The More You Study Consciousness, the Weirder It Gets
About this episode
Pollan spent five years reporting 'A World Appears' on the science and philosophy of consciousness, and the episode follows his tour of the borderlands of the mind. The conversation moves from a beeper experiment revealing the poverty of his own inner life, to William James and the 'fringe' of thought, to the radical idea from plant neurobiology that plants may have a form of sentience — anesthetics put Mimosa pudica to sleep — and from there to idealism, panpsychism, and the claim that the brain might receive consciousness rather than generate it. Pollan and Klein debate what consciousness is for — Mark Solms's 'felt uncertainty,' the social brain, the lantern-versus-spotlight models of attention — and close on the politics of attention: the sense that phones, algorithms, and capitalism have narrowed human consciousness, and that defending it requires a kind of hygiene — meditation, boredom, and time in nature.