Big Technology Podcast Can AI Become Conscious? — With Michael Pollan
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Feb 25, 2026 
Michael Pollan, bestselling author exploring consciousness and psychedelics, joins to probe whether AI can feel. He debates if mind is computable and how current LLMs fall short. Conversations span testing machine consciousness, materialism versus spirituality, psychedelics’ impact on self, and surprising signs of plant sentience.
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Consciousness Emerges To Resolve Conflicts And Social Needs
- Consciousness is a layered phenomenon where most brain work is unconscious and only select conflicts or social-relevant information enter awareness.
- Michael Pollan argues consciousness aids reflective decision-making and complex social reasoning, not mere automation of bodily functions.
Why The Brain Is Not Just A Computer
- Michael Pollan rejects the brain-as-computer metaphor, citing inseparable hardware/software, analog neuronal signaling, and embodied feelings as key differences.
- He emphasizes feelings' bodily, mortality-linked residue that resists reduction to mere information processing.
Eighth Grade Lesson Pushed Pollan Toward Humanism
- Pollan recalls an eighth-grade teacher saying a human's material value was only a few dollars, which pushed him toward humanist resistance to reductive materialism.
- That anecdote shaped his lifelong skepticism of equating humans to mere chemical components.
