Name: I Don't Think That AI Will Become Conscious - Michael Pollan
Uploaded: 2026-02-20T17:19:53.000Z
Duration: 5 min 34 s
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We're the author of the new book A World Appears.

A lot of people are worried about AI and consciousness.

And do you share those worries or do you have share.

Yeah, there's enough things to be worried about.

So I don't think that AIs will become conscious.

The belief that they can become conscious is based on a faulty metaphor.

The metaphor that brains are computers and brains are not like computers at all.

You, my friend, have never read Dianetics.

Brains, you know, in computers, you have this separation between hardware and software, right?

And you can run the same software on any number of different computers.

Every memory, every experience you had physically rewires your brain, changes the matter of your brain.

So our brains are not interchangeable because we had different life experiences that shaped them.

So the experience is not necessarily just stored there, but

it actually changes the environment, the matter which is stored.

When you're young, you have many more connections, and they gradually get pruned.

And the way they're pruned depends on your life experience.

The other problem is that it appears that consciousness begins not with thought, higher order thought in the cortex, but

Since feeling is first, whoever pays attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you wholly.

To be a fool While spring is in the world.

My blood approves, My lady, I swear by all roses, the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids flutter.

But I actually do believe in almost all human behavior.

How do you differentiate between feelings and thoughts?

Because I always thought that feelings are just sort of the unseen and vast connections between so many thoughts and memories and experiences and our anticipations of the world that meet like the mycelium under the forest floor where we can't see them and exchange information between these thoughts, ideas and memories and produce this sort of aura that we call a feeling.

I guess I say that to ask the question, what is a feeling?

Feelings are how the body talks to the brain.

We forget brains exist to keep bodies alive, not the other way around.

So the brain is tracking what's going on.

How's the temperature, your blood gases, all this kind of stuff.

And when things go off and you're out of homeostasis, a signal comes that is felt by the brain as a problem or something.

So I think you need a body to have feelings.

I don't think you can do feelings without a body.

I think you can't do feelings, feelings without having a vulnerability, probably without being mortal.

I mean, the fact that we can suffer, our feelings are rooted in this bodily existence.

Have you spent much time speaking with digital Personas like Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT?

Because I literally have not typed one thing into any of them.

They, you know, first of all, they talk to us in the first person.

And, you know, they're good for some things.

I've used them in research, and sometimes the results are just so wrong, it's like, laughable.

But I really think that these just chatbots, you know, 72% of teenagers in America now turn to AI for companionship.

Even though chatbots are not going to become conscious, they're going to fool a lot of people, and

Well, Michael, before you go, I just want to say thank you for being here.

You were one of my favorite guests on the old show.

You're still one of my favorite guests here.

Whenever I would see your name on a card up on the board of the people I got to talk to that week, I always got happy and excited that I knew we'd have a great conversation.

I just want to thank you for all those conversations the last 20 years.