What if the thing you understand least is the very thing happening inside you right now? In a wide-ranging conversation with science writer Michael Pollan, Ezra Klein explores one of philosophy’s oldest, and most stubbornly unsolved, puzzles: consciousness itself.
Pollan spent five years researching his new book, diving into everything from plant anesthesia experiments to psychedelic trips to Zen caves in New Mexico. What he found wasn’t clarity; it was deeper, more beautiful mystery. The more rigorously scientists try to pin consciousness down, the more it slips away.
This conversation covers the surprising science of how thoughts actually form (hint: your body usually knows before your brain does), why children may be more conscious than adults, how mind-wandering is secretly your most productive mental state, and what philosophers mean when they say consciousness might be a universal field rather than something your brain generates.
It also asks urgent questions about the modern world: Are our smartphones quietly shrinking the richness of our inner lives? And what would it mean to reclaim sovereignty over your own mind?
A rare conversation that leaves you knowing less, and wondering far more.
Excerpt from the NYT article on Consciousness and the link to the article below it
(and you can read this Gift Article by clicking the link even if you are NOT a subscriber to The New York Times)
Ezra Klein: You have a number of scientists, throughout the book (“A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” by science writer Michael Pollan), who are saying: Well, I thought this, and then I had this experience.
And I think that’s really interesting — the felt experience of truth on something that people, who, up until that moment, would only accept what they could prove, and were reducing everything to the provable. Like, they know they ingested a chemical, and yet what that felt like, they’re not willing to dismiss.
It was so definitive and so authoritative.
You’re alluding to Christof Koch, who is a very prominent consciousness researcher. He was there, at the beginning, when he and Francis Crick began on this quest to understand consciousness in the late 1980s, early 1990s.
And he’s an exemplary scientist in that he’s changed his mind in profound ways several times. I find that doesn’t usually happen among scientists. You know the saying: Science changes one funeral at a time.
Not in Koch’s case. He went to Brazil and had a series of ayahuasca experiences. Now this is the prototypical brain guy, right? He ran the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. He had been messing around with neurons and electrodes for years and years and years, and he assumed that the source of consciousness was going to be in the brain.
He had this experience of “mind at large” — this is a term that comes from Aldous Huxley in “The Doors of Perception” — that consciousness was outside of his brain.
And I challenged him on it. I said: Well, but that was a drug experience.
But he would not take that as disproof or even reason for skepticism.
And he used, as an example, a famous thought experiment called Mary’s Room: You have this brilliant woman who is the world’s expert on color, on vision. She knows everything there is to know about cones and rods, and how the whole system works. But she lives in a completely black-and-white world.
She steps out one day and has the experience of color. What has she learned? What has been added to her stock of knowledge?
He said: I was like Mary, and I had had this vision, and nobody could convince me, when I went back in the box of scientific materialism, that it hadn’t happened. It had happened. I was as sure as I have been of anything in my life.
And now he’s exploring idealism.
What is idealism?
Idealism is the philosophy that consciousness is a universal field and that consciousness precedes matter. We automatically assume that matter is primary, that everything can be reduced to matter and energy, and they can be reduced to each other.
Idealism argues: You’ve got to start with consciousness. Matter comes second.
The argument for it is there’s nothing you know with more certainty than consciousness. It’s the thing you know directly. Everything else you know is inferred. You see through consciousness.
So why is it that we privilege the thing we infer rather than the thing we know? Why do we privilege matter as the ultimate source of everything?
Maybe a smarter person than me knows there’s a logical fallacy there. I don’t know. I don’t see where it is.
So the idealism theory is related to this idea. You bring it up in the book. I think you’re the first person from whom I had ever heard about this: the idea that the mind may be like an antenna.
Yes. Or a radio receiver.
It’s not generating the consciousness. It is receiving some kind of signal and then interpreting it. And in the same way that if you break a TV ——
It’s not going to work anymore.
It’s not going to work. But that doesn’t mean the waves that it was absorbing are gone.
Yes. And you shouldn’t look in the TV set for the weatherman.
And that’s kind of what we’re doing.
But it’s channeling this information from the universe, and that’s why the brain is involved in a critical way. If you damage the brain, you damage consciousness — or anesthetize the brain or whatever. But it’s involved in a different way.
And the evidence kind of works the same either way, whether you say the brain generates consciousness or channels consciousness. It’s hard to make a case that one is better than the other.
The term scientists use is that consciousness is “an emergent property” of the brain — which sounds really scientific, but if you press, it’s just abracadabra. [Laughs.] It doesn’t really explain anything.
What is the difference between idealism and panpsychism?
Panpsychism is the idea that every little bit, every particle, has a quantum of consciousness, of psyche. And in the same way that, 200 years ago, we added electromagnetism to the stock of what reality consists of, of what material reality consists of, we should add psyche. It’s another thing.
So in a way, it’s a new materialism. Or it’s materialism with something added to it.
It’s a big price to pay for your theory that you’re adding something completely new to the stock of reality. But it solves the problem of where consciousness comes from. Because it comes from everywhere — it was already here.
So these ideas, when I first learned about them, I thought they were crazy. But then you realize that materialism has kind of hit a wall with consciousness studies. There is this gap that we can’t seem to cross, from a very good theory, like Global Workspace Theory to: Well, wait a minute — when you say you’re broadcasting to the whole brain, who’s receiving that broadcast?
And then you have other people saying: Well, consciousness is just an illusion. But an illusion is a conscious experience. So what about the subject? And that’s where everybody starts waving their hands.
What level of plausibility do you assign to that?
To what?
I guess either, but I’m thinking of the idea that the brain is a radio receiver.
I have to say: I don’t know.
It’s weird to spend five years on a book and come to an answer like that. As I said at one point: This is a book where you may know less at the end than you do at the beginning. But you’ll know a lot of other things. [Laughs.]
Read the full conversation here:
Know Thyself 