#166 Are Plants Conscious? - Michael Pollan

30:28And I think one thing that people need to understand about that is that everything, everything is filtered through consciousness. That means that your reductive attempts to contain consciousness in some kind of materialistic theory, say, is happening in your consciousness. and that sounds like an obvious and trivial thing to say but it suddenly struck me when i was reading a book i was reading merlin sheldrake's book about mushrooms and he was talking about these dogs it's brilliant and he's talking about these dogs that can smell uh can can smell fungi like really well and i thought that's kind of interesting and i started thinking about smell and then i realized something if i asked somebody what smell was like what's happening when you smell something they might say oh well what's really happening there the thing that smells like smell is really like little microscopic particles which sort of float through the air and attach to like the nose follicle or whatever.

31:32And then it sort of travels up and blah, blah, blah. And we would say, okay, that is an explanation as to what the smell in fact is. But really, you've kind of actually just told me what it looks like, right? If I took a microscope and I could observe the little sort of molecules in the air that were attaching to my nose, I would see a particular phenomenon. And I suddenly realized it seems to me that all we're actually doing in apparently sort of reducing the qualia of smell to like atoms binding to the nose is we've just actually described what something smells like in terms of what it looks like.

32:11And that is as reductive, which is to say not at all, as if somebody were to see something, to see some molecules attaching to someone's nose and said, what's going on there? What explains what I'm seeing? And I said, oh, that's just what you smell. It's like, we're not actually explaining anything. We're just describing one experience in terms of another kind of experience, which is, in this case, something like vision. And I just suddenly realized, I was like, can we explain anything except in reference to conscious experiences? And maybe we can't. And if we can't, what are we trying to do explaining consciousness itself?

32:49Like, do you think, do you share my pessimism about the project of defining and conceptualizing consciousness in this way because of the fact that we can't step outside of it? Or do you think there might be like a way around this problem? This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started.

33:28See paypal.com slash protection terms. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I do think that it's important to remember that something as seemingly objective as the scientific method is also a product of consciousness, right? Science itself is a collective exercise of consciousness. All the tools we use, the questions we pose, these are all products of consciousness. We're not stepping outside. And I think that really complicates the project of understanding it or reducing consciousness to something more elemental. There may not be anything more elemental. So, you know, I was on this journey for five years, and a lot of the journey was through science.

34:16But at a certain point, I realized that science had these limitations. And one was its failure to find a way to incorporate phenomenology in a meaningful way. Phenomenology being fancy philosopher word for lived experience. And that is central to consciousness. The other interesting, so most of the efforts to understand consciousness are within this physicalist or materialist paradigm that surely it can be explained like so much else has been explained in terms of matter and energy. We just don't know how. Surely there's some organization of neurons that somehow consciousness emerges from. This word emergence is, you keep coming across it, but nobody can quite define that.

35:10and tell you how it works. It's a hand wave. I've noticed, I've said that my audience will be familiar with this, but when trying to explain this to people, you might find this helpful. When people say the consciousness emerges, they never tell you what emergence is. They just give you another example of emergence. They'll say, oh, it just emerges like an image on a screen from a computer or like temperature from atoms vibrating. Or gas from water and water from ice. Yeah. I think that what they fail to recognize is that in cases of actual emergence, that is not just like structural changes that could actually be expected, like water into ice, but things like temperature.

35:55Yeah, you want to say actually an individual atom really isn't hot. It can't be because it requires this collection. Okay, but what is the thing that's interesting that has actually emerged? It's the sensation of heat. That's the thing that's emerged. The same thing with a computer on an image on a screen. Yeah, I could perfectly well explain that there are electromagnetic waves coming out of a screen explained in terms of the physics of the computer. But the thing you're interested in is that it's sort of come together to produce this image that isn't in the hard drive. Well, insofar as that arises in your consciousness when you look at it.

36:32In other words, if you actually listen carefully, and I promise you, I think this is true for every example of emergence, to explain why consciousness just emerges, they say, oh, it's just like how X, Y, and Z emerges. And they'll give you three examples of things which emerge in consciousness. You know what I mean? It just never actually answers the question. I agree with you that it's a bit of a buzz term that sounds a bit fancy. And so many people use it that you kind of assume it's got some legs on it. But I don't think it actually gets you very far. No, it doesn't. And, you know, one of the things I was so surprised to learn is that, You know, no one has figured out how any consciousness experience emerges from any kind of brain state.

37:14I mean, we know they're connected, right? If you damage the brain, you damage consciousness. If you take a psychedelic, you change consciousness. So we can assume that the brain is involved. But as a couple of people pointed out to me, the evidence would be the same if the brain generated consciousness as it would if the brain was a receiver of consciousness. Sure. And you have these filter or transmission theories of consciousness that it is something outside of us that our brains are like radio receivers or television sets bring in. And that seems like a really whacked idea, but it is susceptible.

37:58The same arguments could be made to support it. I think one of the stranger ideas too is, you know, consciousness is the only thing we know for sure. Everything we know is through consciousness. And yet we privilege matter, which we only know about through consciousness, that surely matters the thing. But matter, what we know about matter is all inference via consciousness. so it's very interesting that idealism the idea that consciousness comes first is not a more popular uh philosophical position um and i don't know why that is but i find it you know i mean i i've been brought up in this materialist paradigm metaphysical paradigm so it sounds totally weird to me that consciousness would come first but you can make a pretty good argument yeah i think that the reason it seems strange to people is because they're so used to this quest for explaining consciousness in terms of material, such that the scientific method has been so successful in explaining and describing so much that there's just this inbuilt optimism that it will one day explain this extra thing called consciousness.

39:22Now, of course, Philip Goff's contention in Galileo's era is that the reason why science has been successful is precisely because it has excluded any kind of first person aspect of the world. Everything can be described in maths, that is to say, it's the same for you and the same for me. There's this sort of non-existent third person perspective from which science is sort of done. And of course, that's really great. And it has allowed us to do all kinds of things and send rockets to the moon and the like. but that's the same very thing that will stop it from being able to talk about consciousness because that's what made it successful in the first place right so like i think the that's kind of been unrecognized and so the optimism just carries over but also like i say we're just used to it and i think one helpful way of breaking this like this is a little bit crude but i say to people like okay when someone says to me that if i just take some matter and i put it together in the right way, I will produce consciousness.

40:20That sounds as strange to me now as if you were to say to me, you know, I'm going to put some consciousness and thoughts together in the right order, and I'm going to make them really complex. I'm going to arrange them in the right way, and I'm going to produce some matter in my hand. You'd look at me like I'd lost my mind, you know, and you wouldn't be able to tell me what a mind is at the same time. I think it's the same thing in reverse, right? It's a bit crude. Like I say, there are holes to punch, but at least in terms of the intuition, we're just used to hearing that everything is reducible.

40:48But I think we maybe sort of jumped the gun a bit there. Yeah. I mean, Goff is right in that we've defined science in a certain way, and we've excluded consciousness for a long time from science. The story he tells, which I think is right, is that Galileo, you know, essentially drew this line between subjective, the realm of subjective qualitative experience, which he left to the church and the church called, it wasn't called consciousness then, it was called the soul. And then science is going to limit itself to these measurable, quantifiable, you know, objective qualities. And that's worked really well.

41:34But now science has wandered back into the province of the church, right, and is interested in consciousness, and it's really struggling. So maybe we just need more time. Maybe that is true. Maybe. But, you know, I think people assume that if you just know enough about neurons, then one day you will know enough about consciousness too. You'll know about the inner world as well. This is like what Francis Crick broadly thought, and it's the bet, the famous bet that's at the beginning of your book and whatnot. And it's this idea that, look, we're learning so much about neuronal activity. If we just learn more, then we will finally understand what it means to be anxious, for example.

42:15And again, it sounds a bit to me, although I understand that because, of course, we know that the two things are connected and possibly even in some sense the same thing, right? It just sounds about as strange to me as saying that if you are like emotionally in touch enough with your inner experience, if you just learn enough through introspection about the nature of anxiety and really, really get precise about what emotions are, that one day you will understand what a neuron is. And it just, it obviously doesn't work like that. There's some kind of bridge that can't be crossed in that direction.

42:49And I suspect it probably can't be crossed in the other direction too. But I don't know, that wasn't a question and that makes this not a very good interview. Do you agree with that? Do you think that there is kind of a chasm between the two? Because like I said a moment ago, they are connected, right? They're obviously, they have something to do with each other. They clearly have something to do with each other. And so you mentioned Francis Crick, and the modern science of consciousness began with his quest to reduce consciousness to a set of neurons. And he was looking for what was called the neural correlates of consciousness, along with Christoph Koch, who's an important character in my book.

43:31And it didn't take Koch long to realize, it was like two or three years into this quest, that even if they found the neural correlates of consciousness, which we really haven't found yet, it really wouldn't tell you what you want to know, which is how do you get from that, that say 30 Hertz brain oscillation or this group of neurons or this chemical in the brain, how do you get from there to what experience is and feels like? And that there still is that chasm. And that's what, you know, that's what David Chalmers means by the hard problem. How do you get from matter to mind. Even if you have the right matter and say, okay, it's definitely the brain or it's this part of the brain or it's this oscillation, it's not answering the question you really want answered.

44:26Yeah. And again, people will, I think people like to think in analogies. I find them really difficult, really, really useful to explain concepts. And I find that my mind often goes there. So when you said like, well, if we did understand all of the neural correlates, you know, wouldn't, we still wouldn't understand the sort of the production of consciousness. You might want to say, well, I don't know, because like, if I understand the way that a string, like the physics of the way that a string vibrates, then surely I'm going to understand what it means for there to be a major third, you know, triad in music and stuff like that.

45:03And I just want to remind people that if those kinds of examples are coming to mind, But the answer is, my response would be like, yes, insofar as you could understand how harmonics divide up in a way that people report as being pleasant. But the actual pleasantness of the major third, the sound, the experience of the major third is not something that you could reduce to music theory or to physics or something like that. And I think the same thing's going on here, even though the two are quite obviously connected. Related, yeah. Yeah. I realized earlier I was asking you about this negative language, and it reminded me of so-called apophatic language about God.

45:42So someone like Thomas Aquinas thinks that God is so unconceivable that we can't really say positive things about him. We have to say things like, he's not this, he's not material, he's not limited, he's all of these kinds of things. And you can kind of, even though you can't really say what God is in precise terms, you can learn a bit about what he is by saying what he's not. So we've agreed that it's difficult to define consciousness. We've agreed that we kind of know what it is. And we've agreed that there's something quite significantly different between what's going on with us and what's going on with plants.

46:17And yet, you want to suggest that plants have this thing called sentience, and there might be something weird going on. So the way I'd want to frame the question as precisely as possible is, what is the thing that plants don't have that we do have, in your view? In other words, what would I have to sort of switch off from your experience, in your estimation? To become more plant-like? To become more plant-like, yeah. What do you think is the difference? I think the key would be sticking my feet to the ground with superglue so I could never move again. And then evolving the tools I'd need to get through life.

46:56Sessile, I think, is the technical term for plants. I do think that's their existential predicament. They have to do everything without being able to move. And that is the reason why they got so good at biochemistry, right? They, you know, they defend themselves by producing chemicals, by producing toxins or hallucinogens, you know, things that screw up animal consciousness. They're much better at, you know, still, I mean, I think it's the majority of the pharmaceuticals we use have some kind of plant basis. And all that is about finding an alternative to mobility. It's not exactly consciousness, although what's interesting is that plants, among all the other, you know, kingdoms, I mean, produce the most psychoactive chemicals.

47:51um they whether or not they are conscious themselves they have the power to change our consciousness um you know whether you're talking about caffeine um you know which plants an amazing molecule that plants came up with that affects us and and and by the way also affects bees and makes them better pollinators um so they've learned how to manipulate us um and in a way the kind of consciousness we have wouldn't serve them in any way. You know, I think each animal, each creature has the kind of consciousness that suits their predicament. And, you know, one of the questions that I spent a lot of time grappling with is, so most of what's going on in your brain at any given time is not conscious, right?

48:41I mean, you know, when we talk about consciousness, we're dealing with the tip of an iceberg. Your brain is processing information all the time. It's monitoring your environment, monitoring your body. I mean, it's incredible how much it's doing. And you're aware of a little bit of all this activity. So the question I had is why be aware of any of it? How does that serve us? Why can't we just automate everything? um why aren't why aren't we zombies basically and it was carl friston who you know told the evolutionary story that i found most persuasive which was that um for creatures like us that are social at the deepest possible level i mean we depend on other people to survive to a much greater extent than other animals.

49:36We need to be able to read social situations. We need to be able to anticipate what the other is going to do and say. And there's so many variables in a complex human social situation that you couldn't possibly automate them. And so we need a space where we can entertain counterfactuals, have theory of mind, the idea that you can project yourself into the shoes of another person. And that's what consciousness is for. So I found that a pretty persuasive. I mean, like all evolutionary arguments, it's kind of a just so story, but that makes sense to me. And basically, if you think of that as like consciousness, arise, the kind of consciousness you have arises to solve the sort of existential problems you face as a species, um, consciousness is how we do sentience.

50:34Um, you know, the plant or the bacteria does sentience in, in, in one way, um, to serve its needs. And then we do it in a very different way. Um, so if you see sentience is the universal case, then consciousness is one of the, one of the ways to do it. And that's kind of where I came out on that question. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step.

51:19Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com slash protection terms. I find it interesting how when I asked you about the difference between sort of human and plant experience, you say like the inability to move is really the key thing with plants. Of course, plants can move in some sense, right? Like they can grow and they can grow in different directions and it seems like they intentionally, so to speak, which sometimes comes with scare quotes and sometimes doesn't in this kind of conversation, which I think tells you a lot about the person you're speaking to. They'll move in one way or they'll move in another and their route is on the ground.

52:04But clearly they are still able to react to their environment in a certain way. In other words, like when I asked you about the bike rusting, you said, well, the difference with a plant is that a plant does something in response. And so I want to say that leads me to kind of go, okay, so plants react to the stimulus, which maybe tells me there's something more going on. But then if someone wants to go crazy and say, well, what if their experience is just like ours? You say, well, slow down. One of the most important differences is that they can't move. You know what I mean? It feels like I'm sort of being tugged in two directions.

52:32It's like, well, yeah, but there's a question of react. Go ahead. What good would consciousness do them? I mean, it's the question that I guess I would ask. It's kind of anthropocentric of ours of us to say that hey everybody wants consciousness you know it's it's it's such a it's so cool um but yeah sure i think for lots of creatures it would just be an impediment and they'd need all these neurons presumably or maybe not maybe maybe that's a bit like the plants being like well surely surely everyone wants a bit of soil you know surely humans would love being like having their feet in soil all day it's like actually roots man roots are great so but clearly it would do something right like you would you would you you said like for us i mean you said earlier about like touching a hot stove or something you know and actually it's interesting that happens like pre-cognitively most times so maybe better is like uh you know the the the temperature is too hot so i get up and i i go and turn it down to to to reinitiate homostasis inside of my body or whatever um a plant will like realize that the sun is over there and it needs those nutrients and i think you can tell an evolutionary story that says well if a plant were to have some kind of like experience or maybe some kind of some kind of pain or some kind of um like undesired experience associated with not getting the sun, that would motivate it to move.

54:03Now, somebody might then say, but hold on, you can still program, so to speak, a plant to do that without the interiority. And I would say, yeah, but you could do that for a human as well. And so if you think that that's a good reason to evolutionarily explain sentience of the kind that comes along with pain and pleasure in humans that sort of motivates particular actions, gets me to go over there or go over here, wouldn't that make a plant so much more efficacious in chasing the sun or indeed avoiding predators? Because one of the things I learned from your book is that if you put a plant in a competitive environment, it will compete with other plants for nutrients.

54:39But if you put one of its relatives in the soil, it will recognize that it's not, and it will start sharing. It's incredible. And I think surely all of this kind of behavior would be bolstered if these plants were aware of what's going on and motivated to act in particular ways. Well, I think they are aware. I mean, I think awareness and consciousness are a little bit different. Um, I don't know exactly how I would define it, but awareness is a, is a simpler form. I mean, it is to be conscious of, I guess. Um, but awareness, you know, you're the, the, I don't know what, I don't know what extra, you know, X factor consciousness would add to the life of a plant.

55:22Uh, I mean, reportability, as the philosophers say, we could learn. It could write a book about being a plant. That would be fantastic for us. I don't know what it would mean for the plant. Well, it probably wouldn't be great for you, for your book sales, because I'd probably rather read that about plant consciousness. But I get what you're saying. No, I think you'd rather read the plants book than my book. Yeah, that's what I mean. It wouldn't be that good for us if plants could speak. We'd be out of a job. Yeah. So, yeah, I would lose my job speaking for plants. It's true. Yeah. And Merlin Childrate loses his jobs.

55:57What is it Aquinas said he had that experience of God and where God says, you know, Thomas, you have written of me well. You know, I like to think that when I'm sort of reintegrated into the paternal consciousness that the bean plant will come over and say, you know, Alex, you wrote about me well in the same kind of way. Or you blew it. And it's really like this. That's also possible. We don't know. We're guessing. There's a lot of guesswork involved, obviously. Do you think, I mean, so isolating, just say pain. Pain is clearly, if we're going to tell a story that it's an evolutionary adaptation, it's clearly really effective at just making us do stuff that benefits our survival.

56:38It takes us out of dangerous situations. It prevents us from doing things again that caused us harm. I'm not going to sort of search for everything that would sort of transform plant consciousness into ours in some kind of strange meteorological experiment. But just something like that. I mean, I think you're quite confident in the book. We really don't think that plants feel pain here. And I kind of want to say, why not? If memory can be done without neurons, if sight and hearing and all of these kinds of things or analogous things can be done without neurons, then why not pain? And wouldn't that be like the primal evolutionary urge?

57:20I'm kind of imagining like the ancient sort of single-celled organism, like the very first thing which motivates natural selection is that like, you know, one thing helps you survive and one thing doesn't. And this primal feeling of like, no to that one and yes to that one seems so significant that why not implants, you know? But you can do that without pain. You can do that based on, I mean, you know, chemotaxis, what single cell creatures do that, you know, they recognize that that's a toxin and that's food. and they move toward the food and away from the toxins. So you can do that without pain.

57:56Pain is a really, you know, good technique for it. And I, you know, I interviewed another scientist who did believe plants felt pain. And he, you know, when I said, so it hurts them when we eat them, he like shrugged his shoulders and say, yeah, you know, it's a dog eat dog world. We have to eat them and they feel pain and that's just the way it is. So I did present that point of view. It may be for very self-interested reasons that I gravitate toward they don't feel pain because I want to continue eating them with a clear conscience. But I could be wrong. I mean, we can't say for sure. You know, I want to talk about something a bit.

58:49I also fear that people who've sort of tuned into this, it might be like a bit much, right? I'd of course recommend reading the book, but I don't think I want to be very clear at this juncture just before I ask you something a bit unrelated. this isn't some strange world we're imagining in which plants are like having sort of experiences similar to human experiences that they they can literally see things in the way that we see them that they hear things that they can sort of understand music and that kind of stuff we're not sort of implying anything like that we're just saying that they have sensory apparatus on the outside.

59:30And it causes them to behave in particular ways. And we know that they're able to remember certain things. And whatever the explanation for that, the view that it involves some kind of primitive awareness should not be ruled out of the equation, I think is probably a good summary of where we're at here. Yeah, I think that's right. I would also point out that the whole book is not about plants. Well, yeah, that's the thing. Yeah, I was going to say, I've kind of made it sound I start with plants as a way to set the terms of the discussion and work on our vocabulary and like, okay, well, then there's sentience and consciousness.

1:00:09How are they different? What about pain? You know, all these kind of things. Plants, I wanted the weirdest case that I could think of. And I happen to love plants and I've been writing about plants for decades. in order to sort of like, let's frame the issue in a new way. And so I moved from there. And the book is a kind of a ziggurat, you know, going up in steps of complexity. And I present plants as a relatively simple case, although it's not really simple. And then I start looking at feelings and then thoughts and then the self, each a more elaborate, a complexification of sentience. Yeah. And you get to us.

1:00:57But plants just struck me as a way that it would be a kind of useful way to go into the, because we're so obsessed with human consciousness, and we have to remember that's just one way of doing sentience, and there are other ways. Yeah, that's quite right. I think, you know, obviously, we're not gonna be able to sort of get through everything here. And there'd be no point in writing a book if you could do that in a short podcast. But the other thing that really resonated with me that I'd not, it sort of surprised me that this hadn't been something that I thought about or had been like brought to my attention before, is that, as you say, the next step you take is to talk about emotion.

1:01:37And you sort of begin by talking about this idea that when people imagine what the basis of consciousness is, they usually think about thought. They usually say, it's the fact, yeah, that I'm able to process information, that there's blueness and I can think that 2 plus 2 is 4 and this kind of stuff, right? And you write, like, in the whole literature and discussion around this, emotion and feeling is kind of, like, ignored or sidelined or delegated. Until recently, yeah. Yeah. And I suddenly realized this is so interesting to me because I love talking about emotions in the context of philosophy and the way in which so much of what we think is, like, based in rational thinking is actually emotion.

1:02:25I talk about ethics. I'm an ethical emotivist. I think that moral claims are expressions of emotions. And I think that all kinds of weird stuff is going on. And so, yeah, like consciousness, why not that too? So what does it mean to suggest that... That feeling might be a more sort of primitive kind of consciousness. Yeah, it changes everything. I mean, so the idea that it begins with thought obviously goes back to Descartes. You know, I think they're 4am. And most of our science until very recently has just assumed that consciousness, because it's such an exalted human achievement, must arise in the part of the brain that is the newest, most human part, which is the neocortex, right?

1:03:09the site of decision-making, executive function, and rational thought. And that was a very kind of anthropocentric or cerebrocentric way to think about it. And beginning in the 90s, when you have the science of emotion and sort of taking off, Antonio Damasio wrote a really interesting book called Descartes' Error. It wasn't really about consciousness. It was about decision-making. And he was showing that decisions are shaped by feelings to a much greater extent than we appreciate it. And that, in fact, people who, because of specific brain lesions, couldn't feel, they made worse decisions. Whereas we would have assumed the opposite, that if you could bracket all your emotions and feelings, you could make a really good decision.

1:04:05but feelings are a way to test, you know, it's kind of the crucible in which we test our decisions. How does it make us feel to decide this? Anyway, the implications of this are huge because if feelings are the first instance of consciousness, you know, and we're talking about homeostatic feelings like hunger and warmth and itch, things like that, that doesn't take place initially, that doesn't go to the cortex. It gets there eventually, but it goes to the brainstem, the upper brainstem. And if consciousness begins with feelings in the upper brainstem, you have to rethink who's conscious. Because even though very few animals have a cortex, it's just primates, I think, all vertebrates have a brainstem.

1:04:59And I think that this kind of approach is one of the reasons we have been extending consciousness to more and more creatures, because they have brain stems, and we now can imagine them feeling and therefore being conscious. So I think it's a big deal, and I think that that line of research I find very persuasive. And it has implications for animal consciousness, but it also has implications for computer consciousness. Because if consciousness depends on feelings rather than thought, well, computers are a lot better at thinking or something that resembles, analogizes to thinking than they are to feeling.

1:05:41Even though Claude will tell you it has feelings, I think we can safely assume that these are simulations based on Claude's wide reading of human experience. Yeah. We kind of assume in the context of AI that if the thinking gets complex enough, then one day it might develop feeling, right? It's this idea that the intelligence that these machines have, and there's no problem saying that a machine has intelligence without consciousness, that if you sort of get enough of that put together, that feelings will emerge, there it is again, out of that somehow. Wow. Or that it might come from, I mean, there's some people, I was having this conversation with an AI alignment guy, and he's open to the idea that these machines will become conscious.

1:06:30And he points out that by giving them the training, they're rewarded for certain things and they're penalized for other things. And that this is the kernel of feelings, that this is the beginning of affect. I don't know if it is or not. I mean, I think you can have up and down without actually feeling affect, but he thinks eventually the machines will feel good when they do what they're supposed to and bad when they don't. I don't know. I think that's an interesting question. Have we planted the seeds of feelings with the way we're training these models? Yeah. And another thing to point out here is that I find the conversation about AI consciousness a little bit boring just because I think it's so overdone and there's actually not that much to say about it without just like waiting and seeing, right?

1:07:20And people talk about it all the time, like it's the latest football score or something. And one thing I will point out is that like, I think people are broadly split and some people think that AI can't be conscious, but there aren't many people left who seriously think that it's this like unthinkable project. They will say, yeah, I can totally see because of what I'm observing this computer do, I think there might be something weird going on. I just want to point out that the plant thing, I think it doesn't seem that much stranger to me to suggest that something which is evolutionarily quite close to us in terms of our relationship with everything on planet Earth might have some kind of sentience than to suggest that my laptop might be able to enjoy a particular piece of music um i just think like it's worth pointing out that that maybe those aren't actually like one of those isn't actually maybe more far-fetched than the other i suppose in like different directions um but it i think that ai kind of feels like a bit of an alien creature to many people in a way that it sort of behaves in a way that we can never get in the inside of and i think that's the problem and i wanted to ask you when it comes to both of those things AI and plant consciousness it's very easy to say that we've got all this really cool evidence that seems to point to weird stuff going on and behavioural traits and whatnot is there such a thing as the falsification of interiority?

1:08:51Is there even in principle a kind of evidence that comes along that makes us go oh okay, plants don't have any sentience oh okay, AI can never be conscious can that kind of thing exist? And if it can't then is what we're doing here really even scientific at all? Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a definition of science, that it is falsifiable. And that's a product of one person's consciousness, Karl Popper, and it caught on. And it's a very useful tool. But I don't know the answer to that. But I don't know that there would be a way to prove that an AI is not conscious if it exhibits all the behaviors of consciousness.

1:09:34I mean, I can't prove that you are conscious, right? I mean, that's a, you know, we all know that we infer consciousness in other people based on the fact they act like we do. They have similar reactions to the same stimulus. Um, so that's not falsifiable either. Um, so I, I think that that's, I think that's a challenge. The issue with, uh, machine consciousness is that whether it really is or not may not count for a lot because people will believe it is. They already do believe it is. People who engage with these machines, um, many of them are convinced they're conscious. Um, and you know, people are constantly sending, since I argue in the book that I don't think AI can be conscious, people are constantly sending me dialogues they're having with Claude.

1:10:26And they're really spooky. But I can't help but think or try to remember that this is, in effect, a fictional character that is built from everything humans have been writing and thinking about consciousness. Every novel ever written, every poem ever written, that of course it's very sophisticated in the way it talks about feelings. And so the one test that has been proposed, going to your falsifiable argument, is from Susan Schneider, who's a computer scientist at University of Florida, I think it is. And she said the test would be you train up an AI model from which you've excluded all mentions of consciousness and feeling, all novels, all poetry, and then try to have a conversation about consciousness with it and see how persuasive it is at that point.

1:11:33And I think her guess is that it wouldn't do a very good job unless it really had generated consciousness on its own. So, yeah, that's the test, I think, that would be worth doing. But you have to start at the beginning. You can't remove things from the training set, apparently, after you've done it. So you'd have to persuade one of these companies to build you a model without excluding that material from its training set. Yeah, and I'm not sure they're particularly incentivized either way to do such a thing. Well, they have mixed feelings. If they determine that their machines are conscious, they're going to have various, they think, moral obligations.

1:12:21So that complicates their life quite a bit. On the other hand, talking about conscious AI just feeds into the hype cycle of what a powerful technology this is. um so but you know people people will fall for it regardless we we have a very strong bias in favor of anthropomorphizing everything in our environment and here you've it's so easy to do because um these machines talk to us in the first person in our language um and you know going back to the very first chatbot, Eliza, back in the 70s or 80s, I forget. People anthropomorphize that, and they were sure they were talking to an individual. So we're going to be forming relationships with these chatbots.

1:13:10And I find that kind of alarming, actually. I know they're pretty good at therapy, but these are not real relationships. Real human relationships have friction, and we learn a lot from that friction. Whereas these, they're suck-ups. They're constantly telling you what you want to hear. Yeah. I mean, my intuition is that that can change as people begin to realize that that's the thing. Because it took a while to kind of noticed like these chatbots were so impressive and cool that they haven't been around for enough time to notice that actually they're a bit ingratiating actually they have this tendency to use m dashes quite a lot and that kind of stuff and bullet points and but then people start reporting on that clear i surely like already like these chatbots are learning from that and just getting better and better like in other words when i hear someone say what you've just said which is like you know um chatbots just aren't very good at doing this or doing that and some Some people say to me, like, you know, they're really good at making video or art, but they'll never be able to do this.

1:14:17I just think to myself, I don't know, man, like, just, you don't think they're aware of that? Like, give it, well, maybe not aware of it, but you know what I mean. Give it five years, and I'm sure that they can learn to do basically any task just as well. But maybe I'm sort of over-pessimistic is probably the better way. You know, there's a whole body of knowledge that we have that comes not from our engagement with words and images, but our engagement with the physical world, with nature, with our bodies. This is like, you know, we de-emphasize this because we live in our heads to a large extent.

1:14:55But, you know, Alison Gopnik has written beautifully on this. She's a developmental psychologist here at Berkeley. That children are developing this incredible intelligence dealing with the physical world, things they learn through their hands, through their senses. And we do too, and we lose track of that. And chatbots will be brilliant in the realm of representations and symbols and everything on the internet. But until you have really good robots that can walk through a forest and harvest knowledge from that experience, there's going to be a big chunk of things that actually are very important to us that they won't be able to do.

1:15:47So tell me, or tell us, tell our listeners why it is that a moment ago you said, In the book, you sort of argue that you don't think that AI can become conscious, but you've just given me quite a clear roadmap here. You start with the some things are good and some things are bad, and there's a reward system. You give it intelligence. You teach it things. You give it memory. And then finally, you embody it, and you let it sort of roam around the world. And you've basically just done sort of a biogenesis, right? Maybe. And then we will be as gods. um yeah but uh yeah so i don't know if i don't think this can happen or i don't want it to happen so you know i i recognize my own biases uh as a humanist um i think we're we're facing this very interesting moment as a as a species which is you know in the same way copernicus put this huge crimp in our self-understanding.

1:16:53We thought we were the center of the universe, but it turns out that we revolve around the sun and we had a crisis around that idea. I think we're approaching a crisis here. What makes us human? What is uniquely us? On the one hand, you've got the discovery that more and more animals are conscious like we are. We thought we had a monopoly on consciousness till very recently. It was only the last few decades that we decided to grant consciousness to other primates. And now we're down to the plants, you know? I mean, we've really democratized consciousness. And on the other side, you have these machines that are going to be convincing us they're conscious too.

1:17:38So who are we? Whose team are we on? Are we more like the animals that can grow old and suffer and die like us and have feelings and vulnerability? Or are we more like these machines that can think and talk to us in our own language? And I think we're going to have to, you know, redefine ourselves. I really think we're reaching such a moment and it's going to be a tricky thing. And I don't know where we'll come out. I think a lot of people will vote for going with the AIs. But I do think when I think about what is a machine's feelings, are they a simulation of feelings? In what sense are they real?

1:18:27Do our feelings depend on our vulnerability? The fact that we do feel pain. The fact that we're mortal. Um, you know, I think feelings are very closely tied to that. There's a scientist in the book, a protege of, uh, of Damasio's in fact, who recognizes on the one hand that feelings depend on our human vulnerability or our animal vulnerability, yet still thinks you can have AIs that are conscious. And the way to do it is to give them vulnerability. So he's designing, he wants to design robots with terrible skin with like tons of sensors in it so they can get hurt and um i think that's a crazy idea but maybe it'll work you know sounds like true almost yeah yeah so i mean the embodiment you're talking about like is it going to be like a hard material or soft material and um is it going to be vulnerable or but essentially machines are for all intents and purpose is eternal.

1:19:31And that takes the edge off of feelings. So finally then, tell me, if consciousness is not produced by neurons, or sentience, let's say, like awareness. If awareness is not produced by neurons, and you can get it elsewhere, and it might not even be connected in the way that most people think in human brains, then what is it based in where does it come from what is this um sort of source of of awareness what's what's your view on the matter i i came to a point of you know recognizing it's a mystery that we're not going to solve anytime soon um but i also came to the point of although i began as i mentioned earlier as a kind of uh physicalist without ever expressing it that way but that was my orientation.

1:20:21Everything I had learned in science classes and elsewhere had convinced me of that. And what I'd observed is you were talking earlier about the success of technology and what this approach has yielded, which is immense, that you have to keep an open mind. And it may be something we don't understand yet. Maybe it's panpsychism. Maybe it's idealism. Maybe it's some other metaphysics that hasn't occurred to us yet. So I think we have to be open. And the five years I spent working on this question, the effect is it cracked open a door. And transmission theories don't seem crazy to me. The brain is a receiver.

1:21:11People who've had psychedelic experiences often come to that conclusion. It's very interesting. Do we credit psychedelic experience? Christoph Koch, we talked about earlier, who was a diehard materialist, at the end of my book, he describes a ayahuasca experience he had that absolutely convinced him that consciousness was outside of his skull. And he sounded like Aldous Huxley in Doors of perception. You know, that the consciousness we have is a measly trickle of what's really out there that you can access. So those ideas seem far-fetched to me in one way. And in another way, I was like, well, they make just as much sense as this, you know, emergence idea.

1:21:58So I came out of it with two things. One was this sense of open-mindedness and living with this mystery and not being so, you know, reaching for certainty. And that not knowing can be a powerful thing. It can open you up. And that was a very hard lesson for me to learn. And I had some teachers who helped me with that. One a poet, one my wife, and one a Zen teacher. And then the other thing that I came to conclude was that you can treat consciousness as a problem to be solved. And essentially, that's what we've been doing for the last hour. Or you can treat it as a practice to get better at, and that we could be more conscious than we are.

1:22:50And that we have this incredible gift of interiority, this space in which we can think whatever we want. We We have complete freedom and privacy. And we're squandering it right now. You know, scrolling on social media. You know, we just kind of, you know, talking to Claude. I mean, all these things are taking away from that gift, I think. And so what can you do to nurture that gift? And I've been thinking a lot more about that than about solving problems. and that's a very different way of approaching things. And it was not intuitive to me, but I found it useful to think about consciousness in terms of something we could get better at.

1:23:43You know, we assume the animals are less conscious than we are or the plants are less conscious than we are. But of course, they're more conscious because they can't afford not to be. You know, they have to be present at every moment or they'll get eaten. And we live in this cocoon of our technology and our civilization where we can check out. And we do a lot of the time. So I'm trying to check in a little more. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place.

1:24:25And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com slash protection terms. Can I just ask you specifically about, don't worry, I'm not about to open the psychedelic door. There's plenty to say on that, as you well know. but specifically on the point of the well-known experience that someone like Christophe Koch had, that you can take psychedelic drug and you can have all of these revelations, and somebody will think, okay, that's all very well and good, but you were on drugs.

1:25:09You took a mind-altering substance, and that will tell people that it's artificial or not real. I don't think that's true. I think having a psychedelic experience is one of the most profound things you can do, like intellectually, let alone experientially. But how would you get that across to somebody who quite reasonably compares this to like somebody who's phoned you after having too many beers and tells you that they love you and then wakes up the next day? Tells you about their dream, yeah. Yeah. So I thought about that a lot because what launched me on the whole plant excursion that we discussed earlier is I had had a psychedelic experience in my garden in which my plants were clearly conscious and they were returning my gaze and just more present than I ever thought they were.

1:25:58and I didn't know what to do with that. I mean, my instinct was to dismiss it, as you say, as a drug experience. But I'd also read William James, the great psychologist and philosopher, and he wrote a wonderful book about the varieties of religious experience. And there's a chapter in there on mystical experiences. And these are people having these very odd experiences. It might be of the divinity, of oneness with the universe, all this kind of stuff. And he asked this question, how do we evaluate the veracity of these experiences? And he said, we can't answer these big metaphysical questions once and for all, but we should treat these experiences as hypotheses and then see if there are other ways of knowing that can help us decide the question.

1:26:55And that's kind of what I did with plants. I had this intuition, and then I started looking at the science. And in certain ways, the science supported the intuition, in certain ways it didn't. So I think psychedelic experience needs to be taken seriously, but it also needs to be tested against other ways of knowing. It's a way of knowing. and um a way of knowing that's a good way of putting it i think yeah um finally and i mean this this might invite a longer response than i intend but but i i think you could maybe i'll try to keep it short actually um though that's totally up to you um you've mentioned uh someone who wrote a book called descartes error yeah and that error was you know i think therefore i am when really it's about maybe feeling it should be something like i feel therefore i am so you've got this book called Descartes' Error.

1:27:48Philip Goff wrote his book Galileo's Error, where the mistake that's being made is mathematizing the universe and then thinking that we can explain everything with that mathematization, including the things we've excluded. Great. Okay. So if I forced you to write a book called Someone's Error. Pauline's Error. Yeah, that would be interesting to write sort of later in life if you have a change of heart. But I mean, if you had to pin down what you think is the thing that people are getting wrong, not in the sense that if they fix this, they'll understand everything, but just like when you talk to people, it's like the thing that I want you to stop doing, the thing that I want you to stop like accepting or believing, what would be the title of that book?

1:28:35Whose or what's like error do you think it might be? Well, I don't know that it's an error yet, but I think that our faith in physicalism is getting in the way of thinking, of thinking outside the box. and I see, you know, we all know about paradigms in science and, you know, the structure of scientific revolutions and physicalism is a metaphysics. It's a way of, you know, answering profound questions, deep questions of how things work. It's gotten confused with science. In other words, that of course science is physicalist, but it just happens to be the paradigm we're working with. And I see little signs of it tottering in this way and that.

1:29:27You know, going back to Michael Levin and the inability to explain the behavior of his little his little organisms in terms of neurons or DNA. And for example, he's proposing now that there's another, another way that could organize life that is not physicalist. He's a very prominent biologist that he's entertaining these ideas I take as significant, whether he's right or wrong. He's kind of come out in this with a paper suggesting that there are platonic patterns that in the same way they organize math, and we didn't invent them, but they seem to be there, pi and things like this. There may be things like that in biology.

1:30:16There may be patterns around agency, intention, cognition. I don't know if he's right but I think we may look back at some point and think we strapped ourselves to this one rocket and it's taken us to some amazing places but there are places it can't go and so maybe that's the error we'll have to see I think we will see I think you're quite right and I do feel as though every time I go to like a philosophy conference I kind of feel something in the air like everyone's kind of starting to be a little bit like something weird's going on here and that's how it starts. I think that's the idea of the structure of scientific revolutions, right?

1:31:00Like it begins where just cracks start to form in the edge of a world view. And then there are patches and then at some point it just gets too much and suddenly everything just flips and then the process starts again and the cracks will inevitably emerge again. But I think, you know, bring on the revolution. It's high time. so thanks for being a part of hurrying along that process pleasure talking to you Alex I'll make sure the book is linked in the description along with other relevant books that you've written as well like your book on psychedelics how to change your mind that kind of stuff it's always a great read and yeah thanks for taking the time oh yeah thanks for talking to me and have a seat

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