Michael Pollan Discusses Consciousness on The Ezra Klein Show
Michael Pollan '76 joined The Ezra Klein Show to discuss his most recent book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.
Reports Ezra Klein for The New York Times:
"Here’s the paradox of our consciousness: It is the only thing we truly know — and the only thing we have actual firsthand experience of. Yet we don’t understand it at all.
"We don’t know what it’s made of. We don’t know how it works. We don’t know why it exists. And the closer we look at it, the weirder it gets. The more we try to describe it, the more our language begins to fail.
"I find it delightful that something so close to us can remain so mysterious. That a central question about the universe is happening inside of us, all of the time. Now, that’s not to say we haven’t tried to understand it — or that we haven’t learned a lot from those efforts.
"In his new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, the science writer Michael Pollan takes us on a tour of those efforts, of those theories, of those experiments, of those psychedelic trips and meditation retreats — and keeps finding himself in stranger and stranger territory, deeper inside the mystery.
"So I wanted to have him on to talk about it."
