Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness

Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals, and I wouldn't even

call my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen, but it's one thing to know, and another thing to understand. Alan, murder, me, what the hell was Alan thinking? From serial productions and the New York Times, I'm M. Gesson, and this is the idiot, out my 26th, wherever you get your podcast.

Here is the amazing thing, the deep paradox of consciousness. It is the only thing we truly know.

“The only thing we have certain actual first-hand experience of, and yet we don't understand”

it at all. We don't know what it's made of, we don't know how it works, we don't know why it exists, and the closer we look at it. The weirder consciousness gets, the more we try to describe it, the more our language begins to fail.

I find that so delightful that something so close could remain so mysterious, that such a central question about the universe is happening inside of us all at the time. Now, let's not say we haven't tried to understand it, but we haven't learned a lot from those efforts. In his new book "A World of Pears," a journey into consciousness, the science writer Michael

Pollen takes a tour of those efforts of those theories, those experiments, of those psychedelic

“trips and meditation retreats, and he keeps finding himself in stranger and stranger territory”

deeper inside the mystery.

So I want to have him want to talk about it, as always my email, as we're going to show

it at mytimes.com. Michael Pollen, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Good to be back. So I wanted to begin with an experiment that you participated in during the reporting of a

spook, where you were a beeper and tried to record what was going on in your mind when that beeper went off. What did he learn from that? He was going to go off. The experiment was that there's a psychologist at University of Nevada Las Vegas named Russell

Hurlberg, and he's been sampling inner experiences. He calls it for 50 years, and the way he does it is he equips you with a beeper, you wear this thing in your ear, it emits a very sharp beep, you know, exactly what it was, and when it was, there's no reaching for your phone or any doubt about what you're dealing with. Then you're supposed to write down what you were thinking at that very moment, and then

you collect a day's worth of beeps, which could be five or six beeps, and, you know, it's got various kind of observer-effect problems, you wonder, you know, got it, the beeper went off now, what would I have to say, oh, that would really be embarrassing. So there is this self-consciousness, but you forget about it over the course of the day, suddenly you get a beep, and you write it down, and, you know, I was struck by half an

all, my beeps were, I mean, I would be like the one I described in the book, is I'm waiting online at a bakery, and I'm deciding, should I buy a roll or use the heel of bread, I have it home, to make a sandwich for lunch? This is not profound stuff, and then he interrogates you about them to try to make sense of it, and help you become a better student of what's going on in your own mind, because

it turns out very often we don't know what we're thinking, at least I didn't know what

“I was thinking, and he would say, now, did you speak that, or did you hear that spoken?”

I was like, I have no idea, was it in language or was it an image? And I said, well, there was sort of an image, it was kind of very specific kind of an emoji of a roll, not a real roll, and he take you through it, and it was an incredibly challenging process.

I want to stay on that for a second, I would say that a lot of thoughts I have, if you

push me, they're the feeling of a thought too. I know it's there, but it's not spoken, I'm not looking at lettering on the projector screen of my brain. It's something less than a fully formed thought. This word thought implies a kind of, you know, roundedness to the thing that just doesn't

exist, and many of our thoughts are these whispers of mentation, you know, that I love that gospel or whispers of mentation as I put it in the book.

really understand what those would be, if they're not words and not images, but his finding after 50 years of this is that we think in very different ways. He roasts you at the end of the experiment. Oh, man. You finish this up, and he says that you are low on very little in our lives.

Yeah, I didn't know how to take this, I mean, we all think we have a lively inner life,

but absence of one, it never occurred to me that raises a question for me, which is,

to what degree was what you were recording in this experiment different than your perception of how your mental life feels to you in a day very different.

“And so what was the difference in what do you make of it?”

I just assumed I had a little more going on than he thought I had. But part of the reason he came to that conclusion is I argued with him a lot. I found the whole idea of separating thoughts into these discrete chunks, absolutely impossible. When I was on that bakery waiting in line, there was the smell of baked goods and cheese. They sold cheese at this place.

There was the image of this woman in front of me who had this very loud, plaid skirt on that was kind of hideous. There was my awareness of the other people there that I recognized anybody. I often bump into people I know here. My thoughts were so inter-infected by one another, one thought coloring the next.

And he just kept drilling down until I absolutely would separate all that. But I had read a lot of William James at this point. He's got this amazing essay on the stream of consciousness and he's an incredibly acute observer

“of the nuance and subtlety of our thoughts and he talks about things like the unarticulated affinity”

between two thoughts or how one thought colors the next and then the other. And that it is a stream and you can't pull anything out of the stream without completely disturbing it.

Let's talk about William James because he always ends up the Godfather, the leading source

of metaphor and any book like that. Who is he? So William James is the father of psychology in America. He is now regarded more as a philosopher and that's because psychology is so empirical in the house.

He was really, I don't know if he used this word, but he acted like wrote like a phenomenologist which is to say about the lived experience of thought. I first got acquainted with him when I was working on how to change your mind because he has written the varieties of religious experience and there's a fantastic chapter there on mystical experience and he experimented with drugs himself to look at these kind of

outer reaches of consciousness.

“He's kind of unreadable yet he's also a great writer at the same time.”

There's something about his senses that are so long and intricate that he loses a modern reader about 80% of the way to the period, at least me. But the observations are just so refined and they kind of put to shame all the scientists working on consciousness. I mean, I hate to say that because I respect a lot of them but that he's onto the subtlety

of mental experience and they of course are reducing it to fairly simple things like visual perception or a qualia which is their word for the qualities of experience. He goes so far beyond qualia to delve into these details of thinking that it was, so I had a head full of James when I was doing this experiment and it seemed to keep doing violence to that.

I recognize my thinking more in James than in Herbert's questions. One thing I love about James is his precision in describing how imprecites the stuff of the mind is and mind stuff is a word or something. I want to quote you quoting him here because I love this.

You're writing the objects of our thoughts can never be completely disentangled from what

James veryically calls their oras, halos, accentuations, associations, effusions, feeling of tendency, premonitions, psychic overtones and you say perhaps my favorite fringe of unarticulated affinity. Have the fringe. It's so beautiful.

But talk to me a bit about that because I do think that I do a meditation often where you know what is going on in your attention and you know your thoughts and even with in thoughts, you know, did I hear that? Did I see that? Did I feel that?

And it always also seems to me to be doing a kind of violence I'll sink into a dream a little bit. And what was that exactly? It wasn't quite a word, it wasn't quite a visual. All this stuff that you just quoted.

I think it's just a reminder that our mental life is just far more intricate, complex and

shadowy than we give it credit for and that, you know, it's in the nature of reductive science to simplify things in order to unbetter understand them. It'd be very weird to start from a Jamesian view of the stream of consciousness and try to understand that scientifically. I feel like one of the central questions of your book and one reason I like the topic

“of consciousness so much is that it is the only thing we have actual experience of.”

It is the most familiar thing to us and it actually quite unfamiliar and I mean this is one of the great lessons of meditation or psychedelics more unfamiliar than more you attend to it? Yes. That is what really interesting.

I mean the more I thought about consciousness, the more elusive the phenomenon becomes.

And meditators get acquainted with this pretty quickly. You realize pretty quickly that you have thoughts that you are not thinking. You have images that you have in conjure, you know, that you're on the verge of sleep or sleepiness and they just pop into your mind, that where did they come from? And this idea of thoughts thinking themselves is bizarre to most people but I just think

the poets and novelists are further along than the scientists as they often are. And that is one of the reasons I kind of turned to our literature later in the book for a kind of more subtle understanding of the thought process. Let's stay with the scientists for a while at least. One of the things you try to do in the book is track their efforts to reduce consciousness

to something measurable and maybe proto-human, non-human.

You have a great chapter on plants.

I guess maybe a place to start with the plants is you taught me something I didn't know which is you can enness the ties of plant. Isn't that mind-blowing?

“Can you talk about that experiment and what it seems to imply?”

Yeah. So there's a group of scientists, botanists, and they call themselves plant neurobiologists, which is a very tintentious thing to say because they're known neurons involved in plants. They're trolling more conventional botanists, I think. I appreciate people trolling each other in ways that my men don't even know is like, not super fine.

No, it's fighting words in the field. Okay, so there are plant dorks, absolutely plant dorks. And they do all these experiments to see how intelligent plants are, how much they can respond and solve problems. And they've also done experiments to try to determine if they're conscious, or I would

use the word sentient, is more reasonable, although they will use the word conscious. So you want to say the difference in your mind, so those two words sentient is a kind of more basic form of consciousness, it's what, perhaps all living things have. It's the ability to sense your environment and recognize what's the valence is that a positive or negative thing happening and then respond appropriately.

“You know, bacteria can do this, they have chemo taxes, right?”

They can recognize molecules that are food and molecules that are poison and act appropriately. So it's a very basic form, consciousness is how humans do sentience, and we've added lots of bells and whistles, like the stream of consciousness, like self reflection, like the fact that we're aware that we're aware, most other creatures are just aware, although we recently learned that chimps have imagination, which is kind of mind-blowing.

How do we learn that? Experiments, they got chimps as I recall to play a kind of tea party game, you know, as you would play with a kid and you know, they're pouring an empty picture into cups, and they get completely into the game, and there's some reason you can tell that they know it's not real.

So they're imagining this. Every time we build a wall and say, "Only humans can do this," we find that, actually, no, other animals can. So, and that's the test plan. Yeah.

So, one of the experiments these guys did was take anesthetics that work on humans, including a really bizarre one called xenon gas. I say it's bizarre, "Kazenon gas is inert," yet somehow it puts us out if you expose us to the gas, which is weird, because there's no chemical reaction going on. And if you take a carnivorous plant or a sensitive plant, a mimosapudika, which is the one

that tropical plant, if you touch it, it kind of collapses its leaves, and you give it the xenon gas, or any number of other anesthetics that work on us, they won't react. They'll be a period where they appear to be asleep, and then they'll regain their ability. So the fact that plants have two states of being is a very pregnant idea, and there's this least two states of being.

At least two states, right, two that we've identified, lights on, lights off. That, to some implies consciousness, there's the famous definition of Thomas Nagel, who wrote

His test for consciousness is, if it is like anything to be a creature that creature

then is conscious. So it is like one thing when the plants are awake, and it is like something else when they're not, or it's no longer like anything. But the switch in state is very much like conscious. Let me hold you on that, because as I understand the Thomas Nagel I say, it's that it

is like something to the organism. Yes. It's internal. So you could imagine a situation where a world in which it is not like anything for the plant to be awake.

You give, actually, an example, the way to this in the book, we say, "When you plug a toaster in, you get through me off." Yeah. Toast with it.

But when you plug it out, we don't think it is slightly like something different or unlike

something for the toaster to be turned off. I don't think it's like anything for it to be a toaster. And so in either, the fact that something has response to stimuli doesn't necessarily imply it has a subjective experience. Right.

That's true. The difference between plants and toasters is complicated. But living things have a sense of purpose, they have directionality, they have good and bad. Any kind of things like that we give to like a thermostat is really just us giving those

qualities to the thermostat. The thermostat doesn't care on its own, whether it's 70 degrees or 60 degrees.

So I don't think it's proof of consciousness, but it's really spooky and interesting.

And this researcher in questions, as name a Stefano Mancuso, he's an Italian researcher at the University of Florence. He's also shown how plants sleep. There are these characteristics that mark a creature's ability to sleep, which we thought only belong to higher mammals, I guess, or no bird sleep, too.

But we didn't think really simple creatures slept, it turns out even insect sleep. And Giulio Tononi is the scientist who came up with these criteria for sleep.

“And plants meet, I think all of them, which is interesting, and some take that as evidence”

of consciousness. You're a guarder. Yeah. Do you think you're causing plants pain by pruning them? Yeah.

But you're bringing up the issue that immediately comes to mind when you start hearing about plant consciousness, which is, are we hurting them? When we mow the lawn, is that beautiful scent of freshly mongrass, the screen of the screen of the lawn. And that'll make you crazy, but I actually, people know we're causing pain to cows and pigs

and chickens. So it turns out it does not make human beings crazy to cause mass pain to living things on industrial scale. Yeah, although there's all this worry about this in Silicon Valley, that our tender hearts should go out to these machines that might be conscious and we owe moral consideration

to the machines.

“Anyway, I think here's my suspicion about that, because I do think it is possible we're”

going to make sense in machines, machines that have some experience of what it is like to be a machine, and I think that you will find there's a lot of concern about that and tell the moment it turns out to be against anybody's interest, because you'd have to do anything about it. Yeah.

And also, they love the conversation about the far future or near a far future of, you know, whether it's boomer or doomer view, because it's a great way not to deal with what's right in front of us. One of the things that has struck me in it's a theme of your book is our ability as human beings to wall-off our experience from that of everything else in the world.

I forget the great philosopher you're quoting here, but there is one of them who just doesn't believe animals can feel pain, sees them as functionally robotic. Well, they cart. They cart. They cart.

Yeah. And that is in part helping to justify the visections of life animals and animals. Yeah. It's like, I have two dogs, I've been around some rabbits. The idea that you would believe those animals are not feeling pain.

It actually raises a pretty profound from a question about human consciousness and our ability to interpret what we are seeing around what we would like it to be as opposed to what it is. Yeah. In the power of an idea, I mean, he developed this idea that humans had this monopoly on consciousness.

“I think, therefore, I am, in other words, the thing I know is that I'm a conscious being”

and nobody else has it, no other creature has it. And he was so convinced of his own idea that when these animals screamed sounds that we

He just thought it was automatic noise.

And it is hard to believe. And it's true. It tells you something about the power of an idea to overcome our feelings, our instincts. But we do, you know, we do this all the time. And, you know, he was so wrong about this, it's not funny.

But we see things through ideological lens, you know, and it shapes what we actually see in here. And it changed the sound of those screams to him, to meaninglessness.

“Can we do get into this question of, yes, are we causing suffering to plant?”

Yeah. There's definitely no one who's about this in some other research or some one in particular believes, yes, we are causing pain to plants. And his take was, but hey, that's just life.

You know, if we don't eat plants, we're down to salt, basically.

You know, if you give up on animals and plants, my cousin doesn't think so. He thinks pain would not be adaptive to a creature that can't run away. And the big fact about plants, of course, is their secile, their stuck in place, they're rooted. And that dictates everything about them.

And it's the reason why the language in which they work is biochemical, right? They produce chemicals to protect themselves, to intoxicate, to interact, all different kinds of things. So he says, they're aware that they're being eaten. They often don't mind.

The grass is actually benefit from being eaten. And then, of course, they're all the fruits and nuts that they're happy to give away to mammals.

So I don't know where I come out on that.

I don't think my plants. And I'm pruned them. I mean, they like being pruned. You know, they respond with more growth than new leaves. And so I'm not too worried about that.

There are a lot of things I go through that make me grow that I don't like. But it's been a consistent experience of my life. Well, this is short-term long-term, right? There's when you cut them with the seconders, that bothers them. But they respond in a really constructive way.

There is also another more complex way of plants operating on the spoke, which is that some

“of this book is motivated by experiences you have to psychedelic mushrooms.”

Right. Which are not exactly plants. But okay. Fine. You'll get letters into saving you the trouble.

And you have had in it, you have experienced there that I have heard from many others, which is a kind of openness to animism that may not have been there before. Yeah, that's a very common experience on psychedelics. The world seems much more alive than it does in normal times. You know, animism is very interesting, because it's kind of our default as a species.

You go around the world. You look at traditional cultures. They believe that there's a spirit in fusing, especially living things, but also rocks and cliffs and sky and clouds and everything. And most kids are animists till they go to school, and then we kind of knock it out of them.

So it's interesting that we exist in this unanimous bubble of Western scientific materialism. But you push in any direction or travel in any direction or have a psychedelic experience and suddenly questions are raised about it.

“And I think that's what's interesting about what these plant neurobiologists are doing.”

They're returning us to a, if it's not full-scale animism, it's a reanimated world where there is just, and I did come out of this research experience of looking at plant consciousness or plant sentience, with a sense that the world is more alive than I thought. I've just weighing with, and I want to ask you this question, but I think I do for it. So something I have noticed from psychedelic circles, which I'm much less plugged into than you are,

is people who work with plants like a delix over long periods of time, tend to find themselves, or believe themselves into, as working with plant or spiritual intelligences, people who do mushrooms, or bogo, or ayahuasca, there's a sense of there being something on the other side. In a way that artificial psychedelics kind of mean LSD, people do not sort of leave believing those like an LSD spirit on the other end of the phone.

And just as somebody who's, you know, one of your previous books was on psychedelics and doing this book, that the reason I think people get pushed towards animism isn't necessarily the more narrow question of what happens when you anesthetize a plant, but people are having some kind of experience there, where they feel there are plant intelligences communicating to them. Oh, yeah, especially in ayahuasca, especially in ayahuasca, which is a plant based, right?

There's two plants, it's a brew of two plant, and if you ask most ayahuascaros, how did anyone ever figure out the recipe, because it's so obscure that these two plants cooked together would have this effect, and neither by themselves has any effect, or much of any effect, and they'll tell you the plants taught me,

it sounds ridiculous to us. You know, I mean, if I came out anywhere on this whole book, it's like my mind is much more open than it was to a lot of weird stuff,

“just because the normal stuff hasn't really panned out that well. Now why would the plant-based psychedelics be more likely to do this than the chemistry-based psychedelics?”

I think there, it's set and setting, you know, Timothy Lerys' great contribution was explaining that the psychedelic experiences shape profoundly by the physical setting in which it takes place, and the mindset, the mental setting, that you bring to it. When you're using a plant-based psychedelic, you, I mean, the imagery is all jungle imagery, you know, people see leopards, and they see vines, and... Do you think that's because they're setting or because they're something in the... I think it's, I think it's setting setting, yeah.

So you don't buy the shamans who tell you, we were told this by the plants.

No, but there's like 5% of me that was like, okay, maybe. I'm kind of... I've entered this never say never realm with this research.

I'm Robin, and I am excited to open my cross-play app. I'm challenging John. My colleague at the New York Times. Robin played the word "grunge," which has a G, which is four points. She got that triple word multiplier. I'm going to take facts, and make it facts as for 30 points.

“I might just take another two-letter word here with Woe gets me at 23. I think this will put me back in the lead if my maths are mathhing.”

I like to play it more from a strategic point of view, and see where I can block the other player from scoring high. I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to beat friends and co-workers, and also get to learn new words.

Crossplay, the first two-player word game from New York Times games, download it for free today.

I think he thinks he has this in the bag, but I'm not so sure. So certainly the mainstream interpretation of what consciousness is, is that as life becomes more complex, as unlike planets, we're moving around, that you have an escalating complexity in conscious experience in order to achieve goals in the world. That consciousness is being created through evolutionary pressure, adaptive. It's adaptive. One thing you do is go through a couple of the ideas

of what it could be adaptive towards. Tell me some of them. So I'm going to back up a little bit to make sense of this idea. One of the big questions is your brain, at least 90% of what it's doing, you're not aware of. It's doing all this work, monitoring your body, maintaining homeostasis, perceiving things in your environment without you beat consciously aware of it. You know, peripheral visions, smells, you know, touch all these kind of things, temperature.

So the question then becomes, if this automatic machine is so good at what it does, why does any of it become conscious? That's part of the hard problem of consciousness, why aren't we just zombies, you know, wouldn't that have been simpler? And the reasons and to some extent these are evolutionary

just those stories, but they're persuasive, that basically you can automate things until you get

to a level of complexity. And for us, it's our social lives. The fact that we are fundamentally social beings absolutely dependent on other people with a long period of complete dependence for babies and children compared to other species, social life cannot be automated. It's just two

“complex. So you need to be able to anticipate what I'm likely to say, how a remark is going to land,”

theory, you know, we call it theory of mind, this idea that we can imagine our way into other people basis of compassion and things like that. So once we entered this realm of great complexity, automating our responses just wasn't going to work. And the creatures that had consciousness, that could imagine what was going on in another human's head did better than people who didn't and failed to imagine what was going on in someone else's head. I find that a pretty persuasive theory.

I guess one question it raises is, you look at a baby or one year old. They are very, very socially dependent. And I think they're clearly having a very intense experience of consciousness. A more intense one that I have. My consciousness is much better at filtering out information than

you talk a bit about that because on the one hand, it feels like that idea would imply consciousness becomes richer, as it become more gold-directed, but I think it's quite clear that it becomes narrow out, as it become more gold-directed. Yeah. I think you could make a case the young children are more conscious than we are. I think it's almost an arguable. Yeah. And which is a kind of interesting thing that we prune consciousness down the way we're pruning so many things in the brain.

As we age, but this idea of lantern versus spotlight consciousness, I found very powerful.

I learned it from Allison Gopnik who's a child psychologist, developmental psychologist at Berkeley. And she gave me a lot of good advice as I was embarking on this. The first was

“never forget that the kinds of people working on these questions about consciousness”

are not typical in their consciousness. These are people who can sit in a chair for a really long time, read books for a really long time, think out problems. They have an extreme version of spotlight consciousness, which she calls professor consciousness. So that was very helpful. She contrasts this with children's consciousness, which she calls lantern consciousness. So instead of having that one degree of attention focused on some object, they're taking

information from all 360 degrees. It seems very undisciplined, very unfocused. You find it when kids get to school. Some kids can sit there and do it and a lot of kids can't because they're still taking an information from all these sides. It's interesting. It allows them to solve problems that adults can't solve. They think outside the box. They have more divergent thinking. And then as time goes on, we now are a focus. It allows us to get a lot done to put off the shoes

in a pretty efficient manner. And but it involves putting these blinders on. So there's a trade-off. And one of the things psychedelics do, and Allison made this point to me also, is return us

to lantern consciousness. She said in an interview with me and other people, when she first tried

LSD, which wasn't until I think her 60s, she realized, oh, this is how the kids are thinking. They're tripping all the time. And she said, just have tea with a four-year-old, then you'll see. And there's a lot of truth to that, I think. I want to get at another theory of what consciousness is

“for. I think the language in the book is consciousness is felt uncertainty. Is that beautiful?”

That is very beautiful. Although in practice, I find it very unpleasant. But what does that mean? So the phrase comes from a scientist named Mark Somes, who is a neuroscientist and a psycho-analyst in South Africa. And he's written a really interesting book called The Hidden Spring. And his theory is that consciousness arises when you can't automate things. And in this case, he's talking about the fact that you might have two competing needs. Let's say you're hungry and

you're tired. And you have to decide which to privilege. And that takes decision-making. And what consciousness does is open up this space to resolve uncertainty. So if everything was predictable in the world and you could be certain when this happens, that happens. And you had a kind of need algorithm to deal with contingencies. You don't need it. But a lot of life presents us with uncertainty.

“And that's when consciousness arises. I think I've thought about this part of the book more”

than any other. And I think that's in part because the way my mind works. And I'm not really how generalizable this is. My thoughts attract to uncertainty in my life. I just ruminate and

ruminate and ruminate over whatever I am, typically most emotionally uncertain about. Not always

by the way, the most useful forms of uncertainty. There are other unsolved problems. It would be better if my mind was interested in thinking about, but I get it. So on the one hand, this idea that there is something at the very least that is attracting the spotlight of my attention to uncertainty feels true. But I also have a couple of questions and problems so that one is that it doesn't seem like we're talking here about exactly consciousness. I mean, what you were just saying about the child

or about the adult on the economics, they are not attracted to uncertainty in the same way. The experience of like psychedelic consciousness expansion is, I mean, always I think less of the experience of felt uncertainty. It becomes much more about experience. Whereas uncertainty, at least in the way I experience it, my consciousness tends to be a much more spotlighted, much less experiential, like it's a distraction from experience. Yeah. I think that's right.

I haven't really thought about that that much. One of my takeaways is that we have to be kind of pluralists of consciousness that there are many different kinds and that psychedelic consciousness

And then there's every day consciousness and spotlight consciousness and that. So I think we all

have a toolkit to some extent. And we experience, I mean, the kind of consciousness you experience as a meditator is very different than the kind you do at work, right, or when writing. I mean, writing is a great example. That's a very peculiar form of consciousness. So the other thing I was

“thinking about with this was consciousness is felt uncertainty, felt where? Because I think we think”

of consciousness, the thing happening in our minds. Something I think actually that has come out of my meditation for me, but then I loved seeing how much of it there was in your book is recognizing how much it's happening in the body. Yeah. I think that's my biggest discovery. I have someone who lives in his head most of the time. How important having a body is to be in conscious. You know, we identify with our heads more than our bodies, right? Maybe because our eyes

are there, I don't know. But consciousness probably arises with feelings first. It starts with things like hunger and itchiness and as it gets filtered into the cortex becomes the kind of complicated thinking that we pride ourselves on. I think that feelings are based in the body. Finally, it's how the body talks to the brain. And we have to remember this very simple fact, which is the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around. We're not just a support system

for this amazing three pounds of tofu in our heads. And once you realize that you realize that

the message is coming from the body are really important to the brain. And these feelings are the beginning of conscious experience. And if you didn't have them, it's questionable whether

“you would have consciousness. There's no doubt, I think, that the experience of consciousness”

is some kind of interplay between both. I feel uncertainty in my solar plexus. I think about things I'm in certain around in my brain. Exactly. And where do you experience discussed? Like moral discussed? It's in your belly. You have a great experiment in the book about ginger. People give ginger. Can you describe that? Yeah, this is a very cool experiment. They gave people ginger before exposing them to some morally distasteful event or something or image.

And the people who had the ginger were less disgusted because their stomachs were settled. So our feeling of moral disgust is kind of channeled through our gut, which is such a weird idea. But that's probably true of a lot of feelings. And that it has enormous implications for this discussion about AI, whether it can be conscious. Because feelings are not just signals. They're not just bits of information. They contain information. You're getting a lot of information from a feeling.

But that's the residue of the feeling. There's something more somatic about it. And it's very hard to imagine how computers could get to that. And feelings have no weight. If you don't have a vulnerability, if you don't have the ability to suffer. And perhaps be mortal. Otherwise, a feeling is just more information. And we know feelings are a lot more than that to us. I wanted to describe an experience that has had what we're doing that. I wrote a note to myself

“to come back to this part of the conversation later to maybe clip it out because I think it's particularly good.”

One thing I find I need to do during these podcasts is pay very close attention to my body. Because what happened there was not that I had a thought. This is good come back later. What happened there is that my skin got pricklier. And I noticed like a heightened sensitivity. And that was an alert to my mind to start paying tender. What am I trying to pay attention to? I see it's all the time in the podcast. My body has reactions to things that are going on.

And then my mind has to interpret why that is happening. And the body is smarter about things. And the mind which I created the questions document I walked in here with. Yes. But it's such a strange experience that something just happened in my chest and my hands that told me my body thinks this part of the conversation was good and to put it into my brain so I could write a little note to come back to it later.

So William James writes about this. You have feelings and motions and thoughts and emotions are more of the physical manifestation of feelings. I can tell your emotions. I can't tell your feelings.

Those are internal. He said basically they start in the body. Anger starts with a racing heart or

something like that. And then the brain interprets why did the heart start racing? Why did blood pressure go up? Maybe it's fear. So the brain is constantly interpreting the messages it's getting from the

different ways. And it totally changes how you think about consciousness and the potential of

automating this or the potential of digitizing it. If feelings are that, if feelings come first,

“feelings bear more thought in that, where do they come from? How can they, how can they be simulated?”

Feelings and bodies bear more thought. Yes. This is something bodymen. The consciousness is an embodied phenomenon. And the brain and of that mean just no, it just doesn't work. Dido, the downloading of consciousness onto a machine, the dream of the transhumanists, you're not going to have a body? How's that going to work? I think if somebody was to go out into self-improvement podcast for old or school or anything. And their fundamental question was, how do I get smarter? How

am I more intelligent? The answer you basically get has to do with training your minds, studying, reading more journaling in the morning, whatever it might be. And there's actually very, very little about deepening the connection between your mind and your body.

“As I have gotten older and as my work has become more creative, I think. I've come to think”

it's a huge mistake that a huge amount of just what I've had to get better out of for the years is paying attention to my body such that then my mind can do something with these signals that are

not always easily interpretable. But have some intelligence that I don't feel like I'm in control of.

Yeah, and we misinterpret them. I mean, think about you've got young kids. When they're hungry, they will misinterpret that as frustration or anger and you realize they just need to eat and then they'll be fine. So we do go through a process of learning how to interpret what our body is telling us. But it's true as adults, where do you go to learn that? I mean meditation a little bit, you know, doing body scans and things like that, you know, I've done meditation practices where

the focus is very much on the body and what's going on in every different part of the body.

“But I think we would be wiser if we learned how to do this and paid better attention to our bodies.”

And I also think, I mean in the way, this is the lesson of Antonio Demosia's first book in 1994,

Descartes Era, it was called. And he was basically showing that feelings and emotions should be admitted into the decision making process. And he proved that people who couldn't experience emotion or feelings made worse decisions than people who could. And that there was a kind of a gut check. You know, we have all these words for the gut and thought. And there's a, there's some kind of very deep in the language as this understanding that our gut has something important to tell us about

a decision. And so he kind of rehabilitated feelings and emotions in the whole science of the brain. But basically, we've been drumming feelings and emotion out of our understanding of the brain for hundreds of years. And you know, I don't know why. I mean, I just, you know, this idea, the pinnacle of human consciousness is the cortex. Or the kinds of people who do this research are just really out of touch with their bodies. I like that as a, as a hypothesis. I'll be hearing

from some of that. Fair enough. I want to pick up something you said in there about the sequencing, about how feelings often perceived thoughts. There's a great piece of research you bring up that is research done on meditators who are asked to note when they're interrupted in the meditation by a thought. Can you describe that story? Sure. So this scientists, a clean-up, Christoph, Hajji Livia, psychologist. Her field is spontaneous thought, which is a, I hadn't thought

about that as a, as a field. And that includes things like daydreams and mind wandering and creative thinking and flow. And to try to understand this, she's very interested in the question of how things get from our unconscious into our conscious awareness. Because we know there's a lot going on below the threshold of awareness. So she works with trained meditators, people who have like 10,000 hours experience meditating, puts them in an FMRI, gives them a button to press as soon as

a thought intrudes. Because even if you're a experienced meditator, it's going to happen. She says it happens every 10 seconds for everybody. She said the great lesson of meditation is the mind cannot be controlled. It's very, very freeing to people trying. What was interesting about this

there was activity in the hippocampus, which is the source of memories and other stuff as well.

But she was watching that as a source of a thought. And it took four seconds between the, the FMRI showing activity in the hippocampus and the person being aware of that thought. So what is happening? Four seconds in the brain time is like an E on. What is happening

“for a thought to transit from the unconscious to the conscious? And why does it take so long?”

And she doesn't know. I'm sorry, I can't pay this off. But one of the theories called global neuronal workspace theory, which is that there are thoughts competing with one another for access to our conscious awareness. And they're kind of, you know, this Darwinian process.

And only the most salient ever gets into the workspace and then broadcast to the whole brain.

The problem with this theory is there's a lot of trivial stuff that somehow gets through at least in my case. I think there's a lot of traffic going back and forth. And that's something also that you happen, not just during meditation, but during psychedelic experiences. There's lots of unconscious material that comes up. I actually find this to be a problem with meditation. For me, which is that there's a lot of meditation that is about open awareness or trying to watch things

“happen non-judgmentally. Yeah. But the very act of having awareness is very clearly changing what is”

happening in my brain. Yeah. So the more awareness I have, the more my brain feels slightly or my mind feels somewhat controlled. And the less awareness I have the more I'm going to get these sort of little whispers of meditation. Yeah. So there's a meditation teacher I really like, whose meditations are on YouTube, a Michael Taft. And his attitude is like, look, the machinery of the mind is going to go on. But just put it down the way you put down your phone and just, you know,

let it do its thing. You can just ignore it. And I find that very helpful. And I have this sense of a little buzzing going on in this corner. You know, like thoughts that I'm not paying attention to. But, you know, as Kalina shows, it's very hard to control this material. And things are going to bubble up. And they're interesting. Well, I guess one of my deep and fundamental questions by being a human being is why I attend to what I attend to. If I could go and talk to the algorithm

in my mind in the way that increasingly you can, you know, go tell, cloud, what is how it is you won't cloud-dact. I would change the algorithm. Yeah. I would worry less about interpersonal conflict in my life. I would spend a lot less time thinking about whether or not people are mad at me. But there is some process by which I hate the term global workspace theory. As a description of what is going on in the mind. It's so bloodless and built on personal computers in 1990. Productivity, I do. Yeah.

But that idea that things are competing. And somehow or another, some part of my mind is running some kind of process to decide what comes into the spotlight of attention. Yeah. And if it's really shocking, there's a car accident next to me or there's shortcuts. Yeah, like all of a sudden it'll move me there entirely. But moment to moment, there's some kind of competition and what comes up. I can be aware of it, but the more aware I am of it, the less in control that I feel, which is

one of the great and slightly terrifying lessons of meditation. And so that that question of the unconscious doesn't seem mild to me. That is the factory producing thoughts comes from. And then something is deciding what to put in the front shelves. So you're thinking about in terms of an algorithm and a massive data and different things could get pulled into it. That's not a bad metaphor. I mean, we don't know exactly how it works. There is still this question of if the workspace

idea is true, everything we think should be of some consequence. And we all know that's not true.

“And so why do things that are completely trivial or banal enter our consciousness?”

You know, Freud would say we're suppressing more important things. But there is clearly a way that the mind learns what to think about over time. So do you see the example of my kids? It is quite clear to me that my children do not spend any time during the day thinking about things they have to do in the future. Right. They might think it's about things they want to do in the future.

Right. But they're never like, you know, I think it's been a while since my last pediatrician

appointment. I might need some shots. Right. You leave me with my mind alone for much time at all. And a to-do list begins bubbling through it. It's very, very persistent. I mean, I meditate

Somewhere along the way, I went from being a kid who's pretty present in his life and thought

more I think about things. I wanted to think about or and became somebody whose mind has bent

“towards productivity. Yeah. Thought the only thing that happens in my mind, but it is clearly a favored”

topic. Yeah. And it makes you successful. I mean, you know, they're they're standards by which that makes sense. So what I would say about that is you brought up something a minute ago. We said, well, the problem with this theory is it why there's so much triviality emerged. But I mean, couldn't you just say, well, it is over-applied rules. Like my biggest complaint about my mind is I think too much about relational stress. But you grow up, you a family, you're very dependent on

caregivers. It's very easy to imagine how a mind would bend towards really, yeah, it was bullied

in school, right? You know, being out of joint in relationships can really harm you. So it's not unclear to me how my mind might have overlearn the rule, scan for relational thread at all times. And so I'm curious about that learning. Like, something is happening over time that is not the same in all people. It's dependent on life experience. You know, people grew up in times of famine, into storm or food when they're older, right? There's something happening. And also,

and that pleasure is not driving this, right? I mean, it's success. You are learning algorithms. So we're going to use that computer metaphor that are, even though it doesn't feel good,

are promoting the kind of behavior that's going to solve problems and keep everybody happy,

maintain the peace, you know, all these kind of things. So our minds are, you know, invested in our success, not our pleasure. I mean, one of the things, you know, I talked a lot about how psychedelics inspired this book. But meditation did too, because as soon as you stop to examine what's going on in your mind, which many people don't do, but now tens of millions of people do do, especially since the pandemic or a lot more meditators than there were, is how strange our minds are

and how little volition is involved and that we think we're calling the shots as conscious human beings, but to a remarkable extent, we're not. And where that material is coming from,

“we can call it the unconscious. We don't really know, but it's just de-familiarized, right?”

I mean, you're just distraining from your own mental processes and this whole idea that that that great meditation exercise, you know, will look in your brain for who's thinking those thoughts, who's feeling those feelings, and you won't find anybody. Talk to me about a state of mind that has come up briefly in our conversation already that I think is between unconscious and gold directed, which is the wandering mind. And I think it's something we don't, I think we have

come to diminish its role. Oh, yeah. I think so. So what is it and what do we know about it? Well, the wandering mind is just what's happening when you're bored. That's the precondition in a way for a wandering mind. I've got nothing to do. There's no task here. I'm just killing time, and suddenly we're off and daydreaming or mind wandering. They're very similar things. I forget how clean it distinguishes them, but she does. She thinks it's a really important part

of life that we haven't studied because it's not productive. And that all the work in psychology

“goes into productive areas of thought. I think that's changing now. You know, you have people studying”

awe and emotions that are not necessarily productive, but awe is very useful. So she just thinks this is a space of creativity. And that a lot of creative thinking comes out of mind wandering and daydreaming. And, you know, it's something novelists do all the time, right? I mean, they get pretty good at daydreaming. And she says we've lost this. You know, that the space of our interiority for this kind of thinking is diminished because of our distractions, our technological

distractions. I want to challenge not that she believes us, but this idea that it's a non-productive form of thought. I think it, oh, I think it is very productive. It's just how are you defining productivity? I would say the biggest barrier for me and productivity, true productivity, which is the ability to do better with the same amount of resources you already have, is that I don't spend enough time with my mind wandering. Yeah. And it is redeemed the absolutely most creatively important

times I will spend. I thought I was taking the break. Yeah. I thought I was doing something else. I wasn't rock. I wasn't just driving my mind further into the ground, flicking through web pages when I was already too tired to absorb information. Right. Then all of a sudden I'll have the insider or I'll realize where I should call this person or and I don't know where it comes from.

the spotlight gets in the way because of those blinders. And I think when you're daydreaming or mind

“wandering, the blinders are kind of opened up and you're taking an information from more places.”

She argues that it's just the belief that this is unproductive thought because nobody wants mind wandering workers. Right. The capitalist wants us to be, you know, spotlight consciousness. And the example she gave is like, right now, my job is to grade blue book exams. And that's what I should be doing. But my real life project is making sense of my life and having a fulfilling life and I would be better off taking a walk or mind wandering. So there's attention. There's

attention there between what the economy considers productive thought and what emotionally is productive

thought or creativity or what the economy should consider productive thought if it were smarter. It just, you can't quantify it on the hour to our level. One of the most interesting mind states for me is a mind state. I functionally only have when I am reading something on paper without screen distractions around me, which is it becomes my mind becomes highly associational and I'll be reading and then I'll look up and I'll have ideas. They're often not about the book

at all. It's like the book itself is a scaffolding of a certain kind of attention. But I'm aware and I'm awake and so I'm noticing other things. It is by far my most creative state. Do you have a pencil or pen in your head? Yeah. And it is achieved more easily on airplanes than anywhere else because they really don't have distractions but it can happen at a coffee shop but it won't happen if I'm looking at a screen. Right. And so it's made me think about how

“if we wanted humans to be more productive more creative more, I think a lot of our received”

beliefs about this are really wrong. We'd want to put people more in touch with their bodies. We'd want to teach them how to find states of open association and mind wanting you want to put yourself in the way of inspiration or often because it's not controllable in the way we wish it were. Completely agree. Kalina edited this book, the Oxford Companion to spontaneous thought and there is a history of spontaneous thought that looked at how incredibly creative people

composers novelists, how they spent their days and they only worked like four or five hours. They spent a lot of time in unstructured wandering walking and we all know there's a connection between creative thinking and walking. It's much more likely to break through if you're stuck in your writing or whatever else you're doing. If you get up from the desk and take a walk instead of just like worrying that problem. So yeah, we could reorganize our lives in a way but the one thing

we do know is how our phones or social media are bringing down that viewpoint, keeping us from looking up, keeping us from making associations because there's no time for association. You're just scrolling and something else comes in and you're getting another little hit and so we've shrunk in that space and it is a space of creativity and there's no reason we can't reclaim it but we have a lot of trouble doing it because these algorithms are really sophisticated and they

know how our minds work. Why do you most creative walking? I would say it's where I walk a lot, I walk in the Berkeley Hills and although even then I have to say half the time I fill my head, I have my AirPods on on listening to a novel or a podcast, listening to you when I could be, but let's not be too hasty and diminishing the importance of information on put here. Yeah, no, it is important. But anyway, and I have to remember to take out the AirPods and like

“listen to what's going on and we haven't talked about time in nature but that's I think a very”

hygienic space for consciousness is being off of all media while kind. As the book evolves, you start widening to less and less goal oriented theories of consciousness and one thing that is happening throughout the book that you're very attentive to

is first the number of scientists of consciousness, scientists of the mind who are now

sort of part of the reasons happening, so should be that surprising. And there's a selection by

us people know they can talk to me about their trips. Yeah, it's a crowd of quite a role you've created for yourself in public life. And to the way that is upending their theories of consciousness, I mean, you have a number of scientists who come in out through the book. We're saying,

“well, I thought this and then I had this experience and I think it's really interesting the”

felt experience of truth on something that people who up until that moment would only accept they could prove and were reducing everything to the proveable. Like they know they ingested a chemical and yet what that felt like was still not willing to dismiss. And so authoritative. Yeah, and you're

you're looting a cristoff coke who is a very prominent consciousness researcher. He was there

at the beginning when he and Francis Crick began on this quest to understand consciousness in the late '80s, early '90s. And he's an exemplary scientist and that he's changed his mind and profound ways several times. I find that doesn't usually happen among scientists, you know, that the saying that science changes one funeral at a time, not in his case. He went to Brazil and had a ayahuasca, a series of ayahuasca experiences. Now, this is the prototypical brain guy,

right? He ran the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle. He's been messing around with neurons and electrodes for years and years and years and years and assumed that the source of consciousness was going to be in the brain. He has this experience of mind at large. This is a term that comes from Aldous Huxley and the doors of perception that consciousness was outside of his brain. And I challenged him on it. And I said, well, but it's a drug experience and he would not take that as disproved or

or even reason for skepticism. And he used as an example a famous thought experiment, the Mary experiment. You have this brilliant woman who is the world's expert on color, on vision. And she knows everything there is to know about cones and rods and how the whole system works. But she lives in a completely black and white world. She steps out one day and has the

“experience of color. What has she learned? Right? What has been added to her stock of knowledge?”

And he said, I was like Mary and I had had this vision and nobody convinced me when I went back in the box of scientific materialism that it hadn't happened. It had happened. I was as sure as I have been of anything in my life. And now he's exploring idealism. What does idealism? Idealism is the philosophy that consciousness is a universal field. And that consciousness precedes matter. We automatically assume that matter is primary. Everything can be reduced to matter and energy.

And they can be reduced to each other. Idealism is known under you got to start with consciousness,

a matter comes second. The argument for it is there's nothing you know with more certainty than

consciousness. It's the thing you know directly. Everything else you know is inferred. You see through consciousness. So why is it that we privilege the thing we infer rather than the thing we know? Why do we privilege matters? The ultimate source of everything. I was like, now maybe a smarter person than me knows there's a logical fallacy there. I don't know. I don't see where it is. So the idealism theory is related to this idea. You bring it up in the book. I

think of the first person who had ever heard about this from this idea that the mind may be sort of like an antenna. Yeah, or a radio receiver. It's not generating the consciousness. It is receiving some kind of signal and then interpreting it. Yeah. And in the same way if you break a TV, it's not going to work. It's not going to work. But that doesn't mean the waves that it was absorbing are gone. Yeah. And you shouldn't look in the TV set for the weatherman. Right. I mean, you know,

that's kind of what we're doing. But it's channeling this information from the universe and that

“that's why the brain is involved in a critical way. And if you damage the brain, you damage”

consciousness or anesthetize the brain or whatever. But it's involved in a different way. And the evidence kind of works the same either way. Whether you say the brain generates consciousness or channels consciousness, it's hard to make a case that one is better than the other. You know, the term scientists use is that the consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, which sounds really scientific. But if you press, it's just Abercardabber. It doesn't really explain

anything. What is the difference between idealism and panpsychism? Panpsychism is the idea that every little bit, every particle has a quantum of consciousness of psyche. And that in the same way 200 years ago, we added electromagnetism to the stock of what reality consists of material reality

materialism was something added to it. It's a big price to pay for your theory that you're adding something completely new to the stock of reality. But you know, it solves the problem of where consciousness comes from, comes from everywhere. It was already here. So these ideas are, you know, they,

I mean, when I first learned about them, I thought these are crazy. But then you realize that materialism

is kind of hit a wall with consciousness studies. And that there is this gap that we can't seem to cross from a very good theory, like workspace theory to, well, wait a minute. When you say you're broadcasting to the whole brain, who's receiving that broadcast? You know, and then you have other people saying, well, consciousness is just an illusion. But an illusion is a conscious experience. So what about the subject? And that's where everybody starts waving their hands.

“What level of possibility do you assign to that? To what? I guess I there, but I think I'm thinking”

of the more novel brain is ready to receive her. I have to say I don't know. I, you know,

it's weird to spend five years on a book and come to an answer like that. But, you know, as I said at

one point, this is a book where you may know less at the end than you do at the beginning. But you'll know a lot of other things. It's a very fun tour. I told you at the beginning of this, I'd give you my theory of the book towards the end of our conversation. When we sat down around how to change your mind, your book on psychedelics, I told you that I thought that was a book about the mind posing as a book about psychedelics. And I kind of think this is a book about psychedelics posing as a book about the

mind. Because, and not to do violence to it, both were actually about their subject, but it is striking to me how often in this book. It's not just Coke. There is the scientist who is building, I think

“a robot trying to make consciousness and then does, I think, five million DMT and realize this is”

everything. It's love. Your, your mushrooms, there's a lot of people who note offhandedly that they are, there seems to be something here that it has caused a larger ontological shock. Then I think a stylized description of, well, you're just a chemical, of course, you'd a chemical experience would naturally. Totally unsatisfying explanation. Yeah. Well, I think that the interest in psychedelics is partly an interest in taking back our consciousness

and exploring it. Because one of the things that happens, you know, the day you do a psychedelic is not a day you're looking at your phone. It's a day that you've put a fence around if you're doing it right. You're not just walking around the streets and Manhattan, you know, tripping, but you're doing it with some intention. And you reclaim your mind for a period of time and and you explore it. And, you know, this idea of expanding consciousness, there's a line in

all this Huxley that I've always really liked. He believed in this transmission theory of consciousness,

which he got from Henri Barrickson, who really was the person who first put that forward, was that in normal times, our brains admit only the trickle of consciousness we need to get through the day to be productive, to do what we need to do, but there's so much more. And what he said psychedelics did is open what he called the reducing valve so that more consciousness got in. What was that consciousness? To him it was the mind at large. But I find it's also sensory

information, bodily information. I mean, sometimes trips are incredibly somatic and they're all about the body and other times they're about, you know, visual material. But it's ours,

“it's mine, right? Although some people go to a divine place about it. And so I think it's,”

you know, I'm just out there starting to talk about consciousness and I'm like, I'm curious that people are so interested in consciousness. Like, I didn't expect this when I started on this book. Really? Yeah, no, I didn't. And it seemed like a very academic topic. And, and I think two things have have changed that. One is the fact that I think we feel our consciousnesses are just full of bullshit right now. And so much stuff we don't want to be thinking about that we're thinking

about. And, you know, take phones away from kids and they're actually grateful even once they get over the shock of living without a phone for a day or while they're in school. Because our consciousness is under pressure from everyday life, capitalism and the need to succeed, you know, financially, we happen to have a president who intrudes on our consciousness for a lot more of the day than any of us have had experience before with previous presidents. So I think there's some desire to get

back to some more sovereignty around our consciousness. And psychedelics are part of that too.

a possible read definition of what it means to be human. On the one hand, we have all these animals

“and even plants that turn out to be conscious what we used to think was our special thing. And on the”

other side, we have these machines that are going to be smarter than we are. And some people think they'll be conscious, but whether they can or not, we're going to think they're conscious and act on that basis, which raises all sorts of problems. So who are we exactly? If we're not the smartest, most conscious being. And are we more like the animals who can feel and die and suffer or we more like the thinking machines who speak our language? You talk about consciousness as a reducing

valve, as a filtering mechanism of sensory experience. And we've talked a little bit about the

wider or more lantern like consciousness of children. I wonder how different the experience of being conscious in advanced modernity with a smartphone and a task list. And we are really training ourselves to narrow down to be successful in the economy. We have structured in much of the Western. They're not only Western world at this point. We have altered what it means to be human. And I wonder how much we've made the experience of consciousness increasingly un-satisfying by

like you can overtrain any muscle. And what we are doing, staring in a narrowed way to computer, I mean, there's all the written neuroscience on there. It's between wide gaze and narrow gaze, which I really feel when I look out over a mountain range and when I look at my phone, you can feel just shrinking of the shrinking and the tightening of the chest and the posture. The posture, screens. Yeah. We have narrowed how it feels to be human being. We have. But it's not too late.

You know, I mean, tell me about your consciousness sovereignty ideas as you're moving in here to consciousness hygiene. One of the things I've been talking a lot about protecting our consciousness and what a precious space of interiority we have. And it's this place of mental freedom. But I realize for some people going there, it doesn't feel good. That these are people who rumenate a lot. And I'm prone to that too, to a lot of rumination, which is, you know,

very circular thinking, often not productive. It keeps you focused on something, but not in a way that's making progress, usually. It's a spiral, maybe. But also realizing you can take some control over your consciousness and that we need to do more to defend it. And meditation is one great way. And as challenging as it can be, you feel like, here's my mind. With my mind, it might be painful, it might not be. But no one is telling me what to think. You know, we spend so much time thinking

the thoughts of other people and enduring the rants of other people and the obsessions of other

“people. Meditation is, I think, a really interesting way to kind of put a fence around your consciousness.”

You know, you put down your phone. You still have a pad because you're just trying to get rid of those to do things. But when it's working really well, there's a great pleasure in watching the, you know, the show go by and the things I wasn't expecting to think about, suddenly I'm an imagery and all this kind of stuff. I do have an internal life contrary to what that guy said. So sure you do Michael. We believe you for sure. You're not just a zombie here.

Something you said a minute ago, pinged for me, which is often people actually don't like being put in a room with their consciousness. There's a a famous old quote. I don't have this speaker in memory, but it says huge amount of the world's problems come from man's inability to sit in a room by himself. I remember as in a period of meditation a couple of years back and I sure I meditate a lot because a lot was happening in my life and I felt like I was just getting

more and more upset. And I remember talking to Will Capitzen, who's a great meditation teacher in

the Bay Area, who we both know, and he said to me something I've never forgotten. He said, "Oh,

you're not enjoying the process of insight." And I actually think this is part of actually a lot

“of things to say nothing of our president who I think is, cannot sit in a room alone with him,”

cannot sit in a room alone with himself. I think he's without it for constant distraction and ego reinforcement actually speaks to some complicated relationship he has of his own consciousness. It is sometimes

meditative retreat often have very difficult times. It can be, and I think usually is very profound and but you're often going through struggle. Yeah, one of the great lies about meditation is that it's peaceful. In fact, it's often very hard. Yeah, it's much more peaceful to distract yourself or peaceful may not be the word I'm looking for there, but we distract ourselves away from. Yeah. In terms of vegetation. I've been a lot of time in Nesthetizing ourselves and

“there's a kind of boredom that I think is generative that we don't experience anymore because we have”

all these amazing ways to fill that space. But that space was productive in its unproductive way

and we've given that up. So that's a space of consciousness too that we could easily reclaim. I think psychedelics are one way to take control of your consciousness. I mean, that's probably not the right verb because there's so much that's uncontrolled but it's all you. And I think that's one of the reasons that there's so much interest in it right now. You're blocking out a lot during a psychedelic experience as you go inside. So those are the kind of things, you know, I think we need

to think in terms of hygiene for this great gift we have. And what does hygiene mean here? Haging towards what? Keep it from being polluted. Keep it clean. Keep your consciousness from

you know, letting others dictate its contents basically. Is that a question of consciousness

“or of attention? Well, they're very closely related. I think attention is a subset of consciousness.”

So attention is part of it. Attachment is another part of it though. Our attachment? Yeah, emotional attachments. That's a big part of consciousness too. And that's now having one our attention. Now the companies are now going for our attachments with chat bots. I've just met people who are increasingly working on intentional liberation movements. The friends of attention being a good example of this, it just came out with a new book and I've met people creating schools on this.

And there is an interesting way, verbaling around a kind of sense that a intentional freedom is an increasingly political and structural question. I think we see it fairly clearly with our kids, but I think we know it with ourselves too. And it's very hard to think about how to create a coherent politics around it and activism around it. And also nothing is more fundamental, including to how politics works than what kind of attention you're cultivating in a society.

“Attention is a collective resources. I think is an underplayed frame for this.”

Attention is a collective capacity that is being exhausted by people like Trump by certain ways. The media and algorithmic media works. A society with a more irritable, distracted and diminished capacity for attention is going to be politically different than a society with a healthier formal. That's going to be easier to manipulate. Definitely. It's going to be angry. It's going to be angry. I mean, it's a space of freedom and you give up the space of freedom and you're thinking

other people's thoughts and you're much more vulnerable to manipulation. And if you really nurture your own mind and your own sense of consciousness, you're much less likely to fall for lies. You're much more likely to think independently. How do you think independently when you're scrolling? You don't. You react. But you're not setting the agenda. You're letting an algorithm set the agenda. But it is the nature of capitalism to intrude on more and more of our lives. More and more of our

time. There was an interview with the President of Netflix who is explaining in regard to competition over an acquisition or something like we're not competing with other streaming services. We're competing with your dream time. Yeah, this is Reed Hastings years ago. He said that our primary competitor is sleep. Yeah. It was one of the more dystopic things I've heard of CEO say. I know it really is. You know, they are competing with our part of our consciousness that wants to think

its own thoughts because there's more money to be made if we think their thoughts. I particularly loved the quota, the final chapter. You go spend time with Joan Halfax, a great Zen teacher. And she's a line in there that coming as it does at the end of its very heavy book. She says that she has divested herself from all meaning. Yeah. And you go to talk to her

and she basically sends you to a cave and puts all talking to you. Tell me a bit about that

experience and also what you took from that extremely Zen form of teaching. Yeah, well exactly you were gifted. Yeah, I mean, it was kind of an experiential coin, right? I'm like, I'm not going to I should have known she's Zen teacher that she would be allergic to concepts and interpretation and everything I wanted to do is like duh, you know. So I had met her once twice before. I had a

psychedelics. She was married to Stan Grough and administered huge doses of LSD to the dying

back in the 70s. And I thought I would go such a wild project. I know it really is. Although many people have been helped by this. I mean, it's one of the better applications of psychedelics I think is helping people with terminal cancer. But anyway, I was working on the self-chapter at the time. And you know, there's this Buddhist idea that the self is an illusion, which I've struggled with in various ways. I understand sort of how it's true, but yet self seems to be still working in my life.

And I wanted to talk to her about that and she had described her retreat center, which is called

Yupaya. It's in Santa Fe as a factory for the deconstruction of selves. It's like, oh, that sounds

“interesting. I should go get deconstructed. So that's why I went. And I got there and I spent a couple”

days with the add-ups and the monks. But then she said, you know, I think we should go up to the retreat. And she said, we'll go up there and you'll stay in the cave. And I'm like the cave. It's like that not my kind of thing. I'm not a camper. And she said, don't worry. It's a five-star cave. So we get there, and then after this 25-mile dirt road, and then there's another half-mile hike out to the cave. And there's no electricity and there's no running water. And somebody's dug into

this hillside, these caves, and with a glass door on one side, overlooking this meta. And there I was

for the next three or four days. And she kept ducking my interviews. And at one point she said, I've, I've divested a meaning. That's like, oh, shit. This is not good for the journalist conducting

“the interviews. But like a meditation retreat that you were describing, it is almost a psychedelic”

experience when you're alone with yourself. And the borders of self, attenuate. They become kind of more porous. You realize the extent to which our identity is selves is a social identity. And it's reinforced by everybody we talk to, because they're treating us like a self. So we must be a self. But if you're absolutely alone in the middle of nowhere, and you have no access to media, it's softens. And then I was meditating for hours at a time. And it was very interesting

because life became like a meditation. In fact, I had more profound meditations doing chores, you know, chopping wood and sweeping out my little cave, then I did when I was sitting on the platform. And it shifted my thinking about consciousness in this way. I had gotten caught in this frame, very Western, very male of problem solution, hard problem of consciousness solution. And I had trained my attention. I had narrowed, right? I had a focus on that question for five years

of really, you know, struggling to understand this. And I suddenly realized, well, there is the problem of attention, but there's also the fact of it. And the fact of it is so marvelous. And so astonishing and mysterious. And why aren't I paying more attention to that? Why aren't I being more present? One night, I woke up in the middle of the night to go out to pee, and there is it's a new moon and there's no light pollution at all. And the stars, this vault of stars,

is more numerous and more gorgeous than it's ever been. But it's not out there. It's reaching all the way down to me here that we occupy the same space, the same intergalactic blanket. And it was such a, all my kind of learned ways of looking at the starry sky. You know, we all have these predictions, right? The brain is a prediction machine, all the concepts and the frames just went away. And it was just kind of like me, stars, space. And you know, this is not such an unusual

experience, but it shifted my thinking from solving a problem to being within it. You talked earlier about the way this book has a quality of you read it, and maybe you know less. But it adds wonder. Yeah. And it made me think as I was going through different theories, you know, integrated information processing or whatever it's called, then, has sat, I'd be of any of them or true. If you could prove to me the global workspace theory was the truth of consciousness. If you could

“prove to me consciousness evolved and all the things I think are byproduct of an evolutionary”

process for reducing uncertainty, I would hate it. Well, you know, it's funny. This is the lesson

me about, you know, not knowing has its own power. And of course, it is an idea to cultivate

“the don't-know mind, and she's right. It does have a power, and that not knowing opens you”

in a way that knowing closes you down, and that we're very frustrated with not knowing. But it is the state, it is our existential predicament about many, many things, and getting comfortable with it. I mean, it was a long way to go for me to get comfortable with it, but getting comfortable with it, yes, more or more wonder in the phase of mystery. I got spliced to end. Also, I found a question, but if you're going to recommend to the audience, three books for you. Well, a book that was

“really influential in the writing of this book is a book called The Blind Spot. It's by a philosopher”

Evan Thompson and two physicists, Adam Frank and Marcelo Glyzer. It's a critique of Western science,

and it makes a very powerful case that the blind spot of the physical sciences is inability

to deal with lived experience. And so for science, you know, red is a certain frequency, and red to them is an illusion, because it's constructed in the brain. But they're pointing out that humans who experience red is a fact of nature like any other fact of nature, and you got to deal with it. So how does science deal with lived experience? It's a fantastic book.

Another book that was really influential, as I was working on the stream of consciousness, is

a stream of consciousness novel by Lucy Elman called Ducks Newburyport. It's a thousand pages, one sentence, and that sounds really daunting. And like, I'm not going to pick that up. You can open it anywhere you want, read 10 pages. You can listen to the audiobook. You can fall asleep, pick it up again. It's still there. It's like this pool. You can enter. And it's all the thoughts of this middle-class middle-aged woman who lives in Ohio as a home-baking business, and it's everything going on in

“her head, including scrolling on her phone. But you have to infer that because there's no”

nothing to orient you. But anyway, it's great fun and really funny and brilliant book. Lastly, there was a book about consciousness. There were several books on consciousness I like, but the one I want to recommend is being you by a Neil Seth. He's an English neuroscientist, and it's a book about the self, and he treats the self as a perception. And he's one of the great explainers of consciousness and mental phenomena in general. His TED talk about reality as a

controlled hallucination has been one of the most popular ever, and he discusses that here too, but it's a really good primer on consciousness with specific attention to the self. So those would be my three. Michael Paul, thank you very much. Thank you. Which includes Annie Galvin, Marie Casione, Marina King, Jack McCordic, Roland Who, Emma Keldek, and Yon Kobel, original music by Almanza Hota, and Pat McCusker,

audience strategy by Christiania Simuluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times has been an audio is Annie Rose Strasser.