Michael Pollan explains why AI will never recreate human consciousness

Michael Pollan explains why you can’t be sure that other people are conscious

By Claire Cameron edited by Jeanna Bryner

Of all the best contenders for the hardest problem in science, perhaps the most important to our lived experience is this: What exactly is consciousness?

Humans have a very complex brain and, for some of us at least, even more complex emotions. We can think and feel; we are aware of ourselves. We can create new ideas. But where this consciousness comes from is a mystery. And why we even feel anything about anything is overshadowed by subjectivity.

“The only tool we have for exploring consciousness is consciousness itself,” says Michael Pollan, a renowned science journalist and author of the new book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. This conundrum—and how it can potentially be solved—guides Pollan’s investigation of consciousness, highlighting both the science and the philosophical dilemma it poses.

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How we know we are conscious is probably impossible to fully explain using conventional neuroscientific research methods such as brain scans, says Pollan. “One of the speculations in the book is that it might take a scientific revolution to really help us,” he says.

There are around 29 competing theories of consciousness. We can trace signs of consciousness and emotions in the brain. We can feel certain that we, as thinking individuals, are conscious and can infer that other people are also conscious. But, claims Pollan, that’s about it.

One of the big questions Pollan addresses in the book is whether we could ever recognize consciousness in another species or entity. Detecting such a phenomenon in an organism or entity that doesn’t look and behave like a human would be “really difficult,” he says. An artificial intelligence can, for example, express consciousness in completely different ways than humans do, he adds.

“I don’t think there will be anything like ours,” he says. “Because ours is largely a product of our bodies and ours of our human vulnerability.” One researcher he cites in the book is Mark Solms, whose lab is trying to develop a conscious AI by making it feel uncertainty and conflicting needs.

“We may have to become a kind of majority consciousness and determine that there are going to be many different types,” Pollan says.

Listen to the podcast interview with Pollan here.

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