Michael Pollan sets out to explore the mysteries of consciousness in his new book, A World Appears
VANDANENDE LAGERKREATIV / Alam
What is Consciousness? It is one of the most perplexing questions in science. You would expect that our intimacy with it would give us a leg up in understanding how it works, but this has proven to be more of a hindrance than a help. Science prizes objectivity. So how can you study something objectively when it is also the very tool you use to study?
This conundrum forms the backbone of Michael Pollan’s latest book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. Pollan’s previous works include The omnivore’s dilemma and How to change your mind. The former helped bring to light the environmental and animal welfare effects of the American food system, while the latter introduced the public to the psychedelic research renaissance. Both strongly influenced me as a young adult, steering me toward a career in science journalism. So I was eager for his view of consciousness.
Pollan approaches the subject with serious curiosity. He sits, rather than breaks, with the so-called hard problem of consciousness: how and why humans and other organisms have a subjective experience. The resulting attack is much like consciousness itself: fascinating, but at times abstruse.
Pollan reported on and wrote this book over five years, exploring consciousness through fields as diverse as artificial intelligence, plant biology, Victorian literature, and Buddhist philosophy, to name a few. Given how extensive the subject of consciousness is and how little is understood about it, it must have been a challenge to weave these threads into a coherent narrative. But Pollan tries his best—and largely succeeds in structuring his book into four chapters, each representing an increasingly complex dimension of consciousness.
The first of these, sentience, is based on an experience Pollan had with magic mushrooms. While under the influence in his garden, he felt certain that the plants around him were sentient. This later led to him talking to a number of researchers who investigated the case. Some of the discoveries are remarkable, such as the ability of roots to navigate labyrinths. Pollan is not sure about attributing consciousness to plants (at least not yet). He is more comfortable considering them sentient, what he calls a step below consciousness.
The next chapter is about feelings and emotions. I would describe it as an interesting, but uncomfortable, pit stop on our investigation of consciousness. We meet a series of scientists trying to imbue machines with consciousness, including a scientist who programmed a computer to seek food, water and rest in a digital landscape. The idea is that these basic drives can eventually give rise to consciousness—a claim that disturbed me. Can consciousness really be reduced to a by-product of hunger? I struggled to accept this. Perhaps it is my own desire for a little magic, something Pollan notes that many researchers would see as a weakness in the face of objectivity. But I cannot shake the belief that consciousness, the consciousness of being alive, is far greater and richer than a computer algorithm. At this point I was worried about how I was going to get through the remaining 150 pages.
The next two sections, on thoughts and self, largely turn away from scientists (to my relief). Instead, they lean on philosophers, writers, and artists, who, as Pollan notes, have pondered questions of consciousness far longer than scientists. He examines how metaphors likening the mind to machines have limited thinking about the hard problem, leading us to assume that consciousness arises from some arrangement of matter, usually a network of neurons. But these materialistic approaches sometimes downplay the life and complexity of consciousness, unlike the humanities.
This is just one of the reasons why Pollan ultimately concludes that the materialist approach to consciousness has hit a wall. While not everyone in the field will be ready to abandon it, he believes this frees us to explore ideas that would otherwise be scoffed at—among them the possibility that consciousness does not originate in the brain or body at all, but is instead woven into the fabric of reality, like gravity, an idea he simply plants rather than expands.
Towards the end of the journey, Pollan admits that he now knows less about consciousness than when he started, a sentiment I share after reading the book. But, as leading consciousness researcher Christof Koch tells him, in a strange way it is progress. “Sometimes not knowing opens us up to possibilities that knowing, or trying to know, or thinking we already know closes,” writes Pollan. It may be more fruitful, then, to treat awareness as a practice, engaging fully with our present moment, rather than a puzzle to be solved—a conclusion I couldn’t agree with more.
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