#475 — The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Science, Society & Culture

4.6 • 29.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2026

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Michael Pollan about consciousness, the mind, and the self. They discuss Pollan's new book, the relationship between consciousness and intelligence, whether consciousness is a product of evolution, the role of psychedelics in consciousness research, AI and the question of machine consciousness, the illusion of the self, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris.
0:04.1	This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation.
0:09.1	If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org.
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0:16.2	It runs entirely on subscriber support.
0:19.0	If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today. I'm here with Michael Pollan. Michael, it's great to see you again. Yeah, great to be back, Sam. Or to see you for the first time. We were just talking about the fact that the last podcast, I think, was just audio, right? It was a phone call call effectively. Yeah, it was, I actually remember the day
0:37.8	really well. It was 2018, and I was in a hotel room in Portland, Oregon. Has that much time passed?
0:45.1	Jesus, that's really depressing. Yeah, it was how to change your mind had just come out. Yeah,
0:49.8	wow. And we were talking about psychedelics. If, this must be a function of age, but when asked to estimate how much time has elapsed,
0:58.7	I'm always off by a factor of at least two, if not three.
1:03.7	I mean, it's always, and I'm always wrong in the direction of underestimating.
1:09.0	Yeah, it's been a while.
1:10.4	Yeah.
1:14.2	Well, it's great to see you. It's great to see that you have a new book and you have, you have written a, not everyone does this, you have written a
1:18.4	bestseller on the nature of consciousness. And the book is, is a world appears, a journey into
1:24.0	consciousness, which is an all too natural follow on from your last book on
1:29.0	psychedelics, how to change your mind. Before we jump into the deep end of the pool, let's just have you
1:33.7	connect those dots for me. How did you convince yourself that you wanted to go deeper in this direction?
1:41.0	You know, I think it's a very common response to psychedelic experience. I had a series of
1:45.8	experiences, research trips, if you will, from when I was working on how to change your mind.
1:51.5	And one of the things psychedelics kind of reliably do for people is defamiliarize consciousness.
1:57.4	You're suddenly made more aware of it. I described it in the book as like smudging the
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