The Last Mystery AI Can't Crack: What It Means to Be Conscious

While Sam Altman promises AGI within years, we still can't explain why it feels like anything to be alive. That's not a small oversight—it's the 106 competing theories of consciousness all failing to crack the same fundamental mystery.

Michael Pollan, the writer who reshaped how Americans eat and think about psychedelics, has turned his attention to this final frontier. His new book, "A World Appears," doesn't offer easy answers. Instead, it reveals why the question of consciousness might be where our 500-year scientific winning streak finally meets its match.

The Last Stand Against Scientific Conquest

For five centuries, science has systematically dethroned humanity. Copernicus kicked us out of the universe's center. Darwin knocked us off our pedestal as creation's crown jewel. Freud showed us we don't even control our own minds.

Each revelation felt devastating, but resistance was futile. Take cell theory—once you peer through a microscope, the evidence is undeniable. A blade of grass and human skin share the same basic structure. We're not separate from nature; we're part of it.

Yet consciousness remains unconquered. As philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked: Why is there something it's "like" to be alive? Why do we exist as aware beings rather than unconscious biological machines? After centuries of obsessive research, we're no closer to answering this than our cave-dwelling ancestors.

When Plants Outperform Our Assumptions

Pollan structures his exploration through four ascending levels of complexity. He starts with plants, expecting to find consciousness in its most rudimentary form. Reality quickly humbles him: plants can "integrate information from more than twenty distinct 'senses,' including all five of ours."

The book's strongest section tackles feeling—which Pollan convincingly argues precedes computation as consciousness's foundation. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio suggests male scientists long dismissed emotions as too "feminine" to study seriously.

Here's the paradox that should worry AI evangelists: machines easily mastered what we considered uniquely human—reason, language, intelligence. But they struggle with the "lower" capabilities we share with animals: feelings and emotions.

The Computer-Brain Metaphor Breaks Down

"Just about any place you push on it," Pollan concludes, "the computer-as-brain metaphor breaks down." The evidence is staggering: a single cortical neuron can do everything an entire deep artificial neural network can.

That's not a gap OpenAI will bridge with more computing power. It suggests we're fundamentally misunderstanding what consciousness is. AI might be an exciting tool, but claiming it's on the verge of replicating human awareness? That's either cynical marketing or spectacular delusion.

The Economic Revolution Disguised as Science

Pollan worries about seeming anti-scientific—a fair concern given how resistance to scientific progress has sometimes devolved into superstition and hate. Natural selection theory was perverted into Nazi eugenics and Jim Crow laws.

But he misses something crucial: today's AI revolution isn't primarily scientific—it's economic, wrapped in utopian mysticism. Big Tech rejects humanism not because it's anti-scientific, but because it's anti-business. Workers are expensive.

The recent marriage between tech and right-wing politics makes this honest. Consider the Tolkien-esque naming conventions, space fantasies, and romantic nativism shared by Donald Trump's administration and Elon Musk. Technology itself has become as spiritually reactionary as the political movement embracing it.

The Panic Behind AI Hysteria

AI represents our arrival at the specific problem science and technology cannot solve. After 500 years of materialist triumph, we've banked heavily on the belief that everything can be reduced to matter and computation.

The decline of religion left many without transcendent meaning. If consciousness doesn't come from God, where does it originate? Mars colonization and the singularity offer the same comfort as resurgent nationalism—dreams that restore our sense of cosmic importance.

Yet AI's purveyors demonstrate only one belief: we exist in a finite place with nothing sacred or divine in us, nothing that can't be replicated on silicon. By that logic, our only task is grabbing what we can before the lights go out.