Music, Consciousness and the Power of Connection

19:30Kara Swisher:Right. Absolutely. Is there any one of them that you think is in doing these studies the most promising from your perspective? MDMA and psilocybin are sort of the compounds. Although MDMA is not classically considered psychedelic, it's often thought of in that same conversation. And both of them, I think, have the most evidence kind of behind them within a clinical sort of biomedical context. But there's also a lot of, I think, interest in LSD, Ibogaine, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT. I think psilocybin and MDMA are the ones that sort of have the most clinical evidence behind them currently. Beyond recreational use in terms of...

20:05Kara Swisher:Yes. In the lab. And so, yes. Yeah, within a research clinical context. Those are going to continue. Well, I think that's another fear, right, is that as these become more in vogue clinically and endorsed more from a research and clinical perspective is that it opens up then a more permissive environment for recreational use where the harm and the risk is a lot higher than in a clinical setting. Well, it's already, that ship has sailed, I think, on lots of levels. I used to live near Berkeley. It's sailed a long time ago. So getting back to sound and music, when you look at the American medical system, music is not a part of it, aside from your lab.

20:40Kara Swisher:I don't think I've ever heard music except bad elevator music at a doctor's office. But where does it fit in and where should it be fitting in? I think music has often just been seen as art, as entertainment. Now, when we look back in history, even in the early Greeks, Hippocrates and Pythagoras, they were already thinking about music as a way of shifting nervous system activity and as an early form of medicine. When we look at traditional healing systems across the globe, music is an integral part of it. But in our westernization, art and entertainment became something separate from science and healing.

21:20in our education systems is very scattered. There's no core curriculum that's taught widely around medical schools. It's certainly not something that I learned about in medical school or residency. So I think that lack of training also, when physicians start to practice, they don't have any models. They don't really know what the evidence is for different kinds of musical engagements. And so a lot of the work we're doing with our colleagues is to ask, How do we take the evidence that's there and begin to teach medical students, teach residents the evidence and the model so that when they are practicing clinicians, they understand how to integrate these things.

21:56And as there's more and more clinical trials and more and more evidence, I think it will have to become more and more mainstream. And there's a huge arts and health movement to support that.

22:05Kara Swisher:So one of the things the series is examining is what stands in the way of getting better science to more people rather than a small select group of people. And I can't imagine there's a CMS billing code for playing harmonious chord progressions. What would it take to make this a bigger part of the system? Yeah. So I think you touched on one of the things right there up front, which is like how does this fit into our payer system? How are physicians reimbursed? Because that's all that matters, you know, how we get paid. But anyway, that is all that matters. I have doctor relatives. This is their number one complaint is the CMS billing system.

22:42Yeah, and I think, you know, at the end of the day, hospitals are set up as businesses for most of them. And so there's a bottom line. There are these things that have to be part of the consideration. So I think that's part of it is payer systems and the kind of evidence that they're looking for and how can we provide that for them. I think one of the things I mentioned before about training systems, how are we getting this evidence and information to the people who are actually going to be on the front lines and have to implement it? then patients how do patients understand what music is doing and why it's not just an entertainment or intuition but that there's a real biology there you know and so we try to actually work across all these different domains one working with policymakers working with payers to present the evidence and to understand what kind of evidence they need to adopt and show how it can lead to cost savings we do training and curricula for development for medical students and residents so that they can learn.

23:39And then we think about how do we get the information to the community because they're not going to come read my paper, as proud as I am of having published it.

23:46Kara Swisher:How is it received when you do that? I mean, obviously the first thing a doctor is going to go, oh, that's ridiculous, right? Like, I'll just hand you the pill. So, no, actually surprisingly what I've found is that most of my colleagues are also intuitively aware of this because they've had their own personal experiences with music. And many of them are actually musicians. And so when I come to them, I start talking to them. Yes, they are. A lot of doctors are. A lot, yeah. So when I start talking to them about music, there's something intuitively that resonates with them. What's been missing is the physiology, the biology, and really understanding that there's a medical biology that we can tap into that music is a powerful modulator of.

24:24And so it actually resonates very well with physicians when they see the evidence for this kind of work because it maps onto the experiences they've already had. They've already talked to patients who they know use music to help them. And same thing when I talk to people in the community, they already want more arts. They don't want to go to the typical clinical setting in many cases. And they would love to see arts integrated systems. They would love to understand how they could access psychedelic assisted therapy in the community. And so I think all of these things are actually resonating very strongly with both people in the community as well as with the physicians that I interact with.

25:01Kara Swisher:Yeah, it's interesting. In some ways, in reductive science, the kind of science that breaks complex things into simpler problems has struggled to explain how the brain works. I don't know if you necessarily agree with that. How do you see your work fitting in to that problem? Yeah, so I will say that, you know, I was trained within the system. So I honor the value of being reductionist and what it can teach us. I mean, we've learned a lot of cool things about how the brain works and how the human brain functions through that. And it's clear that within that framework, we're missing some vital pieces of information, which is what has been, I think, one of the challenges in translating.

25:38And so I think understanding how to study things in more complex, naturalistic environments is adding on to this body of work that we've had all along. Understanding how the brain is functioning differently in social context, real life social context versus the kind of isolated experiments that we've had in the past is now adding on to this body of literature. And we hope giving us the information that can help us take the next step to actually be able to make progress on the mental health crisis and the loneliness epidemic and the polarization crisis.

26:09Kara Swisher:So the last question for you, it's singing as part of it because it's listening. Is that something you're studying at the same time? Absolutely. So this brings up the importance between passive and active music. And what we found is that, and what has been found in the literature before, is that active music tends to be the most powerful way of modulating the system. Singing is a really strong form of active music because not only is it, you know, there's some motor component, but there's also the actual vibrational quality of the singing. And there's a sensory motor entrainment of listening and producing at the same time.

26:46We've also done active music with drum circles. and playing the drums can also have a very powerful effect.

26:54Kara Swisher:In making music itself. Yep, making music. Playing or drums. Anyway, this has been really fascinating, AZA. I really appreciate it. Your work is really interesting, and I hope more people start to pay attention to it going forward. Yeah, thank you for having me on, and I always appreciate the opportunity to talk about this important topic.

27:17Kara Swisher:we'll be back in a minute

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28:08Kara Swisher:I'm very excited, actually. I have a lot of these things like the Oura Ring and an Apple Watch and things like that. And it's actually something used in other countries. And so far, I just installed it. It was super easy to put on. Now I'm really eager to find out how healthy I am and figure out ways I can make changes for my health based on the information I learned. So learn more at KohlerHealth.com and use the code CARA1YEAR for a free annual membership to the Kohler Health app when you purchase Dakota.

28:40Kara Swisher:When we talk about connection in health and wellness, we're often talking about connections to other people, but feeling connected to the broader world around us is part of it too. And my next guest has gone deep into that part of it with a study of consciousness and what it means to be conscious. Michael Pollan is a science journalist who's written many bestsellers about food, about psychedelics, and so many topics. He's a brilliant guy. I've known him for years. I have so much regard for him as a journalist, a thinker. He's a beautiful writer. He's very funny. There's nothing he doesn't do beautifully.

29:13Kara Swisher:And he's never high-handed about it. As you'll see, he's a terrific person. And he really puts his finger on important ideas right as they're about to take off into the zeitgeist. And I feel like he's from the future. He comes back and writes about what's about to happen. And his most recent work is A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness, published earlier this year. He has some great observations about the mind and what it means for it to be healthy. And he's got a lot to say about how we should think about sentience and AI, which is something I'm excited to talk to him about. Michael, thank you for being on On.

29:45Pleasure to be here.

29:46Kara Swisher:This may be a strange place to start, maybe, but I want to open with the question about psychedelics and this new book about consciousness, which we talked about in our previous interview, your previous book. You began with a story about having taken mushrooms and becoming convinced the flowers in your garden were sentient. Tell us the story. Explain how it fits into your exploration of consciousness. And then I'd love your definition of consciousness. Sure. This book was inspired by my psychedelic, my research trips that I took for How to Change Your Mind a few years ago. And two things happened.

30:18One was this powerful conviction that the plants in my garden were conscious. They were returning my gaze. They had agency.

30:26Kara Swisher:They had a point of view. and then there was a more general thing that happens i think to most people who take psychedelics which suddenly you defamiliarized consciousness you're you're aware of it it's not as transparent as it usually is right um i describe it as uh smudging the windshield uh through which we perceive reality and suddenly you realize shit there's a windshield uh which wasn't really clear to you before that. And so that got me interested and set me down this path of like, what do we know about consciousness? And specifically, I did look at this plant question, trying to test that insight.

31:05I mean, because the value of psychedelic insights is really up for grabs. I mean, you could dismiss them as drug experiences. Or you could say they're coming out of your subconscious or some other place, or maybe they're true. And William James wrote about mystical experience, and he said, we can't actually judge for sure whether they're true or not, these encounters with the divine or whatever. So what we have to do is see if the insight is useful, and then test it against other ways of knowing. And that's essentially what I did. I went down this deep rabbit hole. Down the path from this one experience.

31:39Kara Swisher:And sentient, you were talking about human-like, correct more than well yeah i i make a distinction between sentience and consciousness that i think is really important sentience is a more basic form of consciousness it's it's merely awareness of your environment an ability to sense changes good or bad and respond intelligently to them a lot people yeah this may apply to all living things i mean this may be true for single cell creatures. You know, bacteria have chemotaxis. They recognize good and bad molecules and can gravitate toward the food ones and away from the toxin ones. But I think plants have it, have this quality.

32:21It doesn't include all these bells and whistles that human consciousness has. Self-awareness, the fact that we're not just aware, we're aware, we're aware. um a sense of self uh as this continuous you know presence through our lives um so and in terms of definitions very simply a conscious experience um if you're having experience you are conscious um you could add to that more elaborate elements like in having a sense of interiority um but i think conscious experience is good enough. A very common one in the field, both among the scientists and the philosophers is Thomas Nagel, the NYU philosopher in the 70s, wrote a wonderful essay called, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

33:11And he basically said, if we can imagine it's like anything to be a bat, a creature that navigates the world through sonar rather than light, then that creature is conscious, even if we can't exactly say what it's like.

33:24Kara Swisher:Or they can't articulate. Or they can't, yeah. But you don't need reportability for that. So your toaster is, it's very hard to imagine it having experience that it's anything like to be your toaster. We've been in this interesting process of kind of democratizing consciousness. It was only a few years ago that we kind of admitted to ourselves that other primates are conscious. Right. And now we're saying that cephalopods are conscious and cetaceans are conscious and basically all vertebrates we think now are conscious. Did plants have consciousness? Did you ever come to the conclusion? Yeah, I decided they didn't have consciousness as we understand it, but they did have sentience.

34:05They were sentient beings. We used to think that simple creatures like plants, not that they're so simple, operated on instinct alone. And, you know, were pre-programmed to deal with what they had to deal with. But I think the understanding in biology now is that the environment is so changeable that you couldn't fully program any creature to deal with every possible contingency.

34:34Kara Swisher:Including trees, right? Including trees, yeah. They're all dealing with a shifting landscape. And so what evolution comes up with are these cognitive beings that can solve novel problems. And that, again, may apply to everything that is alive. So that it's not just philosophical, it's scientific. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of research going on around plant intelligence and consciousness, and I kind of follow that. So let's make it a bit more concrete. Give me some specific examples and have you try to describe what scientists believe is happening in our minds, in our consciousness during these moments.

35:12We really don't know. You know, the quest to understand consciousness, the modern quest, scientific, it doesn't really start until 1990 or so, 1989. It's remarkably new. And it was considered kind of a forbidden topic in science. Because? It would ruin your career. It was too vague. The problems were ill-defined. But then Francis Crick, who had, of course, co-won the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA and how heredity worked, thought for his next trick he was going to solve consciousness. And the way he approached it is the way suggested by your question, which is, let's find the neural structures, the specific neurons or networks that generate subjective experience.

35:59experience. And he realized pretty quickly that even if you found those, and we have not found those, it wouldn't tell you what you want to know, which is how do you get from matter, you know, these three pounds of tofu-like substance between our ears, to mind? How do you cross that gap? There's something like 22 fully fledged out theories of consciousness, which, you know, tells you the field is flailing. Right.

36:30Kara Swisher:Is there one that compels you more? I would say yes. There's a line of theoretical analysis with some good empirical backing that I find persuasive. It doesn't quite get you to a full theory of consciousness, but it gets you closer than we've been. And that is the idea that consciousness begins with feelings generated in the body. And this is a real departure from the assumption that it was a cortical process. You know, the cortex is the most recent, most human, most advanced, it's logic, decision-making, abstract thought, surely consciousness comes from there. But the thinking now, and this is research begun by Antonio Damasio, the neurologist, but picked up more recently by Mark Soames, is that the inaugural act of consciousness are feelings like hunger, thirst, cold, itch.

37:27Yeah. And that the body essentially is speaking to the mind about falling out of homeostasis. And so consciousness begins where these, they're called interoceptive signals enter the brain, which is at the upper brainstem. And if that's where consciousness begins, that argues for lots of animals being conscious because they have brainstems. So it begins with feeling and these homeostatic feelings, and then the cortex gets involved. So you feel hunger, and then the cortex helps you imagine some counterfactuals of how you might satisfy that desire. So when they talk about feelings as the beginning of consciousness, people like Damasio said, these feelings are spontaneously conscious.

38:18But that's not really an explanation. That's just kind of an assertion. So where they get stuck is like, okay, there's a feeling, but who's feeling it?

38:27Kara Swisher:How does it end up into an action, for example? Like when you follow a stream of thought to some are unexpected. We don't know what's happening there, correct? Yeah. Getting to the contents of consciousness, we're kind of lost. There's some interesting work going on, but it's very hard to understand what's going on. And also how a thought passes from our unconscious to our consciousness. I mean, most of what the brain does is not conscious, right? It's a great automatic machine. It's monitoring your body, all your vitals, keeping them in the right range. It's picking up lots of sensory information without you being aware of it and making decisions without us knowing it.

39:08So the interesting question is, why should any of it be conscious? Why aren't we zombies? Why don't we just kind of automate it all? And the reason goes back to what I was saying about sentience is that, you know, in a world that's incredibly complex and changing all the time, you couldn't program all the appropriate responses.

39:26Kara Swisher:Now, for this book, you engage in all manner of strange experiments, and I've done the same with reporting about aging and longevity. So have you, actually. Some of them are hokum that I did, but in a way, it's a way to learn about it and understand it and why people are doing these things. I want you to describe one of these experiments you ran on yourself where you needed to record your own thoughts a certain number of times a day. Explain how it worked and what you learned with that. So I was interested in the contents of consciousness as well as the form and how it gets generated. And I found this guy, this psychologist at the University of Las Vegas named Russell Hurlburt.

40:01And he has been spending the last 50 years doing what he calls experience sampling. And you wear a beeper and you've got a little earpiece and it's a little box you keep in your pocket or on your belt. And at random times of the day, it sends a very sharp beep into your ear. And you're supposed to write down what you're thinking at that moment. What is the thought you're having? And then you collect about five or six of these over the course of the day. And it's a very weird experience wearing this thing because you're hyper self-conscious. It's like, what if it goes off now? What am I thinking?

40:38Kara Swisher:You're thinking about it going off, right? Yeah, constantly. So, I mean, there's a problem right there. So then you have this long Zoom session with him where he runs through the beeps and asks you questions. And so you'll say, there was one beep I had where I was seasoning the filet of salmon and walking into the fridge and I'd put the salt on it. And at the moment the beep went off, I was thinking to myself, shit, pepper. I forgot to put the pepper on. So I was taking it back. And so that seemed really clear cut. It was a verbal thought. And this is what it was. And this is when it happened.

41:14And he said, well, did you hear that pepper or did you speak that pepper? So the voice in our heads, are we identified with it or is it talking to us? I had no idea. And so I also had a lot of trouble disaggregating a thought from the context, from what just happened before, from the smells when I'm standing in the bakery, you know, buying a coffee. So I said, so what have you learned after 50 years?

41:43Kara Swisher:50 years, yeah. Yeah. Basically, he said, well, we don't know that much about what we're thinking. We assume we're all verbal thinkers, that our minds, our consciousness is made of words. But it turns out that some people, many people, their consciousness is more visual when they're thinking. And other people have kind of unsymbolized thought. And even among the verbal people. Some people think in fully formed words and sentences, and some people think in these kind of wisps of language. So it's interesting. We have different styles of thinking. And we have this word called thinking, and we think it describes the same phenomenon in all of us.

42:27But in fact, it's an umbrella term. And what thinking means to you may not be what it means to me.

42:35Kara Swisher:Yeah. Now, let me ask you something else. Psychologists who came up with this descriptive experience sampling has been doing it he said for decades do you have a sense that your experience is typical of other people who've done it or not you know a journalist who had read the book just did it did it with him um and he had similar experiences i think i was particularly bad at um separating out one thought from another they all kind of mushed together in my head In the end, Russell concluded, and this was kind of funny, that I was part of a small group of people that didn't have much internal thought at all.

43:17And that my interiority was sparsely furnished.

43:20Kara Swisher:Oh, wow. That's like what? You know, it was ridiculous, though. It's like what, in a Kia living room or something? A Norwegian living room? Norwegian wood. Yeah. One more experience I wanted to ask you about being fully, freshly present to the universe, as you put it, at a retreat where you lived in a rudimentary cave and meditated deeply. Describe that and how it helped you come to some sort of understanding of consciousness, given how empty your mind is, according to this psychologist. Well, I undergo a kind of shift in the course of my exploration of consciousness. For most of it, I approached it like the classic Western male thinker.

43:59We've got a problem. What's the solution? And, you know, we have powerful abilities to focus, right? What's called spotlight consciousness, you know, where we wear blinders and we rule out lots of things and we narrow the aperture in a way that is very good for getting things done and solving problems, but it also eliminates a lot of peripheral vision and things like that. and I realized I had gotten so focused on like what's the solution to this problem of how consciousness comes about that I was not as conscious as I could be that I'd given up a lot and that I could think of consciousness as a problem to be solved or I could think of it as a practice that we have this incredible gift which is this private space in our heads that no one can tell us what to think that we have total mental freedom to think whatever we want sure But we're not using it.

44:53And so that's what grew out of all this meditation I did in the cave and looking at the stars and just realizing, okay, you know, maybe we'll solve this problem of consciousness at some point. But in the meantime, we're really squandering it. And we should take it back. We need to kind of reclaim the space of interior. It's really hard. Technology is, I mean, you know, the algorithms are hacking our attention.

45:22Kara Swisher:The life of the mind is much harder to have. Although I have to say it was before. I went on an Outward Bound once where you go on those journeys by yourself. You know, you're sitting in the woods. And I looked up at the beautiful stars and I was sitting there. And all I could think of was I would like some graham crackers. and I literally was like, what is wrong with you? I was hoping for deep thoughts and instead it was like, my graham crackers would taste delicious right now and I could not get the thought out of my head. We'll be back in a minute.

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47:12Kara Swisher:So let's move into artificial intelligence and how it fits in here. So the idea of artificial intelligence and whether it can have a consciousness is all through the book, which is why I loved it. In Silicon Valley, it's widely accepted. The answer is yes, AI can and maybe will achieve consciousness. It's their artificial general intelligence. um you don't think so and i don't think so and many smart people also don't think so because it's a reflection of our thoughts all of all it has but can it make new ones it's always based on our thoughts no matter how they slice it they never came up with it originally itself so talk a little bit about this so you you know if you ask a um a chat bot are you conscious they've been told to say they're not.

47:53But you can jailbreak that fairly easily and start a conversation and then back into the subject of consciousness. And suddenly it'll tell you it has feelings. And many people are fooled by this. We know this. People get into these deep emotional relationships. It's no wonder that we can be fooled by this because the whole human conversation about consciousness and feelings is part of the training data set. So it knows how to talk the talk. It would be very interesting, and Susan Schneider has proposed this, build an AI from the bottom up and exclude from its training set all mention of consciousness, all feelings, no novels, no poetry.

48:41Kara Swisher:Right, because the minute you get Shakespeare in there, you get violence, right yeah and then try to have a conversation about consciousness with it and and my guess is it would not learn how to talk in a way that sounds conscious to us you know the the nobody has this problem with uh what is it alpha fold right thinking it's conscious it's just a machine and what it knows is proteins that's all it knows so there's a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst named mark psalms from south africa who spent some time with he's trying to build feelings into an AI agent. Explain what that even means and what you made of it.

49:15He has a project to make a conscious AI, and he let me sort of be a fly on the wall for a while. And it's essentially a game, and there's an avatar in it. And he believes feelings arise when you have conflicting desires or incommensurate desires. So you're hungry and tired. what are you going to privilege? What are you going to deal with first? So he's trying to subject this avatar to these desires that can't be easily averaged or reconciled. And he thinks at that point it will generate a feeling. I mean, I think it's crazy. If it claims to have a feeling, it's not going to be a real feeling. I mean, a feeling is rooted in the flesh.

50:02You have feelings because you're vulnerable. You have feelings because you can suffer and feel pain. And I think our mortality is tied to our feelings. Absolutely. I mean, think about if you knew you were immortal, you would just ignore all sorts of feelings in your body. They wouldn't matter.

50:20Kara Swisher:Especially if you couldn't be killed or hurt. You have to add on extra things, right? Or you'd never be hungry. If you removed all that stuff, for sure. You might still have pain, but I don't know that you'd have suffering because you know that, oh, whatever, this is just noise. I'm going to live forever. So why would a machine have feelings? Why would it need to have feelings? They are, for all intents and purposes, immortal. Yeah, they're not a meat sack, as Elon Musk's favorite sci-fi show did. We don't have meat holes or meat tubes, which are throats and stuff like that. So why is there this obsession with the idea of consciousness in machines?

50:58Well, I don't know because there's no money in it that I can see. I mean, you know, there's a lot of money in making machines intelligent. And intelligence, the other issue here is intelligence and consciousness have an orthogonal relationship. That's correct, yeah. We all know people who are conscious without being particularly intelligent. And it isn't automatic that as these machines get more intelligent, they will get more conscious. maybe it would happen but it's not it's not implicit in the in intelligence so mimicry is

51:32Kara Swisher:what you're talking about and i think daria modi was i think anthropic just there's a lot of feelings happening and i'm like well they read shakespeare of course they have feelings well exactly i mean but his comments are very interesting i mean he he seems sincerely to believe that um claude is um anxious and uh he's given it the right to end human conversations that make it uncomfortable. So, you know, they do say spooky things. You know, my theory, I have this strange theory of why these men think this, because they can't have children. They can't physically make children. This is their children.

52:10Kara Swisher:And I think everyone understands, even if you're a misogynist, childbearing is miraculous, right? It really truly is. It's astonishing even to me, and I had a kid like that. But I think they can't make children, and this is their version of it. So it has to have a consciousness. Yeah, that's very interesting. It's just mimicry. It's just Pinocchio and not the boy. Right. Now, there's an interesting point Psalms raised, and you explored in the book about the ethics of how humans would interact if AI did indeed have feelings. Yeah. If it had real feelings, there would be moral questions. I mean, if a machine could suffer, we would have introduced into the world a lot more suffering.

52:54And the question of do we then owe them moral consideration? I think by normal human moral standards, the answer would probably be yes. Yes. But, you know, when I read all this concern, especially in Silicon Valley about, you know, how are we going to deal with the morality of, you know, of these suffering beings we're creating? There's so many humans we have an extended moral consideration to. Silicon Valley prefers to deal with the abstract future than the present, right? What's right here, right? There's an escapism to it.

53:29Kara Swisher:Well, think about how they behave. Yeah, the bunkers. Peter Thiel just moved to Argentina. Yeah, I just saw that. Or the obsession with interplanetary travel. See, I see it all about transcendence of the mortal flesh. This idea that, you know, if you're rich enough, you can buy anything. It seems unfair that you have to die. You should be able to buy your way out of that one. It's at the heart of my thing. So talk a little bit about where this is going then. And if there's this idea that they are going to have feelings, all of them think it does. They think they have to. I mean, there are two issues.

54:07One is whether they're really going to have feelings and be conscious. And the other is whether that matters because we're going to believe they do. I think it was a really fateful decision, and I don't know who made it, to have chatbots speak to us using the first person and, you know, in our language. I mean, we were bound to anthropomorphize them at that point. That was, you know, in the history of this whole story, that's going to be a very big decision. It didn't have to be that way.

54:37Kara Swisher:Right. And maybe that began with Siri. I don't know when that began. Or robot, you know, science fiction robots. Well, there is a lot in science fiction. No, tons, tons. What I say in the book is we're arriving at what I call a Copernican moment. In the same way that Nicholas Copernicus, when he demonstrated that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around, it was a shock to our species and our sense of centrality. And it caused this kind of redefinition of what it means to be human. I think we're approaching a cliff where we're going to have to figure out what does it mean to be human?

55:12What is special about us that these machines can't do and these animals can't do? And also, whose team are we on? Are we more like the machines that speak our language and we can talk to? Or are we more like the animals that go through a life like ours of being young and growing old and suffering and dying, even though we can't talk to them? So who are we?

55:38Kara Swisher:Right, where do we fit? And I think that's the big question being raised. And I think it's very interesting. It's happening in both realms, this idea that consciousness may be more universal in the natural world. And then we have these machines making claims to be conscious also. I don't know how it'll come out. We'll go with the machines. I'm afraid you're right. I want to bring this back to the main idea of the series, which is about longevity, lifespan, healthspan, which you just touched on. It seems this dream of tech billionaires that they can live forever with the help of AI and machines.

56:10Kara Swisher:Does that idea even hold water? Talk a little bit about the idea of wanting to get the soul of the machine. Yeah, it's the old idea of downloading your consciousness into a computer, and that's the immortality you have. The problem with that idea is it implies you can separate consciousness from the body when we're learning just the opposite, that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon. Right. It all goes back to this idea that brains are computers. And this metaphor is very powerful in our culture, but it doesn't bear close scrutiny at all. So in computers, you have a very sharp distinction between hardware and software.

56:54And the thinking is that consciousness is like software and silicon is like hardware. or we have these meat computers, as they like to call them. But in fact, in brains, you cannot disentangle the two. Every memory is both hardware and software. You know, everything that happens to you physically changes the substance of your brain. Your brain is not interchangeable with mine because you've had different experiences. And so the whole premise is that you could take consciousness, this pure, I don't know, digital cloud thing, and put it somewhere else. But consciousness doesn't exist apart from brains and bodies.

57:37So I think it's a dream of immortality. It's a dream of transcendence. And it's been fed by science fiction for a very long time.

57:48Kara Swisher:Did you find any examples that would change your mind about that? No, I haven't yet. I mean, you know, we hear about these biomorphic computers that will actually have some living stuff in them. You know, these things may become conscious, but it's hard to say. I mean, without a really working theory of consciousness that, you know, has some support, it's going to be hard to tell in that case, too. What about the brain being mapped, the idea? because that is, to me, if I was a scientist, that's all I would study. Yeah, and there's a lot of effort to do it. It's so hard. So, you know, we liken neurons to transistors, right?

58:26Because they're on or off. But again, we're oversimplifying because transistors are also affected by chemicals, how hard, you know, how intensely they fire. I mean, you know, hormones, neurotransmitters, drugs, all affect what they do. They're also affected by waves. So they're very analog, actually. even though they have this digital component. And also a single cortical neuron can be connected to 10 ,000 other neurons. I mean, the level of interconnectedness is so massive and so beyond anything we can imagine that those maps, which will be incredibly important when we get them down, but we're a long way.

59:10Kara Swisher:So this is the last question. You've written a lot of zeitgeist stuff before they were that way. And you were delving into the food with the omnivore's dilemma, which by the way, I recently reread it. So holds up back in 2006. I wish it didn't hold up. Yeah, but it does. And so does eat food, not too much, mostly plants. And of course, psychedelics, you were there early in how to change your mind. You've just written about consciousness. What do you think the next thing that interests you is in this way? Because it's all around the body in some fashion. Yeah. I mean, the thing I've been thinking about since publishing this book, and this comes out of my conversations with readers on book tour, is this idea we discussed earlier, which is the fact that the sense that our consciousness is being polluted, and that between Trump, who commands so much of our attention for so long, in an unprecedented way.

1:00:06When have we let someone do that for 11 years? And then you have social media, obviously, and the problem of our attention. And now you have people forming these powerful emotional relationships with chatbots. So I think that people feel that their heads are just full of crap and they want to reclaim that space. And so how do you do that exactly? Obviously, taking breaks from technology is one way getting out in nature is another way i think psychedelics is another way i mean you're with your thoughts um and you're not with some algorithms thoughts and uh it's your own algorithm um so i i think that that's a nice way of looking at it to the extent that there's a movement that implicit in all this it's that it's like reclaiming this

1:00:56Kara Swisher:space of interiority instead of changing your mind reclaiming your mind it's absolutely true Anyway, thank you so much, Michael. My pleasure, Cara. Anytime.

1:01:08Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Tracy Hunt, Emma McNamara, and Dave Shaw. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Our engineers are Jim Mackle and Steve Bone. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you have a richly furnished mental interior. If not, your mind looks like a college dorm. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday.

1:01:48Kara Swisher:Thanks to Kohler Health for their support. We focus a lot on what we put in our bodies, but not nearly as much on what comes out. You get my point. Kohler Health is changing that with its Dakota tracker. which turns your everyday bathroom habits into meaningful insights about your gut health, hydration, and even presence of blood without any manual logging. Over time, Kohler Health helps you build your baseline so you know what's normal for you and you can take action when something changes. Learn more at KohlerHealth.com and use the code CARA1YEAR for a free annual membership on the Kohler Health app when you purchase Dakota.