Speaker 2: one hard problem, but in doing so, you created it.
Speaker 3: At least two new ones, like one, what.
Speaker 2: Imbued those entities like the atom that makes up this
Speaker 2: table with consciousness?
Speaker 3: Where did that come from? Who's the initiator of that?
Speaker 2: And then how do those individual conscious units merge?
Speaker 1: Well, the combination problem, which is the hard problem of panpsychism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they answered it with another I know, I know,
Speaker 2: but it's sort of like physics, you know, deciding that
Speaker 2: you know, well, we have this problem, but if we
Speaker 2: stipulate a multiverse, the.
Speaker 1: Problem solved, so so you know, it works at some
Speaker 1: theoretical level. The other idea is that consciousness is a
Speaker 1: field all around us like electro magnetic waves, and we
Speaker 1: channel consciousness so that we should think of the brain.
Speaker 1: The brain is still intimately involved, and you know, if
Speaker 1: you damage the brain, you damage consciousness, and if you
Speaker 1: change the brain, you change consciousness. But the brain is
Speaker 1: a receiver. These are transmission theories of consciousness, and that
Speaker 1: the brain is like a radio or television receiver. And
Speaker 1: in the same way you wouldn't look for the weather
Speaker 1: lady or guy in the in your TV set. That's
Speaker 1: not where you're going to find him. That's not where
Speaker 1: you're going to find consciousness either. So it's coming in.
Speaker 1: Alvius Huxley believe this theory. Omri Berrickson was a philosopher
Speaker 1: who believed it. And you know, how do you prove
Speaker 1: these theories? They're not they're not provable.
Speaker 3: Is there one that you find?
Speaker 2: I you know, you said there's over two hundred one
Speaker 2: that you find particularly compelling. Something new, a new version
Speaker 2: you learned of that you were like.
Speaker 1: I didn't finally like come out and argue one theory
Speaker 1: of consciousness, But there was a line of research that
Speaker 1: I found the most helpful in understanding consciousness. And that
Speaker 1: goes back to a neurologist, Antonio Dimasio. For a long time,
Speaker 1: we thought that consciousness had to be a product of
Speaker 1: the cortex, this you know, new part of the most
Speaker 1: advanced human part of the brain. Surely, you know consciousness,
Speaker 1: this great achievement of humans, must originate there. But he
Speaker 1: suggests it starts with feelings, not with thoughts, hunger and
Speaker 1: thirst and warmth and itch, and that these are the
Speaker 1: inaugural acts of consciousness. Basically, you know, we forget that
Speaker 1: the brain exists to support the body, keep the body alive,
Speaker 1: not the other way around. And feelings are the language
Speaker 1: that the body uses to communicate with the brain and
Speaker 1: tell it when homeostasis is not working right, when you're
Speaker 1: too hot to cold, hungry, you know whatever. And these feelings,
Speaker 1: some of them are dealt with automatically, but some of
Speaker 1: them have to be dealt with consciously. So it begins
Speaker 1: in the brain stem, not in the cortex, the upper
Speaker 1: brain stem. And indeed, if you have a leisure in
Speaker 1: the upper brainstem, you lose consciousness, whereas if you lack
Speaker 1: a cortex completely, there's evidence that you are conscious. So
Speaker 1: that's kind of the evidence they're working with. There still
Speaker 1: is the question of who's doing the feeling, and saying
Speaker 1: that feelings by definition are felt doesn't quite answer that problem.
Speaker 1: But I found that line of reasoning really compelling, and
Speaker 1: I think that we need to pay more attention to
Speaker 1: feelings as an originator of consciousness.
Speaker 2: He mentioned, there's some evidence to show that there is consciousness.
Speaker 2: How is it that researchers have found ways to evaluate
Speaker 2: consciousness and other entities given that we can never fully know,
Speaker 2: So we're like tris for consciousness.
Speaker 1: In other creatures.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or in the person with the brain damage as
Speaker 2: you were describing.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well, there's a horrible form of brain damage.
Speaker 1: Certain kids are born without a cortex, and nevertheless they
Speaker 1: appear to have appropriate emotional reactions to things, to various stimuli,
Speaker 1: and animals can be decorticated, which sounds pretty awful, and
Speaker 1: that they too show evidence of consciousness. Again, though you
Speaker 1: know you have to impute consciousness. You can't even I
Speaker 1: have to impute it to you. I can't be sure
Speaker 1: you're conscious. There's no way to prove someone is conscious
Speaker 1: except oh, you've got the behaviors of a conscious being
Speaker 1: and you're you know, you're my species, and you know
Speaker 1: they don't take this personal.
Speaker 2: Yes, talk about breaking emotional intimacy, man. So one question
Speaker 2: I have is what the necessary ingredients are for creating
Speaker 2: a conscious entity? And again, in this whole space, it's
Speaker 2: always just about theories, right, I Mean, one of the
Speaker 2: things you open the book by saying is like, you
Speaker 2: went on this quest, and there's even more things to
Speaker 2: be confused about post the quest than before. But how
Speaker 2: do people think about the necessary ingredients? And obviously this
Speaker 2: is particularly pertinent right now in the era of AI,
Speaker 2: and whether scientists ever deem AI to be conscious, it's.
Speaker 1: Going to be really hard to tell. Already. You know,
Speaker 1: ais that are clearly not conscious are convincing people they
Speaker 1: are conscious. People are falling in love with chatbots. People
Speaker 1: are convinced they've solved important problems of math and physics
Speaker 1: who aren't even mathematicians or physicists. People are being convinced
Speaker 1: they're gods. There's AI psychosis is a real thing right now.
Speaker 1: It's really frightening. I don't think AIS can be conscious.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can, you know, make that argument for
Speaker 1: you if you want, But the point is it's not
Speaker 1: going to matter, because people are going to think they're conscious.
Speaker 1: The usual test, so we had this Turing test right
Speaker 1: to determine if a computer is intelligent, and if he
Speaker 1: could fool someone an intelligent human who didn't know he
Speaker 1: was talking to a computer or she was talking to
Speaker 1: a computer, then it was intelligent. But that doesn't work
Speaker 1: for consciousness because consciousness is pretty easy to fake. We
Speaker 1: anthropomorphize everything. It's just a human bias, I think, to
Speaker 1: anthropomorphized thing, and it's safer to anthropomortize. And so I
Speaker 1: think the only test, and I'm saying this is someone
Speaker 1: with very little computer sophistication, would be to build an
Speaker 1: AI from which you never included any of the human
Speaker 1: conversation about consciousness or feelings, and you don't give it
Speaker 1: any novels to read, no poetry, and then have a
Speaker 1: conversation with it about consciousness. And I'm guessing it won't
Speaker 1: do very well. Yeah, but I don't know. I hope
Speaker 1: someone who you know works for Google will undertake this.
Speaker 3: It makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2: I think, brilliant instincts that that would be how we
Speaker 2: could at least get some sort of signal, right at
Speaker 2: a meaningful, reliable signal out of the machine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And you know, I think the feeling issue.
Speaker 1: If it is true that consciousness depends on feelings, which
Speaker 1: is to say, on a body, Yeah, then that's a
Speaker 1: real problem for ais. They lack bodies. If you think
Speaker 1: about what a feeling is, it's very much tied to
Speaker 1: having a body that is vulnerable, that can suffer, and
Speaker 1: probably that it's mortal. And I don't see that working
Speaker 1: for machines.
Speaker 2: How should we think about the constituent parts of consciousness?
Speaker 2: Does it require a nervous system? People used to think, Oh,
Speaker 2: it's intelligence, that's all the needed. If the thing becomes
Speaker 2: intelligent enough, consciousness.
Speaker 1: Will enron but they're actually very different ideas intelligence and consciousness.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think they're kind of orthogonal. I don't
Speaker 1: think one. I mean, we all know people that are
Speaker 1: conscious but not that intelligent, and the other way around.
Speaker 1: I'm not so sure.
Speaker 2: You is your instinct then that consciousness requires a nervous
Speaker 2: system of some kind.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, the plants are doing pretty well without
Speaker 1: a nervous system. You know, first chapters about what science
Speaker 1: has to say about plant consciousness or sentience, which is
Speaker 1: a much more appropriate word I think when it comes
Speaker 1: to plants. And I learned all this incredible research. There's
Speaker 1: a group of kind of renegade botanists. They call themselves
Speaker 1: plant neurobiologists, even though they are no neurons involved. They're
Speaker 1: trolling more conventional botanists by calling themselves that. And they
Speaker 1: do things like, you know, see if they can tea
Speaker 1: plant and see how long it'll remember a lesson. And yes,
Speaker 1: you can teach a plant and it will remember for
Speaker 1: like twenty eight days, which is twenty seven more than
Speaker 1: a fruitfly. I can remember anything. Oh what else can
Speaker 1: they do? I mean, there's a vine that changes its
Speaker 1: leaf shape depending on what plant it's colonizing. Yeah, how
Speaker 1: does it see the leaf shape to imitate it? How
Speaker 1: does it do that? We don't really know. They can hear.
Speaker 1: If you play a recording of caterpillars munching on leaves,
Speaker 1: they will react and send toxins to their own leaves
Speaker 1: and alert other plants. They recognize self and kin. If
Speaker 1: you put them in a pot to compete, if they're
Speaker 1: with a related plant, they won't compete. They'll share, incredible,
Speaker 1: but they'll compete otherwise. So they have some sense of
Speaker 1: self and other anyway, and the same anesthetics that will
Speaker 1: put out a human put out plants. Now you might think, well,
Speaker 1: they're already kind of out, aren't they, But no, they're not.
Speaker 1: They have behaviors, they're just very slow. So they have
Speaker 1: two modes of being. That's really curious anyway. So I
Speaker 1: went deep and finally concluded that I wouldn't use the
Speaker 1: word conscious for them, in that they don't have interiority,
Speaker 1: They don't have a voice in their heads, they don't
Speaker 1: have heads. But they're sentient, and sensient is kind of
Speaker 1: a more basic form of consciousness, more elemental, and it
Speaker 1: really just connotes they have senses, they feel and they
Speaker 1: can recognize good and bad changes in their environment and
Speaker 1: respond appropriately, and that may be a property of life.
Speaker 1: So I'm not prepared to say you need a nervous
Speaker 1: system to have consciousness.
Speaker 2: After the break, Michael's exploration of consciousness takes a personal turn,
Speaker 2: and he's quite surprised by what he finds. That's in
Speaker 2: a moment on a slight change of plans. As the
Speaker 2: book advances, things get more personal, right, So you get
Speaker 2: to the feeling and thinking in self chapters and you
Speaker 2: end up interrogating your own consciousness. You're like, let me
Speaker 2: do some firsthand experimenting and observation here, and you conduct
Speaker 2: this fun little experiment in which you are quite surprised
Speaker 2: by the findings. Do you mind sharing that?
Speaker 1: Yeah? So this isn't a book all about science. It's
Speaker 1: a book that kind of starts with science but ends
Speaker 1: up somewhere different. And as I was talking to these
Speaker 1: scientists who work on consciousness, I realized what they were
Speaker 1: talking about and what was going on in my head.
Speaker 1: We're not quite the same thing. And it's not because
Speaker 1: I'm so idiosyncratic. It's that they focused on things like
Speaker 1: visual perception, because that's what we know the most about
Speaker 1: in the brain. But when I think of consciousness, I
Speaker 1: think of thoughts, I think of interiority, I think of
Speaker 1: all these other things, and they don't want to go
Speaker 1: near that. It's hard enough to figure out how a
Speaker 1: world appears to our perceptions. So I went looking for
Speaker 1: scientists who were looking at thought and I met this
Speaker 1: guy named Russell Hurlbert who teaches at the University of
Speaker 1: Las Vegas, and he has been doing one experiment for
Speaker 1: fifty years of his life, and that is sampling people's
Speaker 1: inner experience. And he does this with this He has
Speaker 1: a beeper device that you carry around, and fifty years
Speaker 1: ago there were no beepers, there were no personal electronic devices.
Speaker 1: He had to design and build it, and it has
Speaker 1: a little ear piece and you keep the thing in
Speaker 1: your pocket and at random times of day, the sharp
Speaker 1: beep goes into your ear and you know immediately what
Speaker 1: it is, and you take out a pad and you
Speaker 1: write down what you were thinking, and then you do
Speaker 1: about five beeps in a day, and then you have
Speaker 1: a session with him on zoom where he kind of
Speaker 1: interrogates you. So, for example, I would have a beep
Speaker 1: and I have to warn you my beeps were very
Speaker 1: banal and often involved food. So I had this beat.
Speaker 1: I had seasoned a filet of salmon, and I was
Speaker 1: walking to the fridge to put it in the fridge
Speaker 1: and then beep, And at that moment I was thinking, shit,
Speaker 1: I forgot the pepper, and that seemed like a good,
Speaker 1: clear beep. But when I went to talk to Russell
Speaker 1: about him, he would say, well, did you hear that?
Speaker 1: Did you hear the word pepper or did you say
Speaker 1: the word pepper? So when you have that voice in
Speaker 1: your head, are you listening to it or are you
Speaker 1: speaking it? And that's very hard to determine. I had
Speaker 1: no idea, and it was really a hard experiment. Part
Speaker 1: of it is you're constantly wondering, what if the beep
Speaker 1: goes off now? And you're allowed to erase a couple
Speaker 1: beeps if it's like too embarrassing. Anyway, it was an
Speaker 1: interesting experiment. But fifty years later I said, so, what
Speaker 1: have you learned? He's a funny guy. He's like totally
Speaker 1: allergic to theory. He's drawn no theoretical conclusions from this work.
Speaker 1: He's got fifty years of data and he doesn't believe
Speaker 1: in theory, and you know, when I told him I
Speaker 1: was writing a book on consciousness, he was like, good
Speaker 1: luck with that anyway. The finding, though, which I think
Speaker 1: is really significant, is that, you know, most of us
Speaker 1: assume our thoughts are in the form of language, and
Speaker 1: he says that's actually a minority. There are lots of
Speaker 1: people who have their thoughts are visual, They see and
Speaker 1: they think in images. Then there are people who think
Speaker 1: an unsymbolized thought. And the word thought, which we all
Speaker 1: think we know what it means, like what are you thinking,
Speaker 1: means very different things to different people. And that was
Speaker 1: kind of interesting to me because I assume that, you know,
Speaker 1: language is at the heart of it, but he has
Speaker 1: found that not to be the case. We resort to
Speaker 1: language obviously to tell our thoughts to other people, but
Speaker 1: they don't start there. And we had a lot of
Speaker 1: arguments because I just didn't believe you could disaggregate a
Speaker 1: thought that in my experience, there were multiple things going
Speaker 1: on at the same time that I was like that
Speaker 1: the cheeseboard deciding whether to buy a roll or not,
Speaker 1: this was another big thought I had, But I was
Speaker 1: also looking at the plaid skirt on the woman in
Speaker 1: front of me that was really unflattering.
Speaker 4: And I was.
Speaker 1: Smelling the cheeses and the cheeseboard and the smell of
Speaker 1: bake goods, and there were all these things going on.
Speaker 1: And I had also just read William James's s say
Speaker 1: on the Stream of Thought, and he's just so granular
Speaker 1: about the nature of our thoughts. And he said, you know,
Speaker 1: no thought, no two thoughts are alike, even your own thoughts.
Speaker 1: Whenever you come back to a thought, it has been
Speaker 1: colored or tinted by the thought that came before. And
Speaker 1: so Hurlbert was making me dissect my thoughts and separate them.
Speaker 1: So finally, at our final debrief, I said, so, what
Speaker 1: kind of thinker do you think I am? And he said, well,
Speaker 1: there's a fourth category, and these are people who have
Speaker 1: very little inner life. So there you have it.
Speaker 3: We have here an impoverished in your mind.
Speaker 1: Talk about the zombie problem.
Speaker 2: That's the kind of mind that produces this. I think
Speaker 2: we're in good shape, Michael. The rest of us are hopeless.
Speaker 2: I'm assuming that, given your profession, the fact that you
Speaker 2: write for a living, you assumed, as I think you
Speaker 2: were nodding to this right, you kind of assumed that
Speaker 2: you thought in words of some kind, right, and then
Speaker 2: what did you observe? So, for example, when you said, oh,
Speaker 2: should I forgot the pepper? When you tried to dissect that,
Speaker 2: did you notice that an image had come to mind
Speaker 2: of the pepper?
Speaker 1: And it was clearly a word pepper? It was just
Speaker 1: so clear. But I realized a lot of my thoughts
Speaker 1: are what James called promontory thoughts, thoughts on the verge
Speaker 1: of becoming words, and that there's a gap between the
Speaker 1: thought and the word. And I definitely have that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'll have thought and I have to think a little
Speaker 1: more to put it into words. So I don't think
Speaker 1: I think in words I would have assumed I did,
Speaker 1: But I think in something just a little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pre linguistic.
Speaker 2: And do you find that or when you're thinking, when
Speaker 2: you think about your thoughts in the context of an
Speaker 2: experiment in which you know you're going to be judged, Oh,
Speaker 2: there's a.
Speaker 1: Huge observer of your thoughts without questions.
Speaker 2: Yes, like the what kinds of artifacts did you notice emerge?
Speaker 2: Like were you you maybe rounded out of thought a
Speaker 2: little bit? Or the skirt wasn't that bad?
Speaker 5: Was it?
Speaker 1: Yeah? No, it does make you self conscious, Yeah, meditation
Speaker 1: does that too. You know. Meditation is one of these
Speaker 1: places we can go to watch our thoughts and it's
Speaker 1: it's it's interesting how weird they are. And we don't
Speaker 1: really think about that very often, but I'm always struck by, like,
Speaker 1: where did that thought come from? I go to a
Speaker 1: meditation class and the teacher will often do this exercise
Speaker 1: of like go into your mind, and you know, you've
Speaker 1: observed your thoughts and your feelings, and now look for
Speaker 1: who's thinking them.
Speaker 3: Yes, oh my gosh, who's the.
Speaker 1: Thinker of your thoughts? Who's the feeler of your feelings?
Speaker 1: And there's nobody home, I mean, in my case to
Speaker 1: speak for you already established that. So I mean and
Speaker 1: David Yume did this experiment in the seventeen forties. You know,
Speaker 1: he was trying to understand the self, and he went
Speaker 1: looking for it in his own, you know, by introspecting,
Speaker 1: and he said, I found plenty of perceptions and ideas
Speaker 1: and feelings, but I didn't find any perceiver. And the
Speaker 1: self is a very elusive concept and it's one of
Speaker 1: the more interesting creations or manifestations of consciousness. And so yeah, so,
Speaker 1: and I you know, I looked at the Zena or
Speaker 1: Buddhist ideas of self too, and you know, they believe
Speaker 1: self is an illusion, and I get where they come out.
Speaker 1: I mean, but I also think that there is I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a conventional self right there's the self that you
Speaker 1: and I are experiencing right now, and there may be
Speaker 1: no basis for it, but it's nevertheless conventionally useful. But
Speaker 1: it's also very interesting. And I explored this in this
Speaker 1: chapter on the Self, that consciousness can survive the disappearance
Speaker 1: of the self. I was surprised by that.
Speaker 3: You're telling in the context of a psychedelic trip.
Speaker 1: That's one context, but there are other context too. I mean,
Speaker 1: experienced meditators get to a point of complete selflessness, yet
Speaker 1: there's still conscious. There's a philosopher I interviewed named Thomas
Speaker 1: Metzinger who's collected like a fifteen hundred case studies of
Speaker 1: people having consciousness without a self only, some of which
Speaker 1: are psychedelic. And he points out that we all have
Speaker 1: this experience every morning when we wake up and there
Speaker 1: is that five hundred millisecond gap between like until you
Speaker 1: realize where you are and who you are, and if
Speaker 1: you're in a hotel room, it's like seven hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty milliseconds. No, because it's very disorienting. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: we've all been there. So yeah, the self is a
Speaker 1: challenging concept.
Speaker 2: I feel like one of the fastest ways to challenge
Speaker 2: my personal belief that I have any free will at
Speaker 2: all is to ask myself where a thought came from?
Speaker 3: And then where where where did that? Who did that?
Speaker 2: Who generated that thought? And then who generated that other thought?
Speaker 2: And oh my god, Okay, yeah I don't I'm not
Speaker 2: in control of any of it. Yeah, They're all just happening.
Speaker 3: There's no conductor.
Speaker 1: It's it's very it's very interesting, and you defamiliarize these
Speaker 1: things that you just take for granted, and so you
Speaker 1: may not want to go down that whole past.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I want to get to questions. So I have
Speaker 2: one final, one final question for you. I feel like,
Speaker 2: by the way, if my beeper went off right now,
Speaker 2: it would be is cheeseboard going to be open after
Speaker 2: this event and so that I can grab a slice?
Speaker 3: Thank you for that.
Speaker 2: We do share the food obsession in commons. This is great, Okay, Uh.
Speaker 3: I want to know.
Speaker 2: How has writing this book changed the way that you
Speaker 2: live your life?
Speaker 1: That's a good question.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 1: It's definitely made me more aware of my thought processes.
Speaker 1: I'm more definitely more aware of the windshield as I
Speaker 1: go through life. I'm a little I have a little
Speaker 1: more perspective on my ego, which is another word for
Speaker 1: the self, and don't feel quite as identified with it
Speaker 1: that I can like point at it and say, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's one voice in my head, you know, but I
Speaker 1: don't have to listen to it. And who is I
Speaker 1: that in that sentence? I don't know. You know. I'm
Speaker 1: a meditator also, and I really like entering that space.
Speaker 1: And I think that the space of our conscious selves
Speaker 1: are this this interiority is very precious and I've become
Speaker 1: more appreciative of it and also worried about it because
Speaker 1: of the fact that we're squandering it in various ways
Speaker 1: and that we're just filling our minds with just you know, bullshit.
Speaker 1: I mean, not to put too finn a term on it,
Speaker 1: but you know, we have social media, you know, with
Speaker 1: very sophisticated algorithms that give us these little dopamine hits.
Speaker 1: And yes, you have to be conscious to scroll on
Speaker 1: your phone, but minimally so, and now, you know, as
Speaker 1: we form relationships with chatbots, you know, these are synthetic
Speaker 1: relationships that offer none of the generative friction that comes
Speaker 1: from real relationships. So I guess what I've come out
Speaker 1: of it with is the sense that there's something very
Speaker 1: precious here that's endangered and that we need to reclaim,
Speaker 1: and we can reclaim. I mean, there are things you
Speaker 1: can do. You can put down your phone and sit
Speaker 1: with the boredom. Boredom is generative. Also if you just
Speaker 1: sit there, you know, if you start watching people, you
Speaker 1: start thinking about them, you overhear them, you mind wander.
Speaker 1: You know, there's this. I learned a lot about what's
Speaker 1: called spontaneous thought from a really interesting psychologist in the
Speaker 1: thought section who and she studies mind wandering and daydreaming
Speaker 1: and intuitions or you know, bolts from the blue, and
Speaker 1: she says, we have less spontaneous thought in our lives
Speaker 1: than we did ten or twenty years ago because we're
Speaker 1: filling our heads with these distractions. And of course these
Speaker 1: distractions have corporations behind them that want to monetize our attention,
Speaker 1: which is to say, our consciousness. So I think we,
Speaker 1: you know, we need to take it back.
Speaker 3: It's beautiful questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have microphones. If anybody wants to ask a question,
Speaker 1: you want to come out and ask it there so
Speaker 1: everybody can hear you.
Speaker 6: I'll beat you to it too slow. Michael, thank you
Speaker 6: fantastic book, really and for inspiring one thing. I think
Speaker 6: it was in the section about Alison Gopnik. We talked
Speaker 6: about how the selfless forms socially, you know, by the
Speaker 6: engagement of parents with children encourage them to kind of
Speaker 6: develop a self. So I'm curious about the kind of this,
Speaker 6: you know, the meta consciousness, I guess, the social construct
Speaker 6: of consciousness, and how society is in large constructs consciousness,
Speaker 6: and whether you can hypothesize a kind of societal consciousness
Speaker 6: as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, there are how
Speaker 1: the way our consciousness is shaped by our social life.
Speaker 1: I think is probably I mean, I think it's probably
Speaker 1: critical and would be very different, and it's probably different
Speaker 1: in different societies. You know, I think consciousness is I mean,
Speaker 1: it probably is a biological phenomenon, but like a lot
Speaker 1: of biological phenomenon, it has a social or even historical component.
Speaker 1: My guess is that people who lived you know, five
Speaker 1: hundred years ago have a different consciousness than we do.
Speaker 1: And my guess is we learn ways of being conscious.
Speaker 1: I think great artists and possibly great philosophers may change
Speaker 1: our sense of what consciousness is. So I think it probably.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know how to prove this, but
Speaker 1: I think it is subject to the usual historical forces,
Speaker 1: and it would be great. I mean, we have some
Speaker 1: sense of this from literature, right, I mean, the mind
Speaker 1: that conceived of the Odyssey and the Iliad was a
Speaker 1: different mind. So yeah, I would say it does have
Speaker 1: a social component.
Speaker 6: And the fact that we can reference that. I love
Speaker 6: the quote some literature and how you brought us through
Speaker 6: that as well, And.
Speaker 1: Well, literature was very important to me. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: at a certain point I realized, you know, novelists know
Speaker 1: an awful lot about consciousness, and poets too, and in
Speaker 1: some ways they're ahead of the scientists, and they've been
Speaker 1: working on the problem longer than the scientists have to.
Speaker 1: So yeah, thank you, thanks for your question. Hello, Hello,
Speaker 1: good evening.
Speaker 4: The young lady mentioned free will, and I think it
Speaker 4: was a Bob Hope who was asked, do you believe
Speaker 4: in free will? And he shrugged his shoulders and.
Speaker 1: Said, I have no choice. Thank you for that.
Speaker 4: So I recall.
Speaker 3: Reading, oh and thanks for calling me young.
Speaker 4: Everything's relative. I recall reading a book where Blaize Pascal
Speaker 4: was talking about behavior and if there's a tug of war,
Speaker 4: a battle between the heart and the brain, it's no contest.
Speaker 4: The heart is going to dominate. And I'm wondering, in
Speaker 4: this book or in some of your previous books, do
Speaker 4: you talk about how the thought affects our behaviors?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do, And you know, I think one of
Speaker 1: the lessons of this work that I was describing about
Speaker 1: feelings is about the importance of feelings to decision making.
Speaker 1: That's really what Demasio's book was about. And he found
Speaker 1: that people who felt their way through decisions made better
Speaker 1: decisions than people who say since the ability to feel
Speaker 1: was impaired, and that there's a process in which we
Speaker 1: pass our body does kind of a gut check on
Speaker 1: when we're making decisions, and that when we do that,
Speaker 1: we make better decisions. And so that's really the argument
Speaker 1: of Descartes error. It's a really interesting book. And you know,
Speaker 1: the I mean, if you think of the emotion of disgust,
Speaker 1: which is a really interesting emotion, because it's a really
Speaker 1: embodied emotion. There was an experiment I allude to in
Speaker 1: the book where they had a control group and one
Speaker 1: group got ginger and ate a bunch of ginger, and
Speaker 1: then they were presented with a morally repellent scenario about
Speaker 1: incest or something like that, and the people who had
Speaker 1: eaten ginger were less judgmental because their stomachs had settled. So,
Speaker 1: you know, embodiment is more important than I think we've realized.
Speaker 1: And I think it's kind of a very interesting trend
Speaker 1: in neuroscience to pay more attention to the body than
Speaker 1: we once did. We used, you know, the brain in
Speaker 1: the vat was a kind of like meme, and that
Speaker 1: really doesn't work. Thank you, I thank you very much.
Speaker 5: I can think of three examples of where language is
Speaker 5: not connected consciousness. I used to work with very developmentally
Speaker 5: delayed children who had no language, and they definitely were
Speaker 5: able to communicate in other sensory ways. The second one
Speaker 5: was I used to work with Coco of the gorilla,
Speaker 5: and how the gorilla had such a presence and a
Speaker 5: connection and looking in the gorilla's eyes and talking with
Speaker 5: the gorilla who had apparently some language that was a
Speaker 5: good example. And the third one that I feel is
Speaker 5: very important to recognize is that I know deaf people
Speaker 5: who were born deaf, who were profoundly deaf, had no language,
Speaker 5: who didn't acquire language until they were five, six, seven
Speaker 5: years old. And how do you think without words? How
Speaker 5: do you think? How do you get concepts? And what
Speaker 5: is your world like? Looking at the world from that,
Speaker 5: So I would say that shows that those.
Speaker 1: Are great examples.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, you don't need to have a language in
Speaker 5: order to have a thought.
Speaker 3: That's how I feel.
Speaker 1: And if you read fiction, they are novelists who clearly
Speaker 1: improvesd believe that, whereas Joyce thought consciousness was made out
Speaker 1: of words, And yeah, that's a great example. Another one
Speaker 1: is there was an experiment that recently happened where they
Speaker 1: found that chimps have imagination, and they were able to
Speaker 1: sit down with a chimp and have you know the
Speaker 1: kind of imaginary tea party you might have with a
Speaker 1: four year old where you're pouring and there's no liquid
Speaker 1: and you're sipping and there's no liqu.
Speaker 5: Cloco used to do things like that too, And when
Speaker 5: she had a kitten who died, she would express her
Speaker 5: sorrow and how sad she was and talk about the
Speaker 5: past and the future, and that was something they thought
Speaker 5: of the humans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, good do Well, we're losing our sense of exclusivity.
Speaker 1: I think the only thing I'll be left is where
Speaker 1: the species that worries about what consciousness is. Thank you
Speaker 1: all for your wonderful question.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Thank you, and thank you Maya,
Speaker 3: thank you, thank.
Speaker 2: You, hey, thanks so much for listening. You can find
Speaker 2: more information about a world appears at the link in
Speaker 2: the show notes. Next week, were visiting my conversation with
Speaker 2: Michael on the topic that started it all, psychedelics.
Speaker 1: One of the things psychedelics does is it takes all
Speaker 1: that ironic crust we cover the world with and it
Speaker 1: scrapes it off really effectively, and suddenly things appear with
Speaker 1: the profundity and beauty of first sight. I mean, awe
Speaker 1: at the ordinary. You know, a piece of music, a flower,
Speaker 1: and that's a wonderful aspect of psychedelic experience.
Speaker 2: Oh and one more thing, Thank you so much to
Speaker 2: each and every one of you who's read my book,
Speaker 2: The Other Side of Change. I've loved hearing about how
Speaker 2: the stories have affected you or made you think differently
Speaker 2: about the changes in your own life. I'd be so
Speaker 2: grateful if you could share your experience of the book
Speaker 2: on Goodreads. It really helps read the word. We've shared
Speaker 2: the link in the episode notes. Thanks so much and
Speaker 2: I'll see you next week. A Slight Change of Plans
Speaker 2: is created, written, and executive produced by me Maya Shunker.
Speaker 2: The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Alexander Garatin, our
Speaker 2: editor Daphne Chen, our lead producer Megan Lubin, our associate
Speaker 2: producer Sonia Gerwitt, and our sound engineer Erica Huang. Louis
Speaker 2: Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped
Speaker 2: arrange the vocals.
Speaker 3: A Slight Change of Plans is.
Speaker 2: A production of Pushkin Industries, So big thanks to everyone there,
Speaker 2: and of course, of very special thanks to Jimmy Lee
Speaker 6: M