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Borussia Dortmund president expects Erling Haaland to join Real Madrid
As part of his Real Madrid presidency push, Enrique Riquelme claimed that he will bring Jurgen Klopp and Erling Haaland to the Bernabeu. However, the representatives of both have already dismissed the...
Hunter Biden, in viral social media posts, reclaims his narrative
Former first son Hunter Biden was plagued by scandal, cast by critics as an X-rated troublemaker. Then, he started tweeting on X.
More Republicans are breaking with Trump. Is it conscience or politics?
Congressional Democrats say GOP majority is unraveling, but moves may in fact be aimed at retaining power
Multiple sources, joint analysis: pooling public health data for stronger public health intelligence across the Western Pacific
WHO Western Pacific countries and areas endorse a new policy brief on multi-source surveillance. A new World Health Organization (WHO) policy brief outlines a transformative approach to public health intelligence that connects data across a range of systems, sectors and disciplines. By creating a single, actionable picture of health threats based on multiple sources, such an approach aims to fill critical data gaps and aid countries in decision-making. WHO Member States across the Western Pacific endorsed the policy brief, Multi-source Surveillance to Support Public Health Action and Decision-making, at the WHO-led Asia Pacific Health Security Action Framework (APSHAF) Stakeholders Meeting held on 11 June 2026 in Malaysia.
Yooka-Laylee is back in a SNES-style kart racer from some of the team behind Diddy Kong Racing
Playtonic's acclaimed platform series is swapping feet for wheels, with multiplayer beta tests promised ahead of launch.
Can alkaline water actually improve your health? Experts separate fact from fiction
Is alkaline water actually better for you? Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School experts weigh in on the claims, benefits and potential dangers.
UFC Vegas 118 Results: Muhammad vs. Bonfim
Belal Muhammad aims to snap two-fight skid at UFC Vegas 118
DOJ office says ‘multiple’ probes of California elections underway after Trump cries foul
A federal prosecutor indicated the investigations are focused on the Los Angeles area following President Donald Trump’s claims, without evidence, of cheating in the primaries.
Small business owner raises concerns about long wait time for business license renewal
A local food truck owner is drawing attention to what she claims is a major problem facing Albuquerque’s small business owners.
The Wolf Among Us 2 finally arrives next year, a decade after it was announced, but a remaster of the acclaimed original is coming first
It's been a long time coming but The Wolf Among Us 2 is finally launching next year, ending a tumultuous decade of development.
Tallahassee woman’s dream business in limbo amid lease woes
Just when a hobby evolved into a lifelong dream, a Tallahassee businesswoman claims the rug was pulled out from under her.
Guild Wars 3, Modern Evolution of the MMORPG, Announced at Summer Game Fest for PC and PlayStation 5
/PRNewswire/ -- Critically-acclaimed game development studio ArenaNet® tonight announced Guild Wars 3™, the third entry in the legendary and beloved Guild...
Guild Wars 3, Modern Evolution of the MMORPG, Announced at Summer Game Fest for PC and PlayStation 5
/CNW/ -- Critically-acclaimed game development studio ArenaNet® tonight announced Guild Wars 3™, the third entry in the legendary and beloved Guild Wars®...
First on CNN: DOJ sends prosecutor to observe LA ballot counting amid Trump’s baseless ‘cheating’ claims
The Justice Department sent one of its attorneys to observe ballot processing in Los Angeles Friday morning, the county’s elections office told CNN, after President Donald Trump claimed earlier this week the US Attorney’s office there was investigating the vote counting.
Livid dog trainer customers say they paid thousands to SE Michigan business
Customers across Southeast Michigan say they were left out thousands of dollars after paying for dog training services they claim were never provided by Great Lakes Dog Training.
Who is Lyndsey Fifield, Graham Platner's ex-girlfriend?
Lyndsey Fifield made most explosive claims about Platner in Thursday's New York Times story.
Starmer says questions need to be asked over Nowak case but rejects ‘two-tier policing’ claim
PM rebuffs US state department’s criticism, adding police response to murder of Henry Nowak is under review
How a Citizen Science Organization Aims to Preserve the Places It Brings Tourists to Study
The actual eco-friendliness of ecotourism varies considerably. One research station in the Peruvian Amazon is out to prove it can bring visitors to the area without disrupting the environment.
'Diners, Drive-Ins, And LIES': Guy Fieri Slammed For Allegedly Not Swallowing Any Food
There's a fun conspiracy theory going around on the internet right now that claims Guy Fieri never actually swallows any of the food he eats on his show.
Alien hunters update guidance on sharing news of possible intelligent life
Experts stress need for transparency while aiming to prevent premature announcements and protect scientists
Proposed Trump Rule Targets ‘Woke’ Federal Grants for Public Lands, Health, Science
Aimed at “responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars,” the White House wants political appointees to have final say on grant review.
The Players Alliance announces 20-year sports business professional as new CEO
The Players Alliance, a nonprofit organization comprised of current and former professional baseball players aiming to “make the game more accessible through increased representation,” announced Friday the addition of Dr. Jamil Northcutt as executive director and CEO. He began his role in May, according to a release. Northcutt has spent
New initiative aims to bring more business to Buffalo's Electric District
As part of District Live, businesses near the Electric Tower are teaming up to host indoor and outdoor special events and promotions.
Africa CDC and WHO launch joint continental Ebola response plan
The six-month plan, covering June to November 2026, aims to raise US$ 518 million to support African countries together with partners to prepare for, rapidly detect and respond to the outbreak.
AI-designed universal coronavirus vaccine passes first human trial
Scientists have successfully tested an AI-designed universal coronavirus vaccine in humans for the first time, finding it to be safe and well tolerated. The vaccine generated immune responses against multiple coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, SARS, and related bat viruses with pandemic potential. By targeting features shared across an entire virus family, it aims to provide protection even as viruses evolve.
NC State Health Plan to propose benefit structure aimed at shifting care to 'preferred providers'
The new structure is necessary, plan administrators say, because costs are continue to outpace premiums. Those premiums are likely to increase next year.
In the Smoky Mountains, a volunteer effort aims to document every species
For citizen scientists, counting thousands of species is one way to monitor climate change in America's most biodiverse national park.
JWST Measures Mass Of Most Distant Dormant Black Hole – Shattering Previous Record By 15 Times
JWST and gravitational lensing allowed scientists to resolve an area in the distant universe equivalent to looking at a "coin on the surface of the Moon."
Brave is charging $60 to remove features it added in the first place
Pay more to get less.
Texas claims second straight WCWS title over Texas Tech
Kayden Henry homered to lead Texas to a 4-1 victory over Texas Tech on Thursday night at the Women's College World Series for a second straight national championship.
AOC dodges questions on abuse allegations, Nazi tattoo claims rocking Platner's campaign
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she needs time to review new allegations of aggressive behavior against Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner reported by the New York Times
O.C. officials walk back claim of 'no leak' in chemical tank crisis
In response to questions from The Times, the O.C. Healthcare Agency said it did not dispute statements that vapors were released from the pressurized tank on May 21.
NM Health Care Authority announces $76M in federal rural healthcare funds
When fully implemented, the program aims to reduce long wait times, chronic disease risk factors and readmission rates to rural hospitals.
Trump’s Fraud Claims in California Could Undermine Confidence in November Result
The president is claiming without evidence that the lengthy counting process in California, which could help determine control of Congress, means Democrats are stealing the election.
Survey findings show how health insurance denials affect Americans
Patients who have their claims turned down by private insurers often incur debt they need months to pay off, according to an analysis of 4,589 survey responses. More than half the field reported such debt topped $1,000 in their household.
Jefferson County Approves $300,000 for Small Business Development Programs
The Jefferson County Commission has approved economic development funding for two organizations aimed at supporting small business growth across the county.Comm
Epic et al. dismiss a defendant in patient-data lawsuit
SelfRx has been permanently dropped from a suit naming Health Gorilla and several of its customers after the defunct company's founder claimed retrieval of more than 100,000 medical records was unauthorized.
Are German businesses returning to Russia's SPIEF meeting?
Russian officials and media claim German businesses are comming back to the St. Petersburg Economic Forum despite the war in Ukrainer. But who is actually attending Russia's flagship event this year?
Justice Department Eyes Alternative ‘Weaponization’ Payouts After Fund Pushback
Some Trump supporters are aiming to secure government settlements by suing under an 80-year-old law.
Michigan earns B- on maternal mental health care
A new report highlights progress and ongoing care shortages.
Rural health network aims to strengthen independent hospitals
The North Shore Health Board received a presentation from Cibolo Rural Health Network on the benefits of the Headwaters Network, a high-value network made up of Minnesota’s rural independent health care providers. “I would say a relevant correlator to the high-value network is that of a farmers’ co-op,” Brittany Sachdeva, chief operating officer for Cibolo,...
Grind City Amp aims to build on early success in Memphis
Grind City Amp in Memphis officially opened April 22, with a performance by the Alabama Shakes.
Greenwood is Roma’s top target as opening offer ready
Reports in Italy claim that Roma are ready to make their opening offer for Mason Greenwood, who is valued at €50m by Olympique Marseille.Several sources in Italy claim that English winger Greenwood ...
Bale Dalton named to DCCC's Red to Blue program as he aims to unseat Cory Mills
The Democrat is the first Florida candidate named to the program for 2026 and the 20th nationwide.
RFK Jr. Seeks To Peek at Americans’ Medical Records for Clues on Autism and Vaccines
To collect and scrutinize millions of Americans’ health data, U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. aims to work with state organizations that help health systems share medical records. In Nebraska, millions in federal dollars has flowed into one nonprofit cooperating with Kennedy’s project.
Man City consider legal action after Haaland claim
After a candidate in Real Madrid's presidential election unveils an Erling Haaland shirt on live TV, Manchester City dismiss the suggestion their striker will move to Spain.
Minister dismisses ‘two-tier justice’ claim in light of Henry Nowak tragedy as ‘slur’ on police
Politicians on the right have politicised Novak’s death and suggested there is a ‘two-tier’ policing system that victimises white people
LiveOne Expands Partnership With AT&T, Cisco For Connected-Car Entertainment.
LiveOne has announced an expanded collaboration with AT&T and Cisco aimed at supporting next-generation in-vehicle entertainment through AT&T’s Connected Car platform. Under the agreement, automotive manufacturers will be able to
SpaceX aims for world’s largest IPO amid fears it is ‘significantly overvalued’
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
Wilmington Startup IQExit Targets a Blind Spot in Business Succession Planning
Wilmington startup IQExit is aiming to change the way banks prepare for business ownership transitions by surfacing exit signals years before a company is sold. At its core, IQExit is an advisor-in…
Belgium: 2026 World Cup Squad, Fixtures and Schedule
Belgium travel to North America this summer, aiming to revive a fading football identity at their fourth successive World Cup.Rudi Garcia, appointed in January 2025, takes the Red Devils into the fina...
South Korea: 2026 World Cup Squad, Fixtures and Schedule
South Korea travels to North America for the FIFA World Cup this summer, aiming to recapture the spirit of their greatest tournament performance and push deep into the knockout rounds once again.Hong ...
Ballad Health launches Appalachian Highlands Orthopedic Network
Ballad Health and local orthopedic physicians have launched the Appalachian Highlands Orthopedic Network, a new partnership aimed at expanding access to orthope
Jared Verse isn't aiming to fill shoes left by Myles Garrett after trade to Browns: 'My job is to be the best me'
Powering Appalachia Expo connects business owners to valuable resources
Business owners from across the Mid-0hio Valley attended an expo aimed at connecting them to valuable resources.
Dallas Stars Select Plano Site for New $1B Arena and Entertainment District
The NHL team, which brought home the Stanley Cup to Dallas in its 1999 championship season, aims to leave American Airlines Arena behind for a new arena and entertainment district at Plano's Shops of Willow Bend site. A key Plano City Council vote on the arena project is slated for June 8.
Tattoo shop owner claims ex-employee intentionally crashed car into business
"I’m also thinking about changing the name to Hit & Run Tattoo."
WorkSource Fulton, Grady Health System partner for healthcare worker training investment
The funding is aimed at providing more skilled workers for industries in Fulton County, meeting the needs of businesses and residents alike.
College Professors Say Incoming Students No Longer Understand Middle School Math and Science
Professors at the University of California want to reinstate entrance exams, claiming many students don't have a basic understanding of STEM subjects.
Google's new open source Gemma 4 12B analyzes audio, video — and runs entirely locally on a typical 16GB enterprise laptop
For enterprise leaders aiming to decentralize their AI workloads, Gemma 4 12B offers a rare combination of edge-friendly efficiency and frontier-class reasoning.
Senators urge quick action to halt college sports decay
Senators and college officials on Wednesday urged swift action on a bipartisan measure that aims to overhaul college athletics system they say hemorrhages money and hinders student-athletes — even as two powerful conferences said they would seek changes. During a much-anticipated Senate Commerce Committee hearing, both the bill’s authors — Chair Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and […]
Alabama ruling demolishes John Roberts’ claim that justices aren’t ‘political actors’
Democratic appointees said the majority “corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”
WATCH: Rubio scorches claim Trump weighed finances in Iran decisions: ‘Not even for a millisecond’
Secretary of State Rubio calls allegations that Trump considered personal finances in Iran decisions "completely false" during heated House hearing.
Cannabis companies hid health issues from consumers: Federal lawsuit
The complaint targets companies in 13 states and is brought by consumers who claim the products were deceptively marketed.
Nick Saban asks Congress to 'bring order' via college sports bill
Nick Saban appeared in Congress to support the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act, which aims to "bring order to a system that badly needs fixing" in the NIL and transfer portal era.
Families push CES to expand science curriculum
A group of 13 families has expressed concerns over the quality of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education at Conners Emerson Elementary School, claiming that the current structure of
Can Hollywood help heal America's divides?
Steven Olikara believes movies and TV can help Americans move beyond caricature, contempt and political division.
Meta launches enterprise-focused AI 'business agent' to automate daily operations
Meta Platforms on Wednesday unveiled an artificial intelligence agent aimed at helping businesses carry out day-to-day operations, positioning the social media giant as a player in the enterprise AI market.
Cannabis companies hid health issues from consumers: Federal lawsuit
The complaint targets companies in 13 states and is brought by consumers who claim the products were deceptively marketed.
The Latest: Trump keeps immunity from tax probes while scrapping $1.8 billion compensation fund
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Trump administration has definitively scrapped a $1.8 billion fund to compensate President Donald Trump’s allies, but the White House is sticking with the part of the deal that permanently drops tax claims against him
The Latest: Trump keeps immunity from tax probes while scrapping $1.8 billion compensation fund
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Trump administration has definitively scrapped a $1.8 billion fund to compensate President Donald Trump's allies, but the White House is sticking with the part of the deal that permanently drops tax claims against him.
Cannabis companies hid health issues from consumers: Federal lawsuit
The complaint targets companies in 13 states and is brought by consumers who claim the products were deceptively marketed.
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!
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How Science Works
The 2nd Weather and Climate Livestream is now underway. It is organized by a group of early-career researchers concerned about declining funding for the field and eager to demonstrate how weather and climate research makes a difference in our lives. Last year’s event was a great success, drawing terrific press coverage including a piece in the NY Times. This year features a strong lineup of talks aimed at a general audience — I highly recommend tuning in. Share I gave a talk yesterday about How Science Works in Three Steps. You can see the short presentation here (I’ve appended a transcript below): And please tune into the livestream here. It runs through tomorrow at 6 pm ET. Thanks for reading The Climate Brink! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Subscribe Cleaned up transcript: Thank you, and thanks to everyone tuning in. I want to talk about something I think a lot of people don’t really understand: how science actually works. Arguments over any scientific topic — climate change, vaccines, you name it — revolve around competing claims. For climate change, the claims are: Is the Earth warming? Are humans to blame? What will the impacts be? Over the last 150 years, the scientific community has developed a remarkably robust method for sorting out which claims are true and which aren’t. That method is what I want to walk through. So how does science generate knowledge? If you ask a high schooler, they’ll give you the version they learned in ninth grade: an individual scientist forms a hypothesis, runs an experiment, and draws a conclusion. That’s more or less what happens at the individual level, though in practice it’s more iterative — you design, test, and refine all at once, landing on a slightly different idea each time until you reach a conclusion about whatever hypothesis you’ve ended up with. But this isn’t science. It’s only step one. Any individual scientist can make mistakes — scientists are human. Maybe there’s a bug in the code, maybe there’s an error in the experiment. Just because someone ran an experiment and reached a conclusion doesn’t mean it’s right, and scientists don’t treat a single result as settled truth. Step two is peer review, the first layer of quality control. The scientist writes up what they did and submits it to a journal, which sends the paper to other experts in the field. Those experts judge whether the methods are sound, whether it properly references prior work, and whether the conclusions actually follow from the data. Ask any scientist and they’ll tell you peer review is miserable — the comments come back brutal, often harsh, and you have to revise and resubmit, sometimes multiple times, before an editor finally accepts the paper. Peer review catches an immense amount of bad science, but it can’t catch all of it. Reviewers get sloppy or overworked, they miss obvious mistakes, and they can’t catch hidden errors — a bug in the code, a misread instrument. So a peer-reviewed paper making it into a journal doesn’t mean the paper is right. Nobody treats a single paper as the final word. That’s where step three comes in: the crucible of science. Important results get retested by the broader community. If you publish something interesting, it gets dissected. Sometimes people try to reproduce your work directly but more often they test its implications. If someone claims X is true, and that implies that Y is also true, then scientists will go check Y. If a claim survives this gauntlet long enough, it becomes accepted. That’s how we generate knowledge. Let me give an example: the ozone hole. In 1985 — and I doubt many people watching were around then, but I remember it well — Joe Farman and his colleagues published observations from Antarctica showing that a huge chunk of ozone was disappearing every year. This was shocking because most atmospheric chemists had expected ozone loss to occur at mid-latitudes and high altitudes, not over the South Pole. When scientists see something they don’t understand, they rush to explain it, and several competing hypotheses quickly appeared in the peer-reviewed literature. One pointed to chlorine chemistry from chlorofluorocarbons. A second blamed nitrogen chemistry, possibly driven by solar proton events — meaning the sun was responsible. A third argued it wasn’t chemistry at all but dynamics: winds were carrying naturally low-ozone air from the lower atmosphere up into the stratosphere. Then the community went to work testing which theory could survive the crucible. Aircraft flew into the ozone hole and found no nitrogen, ruling out the nitrogen theory. Measurements showed the air in the polar vortex was descending, not rising — which would bring high-ozone air down, eliminating the dynamics theory. Meanwhile, those same flights measured enormous amounts of chlorine, strongly correlated with exactly the regions where ozone was being destroyed. That became known as the “smoking gun” paper, and it established that chlorine chemistry was the cause. Through this process, a consensus emerged. And it’s worth being clear that this consensus is organic. There’s no vote, no poll, no meeting where it gets decided. Scientists go to conferences, talk to one another, and independently arrived at the same answer. It’s the ultimate free market of ideas. After the consensus was established, the peer-reviewed literature doesn’t even mention the rival theories — it simply takes chlorine chemistry as given. That’s what a consensus looks like. It doesn’t mean every single scientist agrees, but it does mean there’s no longer any legitimate debate. So where can you see what scientists actually think? It’s all in the peer-reviewed literature, which contains the entire historical record of the argument: the discovery, the competing theories, the debate, the testing, and finally the community coalescing around one answer. But there’s a lot of room for misrepresentation. You can dig up an old paper claiming the ozone hole was caused by dynamics and wave it around as if there still was a debate about the cause of the ozone hole — without mentioning that the idea was disproven long ago and that even its own authors no longer believe it. There’s a bigger problem, though: the peer-reviewed literature is written in a language I call “nerd.” It’s extremely hard to read — honestly, some of it is hard for me to follow. It takes graduate students years to work through the literature in a single field, so we can’t expect policymakers or ordinary people to do it. This is where scientific assessments come in. The most famous is the IPCC — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The job of an assessment is to read and summarize the peer-reviewed literature, synthesizing what’s settled, what’s been disproven, and what remains genuinely debated. To ensure the assessments accurately summarize the peer-reviewed literature, assessments are written by large teams, which are far less prone to bias than individuals and which dilute the influence of any one scientist with an axe to grind. The teams are deliberately assembled to avoid stacking the deck, and the reports themselves go through multiple rounds of peer review. That rigorous process is exactly why you can trust them and why people consider the IPCC to be the gold standard of what we know about the climate system. An assessment produced through a different process may well not be credible. You can even watch the consensus evolve across assessments. Take the attribution of warming. The 1990 IPCC report said the observed warming was broadly consistent with model predictions but also comparable to natural variability — in other words, we don’t know whether humans are responsible. By 1995, it concluded that the balance of evidence suggested a discernible human influence — a sentence only a committee could write, and one that barely commits to anything. By 2001, most of the warming over the previous 50 years was judged “likely” due to greenhouse gases; by 2007, “very likely”; by 2013, “extremely likely.” The 2023 report says essentially the same as 2013 — there’s not much stronger language available. So, to wrap up: science is our ultimate tool for deciphering the universe — the most successful method we’ve ever developed for determining what’s true and what isn’t. Our understanding is written into the peer-reviewed literature, so if you want to know what scientists think, that’s where to look. And for those of us who don’t speak nerd, scientific assessments are the Rosetta Stone — they translate nerd into English. Let me open the floor to questions. Thank you.
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