1:31:01The More You Study Consciousness, the Weirder It Gets | The Ezra Klein Show
Ezra Klein talks with the science writer Michael Pollan about his new book, A World Appears, the record of five years touring the science of consciousness. They walk the whole arc: a beeper experiment that catches the banality of inner experience, William James and the stream of consciousness, anesthetized plants and plant neurobiology, the evolutionary case that consciousness handles uncertainty too complex to automate, Alison Gopnik's lantern versus spotlight consciousness, and the discovery that feeling lives in the body. The conversation moves to a brain scan showing a thought firing four seconds before awareness, global workspace theory, the creative power of the wandering mind, and then the far edges, idealism and panpsychism and the brain as a radio receiver rather than a generator. It closes on a Copernican redefinition of the human, squeezed between conscious animals and seemingly conscious machines, on attention as a contested collective resource, and on wonder and the don't know mind rather than any answer.