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