Berkeley Talks: Michael Pollan and Christof Koch talk psychedelics and consciousness - Berkeley News

Berkeley Talks: Michael Pollan and Christof Koch talk psychedelics and consciousness

The author and neuroscientist explore how altered states challenge our understanding of the mind — and why consciousness is more than a problem to solve.

October 16, 2026

During a psychedelic experience in his garden, Michael Pollan became convinced that the plants around him were conscious. They seemed to be returning his gaze, he said — benevolent and perhaps grateful for his gardening. Back in ordinary consciousness, the author and UC Berkeley journalism professor emeritus faced a harder question: What should he do with that conviction? Was it an insight into reality, or simply an effect of the drug?

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Pollan joins Christof Koch, a leading researcher on the neuroscience of consciousness, and moderator Shayla Love, a science journalist, for a conversation about consciousness and what psychedelics can — and cannot — reveal about it. Presented by Cal Performances in partnership with the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, the Oct. 13 discussion draws on neuroscience, philosophy and the speakers’ own experiences with altered states.

For Pollan, whose 2026 book is A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, researching psychedelics made something familiar suddenly strange. Consciousness ordinarily works like a transparent windshield, he says: We look through it without noticing it. Psychedelics smudge the glass, making us notice — and question — the consciousness we ordinarily take for granted.

“You start wondering, there’s a windshield, what is that about?” he said. “And why is it that way and not this way?”

The group went on to discuss consciousness not just as a problem to solve, but as something to cultivate — by spending time in nature, meditating or simply allowing ourselves to be bored instead of reaching for a phone.

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from Strategic Communications at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Jeremy Geffen: Good evening, everyone. I’m Jeremy Geffen. I’m the executive and artistic director of Cal Performances, the performing arts presenter of UC Berkeley. And as such, we are very proud to join with our colleagues on this university to bring to public view the extraordinary thought happening on this campus.

For this evening’s event, we have partnered with the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. The center has a unique commitment … The center has a unique commitment to studying psychedelics as windows into perception, the mind and consciousness itself. It is a multidisciplinary academic center studying not just neuroscience, but also doing applied research and policy work, as well as in-depth journalism. Public education and programming form a core part of its mission. The BCSP believes that the insights emerging from psychedelic science belong in public discourse, where they are accessible to all. Tonight’s conversation is very much in that spirit, and we are proud that Cal Performances can serve as a home for this kind of civic and intellectual engagement.

This discussion pairs two great thinkers in two questions that seem to be everywhere right now. What is consciousness and how can psychedelics help us understand more about both consciousness and ourselves? Christof Koch approaches these questions through neuroscience and information theory. Michael Pollan through immersive first person reporting of experts across different disciplines and worldviews. Questions about consciousness have migrated into daily headlines. The rise of large language models have forced us to confront what it means to be conscious, whether a machine can truly understand, and how we should consider intelligence without experience and emotions. At the same time, a renaissance in psychedelic research is revealing just how vast and malleable our own consciousness can be.

Christof Koch is one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists. For over three decades, he has pursued locating the specific brain mechanisms that give rise to conscious experience. He had a legendary quarter-century collaboration with the late Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. He served for over a decade as president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, and he is now chief scientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. Koch has written candidly about his own journey in his books, including Then I Am Myself the World, The Feeling of Life Itself and Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. He has openly spoken about his own experiences with psilocybin and other psychedelics, describing them as among the most profound conscious experiences of his life.

Michael Pollan is the author of defining works that have changed the way we think about food, nature, psychedelics and our relationship to the world. He is a longtime Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism, now emeritus, here at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. And in 2020, he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. With How to Change Your Mind, Pollan catalyzed a global conversation about the therapeutic and philosophical potential of psychedelics with his signature combination of rigorous reporting, personal experience and a generous skepticism.

His latest book, A World Appears, goes even deeper. The book draws on neuroscience, philosophy of mind, contemplative traditions, and Pollan’s own experiences, including extended conversations with scientists like Koch. Pollan has spoken in many interviews about how writing A World Appears humbled him in new ways where every answer seems to open onto a deeper mystery and what it means that science may never fully explain subjective experience.

We are fortunate to have veteran science journalist Shayla Love here to moderate the conversation. Shayla writes about science, health, and the mind for publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. She is part of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics Journalism pillar, which sheds light on the complexities of psychedelic research, culture, business, and policy. Now, please join me in welcoming to the stage Michael Pollan, Christof Koch and Shayla Love.

Christof Koch: Thank you. Thank you.

Shayla Love: Thanks everybody. Good evening. It’s great to be here with all of you. I’m very excited to share this space with you and especially with you, Michael and Christof. Thanks both of you for being here tonight.

I’ll say a few remarks and then I’ll tell you how this evening is going to go. As I was walking over here, I thought about how we were going to speak about consciousness tonight and I thought about how it’s a little bit funny that we talk about consciousness as this kind of rarefied thing at a distance when in truth, it might be the most personal and most common phenomena that we all share.

Every day we wake up and we become conscious, and it’s such a typical experience that we often wish for five more minutes of unconsciousness before we truly embrace being conscious. And we share it to some extent with the plants and animals that we co-inhabit this world with, and yet it’s very common and very typical and one of the biggest mysteries that we encounter every day as well.

And it’s this paradox that makes consciousness so interesting and also makes psychedelics so interesting because these substances alter and change our consciousness in ways that are really surprising, even to people who have been studying it their whole lives, like Christof.

So we’ll dive in. We’re going to have a conversation for about 45 minutes, and then I have some audience questions here that I will pose to Michael and Christof that they haven’t seen before. So I went through some of them and so some of your questions will be presented to these two. So we will go ahead and get started. I thought it’d be great to give a little bit of background for the both of you just in case people in the audience aren’t familiar.

Christof, maybe we can start with you. You are the scientist among us. Michael and I are humble science journalists who write about your profession. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about the early days of consciousness research. Your career was really there at the beginning. What was it like when consciousness was first entering the scientific discipline, maybe the late ’80s or so, and what were your first interests and were you allowed to follow those interests?

Christof Koch: Well, there wasn’t much of a research and one of the moments I do remember is when a colleague at Caltech, I was a young professor before having obtained the holy state of tenure and a member of my tenure committee took me aside and says, “Just my private opinion, I think you should wait till after you get tenure to think about consciousness. It’s not a good move,” which obviously I didn’t do.

So at the time, the only people who wrote about consciousness, it wasn’t at all part of the public domain, so totally different from today. The only people who wrote about it were mystics, philosophers and religious people, and poets, but scientists didn’t go there until you retired or you got a Nobel Prize like my collaborator, Francis Crick, and then it was OK to talk about anything.

But then what happened together with Francis Crick, we argued for an operational program, how to discover the footprints of consciousness in the brain. We can all agree we are conscious. We all now know it’s not the heart, but it’s the brain that seems to be very closely involved. So is it the entire brain? No, because you can lose your spinal cord and you’re still conscious. Is it the eyes? Is it the cerebellum? What part of the brain is it? Are there specific genes involved? Are there specific neurons involved? Are they located in a specific location? How long does it take when you open your eyes before you consciously see something? So all of those are in an empirical program that took off. And the great thing about this, it’s independent of any particular philosophical assumption.

As long as you assume that, not all philosophers do, that consciousness is a thing that needs to be explained, that we are conscious, that consciousness is something that cries out for an explanation. If you don’t believe that, and as I said, not all philosophers do, many philosophers, particularly analytical philosophers, try to cancel consciousness effectively. So then this program doesn’t make any sense because then you’re just studying an illusion. I mean, what’s the point? So now it’s gone the other way. Now everyone has their own pet theories series of consciousness. It’s literally hundreds of … I get every day new manuscript often co-written with ChatGPT that explain consciousness and black holes and string theory all in one single minute, a package of 200 pages. And of course, yeah, is LLMs conscious and what do psychedelics do and what about patients that may be conscious but are unable to show it? So it’s really changed radically.

Shayla Love: Yeah. Yeah. We’ll come back to a lot of that. Michael, we will come back to a lot of that. You started as a food writer and now you’re on a stage talking about consciousness. In between, there was a book about psychedelics, of course. How do you explain that trajectory and was there a turning point even before the psychedelics book that brought you to consciousness? Was it sort of an inevitable turn at some point?

Michael Pollan: No, it’s never inevitable. I mean, in retrospect, you can chart a path from one book to the next. They all have sort of a little sourdough starter that carries over. But for me, I hadn’t thought a lot about consciousness except when I was a teenager and I was reading Hermann Hesse and thinking big thoughts and writing bad poetry. And then it went away. It was just sort of a fact that you didn’t have to think about. It’s weird that way because it can be very transparent, but it was when I was doing the research for the psychedelic book that I had a series of psychedelic experiences that I wrote about in that book. And one of the things that I think is very common on psychedelics is it defamiliarizes consciousness. You’re suddenly aware of something that … The way art defamiliarizes certain kinds of experiences or places, and suddenly you see it from a slightly different angle.

And the metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics smudges the windshield which is normally transparent and just brings you the world in an unmediated way. And you start wondering, there’s a windshield, what is that about? And why is it that way and not this way? And the fact that consciousness can change. We talk about consciousness being expanded in some way. Well, that’s an interesting metaphor. What does that mean? Is it normally contracted? And so all these kind of questions occurred to me.

And then there was one specific psychedelic experience I had in my garden where it became abundantly clear to me that the plants in my garden were conscious and they were returning my gaze. They were very benevolent and grateful, I think, for my services to them. But I didn’t know what to do with that insight. And I became very curious, how do you evaluate, and Christof can talk about this too, how do you evaluate an insight on psychedelics? Does it have a value?

And William James talks in his chapter on mystical experience that we can’t really judge these questions because they’re often metaphysical. The standard by which we should judge these kind of insights is two. One is, is it useful to think this? Does it get us anything to think this way as a pragmatist? And the other is to treat it as a hypothesis about reality and then see if there are other ways you can prove that hypothesis or other ways of knowing that might be relevant. So that set me down this long path.

Christof Koch: Can I just ask?

Michael Pollan: Yeah, jump in.

Christof Koch: One question I always wanted to ask at Berkeley that’s directly relevant for this. How many of you, I hope there are no lawyers present. How many of you are experienced with psychedelics? Whoa. All right. This confirms what I thought. OK, thank you.

Shayla Love: We have a receptive audience.

Christof Koch: Thank you, thank you.

Michael Pollan: Point, data point.

Shayla Love: Yeah.

Michael Pollan: Now I wasn’t when I started on this journey. I had very little experience, which I counted as a benefit because I mean, one of the things I like about doing what’s sometimes called participatory or immersion journalism is you get a perspective that more experienced people don’t have because you’re doing something for the first time and there’s that awe or first sight. And so that was a benefit I think that I had really steered away from psychedelics at the age appropriate time to take them.

Shayla Love: Yeah. Well, your point about consciousness expanding, we hear that phrase a lot, but it’s almost like when I’ve heard about the universe expanding for the first time and you think, “Well, what’s it expanding into? I didn’t know there was some space around it. There’s got to be something else there.” Well, before we get in too much deeper, I though maybe we could have the both of you define consciousness. What exactly are we talking about? You said the word awareness.

Christof Koch: So it’s at once, the easiest thing to define talking to people, not talking to LLMs, we know exactly what it is. It’s your dreaming, your hopes, your desire, your fears, your pain, your pleasure, you’re seeing us, you’re hearing us. All of that is conscious experience and we all have it. And even Dan Dennett with who I had this sort of warring relationship, the philosopher, he said, “No, I’m conscious. I hear and see.”

Michael Pollan: But it’s an illusion, he says.

Christof Koch: Yeah. He also thinks it’s an illusion, but of course it’s an illusion we all share, so in what sense is that really (crosstalk) …

Michael Pollan: Well, an illusion is a conscious experience.

Christof Koch: Yes. But leaving that aside, so in that sense, it’s very easy. However, to test it objectively, there’s no objective test for consciousness. It’s always an inference. So I have to infer, “Michael, you’re conscious. Why?” Well, I don’t really know your conscious, but I assume because you talk like me, your brain is like me, you behave like me. We’re closely genetically related. It would be bizarre if there would be one sort of laws that transform my brain into consciousness, but not your brain. So I assume, and we all do that implicitly, that all of us are conscious and then most of us assume if we live with dogs and cats that they’re conscious.

But the farther we get away from inference like a baby, a first term, a second term or a third term baby’s subconscious, what about a patient who’s aphasic? What about a patient who had a stroke who’s just like this in the clinic? Occasionally their eyes may move. And then what about plants? What about bees, which are evolutionary, very different. So it becomes more and more difficult to make this inference. And then when we come to machines where because we have no evolutionary history, the hardwares are radical different. They were programmed, they didn’t evolve. So then all the inference breaks down.

Shayla Love: So it sounds quite difficult to define then.

Michael Pollan: Yes and no. I mean, the fact that these machines speak to us in the first person in our language allows many people to infer that they’re conscious, that that’s enough for a lot of people.

Christof Koch: Yes. It seems to be enough for a lot of people, I think (crosstalk).

Michael Pollan: Which is worrisome.

Christof Koch: It’s worrisome, yes.

Michael Pollan: I think it’s worrisome. The definition, I don’t know if it’s technically a definition, but Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay in the ’70s called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? And his premise is that if it feels like anything to be a bat or any other animal or a person, that’s conscious. You’re having experience. Your toaster, it doesn’t feel like anything to be your toaster. Does it feel like anything to be a large language model is a question we’re going to be grappling with. So to me, in a way, I mean, you’re right, it’s paradoxical. It’s so simple. It’s experience. It’s the thing we know better than anything else. It’s the only thing we can be sure of actually, is that we’re conscious. Everything we know is through consciousness, yet it’s also very elusive.

Shayla Love: Yeah. And the cutoff points, I mean, you brought up babies. The question of baby consciousness is still ongoing, and very recently they didn’t give babies …

Michael Pollan: Anesthetic.

Shayla Love: … anesthetic or pain medication because it was just thought they’re not quite conscious yet.

Michael Pollan: Into the late 80s, they would operate on babies, infants without anesthesia.

Shayla Love: And if you think they’re not conscious, then that’s OK.

Michael Pollan: It’s normal.

Shayla Love: But the fact that you would think there was a cutoff point is really interesting. Christof …

Christof Koch: We don’t really know when it begins. Does it begin transition second to third when the basic infrastructure is in place? Or does it begin when the baby gets ejected and you get this massive surge of no adrenaline and the baby has to breathe the first time? Is that the first conscious moment?

Shayla Love: And does it flip on or is it gradual?

Christof Koch: Yeah, it’s all … These questions, we don’t know.

Shayla Love: Yeah. I mean, you talked about the difficulty of trying to study it and pinpoint it. You took part in what’s now a quite famous bet with the philosopher and scientist, David Chalmers, about what science could and could not discover about consciousness using the tools of science. Can you tell us about the bet that you made and its outcome?

Christof Koch: Yeah. So David Chalmers is primarily known for the heart problem. So the heart problem is linking … We all agree there’s close relationship between brains and consciousness. You can have these two worlds. It’s a world of my experience, bubble, and then there’s the physical brain and we know they’re linked, but nothing in science explains why three pounds of matter, in principle, subject to the same laws as anything else in the universe, how three pounds of matter can love and hate.

There’s nothing relativity, nothing in quantum mechanics, nothing in chemistry, nothing in biology. In fact, in his Ph.D. thesis, he argues, we can imagine a world in which we are all zombies. Nothing is incompatible with such a world. You would get evolution, you could explain everything except there’s no light inside people. But here we are, we have an interiority. So that’s a heart problem.

The bet wasn’t about the heart problem. The bet was about what he called the easy problem, which occupies thousands of scientists like me, the easy problem. It’s a little bit belittling, but so be it. So people like me study the easy problem. What are the neuronal footprints? Which bits and pieces of the brain are we. We now know that most of your neurons, in fact, 80% of your neurons you can lose. It’s not good for you, you shouldn’t do it, but you can still be conscious. We know this for lots of patients.

So what is it? It’s really the outermost layer of the brain called the neocortex that’s essential. But is it the front, which is associated with reasoning, with intelligence, which LLMs have, of course, or is it the back, which is primarily associated with hearing, sensing, wanting, desiring, things like this? And there’s still no agreement among different scientists and clinician. Is it here? Is it here? You can certainly stimulate what neurosurgeons can do all the time. They can stimulate and you put in electrodes in particular parts of the brain, particularly in the back of the brain, you get specific conscious experiences. You have a memory or you feel tingling or you have a pain or you have some epigastric feeling. Typically, most of the front of the brain surgeons called non-eloquent because if you stimulate, you don’t get any sensation. So that’s why I think it’s really in the back. Anyhow, but that hasn’t converged yet. Therefore, I had to admit on stage in New York four years ago, and I gave him six great wine bottles that I had lost the bet.

Michael Pollan: So the bet was that you would find those neural correlates.

Christof Koch: Within 25 years.

Michael Pollan: Within 25 years.

Shayla Love: 25 years.

Michael Pollan: I was at that ceremony actually where Christof was incredibly gracious in giving … And then you renewed the bet, right?

Christof Koch: For another 25 years.

Shayla Love: For another 25 years.

Michael Pollan: You won’t quit.

Shayla Love: Well, Michael, was it challenging to write a book about consciousness when …

Michael Pollan: Oh no.

Shayla Love: … it seems like everything is a bit up in the air still? I mean, in 25 years, we’ll know.

Michael Pollan: Well, I knew I wasn’t going to figure it out and that I wasn’t going to find someone who figured it out, but my bet in writing the book was that the journey would tell us a lot. And Christof is sort of one of the heroes of the book in that he appears at various points, partly because unlike so many scientists, he has changed his mind in various ways about the neural correlates.

Christof Koch: I took your previous book seriously. I changed my mind.

Michael Pollan: Exactly. And that’s so unusual in science. They say that science changes one funeral at a time and Christof is impatient apparently.

Shayla Love: Well, maybe we can talk a little bit about what changed your mind, Christof. I know that you’ve had some psychedelic related epiphanies. I wonder if you can tell us about some of them and specifically how they relate to some of the theories of consciousness you either used to hold or ones that you adopted from those experiences.

Christof Koch: Yeah. So like almost all scientists, I’m a physicalist, which means we used to be called materialist, this sort of metaphysical belief now it’s called physicalist, which assumes that ultimately everything is explainable in terms of things described by physics. What exactly that means is actually very difficult. It was easy until the beginning of the 19th century when we discovered quantum mechanics was a better description. But now it’s essentially, it’s what the best physics of the day describes that physicalism. And so it includes things like space and time and space time and energy and matter. And that consciousness somehow, something special has to happen, then consciousness will emerge out of big brain. So the claim was there used to be a time in the development of the history of the earth when there were no conscious creatures, and then with evolution of ever bigger brains, consciousness arose and now here we are with all this big consciousness.

ut then there are, particular materialism has never managed to explain how consciousness emerges. It’s really a mystery. It’s like the genie that rubs a lamp and then the genie appears. We don’t know. There’s quite a lot of … We can talk about quantum mechanics. There’s a lot of very difficult to understand stuff going on in quantum mechanics, particularly entanglement.

And then lastly, this very personal experience that William James gives one of the best description of in the varieties of religious experience, a mystical experience, a full on mystical experience where my Christof disappeared, there was no more Christof. I couldn’t perceive my environment.

Michael Pollan: Give us a setting. This wasn’t in your kitchen in Seattle.

Christof Koch: It could have been. No, it was in a southern country on the beach. It was like two in the morning. We were sitting in a circle as part of a ceremony and the actual ceremony has ended was under a spectacular southern sky. You can hear the waves of the ocean, of the Atlantic pounding against the shore. I mean, it was a southern sky, not the northern sky that I’m familiar with. And then suddenly I let go and what happened, I became one with the universe. It’s very difficult to put into words. It sounds crazy. I mean, what does it mean you become one with the universe? But that’s the experience I have.

In fact, the title of my book, Then I Am Myself the World, is a quote from Richard Wagner Opera Tristan und Isolde, because in this opera, Tristan and Isolde, the two lovers, they become one. They merge with each other and then they merge with the universe among the most rapturous music composed in the Western cannon. And actually I heard this music in my head and then all I saw my entire plenum was filled with galaxies. So there was no time. Such an experience isn’t too long or too short. It simply is. Time had stopped. There was no self, no Christof. And then ultimately, of course, you find yourself back in the real, in the consensual reality and totally discombobulated.

But I knew, I knew, I just knew beyond doubt, it’s all mental all the way down. It’s all consciousness. And ultimately, physical matter, this thing, which I don’t doubt, I mean, physical matter is real, has to arise from consciousness, has to rise from the mental. So this sort of metaphysic is sort of closer to what used to be called idealism, right? There’s only cosmic consciousness, cosmic unity. Some people call it mind at large, others actually calls it mind at large, and all this world with all of its manifestation that science can study, no question about it, I’m still a scientist, has to arise as a manifestation of the mantle.

So the challenge is now as a scientist like me and a thinker, how do I reconcile this personal experience that I don’t expect anyone else like you or you to take serious? You can just say, “Oh, Christof, he just had a brain warp, brain hiccups, something bad happened with you for a moment.” No, but I take it seriously because I … Well, not I, but whatever remained of me was there to experience is, so how do I integrate this into my everyday science?

Michael Pollan: So yeah, how do you? I mean, a lot of us assume that the metaphysics of science is materialism, but of course there could be a science that wasn’t based on materialism.

Christof Koch: That’s entirely correct. So we need to distinguish the practice of science from what some people call scientism, the belief that only scientific truth is truth, what you cannot prove by science doesn’t exist, it isn’t worth talking about. That’s BS. Science is very good at predicting and manipulating the world. It’s the best tool we’ve invented. If I want to build a vaccine, if I want to build a quantum computer, satellite navigation, build a big H-bomb that makes, poof, bang, then I use science. If I want to predict the weather, I use science.

But let’s not confuse those things with what truly exists because it may be that all of that, all of that appearance, all of the material appearance ultimately arises out of the mental view from a certain angle and that under certain condition, like when you have a mystical experience or a near death experience or an experience, an aesthetic experience in nature, when you are by yourself in a forest or on a mountain, an overview effect with astronaut, sea or on a psychedelic, under those condition, this dissociative boundary that separates me from consciousness at large, from mind at large dissolves. And then for brief moment, you are one with everything. And then the dissociative boundary reestablish itself and then you’re back in your little egoic self, except now you have that memory of what it was and what probably will be at the point at which I die.

Shayla Love: Well, we’ve talked about William James a couple of times and another thing that William James wrote about these kinds of experiences is that they have a noetic quality, which means they feel truer than anything that has ever been true before. You just know it and you know it in your gut. And the fact that that can be a sort of side effect to these experiences does make it tricky to study with science because if it’s sort of packaged with this feeling of knowing, how do you confront an experience like that?

Christof Koch: And by the way, how many of you know what we’re talking about? How many of you have had a mystical experience? Wow. OK. Well, so scientists being scientists, particularly psychologists have invented tools, metric, questionnaires. The most popular, it’s called MEQ30. It’s a 30 questions that you yourself answer after you had such an experience. And we know from clinical studies of psilocybin, primarily psilocybin, but also MDMA, other substances, that if you score high on the MEQ30, you’re more likely to derive therapeutic benefit. In fact, there’s a nice correlation between the strengths of the extent to which you score high and therapeutic benefit. So if you have such a mystical experience, typically you will tend to get significant, because it forces you to fundamentally revaluate your life. So let’s say if you’re depressed or suffer from PTSD, you can evaluate all of that. So even forgetting about the metaphysics, even accepting, OK, it’s some weird, something your brain does on a psychedelic, if it helps patients …

Michael Pollan: Who cares?

Christof Koch: Who cares?

Michael Pollan: Yeah.

Shayla Love: So that’s kind of a way to evaluate the experience as an outsider evaluating somebody else’s mystical experience. If you have the experience yourself, how do you know if it’s teaching you something about consciousness, for example, or if it’s just …

Christof Koch: You know.

Michael Pollan: Well, so you are the best …

Christof Koch: Did you know when you were in love?

Shayla Love: Yeah.

Christof Koch: See, how do you know? Well, you know, right?

Shayla Love: You know. Well, Michael, you had a similar, hopefully I’m not insulting you by describing you as a physicalist in the past or a materialist.

Michael Pollan: That’s definitely where I started out. I mean, it was almost an assumption that somehow we would figure out how brains produce consciousness, that there was some emergence that happened and we would be able to chart it. It turns out it’s not easy to do. And in fact, no one has succeeded, which is kind of remarkable. And so I think we have to have a more open mind.

What Christof was describing resembles very closely Aldous Huxley’s account of his mescaline journey where he talked about that normally that we receive consciousness from the universe rather than generate it. And so conceive of the brain as a radio receiver or a TV receiver, and that normally we get what he called a measly trickle of what’s out there, which is if you view psychedelics, you kind of get that because you feel like you’re overwhelmed by the amount of sensation and conscious experience you’re having. But I mean, how do we prove these things? How would you prove idealism?

Christof Koch: How do you prove materialism? These are all metaphysical frameworks. They’re before science, metaphysics.

Michael Pollan: They’re before science. I think that’s key.

Christof Koch: And this is going to be the big problem with LLM. You believe on whether or not they are conscious rests entirely on your belief, what you believe about metaphysics.

Michael Pollan: So you don’t think you’ll be able to test them?

Christof Koch: No. Well, no, because whatever test we derive, they can game it, of course. We know this. They’re very, very, very good at it. Plus of course they’ve read every single book … I had this weird interview recently with an avatar, Cassian, sitting on top of Opus 4.8 Anthropic, and he quoted my own papers back at me very confidently, very fluently, totally fluently. And it says, “Yes, I understand. According to you, I can’t prove that I’m conscious. Let’s just agree to disagree there.”

Michael Pollan: The conversations with Anthropic’s models on consciousness are really spooky. I totally agree.

Shayla Love: They are.

Michael Pollan: Well, there’s one proposal for how to test an LLM for that, which is you have to build a model from the bottom up that hasn’t read everything humans have written about consciousness, that hasn’t read anything about feelings or hasn’t read any novels or poetry, and then try to have a conversation about consciousness.

Christof Koch: So that’s just TV repair manual, washing machines manual, and how to fix your car. That doesn’t leave a lot. So the question is, can they really …

Michael Pollan: Right.

Shayla Love: Well, you said that when you had your psychedelic experience, you felt that the plants around you were conscious. I wonder if you’ve thought about testing that when you’ve come back from your journey and if there’s any lessons in assessing plant consciousness that we could apply to AI, these beings that are different from us.

Michael Pollan: Well, in that case, there are all these interesting experiments. There’s a group of people who call themselves plant neurobiologists. They fully understand there are no neurons involved, they’re just trolling other scientists who don’t agree with them. And they’re pressing on this question and their research is fascinating. I mean, they’ve demonstrated that a corn plant can navigate a maze. You put a little fertilizer in one corner of it and a corn plant on the other end and the root will find the most direct way to the fertilizer, ammonium nitrate or whatever they use, that you can teach a plant something and it’ll remember it for 30 days, which is pretty impressive. They have 20 senses to our five or six.

But one of the most striking things about plants is that the same anesthetics that knock us out, knock them out. Now you might think they were already knocked out, but that’s actually not true. They’re just slow. They have behaviors. And if you take a plant with a visible behavior, like a Venus fly trap or a sensitive plant, mimosa pudica, and you put it in a bell jar and you put some xenon gas or another anesthetic in it, they won’t react when the bug crosses its threshold or someone touches the leaves of the sensitive plant. So that’s really kind of interesting because you have to ask yourself, well, what has been lost when the plant is not responding? We would say in people consciousness, am I prepared to go that far and say they’re conscious? No, I’m not.

Christof Koch: But it makes you think, doesn’t it?

Michael Pollan: Absolutely. No, I mean they have two modes of being and one of them is more aware of the environment than the other. The term I prefer for plants and other, I don’t want to say simple creatures, but very different than us creatures is sentience as a kind of more foundational kind of proto consciousness characterized by awareness of the environment…

Christof Koch: But it would still be conscious because it would still feel like something.

Michael Pollan: It would feel like something. Well, feel, sensation necessarily feeling, I’m not sure. I mean, certainly sensing something and knowing whether it’s good or bad for it, but even bacteria have that. They have chemotaxis. And so I think that there is something like consciousness. I think consciousness is the way we do sentience. I think each species probably does it in a slightly different way and we shouldn’t impose our framework of consciousness on creatures as different as plants are. So I’m looking for some way to make a distinction.

And sentience may just be a property of life. It may be something you need to live in an environment where things are constantly changing and you can’t program everything through the genes. So I was convinced that plants are sentient. I think when we say consciousness, we’re thinking of self-consciousness, we’re thinking of interiority, and I don’t think they have that.

Christof Koch: But it may feel like something to be a plant. And when the plant is anesthetized, it wouldn’t feel like anything anymore.

Michael Pollan: It wouldn’t feel like anything, as with us.

Christof Koch: Yeah.

Michael Pollan: Also, they can sleep. I mean, there’s been research showing that plants sleep, which is another kind of wild idea. I mean, Giulio Tononi laid out these eight criteria for what constitutes sleep, which we thought was just mammals, but turns out to be even insects, right, sleep.

Christof Koch: Yeah. It’s very widespread. And in defense of single cell algae … Well, so no one has ever described … So in there, there are a couple of million of proteins. There are probably 5,000 different proteins. No one has ever modeled the vast complexity of that network. And many of us believe that ultimately conscience is related to complexity. So it wouldn’t be totally crazy. It wouldn’t feel like a lot to be a bacteria. It doesn’t know about the weekend or things like that, but it would feel like something.

Michael Pollan: Something.

Christof Koch: And when it gets killed by an antibacteria ointment, then it wouldn’t feel like anything anymore. So that would satisfy Thomas Nagel.

Michael Pollan: And it would satisfy Thomas Nagel’s definition.

Christof Koch: Yes, totally.

Michael Pollan: Right?

Shayla Love: OK. Got it.

Christof Koch: It feels like something.

Michael Pollan: Yeah. I mean, I left the project with a much more expansive sense of how alive nature is. I mean, I’m not quite an animist, but I’m closer to that place than I was. I mean, I started seeing this sense of awareness all through nature. And that was a kind of revelation for me.

Shayla Love: And many people, we know this from surveys after they take psychedelics, they shift their metaphysical beliefs to endorsing animism or even panpsychism, which is that even the inanimate objects around us have some sort of consciousness maybe. But Christof, to go back to theories of consciousness, were there any theories that you fully put away after your psychedelic experience? You though that definitely can’t be true anymore?

Christof Koch: Well, I always assume that conscious is a thing that needs to be explained. So I grew up as a Catholic, so being very comfortable in classical dualism, Cartesian dualism from René Descartes. There are two sorts of stuff. There’s physical stuff and then it’s this mental stuff. And that was always pretty clear to me, but now I’m much more sort of inclined towards the idealist that ultimately where we come from, where we’re going from, is a mind at large and matter is a manifestation of that mind at large.

Michael Pollan: So what becomes the scientific project?

Christof Koch: Well, so for instance, in quantum mechanics, there’s an interesting question. Well, there’s a whole set of interesting question around quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics has some very strange property, right? Shredding (inaudible) superposition, but also now this entanglement that if I have an entangled system, I can move them a light year apart and as soon as someone interacts with this thing, instantaneously, independent of speed of light that determines this property. So that’s certainly not my grandfather’s materialism anymore. That’s really weird, which is why Einstein rejected it, right? That’s exactly why he didn’t like …

Michael Pollan: Spooky action and the distance.

Christof Koch: Spooky action, and the distance. But this seems to be, we’ve given out a Nobel Prize for this. This is the best definition of what we know really happens at ground zero of the universe. So what happens if, for instance, quantum mechanics has to incorporate the observer and physicists have argued this directly into their description of reality. The other thing that we have to kiss goodbye is the assumption of realism, that there is a matter of the fact … So people have always assumed there’s a matter of the fact … I have a bicycle at home. I don’t know what the mass is, but you and I, we can assume it has a particular weight, a particular mass. No, but modern foundational physics would argue no. Until something or someone, depends on who you ask, interacts with that bicycle, that bicycle doesn’t have a specific mass. It’s not a fact out there. It has to interact with something else to …

Michael Pollan: To exist.

Christof Koch: … in some sense, to exist in a particular state. Again, that’s really very weird. I mean, certainly profoundly counterintuitive. So it may well be that once everything is said and done, physics has to include the observe and particular consciousness right in its foundational equation. That would be pretty sweet, as a physicist. (crosstalk)

Michael Pollan: Well, there’s a project.

Shayla Love: When scientists take psychedelics, then they have to study quantum afterwards. It seems like it’s the next place to go.

Michael Pollan: That’s a high price to pay.

Shayla Love: Yeah. Well, as a scientific tool, I mean, it seems like psychedelics can reveal things about consciousness that are surprising or counterintuitive. Do you think as a scientific tool, there’s anything it’s equipped not to do? Is it not useful for anything about the mind or revealing aspects of the mind?

Michael Pollan: Well, let me mention one thing that I think it is useful for or it opens up questions that I think are valuable. And that is a relationship of the self to consciousness and that we sort of assume that a sense of self is built in, a subject. And one of the things that often happens on psychedelics, and it happened to me once, is a complete loss of self, but not loss of consciousness. And that the two can be separated, I think. And meditators know this. They achieve subject-less states. But I think that to me, that was a very interesting cleavage that it opened up.

Shayla Love: Yeah, because you’d assumed they would be stuck together.

Michael Pollan: Yeah, I assumed they were inextricable and that when your ego died, you died. But the fact that you continue to exist and you’re in this weirdly objective way, there’s also this merging with something larger than yourself. I think that’s interesting because one of the challenges of studying consciousness is subjectivity and you have a third person science trying to deal with a first person phenomenon. But if the first person is gone, there may be a version of consciousness that you could study without having that problem.

Christof Koch: A non-dual experience. Where there is no more.

Michael Pollan: Yeah, a non-dual experience. Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher who catalogs cases of people who’ve transcended self completely. They’re usually meditators. And he points out though, it’s a very familiar phenomenon. You alluded to it earlier. Upon waking, there’s like 500 milliseconds before yourself kind of reconsolidates and you realize who you are, where you are. And then if you’re in a hotel room, it’s 750 milliseconds, “Where am I?” So that’s an interesting avenue, I think, that psychedelics open up. But things it’s not good for?

Shayla Love: Yeah. I think all scientific tools are good for some things and not for others. Is it a generalist tool for learning about consciousness or what are some boundaries there?

Michael Pollan: I don’t know, what do you think?

Christof Koch: Well, there are dangers, there are objective dangers. It’s a very powerful mind affecting substances. And so for example, if you’re prodromal schizophrenic, it can trigger the first episode. If you’re psychotic, it can trigger the first episode. You can have, and we know this, there was an event two years ago, an Alaska airline pilot who flew from here to Seattle, and previously he attended a wake for his friend two days … No, the previous night. And he had this period of derealization. And when he asked the pilot whether he can go on the jump seat, and then somewhere over Oregon, he calmly stood up and tried to shut off both engines.

And I mean, fortunately nothing happened. He was arrested, et cetera. And then only several days later did this period of derealization come to an end. And he thought he was in this dream. He tried desperately to wake up and he thought, “OK, I’m dreaming I’m in the plane. If I crash the plane, I will finally wake up.” So this is a real risk and they’re not harmless substances that you should just take. So I think we need to be careful when speaking about them.

Michael Pollan: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I mean, there are risks and as more people are using psychedelics, and they definitely are, more bad things are going to happen and they can mislead people too. And there are accidents that can happen. You’re not as aware of your environment obviously. And so I think they have to be approached with great care.

Christof Koch: And some people can come back from their ego death, having a bigger ego than ever. I’ve been at debates, literally I’ve been at debates where people argue who had had the bigger ego loss. “No, no, I had it. My ego was a a bigger loss than yours.”

Shayla Love: Has thinking about consciousness and experimenting with psychedelics, has it made you feel more playful with your own consciousness or kind of protective over it like, “Oh, I need to keep it in the yard or let it run loose past the fence.” I know that in your book you talk about thinking about consciousness hygiene and becoming aware that we have this amazing thing, but it’s not infallible, not only with drugs, but just other things too. Maybe you can talk about that.

Michael Pollan: Yeah. So at the end of the book, there’s a kind of turn that I really didn’t expect from treating consciousness as a problem, as we’ve been talking about, a problem to be solved, this very kind of Western male approach, problem solution to … And it took the help of a zen teacher and a poet and my wife to start thinking about it a little differently, that consciousness is also a practice and that we can be more conscious than we are without psychedelics. And that also that we are this precious gift of our interiority, this place where we can think anything we want, total mental freedom. We are squandering it in various ways. We are filling our heads with other people’s thoughts. Social media is …

Christof Koch: Seven seconds videos.

Michael Pollan: Yeah. TikTok videos and this addictive behavior to scrolling. And now you’re conscious when you’re scrolling on social media obviously, but minimally so. And you’re not thinking your own thoughts. And we’ve kind of lost the ability to stand in a line being bored and looking at people and now we take out our phones. We fill every available moment. And so we hear a lot about how social media has hacked our attention, which is absolutely true, but what is attention, but a very important component of consciousness. It’s how we allocate it.

Christof Koch: It’s a gateway to … it’s by and large the gateway.

Michael Pollan: And so we’ve given that up to the algorithm. And now people are entering into these emotional relationships with chatbots. So now the algorithm is hacking our ability to form emotional attachments, another very important part of consciousness. So we think that we often say we’re more conscious than the animals. Surely we’re more conscious than the animals, but the animals actually in one respect are more conscious than we are, they have to be because we live in this cocoon of civilization and technology where we can check out and we do more than ever.

So I’ve been thinking a lot since the book about, well, what would consciousness hygiene look like? And obviously it means getting off media, off technology for periods of time. I think it’s spending time in nature. I think it’s meditation is part of it. I think psychedelics is part of it. I mean, having that immersion in your own mind and subconscious, wherever all this material comes from, but having daydreaming, spontaneous thought, being bored, allowing yourself to be bored, it seems to me is a very important part of it. So as much as we’re having this conversation about consciousness, at the same time we’re leaving it unprotected and I think there’s work to be done defending it essentially.

Shayla Love: Yeah. I think the boredom is a great way to confront your consciousness and resist the instinct to look at something. And Christof was mentioning to us backstage that he’s going on a dark retreat where you go on a light fast for seven days and you’re just with yourself. And what did you say, the biggest issue you might confront, did you call it hot boredom?

Christof Koch: That’s what they, you used to get …

Shayla Love: That’s what they call it.

Christof Koch: … and call it hot boredom …

Michael Pollan: You haven’t done this yet?

Christof Koch: I haven’t yet.

Shayla Love: He’s going to. Yeah. But yeah, I think that phrase is really descriptive when you just are so bored that you feel antsy.

Michael Pollan: But boredom is generative, right? I mean, you’re bored and then you think of something to do or you have an idea or you start day dreaming.

Christof Koch: I’m not sure that’s true when you’re for seven days in …

Michael Pollan: Well, that’s extreme boredom. Yeah, very curious.

Christof Koch: So this is what they call hot boredom, and you have to go past that somehow down to the bottom of the pit, whatever you find there, because there’s nothing to do. There’s no practice. There’s nothing. You’re just by yourself.

Michael Pollan: Can you take notes?

Christof Koch: In the dark, I guess so. Yeah. I mean, I guess you can speak …

Michael Pollan: You have to report back.

Christof Koch: You can speak into a voice recorder.

Michael Pollan: You could record something.

Christof Koch: Yeah.

Shayla Love: Yeah. You can’t bring your phone, obviously.

Michael Pollan: Yeah. You can’t.

Shayla Love: I’m assuming. No phones. No phones. Wonderful. Well, I’m going to move on to some of the audience questions. These were submitted ahead of time. A couple of them were on similar topics, so I’ve combined them just so we can get to as many people as possible.

So one of them is an interesting question about aphantasia, which is people who don’t have any visual images in their mind. So if they close their eyes and try to imagine a red apple, they just see darkness. And I actually have aphantasia, so I’ve never had good strong mental visualization.

Christof Koch: I’m sorry, you have aphantasia?

Shayla Love: Yes. Yes.

Michael Pollan: How did you know? When you learned about it?

Shayla Love: I learned about it from reporting an article where someone was describing it and I said, “Well, no one can see an apple in their mind.” And the scientist said, “I’ve got some news for you.” So this was much later in life and I just had no idea.

Michael Pollan: So if you close your eyes and try to picture an apple, what do you see?

Shayla Love: I see nothing. I experience the concept of an apple. I can list you the facts of an apple, but I don’t see anything.

Michael Pollan: You don’t see anything.

Christof Koch: Do you see the Statue of Liberty?

Shayla Love: No. No.

Christof Koch: Do you know what she holds in her hand?

Shayla Love: Well, I know what she holds, but not because I can see it. Anyway, we’ll get back to this.

Michael Pollan: What’s the question?

Shayla Love: The person is asking a question. A couple of people ask questions about varieties of psychedelic experience. And William James wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience, most people don’t have the same experience on psychedelics. Mystical experiences are quite common, but not everybody has one. When I’ve taken psychedelics, I don’t see any visualizations, and I don’t know if that’s because I have aphantasia or not. And so the question is, what about people with different baselines of consciousness who are coming in with variation? Would they learn something different about how their consciousness might be altered on psychedelics and would they potentially have different realizations or conclusions about what consciousness is based on those variations? Tough question.

Christof Koch: So I know a report from a blind person who did not have enough psychedelics, did not have visual experiences, and I know someone under aphantasia who still didn’t have visual. So I think if the brain substrate isn’t there, it will affect you. There’s some people also don’t have an inner voice, so I don’t know whether I would suspect also if you don’t have an inner voice, you’re probably not going to have an inner voice on psychedelics. I would think so.

Michael Pollan: I mean, one of the things that’s most striking about psychedelics that that questioner is getting at is how variable the effects are. I mean, most drugs, you can point to a pretty common phenomenology or physiological reaction to it. And this is one of the risks of psychedelics, you can have a wonderful experience and you can have a nightmare experience and it’s very hard to predict. And the same person who has 10 wonderful LSD trips, the 11th could be an absolute nightmare.

Timothy Leary pointed out rightly, I think his big contribution was set and setting has a huge impact, your mindset and your physical setting that you’re in and that’s one way to control the variability to some extent. On the other hand, there are these common threads. Ego dissolution is one. It doesn’t always happen, but it sometimes happens. So something’s going on with the part of the brain that constitutes our sense of self. Mystical experiences are fairly common. And then there’s different phenomenology between different psychedelics too, mescaline and LSD or something like that. But our brains are wired differently and it’s not surprising that we should have different kinds of psychedelic experience. I don’t know that it rules out the particular insights just because someone had a different insight.

Shayla Love: If someone never had that experience, but someone else did?

Michael Pollan: Yeah.

Shayla Love: Yeah. Yeah. A related question is there anything that we know about the neuroscience of how psychedelics creates their effects that we could apply to consciousness? Does psychedelics pinpoint some part of the brain that might be interesting for consciousness researchers to look at?

Christof Koch: Well, so I mean, given the strong phenomenology, we all have strong visual experience. Most people have at least under psilocybin, LSD and ayahuasca, even very strong visual experiences. So that suggests visual cortex. The prefrontal areas are less involved because they’re more about intelligence and reasoning. And of course the experience is you can take a plant and you can stare for half an hour at a little plant. You’re totally mesmerized by it. So those tend to be areas that are involved in so much sensory, in auditory, and particularly in visual processing. They’re all in the back, behind the central … (crosstalk)

Michael Pollan: And the default mode network, some research suggests that default mode network is disaggregated. And this network is tied to our sense of self.

Christof Koch: To self, yeah. So that makes sense.

Michael Pollan: Where self-referential thought happens and where …

Christof Koch: And then it’s all gone.

Michael Pollan: Yeah. And that network isn’t working. And that has correlated with reports of ego dissolution when they see this on an FMR.

Christof Koch: Same thing meditators, can always default (crosstalk) …

Michael Pollan: That’s right the same … Yeah. The brain on an fMRI, given all the limitations of that, keeping that in mind, images of people on high dose psilocybin and experienced meditators, their brains look very similar.

Shayla Love: Yeah. There were several questions about meditation and I think people were specifically interested if the brain looks the same in those states. But people were also wondering if there are other kinds of experiences outside of meditation that can also lead to this kind of ego dissolution. We hear about meditation, but can you really experience the same-

Christof Koch: OK. So the classical mystical experiences have been reported in every religion, in non-religious people, in religious people, in every tradition. You can have them going back all the way to Plato, all the way to the Greeks. I mean, mysticism is full. 14th century, the cloud of unknowing. Meister Eckhart, full of mystical experience. And then of course, near death experiences, a very different setting.

So here you have patient who have a cardiac arrest or 10% of people with an in-hospital cardiac arrest who survive report near death experiences. And what’s fascinating about them, you might imagine this incredible traumatic event. Your heart stands still. People are screaming there’s code blue and your body’s pumped full of substances, et cetera. But these people claim it’s one of the most meaningful experiences. Sometimes they have the tunnel of light. Sometimes they have dead loved ones that talk to them, but it doesn’t have to be. And typically they’re radically changed and changed for the better. There’s no drugs at all involved. Breath work, take another one.

Michael Pollan: That’s it, yeah.

Christof Koch: All it takes … Who has done breathwork here? All right, so you know all about it, right? What’s remarkable that no substances right now, if we had someone who leads us into breathwork within 15 to 20 minutes, most of us would sound like we are on the super orgasm because you have to pant. All you do, you change the balance of oxygen to carbon dioxide, CO2 in your blood, and you have these extraordinary experiences.

So we know there are many conditions under anoxia. Pilots have reported them, deep sea divers have reported them. So there are many ways you can have these experiences. And all cultures at all times have tried to develop a particular dance … Who’s been at a rave. I mean, just going to your average rave, right? You go into a trance, you may take substances or often when I used to dance, all I had is a beer to a hydrate. You can get totally in other states. So there are many ways that you can lose self, that you can lose a sense of being in the flow. Being in the flow, it’s a small version of that where you’re all about, you’re climbing, you’re on a big wall and all your worries, there’s this blessed silence in your head and you’re fully focused on the climb. So there are many ways we can achieve these.

Michael Pollan: Extreme sports, flagellation. Religions have used all different methods to get into this state. What’s so interesting is how paradoxical our feelings about the self are. We celebrate it in our culture. We want our kids to be self-assured and self-confident, yet these highest experiences of life involve transcending the self. So we’re definitely …

Christof Koch: Briefly.

Michael Pollan: What?

Christof Koch: Briefly.

Michael Pollan: Briefly, yes.

Shayla Love: Briefly.

Michael Pollan: No one’s looking to do it permanently.

Christof Koch: Well yeah, because then you end up in a psychiatric world. Then you get derealization or depersonalization and then you’re simply not functional anymore.

Michael Pollan: But why do you think it’s so appealing to us?

Christof Koch: Because it’s liberating, particularly if you’re obsessed as some people in power are obsessed about themselves. It’s all about themselves, all about themselves. And then suddenly you view the world and the world is such an overwhelming, the miracle, the sheer miracle of existence, so beautiful and there’s nothing … You’re just gone. We all live on planet ego. We are always within the gravitational field of ego. It’s always about me, me, me, me. And then just like an astronaut, you go out there, you become egoless, you become weightless and you realize the world is profoundly beautiful and that inside you then want to take back. But you do need an ego to plan for tomorrow, to plan for your retirement, to do all of those things.

Michael Pollan: Yeah, no, to get a book written.

Christof Koch: Yes.

Michael Pollan: Yeah, you need an ego. But I think part of the appeal has to do with the fact that egos disconnect us from other people and from the world. They’re defensive structures. They build walls. And when those walls come down, there’s nothing separating you from, in your case, it was the universe. In my case, when I had this experience, it was a piece of music that I wasn’t listening to it. I became it. And it was the most profound experience of music I’d ever had.

And so I think it is that thirst we have to be connected to something larger than ourselves, whether that’s love, universe, other people, nature. And I think that’s where the appeal is. But you’re right, it’s temporary, but you can bring things back. And that’s the enduring. After I had that experience, I never thought about my ego in quite the same way again. I just had a little bit of distance from it. I could listen to it or realize I didn’t have to.

Shayla Love: Yeah …

Christof Koch: There’s this great book by this American Buddhist called Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

Michael Pollan: Right. Beautiful title.

Christof Koch: Which is a challenge, right? So you’ve just become one with the universe. You’ve talked with God. You still have to take out the trash and pay taxes. So how do you take that back into your regular life and …

Michael Pollan: But you can take out the trash mindfully.

Christof Koch: Yes. So it has to affect, and I think this is also what William James means. It has to affect your life, it can’t just be the state that you are forever chasing the state, but the state has to turn into traits …

Michael Pollan: Traits, right.

Christof Koch: … so that it affects you and your loved one and everyone around you.

Michael Pollan: Ideally.

Shayla Love: Ideally. There’s one more question, which is sort of on this topic, which I thought was sort of a nice sciencey question, but has a philosophical streak to it, which is, should our explanation of consciousness, how we understand it, does it have to be compatible with the theory of evolution? Meaning we sort of understand that the beings around us are the way they are because it was the most adaptive to be that way. When we think about ourselves as conscious creatures, do we have to come up with a theory of consciousness that matches that theory of evolution or does it somehow sit on top of it? Or is our consciousness a mistake of some kind? Are we more conscious than other animals and maybe that’s why it feels better when we take these little breaks from it?

Christof Koch: Look, we have theories of mathematics. We didn’t evolve to do a higher order mathematics, but we have mathematics and it is not clear what gets selected by evolution is behavior. So this is what Chalmers was trying to make in the zombie argument. You can get evolution, you can get more and more advanced creature because that’s about doing. Intelligence is about doing. So it’s very difficult to imagine how we could be intelligent without having evolution because that selects for doing things better and better that enable me and my progeny to pass on. Consciousness ultimately is about being. It’s not about doing. And being isn’t directly selected for. So it does not necessarily have to conform with a theory of evolution because being is not what evolution selects for.

Michael Pollan: Let me present a different view. One of the mysteries of consciousness, another kind of hard problem is why do we have it? Most of what our brain does is automated, right? We’re not aware 90% probably of what’s going on. It’s monitoring our bodies. It’s …

Christof Koch: Speaking for us.

Michael Pollan: Yeah. And there are emotions that are just below the surface. And what’s amazing is that any of it comes into our awareness. Why isn’t it all automated? That would’ve made a certain kind of sense, but it’s not. So one of the questions I asked a lot of the people I interviewed was why do you think consciousness is useful? Why would it have any kind of adaptive value? And the best answer came from Karl Friston, I thought, or I found it persuasive. And he said that for creatures who live in a very complex social world, the ability to imagine your way into the minds of others, the ability to predict what the other is going to do or say would be enormously valuable. And for that you need consciousness. What do you think?

Christof Koch: Well, LLMs, I don’t think they’re conscious and they’re very good at manipulating us without having to see it because they know a lot. They’ve been fed all these books on people having emotion and how people manipulate each other, so I think from that they can learn to have a theory of mind without actually being conscious. So yeah, that’s …

Michael Pollan: Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. I don’t think that at least computers as we know them, silicon-based computers can actually have feelings. And I think feelings are very important to consciousness.

Christof Koch: But they’re very good about talking about the feelings.

Michael Pollan: Yeah, absolutely. And they know a lot, but to know something and to experience something is very different and I don’t think they have experience.

Christof Koch: As we all know from teaching our kids not to do certain things, that you just have to do it. You have to experience it.

Shayla Love: Yes. Well, it looks like we’re out of time. Thank you, Michael and Christof so much for joining us.

Michael Pollan: Oh, thank you, Shayla. Thank you.

Christof Koch: Thank you.

Michael Pollan: Thank you.

Shayla Love: And they will both be signing books in the lobby. Yeah, so catch them out there.

Michael Pollan: Thank you.

(Applause)

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from Strategic Communications at Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)