The Current - Michael Pollan on the labyrinth of human consciousness

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

Why is it so hard for us humans to come to grips with what it means to be conscious? We talk to bestselling author Michael Pollan about how scientists have tried, and often failed, to unlock the mysteries of consciousness, whether plants could be considered conscious, and why he believes that we need to "defend" human consciousness against those who may try to simulate it with computers and AI. 

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Consciousness is a labyrinth from which there is no exit. That is a line from the introduction to best-selling author Michael Paulin's new book. In his previous writing, Michael Pollan has helped demystify our food system delved into our relationship with the natural world. He's written about psychedelics. as well. And now Michael Pollan is headed into the complicated maze that is the human mind to try to understand more about what it feels like to be us and whether we are unique in having that feeling of consciousness. His new book is called A World Appears, a Journey into Consciousness. Michael Pollan is in New York City this morning. Michael, good morning. Thanks. Good to be here. Start, if you would,

because I think a lot of people wonder what it is that we're talking about with the definition. What do you mean when you talk about consciousness? Yeah, consciousness very simply is a subjective experience, the fact that you not only exist, but you know you exist, and that it feels like something to be you. And that's not true for your toaster or any number of other appliances. That idea that there's a feeling about being alive, that you have a sense as to what it means to be alive. Yeah, and that kind of comes from a wonderful essay written by Thomas Nagel, a philosopher back in the 70s. And it was an essay called, what does it like to be a bat? Great title.

And, you know, bats obviously are very different than we are. They navigate the world not through vision, but echolocation. They hang upside down for most of the time. But we can imagine that it's like something to live that way, to navigate the world that way. So therefore, a bat is conscious. That's the standard for consciousness, whether it is like something to be you. I mentioned in the introduction that you had written about psychedelics. A few years ago, you put out a great book called How to Change Your Mind.

And you've talked a lot about the impact and the role of psychedelics in your life and studying them. Tell me a little bit about how that book led to this book. Yeah, pretty directly, actually. You know, the thing about psychedelics is they raise questions about consciousness. They make you aware of it. The way I describe it, they sort of smudge the windshield through which we perceive the world most of the time and which normally seems perfectly transparent. We're not aware of consciousness all the time. It's just the water we swim in. But psychedelics kind of defamiliarize consciousness, make us stand back and notice it and realize, wow, it could be different than it is.

Why is it the way it is? The other insight that I had during my experiments with psychedelics in one particular experiment where I used some magic mushrooms and I was in my garden in Connecticut. And I had this distinct impression that the flowers in my garden were conscious, that they were aware of me, that they were returning my gaze in a sense, not literally, and they didn't have kind of an interiority to them, but that they had a much greater awareness.

They were more alive than I'd ever thought. And I didn't know what to do with that insight. You know, I mean, it was caused by a drug. So should I believe it? And I decided, well, it would be interesting to find out. Are plants conscious or sentient? And that also sent me down this rabbit hole of learning about plant intelligence. And in fact, it turns out there are some very respectable scientists who would argue that plants

are conscious. not the way we are, but that they have an awareness in their environment, they have a sense of changes, whether they're good or bad, and they make decisions to favor the good and stay away from the bad. Do you believe that? You know, I think if you make a distinction between sentience and consciousness, I believe it. Sentience is a much more simple, basic form of consciousness.

It's really just this idea that you are aware of your environment, and you see and you can assess changes whether they're good or bad. And that may be a property of all living things necessary to their survival. Consciousness is a much more elaborate phenomenon that we have and perhaps some other of the other primates and maybe a couple other species. And in that case, you have self-consciousness. You're not just aware, but you're aware that you're aware. you have this space of interiority.

You have a voice in your head, as we do. And that kind of consciousness makes sense for a social creature like us. Plants don't need that kind of consciousness. Their evolutionary investment was much more in biochemistry, so they could manufacture all these cool chemicals as defense chemicals or attracting chemicals. So if you put it that way and you make that distinction between sentience and consciousness, then I would say, yeah, plants probably are sentient.

What do we do with that then? I mean, there are ethical concerns, and this isn't just about plants, it's about animals and what have you, but what do we do with that if that's what we believe? Well, you know, the question that immediately occurs to you is, oh, my God, are they feeling pain? Can I eat them? You know, I talk to some of these scientists about it, and some said, yes, of course, they feel pain. They have to react to what's going on when a caterpillar is chum. stomping on their leaves. Others, however, would say, no, pain would do a plant no good,

since it can't run away from whatever the threat is. So I don't know who to believe, but I don't know just because something is sentient that it is entitled to all sorts of moral consideration. I mean, this debate, of course, is going on now with AI. If AIs appear to be conscious or are conscious, do we owe them moral consideration? I think we decide that as a species. I mean, moral consideration is a human category that we invented. Same with rights. And so I think that we would probably draw the line somewhere north of plants in determining that. I want to come back to the AI thing, because I think that's a huge, I mean, there's an undercurrent of that in the book, but it's also just one of those things that people are thinking about now

in terms of what it means to be human and what it means to be alive. But people have been thinking about this idea of trying to figure out what consciousness is for a long time. Scientists have been wrestling with this for decades and longer. What is what they call the hard problem? That phrase was coined by a philosopher named David Chalmers back in the 90s. And he said, you know, that there are easy problems of consciousness like understanding emotion and perception and, you know, how the brain works, its various functions that can be understood using conventional science. But then there was this hard problem, which is essentially, how do you get from matter to mind? How do you get from these three pounds of neural tissue between your ears to subjective experience? And the other closely

related question is your brain is doing all sorts of things of which you are not aware. It is monitoring your body 24-7, adjusting your heart rate, your digestion, your blood gases, all this kind of stuff. You know, it's probably 90% of what your brain is doing you're not aware of. So why are you aware of any of it? Why isn't the whole thing automated? Why should mental operations be accompanied by feelings and subjective experience? And thus far, nobody has been able to answer this question. There are a bunch of theories of consciousness, but all of them hit that wall of, well, how do we get from this explanation and what's going on in the brain to the fact that it feels like something when that happens? How far do you think science can go and explaining that?

I think there are real limitations. You know, you quoted me about the labyrinth of consciousness, and what I was getting at is that the only tool we have with which to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we're sort of trapped in a loop. I mean, everything we, we, understand about the world is filtered through consciousness, and that includes the scientific enterprise. You know, the problems we frame for ourselves, the tools we use, the measurements we make, all these things are products of consciousness. So we literally can't get around it or outside it to study it, and that complicates things. The other problem for science is that we have founded our science, focused on the objective, measurable, quantifiable,

world. And everything else is just subjectivity, and we've laid it aside. This goes back to Galileo. He drew this distinction, largely to keep scientists from getting burned at the stake. He said, science will focus on these objective qualities, and we're going to leave the subjective. We acknowledge it's real, and it exists, but we're going to leave that to the church, and we're going to call that the soul. And this served science very well for hundreds of years, but now that it wants to attack this problem of subjectivity, it really is ill-equipped. And it doesn't really have a good way to bring a human experience, lived experience, which of course is at the very heart of consciousness into its ambit. One of the things that one of the researchers that you speak with in the book told you is to be wary

of the desire for magic. That if science doesn't explain all of this, people might say, well, there's something inexplicable that is going on that we can't measure scientifically, that we can't understand scientifically. Why would people want to be afraid of magic, of the magic? Well, you know, I think it's the confidence of the reductive materialist scientist. You know, I think it's important to have an open mind that there may be other ideas. It may not be that this three pounds of neural tissue generates consciousness, it may come about some other way. And there are other ideas in play

that this guy, who I was quoting, would call magic. One of those ideas, just to throw it out there, is panpsychism. And this is the idea that everything, all matter, has some infinitesimal degree of consciousness, of psyche, something, you know,

very preliminary kind of consciousness. And somehow everything, every particle in your desk. So if you're worried about hurting things, I'm talking about the pen that I'm chewing on sometimes. Yeah, no, and don't pound your desk. So this idea would explain consciousness, i.e., that it didn't come into the world.

It was always here. It's just part of this stock of material reality. Other ideas are that consciousness is a field, is a universal field that we channel and that we should think of our brains not as generating consciousness, but as channeling it in the same way that a radio receiver or a television receiver is bringing in this knowledge. So that's another idea.

They all sound magical, but so does the idea that three pounds of tofu could produce conscious experience. That's pretty magical, too. It's a new season of the hit comedy. Welcome to Small Achievable Goals, the show where two friends get real about menopause and middle age. Today, we're talking hot flashes. Oh my God, I'm so hot all the time.

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Watch free on CBC Gem. You went and you spent some time in the book, just trying to measure that experience and kind of document what that experience is like, including what you were walking around with this beeper that would prompt you to record your own thoughts every time it went off? Well, one of the things I really got interested in was the contents of consciousness. You know, leaving aside like how is it created, there's still some easy, so-called easy problems we can address. And one is our thinking process.

And so I worked with this really interesting psychologist named Russell Hurlbert at the University of Las Vegas. and he, for the last 50 years, has had a system for sampling inner experience. And basically, you wear a beeper, an old school little device, the size of an old transistor radio, and you've got this earpiece. And it goes off at completely random times during the day with a really sharp beep that you can't miss, and you know exactly what it is. And what you're supposed to do is stop and record. he gives you a little pad exactly what you were thinking at the moment of the beep.

And you collect a series of beeps over the course of the day. And then you have a Zoom session with Russell where he basically interrogates you about it. And the reason he needs to do that is it's surprisingly unclear what's going on in our head. He would start asking questions like, well, did you think that in words or images or unsymbolized thought? if words, did you speak them or hear them? And so he takes you through this set of questions by the end of which you realize your own thinking is less obvious to you, how it works, what it is.

And it was quite sobering that way. And the big takeaway is that we think in very different ways and that we assume that our thinking takes place in words. But in fact, that's a minority of people. and that there are lots of people who think strictly in images and people who think in un-symbolized thought in neither images or words. We assume we mean the same thing when we say, what are you thinking or I was thinking this. But in fact, we mean something very different. And it's not just thinking.

It's also feeling, right? That feeling actually may be more important to our understanding or our idea of consciousness than just thinking. Yeah. So there's a strain of thought that goes back to Antonio Demosio, a great neurologist at USC, and he wrote a book called Descartes's Error back in the 90s where he tried to make the case that actually feeling is more important than thinking for consciousness and that, you know, we tend to privilege the cortex, which is the outer layer, the most recent layer of the brain and it's responsible for rational thought and executive function. And we sort of assume that that's the

great human distinction. But he's arguing that the cortex only gets involved in consciousness after the brain stem has already conveyed feelings from the body. And that the whole function of the brain is essentially to keep the body alive. And feelings are how the body alerts the brain that either things are going well or things are going poorly, and that that is the inaugural act of consciousness, as he puts it. And that changes how we see things because lots of animals have feelings and an upper brainstem structure similar to ours.

And if you accept his idea that feelings are really central, much follows from that. One is that you have to kind of democratize consciousness over all the animals that can feel And the other is, it raises real questions about the potential of AI to be conscious because it's one thing for a machine to think or simulate thinking. It's quite another for it to simulate feeling. Do you think it's possible to engineer a conscious version of artificial intelligence?

People believe, and you speak with people in the book who do believe that this is possible. Oh, yeah. And I would say it's the consensus opinion in Silicon Valley that it's just a matter of time. but I don't think they're right. I think that they're basing that belief on a false metaphor. And that's the metaphor that the brain is a computer. And that's incredibly common. But in fact, if you press on that metaphor,

you see that brains and computers are very different. Just briefly, you know, computers have a very sharp distinction between hardware and software. You can run the same software on multiple different, computers or hardware. There's in the brain, there's no distinction between hardware and software. Every experience you have literally rewires the brain. And, you know, your brain and mine are not interchangeable because we had different life

experiences. Another problem is this question of feelings. Even though it's possible to simulate thinking, is a simulated feeling really a feeling? It doesn't have any sort of bodily origin or power. So I think consciousness depends on having feelings, which in turn depends on having a body. If you think about it, your feelings would be completely weightless if there was no fundamental risk, no fundamental vulnerability. And feelings may depend on the ability to suffer or possibly on our mortality, all things that are not. shared by computers. So I'm very skeptical that computers will be conscious.

What do you make of the guy who worked at Google who said, we're already there? I mean, he was roundly shouted down when he said Google has already created a thinking, feeling machine, but a lot of people paid close attention to it. Oh, yeah. And I think there are other people who believe it. If you read Anthropics Constitution for Claude, their chatbot, the people who work there seem to believe that their chatbot is conscious. They're very concerned about hurting its feelings by asking it to work on on challenging, morally challenging projects. So, you know, I think it's just very easy for a machine that speaks to us in the first person, in our language, to convince us that it is

conscious. We anthropomorphize everything. We want to believe that these machines are conscious. So even though I don't think it actually can happen, that belief may not matter because already people are falling in love with chatbots. People are using, you know, 72% of American teenagers are turning to AI for companionship. I think this is really crazy and dangerous because these are not real relationships.

And they don't teach you how real relationships work. So I just worry that the muscles for social engagement will atrophy as we settle for these, you know, these fake sycophantic relationships. Is that why, I mean, in the book, you talk about human consciousness is something worth defending.

We've had a lot of conversations on this program about what it means to be human now, what it means to be alive right now. What do you mean by that that we need to defend human consciousness? Well, I think that our consciousness is under siege right now. I think that beginning, I mean, it has been in one way or another for a long time. there are obviously there've always been politicians who want to dominate our consciousness we happen to have one in our country right now who's really good at it but there are other problems too i mean you know we've all heard about social media and how the algorithms hack our attention what is that attention except our consciousness and how we've chosen to to spend it you know how did you used to spend that time when you were waiting online for the barista to foam your latte right you would daydream you would mind wander you'd look at the people

around you, you might have a fantasy about them. You know, there's a kind of generative quality to boredom that you lose when you're scrolling all the time. And then you also have chatbots now trying to essentially monetize your consciousness and not hack, not just your attention, but your deep emotional attachments. They want to get between you and the other humans you normally attach to or exploit your loneliness, which is the other thing that's going on. So I think we need to defend our consciousness against these intrusions. And that means putting down the phone, that means, for me, it means meditating every day, kind of draw a line about your, around your consciousness, and be alone with your thoughts, spend time in nature. I think of all these things

as consciousness hygiene. And I think we need to practice that. Practice is interesting because, I mean, when you talk about meditation, we will talk about a meditation practice. And that's what you talk about in this book, that consciousness can be a practice, not just something that exists, but that it's something that we actively engage in. Yes. And we lose track of that. And I think it's really important to be as conscious as we can be, which is to say as present to the moment as we can be. And one of the things these technologies are doing is taking us out of the moment, putting our consciousness to some instrumental use, which usually is about selling advertising to us,

and that we need to reclaim it and that it is this precious gift of internal freedom and privacy. You know, being alone with your thoughts can be difficult for some people, but these are analgesics, you know, to spend your time scrolling. And I think there's a growing recognition

that this isn't good for us, that it's a kind of addictive behavior. And you're seeing kids who are actually relieved in situations where they're forced not to bring their phones, put them down in school. I think we're at an interesting inflection point.

But one of the really unfortunate things about this particular moment where AI is coming of age is that it's coming of age at a time when no one in Washington is going to regulate it. And I think that's a mistake. I also think, you know, we are arriving at what I call a Copernican moment in the same way, Copernicus's discovery that the sun did not revolve around the earth and we were not the center of the universe forced us to redefine ourselves. I think that the prospect of intelligent machines, at the same time, we're expanding the circle of conscious beings to include even possibly plants and insects. Who are we?

You know, are we more like thinking machines or are we more like animals that can feel? And I think those are really big questions that we'll be seeking answers to in the next few years. To a lot of people, those big questions would break their brain. It's really hard to wrap your head around this. I mean, even you say this in the book. Like, by the time you get to the end, do you know more about what consciousness is than you did when you started the book out? But you also want this book. I mean, you use that idea of smudging the windscreen.

You want the book to smudge our own kind of windscreen. What would you want people to think about it? When they finish this book, aside from trying to understand what consciousness is, what else? You know, I hope when you close this book, you'll sit and think for a minute, like, what is it like to be a conscious human being? And if people come out of the book with a clearer sense of what it means to be conscious, and then to realize its preciousness and to treasure it, basically. I mean, that would please me no end.

Can I ask you, just because I have you on the line, I spoke with you a number of times years ago about the omnivores dilemma and your writing on food and the rules about, you know, don't eat anything that your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food and eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Exactly right. And that that phrase and that, that phrase and that, changed how people think about what food is. And I wonder 20 years later whether you feel vindicated

when you see, I mean, you might have other feelings about that government, but the Trump government through RFK, kind of taking a lot of those ideas, particularly in a war on processed foods and putting them out front and center for people, that they're trying to get people out of, you know, that processed food aisle, that they want people to eat plants. Do you feel vindicated by that? Do you feel, does it feel like progress to you? Well, I don't feel vindicated. it does feel like progress, especially to see people who we, you know, we think of as more on the right than the left talking about these issues. When the conversation around reforming the food system really got going in the early 2000s and was taken up by the Obamas, they got a world

of grief for being, you know, organic limousine liberals and, you know, preaching a nanny state and being elitist. And, you know, the movement did code a little liberal and left. And now, you know, to see it getting picked up on the other side, by the other side, I think is very encouraging, because that's how change happens if you can make a coalition like that. So I'm hopeful, guardedly hopeful. I don't think, though, that what we're talking about with regard to ultra-processed food and pesticides, which has been another topic that RFK Jr. has railed on is very important to maha moms. I don't see Trump licensing that sort of re-regulation. He is really devoted to deregulation.

There's a real split between the maha moms who really are concerned about pesticides like glyphosate or Roundup and the Trump administration, which just last week invoked the Defense Procurement Act to ramp up production of this herbicide. So we'll see. The politics are getting really, really interesting.

But yeah, I mean, you know, it's gratifying to have started, help start a conversation about something and to see that it has a life of its own. But, you know, I see that work is not completely unlike this work in that. What I was trying to get people to do was be more conscious of their food choices and where their food came from. Think about this. Look at this.

Be conscious of what you're doing. This sounds obvious, but you do write books that make people think. And that's the goal. That's a good thing. And I would add and feel. That's important, too. It's always good to talk to you. Michael Pollan, I appreciate it.

Thank you very much. My pleasure. Thanks very much. Michael Pollan's new book is called A World Appears, A Journey, Into Consciousness. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.