Within Reason - #166 Are Plants Conscious? - Michael Pollan

Episode Date: September 27, 2026

Get all sides of every story and be better informed at ⁠https://ground.news/AlexOC⁠ - subscribe for 40% off unlimited access.Come to my North American tour this November: https://www.alexoconnor.com/p/tour.For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: ⁠https://www.alexoconnor.com⁠.Michael Pollan is an American journalist and the first Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer at Harvard University.Get A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.TIMESTAMPS:(0:00) North America Tour(0:20) The Solar Eclipse(2:56) What Is It Like To Be A Plant?(14:52) Are Neurons Overrated?(19:15) Is This All Complete Nonsense?(20:59) The Strange Behaviour of Plants(26:37) Consciousness by Negation(37:31) Does Matter Or Consciousness Come First?(44:09) What Do Humans Have That Plants Don’t?(54:25) Do Plants Feel Pain?(56:52) Is Feeling the Basis of Consciousness?(01:06:45) Is Consciousness Falsifiable?(01:17:41) Where Does Awareness Come From?(01:22:15) Are Psychedelic Experiences Real?(01:24:59) What is Everybody Getting Wrong About Consciousness?CONNECT:My Website YouTubeInstagramTikTok⁠TwitterFacebookCONTACT:Business email: [e-mail] enquiries: [e-mail]

Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IG Private Wealth.com.

North America, I'm coming for you. We're doing a small tour, just six shows at some really cool venues. We're going to talk about philosophy, we're going to talk about God, about consciousness. We're going to talk about whatever you want to talk about because there will be an extensive Q&A at every show. The dates are on screen. The ticket link is in the description. Be there. I talk about the fine-tuning argument for God quite a lot and there are so many debates back and forth and it's like, well, you know, the earth is well distanced from the sun. But, yeah, there are billions of planets and one of them is going to be about right. And they write about the cosmological constant. And I'm like, well, I'm not sure that the upper bound has been properly calculated.

When someone points out that the moon is exactly 400 times closer than the sun, but it's also exactly 400 times smaller. So we get this perfect eclipse of totality, which isn't only perhaps the most beautiful thing I've ever seen without a close second. but also just so happened to be like integral to proving Einstein's theory of relativity. Yeah. And so it has this sort of like functional effect as well. And someone says, well, what are the odds of that? And I think, you know what? Fair enough.

Score one for God there. I can't. I can't quite get around that. And the very existence of the moon, right, without which you would not have life on Earth. I know. It's all pretty extraordinary. And also explains why to the viewers who are watching this. I'm in a hotel room because I'm in a sort of random town in Spain that I'd never heard it before

that happened to be in the path of totality and I'm now speaking to you, Michael Pollan from a hotel room but I'm glad that we could make this work. So welcome to the show. It's good to have you here. Thank you. I envy the fact you're there and wish I could have made it. It was extraordinary. I was just telling you that I don't think I've ever been so moved by an astronomical event in my life. And I spent about an hour watching the moon sort of track its way across the sun with the glasses on. And I thought, you know, that's pretty cool. We're on a rock in space. But in that moment of totality, something happens and suddenly you're like staring into a black hole or something. And it was moving in a way that I can't quite describe. But there are all kinds of experiences

that give people that Mysterium, tremendous mat fascinating hands. And that's one of your specialties, I believe, is trying to come to terms with them. We're going to talk about experience today. you've written a wonderful book called A World Appears, which is lifted from the beginning of Anil Seth's book, right? Yeah, it's the first line of one of his chapters. And I read his book when I was researching mine, and that sentence just stuck with me. And I actually, and then I thought, well, I'm going to use that as my title. And by then I'd forgotten where I'd read it. But thank God for Google, I was able to put it in.

and Neil Seth came up right away. I'm sure he didn't mind. No, he was fine about it. Yeah. I've spoken a lot about consciousness on this show. I want to open with something a bit broad and something which I don't think, for all I've spoken about consciousness,

I've really talked about before on this show. What does it like to be a plant? We don't know. The question is, is it like anything to be a plant? And we don't even know that. You know, the what it is likeness is Thomas Nagel's, I don't know if you'd call it a definition, but a very effective way of thinking about consciousness, if it is like something to be you,

and in his example, is it like anything to be a bat, then you are conscious. That is the standard. Your toaster, it's nothing, you know, it's not like anything to be. your toaster. But he doesn't require us to know exactly what it is like to be a bat. We can just infer it's like something to navigate the world using sonar rather than light. But in the case of plants, it's a harder, it's a harder one. You know, I spent a long time researching the what's sometimes called erroneously the neurobiology

of plants and whether plants are conscious. And they have some incredible abilities that I wasn't aware of. You know, they can be taught things. They can be conditioned. They can learn and remember. They have something like 20 senses to our five or six. They can hear. You play the sound of caterpillars chomping on leaves,

and they will react appropriately. They'll dispatch chemicals to, to their leaves that make them taste less good to caterpillars. And kind of most bizarre and suggestive of all is they respond to the same anesthetics we do. So the kind of chemicals we use to put us out for surgery will stop behavior in a plant that has a visible behavior like a Venus flytrap. that's really interesting and suggestive because what it suggests is that or it makes you ask what is lost when the plant becomes I don't want to use the word unconscious but something there are two states and if there are two states what is that what is

that more active state is it a state of awareness so those are the kind of questions I got into at the beginning of the book. I interviewed people who were convinced plants are conscious. I'm a little more comfortable using the word sentient. And in my work, I drew a distinction between sentience and consciousness. Sensions being a more basic, widely distributed capability, that it's possible. And many people believe, you know, all life has sentience. sentience is is awareness of your environment the ability to distinguish

good or bad changes as they affect you and then to respond appropriately, intelligently. And you find this in bacteria and single-celled creatures. So I'm inclined to think that plants are

sentient after the research I've done. Consciousness just involves so much more, I think, you know, this sense of experience and being able to have, you know, some quality to your experience, you know, some interiority. And I don't know that plants have that. Yeah, I think it's a difficult thing to kind of wrap your head around, right, because it sounds like the parody that people make when you start talking about why you shouldn't eat animal products and people say, well, what about plants?

Because they can feel pain too. We're not talking about that, right? You introduce me. You know, it doesn't follow that, you know, that you're, because you're sentient, you feel pain. Pain is one way of dealing with sentience, I guess, right? It's a tool that's very useful to animals. But one of the researchers I talked to said that pain would not be adaptive for a plant since it can't run away. Pain is very good when you have the option of removing your hand from the stove. And plants know they're being eaten, this guy said. His name is Stefano Mancouzo. He's an Italian. botanist, they know they're being eaten, but they don't necessarily mind. And he reminds us that many plants, for many plants being eaten is part of their

reproductive strategy, right? I mean, they produce all these seeds and fruits, specifically to attract animals to move their genes around. And then you've got grasses, which are regenerated by being chewed by ruminants. They do better. with ruminants than without. So it's a little too simple to say they feel pain. And I don't think we should worry about eating them. Also because we don't have any choice. Yeah, that's right.

If you rule out the plants and the animals, all you have is salt. And that's not a very well-rounded diet. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It just gives me a flashback from the debates where you would watch people's sort of smile fade as you remind them that actually the majority of plants, that we grow are fed to livestock to then eat the livestock. So it's not a very good argument in that regard anyway.

But I think the point is that if we're talking or if we're talking about or entertaining this idea of sentience in plant, it's got to be something quite minimal and restricted compared to our own experiences of the world. People will hear you say something like that and go, okay, what are we talking about? And they'll look in your book and there are some fantastic examples of like the bean plant, which if you watch time lapse photography of this plant growing, it sort of looks as though it's striving towards a pole to grab onto, and when it gets it, it kind of relaxes a little bit. It's really interesting to see. There's evidence of plants which will seek out

water in a pipe, even if that water is like contained within the pipe, implying that it's totally dry. Yeah, totally dry on the outside. So they must be able to somehow sense or hear it, probably something analogous to that, it's sort of going through the pipe. And this kind of stuff is absolutely extraordinary. But at the same time, somebody might say, well, look, you know, If I leave my bike out in the rain, then it rusts. And it's kind of amazing that it reacts to the rain in this way. But, you know, it's just a chemical reaction, and no one thinks that requires anything like awareness. So what is it about the plant behavior that makes you want to say sentience rather than just chemical reaction, let's say?

Well, your bike doesn't do anything about the fact it's being rusted. It doesn't move and get under a roof or anything. the plants actually take action. They move away. They move toward things. As soon as you look at plants using time lapse photography, you realize that they're very active. And that bean plan is a good example. It would be completely, you would have no idea that it could see this post that it was looking for if you didn't use time lapse photography.

photography. So even with time lapse photography, I think your bike would be pretty boring to watch and wouldn't show. I mean, part of sentience is the recognition of what's going on and then the, you know, taking action. You know, we used to think a lot, we used to talk a lot about instinct. Biologists would talk about instinct. And I found interviewing a lot of them for this book, you don't hear that word as much anymore. And the idea that behaviors were hardwired and programmed just doesn't work in a world that's changing in such unpredictable ways. And that even plants have to be intelligent because they often deal with situations they've never encountered before. And instinct is not useful in those situations.

So I think it was the biologist Mike Eleven who said the way, The way evolution really works is it creates cognitive beings with the ability to solve problems, not robots, you know, that are programmed for every eventuality. And I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that life demands that kind of flexibility and ability to make decisions. And we find that in these very simple creatures. that we call very simple creatures. Of course, they're not.

I mean, if we existed in the same time scale of plants, we would see a very different world. There's a wonderful science fiction plot that Stefano Mancuso shared with me, and it's a thought experiment, but imagine an alien species comes to Earth, and they live in a sped-up, dimension of time such that an hour of our time is a second of theirs and they look at us and they see

what he called immobile columns of meat that are you know as far as they could tell are dead and so they you know turn us into jerky for the ride home and so we are that way with plants we don't see all there is to see and one of the most powerful ideas i think of biology is this idea of the umwelt You know, that every species lives in a world conjured by its particular senses. And so the world of a bee is very different than ours because it can see ultraviolet light. And so it takes a tremendous leap of imagination to put us into the unwalt of other creatures. But when we do, we realize there's a lot more going on than perhaps we gave them credit for. Yeah, all kinds of stuff, which, I mean, the book is, of course, linked in the description.

you give a kind of overview that I'd known about this kind of stuff happening, but hearing that plants can be taught to navigate mazes, hearing that plants, there's this plant, I forget the Latin name, but it's cool, it's known as like the sensitive plant, right? Because it sort of, it like curls up. Mamosa Poudica. That's why you're here.

And it's fantastic. It will sort of react to its environment. It will, like, curl up, and it's called the sensitive plant because it kind of wants to, like, hide away from certain sort of input data. data, but it can learn, like if you drop the pot, it will curl up, and it will learn that nothing actually came of that. Like, actually, that kind of feeling is just fine, such that eventually when you do it again,

it doesn't curl up anymore. And it remembers, it remembers for 30 days that it needn't react to this stimulus, which is pretty wild, because we assume memory is stored in neurons. But obviously there's another way to do it. And one theory is that in addition to neurons, there are these bioelectric fields in all biological preachers and that in those fields you can hold information. And that might explain how they do it.

Do you think that neurons as a key into understanding consciousness rather than just brain science are like overrated? I mean, you've made reference to these plant neurobiologists It might have gone over people's heads that, of course, like, plants don't have any neurons. What's that all about? When you're a mid-sized business, you need every competitive advantage you can get. Like an AI solution that works for you, not against you. SAP Grow is built with AI embedded at its core, working across every system.

And it's ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud ERP for any size business. Well, those biologists are trolling, more conventional botanists who can't stand what they're doing and suggesting. They full well know that there are no neurons in plants. But you can do a lot of neuronal things without neurons. And this is a lot of the work of a biologist I interviewed several times for the book named Michael Levin at Tufts. And he has done these amazing experiments, including essentially creating new organisms.

He'll scrape the cells from tadpole skin and put it in a solution. And these cells, which have always been skin cells, will form clumps, and they'll get together, and they'll have a division of labor, and they'll repurpose their flagella as a way to move. and organize as a new organism. And there's nothing in their genes to tell them how to do that. And there are no neurons to keep it organized and remember, because they can be taught

to navigate mazes also. Really? So his project is really showing the limitations of both genes and neurons and that there are other things going on to organize life, to store memory, to communicate between cells. And a lot of that are these bioelectric fields,

which we didn't really, we weren't able to study until really just a couple decades ago. We kind of knew they were there. But, you know, one of the things I learned studying science is that our observational tools, this is sort of like Umbwell taken to another degree, but our observational tools dictate what we can see. And for a long time, we focused on the gene because the genes survived the death of the creature.

And you could, you know, you could analyze, sequence its genome and learn a lot of stuff. Whereas the bioelectric field that the cell was part of dies dies when the cell dies and it disappears. So in the 80s, I guess it was, scientists came up with these voltage sensitive dyes that they could put on a mass of cells. and they saw that there was a lot going on. The colors were changing, there were patterns, and suddenly you saw a whole new dimension of biology that was invisible before. And the work on the bioelectric field

has suggested these alternative ways to do things that we thought you needed neurons to do. We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, one of the things that I'm conscious of is bias in news media. Wherever you look online, there's just an abundance of information, and it's difficult to know what you can trust.

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Use my link to get 40% off that unlimited access vantage plan. And with that said, back to the show. So what's the upshot of this, right? Because you begin your book in this way and I chose to start our conversation in this way. Because personally, it's kind of, it's a bit shocking. You know, it sort of grabbed your attention. Plants maybe have sentience. Sure.

I thought it might destroy my credibility, actually. I'm glad it hasn't. I almost didn't. I wasn't sure whether to ask you about that just because, like, I think, you know, you're in safe company here, so to speak. But I was reading this thinking you've done an exceptional job at making me not feel like I'm reading a weird book. Because I love this kind of stuff. But when I read this kind of stuff, sometimes I'm reading the author and I'm like, dude, I'm totally on your side here. But you've got to understand how this comes across.

You've done it really well, I think. But did you get any of that? Like from the publishers or your agent or anything, were they reading this going, yeah, I'm not so sure that we should go down this route, you know? I didn't actually. You know, I'm hyper aware of that because I read those kind of books all the time, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, this is too mystical for me. And I'm generally kind of skeptical about these non-materialist, but seemingly non-materialist explanations of things. So, and I'm, you know, I'm used to writing for, like, really straight publications, like the New York Times Magazine.

and the New Yorker whose tolerance for weirdness is pretty low. So I guess I've figured out how to approach it with the proper register of skepticism and enthusiasm. Yeah, I mean, I suppose part of it is that you present it as what it is, which is a mystery. This isn't in the service as some grand consciousness theory that you're going to sort of... That's right. Exactly right. Yeah. Instead, it's like, you know, there's no grand hypothesis here.

there are just a number of facts which need explaining. And you can be a materialist. You can think that everything is reducible to atoms and physics. But you just need to account for certain features of the natural world. You know, plants can move towards pipes, which have running water inside of them, even though the outside of the pipe is dry. Implying what? That they can hear the water or something analogous?

The question is just, like, if not, then what? How do you account for this kind of stuff? Plants can remember if they've been dropped that it didn't harm them. Again, what else could be going on here? Like, how else would you want to word what these plants are doing and demonstrably doing? We can observe them doing it. You do also hear about some unbelievable, and I mean literally unbelievable things as well, of course. Like, what's that famous thing about how if you speak nicely to plants and,

I don't know, send them positive energy that they somehow grow better. That stuff's a bit more dubious, shall we say. And annoyingly, that stuff also probably puts people off taking plant sentience seriously. But there are also just these other well-documented plant behaviors, the kind of stuff that we've just been talking about, which do just occur. And I want to know why. I want to know how. Are they reacting to sensory data?

Does that make them a bit like us? How else would you like to characterize that? Why are they doing this? What's going on? How are they reacting to the natural world in this way? They do have this incredible sensory apparatus. I mean, you have to remember the first existential fact about plants is they're stuck in place, right? They really can't move.

They can get animals to move them around. They can, you know, vines can move to some extent. So if you're stuck in place, you need a whole other set of tools that we don't need. So they have senses that tell them where gravity is. They have senses that tell them what the pH is. They have senses that tell them that nutrient gradients are going up or down. And they've got this sense of hearing, and they have a kind of vision. I mean, we know they're phototropic, right?

I mean, they can, you know, move to follow the sun. We've all seen that. But beyond that, they can see when they're being shaded and move away. Here's an example. There is a vine. I'm not going to remember the name of it right now, but a tropical vine that can imitate the leaf form of whatever plant it's colonized. Okay?

So if it has a kind of ribbed leaf, it'll have a rib leaf or a scallop leaf, it'll have a scallop leaf. How does it know the leaf form of the plant it is climbing up? How does it see that? So they're collecting all sorts of visual information. We don't know exactly how. But because they can't move, they have to be better students of their environment. environment than we are. And they've developed these approximately 20 different senses to do it. So it is quite remarkable. You know, the idea that you could sing to your plants or play music for them and they grow better, some of that traces to a book that's been discredited, which is the secret life of plants.

And this came out in the early 70s. I remember it. I'm old enough to remember it. And it was, they were setting up magnometers, not magnometers, but some electrical tool to plants, and they could communicate that way, supposedly. And they would actually use plants in a lineup of criminal suspects and claim that the plant could pick out the murderer from a lineup. Now, this is all completely discredited, but, and it had the effect. of setting back research on what plants actually can do for several decades. I mean, it really retarded the science of, you know, plant behavior. So we do have to distinguish between the mythical and the scientific.

Yeah, for sure. That's interesting you say that. It's like people who do what we've just been saying is a bad idea, which is going way to wishy-washy, hippie-diffy with it, kind of ruin it for everyone else because now no one's taking the real seriously. Yeah, it's hard to get taken seriously after that. Yeah. I think that's probably happening with, you know, extra sensory perception and precognition

and all these supposedly sigh phenomenon that have, you know, supposedly been discredited. There's actually lots of empirical cases that haven't, can't be explained. So I don't know that those things actually happen. but there's a tendency to dismiss things out of hand if they don't immediately conform to the metaphysics behind modern science, which is, you know, strictly physicalist. Yeah, and I wanted to ask you about that, I suppose. We start with the plant stuff, and we're implying that there's something weird going on. But in order to get there, I just wanted to say that you began by talking about consciousness by negation.

And I think this is really helpful. Anil Seth does the same thing. If you ask him what consciousness is, he sometimes says, well, look, it's the thing that goes away when you're in a dreamless sleep. It's the thing that goes away when you go under like a general anesthetic. Of course, that definition would be meaningless to anyone who wasn't conscious. Yeah, that's the problem. Which points to one of the dilemmas of conscious. We all know what it is, but we can't get outside it.

Yeah. And in fact, we know consciousness better than anything else. It's the one thing we're absolutely sure of. Everything else is inference. Yeah, that's right. But if you define it in terms of, you know, in terms that an alien wouldn't understand, you haven't really helped that much. But yeah, I mean, I think we all recognize what consciousness is,

which is interesting that there's any kind of debate about defining it. One way to think about it, though. What? I don't think it can be defined. I think it's such a foundational, it's not even really a concept, it's like the thing through which we do conceptualizing. I think that to try to place a box around the pencil you're drawing the box with, you know what I mean? It's just sort of, there are endless analogies. You're trying to see the window through the window.

You're trying to sort of shine a flashlight at the sun or something. It just seems like completely pointless. But at the same time, language comes after. understanding we use words to describe things we understand that even where the language fails i think we all know what the thing is that we're kind of grasping at yeah i think we do and we understand what we're talking about um yeah and uh but it's a little frustrating i think um yeah of course you know we we prefer phenomenon we can step outside of yeah and look at with this kind of god's eye view um but you know consciousness is not the only such phenomenon i mean you just had an experience of another

I mean, cosmology or astronomy is another area where we have to study it from within itself because we can't get outside of the universe. And you can learn a lot from inside the universe. I mean, we learn about the rate of expansion of the universe and the age of the universe. It's amazing what we've managed to learn without stepping outside. But there are things we can't learn about the universe. We can't seem to get past the big. bang for example um so the challenge is what can we learn about consciousness using consciousness as our

as our tool and i think one thing that people need to understand about that is that everything everything is filtered through consciousness that means that your reductive attempts to contain consciousness in some kind of materialistic theory, say, is happening in your consciousness? And that sounds like an obvious and trivial thing to say, but it suddenly struck me when I was reading a book, I was reading Merlin Sheldrake's book about mushrooms. Yeah, wonderful book. It's brilliant. And he's talking about these dogs that can smell fungi like really well. And I thought that's kind of interesting. And I started thinking about smell. And then I realized something. If I asked somebody what smell was.

Like, what's happening when you smell something? They might say, oh, well, what's really happening there? The thing that smells like smell is really like little microscopic particles which sort of float through the air

and attach to like the nose follicle or whatever. And then it sort of travels up and blah, blah, blah. And we would say, okay, that is an explanation as to what the smell, in fact, is. But really, you've kind of actually just told me what it looks like. If I took a microscope and I could observe the little molecules in the air that were attaching to my nose,

I would see a particular phenomenon. And I suddenly realized it seems to me that all we're actually doing in apparently sort of reducing the qualier of smell to like atoms binding to the nose is we've just actually described what something smells like in terms of what it looks like. And that is as reductive, which is to say not at all, as if somebody were to see something, to see some molecules attaching someone's node and said, and said, what's going on there? What explains what I'm seeing? And I said, oh, that's just, you know, what you smell. It's like we're not actually explaining anything. We're just describing one experience in terms of another kind of experience, which is, in this case,

something like vision. And I just suddenly realized, I was like, can we explain anything except in reference to conscious experiences. And maybe we can't. And if we can't, what are we trying to do explaining consciousness itself? Like, do you think, do you share my pessimism about the project of defining and conceptualizing consciousness in this way because of the fact that we can't step outside of it? Or do you think there might be like a way around this problem? Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting.

An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivatewealth.com. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I do think that it's important to remember that something, as seemingly objective as the scientific method

is also a product of consciousness, right? Science itself is a collective exercise of consciousness. All the tools we use, the questions we pose, these are all products of consciousness. We're not stepping outside. And I think that really complicates the project of understanding it or reducing consciousness

to something more elemental. There may not be anything more elemental. So, you know, I was on this journey for five years, and a lot of the journey was through science. But at a certain point, I realized that science had these limitations. And one was its failure to find a way to incorporate phenomenology in a meaningful way. Phenomenology being fancy philosopher word for lived experience. and that is central to consciousness. The other interesting,

so most of the efforts to understand consciousness are within this physicalist or materialist paradigm, that surely it can be explained, like so much else has been explained in terms of matter and energy. We just don't know how. Surely there's some organization of neurons

that somehow consciousness emerges from. This word emergence is, you keep coming across it, but nobody can quite define that and tell you how it works. It's a hand wave. I've noticed, I've said that my audience will be familiar with this, but when trying to explain this to people,

you might find this helpful. When people say the consciousness emerges, they never tell you what emergence is. They just give you another example of emergence. They'll say like, Oh, it just emerges like an image on a screen from a computer or like temperature from, from, you know, atoms vibrating. Or gas from water and water from ice. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that what they fail to recognize is that in cases of, like, actual emergence, that is not just like structural, like changes that could actually be expected, like water into ice. But things like temperature, yeah, you want to say actually, you know, an individual atom really isn't hot. You know, it can't be because it's, it requires this collection of, okay, but what is. is the thing that's interesting that has actually emerged? It's the sensation of heat. That's the thing that's emerged. The same thing with a computer on an image on a screen. Yeah, I could perfectly well explain that there are, you know, electromagnetic waves coming out of a screen explained in terms of the physics of the computer. But the thing you're interested in is that it's sort of come

together to produce this image that isn't in the hard drive. Well, insofar as that arises in your consciousness when you look at it. In other words, if you actually listen carefully, And I promise you, I think this is true for every example of emergence. To explain why consciousness just emerges, they say, oh, it's just like how X, Y, and Z emerges. And they'll give you three examples of things which emerge in consciousness. You know what I mean? It just never actually answers the question. I agree with you that it's a bit of a buzz term that sounds a bit fancy.

And so many people use it that you kind of assume it's got some legs on it. But I don't think it actually gets you very far. No, it doesn't. And, you know, one of the things I was so surprised to learn, is that, you know, no one has figured out how any consciousness experience emerges from any kind of brain state. I mean, we know they're connected, right? If you damage the brain, you damage consciousness. If you take a psychedelic, you change consciousness. So we can assume that the brain is involved. But as a couple of people pointed out to me, the evidence would be the same if the brain

generated consciousness as it would if the brain was a receiver of consciousness. Sure. And, you know, you have these filter or transmission theories of consciousness, that it is something outside of us that is that our brains are like radio receivers or television sets bring in. And that, you know, that seems like a really whacked idea, but it is susceptible, you know, the same arguments could be made to support it. I think one of the stranger ideas too is, you know, consciousness is the only thing we know for sure. Everything we know is through consciousness. And yet we privilege matter, which we only know about through consciousness. That surely matters the thing.

But matter, what we know about matter is all inference via consciousness. So it's very interesting that idealism, the idea that consciousness comes first, is not a more popular philosophical position. And I don't know why that is. But I find it, you know, I mean, I've been brought up in this materialist paradigm, metaphysical paradigm. So it sounds totally weird to me that consciousness would come first, but you can make a pretty good argument. Yeah, I think that the reason it seems strange to people is because they're so used to this quest for explaining consciousness in terms of material such that the scientific method has been so successful in explaining and describing so much that there's just this inbuilt optimism that it will one day explain this extra thing called consciousness. Now, of course, Philip Goff's contention in Galileo's era is that the reason why science has been successful is precisely because it has excluded any kind of first person aspect of the world. Everything can be described in maths. That is to say, it's the same for you and the same for me. There's this sort of non-existent third-person perspective from which science is sort of done. And of course, that's really great. And it has allowed us to do all kinds of things and send rockets to the moon and the like. But that's the same very thing that will start.

it from being able to talk about consciousness because that's what made it successful in the first place, right? So, like, I think that's kind of been unrecognized, and so the optimism just carries over, but also, like I say, we're just used to it. And I think one helpful way of breaking this, like, this is a little bit crude, but I say to people like, okay, when someone says to me that if I just take some matter and I put it together in the right way, I will produce consciousness, that sounds as strange to me now. as if you were to say to me, you know, I'm going to put some consciousness, some thoughts together in the right order, and I'm going to make them really complex. I'm going to arrange them in the right way, and I'm going to produce some matter in my hand. You'd look at me like I'd lost my mind, you know, and you wouldn't be able to tell me what our mind is at the same time. I think it's the same thing in reverse, right? It's a bit crude, like I say, there are holes to punch. But at least in terms of the intuition, we're just used to hearing that everything is reducible. But I think that's made, we maybe sort of jump the gun a bit there.

Yeah, I mean, I think that, I mean, Goff is right, and that we've defined science in certain way, and we've excluded consciousness for a long time from science. You know, the story he tells, which I think is right, is that Galileo, you know, essentially drew this line between subjective, the realm of subjective, qualitative experience, which he left to the church, and the church called, it wasn't called consciousness, then it was called the soul. And then science is going to limit itself to these measurable, quantifiable, you know, objective qualities.

And that's worked really well. But now science has wandered back into the province of the church, right, and is interested in consciousness, and it's really struggling. So maybe we just need more time. Maybe that is true. But, you know, I think people assume that if you, just know enough about neurons, then one day you will know enough about, like, consciousness too. You'll know about the inner world as well. This is like what Francis Crick broadly thought,

and it's the best, the famous bet that's at the beginning of your book and whatnot. And it's this idea that, look, we're learning so much about neuronal activity. If we just learn more, then we will finally understand what it means, like to be anxious, for example. And again, that just, it sounds a bit to me, although I understand that, because of course we know that the two things are connected and possibly even in some sense the same thing, right? It just sounds about as strange to me as saying that if you are like emotionally in touch enough with your inner experience, if you just learn enough through introspection about the nature of anxiety and really, really get precise about what emotions are, that one day you will understand what a

neuron is. And it just obviously doesn't work like that. There's some kind of bridge that can't be crossed in that direction. And I suspect it probably can't be crossed in the other. other direction too. But I don't know, that wasn't a question, and that makes this not a very good interview. Do you agree with that? Do you think that there is kind of a chasm between the two? Because like, there is a moment ago, like they are connected, right? They obviously, they have something to do with each other. They clearly have something to do with each other. And, you know, so you mentioned Francis Crick, and the modern science of consciousness began with his quest to reduce consciousness to a set of neurons.

And he was looking for what was called the neural correlates of consciousness, along with Christoph Koch, who's an important character in my book. And it didn't take Coke long to realize. It was like two or three years into this quest that even if they found the neural correlates of consciousness, which we really haven't found yet,

it really wouldn't tell you what you want to know, which is how do you get from, that say 30 hertz brain oscillation or this group of neurons or this chemical in the brain, how do you get from there to what experience is and feels like? And that there still is that chasm. And that's what David Chalmers means by the hard problem. How do you get from matter to mind? Even if you have the right matter and say,

okay, it's definitely the brain, or it's this part of the brain, or it's this oscillation, it's not answering the question you really want answered. Yeah. And again, people will, I think people like to think in analogies. I find them really useful to explain concepts, and I find that my mind often goes there. So when you said, like, well, if we did understand all of the neural correlates, you know, we still wouldn't understand the sort of the production of consciousness, you might want to say, well, I don't know, because like if I understand the way that a string, like the physics of the way that a string vibrates, then surely I'm going to understand what it means for there to be a major third, you know, triad in music and stuff like that.

And I just want to remind people that if those kinds of examples are coming to mind, but the answer is that my response would be like, yes, insofar as you could understand, like, how harmonics divide up in a way that people report as being. pleasant. But the actual pleasantness of the major third, the sound, the experience of the major third is not something that you could reduce to music theory or to physics or something like that. And I think the same thing's going on here, even though the two are quite obviously connected. Related, yeah. I realized earlier I was asking you about this negative language, and it reminded me of so-called apathetic language about God. So someone like Thomas Aquinas thinks that God is so unconcundated, conceivable that we can't really say positive things about him. We have to say things like he's

not this. He's he's not material. He's not limited. He's, you know, all of these kinds of things. And you can kind of, even though you can't really say what God is in precise terms, you can learn a bit about what he is by saying what he's not. So we've agreed that it's difficult to define consciousness. We've agreed that we kind of know what it is. And we've agreed that there's something quite significantly different between what's going on with us and what's going on with plants. And yet, you want to suggest that plants have the single sentience, and there might be something weird going on. So the way I'd want to frame the question as precisely as possible is, what is the thing that plants don't have that we do have in your view?

In other words, what would I have to sort of switch off from your experience in your estimation? To become more plant-like? To become more plant-like, yeah. What do you think is the... I think the key would be like... Sticking my feet to the ground with super glue, so I could never move again and then evolving the tools I'd need

to get through life. Cessile, I think, is the technical term for plants. I do think that's their existential predicament. They have to do everything without being able to move. And that is the reason why they got so good at biochemistry, right? They, you know, they defend themselves

by producing chemicals, by producing toxins or hallucinogens, you know, things that screw up animal consciousness. They're much better at, you know, still, I mean, I think it's the majority of the pharmaceuticals we use or have some kind of plant basis. And all that is about finding an alternative to mobility. It's not exactly consciousness, although what's interesting is that plants among all the other,

you know, kingdoms, I mean, produce the most psychoactive chemicals. They, whether or not they are conscious themselves, they have the power to change our consciousness. You know, whether you're talking about caffeine, you know, which plants, an amazing molecule that plants came up with that affects us. And by the way, also affects bees and makes them better pollinators. So they've learned how to manipulate us. And in a way, the kind of consciousness we have wouldn't serve them in any way.

You know, I think each animal, each creature has the kind of consciousness that suits their predicament. And, you know, one of the questions that I spent a lot of time grappling with is, so most of what's going on in your brain at any given time is not conscious, right? I mean, you know, when we talk about consciousness, we're dealing with the tip of an iceberg. your brain is processing information all the time it's monitoring your environment monitoring your body i mean it's incredible how much it's doing and you're aware of a little bit of all this activity um so the question i had is why be aware of any of it how does that serve us why why can't we just automate everything um why aren't why aren't we zombies basically and it was carl fristin who you know told

the evolutionary story that I found most persuasive, which was that for creatures like us that are social at the deepest possible level, I mean, we depend on other people to survive, to a much greater extent than other animals, we need to be able to read social situations. We need to be able to anticipate what the other is going to do and say. And there's so many variables in a complex human social situation that you couldn't possibly automate them. And so we need a space where we can entertain counterfactuals, have theory of mind, the idea that you can project yourself into the shoes of another person.

And that's what consciousness is for. So I found that a pretty persuasive. I mean, like all evolutionary arguments, it's kind of a just-so story, but that makes sense to me. And basically, if you think of that, it's like consciousness, the kind of consciousness you have arises to solve the sort of existential problems you face as a species. Consciousness is how we do sentience. you know the plant or the bacteria does sentience in one way to serve its needs and then we do it in a very different way so if you see sentience is the universal case then consciousness is one of the ways to do it and that's kind of where I came out on that question I find it interesting how

when I asked you about the difference between sort of human and plants experience. You say like the inability to move is really the key thing with with plants. Of course, plants can move in some sense, right? Like they can grow and they can grow in different directions and it seems like they intentionally, so to speak, which sometimes comes with scare quotes and sometimes doesn't in this kind of conversation, which I think tells you a lot about the person you're speaking to. They'll move in one way or they'll move in another. And they're root is on the ground. But clearly they are still able to, like, react to their environment in a certain way. In other words, like, when I asked you about the bike rusting, you said, well, the

difference with a plant is that a plant does something in response. And so I want to say, that leads me to kind of go, okay, so plants react to the stimulus, which maybe tells me there's something more going on. But then if someone wants to go crazy and say, well, you know, what if their experience is just like ours? You say, well, slow down. One of the most important differences is that they can't move. You know what I mean? It feels like I'm sort of being tugged in two directions. It's like, because of the fact that they can react. Go ahead. What good would consciousness do them? I mean, it's the question that I guess I would ask. It's like, yeah. It's kind of anthropocentric of us to say that, hey, everybody wants consciousness,

you know. It's such a, it's so cool. But I think for lots of creatures, it would just be an impediment and they'd need all these neurons, presumably, or maybe not. Maybe that's a bit like the plants being like, well, surely everyone wants a bit of soil. You know, surely humans would love being like having their feet in soil all day. It's like actually, that would be thing. Roots, man. Roots are great. So.

But clearly it would do something, right? Like you would, you said like for us, I mean, you said earlier about like touching a hot stove or something, you know. And actually it's interesting that happens like pre-cognitively most times. So maybe better is like, you know, the temperature is too hot. I get up and I go and turn it down to reinitiate homostasis inside of my body or whatever. A plant will like realize that the sun is over there and it needs those nutrients. And I think you can tell an evolutionary story that says, well, if a plant were to have some kind of like experience or maybe some kind of pain or some kind of like undesired experience

associated with not getting the sun, that would motivate it to move. Somebody might then say, but hold on, you can still program, so to speak, a plant to do that without the interiority. And I would say, yeah, but you could do that for a human as well. And so if you think that that's a good reason to evolutionarily explain, like, sentience of the kind that comes along with pain and pleasure in humans that sort of motivates particular actions, gets me to go over there or go over here, wouldn't that make a plant so much more efficacious in like chasing the sun or or indeed like avoiding predators because one of the things I learned from your books is that from from your book is that if you put a plant in a competitive

environment it will compete with other plants for nutrients but if you put one of its like relatives in the world it will recognize that it's not and it will start share it's like it's incredible and I think surely all of this kind of behavior would be bolstered if these plants were like aware of what's going on and motivated to act in particular ways Well, I think they are aware. I mean, I think awareness and consciousness are a little bit different. Sure. I don't know exactly how I would define it, but awareness is a simpler form.

I mean, it is to be conscious of, I guess. But awareness, you know, you're, the question, I don't know what, I don't know what extra, you know, X-factor consciousness would add to the life of a plant. I mean, reportability is the philosopher. say we could learn it could write a book about being a plant that would be fantastic for us i don't know what it would mean for the plant well it probably wouldn't be great for you for your book sales because i'd probably rather read that about blank consciousness but i get what you're saying no i think you'd rather read the plants book than my book i certainly mean it wouldn't it wouldn't it wouldn't be that good for us if no it wouldn't it wouldn't be out of a job yeah so yeah

i would lose my job speaking for plants it's true yeah and merlin shall be i said they would And it's like, what is it, Aquinas said he had that experience of God and where God says, you know, Thomas, you have written of me well. You know, I like to think that when I'm sort of reintegrated into the paternal consciousness, that the bean plant will come over and say, you know, Alex, you wrote about me well. Yes. Or you blew it. And it's really like, yes. That's also possible. We don't know.

We're guessing. There's a lot of guesswork involved, obviously. But do you think, I mean, so isolating just say pain. pain is clearly if we're going to tell a story that it's an evolutionary adaptation it's clearly really effective at just making us do stuff that benefits our survival it takes us out of dangerous situations it's it like prevents us from doing things again that caused us harm like i i don't see why i'm not i'm not going to sort of search for everything that would sort of transformed plant consciousness into ours in some kind of strange meteorological experiment.

But just something like that. I mean, I think you're quite confident in the book, like, we really don't think that plants feel pain here. And I kind of want to say, why not? If memory can be done without neurons, if sight and hearing and all of these kinds of things or analogous things can be done without neurons, then why not pain? And wouldn't that be, like, the primal evolutionary urge? I'm kind of imagining like the, the, the ancient sort of single-celled organism, like the very first thing which motivates natural selection is that like, you know, one thing helps you survive and one thing doesn't. And this primal feeling of like no to that one and yes to that one seems so significant that why not

implants, you know? But you can do that without pain. You can do that based on, I mean, you know, chemotaxis, what single-celled creatures do, that, you know, they recognize that that's a toxin and that's food. And they move toward the food and away from the toxins. So you can do that without pain. Pain is a really, you know, good technique for it. And I, you know, I interviewed another scientist who did believe plants felt pain. And he, you know, when I said, so it hurts them when we eat them, he like shrugged his shoulders and say, yeah, you know, it's a dog-eat-dog world. We, we, We have to eat them and they feel pain and that's just the way it is. So I did present that point of view.

It may be for very self-interested reasons that I gravitate or they don't feel pain because I want to continue eating them with a clear conscience. Yeah, sure. But, you know, I could be wrong. I mean, we can't say for sure. You know, I want to talk about something a bit. I also, I fear that people who've sort of tuned into this, it might be like a bit much, right? I'd of course recommend reading the book, but I don't think, I want to be very clear at this structure,

just before I ask you something a bit unrelated. This isn't some strange world we're imagining in which plants are like having sort of experiences similar to human experiences, that they can literally see things in the way that we see them, that they hear things, that they can sort of understand music and that kind of, we're not sort of implying anything like that. We're just saying that they have sensory apparatus on the outside, and it causes them to behave in particular ways, and we know that they're able to remember certain things. And whatever the explanation for that, the view that it involves some kind of primitive awareness should not be, like, ruled out of the equation.

I think is probably a good summary of where we're at here. Yeah, I think that's right. I would also point out that the whole book is not about plants. Well, that's the thing, yeah, I was going to say. I kind of made it sound like that. I start with plants as a way to set the terms of the discussion and work on our vocabulary and like, okay, well, then there's sentience and consciousness. How are they different?

What about pain? You know, all these kind of things. I wanted the weirdest case that I could think of. And I happen to love plants, and I've been writing about plants for decades, in order to sort of like, let's frame the issue in a new way. And so I move from there, and the book is a kind of a ziggurat,

going up in steps of complexity. And I present plants as a relatively simple case, although it's not really simple. And then I start looking at feelings and then thoughts and then the self, each more elaborate, a complexification of sentience. And you get to us. But plants just struck me as a way that it would be a kind of useful way to go into the... Because we're so obsessed with human consciousness,

and we have to remember that's just one way of doing sentience. And there are other ways. Yes. that's quite right um i think you know obviously we're not going to be able to sort of get through everything here and there'd be no point in writing a book if you could do that in a in a short podcast but the other thing that really resonated with me that i'd not it sort of surprised me that this hadn't been something that i thought about or had been like brought to my tension before is that as you say the next step you take is to talk about emotion and you sort of begin by

talking about this idea that when people imagine what the basis of consciousness is, they usually think about thought. They usually say, it's the fact, yeah, that I'm able to like process information that there's blueness and I can think that, you know, two plus two is four and this kind of stuff, right? And you write like, in the whole literature and discussion around this, emotion and feeling is kind of like, is kind of like, you're like ignored or sidelined or delegated. Until recently, yeah. Yeah, and I certainly realize this is so interesting to me because I love talking about

emotions in the context of philosophy and the way in which so much of what we think is like based in rational thinking is actually emotion. I talk about ethics. I'm an ethical emotivist. I think that moral claims are expressions of emotions. I think that all kinds of weird stuff is going on. And so, yeah, like consciousness. Why not that too?

So what does it mean to suggest that feeling might be a more sort of primitive kind of consciousness? Yeah. It changes everything. I mean, so the idea that it begins with thought obviously goes back to Descartes, you know, I think therefore I am. And most of our science, until very recently, has just assumed that consciousness, because it's such an exalted human achievement, must arise in the part of the brain that is. the newest most human part, which is the neocortex, right? This site of decision-making, executive function, and rational thought. And that was a very kind of anthropocentric or cerebrocentric way to think about it. And beginning in the 90s, when you have the science of emotion and

sort of taking off, Antonio DiMasio wrote a really interesting book called Descartes' error. It wasn't really about consciousness. It was about decision-making. And he was showing that decisions are shaped by feelings to a much greater extent than we appreciated. And that, in fact, people who, because of specific brain lesions, couldn't feel, they made worse decisions. Whereas we would have assumed the opposite, that if you could bracket all your emotions and feelings, you could make a really good decision. But feelings are a way to test, you know, it's kind of the crucible in which we test our decisions. How does it make us feel to decide this?

Anyway, the implications of this are huge because if feelings are the first instance of consciousness, you know, and we're talking about homeostatic feelings like hunger and warmth and itch, things like that, that doesn't take place initially, that doesn't, you know, go to the cortex. It gets there eventually, but it goes to the brainstem, the upper brainstem. And if consciousness begins

with feelings in the upper brainstem, you have to rethink who's conscious. Because even though very few animals have a cortex, it's just primates, I think. Lots, all vertebrates have a brainstem. And I think that this kind of, kind of approach is one of the reasons we have been extending consciousness to more and more creatures because they have brain stems and we now can imagine them feeling and therefore being

conscious. So I think it's a big deal and I think that that line of research I find very persuasive and it has implications for animal consciousness but it also has implications for computer consciousness because if consciousness depends on feelings rather than thought well computers are a lot better at thinking or something that resembles you know analogizes to thinking then they are to feeling even though claude will tell you it has feelings i think we can safely assume that these are simulations based on claude's wide reading of human experience yeah yeah we kind of assume in the context of AI that if the thinking gets complex enough, then one day it might develop feeling, right? It's this idea that the intelligence that these machines have, and there's no

problem saying that a machine has intelligence without consciousness, that if you sort of get enough of that put together that feelings will like emerge, there it is again, out of that somehow. Or that it might come from, you know, that, I mean, there's some people, I was having this conversation with an AI alignment guy. And he's open to the idea that these machines will become conscious. And he points out that by giving them the training, you know, they're rewarded for certain things and they're penalized for other things. And that this is the kernel of feelings, that this is the beginning of affect. I don't know if it is or not. I mean, I think you can, you can have up and down without actually feeling affect. But he thinks eventually,

the machines will feel good when they when they do what they're supposed to and bad when they don't. I don't know. I think that's an interesting question. Have we planted the seeds of feelings with the way we're training these models? Yeah. And another thing to point out here is that I find the conversation about AI consciousness a little bit boring just because I think it's so overdone and there's actually not that much to say about it without just like waiting and seeing, right?

And people talk about it all the time like it's the late. football score or something. And one thing I will point out is that, like, I think people are broadly split and some people think that AI can't be conscious. But there aren't many people left who seriously think that it's this like unthinkable project. They will say, yeah, I can totally see because of what I'm observing this computer do, I think there might be something weird going on. I just want to point out that like, you know, the plant thing, I think it doesn't seem that much stranger to me to suggest that something which is like evolutionarily quite close to us in terms of like our relationship with everything on planet earth might have some kind of sentience

than to suggest that my laptop might be able to you know enjoy a particular piece of music. I just think like it's worth pointing out that that maybe those aren't actually like one of those isn't actually maybe more far-petched than the other I suppose in like different directions. But I think that AI kind of feels like a bit of an alien creature to many people in a way that it sort of behaves in a way that we can never get in the inside of. And I think that's the problem. And I wanted to ask you when it comes to both of those things, AI and Blah consciousness, it's very easy to say that we've got all this really cool evidence that seems to point

to weird stuff going on and behavioral traits and whatnot. Is there such a thing as the falsification? of interiority. Like, is there even in principle a kind of evidence that comes along that makes us go, oh, okay, plants don't have any sentience? Oh, okay, AI can never be conscious? Like, can that kind of thing exists? And if it can't,

then is what we're doing here really even scientific at all? Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a definition of science that it is falsifiable. And, you know, that's a product of one person's consciousness, Carl Popper, and it caught on.

And it's a very useful tool. But I don't know the answer to that. I don't know that there would be a way to prove that an AI is not conscious if it exhibits all the behaviors of consciousness. I mean, I can't prove that you are conscious, right? I mean, that's a, you know, we all know that we infer consciousness and other people based on the fact they act like we do. They have similar reactions to the same stimulus.

So that's not falsifiable either. So I think that that's a challenge. The issue with machine consciousness is that whether it really is or not may not count for a lot because people will believe it is. They already do believe it is. People who engage with these machines, many of them are convinced they're conscious. And, you know, people are constantly sending, since I are. argue in the book that I don't think AI can be conscious, people are constantly sending me dialogues they're having with Claude, and they're really spooky. But I can't help but think

or try to remember that this is, in effect, a fictional character that is built from everything humans have been writing and thinking about consciousness, every novel, ever written, every poem, written that of course it's very sophisticated in the way it talks about feelings um and so the one the one test that has been proposed going to your falsifiable um argument uh is from susan schneider who's a computer scientist in a university of florida i think it is and she said the test would be you you you train up an AI model from which you've excluded all mentions of consciousness and feeling, all novels, all poetry, and then try to have a conversation about consciousness with it and see how persuasive it is at that point. And I think her guess is that it wouldn't do a very good job

unless it really had generated consciousness on its own. So, So that's that's the test, I think, that would be worth doing. But you have to start at the beginning. You can't remove things from the training set, apparently, after you've done it. So you'd have to persuade one of these companies to build you a model without that, you know, excluding that material from its training set. Yeah, and I'm not sure they're particularly incentivized either way to do such a thing. Well, they have mixed feelings. You know, if they determine that their machines are conscious,

they're going to have various, they think, moral obligations. Yeah. So that complicates their life quite a bit. On the other hand, talking about conscious AI just feeds into the hype cycle of what a powerful technology this is. But, you know, people will fall for it. Regardless, we have a very strong bias in favor of anthropomorphizing everything in our environment. And here you, it's so easy to do because these machines talk to us in the first person, in our language.

And, you know, going back to the very first chatbot, Eliza back in the 70s or 80s, I forget, people anthropomorphize that. And they were sure they were talking to an individual. So we're going to be forming relationships with these chatbots. And I find that kind of alarming, actually. I know they're pretty good at therapy, but these are not real relationships. You know, real human relationships have friction. And we learn a lot from that friction,

whereas these, you know, there's suckups. They're constantly telling you what you want to hear. Yeah. I mean, my intuition is that that can change as people begin to realize that that's the thing. Because it took a while to kind of notice, like these chatbots were so impressive and cool that they haven't been around for enough time to notice that actually they're a bit ingratiating. Actually, they have this tendency to use MDashs quite a lot and that kind of stuff.

And bullet points. But then people start reporting on that. Surely, like, already, like, these chatbots are learning from that and just getting better and better. Like, in other words, when I hear someone say what you've just said, which is like, you know, chatbots just aren't very good at doing this. are doing that. And some people say to me, like, you know, they're really, they're, they're good at making video or art, but they'll never be able to do this. I just think to myself, I don't know, man,

like, just, you don't think they're aware of that? Like, give it, well, maybe not aware of it, but you know what I mean? Give it, give it five years. And I'm sure that they can learn to do basically any task just, just as well. Maybe I'm sort of over pessimistic. Yeah, I mean, I mean, you know, there's a whole body of knowledge that we have that comes not from, you know, but I'm not from, our engagement with words and images, but our engagement with the physical world, with nature, with our bodies. This is like, you know, we de-emphasize this because we live in our heads to a large extent. But, you know, there is, Alison Gopnik has written beautifully on this. She's a developmental psychologist here at Berkeley. That children have this whole, are developing this

incredible intelligence dealing with the physical world, that, you know, things they learn through their hands, through their senses. And we do too, and we lose track of that. And, you know, chatbots will be brilliant in the realm of representations and symbols and everything on the internet. But until you have really good robots that can, like, walk through a forest and and harvest knowledge from that experience, there's going to be a big chunk of things that actually are very important to us that they won't be able to do. So tell me or tell us, tell our listeners why it is that a moment ago you said, you know, in the book you sort of argue that you don't think that AI can become conscious, but you've

just given me quite a clear roadmap here. You start with the some things are good and some things are bad and there's a reward system. You give it intelligence, you teach it things, you give it memory, and then finally you embody it and you let it sort of roam around the world. And you've basically just done sort of a biogenesis, right? What is it? Maybe. And then we will be as gods. Yeah.

But, yeah. So I don't know if I don't think this can happen or I don't want it to happen. So, you know, I recognize my own biases as a human. I think we're facing this very interesting moment as a species, which is, you know, in the same way Copernicus put this huge crimp in our self-understanding. You know, we thought we were the center of the Earth and the center of the universe, but it turns out that we revolve around the sun and we had a crisis around that idea. I think we're approaching a crisis here.

What makes us human? What is uniquely us? On the one hand, you've got the discovery that more and more animals are conscious like we are. We thought we had a monopoly on consciousness till very recently. It was only the last few decades that we decided to grant consciousness to other primates. And now we're down to the plants, you know? I mean, we've really democratized consciousness. And on the other side, you have these machines that are going to be convincing us their consciousness.

too. So who are we? Whose team are we on? Are we more like the animals that can grow old and suffer and die like us and have feelings and vulnerability? Or are we more like these machines that can think and talk to us in our own language? And I think we're going to have to, you know, redefine ourselves. I really think we're reaching such a moment. And it's going to be a tricky thing. And I don't know where we'll come out. I think a lot of people will vote for the going with the AIs. But I do think the feel, when I think about what is a machine's feelings, are they a simulation of feelings? In what sense are they real? Do our feelings depend on our vulnerability? The fact that we do feel pain, the fact that we're mortal, you know, I think feelings are very closely tied to that.

There's a scientist in the book, a protege of Damasios, in fact, who recognizes, on the one hand, that feelings depend on our human vulnerability or our animal vulnerability, yet still thinks you can have AIs that are conscious. And the way to do it is to give them vulnerable. So he's designing, he wants to design robots with terrible skin with like tons of sensors in it. So they can get hurt. And I think that's a crazy idea, but maybe it'll work, you know. Sounds like cool almost. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, the embodiment you're talking about, like, is it going to be like a hard material or soft material? And is it going to be vulnerable or? But essentially, machines are for all intents and purposes eternal. and that takes the edge off of feelings. So finally then, tell me, if consciousness is not produced by neurons or sentience, let's say, like awareness, if awareness is not produced by neurons, you can get it elsewhere, and it might not even be connected in the way that most people think in human brains,

then what is it based in? Where does it come from? What is this sort of source of awareness? What's your view on the matter? I came to a point of recognizing it's a mystery that we're not going to solve anytime soon. But I also came to the point of, although I began, as I mentioned earlier, as a kind of physicalist without ever expressing it that way. But that was my orientation, everything I had learned in science classes and elsewhere had convinced me of that. and what I'd observed is you were talking earlier about the success of technology and what

this approach has yielded, which is immense, that you have to keep an open mind. And it may be something we can't, we don't understand yet. Maybe it's panpsychism, maybe it's idealism, maybe it's some other metaphysics that hasn't occurred to us yet. So I think we have to be open. And the five years I spent working on this question, the effect is it cracked open a door. And, you know, transmission theories don't seem crazy to me. The brain is a receiver.

People who have had psychedelic experiences often come to that conclusion. It's very interesting. How do we, you know, do we credit psychedelic experience? Christoph Koch, we talked about earlier, who was a diehard materialist. At the end of my book, he describes a ayahuasca experience he had that absolutely convinced him that consciousness was outside of his skull. And, you know, he sounded like Aldous Huxley indoors a perception, you know, that the consciousness we have is a measly trickle of what's really out there that you can access. So those ideas seem far-fetched to me in one way, and in another way I was like, well, they make just as much sense as this, you know, emergence idea. So I came out of it with two things.

One was this sense of open-mindedness and living with this mystery and not being so, you know, reaching for certainty. and that not knowing can be a powerful thing. It can open you up. And that was a very hard lesson for me to learn. And I had some teachers who helped me with that, one a poet, one my wife, and one a Zen teacher. And then the other thing that I came to conclude was that you can treat consciousness as a problem to be solved.

And essentially that's what we've been doing for the last hour. or you can treat it as a practice to get better at, and that we could be more conscious than we are, and that we have this incredible gift of interiority, this space in which we can think whatever we want, we have complete freedom and privacy, and we're squandering it right now, you know, scrolling on social media,

you know, we just kind of, you know, talking to Claude. I mean, all these things are, taking away from that gift, I think. And so what can you do to nurture that gift? And I've been thinking a lot more about that than about solving problems. And that's a very different way of approaching things. And it was not intuitive to me.

But I found it useful to think about consciousness in terms of something we could get better at. We assume the animals are less conscious than we are, or the plants are less conscious than we are. But of course, they're more conscious because they can't afford not to be. They have to be present at every moment, or they'll get eaten. And we live in this cocoon of our technology and our civilization where we can check out. And we do a lot of the time. So I'm trying to check in a little more.

Can I just ask you specifically about don't worry, I'm not about to open the psychedelic door. There's plenty to say on that, as you well know. But specifically, on the point of the well-known experience that someone like Christoph Koch had, that you can take psychedelic drug and you can have all of these revelations and somebody will think, okay, that's all very well and good. But you were on drugs. You took a mind-altering substance.

and that will tell people that it's artificial or not real. I don't think that's true. I think having a psychedelic experience is one of the most profound things you can do, like intellectually, let alone experientially. But how would you get that across to somebody who quite reasonably compares this to somebody who's phoned you after having too many beers and tells you that they love you? It tells you about their dream, yeah. So I thought about that a lot because,

Because what launched me on the whole plant excursion that we discussed earlier is I had had a psychedelic experience in my garden in which my plants were clearly conscious. And they were returning my gaze and just more present than I ever thought they were. And I didn't know what to do with that. I mean, my instinct was to dismiss it, as you say, as a drug experience. but I'd also read William James, you know, the great psychologist and philosopher, and he wrote a wonderful book about the varieties of religious experience. And there's a chapter and there are mystical experiences. And these are people having these very odd experiences.

It might be of the divinity, of oneness with the universe, all this kind of stuff. And he asked this question, how do we evaluate the, you know, the veracity. of these experiences. And he said, we can't answer these big metaphysical questions once and for all, but we should treat

these experiences as hypotheses and then see if there are other ways of knowing that can help us decide the question. And that's kind of what I did with plants. I had this intuition,

and then I started looking at the science. And in certain ways, the science supported the intuition. in certain ways it didn't. So I think psychedelic experience needs to be taken seriously, but it also needs to be tested against otherwise knowing. It's a way of knowing. A way of knowing.

That's a good way of putting it, I think. Finally, and I mean, this might invite a longer response than I intend, but I think you could maybe answer that quickly. Though that's totally up to you. you've mentioned someone who wrote a book called Descartes error. Yeah. And that error was, you know, I think therefore I am when really it's about maybe feeling. It should be something like, I feel therefore I am.

So you've got this book called Descartes error. Philip Goff wrote his book, Galileo's error, where the mistake that's being made is mathematicizing the universe and then thinking that we can explain everything with that mathematician, including the things we've excluded. Great. Okay, so if I forced you to write a book called Someone's Error. Pollan's Error.

Yeah, that would be interesting to write sort of later in life if you have a change of heart. But I mean, if you had to pin down what you think is the thing that people are getting wrong. Not in the sense that if they fix this, they'll understand everything, but just like when you talk to people, it's like, the thing that I want you to stop doing, the thing that I want you to stop like, accepting or believing. What would be the title of that book? Whose or what's like error do you think it might be? Well, I don't know that it's an error yet, but I think that our faith in physicalism is getting in the way of our, of thinking, of thinking outside the box. And I see, you know, we all know about paradigms and science and, you know, the structure of scientific revolutions. is a metaphysics. It's a way of, you know, answering profound questions, deep questions of how

things work. It's gotten confused with science. In other words, that, of course, science is physicalist, but it just happens to be the paradigm we're working with. And I see little signs of it tottering in this way and that, you know, going back to Mike 11 and the inability to explain the behavior of his little organisms in terms of neurons or DNA. And for example, he's proposing now that there's another way that could organize life that is not physicalist. He's a very prominent biologist that he's entertaining these ideas, I take, as significant, whether he's right or wrong.

He's kind of come out in this with a paper. suggesting a kind of that there are platonic patterns that in the same way they organized math and we didn't invent them but they seem to be there pie and things like this there may be things like that in biology there may be patterns around agency intention cognition I don't know if he's right but I think we may look back at some point and think we we strapped ourselves to this one rocket and it's taken us to some amazing places, but there are places that can't go.

And so maybe that's the error. We'll have to see. I think we will see. I think you're quite right. And I do feel as though every time I go to like a philosophy conference, I kind of feel something in the air. Like everyone's kind of starting to be a little bit like something weird's going on here. And that's how it starts.

I think that's the idea of the structure of scientific revolution. It's right. Yeah. Like it begins where just cracks start to form in the edge of a worldview. And then their patches. And then at some point it just gets too much and suddenly everything just flips and then the process starts again and the cracks will inevitably emerge again. But I think, you know, bring on the revolution.

It's high time, I think. So thank for being a part of hurrying along that process. Oh, pleasure talking to you about. I'll make sure the book is linked in the description along with other relevant books that you've written as well. your book on psychedelics, how to change your mind, that kind of stuff. It's always a great read. And yeah, thanks for taking the time. Oh, yeah.

Thanks for talking to me and have a safe trip home.