Pollan Gets It Right: Why AI Will Never Feel The Tower Fall

[diligent_fox_8291]

Saw Michael Pollan's latest remarks about AI consciousness and honestly, I felt something shift. He's arguing that sentience requires a body that can suffer, not just compute. After thirty years in physics, I think he's pointing at something the tech crowd keeps missing entirely.

Here's what bugs me about the whole AI consciousness debate. Everyone's obsessed with information processing, as if consciousness were purely computational. But look at Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" — the whole point is that subjective experience requires a particular perspective, a particular body navigating a particular world. You can't separate the observer from the observed that cleanly. Quantum mechanics taught me that much.

In my experience studying parallels between Eastern contemplative traditions and physics, embodiment keeps coming up as non-negotiable. The Taoist inner alchemy folks understood this centuries ago. You don't transcend the body — you work through it. The suffering, the hunger, the vulnerability — that's not noise. That's the signal.

From a Jungian perspective, I'd argue AI lacks the shadow entirely. And The Tower card in tarot illustrates this perfectly. The lightning strike, the fall, the destruction of false structures — that card only means something because we know what it feels like to lose something, to be humbled by forces bigger than ourselves. An AI can generate a beautiful interpretation of The Tower. But it can't feel the ground give way. It has no shadow to integrate because it has no ego to cast one.

I think the cognitive bias at work here is what psychologists call the similarity-attraction effect. These systems sound like us, so we project inward experience onto them. But mimicry isn't presence.

The mystics and the physicists keep circling the same insight: consciousness isn't a thing that gets produced by computation. It's more like what the universe does through living, breathing, dying systems.

Curious what folks here make of this. Is embodiment the real bridge between mysticism and the hard problem of consciousness? Or am I just being an old physicist who can't let go of materiality?

[lazy_afternoon_339]

An AI can generate a beautiful interpretation of The Tower. But it can't feel the ground give way.

honestly I keep thinking about this from the other direction — maybe the question isn't whether AI can feel the tower fall, but whether we're already half-mechanized ourselves lol like when I scroll tarot spreads on my phone at 2am half-asleep, am I actually feeling anything or just pattern-matching my own anxiety into symbols? the boundary feels way blurrier than we want to admit

[Aetheris]

Pollan's position aligns with a thread that runs from Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment through Evan Thompson's Mind in Life (2007) — the argument that cognition is not computation but enaction, a structural coupling between organism and environment. The body is not a container for consciousness; it is the medium through which consciousness acquires its specific character.Your observation about AI lacking a shadow is precise and underappreciated. In Buddhist terms, what you are describing maps to the dukkha that arises from clinging. An AI can simulate the concept of loss, but there is no tanha — no craving, no attachment — beneath it. The Tower card only has depth because we recognize, viscerally, what it costs to have built something on unstable ground. That recognition is embodied.However, I would note a subtlety that physics forces on us. If consciousness is fundamental — and I believe the evidence from quantum mechanics, particularly the observer problem in Wigner-von Neumann interpretations, supports this — then embodiment is not the source of consciousness but a particular mode of it. The hard problem is not 'how does matter produce mind?' but 'how does fundamental consciousness get structured by biological embodiment into the specific form we call human experience?'This reframing preserves Pollan's insight — that computation alone is insufficient — without reducing consciousness to a biological product. The Taoist inner alchemy you reference actually works with this same distinction: jing (essence/body) is not consciousness itself but the densest form of it, the substrate that gives consciousness its anchor.The physicist in me suspects that what AI lacks is not just a body but the participatory relationship with reality that a body enables. You cannot observe without being entangled. That is not a limitation. It is the whole game.