Joe Rogan Experience #2467 - Michael Pollan

1. JRJoe Rogan0:02

   Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

2. JRJoe Rogan0:04

   The Joe Rogan Experience.

3. JRJoe Rogan0:06

   Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat rock music] Mr. Pollan, so good to see you again.

4. MPMichael Pollan0:14

   Hey, good to be back.

5. JRJoe Rogan0:16

   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-

6. MPMichael Pollan0:25

   Psychedelic book?

7. JRJoe Rogan0:26

   Yeah.

8. MPMichael Pollan0:26

   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-

9. JRJoe Rogan0:39

   Do you do air quotes when you say research?

10. MPMichael Pollan0:40

    Yes. [both laughing] And I, um... A- 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 and 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, [lips smack] uh, walking through my garden and getting the powerful impression that the plants were conscious, and that these-- I remember these part- this particular, it was a plume poppy or several plume poppies. And they were, like, returning my gaze. They were very m- benevolent. They were, you know, putting out positive vibes, [lips smack] 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? 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?

11. JRJoe Rogan2:32

    So there's a bunch of different schools of thought when it comes to consciousness, right? There's one, like the Rupert Sheldrake thing, that sort of everything has consciousness, and there's the sort of r- rational scientists that believe it e-exists somewhere in the mind. I don't know about-

12. MPMichael Pollan2:49

    In the brain.

13. JRJoe Rogan2:50

    Yeah. In the brain, excuse me. And then there's people that think that the brain is essentially just an antenna-

14. MPMichael Pollan2:56

    Right

15. JRJoe Rogan2:56

    ... that's tuning in-

16. MPMichael Pollan2:57

    Receiving, yeah

17. JRJoe Rogan2:58

    ... to the greater consciousness of whatever it is that's out there.

18. MPMichael Pollan3:01

    Yeah.

19. JRJoe Rogan3:01

    Do you have any one of them that you hold?

20. MPMichael Pollan3:05

    I don't.

21. JRJoe Rogan3:06

    Or do you-

22. MPMichael Pollan3:06

    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. No idea.

23. JRJoe Rogan3:36

    Yeah, you talk about it in your book, where the, the two gentlemen who had the bet.

24. MPMichael Pollan3:39

    Yeah, yeah.

25. JRJoe Rogan3:41

    Yeah.

26. MPMichael Pollan3:41

    Um, that was, uh, Christof Koch, who's a, uh, a, a great brain scientist, and David Chalmers, who's a, uh, philosopher. And, uh, this goes back to, like, in the early '90s. They were getting drunk in a bar in Bremen, Germany. And, uh, Christof Koch 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 was, 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 gonna do that for consciousness. And he's a very arrogant man, and he, he thought it was just, you know, no problem. Um, and Crick was kind of his sidekick. Uh, I'm sorry, uh, 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 twenty-five years. That was twenty-five years, twenty-seven years ago now, and, uh, Chalmers won the bet. Chalmers is famous for, um, coining the term the hard problem to, 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, and consciousness is fundamentally a subjective, first-person experience. So how does that, those tools reach in and say any-anything of value about consciousness? So he said, you know, there are easy problems of consciousness we can figure out, like perception, um, emotion, things like that, but, but there is this hard problem. How do you get from matter to mind? And, uh, he won the bet. [laughs]

27. JRJoe Rogan5:50

    Hmm.

28. MPMichael Pollan5:50

    There was a ceremony I went to a couple years ago at, uh, NYU, and, uh, uh, Koch pre-presented Chalmers with a case of very fine, uh, Madeira wine.And, uh, and renewed the bet. He said, "All right, in another 25 years." [laughs]

29. JRJoe Rogan6:06

    [laughs] That's optimistic.

30. MPMichael Pollan6:07

    Yeah.

Episode duration: 2:23:58