Of all of the top contenders for the hardest problem in science, perhaps the most important to our lived experience is this: What, exactly, is consciousness?
Humans have a highly complex brain and, for some of us at least, even more complex emotions. We can think and feel; we are aware of ourselves. We can create new ideas. But where this awareness comes from is a mystery. And why we feel anything at all about anything is clouded with subjectivity.
“The only tool we have with which to explore consciousness is consciousness itself,” says Michael Pollan, a celebrated science journalist and author of the new book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. This conundrum—and how to potentially solve it—guides Pollan’s examination of consciousness, highlighting both the science and the philosophical dilemma it poses.
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In this episode of Science Quickly, journalist Michael Pollan joins Scientific American’s Bri Kane to unpack why consciousness is so hard to define in a discussion that explores what brain science, artificial intelligence experiments and even psychedelics might reveal about how awareness works.
How we know we are conscious is likely impossible to fully explain using conventional neuroscience research methods such as brain scans, Pollan says. “One of the speculations in the book is that it may take a scientific revolution to really help us,” he says.
There are some 29 competing theories of consciousness. We can trace signs of awareness and emotion in the brain. We can feel certain that we, as thinking individuals, are conscious and can infer that other humans are conscious, too. But, Pollan argues, that’s about it.
One of the major questions Pollan tackles in the book is whether we could ever recognize consciousness in another species or entity. Detecting such a phenomenon in an organism or entity that looks and behaves nothing like a human will be “really hard,” he says. An artificial intelligence, for example, might express consciousness in very different ways than humans do, he adds.
“I don’t think it'll be anything like ours,” he says. “Because ours is very much the product of our bodies and our of our human vulnerability.” One researcher he cites in the book is Mark Solms, whose lab is attempting to develop a conscious AI by making it feel uncertainty and conflicting needs.
“We may have to become kind of plurals of consciousness and stipulate that there are going to be many different kinds,” Pollan says.
Pollan spoke to Scientific American's associate books editor Brianne Kane. You can listen to the podcast interview here.