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Summer Travel Plans Soured by War-Linked Airfare Hikes
Flying got more expensive after the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran caused a huge dent in global oil shipments. Hawaiʻi travelers are rethinking vacation plans.
Phillies' Rafael Marchan: Mashes second homer
Phillies' Rafael Marchan: Mashes second homer
New 'Spyro' game gets release window, brand-new flight feature
The "Spyro" games are about to fly to new heights.
Clockwork Revolution: Burlesque, Bullets, and Butterfly Effects
On behalf of the team at inXile entertainment, I’m thrilled to share more of Clockwork Revolution — our time-bending first-person action RPG set in the steampunk city of Avalon, with a cast of unforgettable characters, and a world that reacts deeply to every choice you make. We’re hard at work on the game and can’t wait for you to play it next year.
Blue Jays' Max Scherzer: On track to start Wednesday
Blue Jays' Max Scherzer: On track to start Wednesday
Diamondbacks' Ildemaro Vargas: Out of lineup again
Diamondbacks' Ildemaro Vargas: Out of lineup again
Brewers' Christian Yelich: Held out of lineup Sunday
Brewers' Christian Yelich: Held out of lineup Sunday
Pirates' Oneil Cruz: Not starting Sunday
Pirates' Oneil Cruz: Not starting Sunday
Royals' Salvador Perez: Getting another rest day
Royals' Salvador Perez: Getting another rest day
Tigers' Casey Mize: Rehab start slated for Tuesday
Tigers' Casey Mize: Rehab start slated for Tuesday
Guardians' Brayan Rocchio: Clouts homer in win
Guardians' Brayan Rocchio: Clouts homer in win
Cubs' Ryan Rolison: Earns fifth win Saturday
Cubs' Ryan Rolison: Earns fifth win Saturday
Mets' Sean Manaea: Set for bulk-relief appearance
Mets' Sean Manaea: Set for bulk-relief appearance
Pigeons are famous long-distance flyers. And apparently the liver could be their GPS
From wartime messages to love letters, pigeons have carried our mail for centuries. A new study suggests the secret to how they find their way might be hiding in an unexpected place: the liver.
Angels' Christian Moore: Logging time in LF, at third base
Angels' Christian Moore: Logging time in LF, at third base
Flying with cannabis? TSA's new guidance comes with a major health warning
The TSA has updated medical marijuana guidelines, but experts warn against using cannabis on flights due to health effects at altitude.
Rockies' Zach Agnos: Takes loss Saturday
Rockies' Zach Agnos: Takes loss Saturday
Athletics' Kade Morris: Hit hard in MLB debut
Athletics' Kade Morris: Hit hard in MLB debut
Marlins' Lake Bachar: Perfect as opener Saturday
Marlins' Lake Bachar: Perfect as opener Saturday
Nationals' Brad Lord: Slams door for six-out save
Nationals' Brad Lord: Slams door for six-out save
Pirates' Braxton Ashcraft: Stumbles in third loss
Pirates' Braxton Ashcraft: Stumbles in third loss
Brewers' Luis Rengifo: Riding pine Saturday
Brewers' Luis Rengifo: Riding pine Saturday
Orioles' Samuel Basallo: Not in Saturday's lineup
Orioles' Samuel Basallo: Not in Saturday's lineup
Pair of performances set for Holbrook Island Sanctuary
Multitalented artist and dramatic performer Firefly the Hybrid will perform a free show at the Holbrook Island Sanctuary State Park on Saturday, June 20, at 3 p.m.
Athletics' Brent Rooker: Goes yard in return to lineup
Athletics' Brent Rooker: Goes yard in return to lineup
Mariners' Colt Emerson: Goes yard again Friday
Mariners' Colt Emerson: Goes yard again Friday
Homer-happy Giants provide challenge for Ben Brown, Cubs
Homer-happy Giants provide challenge for Ben Brown, Cubs
Dodgers' Tyler Gough: Shining so far at Single-A
Dodgers' Tyler Gough: Shining so far at Single-A
Sports’ most depressing team, plus the Knicks take a 2-0 Finals lead
The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox. Good morning! At least the weather is nice in Orange County today. Coming up: 🫠 The hopeless Angels 🏀 Knicks in the driver’s seat 🎾 A historic title bid Has your team ever had the second-worst farm system in baseball, sat in last place, trailed 7-0 at home against a team that lost 119 games a year ago, and then gone down more when your right fielder missed a fly ball with his glove and volleyed it over the wall with his head for a home...
Mets' Christian Scott: Earns second win Friday
Mets' Christian Scott: Earns second win Friday
Brewers' Trevor Megill: Earns win despite blown save
Brewers' Trevor Megill: Earns win despite blown save
Liberty finding their stride with test from Fever next
The New York Liberty have brushed off three consecutive losses by securing their first three-game winning streak under new head coach Chris DeMarco.
Cardinals' Quinn Mathews: Authors best start of season
Cardinals' Quinn Mathews: Authors best start of season
Cardinals' Cooper Hjerpe: Kicking off rehab assignment
Cardinals' Cooper Hjerpe: Kicking off rehab assignment
Mets' Jorge Polanco: Will not be activated this weekend
Mets' Jorge Polanco: Will not be activated this weekend
New ‘Crimson Desert’ Patch Adds A Dragon Alternative, Better Battles
Crimson Desert has a new patch that adds a flying mount, and has improved battles across the landscape of the game.
Pirates eager to continue power streak in clash vs. Braves
Pirates eager to continue power streak in clash vs. Braves
Wall St Week Ahead Blockbuster SpaceX IPO set to test high-flying US stocks rally
The long-awaited, massive SpaceX initial public offering is expected next week, a major event for the U.S. stock market, with investors wary of possible overexuberance after a stunning rally.
Scientists warn Trump plan to axe US ocean monitoring system will leave world ‘flying blind’
Experts say dismantling the ocean observation system will ‘severely degrade’ the accuracy of weather predictions
SpaceX IPO: Why Starship Could End Overnight Business Travel
Why some investors see SpaceX’s future in challenging Boeing and Airbus — as well as the airline industry — by flying Starship point-to-point across Earth.
After big offensive effort, Giants look to quell Cubs' momentum
The San Francisco Giants have put together some stellar offensive efforts in the past week, while the Chicago Cubs are hoping a dramatic rally will change their recent fortunes.
Diamondbacks' Ketel Marte: Crushes walk-off homer
Diamondbacks' Ketel Marte: Crushes walk-off homer
Astros' Kai-Wei Teng: Takes fourth loss
Astros' Kai-Wei Teng: Takes fourth loss
Braves' Chris Sale: Takes fourth loss Thursday
Braves' Chris Sale: Takes fourth loss Thursday
Cubs' Edward Cabrera: Expected to start Friday
Cubs' Edward Cabrera: Expected to start Friday
Golden Knights' Brayden McNabb: Goes to hospital
Golden Knights' Brayden McNabb: Goes to hospital
Voting rights group urge Florida Supreme Court to put new congressional lines on hold
Plaintiffs say corrective action can still take place before qualification begins on Monday.
One Seahawks CB to watch during the 2026 preseason
Dansby’s ball skills, toughness and smarts are earning him picks but flying under the radar in his first month of offseason activity with the Seahawks
Vikings' Trayvon Rudolph: Bound for Minnesota
Vikings' Trayvon Rudolph: Bound for Minnesota
Giants' Caleb Kilian: Puts out fire for fourth save
Giants' Caleb Kilian: Puts out fire for fourth save
Dodgers on Deck: Friday, June 5 vs. Angels
The Dodgers are back home ever so briefly, with a single-series homestand this weekend against the Angels at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Back in Anaheim from May 15-17, the Dodgers had their way with the Angels in a three-game sweep, outscoring the Halos 31-3. The Angels come to Los Angeles having lost 29 of […]
Astros' Cesar Salazar: DFA'd by Astros
Astros' Cesar Salazar: DFA'd by Astros
Velociraptor’s cousin flew like a flying squirrel
Four 'wings' helped the crow-sized avian dinosaur glide.
Yankees' Giancarlo Stanton: Ruled out for road trip
Yankees' Giancarlo Stanton: Ruled out for road trip
Guardians' Patrick Bailey: Exiting starting nine
Guardians' Patrick Bailey: Exiting starting nine
Brewers' Chad Patrick: Tosses four shutout frames
Brewers' Chad Patrick: Tosses four shutout frames
Red Sox's Willson Contreras: Sparks big inning Wednesday
Red Sox's Willson Contreras: Sparks big inning Wednesday
Lower Burrell taps intern for business outreach, hopes to improve Leechburg Road corridor
Armed with a manilla folder of flyers explaining his business outreach project and a cellphone loaded with survey questions, Kyle Radecki starts every work day at a different Lower Burrell business. An urban planning student at the University of Pittsburgh, Radecki is doing a summer internship for the city focused
Spurs' De'Aaron Fox: Offensive struggles continue
Spurs' De'Aaron Fox: Offensive struggles continue
Royals' Vinnie Pasquantino: Goes yard in win
Royals' Vinnie Pasquantino: Goes yard in win
Royals' Nick Loftin: Lifts first homer
Royals' Nick Loftin: Lifts first homer
Dodgers' Alex Freeland: Gets aboard four times
Dodgers' Alex Freeland: Gets aboard four times
Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani: Nearly untouchable again
Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani: Nearly untouchable again
Rockies' Michael Lorenzen: Pummeled in loss
Rockies' Michael Lorenzen: Pummeled in loss
Pirates' Spencer Horwitz: Racks up three hits
Pirates' Spencer Horwitz: Racks up three hits
Astros' Spencer Arrighetti: First rough start of season
Astros' Spencer Arrighetti: First rough start of season
Blue Jays' Brandon Valenzuela: Homers in losing effort
Blue Jays' Brandon Valenzuela: Homers in losing effort
Braves' Matt Olson: Three hits in win
Braves' Matt Olson: Three hits in win
Royals' Stephen Kolek: Season-high eight strikeouts
Royals' Stephen Kolek: Season-high eight strikeouts
Reds' Chase Burns: Excellent campaign continues
Reds' Chase Burns: Excellent campaign continues
Giants' Logan Webb: Dominates in win
Giants' Logan Webb: Dominates in win
Guardians' Gavin Williams: Hurt by hard contact in win
Guardians' Gavin Williams: Hurt by hard contact in win
Phillies' Cristopher Sanchez: Scoreless streak ends in win
Phillies' Cristopher Sanchez: Scoreless streak ends in win
Angels' Zach Neto: Sitting third straight
Angels' Zach Neto: Sitting third straight
Marlins' Pete Fairbanks: Nails down seventh save
Marlins' Pete Fairbanks: Nails down seventh save
Tigers' Troy Melton: Nearly goes distance in win
Tigers' Troy Melton: Nearly goes distance in win
Reds' Rhett Lowder: Confirmed for start Sunday
Reds' Rhett Lowder: Confirmed for start Sunday
Phillies' J.T. Realmuto: Back in Philadelphia lineup
Phillies' J.T. Realmuto: Back in Philadelphia lineup
Marlins' Ryan Gusto: Limited workload in return
Marlins' Ryan Gusto: Limited workload in return
Marlins' Liam Hicks: Idle against southpaw
Marlins' Liam Hicks: Idle against southpaw
Giants' Luis Arraez: Two XBH in loss to Milwaukee
Giants' Luis Arraez: Two XBH in loss to Milwaukee
Brewers' Brice Turang: Drives in two, steals 10th base
Brewers' Brice Turang: Drives in two, steals 10th base
Orioles' Shane Baz: Keeps rolling in Tuesday's win
Orioles' Shane Baz: Keeps rolling in Tuesday's win
Tigers' Jack Flaherty: Finally gets in win column
Tigers' Jack Flaherty: Finally gets in win column
The Texas Business Court - A New Forum for Complex Disputes
By Byron F. Egan A key driver behind the DExit movement is Texas’s investment in a specialized forum for complex business disputes. The Texas Business Court represents a significant shift in how commercial litigation is handled in the state.
There’s Indeed a Science to Airline Cockpit Diplomacy
Maintaining civility is critical in a dynamic safety environment like an airline cockpit.
The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science
With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!
Guardians' Steven Kwan: Contributes immediately
Guardians' Steven Kwan: Contributes immediately