Michael Pollan Finds God?

And BTW, no worries about AI

I’ve never read Pollan, because the nature of his “quest’ starts from premises that I don’t share. But this review by Charles Finch of his new book, A World Appears, suggests that he might be working his way toward the premises from which I start:

A World Appears, with its admirable syncretic blend of empiricism and wonder before the limits of empiricism, steals back for humanity some of the sensation of miraculousness that this era has largely outsourced to technology. In the book’s introduction, Pollan describes a research project that tried and failed to answer the question of how “a particular piece of animal tissues generates the feeling of being alive.” That enduring mystery is what prompted Pollan to write this curious, compassionate book. Always to seek the answer, never to find it: That, of course, is what it means to be human. Some people find this fact terrifying. But there is also a pure exhilaration in standing on that last precipice, face-to-face with the question that exists beyond all other questions—which is to say, God.

Most of the review is about how Pollan thinks that AI can never replicate human consciousness. I agree, but that’s not the problem. It’s not that machines are becoming more like humans, but that humans are becoming more like machines, and the machines are creating a world in which it is increasingly difficult to be human.

I’m open to be persuaded that I should spend some time reading Pollan. I have no doubt he is an interesting, honest man, but I’d rather spend my time with writers who haven’t just arrived at where Pollan has, but have been working there for a long time now.