Can a Plant, a Chatbot, or Your Gut Be Conscious? With Michael Pollan

In this special live episode, journalist and bestselling author Michael Pollan explains how a psychedelic experience “smudged the windshield” of his consciousness and started the search behind his new book, A World Appears. He explains the difference between sentience and consciousness and shares some surprising plant research: corn that solves mazes, plants that recognize their relatives, and anesthetics that knock out a Venus flytrap. Pollan’s exploration of consciousness reveals a central idea of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world. Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found. Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show. Visit unlikelycollaborators.com for more information. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 03:29 How psychedelics “smudged the windshield” 08:41 Are plants conscious? 16:03 Can machines be conscious? 18:53 Do we need a cortex to be conscious? 23:53 Materialism vs. idealism 33:17 The microbiome and embodied consciousness 34:53 Why the brain isn’t a computer 40:15 How gut bacteria shape the mind 48:55 Consciousness hygiene 55:00 The Perception Box question

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Consciousness is this incredibly precious gift we have, this space of complete mental freedom. It's very rare in the universe, as we know, and it is something that we are now, I think, squandering.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Elizabeth Koch. What's a perception box? It's this invisible mental box that each one of us lives inside, built from the material of our beliefs, life experiences, and the meaning we've made out of those experiences. You could think of it as a kind of reality filter that's constantly shaping how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us. This podcast explores how, although the walls of this box are always present, they can expand in moments of curiosity, awe, and wonder, or contract in response to fear, anxiety, and anger. Welcome, everyone, to this very special live episode of Science of Perception Box.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  I'm Elizabeth Koch, and I brought my copy of Michael Pollan's latest book, A World Appears. You can probably kind of like there. There's a few posts in here, and there's lots of hearts on all the posts, too. So, Michael asks questions in this book that, speaking of hearts, have captured my heart for a very, very long time. Why do we think what we think? Why do we feel what we feel? And what do we make of this I that's at the center of all of that? Those questions are also central to the perception box. Each of us experiences the world through a lens shaped by our beliefs, our biology, everything that we've lived through, and the meaning that we've made out of all of those events.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Michael's book made me even more conscious and even more curious about what's happening inside of that lens. So, please welcome our hosts, Heather Berlin, Christoph Koch, and our esteemed guest, Michael Pollan.

• 1:59Heather Berlin?

  So, hello, everybody, and welcome to the show. And thank you, Elizabeth. I'm your co-host, Dr. Heather Berlin.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  And I'm your other co-host, Dr. Christoph Koch.

• 2:10Heather Berlin?

  And we couldn't be more thrilled to have our special guest, Michael Pollan. He is a journalist and bestselling author of This Is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, and The Omnivore's Dilemma. And his latest book, his 10th book, A World Appears, investigates questions that I know has motivated Christoph, myself, and many of the people in this room and the people watching at home. What is consciousness? Do we need a brain or a body to experience this phenomenon? Is consciousness limited to human experience? Or does it feel like something to be a plant, or a lobster, or an AI chatbot?

• 2:53Heather Berlin?

  I'm thrilled to have this brilliant mind joining us to explore these questions. So, welcome, Michael.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Thank you, Heather. A very generous introduction. I appreciate it.

• 3:03Heather Berlin?

  Well deserved. So, I mean, Michael, you've written about a variety of different topics: food, plants, psychedelics, and now consciousness. So, what drew you to this subject?

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I have jumped around a bit, but each book sort of leads to the next in a funny way. There's always a little germ or sourdough starter that I can, I find, and I take forward to the next. And in this case, it was the psychedelic book. It was How to Change Your Mind. There is a way in which psychedelic experience defamiliarizes consciousness. You're suddenly aware of it. The metaphor I use is it's smudging the windshield. Normally, there's this perfectly transparent windshield. But once you smudge it by altering consciousness, you realize, wow, it's there. There is a windshield. There's a phenomenon mediating my relationship to reality. And why is it this way and not that way?

• 4:00Speaker 00

  So, suddenly, this cascade of questions occurred to me, and I thought, really? I mean, stupidly, you know, I'm gonna set out and see if I can answer some of these questions.

• 4:11Heather Berlin?

  So, for me personally, I mean, I started thinking about consciousness at five years old. Where do my thoughts come from? How can I keep them when I die? But you didn't even come to this until later in life.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Well, I did as a teenager. I had my, you know, reading Herman Hesse period, and...

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Siddhartha?

• 4:26Speaker 00

  Siddhartha, yeah, a bunch of his books. I just absolutely love them. And I was writing poetry, and, you know, I was very aware of consciousness then. But there's a way in which you kind of put it away to live your life.

• 4:42Heather Berlin?

  And if you're constantly contemplating consciousness, well, except for researchers that we have in the room, you know, it could interfere with just living and being conscious. But, you know, for thousands...

• 4:53Speaker 00

  There is self-consciousness.

• 4:54Heather Berlin?

  Yes, you're too self-aware. But philosophers and scientists and everyday people have been searching for the answers to this question, you know, for thousands of years. Philosopher Dave Chalmers coined the term "the hard problem", the "easy problem" of consciousness, which is basically, could we map every conscious perception we have to specific neurons firing in the brain?

• 5:15Speaker 00

  And the various functions.

• 5:16Heather Berlin?

  And the various functions, which is, you know, not that easy, but theoretically possible, versus what he called "the hard problem", which is, you know, basically, how does this physical piece of matter create subjective experience? But do you think that describing it in this way as a hard problem is kind of like defeatist in a way? Is it, does it affect our perception box of consciousness?

• 5:39Speaker 00

  I think it probably does. I found it persuasive when I first read it. I have such complicated feelings about it. I love his phrase, you know, "How do you turn the water of brain into the wine of consciousness?" And going from matter to mind is very difficult. It has to do with this intrinsic perspective versus the extrinsic perspective.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  So, why do you feel conflicted about it?

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's real, but, you know, I'm sensitive of the way problems get framed in science. And his framing has been so powerful for so many people. And I wonder if it isn't holding us back in some ways. I don't know what the alternative would be.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  Function. It's all function. That's what AI tells us. It's all function. Once you explain the functions, nothing more. Move on, folks, nothing, nothing more to see here.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Well, this idea that it's an illusion, too, is just, I've never understood.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, but that's the alternative.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  I guess that is an alternative.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  That's a dominant alternative today.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  I mean, it seems to be an illusion is a conscious experience. But I think consciousness poses unique problems to science and having to do with these two perspectives.

• 6:46Heather Berlin?

  There, you know, Dave also talked about, you know, he would say even just a simple thermostat has a little bit of consciousness, rather than something that's sort of uniquely human or even tied to animals. And so, what do you, what do you make of that framing?

• 6:59Speaker 00

  I'm not, I see a real, strong dividing line between living things and non-living things, stronger than he does, stronger than a lot of AI people, obviously, and stronger than like Michael Levin, the biologist who sees a continuum from machines. And he thinks all life also begins with a thermostat. I think life is special. And I also think that, you know, in the book, I make a distinction, and it's not just mine, but I found it very useful, between sentience and consciousness. Sentience being a more basement-level, simple form of consciousness.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  But it's still a form of consciousness.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is a form of consciousness. But when we hear the word consciousness, we think of self-awareness. We think of human consciousness, usually. And we're kind of imposing that idea on all the other creatures. But they have very different, you know, I think they have very different forms of sentience. Sentience is simply, I mean, the way I use it in the book is it's awareness of your environment and the ability to sense positive and negative changes and respond intelligently. And I think that may be a property of life. I don't think that's a property...

• 8:09Speaker 03

  The feeling of being alive, fundamentally.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, the feeling of being alive.

• 8:11Heather Berlin?

  But we can do very complex things, approach and avoidance behaviors, without consciousness, right? An amoeba can approach or avoid.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Oh, it's amazing what we can do without consciousness.

• 8:20Heather Berlin?

  Right, so why, you know, the fact that a plant will move toward the sun in a meaningful way doesn't necessarily mean that it has a feeling of sort of, you know, of that.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, I mean, sure, there's lots of automatic behavior, pre-programmed behavior. But there's also lots of intelligent behavior you see in plants. And in fact, I start the book, but as you know, looking at plants. Because I wanted a really hard case. I mean, I guess I could have looked at machines, too. But, and I do later in the book. But I was interested in looking at plants because I love plants, and I started out writing about plants. And I'm a gardener. But also, this is another way in which the psychedelics influenced me. I had an experience on psilocybin when I was working on How to Change Your Mind, in which the plants in my garden were clearly conscious. I mean, they were returning my gaze.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  They were, um, uh, they were just present in a way I'd never experienced. I generally don't know what to make of insights on psychedelics. Kristoff and I have talked about this, um, question. I, it seemed very real to me, but I also felt like I have to test this idea. It's so crazy and so out there. So I, it sent me down this, you know, really fascinating rabbit hole, looking at plant intelligence. And there's a whole group of scientists who call themselves plant neurobiologists. They're just trolling conventional botanists by saying that they know there are no neurons involved.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  They're suddenly trolling neuroscientists.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  They are. And partly because I had read William James on mystical experience. And he says at some point, we can't judge the metaphysical truth or, you know, of these kind of experiences people have. The, the test should be, are they, is it useful to believe this? He was a pragmatist. And also can you find other ways of knowing if you treat it as a hypothesis? So I treated it as a hypothesis, the plants are conscious. And then it started exploring and, and the research is fascinating. I mean, their plants are capable of so much more than I thought. You know, a, a corn plant can navigate a maze. If you put a little bit of fertilizer in one, one quadrant, it will find the shortest route to that fertilizer. They can, uh, recognize self and other in a pot.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  If you, if you put two plants in the same pot and they're genetically related, um, they will share a space. And if they're not, they'll compete for it.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Slime can do a lot of similar things.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Slime molds. Yeah, they can, they can calculate, they do computations. Um, I mean, the more you look at simple life forms, you realize they're not so simple and they have capabilities. And the idea that everything can be pre-programmed, like phototropism is, doesn't hold up. Cause there are novel situations you can put a plant in and it will come up with intelligent solutions.

• 11:06Heather Berlin?

  But again, but intelligence is, and I'm just playing devil's advocate here.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Intelligence is not consciousness. I agree.

• 11:10Heather Berlin?

  And, and, and, you know, and Dave would also argue, you know, the zombie, you can do many, many behaviors that are intelligent.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:17Heather Berlin?

  And, and animals and bees, and that's to say that they're not conscious. But now we're, when we go down to plants, we're talking about something without a nervous system. Just because they can do intelligence thing, doesn't mean we have to make the leap to say that they have feelings.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  They can remember, I mean, without neurons, they somehow, you, you can teach a plant something. You can teach a mimosa pudica, the sensitive plant, uh, to condition it not to respond to a certain kind of stressor. And it will remember for 30 days, but it doesn't have to react when that happens. So where is that being held? Where is that, where is?

• 11:46Speaker 03

  So that's a mechanistic question. Where's the memory being held? There must be some substrate, but what is it about life? Is it all life? So anything that's alive that evolved is conscious. And what is it about life that makes it conscious? Okay, sentient. What, what is it about life that has this uer, uer form of consciousness?

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Well, I think that living things have to, uh, they have to navigate a very challenging environment. Things are constantly changing. Um, so if you had a fixed set of solutions, you know, programmed by your genes, you were, you would run into trouble. I think evolution works a lot better or, or creatures fare a lot better when they're, you know, cognitive beings that can solve problems. You need a certain amount, uh, you know, yes, intelligence can do that. And you can automate all sorts of things. I mean, most of what we do is automated, but there are areas where you need, it's very useful. That sentience becomes this very useful tool, um, to help you be aware of what's happening in your environment and figure out what to do.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  But there are many situations, like when you meditate, you stare at a wall for an hour. Nothing changes, yet you would still for an entire hour see.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Stay conscious.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  Oh, and see that wall. So you can completely predict it, you know, falling predicted, yet you can focus on your breath, you know, in and out, completely predictable. Yet you're always conscious. You can be chronic pain, where you suffer, where you suffer so badly, people shoot themselves, right? But you, it's completely predictable, yet you're highly, highly conscious of that pain. So it can't just be this predictive processing idea that you want to predict that conscience all about, you know, the deviation from the expected, uh, norm.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  It's a mystery, it doesn't turn off at various times. I mean, it does when we sleep, obviously you're an anesthetic.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Well, it's a mystery that doesn't turn on most of the time. I've looked at you for the past 10 minutes and you're still there, blue jacket and all. You don't suddenly disappear because you've become predictable to me.

• 13:41Heather Berlin?

  I guess this leads to the question of, first of all, does, does it need to be a biological system that it evolved in? And, and, and also does it need to be tied to the brain?

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Well, we're getting, we're going to get a test of that. I mean, you know, with AI and the efforts to make AIs conscious. But just one more thing on plants, I just, just as a thought experiment. Um, one of the things that really I found most amazing was the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out, put plants out. And most people might think plants are already out, but they're not. They're, they have behaviors, they're just very slow. And if you put them in a bell jar and you put some xenon gas or some other nitrous oxide or whatever, a carnivorous plant that would normally snap shut when an insect crossed its threshold will not react. And a mimosa pudica will not react. Okay, that's interesting. It tells us something about anesthesia maybe, but you have to ask yourself, if there are these two states of being for this,

• 14:36Speaker 00

  for this creature, what is lost when it responds to the, I won't say is unconscious, but you know, responds to the anesthetic. There's some change, there are two states there and what is that other state?

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Some function.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  What?

• 14:50Speaker 03

  There's certainly loss of function in this anesthetized state for the plant. Like the Venus trap, it, it doesn't close anymore. But, but what you're asking is there's some interior intrinsic loss.

• 15:01Heather Berlin?

  It doesn't feel like something to be a rose.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  No, I mean, how can we say, you know? I mean, we absolutely can't say, uh, and I'm not prepared to say that plants have experience, but I think they have this very simple form of awareness and I can.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  But that is a form of experience.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  I guess awareness does imply.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  What, if you feel like something, even just very dim, I'm alive versus I'm not alive anymore. That is a primitive form of experience. In fact, when you travel from now, let's say to China, you wake up in the whole middle of the night, completely jet lagged, completely discombobulated, you don't even know you're Michael, you don't even know you're man. But sort of you, you know, you're alive, there's something there. I mean, that's sort of, that, that's to me, it seems like sentience.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:45Heather Berlin?

  I mean, it leads to the question, so there's, you know, a couple of questions here. Do you need a nervous system? And maybe, maybe not. Do you need, does it need to be a biological, you know, organic system? And based on your survey in the field, you know, you've, you've, you've delved deep into the research and what is your take?

• 16:03Speaker 00

  My take is it does need to be a biological system, but I'm prepared to be, you know, proven wrong. I mean, you know, when I started this book, this was a, a question of interest to a small number of people relatively, even though it's a universal.

• 16:17Heather Berlin?

  We're all interested.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  No, everybody is, but people don't think about it. It has no, it's, it's not topical, right? People have been thinking about this for 2,000 years. And then chat GPT came out in, uh, 2022. And that same year, Blake Lemoine, the, uh, engineer at Google, uh, went public with the fact that he was convinced Lambda, their, the name of their chatbot at the time was, uh, was conscious, was, was a person.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  For your book?

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Yes, I interviewed him for the book. And suddenly this issue of, you know, can be, can machines be conscious was thrust to the fore? And it was not something I was expecting to deal with and having to explore. I think we're going to learn a lot from the effort to make a conscious AI. I, I don't think it will pan out, but I could be wrong. I'm, or I don't think it will pan. What?

• 17:03Speaker 03

  How would you know whether it pans out or not?

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Well, there's a reportability issue. How will we know if they're conscious? And the problem is, of course, we're, we're all going to be fooled. Um, they're very good at, at fooling us. And, and that, I think that's going to be an enormous problem.

• 17:18Heather Berlin?

  But that's why it's so important that we as neuroscientists have agreed upon theory of what consciousness is.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  Good luck.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, and then a way to test for it.

• 17:28Heather Berlin?

  And then a way to test for it, because of course we'll be, I mean, right now they're just simulations, right? And so it's according to what we understand about consciousness and it's not conscious, but what would it mean?

• 17:38Speaker 00

  But ask the 72% of American teenagers who are turning to AI for companionship. And a lot of them will tell you it is conscious.

• 17:46Heather Berlin?

  And then at what point does it matter if everybody is fooled?

• 17:48Speaker 00

  That's what I'm worried about. If every, you know, if the simulation is that good. Um, but I still think it matters and I think we have to learn how to test. I, I think, um, Susan Schneider had an interesting idea for how to test for consciousness in a machine, which was build a chatbot from the ground up, exclude from its training set, the whole human conversation about consciousness. The, and I would add.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  No novels, huh? That means no novels.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  No novels, no posts.

• 18:16Heather Berlin?

  Especially not your book, definitely not.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Only tech manuals.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Exactly. And then, and then have a conversation about consciousness with it. And my guess is it will not be nearly as good as Claude is today.

• 18:27Heather Berlin?

  But now what if we build a neuromorphic computer? What if we build a physical system?

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Or a quantum computer? I mean, so we're just talking about silicon based computers right now. I have no idea in those cases.

• 18:38Heather Berlin?

  Okay, let's just go back to the human brain for a moment. Do you think we need a cortex? You know, Mark Soames put forth this, now I'm just going to lay, I debated Mark Soames on this issue. And, and we won according to the audience vote, because I think the science was on my side. But he, you know, he came up with this idea that, you know, we don't need a cortex for consciousness, that it's just about feeling and that consciousness, it, it is conscious, it's in the brain stem. And I, and I think you, you've had conversations with him about this. So what's your, what's your take on that?

• 19:06Speaker 00

  So I found the, this line of research very interesting and persuasive. And it really starts with Antonio Damasio. And, um, he directed our, our, our focus away from the cortex, especially initially with regard to decision making, to the brain stem and to feelings. And this idea that consciousness begins with these, what, what they both call homeostatic feelings. These are feelings related to, uh, our blood sugars, our hunger, our, our temperature. Yeah, and itch and all these kind of very simple things. And that, that register in the upper brain stem. And then the cortex is recruited later to help. Solve the problems. And I thought, I found that very interesting.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  I think the question, there's a question whether feelings and thoughts are fundamentally different things. And they would argue, I think that they are. And that feels right to me. It's funny, I put this question to Dave Chalmers, and he saw no distinction. It's just information. And between thoughts and feelings. I think feelings are, you know, dependent on the body. And I, and I do think that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon, like so many other things that we've, you know, isolated in our brain.

• 20:21Heather Berlin?

  But the representation, so, well, I agree, you know, the start of the feelings begin in these lower, you know, in the brainstem areas, but they're then, you know, even just our representation of our body and our feelings of our body, or you need the cortex to kind of have the conscious experience of that.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Including just the feeling of being alive?

• 20:38Heather Berlin?

  I would argue that, yeah. I don't know if Kristoff, you disagree?

• 20:41Speaker 03

  Well, of course, I also believe in the primacy of cortex. However, experimentally, we have the problem. If you have a patient whose entire, who has massive cortical damage, let's say, due to hemorrhage, you can't talk to the patient, right? The patient's in a deep coma, it's very difficult to interact with them. So how would we know that the patient may feel a little, still have some little feeling of pain or of, you know, being extreme discomfort? That would be empirically, just to demonstrate some epistemic humility, ruling that categorically out would be extremely difficult.

• 21:16Heather Berlin?

  Well, Mark, use the argument of these anencephalitic children, right?

• 21:20Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:20Heather Berlin?

  But, but when you really look a bit closer, first of all, they're born that way. So there's some recruitment and there's, you know, neuroplasticity of recruiting other areas that otherwise would have been, you know, brainstem-like, like areas that become sort of cortical-like areas. And there's a little bit of cortex actually kind of there. And so it's a very unique case, but, but normally if you take a fully grown adult and, you know, and then even, we've had discussions about, you know, Terri Schreiber case where you have these, you know, extreme areas of brain damage, and it looks like she's orienting to, you know, and seeing things, and we, we are interpreting it as such. But then when you look at her brain, like she isn't, the cortex, the visual cortex was gone, she wasn't seeing anything. So you get these reactions.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  A reflex.

• 21:59Heather Berlin?

  A reflex that.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  And we tend to anthropomorphize.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  It's difficult to fundamentally rule out that, that if you're just a brainstem, that it doesn't feel a little bit like something in these.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Well, what about pain? You know, you, you don't need a cortex to feel pain, right?

• 22:14Heather Berlin?

  Well, I think you do. I would say, I would say, you know, it starts in the PhD.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Whether they feel pain, if they don't have a cortex anymore, they can't move.

• 22:21Heather Berlin?

  You can modulate the pain networks in the brain, you know, with these Shaolin monks and things that we've looked at in our imaging, where they can down-regulate these pain circuits in the brain and then not feel, in the cortex, and not feel pain. Yeah, there's gateways that come up through the brainstem, but then I would argue the conscious instantiation of the feeling of pain happens in the cortex. And you can actually down-regulate those areas.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  In fact, one operation for, to get rid, relieve chronic pain is when you go into the anterior cingulate and cut and remove that lesion that, and then you ask the next day, the patient, you still feel pain? Yes. You care about it? No. So there is this bizarre dissociation that clearly implicates, in this case, cortex, where they seem to have a pain experience, but the valence is completely gone somehow.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Fascinating.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  Single automy. This is one of the standard ways to deal in some cases with chronic pain, single automy. So it's, that seems to imply.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Some involvement.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:20Heather Berlin?

  I'm going to talk about, this just brings me to the evolution of you, Kristoff, and your views on consciousness and.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  My evolution?

• 23:25Heather Berlin?

  Yes, your evolution as a scientist. Because, I mean, first of all, already just now, talking about, well, it's possible that it all, it could happen just in the brainstem is a novel.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  The older I guess, the more I learn, the less confident I am.

• 23:37Heather Berlin?

  Okay, that's good. So, so we've had this debate, and, and I'm curious where you stand on this, Michael. You know, the mainstream neuroscience view, in this field, which you were very prominent in helping to start the, you know, search for the neural colets of consciousness. But the mainstream neuroscientific view is very materialist. You know, consciousness comes from the brain, and you can see when you have changes in the brain, you have changes in consciousness. And, but you've evolved to this more.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Advanced form.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Enlightened.

• 24:07Heather Berlin?

  Alternative form? An idealist perspective, that consciousness is fundamental. And this is, you know, I also debated Deepak Chopra, and he had this same view, that consciousness is first, and that consciousness instantiates matter versus the, the other way where matter creates consciousness. So you've come to this perspective, and we can talk about it a little bit more in depth. But, you know, Michael, I'm curious what your take is on this issue.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Of idealism, of consciousness?

• 24:34Heather Berlin?

  Materialism versus idealism. Is consciousness fundamental? And then.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  So I, I started out from a pretty strongly materialist point of view. I simply assumed, this was the metaphysics I was raised on, and I was taught in school, and surely consciousness is the product of brains, and it emerges somehow from a certain arrangement of neurons. That, that's kind of where I started out. And, you know, the, the whole story of this journey I was on, it was raising doubts about this in various ways, or feeling that, gee, science has really hit a, hit a brick wall here. I mean, consciousness science is, is a, is a huge challenge to science per se. And so, you know, looking at all the theories of consciousness and, and their limitations and where the field is, has left me feeling that an open mind is required at this point,

• 25:23Speaker 00

  and that there may be, we, we should entertain other ideas. And, and these are ideas I thought as really far-fetched, panpsychism, for example, idealism.

• 25:34Heather Berlin?

  But is it just because you don't know the, you know, the god of the gaps kind of, you don't know what the scientific explanation is, so you assume there's something?

• 25:41Speaker 00

  And we may, and we may come up with a materialist explanation, it's not out of the question. But I, I think we, we make a mistake by limiting ourselves to materialism in, in this quest. I mean, why limit ourselves? It's worked for a lot of things, but.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Well, people say, why? Because science is by far the best tool we have to manipulate.

• 25:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, but science and materialism are not identical.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  No, but most people.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Science, science could have a different metaphysics.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  It just happens to have this one. I mean, they're, I mean, they're good, not just happens, there are good reasons for it. People working in biology are, are more wedded to materialism than physicists, for example. They're like, they've given up on ma, understanding matter as matter, and they have all sorts of questions about what's going on with matter. While biologists, I, I think have been historically more constrained, because they have, they have a stable paradigm called evolution, right? Darwinian evolution. I mean, one of the, the subtext of this book is a story about science and what it can and cannot do, the way we've organized it since Galileo, to focus on the third-person

• 26:49Speaker 00

  perspective and leave the first-person perspective to the church, that was the soul. These were fateful decisions, and we still live in their shadow. And they may be limiting how we, we think about this. I was very influenced in writing this book by my reading of a book called The Blind Spot by Evan Thompson, Marcelo Gleiser, and Adam Frank, two physicists and one philosopher. And it's a very provocative book. You know, they haven't solved the problem. They, they've kind of diagnosed a problem. They don't really have a prescription yet, except to find ways to bring phenomenology, lived experience into third-person science. And that's very hard to do.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  But you have to deal with phenomenology if you're, if you're going to deal with consciousness.

• 27:36Heather Berlin?

  But as somebody who, you know, I've wanted my whole life for consciousness to exist outside of the brain, because fear of death, I'd love my consciousness to go on, but, but also being aware of, you know, having an understanding that we are have, we're so subjective, and we have this phenomenology, but it's so subjective in that, and, you know, science is one of the best ways to get to objectivity, to get around this subject. Because you might have one idea of what consciousness is via your personal subjective experience, and he might have another, and I have another. How do you get to truth? And I think science is one of the best ways that we have, that we've developed to get at it.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  But science doesn't have to assume, as Michael said, that, that it, only physicalism is true, as, as Michael just pointed out. Physicists now reject realism, the idea that there's a matter of the fact about the world without, that's true, eternally true, independent of the observer. They now reject look, you know, local interactions. So that's, that's not my grandfather's materialism anymore. That's very, very different view, and we really haven't come to grips with, with that view yet. And in, in biology, this very strong instinctual rejection, oh, no, that's all BS. I know what it is. It's, it's matter, and that's all there is. And somehow, if I can't explain it, then I'm going to cancel it. I mean, that's essentially what, what people like Dan Dennett, bless his soul, you know, ironically, you know, I said, cancel it.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  You're all confused about it. You, you know, you're not in pain and love. All there is is behavioral disposition, you know, it's behavior and all of that. There's nothing else above and beyond that.

• 29:06Heather Berlin?

  But that's an extremist view. There has to be something in between.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  But it's very popular. It's very popular. It's not extreme if you're in terms of sociology or philosophy.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  Because it solves the problem.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  And people are hungry for a solution.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, because then you don't have to worry about all the voodoo stuff, experience.

• 29:19Heather Berlin?

  So do you believe that your consciousness exists after you don't, you no longer have your brain matter?

• 29:24Speaker 00

  No, I have trouble accepting that.

• 29:27Heather Berlin?

  Okay.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  But that's, you know, that's not a scientific opinion or even an informed opinion. That's a temperamental.

• 29:33Heather Berlin?

  So how do we, then how do we get to truth on this question?

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Well, we, we recently had an attempt. We had the adversarial collaboration, you know, and that was supposed to.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  That worked out great.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it worked out really well.

• 29:46Heather Berlin?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  And, you know, I, it's funny, when I started this book, I thought, oh, that's the frame for this book. This is fascinating. They're having this, you know, this death match with theories of consciousness.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  It was going to be a Boudia Tassell collaboration?

• 29:58Speaker 00

  It was, it was gonna, I, I thought that, and I interviewed everybody at Templeton, and that's when I found my way to you at the beginning.

• 30:05Heather Berlin?

  Initial meeting about how do we plan this?

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:07Heather Berlin?

  What do we, yeah.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  And, and I thought, oh, this, I have my narrative right here. And then I was like, didn't take long for that to fall apart.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  So that was one effort. It's kind of founded.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  Why do you think that's so in your opinion? I'm interested because me and a number of people in the audience were involved in that.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, it was not going to directly test consciousness. It was essentially a neural correlate experiment. And even that.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  Because that's the only thing we could agree, we all.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Could agree on.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  Could agree on.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. So designing these experiments is not, is obviously not easy. And then even in that, the results were kind of equivocal. So anyway, I was disappointed for my own narrative reasons that it didn't produce more. But I don't know how you go about testing idealism. I really don't. I think that's a huge challenge. I see signs that science and biology is willing to entertain some alternatives to materialism right now. I mean, they're little glimmers. I was very struck by the work I talk about in the book of Michael Levin, the biologist at Tufts. And he does really interesting work that has shown that there can be memory without neurons

• 31:23Speaker 00

  and that you don't need DNA necessarily to organize a living creature. He creates these xenobots. The xenobots are new organisms created from the skin of tadpole cells that he puts in a solution, nutrient solution, and freed of their day jobs as skin cells. They clump together and they repurpose their cilia and they start swimming around. They only last about a week. But they come up with an organization that's not dictated in their DNA, by their DNA at all. And he can condition them and things like that. And so they've somehow store memory too. His project, in a way, is de-emphasizing both the neuron and DNA. So it's a pretty bold project.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  And he does it using planaria also, these little worms that can regenerate. They're amazing. You chop off their head, they grow a new head. Drop off their tail, they grow a new tail. He can teach them something, chop off their head, they regrow their head and they remember. So they're storing the memory somewhere else. I, you know, I would ask him, so how's this all work? And he recently published an essay, and I'm curious to see how much shit he gets for it, where he basically says that there may be patterns that just pre-exist everything, the way there are in math, essentially platonic patterns that guide evolution in some ways, that may have things like intention or agency or I don't know what else.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  And that we ingress these patterns, we draw on them. And in his view, machines will be able to draw on them too. It's a pretty wild idea, but for someone of his standing to be willing to put forward ideas like that is a sign of either desperation or openness on the part of science.

• 33:13Heather Berlin?

  But we're still talking about biological systems, which brings me to, you know, we also have, we're embodied, we have a microbiome, right? We have, what is it, 30 trillion?

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Bacteria.

• 33:25Heather Berlin?

  Bacteria that live with us.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  More genes in our gut than in our, anywhere else.

• 33:29Heather Berlin?

  Amazing, right? And that must inform our consciousness in some way. We live amongst these other living beings. We are biological beings. Perhaps that's related to our gut feelings or intuition. And that's different than these AI systems, right? So, you know, again, we're talking about conscious and biological beings. I mean, do you think that biology is important? And these other systems that are, or the glial cells and all this other, you know, it's not just about the neurons, is important in consciousness? Or is it just the information processing? Or, you know, that we, it can be in any, any kind of type of matter?

• 34:05Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I looked at this question. I was very intrigued by, you know, these claims that AI could be made conscious and that people actively working on it, some in secret and some openly. Mark Somes is someone who has an experiment. He's put together this international team of computer scientists and biologists, and they're trying to make a conscious AI. And I followed that closely. I was, I was allowed to go to their meetings on Zoom. I think it's crazy. I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think the way he's doing it's going to work.

• 34:36Heather Berlin?

  I don't think we should be trying to do it, first of all.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  There's that too.

• 34:39Heather Berlin?

  I think this is very dangerous.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  I don't think we want a conscious AI. But I make an argument in the book, why I don't think it will happen, at least on silicon-based computers. And to briefly review it, all the people in Silicon Valley who believe computers can be conscious eventually, and most of them do, which is alarming in itself, subscribe to the idea of what's called computational functionalism. And that consciousness is essentially a computation and it can be performed on any number of different substrates. It can be on, you know, brain matter, but why, why limit it to that? I think that this idea is based on a faulty metaphor. And that is the metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are certain ways in which the brain is like a computer.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  It does perform computations, for example. But if you press on that metaphor, it falls apart really quickly. For example, one of the most important features of computers as we know it is this, is this sharp separation between hardware and software. And that there, in the brain, there's no distinction between hardware and software. Every memory, every experience is a physical change to the brain. So the idea you could somehow extract the software and do something else with it from the hardware just doesn't hold up. Neurons are like transistors in this one way that is the only way they talk about, which is to say that they fire or they don't fire. But there's so much else going on with neurons.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  I mean, you guys know better than me. I mean, they exist in a chemical environment that influences their behavior. And they're affected by oscillations, you know? So they're, they're, they're digital in one way, but they're very analog in other ways.

• 36:21Heather Berlin?

  So I would say you're like me, which Kristoff has labeled the biochauvinist.

• 36:27Heather Berlin?

  Right?

• 36:27Speaker 00

  Or speciesist, as Larry Page has called people like us.

• 36:31Heather Berlin?

  You know, I had a conversation with Larry Page about consciousness and I, and he sort of was like, I don't understand the problem. I said, well, like just pain, the feeling of pain. He said, well, we can just put that into the algorithm. It's just an algorithm, like.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Well, so will the pain of a computer be anything like human pain? I would argue that pain and, and many other feelings depend on having a body and perhaps even more.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  What about a Tesla? What about a computer and a Tesla?

• 36:55Speaker 00

  What about it? It can crash and, oh, it has a body.

• 36:58Heather Berlin?

  Sensors.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  But it's not a, it's not a vulnerable body. It's like a metal body.

• 37:03Heather Berlin?

  But we can easily create a, you know, robot body.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  We're making robots.

• 37:07Heather Berlin?

  That can feel.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  And I, I talk about a character in the book, Kingston Mann, who is a student of Demacio's, or was a student of Demacio's, who's, who completely accepts this framework that, you know, feelings are key to creating, generating consciousness. So his solution to making a conscious machine is, is a robot with skin that tears and can be damaged in some ways. And he's going to load it up with sensors so it really feels it. I don't think those will be real feelings. See, I think Chalmers is wrong. I think there are some important distinctions between thoughts and feelings. And that the simulation of a thought is as good as the thought. He can play chess or, you know, do, you know, whatever it is.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  But the simulation of a feeling is more like the simulation of a weather system. It's not going to get you wet.

• 37:55Heather Berlin?

  I'm on board with you, but I think Kristoff might disagree. So this idea that consciousness is substrate independent, that it can be, that if you think it's fundamental, does it need to be instantiated in a biological system? Or what's your, what's your latest take on this question?

• 38:12Speaker 03

  Even if you adopt an idealist position like Bernardo Costanza has argued for, that he would never say the brain isn't necessary. Of course, we know the brain is necessary for you to have consciousness. If I, you know, put a hole in your brain, it was a bullet, you're going to be unconscious. There's no doubt about it. But he said ultimately, the brain is just the way mind looks under a particular appearance, right? All of matter is, is sort of mind seen from a particular vantage point. And then there are particular, these types of experiences, you know, called mystical experience, during which this dissociative boundary that surrounds, that separates my mind from your mind and from your mind dissolves. And then exactly people report they become one with everything.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  And that's where we originally came from.

• 38:59Heather Berlin?

  Just the hallucination or an experience that's being produced by your brain being in a different neurological state?

• 39:04Speaker 03

  It's all a big illusion, you know, that's a denet. Or you could accept it at face value and you could try to say, well, how does it relate to the underlying substrate? Or you can, like I R T does, or you can say like an idealist, well, what that shows, what that demonstrates is a possibility James alluded to. Ultimately, there's only mind and matter is a, is a manifestation of.

• 39:25Heather Berlin?

  So then can this mind be connected to a non-biological system?

• 39:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know what idealism has to say about that. I guess depends on the structure of that, of that, of that substrate.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  So then there are these filter theories of consciousness that go back to James and Henri Bergson and are consistent with that idealism, I think. And that is the idea, you do need a brain and the brain is like the TV receiver or the radio receiver. And it is channeling consciousness that exists outside the brain. You know, that's a very attractive theory, but I have no reason to believe it's true.

• 39:59Heather Berlin?

  So it's wishful thinking. I want that to be true. I want desperately for consciousness.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  The trouble is no way to disprove that because every time I find a correlate, right? When I see, so here's a neuron that fires every time you see Jennifer Aniston.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Okay, you can say, well, that's just, you know, the consciousness.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  Coming from out there, yeah.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  Out there and that happens to be picked up by that neuron. So I don't know, I don't find that a particularly useful.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  Idea, at least that doesn't lead to any further experimental insight. But maybe we can drill a little bit more on the question you asked about, about this microbiome, these 30 trillion. What do they do for mind, if anything?

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, we don't really know, but we know they're doing something.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  How do we know?

• 40:39Speaker 00

  So, so I'm, I'm researching, I'm reporting right now for a project about the microbiome, which is something I've written about before and have been fascinated by for a long time, but got more fascinated because of this embodiment idea. It's another attack on neurons that I'm, that I'm waging.

• 40:55Heather Berlin?

  Poor neuron.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  The poor neuron. The neurons have looked out for themselves.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Billion. Compared to 30 trillion bacteria, give us a break.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:05Heather Berlin?

  You're a bacteria chauvinist.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  You know, I mean, we are very cerebrocentric, right? I mean, in 500 years, if we're still around, people will look back and say, boy, they were really obsessed with this thing in their heads. And, you know, for a long time, you read literature in history, you know, people thought that emotions came from the spleen and came from the stomach and came the heart and the pineal gland. We've distributed this consciousness around the body at various times. So, right now, there's a lot of interest in the microbiome and its relationship to the mind. So, there's a lot of speculation still. There's, but there's some very suggestive evidence. For example, various mental disorders have a distinct signature in the microbiome.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  There is a depressed person's microbiome. There is a Parkinson's microbiome. There is an autism.

• 41:58Heather Berlin?

  We actually were going to do experiments where we implant fecal matter to help treat OCD from healthy people to the OCD patient. But, yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Well, you were gonna do it, and then what happened? FDA didn't like the idea?

• 42:09Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, it's a long story.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  If you take the fecal contents of people with these disorders and transplant it into mice, the mice will exhibit those symptoms.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Fecal transplantation.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Yes. And the mice will act as though they'll have, they'll develop a tremor. In the case of the Parkinson's, they'll, they'll develop social anxiety. In the case of the autism, and that's quite stunning. I mean, really, it doesn't necessarily say that there's, you know, that the causality, the line of causality is not clear. It's probably more of a loop than anything else. But that is what people are testing now.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Well, at least it's, it's true. That seemed to imply that at least in mouse, you can go from the microbiome that you just injected from the patient.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Yes, to that mental disorder.

• 43:01Heather Berlin?

  Yeah.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Up the vagus nerve into the brain.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, the vagus nerve is, is definitely implicated in this, but there are other ways that some of these metabolites can get into the brain.

• 43:11Heather Berlin?

  You know, there's researchers now, so one thing that's problematic is that we are losing a lot of our microbiome and.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Oh, we have, we have just completely depleted it.

• 43:22Heather Berlin?

  Right, with antibiotics and things. So, there's researchers now that are going to these, you know, isolated tribes in these areas that still have.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Hadza in Africa, and there's a group in Venezuela. And we've, we now know what the primordial microbiome looks like, and it's very different than.

• 43:40Heather Berlin?

  And they're trying to now build these bio banks or whatever. They're preserving the, right?

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, they have a big stash of Hadza microbes in, at Stanford. And they're, and they're starting to do some interesting experiments. So, compared to them, they'll have like 1,300 species, and we'll have 500 or 600 species. We've, we've lost a lot to antibiotics, as you say. Generally sanitation, which is of course had a public health benefit, but the downside of it has been compromising the microbiome. The diet, ultra-processed food is terrible for the microbiome. First of all, I mean, you're, you're trying to make food that doesn't go bad. What does that mean? You're, you're killing bacteria or keeping them from growing. And then you have emulsifiers in the food that are shredding the gut lining.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  We haven't taken the, the gut microbiome into account when we're approving pesticides, when we're approving food additives, or when we're doing the dietary pyramid, you know? We, we don't think about it, but we need to.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a recent discovery, the last 50 years.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, we, yeah, we didn't know much about it. And we didn't know why it was important to eat fiber, for example. You know, we thought it was for, you know, constipation and things like that. But it's really because that's what these microbes like to eat. And they like to eat many different kinds of fiber. So, in terms of affecting our mood, I think what's really interesting as an evolutionary matter is how many really important metabolites or, or chemical production we have outsourced to these bacteria who have their own agendas. You know, they're making neurotransmitters. They make glutamate, they make GABA. Am I pronouncing that right?

• 45:23Heather Berlin?

  GABA, yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  GABA. They make serotonin, although that serotonin doesn't get into the brain. But they make the, the precursors of serotonin, they make tryptophan. They're making like these really important chemicals we rely on. And somewhere along the line, it was just more efficient to let them do it than to do it ourselves. But a lot of these chemicals do have effects on the mood. And especially like butyrate is the short term, the short fatty acid. It's very important to mood and anxiety. And all sorts of inflammatory chemicals or anti-inflammatory chemicals. So, yeah, there's, I mean, the whole idea of gut feelings and gut check and all that is, is real.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  One of the cooler experiments I came across that really shows how the mind and body are more intimately connected than at least I thought is an experiment done on moral disgust. Disgust is an interesting emotion because it's here and we feel it here, too. And so, these researchers had this clever idea. They had divided two groups. One got a capsule or a series of capsules with placebo in it. One got a series of capsules with ginger in it. Ginger calms the stomach. They took their capsules, and then they were presented with these morally repugnant scenarios involving incest and the eating of one's pets and things like that.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  The ones who had ginger were much less judgmental.

• 46:54Heather Berlin?

  Wow.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  Than the ones who had the placebo, suggesting somehow that the, that the cognitive dealing with this scenario was somehow being channeled through the stomach and back again.

• 47:07Heather Berlin?

  So, if we just all ate ginger, we'll make the world a better place?

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Well, being less judgmental doesn't necessarily make the world a better place. It could be the opposite. It's very interesting coming to this after the consciousness work and recognizing just how embodied so much of our thinking is. And that, that, you know, the, the mind-body separation is just so false. And I think, and we're learning so much, too, about emotion, too, and how emotion begins in the body very often. And the brain's job is to interpret signals it's getting from the body. I think we're, very interesting moment in terms of understanding the links between consciousness and bodies.

• 47:46Heather Berlin?

  Do you think that just, you know, in this exploration, that it has fundamentally changed your perception of things that you will take with you now going forward?

• 47:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm, I'm much more aware of, or trying to tune in to what my body's telling me about things. I was very struck in reading Elizabeth's book, her discussion of triggers. I think triggers are really interesting phenomenon. And that is that certain things happen. People say something to you, and you clench or contract or have some sort of negative feeling, that, that these are real portals into your emotions and into your psychology. I start to pay attention to that. We, we haven't talked about the subconscious or the unconscious, but, you know, how you access that has been a live topic, right? In psychology for a long time. And Freud thought hypnosis was the way for a while,

• 48:39Speaker 00

  and then free association, and then dreams. It seems like triggers is another. What?

• 48:44Speaker 03

  And, or psychedelics.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  Yes, and psychedelics, exactly. Who, who bring it into it.

• 48:49Heather Berlin?

  I would also say flow states, creativity, getting into these to access.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  I think that's exciting.

• 48:55Heather Berlin?

  You've mentioned this term consciousness hygiene.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:59Heather Berlin?

  What does that mean exactly?

• 49:00Speaker 00

  Toward the end of this book, I, I sort of shift my approach. I didn't mean to, but I had been very much focused on consciousness as a problem. You know, the hard problem. And this is, I think, a very Western and male way to look at everything. And I was really stuck in that framework and frustrated. You know, my wife was always telling me, she's an artist. Not knowing is really powerful, too, and it opens you up. And I was like, meh, I really want to know the answer. And I went to interview Joan Halifax, Roshi Joan Halifax, who's a Zen teacher at, in Santa Fe, Upaya, because I had read that she, she refers to Upaya, her retreat center,

• 49:43Speaker 00

  as a factory for the deconstruction of selves. And I was writing a chapter on the self. And I went to see her, and she kept ducking me, not sitting down for the interview. And finally, she said, you know, you really lost in your head on this whole question. And I should have known, she's a Zen teacher, right? She's allergic to concepts. But she said, you need an experience. So, she sent me to this outpost of her retreat center way up in the mountains in New Mexico where there's a cave. And she said, I think you should spend a few days in the cave. Now, I'm not a camper. This is like not my thing, but I did. And one of the things I came to see is that consciousness

• 50:26Speaker 00

  is this incredibly precious gift we have. This space of complete mental freedom. It's very rare in the universe, as we know. And it is something that we are now, I think, squandering. I think the algorithms that have hacked our attention, I mean, what is attention?

• 50:44Speaker 03

  Given by social media and.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Social media, doom scrolling, the endless scroll.

• 50:48Heather Berlin?

  What we're wasting our consciousness on.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, you know, what is attention but how we allocate our, our consciousness? And we have allowed the algorithms to hack it, hack our attention to a remarkable degree. When you're scrolling on social media, yes, you're conscious, but minimally so. You're not thinking your own thoughts.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  It's almost like you entered dissociative state.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is a kind of fugue state, and it's very.

• 51:13Heather Berlin?

  Well, people do it to escape in a way. It's a kind of escapism.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  There are people who want to be less conscious. And I, and that is a, I think we have to kind of respect that because there are often people who are in pain. Not that numbing yourself solves the problem, but I, I respect that instinct. I think now we are about to pollute our consciousness in a much more serious way with our relationships with these chatbots that we were talking about earlier. And that in the way that our attention was hacked by the algorithm, now it's our emotional connection that's going to be hacked by the algorithm. And people are settling for these.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  Relationships, these conversations. But when we do, we go down to the level of the machine. We don't bring the machine up to our level. I mean, you think about a conversation with a computer, and it's lacking a lot of things we think conversations have, like eye contact, body language. There's an erotics of conversation. There are all these in synchrony or dis synchrony. I mean, all these things go on. It doesn't happen when you're talking to a chatbot, but we accept it. It's sort of like when we took the emoji as, you know, instead of emotion. I mean, we're cheapening ourselves. So I do think we're polluting our consciousness right now, and the algorithms are part of the reason there are other things going on.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  If that's true, then what's the opposite of pollution in this context? I thought, well, hygiene. So what does consciousness hygiene look like? And that's what I've been thinking about a lot since the book came out. I think mindfulness and meditation is a very important part of it. It's an opportunity to be with your thoughts in your head and realize just how weird your thoughts are. I mean, the fact that we have thoughts that think themselves. What's going on there? I think psychedelics are a way, are a form of consciousness hygiene, giving us access to parts of our mind we might not ordinarily have access to. I think thinking about death is a meditation.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  I have never done one, but how much it, I think, makes you cherish what you have while you still have it. So anyway, I'm, you know, I'm open to other ideas. If people have other ideas. I think learning how to defend consciousness is going to be a really important project, especially when the machines are, become so persuasive.

• 53:38Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, and that becomes down to, you know, I think we were given this brief moment in time to have this conscious experience, and like, it's so precious.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  I think, I sense people revolting against the algorithms. I mean, we see it with social media, and I think we'll see it with AI. So I think people want to defend this precious space. And, you know, they may need tools to do it. And I think it'd be an interesting project to help offer those tools.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  Someone smell an 11th book.

• 54:10Heather Berlin?

  I mean, the first step, I think, would be to unplug and, you know.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. And one of the things I've found most powerful, like when I do a meditation retreat, is the time off from media. Although now there's this cliff of what's waiting for you, you know, when you get back on, and that kind of ruins it, but.

• 54:26Heather Berlin?

  I prescribe this to patients. I have with patients with anxiety and, you know, rumination is that it's not just, you know, go for a while. Don't listen to podcasts, just let your mind be free.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  But do listen to this podcast.

• 54:36Heather Berlin?

  Except for this one, this one.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  And I think being in nature, too. Disconnecting and being in nature is very important to recovering.

• 54:47Heather Berlin?

  But if we start giving people kind of some, you know, things that they can do to help in this project, I think it'd be really helpful.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  I think they want them. I really do.

• 55:01Heather Berlin?

  On that note, in every episode, we ask one question to expand our own perception box. And in this episode, Kristoff chose the question, this week's question.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  Heather and Michael, can you recall an event, a concrete event, not just an abstract one, a concrete event in your life where you strongly, very strongly, viscerally, emotionally disagreed with someone in your life, whether that's a loved one or a coworker, or someone over politics, or a romance, or business, or whatever? And where they convinced you that, you know, where they tried to convince you, and you realized, yes, I understand your perspective. I still don't like it. I still strongly disagree with it, but I understand where you're coming from. And how did you feel about that? Did you feel better once you had this, this perspective? Okay, I can look at this from your point of view, and I get it.

• 55:57Heather Berlin?

  Do you want to go first?

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I've had millions of those encounters.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  Millions, wow.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Or thousands, yeah.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  Some people struggle to recall one.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  I have. Well, I have a very poor memory. But I've certainly been there with my wife, where I've been able to sort of see her perspective, largely because she's so good at articulating it. But, yeah, but I can't think of a specific one, I'm sorry.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  But you recall, does that help you make the fact that you're still upset? Because you can still disagree with what she wants. How did it affect you? Did it make you feel better or worse, or indifferent?

• 56:34Speaker 00

  Well, I've been avoiding getting psychoanalysed into the perception box for like, four days now. I'm not going to give up now.

• 56:44Heather Berlin?

  We should explore this block that you're having.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  I have a perception box block, yeah.

• 56:51Heather Berlin?

  You know, this is just an incident that happened recently, and I think this speaks to this question. My son, he's nine, and he's a big Big Bang Theory fan. So I was taking him out on a special thing to go see Jim Parsons in an off Broadway, no, in a Broadway show. And then we were, but first we were going to the Museum of Natural History. And I'd be looking forward to this day. He'd been looking forward to this day for a very long time. We're very excited. So I take him into the city, and I bring also his sister, who's 12, and her friend, you know, because it was a family trip. So my son just had this horrible attitude the whole day. And he's like, I'm not going to the show. I'm not going to the museum. I don't want to talk to anybody. And just really, and I was very upset with him.

• 57:36Heather Berlin?

  You know, I mean, you're so ungrateful. You know, I did this special thing for you. And what I discovered then halfway through the day, where I thought he was just being really obnoxious, and this is making me feel terrible as a mom. But he said, Mom, I thought that this was going to be a special day with just me and you. And I didn't think it was going to be, you know, my sister and her friend. And I didn't know that, you know. I didn't know that in his mind, this was, because he said, this is my favorite thing in the world, Big Bang, and this was going to be a special day. I thought it was my day, like me and you. Which, of course, talk about parent guilt. I felt so terrible. And, you know, he went through the day, and he, and he did enjoy it. But there was this, like, it wasn't what I had expected him to enjoy.

• 58:17Heather Berlin?

  And, but I understood, you know, his perspective in that moment. And it changed my perspective, too. And just to put a bow on this story. So his birthday is coming up. And what I decided to do for him is take, we live in New York, but you can go and visit the Big Bang Theory set at the Warner Brothers Studios. So for his birthday, I'm going to fly him, just me and him.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  In LA?

• 58:42Heather Berlin?

  To LA. We're going to go to the, visit the studio, and we're going to have a special mommy-son trip to make up for this. I know it sounds extravagant and extreme, but this is in lieu of a birthday party and whatever. And, but I really did, it really affected me in that you never know what somebody else is thinking, what they're coming. So anytime somebody's having, is being rude to you, or having a bad day, you know, give them the benefit of the doubt that, you know, you don't know what's going on with them internally. That's all for this special live episode of Science of Perception Box. Subscribe. I'll thank you.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  Thank you, guys.

• 59:17Heather Berlin?

  Thank you.

• 59:20Heather Berlin?

  And if you haven't already, subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the show or listen wherever you get your podcasts. So I want to thank you again, Michael. It's been such a pleasure.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  You're very welcome. Thanks for having me on.

• 59:32Heather Berlin?

  And of course, Kristoff, my fantastic co-host. And thank you, everybody here. It's been great.