#2467 - Michael Pollan

**Michael Pollan** (0:01)
Joe Rogan Podcast, checking out The Joe Rogan Experience.

**Joe Rogan** (0:06)
Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:12)
Mr. Pollan, so good to see you again.

**Michael Pollan** (0:14)
Hey, good to be back.

**Joe Rogan** (0:15)
Consciousness. So, this new book, what inspired it? What got you to, I mean, you've kind of explored consciousness a little bit with your-

**Michael Pollan** (0:25)
Psychedelic book, yeah. How to change your mind. Well, actually, this book was inspired by the research I did for that book. As you know, I had several research trips. And-

**Joe Rogan** (0:39)
Do you do air quotes when you say research?

**Michael Pollan** (0:40)
Yes. And I, 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, have 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 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'd 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? But I decided it'd be interesting to find out. And 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 really interesting path, exploring plant intelligence and plant consciousness. So basically, yeah, the book grew out of the psychedelic experiences. And some meditation experience. Meditation also has a way of making you hyper aware of how strange your thoughts are. Where are they coming from? Who's thinking them?

**Joe Rogan** (2:32)
So there's a bunch of different schools of thought when it comes to consciousness, right? There's one, like the Rupert Sheldrake thing, sort of everything has consciousness. And there's the sort of rational scientists that believe it exists somewhere in the mind.

**Michael Pollan** (2:49)
In the brain.

**Joe Rogan** (2:50)
Yeah, in the brain, excuse me. And then there's people that think that the brain is essentially just an antenna.

**Michael Pollan** (2:56)
Right.

**Joe Rogan** (2:56)
That's tuning in to the greater consciousness of whatever it is that's out there.

**Michael Pollan** (3:01)
Yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (3:01)
Do you have any one of them that you hold?

**Michael Pollan** (3:05)
I don't. They're all equally plausible. 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 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.

**Joe Rogan** (3:36)
You talk about it in your book where the two gentlemen who had the bat.

**Michael Pollan** (3:39)
Yeah. Yeah. That was Christoph Koch, who's a great brain scientist, and David Chalmers, who's a philosopher. And this goes back to like in the early 90s, they were getting drunk in a bar in Bremen, Germany. And Christoph Koch 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 was like the most famous scientist in the world at the time, thought, well, the same kind of reductive science that discovered the double helix DNA and explained heredity, I'm going to do that for consciousness. He was a very arrogant man, and he thought it was just, you know, no problem. And Crick was kind of his sidekick. I'm sorry, Koch was his sidekick. And so Koch, who shared that kind of confidence, made this bet with Chalmers that they would find the neural correlates, the parts of the brain that are responsible for consciousness within 25 years. That was 25 years, 27 years ago now, and Chalmers won the bet. Chalmers is famous for coining the term the hard problem to, you know, to describe the whole effort to figure out consciousness. And it's a hard problem for a lot of reasons. I mean, it is one of the biggest mysteries in the universe. I mean, how consciousness came to be. Did it evolve? Was it always here?