It’s Pollan Season
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in June 2026.
I am in danger of becoming a fan-girl of Michael Pollan, he who famously said ‘Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ Not because of his stance on food, but to figure out what being alive means. I need to clarify my thoughts in this AI era.
Pollan’s most recent book, A World Appears: a Journey into Consciousness (Penguin, 2026) demonstrates, again, his orderly, self-reflective exploration of a very complex question. He’s no penny-anti journalist, but founder in 2020 and head honcho at the UCBerkley Centre for the Science of Psychedelics, a position which allows him to roam the world and trade thoughts with leading scientists and thinkers.
So what differentiates being alive from not being alive? There’s dead, the easily identifiable state of having lost an essence that signifies life. In police shows, it’s the touch of a finger on the neck: the pulse is the essence. In real life, it’s more complicated.
If the lost essence is not heart pumping, blood flowing, what is it? Pollan traces the foundations of where we are now. (a) Galileo divided the world into primary qualities, objective elements that could be quantified, and secondary qualities, subjective aspects like sensory perceptions. The first he claimed for scientific exploration, and the second he left (a self-preserving move) to philosophers and religion. (b) Descartes, the ‘I think, therefore I am’ guy, likewise, identified ‘matter stuff’ and ‘mind stuff’, the latter which only humans had. This gave him permission to do vivisections (no mind, no feelings) and more generally, for humans to assert dominion over lesser creatures and ruthlessly exploit nature. Pollan concludes ‘By subtracting subjective experience from ‘the real world’, five hundred years of reductive science and philosophical dualism have inadvertently elevated consciousness, unmoored from nature, into something very much like magic.’
Our name for subjective experience is sentience, the ability to perceive and feel things. Which includes a lot more than humans. Plants. Trees. Pets. Octopi. Bacteria. Viruses. Maybe not rocks. Water? Pollan doesn’t discuss it, but we here talk about keeping it healthy and it healing itself….
Because science has clung to the solidarity of ‘matter stuff’ and shied away from the tougher question of how ‘mind stuff’ works, we are not as smart as we need to be to figure out where machines who ‘think’ fit into the matter/mind world. The fundamental, and perhaps existential, question is whether machines that can ‘think’ faster and better than humans can have a conscience.
So what is a conscience? I cannot, in good conscience, say I know the answer (which is why I’m reading the book.) ‘In good conscience’, as that phrase is used, implies an ethical, value-based judgement. Meta-cognition, me thinking about my thoughts. (The very thing Descartes said only humans have, because he wasn’t interested in how trees find water and mycelia send messages and viruses outsmart vaccines.)
The AI guys say they can program their computers to have conscience because they feed it the value-based food they have scraped from the musings of humans. That certainty seems based in ‘As the twig is bend, so grows the tree’, attributed to Alexander Pope in 1732. A twinge of truth, but only just. (C’mon, computer guys, get with the times!!).
What we who live in the real world know is that the land of conscience is a land of unending uncertainty. We hardly ever know for sure that our conscious choices were in fact the right ones. We may even question if, in a reality whose complexity we know we cannot fully comprehend, there is a right choice.
But we also know that we must make choices, that life is a series of choices, each more or less confident and clear. My old friend Paulo Freire, in the first part of his teaching, took a beating from Pollan. Freire says that having an ‘I’ that can ‘do’, identify plus agency, is what differentiates man from lesser creatures, but Pollan demolishes that argument. The second part of Freire’s stance stands, however – that life is a two-step of acting on reflection and reflecting on action. I think that is conscience in action.
And that is, I think, what the smartest AI we can produce cannot do, iterative as it may be. So I don’t think AI can have a conscience.
That said, I haven’t finished Pollan’s book yet, and I haven’t yet got to my main reason for delving in, so there’ll be more.
