Reviews
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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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Under the influence of psychedelics, many report that plants seem to be alive. Is it wrong to assume we’re the only sentient beings? The International Dictionary of Psychology opined in 1989 that consciousness was “fascinating but elusive” and “nothing worth reading has been written on it.” I disagree. Consciousness isn’t entirely elusive. We grasp it…
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A new book by Michael Pollan explores the puzzles of the mind. “A FASCINATING BUT elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.” That is how “The International Dictionary of Psychology” described consciousness in 1989. Michael Pollan’s excellent new book…
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“A World Appears” explores what makes you you. A coherent explanation of consciousness eludes modern science. In “A World Appears,” Michael Pollan dives headfirst into the mystery. Why does it feel like something to be you when you wake up in the morning, and like nothing when you’re in a deep sleep? Why do we…
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His new book, about the mystery of consciousness, strengthens the case that technology will never truly replicate humans. Here is a possibility worth holding in mind, just for a moment. What if humans are something better than machines? For that matter, what if it isn’t close? In a way, the thought sits uneasily. For about…
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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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The bestselling American author’s new book is an illuminating inquiry into the essence of being alive. If you’re a Financial Times subscriber, you can read this review here on their website, too. At a philosophy conference in Tucson in 1994, David Chalmers, a young Australian studying in the US, delivered a paper in which he…
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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,…
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OPB’s Dave Miller spoke to Michael Pollan in front of an audience at the Newmark Theatre July 27 in Portland in an event put on by Powell’s Boons. This was one stop in Pollan’s West Coast leg of his paperback tour for This is Your Mind on Plants. Four years prior to this recording, Michael…