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

What is consciousness? It is one of the most perplexing questions in science. You’d expect our intimacy with him to help us understand how it works, but it turns out to be more of a hindrance than a help. Science values ​​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, The 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 effects of the American food system on the environment and animal welfare, while the latter introduced a renaissance in psychedelic research to the public. Both strongly influenced me as a young adult and steered me toward a career in science journalism. So I longed for his acceptance of consciousness.

Pollan approaches the subject with genuine curiosity. Rather than grappling with the so-called hard problem of consciousness: how and why humans and other organisms have subjective experience. The resulting foray is very much like consciousness itself: fascinating, yet sometimes incomprehensible.

Pollan reported on and wrote the 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 vast and poorly understood the subject of consciousness is, weaving these threads into a coherent narrative must have been a challenge. But Pollan tries his best—and largely succeeds, structuring his book into four chapters, each representing an increasingly complex dimension of consciousness.

The first of these, sentiment, builds on Pollan’s experience with magic mushrooms. While under the influence in his garden, he was certain that the plants around him were sentient. This later led him to talk to many researchers who were looking into the matter. Some of the findings are remarkable, such as the ability of roots to navigate a maze. Pollan is not sure about attributing consciousness to plants (at least not yet). It is more convenient for him to think of them as sentient, which he calls a step below consciousness.

The next chapter deals with feelings and emotions. I would describe it as an interesting, if uncomfortable, stop in our exploration of consciousness. We meet a number of scientists trying to imbue machines with consciousness, including one researcher who has programmed a computer to search for food, water and rest in the digital landscape. The idea is that these basic drives could eventually lead to consciousness—a claim that troubled me. Could consciousness really be reduced to a byproduct of hunger? I tried to accept it. Perhaps it’s my own desire for a bit of magic, something Pollan says many scientists would consider a weakness in the face of objectivity. But I can’t shake the belief that consciousness, the consciousness 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 thinking and the self, steer largely away from the scientists (to my relief). Instead, they rely on philosophers, writers, and artists who, Pollan notes, have been thinking about questions of consciousness far longer than researchers. He examines how mind-machine metaphors have limited thinking to a hard problem, leading us to assume that consciousness arises from some arrangement of matter, usually a network of neurons. But these materialistic approaches sometimes trivialize the vibrancy and complexity of consciousness, unlike the humanities.

This is just one of the reasons Pollan ultimately concludes that the materialist approach to consciousness has hit a wall. While not everyone in the field will be ready to give it up, he believes it will free us to explore ideas that would otherwise be scoffed at — among them the possibility that consciousness doesn’t come from the brain or body at all, but is woven into the fabric of reality like gravity, an idea he simply planted rather than expanded upon.

At the end of his journey, Pollan admits that he knows less about consciousness now than he did when he started, a sentiment I share after reading the book. But, as leading consciousness researcher Christof Koch calls it, it’s progress in a special way. “Sometimes not knowing opens up possibilities that are closed off by knowing, or trying to know, or thinking we already know,” Pollan writes. So it may be more fruitful to treat awareness as a practice, to fully engage with our present moment, rather than a puzzle to be solved—a conclusion I couldn’t agree with.

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