Michael Pollan Returns

Episode overview

Michael Pollan (A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness) is a science and environmental journalist. Michael returns to the Armchair Expert to discuss why choosing surrender is liberating in both psychedelics and life, what the “hard problem” of consciousness is and how we get to it, and how sentience serves homeostasis in living beings. Michael and Dax talk about asking what the world would be like without consciousness, the remarkable fact that plants can see, hear, and fight, and experimental evidence via the ginger test that disgust originates in the gut. Michael explains the qualitative redness of red, that there’s so much more going on in consciousness besides computation, and what strange places to visit our minds are.

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Short transcript highlights

These brief excerpts are navigation aids selected from different points in the transcript.

1. 0:00How are you? Welcome. Thank you. Happy to have you. Good sweater you have on. Thank you.
2. 48:35it. So, you fall out of homeostatic balance and you have a feeling, you're hungry, you're cold, whatever it is. Uh,
3. 1:39:08People are going to be talking about this one for sure. Thank you guys. Thank you.