What is consciousness?
After writing a book about how using psychedelics in a therapeutic setting can change your consciousness, that's the question journalist Michael Pollan found himself struggling to answer.
"There's nothing any of us know with more certainty than the fact that we are conscious. It's immediately available to us. It's the voice in our head," he says. And yet, Pollan adds: "How does three pounds of this tofu-like substance between your ears generate subjective experience? Nobody knows the answer to that question."
His new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, explores consciousness on both a personal and technological level. Pollan, who lives close to Silicon Valley, says some believe that Artificial Intelligence is capable of consciousness.
"They base this on a premise ... that basically the brain is a computer, and that consciousness is software," he says. "And if you can run it on the brain, which is essentially, in their view, a 'meat-based computer,' you should be able to run it on other kinds of machines."
Pollan disagrees with this assessment. He acknowledges that computers can simulate thought — but he adds that "real thought" is based on feeling.
"If you think about it, your feelings are very tied to your vulnerability, to your having a body that can be hurt, to the ability to suffer and perhaps your mortality," he says. "So I think that any feelings that a chatbot reports will be weightless, meaningless, because they don't have bodies. They can't suffer."
Interview highlights
I find this whole tender care for the possible consciousness of chatbots really odd, because we have not extended moral consideration to billions of people, not to mention the animals that we eat that we know are conscious.Michael Pollan
On the notion that people have moral obligations to chatbots
That's a very active conversation here, which is if they are conscious, we then have moral obligations to them, and have to think about granting them personhood, for example, the way we've granted corporations personhood. I think that would be insane. We would lose control of them completely by giving them rights. But I find this whole tender care for the possible consciousness of chatbots really odd, because we have not extended moral consideration to billions of people, not to mention the animals that we eat that we know are conscious. So we're gonna start worrying about the computers? That seems like our priorities are screwed up.
On the sentience of plants
Plants can see, which is a weird idea. There's a certain vine that can actually change its leaf form to mimic the plant it's twining around. How does it know what that leaf form is? Plants can hear. If you play the sound of chomping caterpillars on a leaf, they will produce chemicals to repel those caterpillars and to convey, to alert other plants in the vicinity. Plants have memory. You can teach them something and they'll remember it for 28 days.
And plants can be anesthetized. I thought this was particularly mind blowing. So I'm thinking of a plant like the sensitive plant, Mimosa pudica, that if you touch it, it collapses its leaves, or a carnivorous plant that eats bugs that cross its threshold. You can anesthetize them and they won't do anything. So the fact that they have two states of being is very suggestive of something like consciousness.
On losing time to let our mind wander
I worry, too, that with media, with our technologies, we are shrinking the space in which spontaneous thought can occur. And that this space of ... spontaneous thought is something precious that we're giving away to these corporations that essentially want to monetize our attention, and in the case of chatbots, want to monetize our attachments, our deep human attachments. So consciousness is, I think — and this is what to me is the urgency of the issue — consciousness is under siege. I think that it's the last frontier for some of these companies that want to sell our time.
On our paradoxical ideas about the self
What's interesting and paradoxical about the self is that we preach the values of self-assurance and self-confidence and having a strong sense of self. We want our kids to have that. On the other hand, we spend a lot of time trying to escape the self, to transcend it, whether it's through sports or experiences of art, going to the movies or psychedelics or meditation. So we have very mixed feelings about the self. I think because the self separates us. The ego is a defensive structure. It builds walls. And when those walls come down or even just [are] lowered, we can connect to other people, to art, to nature, to the divine in some cases.
On writing a book that grapples with unanswerable questions
There were many moments of despair in the process of reporting and writing this book. It took me five years, and there were many times where [I told my wife] "I've dug a hole here, and I don't know how I'm ever going to get out of it." And some of it had to do with mounting frustration with the science, and some of it had to do with the fact that I had this classic male problem/solution Western frame — that there was a problem and I was going to find the solution.
It took my wife, in part, and [Zen Buddhist teacher] Joan Halifax and some other people, who got me to question that and [they] said, "Yeah, there is the problem of consciousness, but there's also the fact of it, and the fact is wondrous. The fact is miraculous. And you've put all this energy into this narrow beam of attention. Why don't you open that beam up further and just explore the phenomenon that is going on in your head, which is so precious and so beautiful." And that's kind of where I came out — and it's certainly not where I expected to come out.
Anna Bauman and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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