Michael Pollan on Feelings, Psychedelics, and AI

What is consciousness, who has it, and why? How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, when we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea?

For the launch of his new book, A World Appears, Michael Pollan joined Janna Levin for a special conversation on the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life. ♦