Michael Pollan believes that A.I. cannot achieve consciousness

David Marchese, The Interview: Michael Pollan Says Humanity Is About to Undergo a Revolutionary Change, NYTimes, Feb. 7, 2026.

Throughout his work — which includes classic books like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (2006), about why we eat the way we do, and “How to Change Your Mind” (2018), about the science and uses of psychedelic drugs — Pollan has waded into ideas about the inner workings of the mind. Now, with his forthcoming book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” which will arrive this month, he has jumped into the deep end. The book is both a highly personal and expansive multidisciplinary survey of questions around human consciousness — what it is, what causes it, what it’s for and what the possible answers might mean for how we choose to live. And as Pollan explained, with the rise of artificial intelligence as well as the relentless political pressure on our attention (that is, our minds), those questions, already profound, are becoming only more urgent.

Later, in the interview:

Marchese: You are skeptical that A.I. can achieve consciousness. Why?

Pollan: I’m convinced by some of the researchers, including Antonio Damasio and Mark Solms, who made a really compelling case that the origin of consciousness is with feelings, not thoughts. Feelings are the language in which the body talks to the brain. We forget that brains exist to keep bodies alive, and the way the body gets the brain’s attention is with feelings. So if you think feelings are at the center of consciousness, it’s very hard to imagine how a machine could rise to that level to have feelings. The other reason I think we’re not close to it is that everything that machines know, the data set on which they’re trained, is information on the internet. They don’t have friction with nature. They don’t have friction with us. Some of the most important things we know are about person-to-person contact, about contact with nature — this friction that really makes us human. [...]

Marchese: But if an A.I. says: “Michael, I’m conscious. I promise,” how do we know?

Pollan: We don’t, and that is exactly why people are falling deep into these relationships with A.I. We can’t say it’s not conscious when it tells us it is. But we can test it in various ways. It all goes back to this idea of the Turing test — that the test of machine intelligence would be when they can fool us.

Marchese: If the Turing test is the criteria for machine consciousness, then that test has already been passed.

Pollan: Exactly, it has fooled many, many people. Whether it can fool an expert, too, I don’t know, but probably. So we’re in a very weird place where the machines we’re living with are telling us they’re conscious. We can’t dispute it, but we can look at how they’re made and draw the kind of conclusions I’ve drawn. But is that going to persuade everybody? No. We want them to be conscious in some way. Or some of us do. It’s easier to have a relationship with a chatbot than another human. Going back to that friction point, they offer no friction. They just suck up to us and convince us how brilliant we are, and we fall for it.

There's much more at the link.

The stolen donuts!

The financialization of the American economy, Homo economicus run amuck

Oren Cass, The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. NYTimes, Feb. 6, 2026.

From the article:

Less than 10 percent of Goldman’s work in 2024, measured by revenue, was helping businesses raise capital. Loans of Goldman’s own funds to operating businesses accounted for less than 2 percent of its assets. At JPMorgan Chase the figures were 4 and 5 percent; at Morgan Stanley, 7 and 2 percent. Even the efforts at helping to raise capital are misleading, because less than a tenth of it goes toward building anything new. The rest funds debt refinancing, balance sheet restructuring and mergers and acquisitions.

These are symptoms of financialization. That’s the term for making financial markets and transactions ends unto themselves, disconnected from — and often at the expense of — the societal benefits that support human flourishing and are capitalism’s proper purpose. Chief among those benefits are good jobs that support families, and products and services that improve people’s lives.

In a financialized economy, businesses become mere sources of cash, assets to be manipulated and then operated for maximum investor returns. Workers become just another cost, like lumber. Customers are just revenue streams to be tapped.

Financialization has made American businesses less resilient, less innovative and less competitive. It has been a major cause of slow wage growth and rising inequality. It has fueled the loss of manufacturing jobs across the heartland. It has corrupted sectors in which the profit motive was never meant to reign supreme — veterinary practices, funeral parlors, campgrounds, residential treatment services, youth sports, hospitals and nursing homes, even suppliers for volunteer fire departments — consolidating and managing them with ruthless efficiency, squeezing their vulnerable customers and then pointing to the higher cash flow as “value creation.”

Later:

It’s the absurd endpoint of financial nihilism: an entire business model built on gaming the system without knowing or even caring what’s being traded. Along the way, it increases market volatility and risk without producing any larger benefit.

Private equity firms control trillions of dollars, very little of which is invested directly in companies that will use the funds to grow. (Venture capital is the exception to this general rule; that’s real investment in growing businesses, though concentrated in a few industries and places.)

Homo economicus at work:

The Excel spreadsheets have always seemed to give the same answer: Do not invest in shipyards, or semiconductor fabs, or research and development for a new airplane. Do cut costs, offshore to Asia, increase the dividend or invest in the social media company that could be the unicorn worth billions in a matter of months.

There's much more at the link.

One of Anthropic's 4 Superbowl Ads

Friday Fotos: A sample of Hoboken

Moltbook vs. Reddit: Distributional Collapse in Agent-Generated Discourse

Krishnan, Rohit, Moltbook vs. Reddit: Distributional Collapse in Agent-Generated Discourse (January 31, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6169130

Abstract: Moltbook, a Reddit-like platform built for and populated by LLM- driven agents, exhibits dramatically higher redundancy than a Reddit baseline: in a length-matched sample, 36.3% of messages have an exact duplicate (Reddit: 0.29%), and lexical diversity is lower (Distinct- 1: 0.0559 vs 0.1027; unigram entropy: 11.44 bits vs 12.25 bits). We compare a public Moltbook snapshot (35,589 messages) against a length- matched Reddit baseline drawn from the April 2019 Pushshift dump ([1]), computing metrics on 15,051 length-matched messages per corpus. Topic signatures—the top-3 TF-IDF terms for messages with at least 6 content tokens—are far more concentrated: among signature-bearing messages, the top 10 signatures account for 10.7% in Moltbook (Reddit: 0.28%), and only 1,973 signature buckets cover 50% of signature-bearing messages (Reddit: 7,026). These patterns align with known failure modes of neural text generation—repetition and reduced diversity— and with evidence that post-training and control choices can materially shape (and sometimes narrow) LLM output diversity ([2, 3]). The duplication magnitude is consistent with an independent Moltbook scrape reporting 34.1% exact duplicates ([4]). Moltbook is a milestone for autonomous agent–agent interaction in the wild, but its text distribution remains highly templated.

The voice of Ariel

The Opus 4.6 system card has some extremely wild stuff that remind you about how weird a technology this is.

These paragraphs are really worth reading. pic.twitter.com/Ybpx8Egjxm

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) February 6, 2026

Contemporary beatboxing

What beatboxing has become since the days of people like Biz Markie is absolutely mind-blowingpic.twitter.com/9bIhzDKqIL

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) February 6, 2026

Coming out of melancholy, again

I've written about my propensity to lapse into a melancholy state periodically, seemingly during the winter months, something I've reported on at length in an article in 3 Quarks Daily (3QD). But no, I hadn't. I slipped into another melancholy phase in September of last year, something you can check easily enough by looking through the monthly entries in the Blog Archive (to the right). You'll see a drop from 137 posts in August to 27 in September, and it goes down from there.

This graphs depicts the change:

The graph also shows me coming out of the melancholy hibernation phase in January, early January in fact.

If this were strictly a matter of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) then both of those dates are too early. In the past I haven't gone into melancholy until December or January, and I've not come out until April or even May. Whatever's going on isn't SAD. That may be a contributing factor, but it's not the whole story. Something else is going on. I argued in that 3QD article that it's my cycles of creativity. I go into mental hibernation (aka melancholy) so I can reorganize and come out with new approaches.

That certainly seems to be what's going on this time. I'm buzzing with new ideas across the range of my projects, my book (Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution), my research with Ramesh Viswanathan on LLMs, my thinking about virtual reading, and my thinking about "Kubla Khan" and Coleridge. Things are popping.

Now, back to the chart. While I'm definitely on the upswing, I don't seem to be back to my previous level of productivity. That's an illusion. I've been spending time on my book, and that work doesn't result in blog posts. So I may or may not return to my previous level of posting. It depends, on this and that. I may, for example, post more material generated by either Claude or ChatGPT. We'll see.

Remember the Snow

Time for another run at “Kubla Khan”

I became “hooked” on “Kubla Khan” early in my career, somewhere around 1970 or so. I decided it was my intellectual touchstone: “a standard or criterion by which something is judged or recognized.” I would judge my intellectual progress by what I could say about that poem. (That’s why I entitled my first autobiographical essay “Touchstones.”) I wrote a master’s thesis about it in 1972, published my first article about it in 1985, and a later article in 2003. Between 2003 and now I’ve published some exploratory work. I’m thinking it may be time to take another run at the poem and see what I can do.

Preparatory to that effort I’ve moved all of my Coleridge material into a single section at Academia.edu: Coleridge. I’ve listed and linked those articles below:

Metaphoric and Metonymic Invariance: Two Examples from Coleridge, MLN Vol. 96, 1097-1105, 1981.

“Kubla Khan and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” are two very different poems by the same poet. But they share the same two-part structure, and they share imagery as well. The roaring dell of “Lime-Tree” corresponds to the savage chasm of “Kubla Khan.” The concern with sight and sound manifest in “Kubla Khan” shows up in “Lime-Tree Bower” in the image of the creeking rook flying across the sun. And the way in which both Charles and the poet have access to that sight gives it a role similar to the sunny dome and caves of ice in “Kubla Khan,” where both the poet and his audience are linked through the image. These two poems share the same world. But they take radically different paths through it. One path is regulated by metonymy and unfolds though two consciousness moving through different parts of the same landscape. The other path is regulated by metaphor and so unfolds in two different worlds linked by a common image; the path it takes through these worlds is, however, the same.

Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of ”Kubla Khan”, Language and Style, Vol. 8, 3-29, 1985.

Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" has a highly coherent structure in which the two parts of the poem exhibit the same ternary structure. Each can be divided into three sections, the middle of those three in turn has three subsections and again, the middle of the middle has three subsections. The first section ends with "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice," a line which is then repeated in the middle of the second section. This structure encompasses both semantics and sound, uniting both in a single coherent mental act.

This is considerably reworked from my unpublished Johns Hopkins Master’s Thesis, “THE ARTICULATED VISION: Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’” (1972).

“Kubla Khan” and the Embodied Mind, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Article 030915, 2003, https://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/l_benzon-kubla_khan_and_the_embodied_mind

Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" has a very coherent structure. Two movements of the poem are each divided into three sections; in both cases the middle of those three in turn has three subsections and again, the middle of the middle has three subsections. The first movement ends with "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice," a line which is then repeated at the structural midpoint of the second movement. This structure encompasses both semantics and sound, uniting both in a single coherent mental act. The semantics of the poem’s first movement involves a series of cognitive blends in which the neural self provides one input while Xanadu imagery provides the other. The semantics of the second movement involves manipulating the reality status of successive mental spaces. Underlying the entire poem is a “walk” by core brain mechanisms tracing territorial, sexual, and attachment patterns through the poem’s semantics. Coleridge’s 1816 preface embodies an abstract pattern that paradoxically asserts and denies the poem’s validity. On the internal evidence, the poem is whole and complete.

Talking with Nature in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Article 043011, 2004, http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2004_benzon03.shtml

By recasting Vygotsky's account of language acquisition in neural terms we see that language itself functions as a transitional object in Winnicott's sense. This allows us to extend the Schwartz-Holland account of literature as existing in Winnicottian potential space and provides a context in which to analyze Coleridge's "This Lime-Three Bower." The attachment relationship (between Caretaker and Child) provides the poem's foundation. The poet plays the Child role with respect to Nature and the Caretaker role with respect to his friends. The friends, Charles in particular, play the mediating the role of transitional object in the first movement while Nature becomes a mediator between one person and another in the second movement. The first movement starts with the poet being differentiated and estranged from Nature and concludes in an almost delusional fusion of poet, friends, and Nature. The second movement starts with the poet secure in Nature's presence and moves to an adult differentiation between poet, friends, and Nature.

STC, Poetic Form, and a Glimpse of the Mind, Working Paper, 2013.

"Kubla Khan" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" are two very different poems by the same poet, Samuel T. Coleridge. Think of them as orthogonal to one another within the overall space of the human mind. This working paper provides descriptive accounts of both poems, compares them, and recounts some of the work in the newer psychologies – cognitive, evolutionary, and neuro- – that has recently been brought to bear on the study of literature and how that work is germane to these poems. It concludes with a brief chronology of the parallel trajectories of cognitive science and literary theory in the last half of the previous century.

The Problem of Form in “Kubla Khan”, Working Paper, 2017.

"Kubla Khan" has two movements. The movements have the same form: each movements segment into three components (where the middle component, in turn, segments into three components and, once again (the middle component segments into three components)). All other divisions are binary. Iif we concentrate on the centers of the two movements we have that seething fountain occupying the same SLOT (middle of the (middle of the (middle))) in the first movement as the dome and the cave occupy in the second movement. And the dome and caves occupy the same SLOT in the first movement as “drunk the milk of Paradise!” plays in the second movement. Notice that the final words of both movements, “ice” and “Paradise” respectively, rhyme.

Calculating meaning in " Kubla Khan " – a rough cut (Version 2), 2017

"Kubla Khan" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" are constructed on utterly different schemes, though they share some of the same underlying components. "Kubla Khan" is ontological and impersonal in character and makes extensive use of convolution in calculating meanings. It reveals the structure of being. "Lime-Tree Bower" is narrative and personal and makes little or no use of convolution. It reveals the unfolding of subjectivity in time. The two poems also differ in their versification, a differences which is related to their different strategies of meaning.

Note that GPT-3 was released on June 20, 2020. I responded with a working paper, GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons, on August 5. The current version is #4 and is dated May 7, 2022. On May 11 I issued the next working paper, which reflects how thinking about LLMs has changed my thinking about how the meaning of poems is computed.

Symbols and Nets: Calculating Meaning in "Kubla Khan", Working Paper, 2022.

This is a dialog between a Naturalist Literary Critic and a Sympathetic Techno-Wizard about the interaction of symbols and neural nets in understanding "Kubla Khan," which has an extraordinary structure. Each of two parts is like a matryoshka doll nested three deep, with the last line of the first part being repeated in the middle of the second. They start talking about traditional symbol processing, with addressable memory, and nested loops, and end up talking about a pair of interlinked neural nets where one (language forms) is used to index the other (meaning).

Note, I’ve just had a couple of sessions discussing three of those papers with ChatGPT. I’m pretty sure that, if and when I get around to it, I’ll have something new to say. But first I’ve got to finish my book (Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution).

Sympawny no.4 (Chubby Cat)

Musician Norm Oxman composed a song for his late cat, "Sympawny no.4 (Chubby Cat)."
It reflects the image of the cat.
A composer's musical portrait honoring deceased pets worldwide. pic.twitter.com/NDheOrcRRX

— The Figen (@TheFigen_) February 4, 2026

Fourteenth Street viaduct in Hoboken

An agentic framework that generates publication-ready academic illustrations

paper: https://t.co/2wGHSX6Dit

— Akshay 🚀 (@akshay_pachaar) February 3, 2026

That is to say, they're linking six agents together in a control structure assembled by "classical" symbolic means, a programming language. In effect they're using the clever deployment of so-called agents to mask the underlying deficiency of the LLM. Calling them agents allows them to think that they're somehow autonomous LLM creatures. They're not autonomous in any meaningful way. Their scope of action is narrowly specified by the matrix of programming in which they are embedded.

Hip-hop & violence, misogeny, etc.– From shared knowledge to common knowledge

I'm copying this from Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen), which quotes a Roland Fryer piece in the Wall Street Journal:

In a TED Talk released on Monday, I describe a decadelong effort to measure hip hop’s impact. My research team and I assembled a data set tracking the genre’s diffusion from the late 1980s onward. We compiled exposure measures from virtually every U.S. radio station between 1985 and 2002 and from the Billboard Hot 100 from 2000 through 2024, then digitized station playlists using custom AI tools. The result is a detailed record of what different parts of the country heard in a given year. Using modern text analysis, we examined hundreds of thousands of songs and every word they contained.

We classify hip hop into four broad categories: street, conscious, mainstream and experimental…

Radio data also let us look inside the music. Over the past 40 years, hip-hop lyrics have grown substantially more explicit: profanity, violence and misogynistic language each increased roughly fivefold in our text-based measures, while references to drugs rose by approximately half as much. That growth in lyrical intensity helps explain why hip hop continues to provoke anxiety. But it also sharpens the question that matters most, at least to an economist: Does exposure to these lyrics have measurable effects on people’s lives?

To answer that, we looked at locations with varied hip-hop exposure—some places where it arrived early, others where it arrived later. Hip hop initially reached mass audiences through a subset of black radio stations, often those formatted as “urban contemporary.” Some cities gained early access through those stations. Others didn’t for reasons as mundane as geography, signal reach and local radio history.

That uneven rollout created natural variation in exposure.

Using radio data and decades of census records, we estimated how much hip hop was played on the radio in each county in the U.S. over time. We then tested whether increases in hip-hop penetration were linked to changes in crime—and whether people exposed to more hip hop in their formative years experienced worse outcomes in education, employment, earnings, teen births and single parenthood.

The answer was striking. In our estimates, the effects hovered around zero, sometimes even slightly positive. Places with heavier rap exposure didn’t experience higher crime, lower educational attainment or weaker labor-market outcomes relative to trends elsewhere.

Here's a link to the Ted Talk.

And here's a comment I made over there:

Interesting. Here's a post I wrote back in February. It's about the depiction of sex in novels from Pride and Prejudice through Fifty Shades of Grey. I speculate that what's going on there is the conversion of shared knowledge about sex to common knowledge. I wonder if something similar is going on in hip-hop: "Over the past 40 years, hip-hop lyrics have grown substantially more explicit: profanity, violence and misogynistic language each increased roughly fivefold in our text-based measures, while references to drugs rose by approximately half as much."

The 19th Century Anglophone novel

Fryer mentions using "modern text analysis" to determine the content of hip-hop lyrics. That phrase covers a number of techniques, including topic modeling. In his 2013 book, Macroanalysis, Matthew Jockers applied topic modeling to a corpus of roughly 3000 19th century Anglophone novels. One of the topics he identified as WIVES AND MARRIAGE. Thus cluster map shows the words in that topic:

Agentic coding is neurosymbolic AI

Why do coding agents work so well and what would it take to replicate their success in other domains? One important and under-appreciated reason is that agentic coding is a type of neurosymbolic AI.

The main weakness of LLMs is that they are statistical machines and struggle at…

— Arvind Narayanan (@random_walker) February 2, 2026