The Creation of Life Might Have Been a Mere Accident, but Not That of Consciousness

Interview With Michael Pollan, Author of A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness

Do you think consciousness is a biological accident or an evolutionary inevitability – something the universe “does” whenever conditions allow it?

I mean, the honest answer is that I don’t know. We don’t know. It’s impossible to know. I tend to think it evolved from the fact that as soon as you have life, you have the preconditions for consciousness. As soon as you have life, you need awareness of your environment, the ability to judge good and bad changes in it, and the ability to move toward one and away from the other.

Consciousness may be a property of life, or sentience. Let me draw this distinction: sentience is a more basic, simple form of consciousness that may be shared by all living things. Consciousness is how higher animals express sentience. It has more complexity, interiority, a sense of self, and not just awareness, but awareness of awareness.

That’s my best guess based on my research, but it’s not out of the question that consciousness is a property of the universe. What I’m suggesting is that it wouldn’t have been a mere accident. It grew out of the original accident – the creation of life.

Do you think modern neuroscience is too committed to materialism to see alternative explanations for consciousness? Or do historical cases like the CIA’s MK‑Ultra program suggest that research in this direction has never truly ceased?

We don’t really know what MKUltra discovered, if anything, about consciousness. They destroyed most of the records, so it’s very hard to guess. The official line was “Nothing to see here,” but do you believe the CIA?

I think modern neuroscience needs to keep a very open mind and explore alternatives. It approaches the study of consciousness with the assumption that the brain generates it – and that has not been proven. That alone argues for considering other possibilities. Materialism is such an orthodoxy in modern science that it’s hard to see beyond it, but you’re starting to see a handful of scientists question it. Materialism as a paradigm, powerful as it is, is beginning to totter a bit.

The example in the book is Christof Koch, who was once a committed materialist and is now exploring the idea that consciousness may exist outside the brain. The alternative, of course, is that consciousness is a field or something that exists outside the brain, which the brain channels – like a radio or television receiver.

And the evidence would look the same either way: you still need brain structures to channel consciousness or generate it. So the question becomes, how could you prove that experimentally?

Modern neuroscience should be more open to other ideas. In the same way, physicists are very open to many seemingly wacky ideas – for example, that a new universe is created every second. And entanglement, of course. It’s very interesting: they don’t have a stable paradigm, so they tend to be more open‑minded. I think biologists need to start thinking that way too.

I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s line – “Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know?” If we look beyond the humor of the paradox, do you think we are ultimately limited in our search for truth by the very boundaries of our own consciousness? Are we destined to never fully step outside the mind that is trying to understand itself?

I think Woody Allen is onto something, whether he knows it or not. One of the themes of this book is the limitations of modern science and the fact that the only tool we have to understand or explore consciousness is consciousness itself. We can never step outside that loop; there is no external, objective perspective we can attain.

We have to remember that science is a manifestation of consciousness. What we choose to measure, the tools we use, the problems we set for ourselves – all of these are products of human consciousness. So the idea that we can ever attain a God‑like view is foolish, but we often forget this.

We are in a kind of labyrinth when it comes to studying consciousness. It doesn’t mean we can’t learn anything, but some things will be very hard to learn. Astronomy and cosmology are in the same situation. You can’t step outside the cosmos to study the universe. Yet we can learn a great deal from within: we use telescopes, we calculate the age of the universe and its rate of expansion – all from the inside. But we can’t get outside, and there are big questions we can’t answer for that reason.

How should we interpret experiments showing learning and memory in plants – as evidence of proto‑consciousness, or as sophisticated but unconscious information processing?

In the case of plants, I would use the word sentience. I wouldn’t use the word consciousness. I think they have a very simple awareness of their environment compared to ours. When you hear the phrase “plant consciousness,” you imagine plants having experiences, an interior life, and a subjective point of view. I think it’s simpler than that.

It’s very hard to determine this with certainty. The scientists I interviewed use various criteria – for example, the fact that anesthetics that make us unconscious also stop behavior in plants. If you give an anesthetic to a Venus flytrap, it will not react when a bug crosses its threshold. So you have to ask: what is lost when you anesthetize a plant? What is that quality? In animals, we would call it consciousness, but in plants it seems to be some form of awareness or alertness that is temporarily suspended. What exactly is that quality?

These are questions we don’t yet have experimental answers to. Another avenue is looking at sleep. Do plants sleep? There is evidence that they meet the criteria for sleep, which suggests two states of being – and what is that other state, if not sentience?

Do you believe that consciousness is strictly bounded by the lifespan of the organism that hosts it – or is there any sense in which consciousness might extend, persist, or transform beyond the biological frame that generates it?

Once again, the honest answer is that I don’t know – and nobody knows. These are impossible questions to answer. If you take the idea that consciousness exists outside of us and that we channel it in some way, or that we are what some philosophers call “altars of consciousness,” then yes – after death, we melt back into the ocean of consciousness. Not as individuals, but as part of that larger field.

Or it may be that consciousness flickers out as soon as we die, and that it depends on having a body. When the body dies, that flicker of awareness disappears as well. These are fascinating questions, and I explore them in the book, but anyone giving you a definitive answer doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Do you believe AI can ever develop anything resembling true self‑consciousness, or will it always remain a highly sophisticated extension of human‑designed technology – impressive, complex, but ultimately still technology?

Yeah, I tend to believe that’s the case. Computers as we know them – silicon‑based machines – may eventually be replaced by other kinds of systems. People talk about neuromorphic computers that incorporate nerve cells, or quantum computers, and those might change the equation. But if you take computers as they exist right now, I don’t think they can become conscious.

There are a couple of reasons. One is that the belief in conscious computers is based on a false metaphor: the idea that the brain is a kind of computer. It’s a powerful metaphor, rarely questioned, but it’s not a very good one. In computers, there is a sharp distinction between hardware and software. In Silicon Valley’s dreams of conscious machines, consciousness is treated as software. But in actual brains, there is no distinction between hardware and software. Every memory is a physical change in the brain. Every experience reshapes it. Our brains are shaped by our life experiences – your computer is not. If your computer changed physically every time something happened to it, you would throw it out.

So the idea that you could extract consciousness and put it on silicon is based on an impossibility. You can’t separate the brain from consciousness. Even within the materialist paradigm, this critique holds – and there are more radical critiques one could make.

Another flawed metaphor is that transistors are like neurons. It’s true that they fire or don’t fire, but neurons exist in a bath of chemicals that influence their behavior in analog ways. They’re also influenced by brain waves and oscillations, which are analog as well. The idea that you could replace neurons with transistors one by one and eventually achieve consciousness in a computer – that’s a thought experiment David Chalmers has proposed, but neurons are not one‑to‑one with transistors. A single neuron can connect to ten thousand others. That’s certainly not true of transistors.

People who believe AI can be conscious rely on a view called computational functionalism – the idea that what brains do is essentially compute information. I think they do much more than that. What do you do about feeling? There’s a lot of evidence that consciousness begins not with thought, but with feeling that comes from the body. Hunger, cold, an itch – the body’s need to get the brain’s attention. That may be the origin of consciousness. So you may need a body. Consciousness may be embodied. And that means we’ll have to wait for very sophisticated robots before we can have this conversation again.

Your question at the beginning suggested whether we can simulate consciousness – and yes, we can. That’s very different from creating it. We’ve already done that. Many people believe that systems like ChatGPT or Claude are conscious, and they act on that belief. It’s not surprising for two reasons. First, we anthropomorphize everything – it’s a human bias. Second, these systems speak to us in the first person, in our own language. Of course we think they’re conscious. It’s very easy to fool us.

But there’s a key point we often overlook. Anil Seth has noted that AlphaFold – another product from Anthropic, a brilliant piece of technology that can simulate protein folding and has led to the discovery of many new proteins – is not considered conscious. And that’s because it doesn’t talk to us in our language.

Do you remember the very first thing that inspired you to explore consciousness? And have you managed since then to answer a question that has continued to trouble you – or does it still remain unresolved for you today?

What inspired me were the experiences I had with psychedelics while working on my previous book, How to Change Your Mind. Psychedelic experience defamiliarizes consciousness – it lets you see it at a distance, with an awareness you don’t normally have. Most of the time our consciousness is perfectly transparent. We simply assume we’re seeing the world directly. But when you take psychedelics, you smudge the windshield through which you experience reality, and suddenly you realize there is a windshield. You begin to wonder: what is it? Why is it there? What is this thing mediating my relationship to reality? That’s what inspired me.

I’ve learned a lot more since then, but I can’t say I’ve answered the question of how consciousness comes to be – how you get from matter to mind, if that’s even the right question. When I started, I assumed the problem was how you get from the brain to subjective experience, which is how I define consciousness. Now I realize there’s a big assumption built into that: that brains generate consciousness. And we don’t actually know that. In a sense, I know less than when I started. But I’ve learned that these questions are more thorny and fundamental than I first believed.

I learned a lot, and the reader learns a lot in this book, but if you’re expecting an airtight theory of how consciousness emerges, you’ll have to look elsewhere. I’ve told people – and I say this in the book – that you may know less at the end of the book than you did at the beginning. But there’s value in recognizing the full shape of the mystery.

And the beginning is earlier than we thought. I used to think the beginning was the question of how brains produce consciousness. That’s not the beginning.

There’s a popular belief that humans use only about 4% of their brains – of their brain’s potential or capacity. Do you think there is any truth to that? And if so, what are the other 96% for? What are they used for?

Yes. What’s interesting about consciousness is that it represents the tip of an iceberg. Brains are doing many other things. They’re not just remembering everything that has happened to you – though that’s in there somewhere. Their main job is managing your body, and they do that constantly. They take in information, adjust your heart rate, your blood gases, your digestion. It’s a huge job. Bodies don’t exist to keep brains alive; brains exist to keep bodies alive. Managing the body is a big part of that “96 percent,” or whatever the number is.

The more interesting question is: we can automate so many things, and we do so many things without thinking. So why do we have to be conscious of anything? Why does any of it need to happen in the light rather than in the dark?

The best reasons I’ve found – and they’re just theories – are that to navigate a complicated social world, where you need to predict what other people are thinking, saying, and doing, you can’t automate that. It’s too complex. There are too many variables. Instinct will fail you. Consciousness is for situations like that, when the environment and its demands are so acute that you need to make decisions and imagine what’s going on in someone else’s mind.

So it’s the reverse of the usual question. We can focus on the 96 percent, but the real question is: why do we even have the 4 percent? Those numbers are hers, not mine – I don’t know what the real numbers are, and I don’t think anyone does.

Your senses are constantly taking in information, and your brain is acting on it without your awareness. It’s amazing how much happens without thought. We have unconscious biases that make decisions for us and create intuitions. We have feelings – and there’s a constant flow of information coming from the body. We’re only aware of a tiny bit of it, usually when something needs our attention: hunger, cold, discomfort. Otherwise, the body handles it. It shivers, opens pores, closes pores – whatever is needed.

So yes, the real question is: why are we conscious at all?

Interview by Vladimir Tsankov