#166 Are Plants Conscious? - Michael Pollan

Coca-Cola for the big, for the small, the short, and the tall, peacemakers, risk takers, for the optimists, pessimists, for long distance love, for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers. For old friends and new, Coca-Cola for everyone. We got some Coca-Cola at a store near you. 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-distance 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," but 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. It also just so happens to be like integral to proving Einstein's theory of relativity. 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? There are a school one for God there, I can't 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. It 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. Now I'm watching the moon sort of track its way across the sun with the glasses on, and I thought, "You know, that's pretty cool. Yeah, neat. 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 are mysterious and tremendous at that in 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. Thank God for Google. I was able to put it in, and Anil Seth came up right away. I'm sure he didn't mind. I'm sure he did. 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? We don't even know that. 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. 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. In the case of plants, it's a harder one. I spent a long time researching what's sometimes called erroneously the neurobiology of plants and whether plants are conscious. They have some incredible abilities that I wasn't aware of. 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 chopping on leaves and they will react appropriately. They'll dispatch chemicals to their leaves that make them taste less good to caterpillars. Most bizarre and suggestive of all is they respond to the same anesthetics we do. 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. If there are two states, what is that more active state? Is it a state of awareness? 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. Sentience being a more basic, widely distributed capability that it's possible and many people believe all life has sentience. Sentience is awareness of your environment. The ability to distinguish good or bad changes as they affect you and then to respond appropriately intelligently. You find this in bacteria and single-cell creatures. I'm inclined to think that plants are sentient after the research I've done. Consciousness just involves so much more, I think, this sense of experience and being able to have some quality to your experience, some interiority and I don't know that plants have that. Yeah. I think it's a difficult thing to wrap your head around 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. You know, it doesn't follow 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 you, 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 Mancuso, he's an Italian botanist. They know they're being eaten, but they don't necessarily mind. He reminds us that many plants, for many plants, being eaten is part of their reproductive strategy. 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. I don't think we should worry about eating them, also because we don't have any choice. 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. 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 about or entertaining this idea of sentience in plants, 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?" They'll look in your book and there are some fantastic examples of the bean plant, which if you watch time lapse photography with 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 contained within the pipe, implying that it's totally dry. yeah totally dry on the outside so they must be able to somehow send 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 like 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 that it's being rusted. It doesn't move and get under, get under a roof or anything. The plants actually take action. They move away. They move toward things. They, you know, 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, if you didn't use time lapse 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 Michael Levin who said the way, the way evolution really works is it, it creates cognitive beings with the ability to solve problems. That robots 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, 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 in 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, they're 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, 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 umwelt of other creatures. But when we do, we realize there's a lot more going on than perhaps we, 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, a kind of overview that I've known about this kind of stuff happening. But hearing the plants can be taught to navigate mazes. Hearing the 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's sort of, it's like, it's like Curl's, 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, wants to like hide away from certain, certain sort of input data. And it can learn like if you, if you drop the pot, it will like 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, when you do it again, it doesn't curl up anymore. And it has. And it remembers, it remembers, um, for 30 days, um, that it, it, it, it needn't react to this stimulus, which is pretty wild because we, we assume memory is stored in neurons. Yeah. But obviously there's another way to do it. And, um, 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. Yeah. And that might explain how they do it. Do you think that neurons as a key and to understanding consciousness rather than just brain science are like overrated? I mean, you've made a reference to these plant neurobiologists. It might have gone over people's heads that of course, like plants don't have, don't have any neurons. What's that all about? For old friends and new, Coca-Cola for everyone, pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you. Well, those biologists are trolling more conventional botanists who can't stand what they're doing and suggesting. They, they full well know that there are no neurons in plants. But you can do a lot of neuronal things without neurons and, um, 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, 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, as a, a way to move and, and organize as a new organism. And there's nothing in their genes to, to tell them how to do that. And there are no neurons to, to keep it organized and remember and, because they can be taught to navigate Maze is also, um, really. So his project is really showing the limitations of both genes and neurons and that they're, there are other things going on to, um, to organize life, to store memories, to communicate with, 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, um, but, you know, one of the things you, I, I learned studying science is that our observational tools, this is sort of like, um, well 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 gene survived the death of the creature and you could, you could take, 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 when the cell dies and it disappears. So, uh, in the 80s, I guess it was, uh, scientists, uh, came up with these voltage sensitive dies 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, and the work on the bioelectric field has suggested these, uh, alternative, uh, 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 off 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. Bias is something that will never go away, but by using today's sponsor, Ground News, you can help to mitigate that bias by objectively comparing the way that different sources are reporting on the same stories. Ground News is a news aggregation service which brings together thousands of local and international news outlets all in one place so you can compare reporting across the political spectrum. If you look at this story about a drought in Europe which is affecting crop production. Using Ground News, I can see that for whatever reason of all the sources reporting on this story, only 11% of them lean to the right, with 54% of them and majority leaning to the left. Ground News also gives you a factuality rating for each of the sources and it tells you who owns the sources as well. There's even a dedicated blind spot tap which specifically seeks out stories that that you would otherwise miss based on the news that you normally read. Try it out for yourself by going to ground.news/alexoc, all by scanning the QR code that's on your screen. 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 how conversation in this way. Because firstly, it's kind of, it's a bit shocking, you know, it sort of grabs your attention, plants maybe have sentience, sure. - I thought it might destroy my credibility, actually. - Well, 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 didn't get any of that, like from the publishers or your agent or anything. Were they reading this going, yeah, I'm also sure that we should go down this street, you know. - I didn't actually. You know, I'm hyper aware of that 'cause I read those kind of books all the time and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 of some grand consciousness theory that you've been sort of-- - 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. That 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 demonstrable 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 plants sentient 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, like, are they reacting to sensory data? Does that make them a bit like us? Like, 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, OK? So if it has a kind of ribbed leaf, it'll have a ribbed 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 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 they were setting up 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 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 wish you was she hippy-diffy with it. Kind of ruined it for everyone else, because now no one's taking-- Yeah, it's hard to get taken seriously after that. I think that's probably happening with extra sensory perception and precognition in all these supposedly sci-phenomenon that have 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 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. Annal 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 a general anesthetic. Now, 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. 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, 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, there are endless analogies. You're trying to see the window through the window. You're trying to flash light 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. Then even where the language fails, I think we all know what the thing is that we're grasping at. Yeah, I think we do. And we understand what we're talking about. But it's a little frustrating, I think. Yeah, of course. We prefer phenomenon. We can step outside of and look at with this kind of God's eye view. But 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 out of it. 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. So the challenge is, what can we learn about consciousness using consciousness as our tool? And I think one thing that people need to understand about that is that 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 Shale Drake's book about mushrooms. And he was talking about these dogs. 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 the nose, follicle, or whatever. And then it sort of travels up and blah, blah, blah. And we would say, OK, 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, so 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 qualia 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 like reductive, which is to say not at all, as if somebody were to see something, to see some molecules attaching to someone's nose and said what's going on there? What explains what I'm seeing? And I said, oh, that's just what you smell. 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, did you think, did 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 a bit? Or do you think there might be a way around this problem? Coca-Cola, for the big, for the small, the short and the tall, peacemakers, wrist takers, for the optimists, pessimists, for long distance love, for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you. - 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 it's 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, you know, 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. You know, there's some, 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 that it how it works. It's a hand wave. So 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 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 requires this collection of, okay, but what is the thing that's interesting that has actually emerged? It's the sensation of heat. That's the thing that's emerged. It's 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 rock. 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, be a 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. And 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 respect 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 stop 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, "Did 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 you were to say to me, you know, I'm going to put some consciousness and 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 look at me like I'd lost my mind, you know, and you wouldn't be asking 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, Goph 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 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 consciousness too. You'll know about the inner world as well. This is like what Francis Crick broadly thought, and it's the bet, the famous bet that's at the beginning of your book, and whatnot. And a society that, look, we're learning so much about neuronal activity. If we just learn more, then we will finally understand what it means for, 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, it 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 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 of the moment ago? I mean, this is 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 Christophe Koch, who's an important character in my book. And it didn't take Koch 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, 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, you know, that's what David Chambers 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 to answer. Yeah. And again, people will, I think people like to think in analogy, so I find them really difficult, 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, my response would be like, yes, in so far as you could understand, like, how harmonics divide up in a way that people report as being pleasant. But the actual like, pleasantness of the major third, the sound, the experience with 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 things going on here, even though the two are quite obviously connected. Related. So yeah. I realized earlier I was asking you about this negative language, and it reminded me of so-called apophatic language about God. So someone like Thomas Aquinas thinks that God is so inconceivable that we can't really say positive things about him. We have to say things like he's not this. 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 yes, 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 that one's conscious and one isn't 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, they defend themselves by producing chemicals, by producing toxins or hallucinogens, things that screw up animal consciousness. They're much better at- still, 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 kingdoms produce the most psychoactive chemicals. Whether or not they are conscious themselves, they have the power to change our consciousness. Whether you're talking about caffeine, 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. I think each animal, each creature, has the kind of consciousness that suits their predicament. And 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. 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. It's incredible how much it's doing. And you're aware of a little bit of all this activity. So the question I had is why be aware of any of it? How does that serve us? Why can't we just automate everything? Why aren't we zombies, basically? And it was Carl Friston who 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 that 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 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. 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. Coca-Cola, for the big, for the small, the short, and the tall, peacemakers, risk takers, for the optimists, pessimists, for long distance love, for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers. For old friends and new, Coca-Cola, for everyone. I find it interesting how, when I asked you about the difference between sort of human and plant experience, you say like the inability to move is really the key thing 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're moving in another and their root is on the ground. But clearly, they are still able to react to their environment in a certain way. In other words, when I asked you about the bike rusting, you said, well, the difference with the plant is that a plant does something in response. And so 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, what if their experience is just like hard? 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 into directions. It's like, there's a question of reacts. Go ahead. - What good would consciousness do that? - I mean, it's the question that I guess I would ask. It's like-- - Yeah. - It's kind of anthropocentric of ours 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 preachers, it would just be an impediment and they'd need all these neurons presumably, or maybe not. - Yeah, maybe like the plants being like, well, surely everyone wants a bit of soil, you know, surely humans would love something like having a feet in soil day. It's like, actually that would be something. - Roots are great. - So, but clearly it would do something, right? Like you would, 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, so I get up and I go and turn it down to re-initiate her mostasis 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, 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 indeed like avoiding predators? 'Cause one of the things I learned from your books is that 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 soil, it will recognize that it's not, and it will start to 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. - Well, I think they are aware. I mean, I think awareness and consciousness are a little bit different. - I'm 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, 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, 'cause I'd probably rather read that about plant consciousness, but I get what you're saying. - No, I think you'd rather read the plants book than my book. - Yeah, that's what I mean. It wouldn't be that good for us, it would be good for us. - No, it wouldn't be good for us. - We'd be out of the job. - Yeah, so yeah, I would lose my job speaking for plants, it's true. - Yeah. - And Merlin chose it. - It's like, what is it a Quiner said? He had that experience of God, and where God says, Thomas, you have written of me well. I like to think that when I'm sort of reintegrated into the paternal consciousness that the being plant will come over and say, Alex, you wrote about me well and this is anyway. - Yes, or are you blew it? And it's really, yes. - That's also possible. - We don't know, we're guessing. There's a lot of guesswork involved, Abyssal. - 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 prevents us from doing things again that caused us harm. Like, I don't see why, I'm not gonna sort of search for everything that would sort of transform plant consciousness into ours in some kind of strange, myriad of logical experiment. But just something like that, the sort of, I think you're quite confident in the book like we really don't think the 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 ancient, sort of single-celled organism, like the very first thing which motivates natural selection is that like 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-cell 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 toxin. 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 doggy dog world. We have to eat them and they feel pain and that's just the way it is. So he was, 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, it's, it's, we can't say for sure. You know, I want to talk about something but 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 the stretcher 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, 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 stuff. 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 it's 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, the other thing, yeah, I was gonna say. I started with plants. 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, plants. 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. 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. Which a more elaborate, a complexification of sentience. And you get to us and but plants just struck me as a way that it would be a kind of useful way to go into the exact, 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. That's quite right. 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 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'd thought about or had been like brought to my attention 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 in the court, 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 ignored or sidelined or delegated. And tell recently, yeah. Yeah. And I suddenly realized 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 emotiveist. I think that moral claims or 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 a exalted human achievement, must arise in the part of the brain that is the newest, most human part, which is the neocortex, right? The site of decision-making, executive function and rational thought. And that was a very kind of anthropocentric or cerebral centric 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 appreciate it. 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 approach is one of the reasons we have been extending consciousness to more and more creatures, because they have brainstems, 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, we're going to 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 immerse, there it is again, out of that somehow, or that it might come from, you know, I mean, there's some people, I was having this conversation with the 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 have up and down without actually feeling affect, but he thinks eventually the machines will feel good 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 latest 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 in planet Earth might have some kind of sentience then 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 maybe those aren't actually like one of those isn't actually maybe more far patch than the other, I suppose, in like the directions. But it 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 black 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 what not. 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 exist? 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 is falsifiable. And you know, that's a product of one person's consciousness, crawl 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, I think that's a challenge that 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 argue in the book that I don't think AI can be conscious, people are constantly sending me dialogues they're having with clawed. 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, every written, every poem, every written, that of course it's very sophisticated in the way it talks about feelings. And so the one, the one test that has been proposed going to your falsifiable argument 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 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 yeah, 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. So, but, you know, people, people will fall for it regardless. We, 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, and we learn a lot from that friction. Whereas these, you know, they're, they're suck ups. They're, you know, 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 that 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. They have this tendency to use m dashes quite a lot and that kind of stuff. And pull it point that. And, but then people start reporting on that. Clearly, I 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 are so very good at doing this. We're 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. They'll never be able to, I just think to myself, I don't know, man, like, just, 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. But maybe I'm sort of over. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a whole body of knowledge that we have that comes 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 deemphasize this because we live in our heads to a large extent. But, you know, there is the Alison Gotnick 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, and we do too. And we lose track of that. And, you know, the 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 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 tell our listeners why it is that a moment ago you said, you know, in the book, you sort of argue that you you don't think that AI can become conscious. But you've just you've just given me quite a clear roadmap here. You 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? Like what is it? Maybe. And then we will be as gods. 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 humanist. I think we're facing this very interesting moment as a 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're really democratized consciousness. And on the other side, you have these machines that are going to be convincing us they're conscious too. So who are we? Who's 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 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 Damascus, 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 vulnerability. 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. Sounds like slew almost. 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 if consciousness is not produced by neurons or sentience, let's say, like awareness. 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 what's your view on the method? I came to a point of, you know, recognizing it's a mystery that we're not going to solve any time 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 had 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 pan-psychism, maybe it's idealism, maybe it's some other metaphysics that hasn't occurred to us yet. So I think we have to, 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've 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 die-hard 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 of 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, so I came out of it with two things. One was this sense of open, 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, 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 it's, but I found it useful to think about consciousness in terms of something we could get better at. You know, 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. You know, 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. The thinkers and the doers. I can just ask you specifically about, um, don't worry, I'm not about to open the psychedelic door. There's plenty to say, there's plenty to say on that. Yeah. As you well know. But specifically, on the point of the well-known, um, 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. Yeah. You took a mind-altering substance and that will tell people that it's artificial or not real. Um, 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, uh, let alone experientially. But well, how would you get that across to somebody who quite reasonably compares this to like somebody who's phoned you after having too many beers and tells you that they love you. And then what tells you about their dream? Yeah. So I thought about that a lot because, um, what launched me on the whole plant excursion that we discussed earlier is I had had a psychedelic experience in 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. Um, but, uh, I'd also read William James, uh, you know, the, the great psychologist and philosopher. And he wrote a wonderful book about the varieties of religious experience. And, uh, there's a chapter in there on 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, 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. Um, but we should treat these experiences as hypotheses. And then, um, 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. Um, I had this intuition. And then I started looking at the science and, um, in certain ways, the science supported the intuition in certain ways it didn't. Um, so I think psychedelic experience needs to be taken seriously, but it also needs to be tested, um, against other ways of knowing. It's, it's a way of knowing. And, um, a way of knowing. That's a good way of putting it, I think. Yeah. Um, finally. And I mean, this, this might invite a longer response than I intent, but, but I, I think you could make it. I'll try to keep it short, actually. Um, though, that's totally up to you. Um, you've mentioned, uh, someone who wrote a book called daycart era. Yeah. And that era 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 daycart's era. Philip Goff wrote his book, Galileo's era where the mistake that's being made is, is mathematicizing the universe and then thinking that we can explain everything with that mathematical mathematician, including the things it excluded. Great. Okay. So if, if I forced you to write a book called someone's era, Poland's era. Yeah. I, that would be interesting to write sort of later, and later in life, if you, if you have a, 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, not in the sense that if they fix this, they, 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, what would be the title of that book? Who's or what's like era? 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, of thinking, of thinking outside the box. And I see, you know, you know, we all know about paradigms and science and, you know, the structure of scientific revolutions. And physicalism is a metaphysics. It's a way of, you know, answering profound questions, deep questions of, 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 Michael Levin 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. just 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 organize math, and we didn't invent them, but they seem to be their 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 strapped ourselves to this one rocket, and it's taken us to some amazing places, but there are places that can't go. Maybe that's the error. We'll have to see. I think we will see. I think you're quite right. I do feel as though every time I go to a philosophy conference, I kind of feel something in the air, like everyone's kind of starting to be a little bit, something weird's going on here, and that's how it starts. I think that's the idea of the structure of scientific revolution. Yeah. It begins where just cracks start to form in the edge of a world view. Then there are 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 merge again. But I think, you know, bring on the revolution, it's high time, I think. So thank for being a part of hiring along that process. Oh, pleasure in talking to you about this. I'll make sure the book is linked in the description, along with other relevant books that you've written as well, like your book on psychedelics, how to change your mind. That kind of stuff. There's always a great read in that. Yeah, thanks for taking the time. Oh, yeah. Thanks for talking to me, and have a-- Finding a doctor is hard enough. Finding the right doctor even harder. Someone who takes your insurance has an available appointment when you need one, and feels like someone you can actually open up to. That's where Zock-Dock comes in. 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