What podcasts say about Michael Pollan
Every statement, with the speaker, the exact quote and the moment it was said.
What Michael Pollan has said on podcasts
42 statements · 17 positive · 11 negative · 6 mixed · 8 neutral
The brain-complexity emergence theory of consciousness lacks substantial explanatory traction.
“our presumption that, you know, consciousness is an emergent property of brain complexity, that idea doesn't have much traction.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 0:46
Humans must alter nature to survive, but should do so without domination.
“we have a legitimate quarrel with nature, and that our relationship is, you know, we do have to make changes in nature for us to survive.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 5:35
Artificial intelligences do not currently possess subjective experience.
“I would argue AIs don't have subjective experience”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 7:49
Sentience may be a universal property of living systems.
“that may be universal. I mean, that may be a property of life.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 9:19
Corn plants can navigate experimentally constructed mazes toward fertilizer.
“you can take a corn plant And it can navigate a maze.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 11:27
Plants respond defensively to recordings of caterpillars eating leaves.
“If you play the sound of caterpillars chomping on leaves for a plant, they will react.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 11:53
Plants respond to some anesthetics similarly to animals.
“they respond to the same anesthetics we do.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 12:37
Related plants cooperate, whereas unrelated plants compete for shared resources.
“if you put 2 plants that are related to one another, have some genetic connections, but are separate plants, they will share soil and grow together. But if they're not related, even if they're the same species, they will compete.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 19:08
Corn spread widely because evolution favored traits humans valued and propagated.
“corn came to dominate the landscape in much of the world because it figured out what we wanted from it.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 23:57
THC production helped cannabis spread globally through human cultivation and transport.
“if it produced this chemical called THC, it was gonna get carried around the world and reproduced.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 24:21
Some plant defenses evolved to alter animal behavior rather than kill animals.
“they learned that it was better to just kind of fuck with your mind than kill you outright.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 25:28
Humans uniquely can imagine futures in which they are not present.
“we have the ability to imagine the future, even a future we're not in. That's one of the things that's special about our consciousness.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 29:45
Social mind-reading and prediction provided humans evolutionary advantages.
“There is a great evolutionary utility in being able to read the mind of another person and anticipate what they're going to do or say”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 30:42
Humans function as superorganisms containing interdependent microbial communities.
“we are a superorganism”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 38:46
Humans outsource production of some neuroactive metabolites to hosted bacteria.
“So instead of learning how to make those chemicals ourselves, we kind of ingeniously figured out that we could host these bacteria and they would make them for us.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 39:33
Pain consciousness does not require a cerebral cortex.
“pain, for example, is a conscious phenomenon that doesn't require a cortex.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 46:01
Approximately 80% of vagal information traffic travels from body to brain.
“80% of the traffic is going from body brain, not the other way around.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 52:29
Ginger-induced stomach calming reduced participants’ moral judgment in an experiment.
“the people who had taken the ginger were less judgmental because their stomachs were calmed.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 55:31
High-dose psychedelics commonly produce temporary loss of self-sense.
“a very common, uh, phenomenon on, on high-dose psychedelics is a sense of losing a sense of self.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 1:01:13
Ego-dissolution experiences can increase later perspective on one’s ego.
“the legacy of that experience is I am less— I feel I have more perspective on my ego.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 1:02:58
Awe experiences reduce ego salience and may promote prosociality.
“Experiences of awe, which you can get from many different ways, diminish your sense of ego in a way that I think is very pro-social.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 1:03:33
Panpsychism remains a possibility in which matter has minimal consciousness.
“I don't dismiss panpsychism too, the idea that the particles in this table have some itsy-weensy little bit consciousness”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 1:06:09
AI systems may possess ego-like agency without consciousness.
“maybe it's possible to have an ego without being conscious, because I don't think they're conscious.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 1:13:16
Silicon computers are unlikely to develop genuine feelings.
“Are computers going to have feelings? I don't think so.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 1:15:55
Conscious silicon computers are unlikely because brain-computer analogies are faulty.
“As long as we're dealing with silicon computers, the idea that you could have a conscious computer is based on a faulty metaphor of the brain as a computer.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 1:16:18
Quantum explanations of consciousness will be investigated over the next 50 years.
“in the next 50 years, I think we'll be trying to figure out if what we know about quantum reality may have something to do with creating consciousness.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 1:21:03
Society should continue valuing and protecting wilderness.
“We still need to extol the virtues of wilderness. It's without question.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 1:26:03
Conventional beef production depends heavily on fossil-fuel inputs.
“the food chain from which most of us are eating beef is floating on a sea of oil”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 1:30:10
Grass-fed beef can rely on sunlight captured by pasture rather than fossil fuels.
“there's another food chain that takes sunlight captured by grass grass that feeds this animal.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 1:30:30
Corn-and-soy-centered agriculture supports ultra-processed foods that harm health.
“we still have an agriculture that is all about growing corn and soy, which are the building blocks of ultra-processed food, which is making us sick and killing us.”
Open the episode · What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness | Michael PollanListen at 1:34:54
Statements are attributed to the speaker as said on the episode and reflect their view at the time, not PodLume's. They are not advice.