Who is Michael Pollan?
Michael Pollan is an author and journalist whose books include “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “In Defense of Food,” and “How to Change Your Mind." His most recent is “A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness."
TLDR — Key Topics and Moments
- 01Michael Pollan's new book 'A World Appears' explores consciousness through psychedelic experiences and meditation, moving beyond traditional neuroscience frameworks
- 02The hard problem of consciousness remains unsolved after 27 years - scientists can't explain how matter generates subjective experience despite finding neural correlates
- 03Pollan discusses pansychism, the antenna theory of consciousness, and why the brain might be receiving rather than generating consciousness
- 04Psychedelics and meditation serve as tools to recover childhood 'lantern consciousness' - unfocused awareness - compared to adult 'spotlight consciousness' needed for work
- 05Pollan spent days alone in a cave at a Zen retreat center, discovering how solitude softens the sense of self and reveals consciousness through direct experience rather than intellectual analysis
- 06The conversation explores how ritual, flow states, and losing the ego through awe experiences provide access to consciousness that drugs, running, or any focused activity can facilitate
The Show
Joe has Michael Pollan back to discuss his latest book 'A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness.' The conversation kicks off with what inspired the book - Pollan's psychedelic research trips and a powerful garden experience where he felt the plants were conscious and returning his gaze. That led him down a rabbit hole exploring plant consciousness and the fundamental mystery of how consciousness actually works.
They dig into the hard problem of consciousness, which Pollan frames through the famous bat thought experiment involving philosophers David Chalmers and neuroscientist Christof Koch. Back in the 90s, Koch bet Chalmers that scientists would solve consciousness within 25 years. Chalmers won the bet. The core issue is that science relies on third-person objective measurements, but consciousness is fundamentally a first-person subjective experience. Koch recently presented Chalmers with a case of fine Madeira wine at NYU and renewed the bet for another 25 years. Pollan explains that despite correlating certain brain regions with consciousness, we still have no idea how three pounds of matter generates subjective experience.
The discussion moves through different theories - the traditional view that neurons generate consciousness, the antenna theory where the brain receives consciousness, and pansychism where everything has consciousness. Pollan admits he went in assuming the neuron model but found nothing definitive. He explores how these theories address different problems: if consciousness was always here via pansychism, you solve the evolution problem but face the combination problem - how do conscious particles combine into a unified conscious experience?
They talk about psychedelics as a tool for consciousness exploration. Joe brings up how psychedelics reveal our vulnerability and make control freaks paranoid because they're suddenly aware of what they normally suppress. Pollan agrees that surrender is essential - resistance creates anxiety. He mentions how MDMA and psilocybin therapies are helping veterans and trauma survivors in ways SSRIs can't, and how political hesitation is slowing FDA approval despite administration support.
The conversation shifts to different types of consciousness. Pollan describes spotlight consciousness versus lantern consciousness - focused attention versus the open, wandering awareness kids have and adults recover on psychedelics. He explains how psychedelics create that childlike state of wonder and sensory overload. Joe adds that the same thing happens with marijuana for people who aren't control freaks, while those deeply invested in their image tend to hate it.
They explore how other activities create similar states. Joe talks about archery clearing his mind, Pollan mentions runner's high and awe experiences. There's a cool study where people draw themselves smaller after witnessing awe-inspiring moments because their sense of self shrinks. Joe argues that once you're competent at something, you should stop thinking about self-esteem and just focus on the craft - that's when flow happens.
This leads to discussing writing and creativity. Pollan explains how great writing comes through a trance-like state where sentences flow without conscious effort. Joe brings up Stephen King writing Cujo while obliterated on cocaine and alcohol, having no memory of it, which illustrates how getting out of the way of your own consciousness can unlock creativity. Pollan discusses his own coffee ritual and how three months without caffeine gave him ADHD-like symptoms. They talk about how Stephen King found quitting cigarettes harder than drugs because of the ritualistic component.
The final major section covers Pollan's cave experience. Joan Halifax, a Zen teacher and former LSD researcher, invited him to her retreat center north of Santa Fe. Instead of intellectualizing about the self, she sent him to live alone in a primitive cave for days with no power or water. Through meditation and ritual activities like chopping wood and making tea, his sense of self softened. He found selves from different ages when he tried David Hume's introspection exercise under hypnosis with psychiatrist David Spiegel - the bar mitzvah boy, the college kid, the new father - all distinct but all him. The cave experience revealed that our sense of self depends on social friction with others, and in extreme solitude, those edges blur. Halifax told him she'd divested in meaning, representing Zen's rejection of intellectual interpretation in favor of direct experience.
Key Moments
Best Quotes
"Consciousness is like smudging the windshield that you normally see through - suddenly you realize there's something between me and the world and what is it? That's consciousness."
"You have this marvel going on in your head all the time - an interior space where you have complete mental freedom, total privacy, we can think whatever we want and we're giving it away with drugs and social media."
"I went into it thinking I may not solve consciousness but I'm going to appreciate it, use it, and create a space for it through meditation, psychedelics, or other ways to explore what's there, which is miraculous."
"Once you get competency in a thing, forget about the self-respect and self stuff and just concentrate on the thing itself - that's when you find flow."
"Our sense of self depends on other people - it's in the friction between people that we define ourselves. In extreme solitude, the edges of yourself kind of soften in a really interesting way."
Products and Books Mentioned
Everything brought up in this episode — linked to Amazon.
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
AmazonMichael Pollan's latest book exploring consciousness through psychedelic experiences, meditation, plant consciousness, and the hard problem of understanding subjective experience.
How to Change Your Mind
AmazonPollan's earlier book on psychedelics that inspired the consciousness research featured in his new work.
The Omnivore's Dilemma
AmazonOne of Pollan's foundational books exploring food systems and agriculture.
In Defense of Food
AmazonPollan's book on nutrition and food culture.
Perplexity
AmazonAI search app offering 30% off with code.
Armra Colostrum
AmazonColostrum supplement for gut health, immunity, and workout recovery mentioned as JRE sponsor.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Full Transcript (click to expand)
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. >> The Joe Rogan Experience. >> TRAIN BY DAY. JOE ROGAN PODCAST BY NIGHT. All day. >> Mr. Paul. So good to see you again. >> Hey, good to be back. >> Consciousness. So, um, this new book, what inspired it? What what got you to I mean, you you've kind of explored consciousness a little bit with your >> psychedelic book. Yeah. How to change your mind. Well, actually this book was inspired by the research I did for that book. Um, as you know, I had several uh research trips. Um, and uh, >> do you do air quotes when you say research? >> Yes. And I um, and two things happened that were really interesting. One is there's something about psychedelics that makes you think about consciousness. it, you know, it's like smudging the windscreen, the windshield that you normally is perfectly transparent and you see the world through. Suddenly it's like different and you realize there's something between me and the world and what is it? And that's consciousness. And so like a lot of people have who've done psychedelics, you start wondering about this mystery. Why is it this way, not that way? So that was one experience. The other was I had an experience in my garden in Connecticut where we have a house of um uh walking through my garden and getting the powerful impression that the plants were conscious and that these I remember these this particular it was a plume poppy or several plume poppies and they were like returning my gaze. They were very benevolent. They were, you know, putting out positive vibes, but like they were conscious, much more alive than they had ever been. And like a lot of insights on psychedelics, I didn't know what to do with it. Like, is it true? Is it just a drug thing? You know, what is it? Um, but I decided it'd be interesting to find out. And uh I consulted a couple people, scientists, and said, "What do you do with an insight like that?" And they said, "Well, you test it against other ways of knowing, including scientific ways of knowing." And that led me down this uh really interesting path uh exploring plant intelligence and plant consciousness. So basically it yeah the book grew out of the psychedelic experiences and some meditation experience. Meditation also has a way of making you like hyper aware of how strange your thoughts are. Where are they coming from? Who's thinking them? >> So there's a bunch of different schools of thought when it comes to consciousness, right? There's one like the Rupert Sheldrake thing that sort of everything has consciousness and there's the sort of rational scientists that believe it exists somewhere in the mind. I don't in the brain. >> Yeah, in the brain, excuse me. And then there's people that think that the brain is essentially just an antenna, >> right? >> That's tuning in to the greater consciousness of whatever it is that's out there. >> Yeah. Do you have any one of them that you hold >> or they're all equally plausible? I, you know, I went into the experience assuming because this is what most scientists assume that somehow a certain arrangement of neurons in the brain generates consciousness, you know, subjective experience. But no one's been able to show that. We've gotten nowhere in that effort to, you know, we can we we might correlate certain parts of the brain with consciousness, but we don't understand how three pounds of matter could generate the feeling of being you. >> You talk about it in your book where the the two gentlemen who had the bat. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Um that was Kristoff Ko, who's a a a great brain scientist, and David Chomers, who's a philosopher. And uh this goes back to like in the early 90s. They were getting drunk in a bar in Bremen, Germany. And uh Kristoff Ko had had really was at the beginning of the modern scientific exploration of consciousness. And he was working with Francis Crick who had just come off of a Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA. And Crick, who is like the most famous scientist in the world at the time, um thought, well, the same kind of reductive science that discovered the double helix DNA and explained heredity, um I'm going to do that for consciousness. He's very arrogant man, and he he thought it just, you know, no problem. Um and Crick was kind of his sidekick. I'm sorry. Uh Ko was his sidekick. And so Ko who shared that kind of confidence made this bet with Chomemers that they would find the neural coralates the parts of the brain that are responsible for consciousness within 25 years. That was 25 years 27 years ago now. And uh Chomers won the bet. Chomers is famous for um coining the term the hard problem to you know to um describe the whole effort to figure out consciousness. And it's a hard problem for a lot of reasons. Um I mean it is one of the biggest mysteries in the universe. I mean how consciousness come came to be. Did it evolve? Was it always here? Um but he his his point was that our science is based on third person objective quantifiable measurements ...
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