Reviews of A World Appears
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After spending six years investigating where consciousness comes from, Michael Pollan finds no overarching explanation Consciousness is thought by many to define what it is to be human. We know that animals are conscious to some extent, but they don’t have what we have in that department. So if we can explain how human self-awareness…
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Why do we experience consciousness? Tim Crane This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of David Chalmers’s book The Conscious Mind. Chalmers – only thirty years old at the time – was trained as a mathematician in his home city, Adelaide, and had studied philosophy in Oxford and Indiana before becoming a professor at…
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The journalist and polymath probes the mysteries of the mind in this unsettling yet life-affirming investigation You can read Edward Posnett’s full review for the Guardian here.
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Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, plant biologists and novelists have all grappled with the mysteries of conscious experience, to an uncertain end. If you have access to Nature, you can also read this review by Christoph Koch on its website. Humans and other animals have subjective inner mental lives, seeing, smelling, imagining, remembering and feeling emotions such…
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Consciousness—long relegated to scholarly debates—is suddenly more than an academic issue, arising in current controversies over the moral status of artificial intelligence and invertebrates. This head subject is the topic of popular science writer Michael Pollan’s latest book, A World Appears, which offers readers a charming, witty, insightful, and eccentric account of Pollan’s efforts to…
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A page-turner that explores the hidden world of the mind. Pollan’s latest begins with a wager between a philosopher and a scientist back in 1998, one premised on the discovery of the brain’s physical basis for consciousness, which the scientist predicted would “comprise a small set of specialized neurons responsible for subjective experience.” The scientist,…