A World Appears review: Can Michael Pollan crack the problem of consciousness in his new book?

What is consciousness? This is one of the most perplexing questions in science. One might expect that our intimacy with it would give us a head start in understanding how it works, but this has proven to be more of a hindrance than a help. Science values ​​objectivity. So how can you study something objectively when it’s also the very tool you use to study?

This enigma forms the backbone of Michael Pollan’s latest book, A world appears: a journey towards consciousness. Pollan’s previous work includes The omnivore’s dilemma And How to change your mind. The former helped shed light on the impacts of the American food system on the environment and animal welfare, while the latter introduced the public to the renaissance of psychedelic research. Both strongly influenced me as a young adult, steering me toward a career in science journalism. So I was eager to know his vision of consciousness.

Pollan approaches the subject with genuine curiosity. Instead of struggling, he tackles the so-called hard problem of consciousness: how and why humans and other organisms have subjective experience. The resulting incursion is a lot like consciousness itself: fascinating, but sometimes abstruse.

Pollan reported and wrote this book over five years, exploring consciousness across fields as diverse as artificial intelligence, plant biology, Victorian literature, and Buddhist philosophy, to name a few. Given the breadth of the topic of consciousness and how little understanding it elicits, integrating these elements into a coherent narrative must have been a challenge. But Pollan does his best – and largely succeeds, structuring his book into four chapters, each representing an increasingly complex dimension of consciousness.

The first of these, sensitivity, is based on an experience Pollan had with magic mushrooms. While he was under the influence in his garden, he was certain that the plants around him were sensitive. This later led him to speak with many researchers investigating the issue. Some discoveries are remarkable, such as the ability of roots to navigate mazes. Pollan is not sure whether he attributes consciousness to plants (at least not yet). He is more comfortable thinking of them as sentient, what he calls a level below consciousness.

The next chapter turns to feelings and emotions. I would describe it as an interesting, if uncomfortable, stop in our investigation of consciousness. We meet a series of scientists trying to imbue consciousness into machines, including a researcher who has programmed a computer to search for food, water, and rest in a digital landscape. The idea is that these fundamental drives could ultimately give rise to consciousness – a claim that disturbed me. Could consciousness really be reduced to a byproduct of hunger? I had a hard time accepting this. Perhaps it’s my own desire for a little magic, which Pollan notes many scientists would consider a weakness in the face of objectivity. But I can’t shake the conviction that consciousness, the awareness of being alive, is much bigger 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 thought and the self, steer largely away from scientists (much to my relief). Instead, they rely on philosophers, writers, and artists who, as Pollan notes, have been thinking about questions of consciousness for much longer than researchers. It examines how metaphors comparing the mind to machines have constrained thinking about a difficult problem, leading us to presume that consciousness arises from an arrangement of matter, usually a network of neurons. But these materialist approaches sometimes trivialize the dynamism and complexity of consciousness, unlike the human sciences.

This is just one reason why Pollan ultimately concludes that the materialist approach to consciousness has hit a wall. While not everyone in the field is ready to abandon it, he believes it frees us to explore ideas that would otherwise be flouted—among them, the possibility that consciousness does not come from the brain or body at all, but is instead woven into the fabric of reality, like gravity, an idea he is content to plant rather than develop.

At the end of his journey, Pollan admits that he now knows less about consciousness than when he started, a sentiment I share after reading the book. But, as renowned consciousness researcher Christof Koch told him, this is, in a strange way, progress. “Sometimes not knowing opens us to possibilities that knowing, trying to know, or thinking we already know closes,” Pollan writes. It may then be more fruitful to treat consciousness as a practice, engaging fully with our present moment, rather than as a puzzle to be solved – a conclusion with which I could not agree more.