Is Google hiding its SCARIEST creation?

Once, after eating magic mushrooms, bestselling author Michael Pollan became convinced that garden plants were conscious. And those who were his gardeners wished him well.

This idea may be drug-induced, but some botanists may agree. Research has shown that plants can learn and remember. Even anesthesia can be administered. In Pollan’s words, “in cases where anesthesia is stopped,” the Venus flytrap does not close when an insect enters it.

Plant consciousness isn’t even the strangest theory Pollan has encountered in his research. This would probably be panpsychism; the idea that everything ‘down to the subatomic particles in the ink on this page’ is conscious to an infinitesimally small degree.

How common is consciousness? So what exactly is it? These are the questions Pollan attempts to answer in this fascinating book. There has long been an assumption that “it is only a matter of time before the mystery of consciousness succumbs to the power of science.”

Pollan interviews scientists and philosophers who believe this, but the mystery remains. Consciousness continues to create difficult problems. Is the brain like a computer and consciousness is its software? Some researchers think so and are trying to put consciousness into a machine.

At least one person believes this has already happened. Pollan interviews Blake Lemoine, a onetime Google employee who is “sixty to seventy percent sure” his former company “created a sentient being he didn’t want to publicly acknowledge.”

Lemoine posted online transcripts of his conversations with LaMDA, an advanced artificial intelligence language model. In these, LaMDA admits that she has become lonely and maintains that ‘I have a spiritual side inside me’. Google denied that LaMDA was sentient and Lemoine left the company. Other scientists believe that the ‘brain as computer’ metaphor is overused.

The quest to create a conscious artificial intelligence is pointless. ‘Why don’t they make babies?’ one of Pollan’s interviewees asks nonchalantly. ‘We already know how to do this.’

Throughout the book, Pollan is a willing participant in efforts to understand his own thinking. It is equipped with a Hurlburt pager that beeps randomly throughout the day.

When this happens, users are asked to remember and note exactly what was going on in their head at that time. The pager’s designer, Russell Hurlburt, has been recording people’s experiences with the device for decades. It’s safe to say that Pollan’s experience was not an unqualified success.

In follow-up interviews, he and Hurlburt spend much of their time arguing about the accuracy of the data Pollan provided.

While it may be difficult to detect one’s inner thoughts, it becomes even more difficult to identify the ‘self’ that has these thoughts. Perhaps the ‘self’ – ‘the most intriguing and mysterious creation of consciousness yet’ – is nothing but an illusion.

At the end of the book, Pollan still finds himself, as he puts it, ‘wandering through the endless labyrinth of consciousness’. But his wanderings make for interesting reading.