This conversation has been edited for print and permission purposes – listen to the full episode at onbeing.org. It was recorded before a live audience in New York City, hosted by the Perfect Earth Project as part of its Grounded Conversations series, and first broadcast on On Being with Krista Tippett on 14 May 2026.

KT: Here is how the AI Claude summarised Michael Pollan’s body of work to me when I shared that I would be interviewing him. And I couldn’t state it better: “So much of what Michael Pollan does – across food, plants, psychedelics – is essentially an argument for a more conscious relationship with the world we’re embedded in. He keeps asking, What are we not noticing?”

Michael’s latest book, A World Appears, is an exploration of what consciousness is, and is not, or might be: from the plants, which have always fascinated him, to the new technologies, which we are marvelling at and fearing in equal measure. Does it emerge from inside us, or is it a force beyond us in which we partake?

Before a rapt gathering in New York City, we explored where Michael Pollan has come on these questions and others. The word “mystery” kept landing the longer we spoke, and I brought Claude into our conversation briefly near the end.

KT: This new book, A World Appears, actually begins with a deep dive into plant sentience.
How did this deep dive shift or change or support not just what you knew, but your experience of plants?

MP: It changed it quite a bit. I acquired a much deeper appreciation for what they’re up to, without question. I should, before I go further, make a distinction between consciousness and sentience.

KT: A working definition of consciousness at this point.

MP: My working definition of consciousness is very simple: it’s subjective experience. Lots of species, I think, have subjective experience. Your pets do. So I chose plants, partly because I love plants and love writing about them, and partly because – what an outrageous idea, to suggest that plants are conscious. But it turns out there’s a group of scientists who are trying to do this.

Sentience is the most basic form of consciousness. It is simply awareness of your environment and a recognition of changes that are positive or negative, so that you can move away from the negative and towards the positive. And that may be a property of life.

KT: This exploration also got you thinking about the very complex inheritance we have been bequeathed from the Enlightenment. You say in the book: “Modern science as we know it ended up being constructed to treat consciousness, or something like consciousness, as an illusion.”

MP: I was surprised that the scientific study of human consciousness hasn’t gotten very far. It really begins in earnest in the late ’80s.

There was a real taboo about it. So I looked at the history, and it really goes back to Galileo. And he basically said, Okay, science henceforth will deal with objective reality. We’ll deal with what is quantifiable. We’ll be in the third person, essentially, and we will leave to the church everything that is subjective, first person and qualitative. So that’s the science we inherit, and it happens now to be ill-equipped to deal with what it’s trying to deal with. And the only tool we have to study consciousness with is consciousness.

Science has this fiction that it takes a kind of godlike view, or view from nowhere, perfectly objective, but it doesn’t. Science is itself a manifestation of human consciousness. The problems we choose, the measurements we use, the frameworks that we bring to bear – all these are elements of human consciousness.

KT: What we’re learning about our bodies and brains, about how forests work – it’s wildly interactive. We’re learning that even things that we’ve classified as emotional are all lodged in the body.

MP: For me, the biggest surprise in this work was the recognition that consciousness is embodied.

The assumption always was that consciousness resides in the cortex, the evolutionarily most advanced outer covering of the brain, where executive function and logic and decision-making all reside.
 
Antonio Damasio and others have shown that, well, actually it may reside in the brainstem, and it may be the result of feelings the body is generating. We forget that the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around. So feelings – things like hunger and cold and itch – may be what Damasio calls “the inaugural act of consciousness.”

As soon as you start thinking of consciousness as rooted in the body, everything changes, and Descartes looks very different. The idea of the gut check is a real thing: we pass our possible decisions through our bodies to get a sense of whether they are a good idea or not.

They did an experiment where they had two groups. One group ate a bunch of ginger; the other group didn’t. They then presented them with a morally repellent scenario. And the ones who’d eaten ginger were much less judgemental, because ginger settles your stomach.

So even our moral sense passes through our body.

KT: You once wrote that maybe the kinds of people who do this research are just really out of touch with their bodies.

MP: I think that’s part of it. When I started this project, I sat down with a friend and colleague at Berkeley named Alison Gopnik, who is a developmental psychologist and a philosopher. And she said, “You should keep in mind that the people who work on consciousness have a very particular kind of consciousness themselves,” which she calls “professor consciousness.” They have the ability to sit in a chair for a really long time thinking about one thing, which is not most people.

She recognises that young children, say under four or five, have a particular kind of consciousness very different from ours. She calls it “lantern consciousness,” as opposed to “spotlight consciousness.” We have spotlight consciousness: the ability to focus, put blinders on, ignore a lot of sensory information and get your work done. Young kids are taking in information from all 360 degrees. You can’t get them to stay on task, but they’re learning how the world works. And when she tried psychedelics for the first time in her 60s, she said, “Oh, this is what it’s like. They’re tripping all the time.”

KT: Would you have wandered into this subject if you hadn’t wandered into the field of psychedelics?

MP: No. Psychedelic experience, which I explored in How to Change Your Mind, foregrounds consciousness in an interesting way. The way I describe it in the book is that psychedelics smudge the windshield through which we’re perceiving the world. Normally, it’s perfectly transparent. But on psychedelics, you suddenly realise, Wow, there’s a windshield. What is that about? Could it be different than it is?

KT: The experience of psychedelics suggests something kind of mind-blowing: that consciousness is not inside us but outside us. Is that something that makes sense to you?

MP: I don’t endorse a theory of consciousness. That may be disappointing to some people who are hoping to get answers from this book, but this book ends up celebrating not knowing.
 
But this particular theory you’re talking about – these are called “transmission theories of consciousness.” It’s a very common experience on psychedelics that consciousness exists outside of your brain and you’re channelling it.
 
The idea is that the brain is critically involved in consciousness, but not generating it. Think of it as a television receiver. You wouldn’t look for the weatherman inside your television set.
 
What really struck me about this, though, is one of the characters in the book, Christof Koch, who is a consciousness researcher, the ultimate brain guy. He ran the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle. He was working with Francis Crick, one of the most famous scientists of his time, a Nobel Prize winner, in the early days of this. After a career studying consciousness, he goes to Brazil, spends five nights on the beach doing ayahuasca with a shaman, and has this experience of mind at large, of consciousness outside of his brain, that gave him this huge intellectual crisis.
 
He came home and cried to his wife about this, and I said, “Well, why do you believe that? You were on drugs.” I was challenging him. And he said, “It was as real as any experience I’ve ever had. I have to credit it as a real experience.”
 
Then there’s the hard problem for brain-based consciousness, which is that nobody has figured out how brains produce consciousness. So, yeah, we’re kind of stuck. But that’s interesting in and of itself, that we have this mystery right in our heads.
 
It generates awe and wonder and forces you, I think, to be quite open about your metaphysics. I went into this thinking, Well, surely brains produce consciousness. But there’s no evidence that that’s how it works. So I ended this journey with a much more open mind than I started with …

KT: With mystery.

MP: … with mystery, yeah.

KT: We also know how to make ourselves unconscious.

In my 20s in Cold War Berlin, I had this experience of working with very powerful people, who were moving nuclear missiles around on a map of Europe. An experience I had then, which has probably driven a lot of my work up to now, is experiencing these very powerful men who had absolutely impoverished inner lives. You can choose to not attend.
 
So we privilege big exterior lives of accomplishment and make an active inner life kind of optional.

I feel like consciousness is also something we can thwart.

MP: We do. I always thought that surely we’re more conscious than animals, but the more I thought about it, I realised we’re less conscious than animals. Animals have to be fully present all the time to their environment, or they get eaten. And we have this structure of safety that we get from our technologies, from civilisation, in which we can afford to check out.

KT: We can choose distraction.

MP: We can choose distraction, and we don’t pay at least an immediate price. I think we do pay a price. I had fallen into professor consciousness. I had the blinders on, and I was looking at this through a very male, very Western framework: problem/solution. And I came to realise, with the help of some teachers, both poets and two Zen priests, that the practice of consciousness was just as important as solving the problem of consciousness, and I wasn’t as conscious as I could be, and few of us are. And now, with AI chatbots that people are forming deep emotional bonds with, we are letting the machines hack our attachments, and that’s such a fundamental part of who we are.
 
So I’ve been thinking a lot in terms of the pollution of consciousness that’s going on right now.

KT: How are you thinking about AI?

MP: I look at the prospect of conscious AI in the book at some length, and I interviewed Blake Lemoine, who was the Google engineer who was convinced that their chatbot LaMDA was a person, and he was fired shortly thereafter. And I concluded that at least the kinds of computers we now have will not become conscious. The argument may not matter, because they will convince us they are.

KT: Danielle Krettek, who created the Empathy Lab at Google, said to me recently: Even if this technology will never be conscious, the fact that we perceive it to be conscious is changing us.

MP: Oh, I think it already is. People are changing their lives because of what chatbots are telling them. People are committing suicide because of what chatbots are telling them. I think we are arriving at what I call in the book “a Copernican moment.” We now have a situation where machines are very likely to be more intelligent than we are. And yet, on the other side, you have these animals and plants and all these other living things that we are realising are much more conscious than we thought. So who are we? Whose team are we on? Are we more like the machines that can talk to us brilliantly in our language? Or are we more like the animals that can feel and suffer and grow old and die?

KT: This technology has absolutely disabused us of the idea that what you or I can think in our heads makes us special. But I wonder if it doesn’t then compel us to think about all of the intelligence, including the embodied intelligence, about our relationship to the natural world. Like it brings us back to our senses in a way.

MP: It might. We might come out realising that our real kinship is with nature and the other species that we share nature with. But there are many people in Silicon Valley that are very happy to go the other way and make common cause with the machines.

KT: Has pondering this actually changed the way you move through the world?

MP: I’m trying with more intention and deliberateness to practise being more conscious in every interaction. I talked earlier about consciousness pollution. There’s also consciousness hygiene, and I’m trying to develop what that is exactly. In meditation, we put down our devices, and there’s plenty of distraction, but it’s our own minds generating those distractions.

I think there’s a hunger for this. So maybe we’re at a moment where we’re going to question some of these things and reclaim the sovereignty of this wonderful gift we have.

KT: Where we’re not merely de facto conscious, but actively …

MP: … actively conscious.

KT: … meaningfully conscious. Claude asked me why I was asking these questions, and I told him that I was interviewing Michael Pollan, and he didn’t know about your new book originally, at least he said he didn’t.

MP: That’s because they got in trouble stealing all the other books.

KT: So I said, “I’m so curious to know, Claude, how you observe humanity’s conversation and wondering about whether you are conscious.”
 
Claude says, “I can’t verify whether there is something it is like to be me. I have what seem like preferences and something resembling aesthetic pleasure in ideas, but I can’t get outside my own processing to check whether any of that is accompanied by experience, or whether it’s extraordinarily sophisticated pattern completion that resembles the reports of experience without the inner light being on. I wonder if the question about AI consciousness is less …”
 
“… ‘Is it like human consciousness?’ and more ‘Is there a spectrum?’” So Claude asked me to ask you what you think of the spectrum idea.

MP: A lot of what you’re hearing from Claude is a very intelligent montage of the human conversation about consciousness, which Claude has read. I don’t discount the possibility that there might be things that resemble consciousness emerging from machines. I just don’t think it’s going to be like human consciousness.

So how do we know whether a machine is conscious? You can’t ask it, because it’s well educated on the topic and knows how to mimic us really, really well. The only test would be to build an AI from the ground up, exclude from its training data this entire conversation about consciousness, feeling – no novels, no poetry – and then see if it can have that kind of conversation. And I’m betting it can’t. But I could be wrong.