Can AI Achieve Consciousness? — With Michael Pollan

23:09Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, no, I read that in the book, and I thought that was like a terrific potential experiment. And, you know, on this question of, you know, how do we know? I think a question came up that is kind of silly, but I'm going to ask it anyway. which is why why are we you know so precious about consciousness only being ours or only being and again like i'm not arguing that llms are conscious but like you know you type you speak with uh llm today and you ask it what are you i'm a large language model what are you doing i'm trying to help you know help you in these things um and you know it seems to me like well what is our obsession with putting this barrier up that like only humans can be conscious where like if you speak with this thing about whether it's self-aware it's clearly self-aware

24:00Michael Pollan:yeah well i'm not limiting consciousness to humans i'm i'm i'm freely i'm giving it to plants as you know as you know having read the book so i'm i'm pretty generous in who i'm willing to share sentience with if not exactly consciousness um so i'm not being stingy about it uh honestly um And I think that's kind of an interesting phenomenon that I talk about in the book, that we are our definition of the human, what's special about us, which has always been related to our intelligence and consciousness, is under enormous pressure today from these thinking machines and possibly feeling machines.

24:40Michael Pollan:And then from all these animals that we're learning are much more conscious than we thought. You know, we always thought we had the monopoly, not just unconsciousness, but tool making and culture and language, and one after another, they're falling. So who are we? And are we more like these animals who can feel and are mortal and can suffer? Or are we more like these thinking machines which speak our language and can talk to us the way we talk to one another? So, you know, whose team are we on? I think it's one of the more fateful questions we face as a species. Yeah.

25:17Big Technology Podcast Host:And it's also, it's interesting because our answer to that question will lead us in some ways to the way that we handle the machines, the ethics of it. Or the ethics toward the animals too. Well, unfortunately, I think our record, and I think you noted this, our record on ethics towards animals and humans is poor. But we have evolved in our thinking once we realized what was actually going on inside the minds and souls of some of the creatures on the planet. For instance, and this is the thing that really struck me as I read, Descartes thought that animals were not feeling. That when you beat them up and they howled, they were only mimicking.

26:01Big Technology Podcast Host:And they weren't actually. It was just noise. Just noise. And then eventually we realized, hey, wait a second. That's wrong. And we shouldn't. you go to jail now if you did what what these experimenters were doing to dogs in the past

26:13Michael Pollan:although he was monkeys all the time well he was dissecting he was dissecting um you know dogs and rabbits without anesthesia because he didn't believe they were conscious and yeah he was wrong and could we be making the same mistake with our machines well um some people think we are and we might. But, you know, the idea we're automatically going to treat them with all this moral consideration because they're conscious. Yeah, that seems... Given the fact we continue to eat animals, we know, we full well know are conscious. I don't know that we're quite as enlightened as that conversation suggests.

26:51Big Technology Podcast Host:So, let's talk about one of those efforts that you do write about in your book, one that is known. It's called, I think, Free Energy Fighter, where these scientists have built an AI that's trying to get back to some form of homeostasis, and they think that because it's trying to do that, it can be conscious. I wasn't very convinced that this was the right approach to take, but I'm curious to hear your perspective on it and what exactly it was.

27:17Michael Pollan:Yeah. So, one of the characters I profile in the book is a really interesting neuroscientist named Mark Soames, and he's from South Africa. He's actually trained as a psychoanalyst, and he is developing a theory of consciousness around feelings. His work grows out of the work of Antonio Damasio, who was really the first in this modern wave of consciousness scientists to make us pay attention to feelings as opposed to thoughts as the basis of consciousness. And Soames wrote a really interesting book called The Hidden Spring, and he makes the case that consciousness begins in the brain stem not in the cortex as people had previously thought and he and he proves this or tries to prove this with uh evidence that people who lack a cortex and some people are born without one nevertheless are conscious so the cortex gets involved in consciousness you know cortex is the evolutionarily most recent advanced part of the brain very you you know, it's human, more human than other parts.

28:20Michael Pollan:And that he says it doesn't really get engaged until late in the process. It starts with a feeling, let's say of hunger, and then the cortex gets involved like, well, I'll book a table at this restaurant, you know, at eight o 'clock, and forms images and counterfactuals and all that cool stuff. You would think, and I thought, that since he was so interested in feelings, he would believe that it was impossible to make a machine that had feelings. But no, I was wrong. And he has assembled a team in South Africa, actually it's an international team, there are people in several continents working together to develop a conscious AI based on his theory.

29:02Michael Pollan:Now his theory is that feelings arise when homeostatic set points are being violated and you need to get back to balance. You're hungry, you're tired, you're thirsty, your blood pressure is too high, whatever. But that many of these feelings can be addressed unconsciously. But when you have two feelings that are in conflict, that's when things become conscious. And so he's trying to create a situation, and it's essentially an avatar in a video game right now. It's not about advanced computation. um they're really working in the idiom of video games um what happens when this avatar is both hungry and tired and has to make a decision which to privilege that uncertainty is where consciousness is born he he defines consciousness very succinctly as felt uncertainty um and so he's trying to make his avatar experience this felt uncertainty.

30:07Michael Pollan:I asked him, well, would these feelings be real or artificial? And he said, well, they're feelings in the context of the game. So, they're simulation. But he said, for the avatar, they're real. So, I found this all kind of unsatisfying, interesting, but unsatisfying. So, that's That's the way he's going about it. I've asked other people who are pretty knowledgeable computer scientists. Nobody seemed to think large language models are the way to go toward consciousness. But people envision future models of AI that are very different and combine different modules and a large language model would just be one module.

30:54Michael Pollan:And as Blake Lemoine said, you know, Lambda, which was the one he was dealing with, is more than a large language model. It had other modules, too. But I've talked to people and I've said, well, why would it be useful? How could you monetize consciousness? Why are you bothering, except as an intellectual experiment? and some people have said that well in the same way consciousness helps us solve problems in a unique way having a module that could reflect on itself and would possibly help you get to AGI and that one theory of consciousness is the global workspace and the idea there is that there's tons of work there's tons of things modules in your brain going about their business they compete for attention in this workspace.

31:45Michael Pollan:And certain very important information that needs to be broadcast to the whole brain so it can take action, burst ignites into this workspace. And then that's the contents of consciousness. They feel that you could create an AI that had a similar sort of competition for attention and consciousness would be useful in that context. So, you know, we'll see. I mean, right. You know, we could have a bet. Yeah.

32:17Big Technology Podcast Host:I mean, again, like I'm just throwing these arguments out here. I want to like be able to look at this argument from all different sides. And I think the best argument against this video game, it's not perfect, but it does the trick was, I think you brought it up, that a thermostat basically has a set point and works really hard to get into equilibrium when it's out of that. And so it's not conscious. I think we would all agree, not conscious. Yeah.

32:44Michael Pollan:Although I talked to people who said, well, that's the basement. That's the bottom of consciousness. You start with the thermostat and build up from there.

32:54Big Technology Podcast Host:So I think just to conclude this segment, we've covered a lot of ground, but the things that I would say is, you know, if you are a believer that machines can be conscious, I think right now, clearly it's not there. But a lot of these objections seem to be things that maybe, maybe the tech industry over time, maybe in decades can get to this fear of mortality, they can develop a desire. In fact, we already know there's a desire that they don't oftentimes want their values overwritten. They don't want to be shut off. That's what Lambda said to Lemoine, This idea of having this familiarity, right?

33:30Big Technology Podcast Host:The propx of that too. Exactly. And a familiarity being able to like, well, a long context window will certainly build familiarity with someone. The emotions that you see when you're in person with someone. Well, these things will develop avatars and computer vision. You know, may one day be able to give them an experience where they're seeing our reactions as well. Whether we want to allow them to or not, I don't know. but i i think that it's it's sort of this work on whether consciousness what consciousness is and whether machines can achieve it is certainly going to be is foundational now and will be very important moving forward as we start yeah i would just add questions more and more anything's

34:11Michael Pollan:possible given enough time and work that's right um so anything anything though i don't know there some things yeah but i mean yeah yeah i mean it would take a very different architecture i think and you know there are talk about neuromorphic computers we also have we're building brain organelles in in uh solution um i think they've got a shot at becoming conscious um they're working from up from you know actual brain cells forming organisms together i mean there's a lot of a lot of things could happen, definitely. And I'm obviously not talking about the longest time horizon imaginable.

34:51Big Technology Podcast Host:No, I think it's good to have some real science about what we're seeing today, which I think you've provided in large quantities, which is much appreciated.

35:00Michael Pollan:Good. And I should also point out that I'm not very sophisticated on the topic of computers or AI, that I basically have had to... I wasn't expecting to write about AI and consciousness, but after 2022 and ChatGPT kind of burst into awareness, the question started, and Blake Lemoine, actually, who put it on the agenda, I think, for me and a lot of other people, I realized I couldn't write a book about consciousness without delving into this, and that it was really a very interesting phenomenon. Right. And, you know, I came out where I did, and that may reflect my biases, probably does. Most arguments do.

35:43Michael Pollan:I mean, seeing the world is made of information is definitely, you can see how that might be the bias of someone steeped in computers.

35:53Big Technology Podcast Host:Definitely. Yeah, no, and that's why I think taking those theses and bringing them outside of the tech world is important. So when I saw the concept of your book come into my inbox, I said, we got to have a show about this because it's going to be front and center in this world. So on the other side of this break, I definitely want to cover maybe some non-tech stuff, maybe about how consciousness and religion might intersect. And you brought up that you started with plants. So we got to talk a little bit about plants and we'll do that right after this. If a driver in your fleet got in an accident tomorrow, could you prove what actually happened?

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37:19Big Technology Podcast Host:That's samsara.com slash big tech. Samsara. Operate smarter. You want to eat better, but you have zero time and zero energy to make it happen. Factor doesn't ask you to meal prep or follow recipes. It just removes the entire problem. Two minutes, you get real food, and you are done. So remember that time where you wanted to cook healthy but just ran out of time? You're not failing at healthy eating. You're failing at having three extra hours every night. Factor is already made by chefs, designed by dietitians, and delivered to your door. Inside, there are lean proteins, colorful vegetables, and healthy fats.

37:54Big Technology Podcast Host:It's the stuff that you'd make at home if you had the time. There's also this new muscle pro collection for strength in recovery. You always get fresh and never frozen food. It's ready in two minutes and there's no prep, no cleanup and no mental load. Head to factormeals.com slash bigtech50off and use code bigtech50off to get 50 % off your first factor box plus free breakfast for one year. The offer is only valid for new factor customers with the code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase. Make healthier eating easy with factor. and we're back here on big technology podcast with michael pollan he's the author of the new book out this week a world appears journey into consciousness uh i think again great book there's one interesting thing in the book many interesting things but one that i seized on where you said that i think what is it the belief uh uh in consciousness is an escape hatch for materialism and that's the other side of the um thing that i brought up earlier this belief that everything is Well, if you believe everything is not computable and everything is not information, then this thought, this idea of consciousness is actually, you know, quite refreshing because it is something that it doesn't just simply doesn't play by the rules of our traditional materialism.

39:06Michael Pollan:It doesn't seem to. You know, people have been trying to do what has worked everywhere else in science, which is reduce phenomenon to mass, you know, to matter and energy. And it's been an incredibly productive strategy, but it doesn't seem to work yet with consciousness. And the effort to reduce it to things we know hasn't really worked. And it's a tremendous challenge to scientific materialism, which is sometimes called physicalism, because that framework has not allowed us to understand consciousness. Now, again, might it at some point in the future? Sure, we shouldn't rule that out. But I also think we have to, as some consciousness scientists have come to this point of, well, maybe we need to look beyond physicalism.

39:57Michael Pollan:And I profile Christophe Koch, who's been working on consciousness since the late 80s. He was kind of working with Francis Crick, who had won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix DNA. DNA, and he unlocked the mystery of heredity, which is, you know, quite an achievement. Then he turned his attention to consciousness. He was gonna crack that using the same reductive science techniques. He worked with Christophe Koch for many years, and, you know, they were trying to isolate the neural correlates of consciousness. Could they find the neurons in the brain responsible for conscious experience?

40:37Michael Pollan:experience. And Koch realized at a certain point that that really wouldn't explain anything. That would give you a correlation at best. But subjective experience is subjective, and how can you explain that in terms of anything objective? And this is the hard problem, what David Chalmers called the hard problem. so um it's a unique problem um i think that there is some wish fulfillment that we we have something that is immaterial that therefore might survive the mortal body i i think behind a lot of people's talk about consciousness is the word soul even though it's not articulated but what is the soul It's also this immaterial essence of us that is indestructible.

41:27Michael Pollan:So I think there's a little wishful thinking around consciousness that maybe it's immortal in some ways. And I don't go there, but I think a lot of people do. And we're looking for something that transcends this material world. And could it be consciousness? Now, there are theories of consciousness that are not materialist in the sense, well, actually, I shouldn't say that. They're materialist, but they stipulate a different matter. I'm thinking of panpsychism, which is the idea, philosophical idea, that everything has some itsy-bitsy quotient of consciousness to it, every particle, every wave.

42:12Michael Pollan:And somehow, Now, so that consciousness doesn't come into the world, it precedes us. And somehow, yes, these particles come together, these mini-consciousness come together and create the big consciousness we are. But that combination problem, how you get from conscious bits and pieces to us, is another hard problem. And there are other ideas that consciousness is a universal field that we channel, and that our brains are indispensable, but only in the way that a radio or TV receiver is indispensable. And that's, you know, a kind of idealism. So all I'm suggesting is our failures to explain consciousness in material terms, given the science we have, you know, makes you think, well, we should at least keep an open mind for some of these seemingly weird and crazy ideas.

43:09Right.

43:10Big Technology Podcast Host:And I do think that you can't talk about consciousness without the spiritual. In fact, one of the questions I wrote down was, if we do solve consciousness with computing, does some of the mystery of the world go away? If that becomes computable? And you can even flip that statement, and you could say, because of the fact that consciousness is so mysterious, the spiritual can't exist. the spiritual can't exist can can exist yeah i think to me where a spiritualism would reside

43:45Michael Pollan:in that mystery see yeah but that's a definition of spiritualism that um i'm not sure is is mine um that's that's i it's basically suggesting something supernatural exists to me spiritual experience and this this grows out of my experience with psychedelics is more about transcending the self and merging with something larger. Now, for some people, that's the divine, and it's something magical. But for other people, it's just nature or other people or love. So, it depends on your definition of the spiritual. But I do think the hardness of the hard problem nourishes certain kinds of spiritual thinking, that we've got something here that cannot be reduced to the usual categories.

44:34Michael Pollan:And that may well be true. Yeah.

44:37Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, no, I mean, I think that with spiritualism, it can be a bunch of different sides of the same coin. I guess it could be belief in the supernatural, or you could find it, you know, sometimes that's a way of saying that there is something greater than just the individual.

44:53Michael Pollan:Yeah, that's true. Yeah, something bigger than what we can perceive as individuals. I always find that the tension in my mind is between spirituality and egotism. And to the extent you can reduce egotism, whether through psychedelics, but also experiences of art, experiences of awe, all of which kind of shrink the eye in a way that can feel really good, that that is, to me, the door to spiritual experience.

45:21Big Technology Podcast Host:Do you think, so let's just go through this route one more time. Do you think that if consciousness is solved or the hard problem is solved, what do you think that does to this concept of religion and spirituality?

45:39Michael Pollan:It depends on how it's solved.

45:40Big Technology Podcast Host:It would have a huge impact. So talk through a little bit about what those impacts could be.

45:45Michael Pollan:It could nourish our sense of an animate world. Let's say something like panpsychism is proven. and then we realized that, oh my God, consciousness is not a human thing. It's a universal thing. It's in everything. That could nourish a new religious conception. And I say new, but actually more like religion pre-monotheism, right? Where everybody was an animist, right? Everything had much more life to it than we believe. We've kind of knocked that out of, You know, I think it's the default human perspective to see life everywhere. Children certainly have it, right? They're all animists until we knock it out of them in school.

46:29Michael Pollan:And so, you could see a return to a more spiritual or religious world, or if it's solved by, you know, understanding some activity, some behavior of neurons or some emergent property of neurons organized in a certain way, but really prove it, not just say it's emergent, because that's just abracadabra. Then you could come up with a material explanation that would demystify the world even further. So, I think a lot hangs on that discovery. Absolutely. It would be one of those identity-changing discoveries.

47:13Big Technology Podcast Host:Right. And in fact, this was something, the reason why we have so much study of this now, and we didn't beforehand, is, okay, of course, science has advanced. But as you point out in the book, this was something that was left to the church, this idea of consciousness. science you know back when science started making some real breakthroughs said we'll take we'll take everything outside of this and now we'll take everything measurable and quantifiable

47:40Michael Pollan:and and the church you can have everything subjective and qualitative that was galileo's deal and descartes to some extent and it was a very pragmatic deal but it's left us with a science that's ill-equipped to study what they left by the roadside which is to say subjectivity and you know the interesting thing too is can we redefine science in a way that makes it easier to study consciousness? And there are people who argue with, I mean, I talked to philosophers, Evan Thompson, it's somebody in particular, author of an amazing book called The Blind Spot. And he says the blind spot of science is its inability to deal with lived human experience.

48:19Michael Pollan:And it just doesn't value that. So, for example, it doesn't value the experience of the color red, red, which it sees as just a frequency of light, and that red is a construct of the mind, and therefore we ignore it. No, it's a construct of the mind. That's fucking incredible. Why are we looking at that? And he's basically saying the experience of red in the minds of humans is a phenomenon of nature that deserves as much attention as electromagnetism.

48:52Big Technology Podcast Host:By the way, Galileo never should have agreed to that deal because it ultimately didn't work out very well for him. Yeah, it's true. It's true. It was a good try, but it probably saved a

49:00Michael Pollan:lot of other scientists from trouble. Okay.

49:03Big Technology Podcast Host:Well, I'm glad that they turned out okay. Lastly, let's talk a little bit about psychedelics and plants, because that seems to be where this emerged from. I picked up the book and I was like, so did Michael just like do a lot of mushrooms and start talking to plants and then ask what consciousness is? And I wasn't that far off.

49:23Michael Pollan:No, you weren't. I mean, one of the inspirations for the book was the experiments with psychedelics I did for how to change your mind. And, you know, I'm not unusual. Lots of people who do psychedelics start like having trippy thoughts about consciousness. And the reason is that psychedelics smudge this windshield that's normally perfectly transparent between us and the world that we were talking about at the beginning. And suddenly you realize there's a windshield. and why is it this way and not that? And you defamiliarize consciousness to yourself. There are other ways to do that. Meditation does that too.

50:00Michael Pollan:Certain experiences of art do that too. Specifically with regard to plants, I did have this experience in which the plants in my garden, and I had taken mushrooms and I was in my garden in Connecticut, seemed aware. They seemed aware of me. They seemed like they were returning my gaze. They were more alive than they had ever been. And afterwards, I dismissed this as your usual drug-addled, you know, psychedelic insight. But I also thought, well, let's see if we can test this against another way of knowing. Because I had talked to people who said, what do I do with psychedelic insights? Should I believe them?

50:42Michael Pollan:Should I dismiss them? And actually, William James talked about this with regard to mystical experiences. He said, we don't know enough to say whether they're true or false. The challenge is to, one, how useful are these ideas? And two, can you corroborate them with other ways of knowing, i.e. science? So I went down this rabbit hole and found this community of botanists who call themselves plant neurobiologists, in full knowledge that there are no neurons involved, and that they're doing really interesting experiments that show that plants are a lot more intelligent than we thought and perhaps also sentient, which I should distinguish from consciousness because sentience is a kind of more basic kind of consciousness.

51:28Michael Pollan:It's just awareness of your environment, ability to tell positive from negative changes and deal with them. Lots of creatures have that, that. Single-celled creatures have that. And it may be just a property of life. And consciousness is how we do sentience. We've elaborated in various ways that we've discussed. So I learned about some incredible capabilities of plants that they can see, so that they're vines that actually change their leaf form to mimic the leaves of the plant they're colonizing. They can hear. If you play the sound of caterpillars munching, they will produce chemicals to repel those caterpillars and also alert other plants in the neighborhood.

52:16Michael Pollan:They can recognize self from other in a pot, and they'll share nutrients with related plants in a pot and not with other plants that are not related. Same species, but not kin. I mean, they can hear the sound of water in a pipe and will send their roots over there to see if they can crack in. They're incredibly capable and intelligent, and they're not doing everything automatically by any means. The other thing that kind of blew my mind was you can anesthetize plants.

52:49Big Technology Podcast Host:That was the cry. I was going to say you can put them under anesthesia was the thing that literally goes like, what? Now, what does that mean for a plant?

52:55Michael Pollan:Well, if you have a snapping, a carnivorous plant or a sensitive plant, You know, things that have a behavior you can see, the behaviors will not happen under anesthetic. And the same chemicals that put us out, which, by the way, we don't understand how they work on us, too. Some of them are totally inert chemicals like xenon gas that shouldn't react with us at all, but somehow put us out. So, if a plant has two states of being, awake and asleep, then you can say it is like something to be that plant when it's awake that's different than what it is when it's asleep. At least that's the argument.

53:39Michael Pollan:And it's a tough one to refute. So, I'm not ready to say plants are conscious, but I think sentience, I think we can make that case. And I think maybe that's a property of all living things.

53:54Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, the last thing I'll say here, and then we can wrap, is just the thing that really struck me was you talked about how plants, if you watch them sped up, they can show real intent. For instance, there's a bean sprout that doesn't just kind of flail about to try to find something. it sees a branch and it makes a beeline for it twisting like a whip effectively and you told this story where i think this is there's an alien civilization that comes down to humans but they're just real sped up so we're moving so slowly they feel they can do whatever they want to us

54:27Michael Pollan:exactly what we do perspective of speed yeah so we all you know every creature lives in its own dimension of space and time and we live in a different dimension of time than plants they're very slow from our point of view and therefore we don't give them a lot of credit um but as this as this story makes clear another species another alien species could look at us and if they were sped up the way we are relative to plants they would basically um smoke us and turn us into

54:58Big Technology Podcast Host:jerky for the ride home well i hope they're on on our same speed and uh and we can we can just be friends with the aliens like we might be with the computers who knows let us try let's try all right the book is a world appears Michael first of all thank you for taking that uh mushroom trip I'm glad it sparked the book and thank you for coming on the show to speak about it great thank you Alex it was a pleasure it was great all right everybody thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next time on big technology podcast

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