The question of consciousness, long relegated to philosophy and religion, has become a central battleground in the debate over artificial intelligence. Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears, arrives as a timely intervention, arguing that the pursuit of replicating human consciousness in machines may be fundamentally misguided, and that the very effort reveals a deeper cultural anxiety about humanity’s place in the universe.
Pollan, known for his perform on food systems and psychedelic drugs, approaches the subject not as a computer scientist but as an observer of human experience. He begins with a striking admission: after extensive research, he has found no consensus on how consciousness arises. As he writes, You’ll see currently over 100 competing hypotheses, divided between physicalist accounts – the belief that consciousness is solely a product of brain activity – and a vast array of non-physicalist theories. This “profusion of competing ideas,” Pollan observes, suggests the field is “flailing.”
The book traces a path from the rudimentary consciousness potentially present in plants – which, Pollan notes, can integrate information from more than twenty distinct senses – to the complexities of human feeling and thought. He highlights the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who argues that feeling, often dismissed as subjective and unscientific, is actually a prerequisite for consciousness. Pollan points out the irony that capabilities once considered uniquely human, like reason and language, have proven easier to replicate in machines than the more fundamental capacity for feeling.
This challenge to the “computer-as-brain” metaphor is central to Pollan’s argument. He cites a recent study demonstrating that a single cortical neuron can perform the same functions as an entire deep artificial neural network, a finding he says undermines the premise of AI’s current trajectory. While acknowledging AI’s potential as a tool, Pollan suggests the disparity between the complexity of a single biological neuron and the architecture of even the most advanced AI systems is a significant obstacle.
The book also delves into the historical context of humanity’s diminishing self-regard in the face of scientific progress. Pollan draws on a lineage of thought that traces back to the Copernican revolution, which displaced Earth from the center of the universe, and Darwin’s theory of evolution, which challenged the notion of human exceptionalism. As Pollan notes, this pattern of “deflation” was first articulated not by Sigmund Freud, as is commonly believed, but by 19th-century German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond [Scientific American].
However, Pollan cautions against a romanticized rejection of science. He acknowledges the dangers of misinterpreting scientific revolutions, citing the misappropriation of Darwin’s theories to justify eugenics. He also notes the resistance to questioning AI’s potential within Silicon Valley, where skepticism can be labeled as “specieist.”
Pollan frames the current fervor around AI not as a purely scientific endeavor, but as an economic and even spiritual one. He suggests that the pursuit of artificial intelligence is driven, in part, by a decline in traditional sources of meaning and a desire to recreate human consciousness on a silicon chip. This pursuit, he argues, reflects a belief that there is nothing sacred or divine within us, a worldview increasingly prevalent in both technology and politics.
A World Appears culminates with Pollan’s own meditation in a cave in Santa Fe, a symbolic attempt to confront the limits of human understanding. The book offers no easy answers, but instead, a call for humility in the face of the enduring mystery of consciousness. The question of whether AI can truly replicate the human mind remains open, but Pollan’s work suggests that the more pressing question may be what we lose in the attempt.
