A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

by Michael Pollan

When it comes to consciousness, there is one point scientists, philosophers and artists all agree on: that it feels like something to be ourselves. And yet, the fact that each and every one of us has a subjective experience of the world continues to be one of the greatest mysteries in nature. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts and a sense of self? What would studying the inner life scientifically even look like?

What began for Michael Pollan as a startling awareness of his own consciousness soon evolved into a deeper fascination with this strange and elusive phenomenon. In A World Appears, Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness from several radically different perspectives – scientific, philosophical, spiritual, historical and psychedelic – to see what each has to teach us about this fundamental fact of our lives.

Here Pollan ventures beyond the brain labs attempting to find neural explanations for our felt reality, and discovers the latest cutting-edge advances in the field. He introduces us to plant neurobiologists studying nature’s surprisingly complex intelligence; neuroscientists and psychoanalysts attempting to engineer feeling into AI; and novelists recreating our slippery stream of consciousness.

Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness uncovers a world far deeper than our everyday reality – and perhaps even beyond it.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Philosophy, Psychology, Audiobook, Neuroscience, Spirituality

320 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2026

About the author

Michael Pollan is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Theo Logos]

Near the end of this book, looking back on all the various avenues he explored, Pollan sums up his experience thusly:

Because consciousness is the only means we have of knowing anything we can’t step outside it and take up a god-like perspective from which to render a final judgement. So where does that leave us? Exactly where we already were, wandering in the exitless labyrinth of consciousness.

Which is another way of saying that much of the value of reading this book is finding out how little you know, how little you will ever likely be able to know about what exactly consciousness is. Pollan finds value in this negative knowledge, and I’m inclined to agree.

Pollan takes you on quite a wild trip to get to that conclusion. He starts by stating the impediments to examining consciousness, such as:

One reason why consciousness has proved such a hard nut for science and philosophy is because the only tool we can use to crack it is consciousness itself.

He examines the idea of consciousness in plants, spends a considerable amount of time speculating about the possibility of consciousness in machines, and examines perspectives as varied as scientists, engineers, philosophers, novelists, and Zen practitioners. He touches on a plethora of theories of consciousness:

Among the ostensibly crazy ideas…are Panpsychism, the ancient idea that everything, right down to the subatomic particles in the ink on a page is conscious to some infinitesimal degree,
Idealism, the equally ancient idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism, and in fact precedes matter,
Illusionism, the idea that consciousness, perhaps the thing in life we are most certain is real, is just an illusion, and
Quantum Theory, some versions of which put forth the idea that consciousness is an active force in the construction of reality.
Yes, it really does get that weird and weirder still.

This book can be simultaneously maddeningly frustrating and absolutely fascinating. Pollan’s own obsession and relentless curiosity drives the book and the search for an answer that Western science has all but surrendered on obtaining. But Pollan’s curiosity is infectious, and if you have a certain type of mind, you are bound to enjoy this koanic journey. Just make sure to heed the author’s advice:

One bit of advice — don’t spend too much time thinking about consciousness or following developments in the field unless you’re willing to throw into question your most cherished assumptions about reality and entertain some truly strange possibilities.

[Ken]

First, a brief story. As a freshman in college who had to fulfill math and science categories (all together now: Yikes!), I signed up for Astronomy. Why? I loved looking at stars, learning constellations, and even more learning the stories (often Greek myths) behind the constellations. Anyone who knows anything about astronomy knows how this ends (the rating = R). I was roadkill. It was all science. And some freakin' math. Brutal, and about as un- capital R Romantic as you can get (the professor did not say "Greek" or "myth" once).

This book, in its way, reminded me of my Astronomy adventure. It's all about CONSCIOUSNESS, what it is, what it isn't, etc., which I am keenly interested in. Chapter headings give us words like "Sentience," "Feeling," "Thought," and "Self." All attractive to the curious young mind (I may be getting on, but my brain is yet young).

But, alas, the book was Pollan on one interview after another with one scientist after another, many in fields with names longer than the autobahn, many with speculations that lost me at the 23rd hairpin turn. Lots and lots of theory. I was especially bored by the scientists who are convinced they can give AI "feelings." (The return of HAL!) If I never see the letters "A" and "I" again, I'd be a happy man because almost all of its press is bad (though it does expand the permanent press of the already-very-rich's pockets while destroying the environment, eating up RAM so it costs more for laptops, and stealing intellectual property of artists).

Not that the book was all a wash. I quite enjoyed the chapter on plants. Turns out, plants are smarter than we think, even if they lack a brain. The experiments in this chapter will prove it. Too bad no one can say if plants feel pain when they are cut, diced, roasted, chewed, and swallowed (it's a broccoli eat broccoli world out there).

The chapter on the SELF was mind-bending too. Who IS this voice we live with? And can we assume that we all think alike when it comes to our thoughts? Bad assumption, turns out. So, yeah, there were parts where the wind was at the reader's back and times when the reader sat in the Sargasso Sea spelling "doldrums" on his Scrabble board.

An instructive quote from the final pages: "Nearing the end of this journey, I find myself not at all sure what to believe, if anything. I'm abashed to say I know less now than I did when, naively, I set out to unravel the mystery of consciousness. But then, most of what I thought I knew or took for granted, like the assumption that consciousness is a product of our brains and materialism will eventually explain everything, turned out to be unproven or wrong. When I confessed to Koch my fear--that after my five-year journey into the nature and workings of consciousness, I somehow knew less than I did when I started--he simply smiled.

"'But that's good,' he said. 'That's progress!'"

In a nutshell, reading this book gets you nowhere (and in style!), but if you have a taste for science and don't mind all manner of theories on consciousness, you might well enjoy finishing with more questions than answers, because answers are in short supply here, something you might not have expected from a book of this sort.

Both me and my thoughts and my self and my consciousness and my hurt feelings are now signing off (or are they?)...

[Wes]

Total confusion

I admire Pollan’s refusal to fall for Physcialism but the entire book is a painful read for those who know anything about the topic. Not until the very end do we even get a page on Kastrup. I’m unsure what he was expecting. He never engaged with real philosophy but just toured the consciousness deniers.

[Clif Hostetler]

Consciousness, what is it? This is the question that this book strives to answer. At one level it’s an ordinary word that everyone knows what it means. But what is the source of the internal private experience that we perceive to be consciousness? If one tries to define it by various observable properties the question shifts to who or what has it or doesn’t have it. The question is becoming more prescient with AI’s arrival. If artificial intelligence is skilled at acting as if it has consciousness, does it have it?

Most neuroscientists think of consciousness being the physical interaction of many billions of brain neurons. But exactly how do they interactively communicate to create an internal sense of awareness of existence? Even if scientists could utilize billions of computer chips, how to connect them in order to create consciousness is still a mystery.

There are many theories of consciousness—as many as twenty-two—and I don't think the author addressed them all, but it seemed as if he did. Theories varied from all life (single cell life to mammals) have a bit of consciousness to the other extreme of no life having consciousness (throughout universe outside of life). These extreme views are hard to take seriously, but one thing from the book that I’m pondering is the idea that perhaps consciousness can’t be understood because we can’t get outside of conscious life in order to objectively study consciousness from its exterior. Huh?

Pollan does a good job reviewing what all the experts say on the subject. The problem is that experts can’t agree on a definition. Thus any discussion of consciousness is subjective in nature and this book ends up sounding like a transcript of a bull-session of want-to-be philosophers arguing about what is truth. It’s a bunch of talk and theories with no conclusive answer. My interest in the subject wandered as I plodded thru this book’s quagmire of subjective speculation. Thus the two stars. It's not Pollan's writing that's the problem, it's the subject.

The book title reminds me of the experience of a newborn baby. The baby opens their eyes for the first time and “a world appears.” But the same thing happens to all of us when we wakeup from a night's sleep; we open our eyes and a world appears.

[Dieter Mueller]

The state of the art

This exploration of consciousness in the year 2026 is the best there is. It covers everything worth writing about. The footnotes are a treasure trove.

[Grace Wade]

More like 3.5. This is a tough one for me to rate. The first half was a bit hard for me to get through. Lots of conjecturing and not much of a narrative or guardrails to cling on to (I don’t blame him tho. A journey into consciousness is a massive undertaking). Second half was fantastic though. Much more narrative and felt like he was starting to lay down some takeaways. If you’re a Pollan fan, definitely worth a read. If you’re interested in consciousness, also worth a read!

[Milind]

Quite a good book, primarily because Pollan is an intelligent and also not credulous writer, which is really the most important thing in books like this. I found I enjoyed How to Change Your Mind more, though. In this book Pollan spends a lot of time on the scientific attempts to understand consciousness, but not so much on the less physicalist ideas or even his own experiments with hypnosis and meditation. I generally appreciate Pollan for his willingness to not stick to exactly what he’s been told by scientists, and I felt that there was less of that in this book than his other ones.

I would have loved the last fifth (or maybe it was the last sixth) to have been expanded on much more: that’s the part that feels a bit rushed in which he quickly mentions some non-physicalist ideas, that a leading consciousness researcher from earlier in the book has changed his mind about the correctness of a 100% physicalist approach, his own experiments with meditation in the Zen Buddhist school, and some experiments with hypnosis. These to me needed a lot more space to be fleshed out. I think they would have been extremely interesting to hear Pollan’s thoughts and musings on. Perhaps they were edited out, or perhaps Pollan didn’t want to give so much weight to the “non-scientific” schools of thought. A shame, because ultimately whether physicalist or not, the mystery is just as all-pervading.

[Samidha; समिधा]

My first Michael Pollan book, and this was a bit … underwhelming. Except for the chapter on plants and the self, I didn’t find anything compelling. Maybe it’s the subject matter, or maybe it’s just that the chapters seemed to meander without any real argument.

[Amy]

Michael Pollan began his popular nonfiction book career with food, moved to hallucinogens, and is now exploring consciousness in A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. Surely, for him, this has been a natural progression! His progression makes me laugh.

5 stars to Michael Pollan for his capacity to explain and summarize the current science of contemporary researchers and to weave them together into a story. 3.5 stars for narrowness of content about consciousness. Pollan mentions, briefly, the Mind Life Conferences and interviews Matthieu Ricard but does not include enough Buddhist content, and no offense, the Western science is still in its infancy and babyish.

It is interesting to note that the scientists have devolved to a mid-sixties hippy stance. They are often looking to psychedelics to inform them, rather than looking to meditation. In the mid 1960s, anyone who took LSD repeatedly, later went on in search of deeper understandings--religion, spiritual practice, physics, and the like.

[Laura]

I love books about neuroscience and I thought that’s what this book was going to be about generally. Maybe it’ll get there; I had to stop at page 37. But even with a science-trained and science-based mind, I can’t get through it. It’s written at a very high academic level that isn’t really inviting to those who don’t have a background in the area. It doesn’t help that the scientists the author interviews don’t use the same definition of a word (such as consciousness vs sentience). The author defines those words based on his own opinion, but then a scientist he interviews will say something about what they define as consciousness what the author thinks it’s more like he would define sentience. It got too confusing to follow. How will we ever know which one is which?

However, I will now always be thinking of whether or not my plants are sentient. Or are they conscious?

[Myles]

Before everybody runs off in a huff: Michael Pollan is first and foremost a journalist: not a philosopher. And certainly not a neuroscientist.

He pretty much takes the Everyman approach to science and life: "I'll explain to you what I can and for the rest of it you're on your own."

I very much enjoy his intellectual meanderings, but FULL DISCLOSURE: I did not read his book on psychotropic drug experiences.

Looking back at my notes after reading this book, I must say there was plenty to mull over: that life may be a controlled (or uncontrolled) hallucination; that our minds are formed by friction with the world; that impressions are likely encryptions of the self; that technologies open windows of awareness; that intelligent behavior can be something as simple as a distributed group of cells; that robots can never feel familiarity; and that consciousness may be nature's response to entropy.

And there are plenty of warning signs, like Sherry Turkle's missive: "Technologies can make us forget what we know about life." Not to mention forget to take out the garbage.

One thing that stuck with me was the experiment he relates about the plants that compete for soil space when in the wild, but when you put them in a container they suddenly figure out that competition is less useful than cooperation, they compromise, and simply share the available space.

Wouldn't that approach make more sense in the Middle East, in Ukraine, and Houthi-controlled Yemen?

But any writer who hauls in William James -- one of my all-time favourite thinkers -- Marcel Proust, and David Hume is OK in my books.

[Lee D]

I’ve read widely on consciousness from both philosophical and neuroscience perspectives. My key take away from this book is that I don’t think that the various people he interviews would even agree on what consciousness is. Some liken it to sentience, being awake, being aware, or being aware of awareness.

One researcher even suggests that consciousness is just a part of the mind, which is difficult to get on board with given that consciousness is necessary to be aware of the mind and its process.

The talk of creating a conscious AI is terrifying but also amusing in the sense that they are trying to create something that they don’t even understand.

Consciousness may still be a great mystery, but direct knowledge of it isn’t anywhere near as complicated as this book makes out.

My rating is based on the content not the writing. I like Michael Pollan but this book doesn’t offer anything particularly enlightening on the subject.

[Panda]

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Audiobook (9 hours) narrated by the author.
Publisher: Books on Tape.

The narration is fine.

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The book is pants.

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For a little fun eat, drink, or do an activity like a pushup or jumping jack every time the author says consciousness. It won't be long before you either won't care or will lose consciousness. Either way, you will no longer have to worry about the book being pants. Also, that's where the little twinkling stars around the pants come in... pretty....

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[Shiva]

I was so excited about this book having loved everything Pollan has written up to this point. I just found this one lacking - it didn’t surface new ideas or frameworks for approaching the question of consciousness and at the same time didn’t really survey the current state of study in this area in all that clear or comprehensive of a way either. But I still appreciated my time with this book.

[William Adams]

Pollan attempts to report current thinking on consciousness: what it is, how it works, where it came from, who has it and who doesn’t. However there is a scholarly position for nearly every conceivable idea about consciousness, so this survey of current thinking is no different from idle speculation. Pollan is unable or unwilling to search for fundamental principles or common denominators. It appears that the topic defeated him. The result is a superficial survey of thinking about consciousness since about 1994 (the date of the first Tucson conference).

Essentially all the ideas about consciousness covered are either physicalist or computational-informational. Pollan does a decent job in such a short book in summarizing those. He tries to critique them but has no foundational tools to do so. Instead, he seems to equate mind and brain, consciousness and sentience. He, like his interviewees, hopelessly confuse subjective and objective description, observer with observed, mind and brain, ontology and epistemology, self and world, functional and phenomenological terminology.

Pollan very briefly takes up idealism, the idea that all the world is made of consciousness, but declares without analysis that it is “implausible” (a verdict that confuses subjective and objective points of view). He briefly discusses panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is “in” everything, or at least everything alive, without realizing that it does not solve any problem. Spreading consciousness very thinly over everything does not address what it is.

Beyond his offhand dismissal of idealism, Pollan does not seriously consider non-physical, non-functional theories such as Advaita, phenomenology, religion, or any of the philosophical idealists beyond Kastrup. He reports briefly on drug-induced experiences of physical transcendence but without interpretation or integration into any theory of consciousness.

In the end, he opts for an anti-intellectual Buddhist practice, chopping wood and carrying water, failing to realize that as soon as you open your mouth that solution becomes invalid. For someone who has not been paying attention to recent thinking on consciousness, the book might be a useful catch-up, but for anyone else it is an exercise in frustration.

Pollan, Michael (2026). A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. New York:
Penguin

[Irene]

I'm always impressed by Pollan's books because he brings such a personal perspective to them.

Consciousness is one of my favourite topics to read about and I have many controversial opinions about it that would very likely get me into hot water in the comments section.

That said, I would like to inform Pollan of the fact that there is, surprisingly, a small but vocal subset of people (mostly on the internet) struggling with moral scrupulosity who do ascribe real feelings to fictional characters and feel the need to save them or punish them, or the author by proxy accordingly, without being quite aware of the absurdity of the entire premise.

[Kathryn Bashaar]

This book frustrated me a bit while I was reading it. The intro and table of contents led me to believe that Pollan was going to examine consciousness in a methodical way, examining each of its components – sentience, feeling, thought and self – progressively. I was disabused of that assumption in the first chapter, where he uses sentience and consciousness interchangeably, even though they are two different things. This book is more an exploration than an explanation.

Pollan talks to some of the greatest minds that are working on the riddle of consciousness, and shares highlights of those conversations – along with his own impressions and experiences. Unsurprisingly, given the complexity of the topic, those great mind often disagree with each other. Their thoughts are certainly interesting, but sometimes Pollan gives us a little too much. Just summarize, dude.

The key question is why are we conscious? One theory is that consciousness is a universal field preceding matter, and our brains tune into that field. Another theory is that our brain creates consciousness. But how? Did consciousness evolve? If it did, how did that happen? Are only humans and higher animals conscious? Or are all beings conscious or sentient at some level?

One of the most interesting questions the book raises, in my opinion, is the question of whether we have moral obligations to non-human beings who seem to exhibit consciousness. Animals? He even makes the case for some level of consciousness in plants. One “being” that I wouldn’t worry about having a level of consciousness that would rise to the level of moral consideration is AI. A couple of the scientists Pollan talks to speculate that AI will become conscious. I completely disagree. I submit that you can’t be conscious without feelings and you can’t have feelings without a biological body. Pollan seems to lean towards disagreement for the same reason. But it’s a very interesting question.

In the end, Pollan ends where he began: with the notion that consciousness is a mystery and a miracle. In the last chapter, he seems content to exist in the enhanced state of consciousness that comes from fully living in the moment, in acceptance of the mystery.

This book wasn’t very well organized, but I’m glad I read it. It made me think hard, and I like that.

[Vacay]

Chugged this. Going to have to read (listen—Pollan is a great reader!) again in a few weeks, because it's even denser with ideas than "How to Change Your Mind", which this book in every way follows. But, as ever, Pollan has an incredible talent for lucid, tangible descriptions of extremely slippery concepts, as well as a direct line to many of the most interesting thinkers of our times. A must-read if you liked HTCYM, if you're interested in consciousness, meditation, and AI, or just curious about what's going on between your own ears.

[Brian Regan]

This is my first "did not finish" book on Goodreads! I've been a big fan of Pollan's for many years and have read all of his generally excellent books. This one did not engage me. Even he admits that it didn't turn out as he'd expected. He's tackling consciousness here, and it's pretty dense going. I feel like I got a LOT more out of Dan Brown's most recent book, which also covers the topic, but packages the science in a fast-paced narrative. This was just dull. Onward and upward.

[Themis Drakontis]

A dense but thought-provoking exploration of consciousness that combines science, philosophy, and personal insight. At times it feels overly technical and difficult to follow, but it offers rewarding ideas about the mind, the self, and the nature of experience. Its greatest strength is how it moves from complexity to a simple, almost humbling conclusion: consciousness remains a mystery, yet it is also the most immediate thing we have.

[David Steck]

For me, this book was a disappointment. I didn’t come away feeling that I learned much, and I’m not sure Pollan uncovered any especially meaningful new insights about consciousness. At times it drifted into extended backstories and commentary that felt a bit in the Malcolm Gladwell vein. A shame, since “How to Change Your Mind” was so strong.

[Matt Quann]

Michael Pollan seems to have been on a particular wavelength with his last few books. He's interested in feeling out, perhaps mime-like, the boundaries of human consciousness. In How to Change Your Mind and its sister book, Pollan brought me through the history and therapeutic promise of psychedelics and other mind altering chemicals. In A World Appears Pollan trades in the kaleidoscope of psychedelics for a complex hall of mirrors as he interrogates the world of scientific consciousness research.

Let there be no question: this is an interesting book. It's just not an easy one.

Pollan takes the reader on a tour of consciousness researchers and theorists, letting us peek in on the "hard problem" of consciousness from different angles. In simplest terms, the "hard problem" is the question of how our experience of consciousness can arise from the brain. Effectively, if the brain is the hardware that consciousness--the software--runs on, by what mechanism does the brain make it happen? You'll find in here theories, but it's unsurprisingly thin on answers.

See, the problem with researching consciousness is that we are effectively attempting to observe a phenomenon while simultaneously experiencing it. This leads us to the aforementioned hall of mirrors that Pollan walks us down. It was not infrequent in my listening experience to screw up my face and ask "wait, from what perspective am I supposed to be understanding this idea?" It's screwy in a way that the book on psychedelics just wasn't. It's the hard road to a wider understanding, rather than the flashy and exciting trip you may be expecting after the last book.

Of the Pollan books I've read or listened to, this one is my least favourite. Honestly, it's probably the least accessible, which is ironic as all readers have a conscious experience by which to compare. I think Pollan does an admirable job of trying to envelop the gossamer threads of consciousness and its researchers, but it's more work than I'd anticipated. I'm going to file this one under "for only those with extreme interest."

[Evan]

This was by far my most anticipated book of the whole year. I’m an enormous fan of Michael Pollan—his writing, his curiosity, his unparalleled abilities to address incredibly complex topics in digestible and entertaining ways—and upon hearing his next book was about consciousness, a topic I find myself constantly thinking about, I was basically counting down the days.

I’d argue this is up there with his best work! He addresses this fleeting, unknowable concept from so many different angles, speaking to scientists, philosophers and artists in order to leave the reader with a good sense of the territory upon which they could make their own minds up. His personal perspective here is also just so wonderful, and it’s so nice having a guide to this realm who is both incredibly open-minded and willing to call people and ideas out when he feels like they aren’t satisfactory.

Absolute must read.

[Natalie Cutter]

Not for me.

Glimmers of interesting things, but rough to get through. I found myself tuning out time and time again. I don't feel like I learned anything.

[jebrahn]

How do I say this, and who is it going to bother?:
Michael Pollan is highly intelligent (and ***extremely privileged***). He's definitely smarter than you and I are. Prior to this book, I admired him for his love of plants and his writerly devotion to them (and other low-to-the-ground lifeforms). His was a noble and enheartening literary contribution to biotic life itself, to Earth Science and brilliant flora amusements, and herein to the field of collective human consciousness (which is largely what this book is about). In A World Appears Pollan is no longer a gardener: he is an Ubermench. Good God- who has he been having dinner parties alongside, bumping elbows with, chuckling about the forward momentum of AI with rather than changing the subject to Gaza and other assault/slaughter crimes against all of the wonderful plants?
A World Appears is not Pollan with his hands in the soil, taking on a plant as a muse. In this year of 2026 with much less that 100-years-worth of grains of sand left in my hourglass, I have extremely little desire to "connect" to "consciousness" through the mindstreams of privileged, highly-accoladed, ultra financially secure, luxuriously pampered, stunningly efficient (in the way only privilege can buy) white male acedemicians. As a biotic lifeform and a mindstream myself, I just don't want any of that tech-masc "super intelligence" stardust on me on a soul level. Adios. Now's the time to absorb poets from countries that no one cares about. The extraordinary gardener and late-blooming psychonaut was who I needed Pollan to be. Pollan+plants balanced out his social position- but with A World Appears, the scale tips, hard. His audience won't mind- this is the direction things are moving, "inevitably" we are told. For better and for worse. Inherit the ablist future. Ignore that dead brown mystic in a cave in Tibet. Tibet- what the hell is Tibet? You mean China?

If I'm going to read a book on consciousness, it's going to be by a non-white man (or woman-even better- or any other gender) who lived in in poverty, who believed they were (or are) the richest person alive because they have peace and can behold "collective consciousness" with their own senses (including supersenses) at play as they look out before them and see the dance of all the parts, being breathed by Earth and the greater universe, together. Pollan, what the hell, man? Why did you make this your soapbox? This book *feels* like AI: like a superclean synthesis of machine-absorbed wisdom from those faraway eastern non-white lands, now somehow interesting in the same way Ram Das was accessible to the West. Also Ivy Leage. Also highly privileged- he died at his estate on fucking Maui, in the land of his ancestors (I'm totally joking. I'm seriius. Also, I love Ram Das. And I love Pollan, too.). But whatever... let's all pretend like colonialism is not a necessary part of these conversations about whose voices are projected, how, why, and for what.



I guess yoga became too Americanized/workoutified for the message and techniques to have survived. But the Tao is undying. I'd avoid like the plague any transcendental "transmitions" offered by the wealthy white Zen guys from the bay area. I'd rather not get my "consciousness" or "spirituality" mixed up with whatever they and/or their dinner party friends are busy with behind the scenes on that island, if you know what I mean. Stay humble out there, readers. Protect those smaller and sweeter than you- both people and plants.

"Genius may or may not help a writer whose job it is, above all else, to clarify."- Ta nehisi Coates

[Xavier Patiño]

What is consciousness, and how do we properly define it? Like trying to define what we mean by “life”, the answer depends on who you ask. How to define and understand a phenomenon that we can never part from, step outside of? A birds-eye view isn’t available to us – so how can we study consciousness?

Are brains and nervous systems necessary for consciousness to arise? Some scientists say no. Perhaps the brain isn't the seat of consciousness, maybe it's elsewhere in the body, which then begs the question -- can animals and plants be conscious? Studies in botany have shown plants and flowers performing actions that would suggest possible awareness of itself and its surroundings.

"Consciousness is felt uncertainty."

In a world as uncertain and ambiguous as ours, consciousness may have arisen to contend with the unknown. Consciousness allows us to have conversations with ourselves -- our inner monologue. These may be attempts to sort out problems and provide multiple ways in which events can take place.

Are feelings and emotions a part of consciousness? Are they intertwined or separate?

A World Appears left me with more questions than answers, and that is ok. I believe Pollan’s goal was to start a conversation and in that he succeeded. I find neuroscience such an interesting topic. When and how did the mind begin to experience itself?

We are the universe experiencing itself as the great Carl Sagan once said. How mind-blowing.

[Jason Harris]

Bad Bookclub Recommendation

This was a book club pick, and I went in skeptical because I have not enjoyed Michael Pollan’s work in the past. That skepticism turned out to be well placed. I found the writing dull and oddly disengaging, more earnest than interesting, and I could not get through the first chapter. Life is too short to push through a book that does not grab you early.

If you have enjoyed Pollan’s previous books, this may work for you. If you have ever bounced off his style before, this one is unlikely to change your mind.

[Edie]

A book where you know less after you read it than you did before? Yes, please! I adore everything about this exploration, from Pollan's personable narration to his voracious curiosity. I think of myself as quite a connoisseur of rabbit trails but he went down paths I hadn't even thought of. As someone who is slightly obsessed with the idea of identity, this deep dive into sentience was fascinating. Who am I? What makes up the I? Add in the stuff about nature and how to measure consciousness, I am fully invested in the entire conversation. Please read this so we can talk about it!

[John Devlin]

(3.8) Pollan’s a smart guy who knows what he knows and is comfortable admitting what he doesn’t know…and even re-examining what he’s certain about .

The most revelatory aspect is in his discussion of the Self. He makes a solid and insightful case that the Self is a construct that evolution used. That consciousness is not held in the mind but is woven through the universe: quantum observation highlights the wave/particle localization. If an observer is needed for the universe to reify then consciousness can’t be held in the mind but as an interactive across experience…
—heady stuff

“we all inwardly talk to ourselves and experience spaces of interiority, not to mention the simple but nevertheless astounding fact that a world appears when we open our eyes”
—no we don’t all have interior monologues..he mentions this later

Consciousness Is God’s radio

“Psychedelics help us catch ourselves in the act of constructing our own experience.”
—Pollan has written a book on psychedelics and there seems to be real credibility in the drug’s ability to create new phenomena of perspective

“(Plants)They can distinguish kin from competitors and both from their own selves. If two unrelated plants are grown in the same pot, they will compete for nutrients by attempting to colonize as much soil as possible, whereas related plants will cooperate and share the pot, suggesting chemical signals from neighboring plants and fungi. Roots about to encounter an impenetrable obstacle or a toxic substance change course before they make contact with it. They will seek out a buried pipe through which water is flowing”
—so many authors pass on falsehoods on areas they aren’t well versed in, but not Pollan….last year I read a book called light eater that validates this quote.

Timothy Plowman replied with some exasperation: “They can eat light, isn’t that enough?”
—when discussing of plants are sentient…funny stuff

“Thompson believes that Indigenous cultures, with their radically different epistemologies (less “objective,” more “participatory”), have much to teach us on this score”
—strongly disagree here. I’ve read too much on IQ not to recognize the primitive way of seeing is not deep but taken as deep by the far more active minds

“I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches….”
—I love Descartes quote…it’s the only philosophical truth I believe…but this is funny and true stuff

“premise that human feelings owe their existence to our vulnerability, which in turn owes to our mortality.
“The meaning of life is that it ends.”
—certainly something of consciousness is explained over our battles with our oncoming demise…but given immortality I’m confident I’d still retain my inquiring self

“But that doesn’t make it true for everyone. Fewer than a quarter of the samples that Hurlburt has gathered report experiences of inner speech.”

“A slightly lower percentage report either inner seeing, feeling, or sensory awareness. Still another fifth of his samples report experiences of unsymbolized thought.”

“Hurlburt has suggested that we fail to recognize the diversity of thinking styles because we lump them all together under that single word—thinking—and assume we mean the same thing by it, though in actuality we don’t…that other people are having inner experiences more or less like our own.”
—IQ and this inner voice turns out that folks assume we inhabit very similar worlds but in fact it’s like we are all holding Iphones but folks have massively different cohorts of apps running.
“He has sampled a small number of people who have little or no inner experience at all. It’s not that there’s no one home; these people aren’t zombies.”

“I think one can make the argument that it’s actually an advantage,” Hurlburt said. “Because it puts you in touch with the world the way the world actually is, as opposed to your own theoretical view.”
—hard to square with evolution then bc it supposed then that consciousness is a negative internality

“The full-on stream of consciousness novel is a rare bird these days, maybe even on the verge of extinction—for the most part, Anglo-American fiction has retreated to the comforts of a more traditional realism”
—Pollan spends a bit of time wondering about where the stream of consciousness novel went…his answers are far too profound. Ulysses is a tough novel to fight through…Grisham is easier and far more satisfying for most…see my earlier comments on IQ

“And yet who is witnessing the thoughts popping up and passing by”
—curious…our self is really observing our perceptions gathering information

“The role of the senses is not to deliver the world to us as it “really” is but, rather, to error-correct, or update, the picture of reality that our minds infer, or predict, to be out there—in other words, to control the ongoing hallucination in which we live, lest it stray too far from reality.”

“The self is also a source of suffering”
—bc it fears its demise

On researchers “who are superambitious and dominating the discussion yet in their own mental lives are so completely impoverished that they cannot even imagine a self-less state of consciousness.”
—like IQ bias those studying consciousness are hardly average

“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

“You’re just sitting there for hours on end, and the entertainment value of watching the same reruns all day long diminishes over time.”
—an effective strategy
“To transcend the self, force yourself to be alone with it long enough to get so bored and exhausted that you are happy to let it go.”

[Julia C Luft]

Adding Michael Pollan to my dream blunt rotation.