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 through the science of the day, and when the day passes, the science changes. Much that is worth reading has been written about consciousness and its silent partner, the unconscious. Michael Pollan’s “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness” is a fascinating and fluent guide to what’s on our minds.
Mr. Pollan’s previous books include paeans to eating plants and taking psychedelics. Magic mushrooms reappear here, along with many scientists trying to solve the mystery of consciousness. Mr. Pollan approaches the subject from four angles: the nature of sentience; how consciousness is shaped by feeling and emotion; how thought emerges in the brain’s neocortex; and the cumulative impression of the self as “the perceiver of our perceptions and the thinker of our thoughts.”
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was one of the first Westerners to blow his mind and believed that psychedelics would fulfill William Blake’s hope that “the doors of perception” would be cleansed. His experiments with mescaline convinced him that consciousness came from an entity outside the brain that he called mind at large. Psychedelics, Huxley deduced, allowed more consciousness to enter his brain by loosening its “reducing valve.” William James (1842-1910), often called the father of American psychology, had likened human cognition to a “stream of consciousness.” Huxley’s valve metaphor adds industrial pressure.
Modern fields of study such as cognitive neuroscience and integrated information theory also reflect technological change. Mr. Pollan considers the relationship between digital capacity and such analog philosophies as phenomenology (in which consciousness creates itself by intention and is defined by experience) and panpsychism (the theory that all matter is conscious).
Mr. Pollan blames Western science, and especially Galileo and Descartes, for dividing the mind from the body, and humans from everything else. The author first wondered if sentience, a “very simple form of consciousness,” might be “widespread in nature” after he ate magic mushrooms and became certain that the plants in his garden possessed “some elemental sense of being alive and aware.”
Mr. Pollan points to a 2022 study that found that “a single psychedelic experience dramatically increases the likelihood that a person will attribute consciousness to other entities, both living and nonliving.” Neuroscience, Mr. Pollan claims, has “yet to identify the biological structures necessary to generate consciousness,” and humans should not assume “a monopoly on sentience.” Researchers tell Mr. Pollan that plants may even sleep and feel pain. But their phenomenology, he concludes, is nothing like our consciousness. Plant sentience, however, is goal-directed and suggests clear cognition of the surrounding environment. That is more than many humans manage.
In 1994 the philosopher David Chalmers divided the study of consciousness into “easy problems” (linking brain activity to specific mental operations) and the “hard problem” (determining why those processes are accompanied by conscious awareness). We prize thought over feeling, Mr. Pollan writes, because no other creature is as good at “higher-order” mental operations as we are. But the brain’s task is merely to keep us alive by reading “body-to-brain signals” such as hunger and thirst: The nervous system evolved to “mind the body.” Conscious feelings are one of its techniques, emerging “deep in the subcortical regions” where the brain’s interoceptive neurons receive messages from the body and Cartesian duality dissolves.
Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein” (1818) and Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) warned about what Mr. Pollan calls a robot with feelings. Artificial-intelligence researchers rush to create it, even though computer-as-brain metaphors traduce the complexity of human biology, at least for now. Mr. Pollan reports that his “humanist” feelings are sometimes rejected in Silicon Valley as “speciesist.” But he resists the temptations of magical thinking and dementing drugs such as 5-MeO-DMT, a “powerful short-acting psychedelic derived from the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad.” (He’s “not a fan.”)
Reducing consciousness to information or perception can isolate its functions. But we fail, Mr. Pollan writes, if we “mistake our schematic maps for the real, experiential territory” of what Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), a founder of phenomenology, called the lifeworld. Phenomenologists argue that total objectivity is beyond us: We study the cosmos from within the cosmos, and consciousness from within consciousness. Moments of cognition aren’t discrete like electrical signals. They are more like James’s stream. But conscious thought isn’t as common as we think. In one survey, fewer than a quarter of respondents reported experiences of inner speech, or talking in their own heads.
The psychologist Alison Gopnik tells Mr. Pollan that LSD convinced her that psychedelics return adults to the reality of childhood phenomenology. The neuroscientist Anil Seth says the brain is a “prediction machine,” and selfhood a useful hallucination. The biologist Michael Levin gets closer to the hard problem: The self, he claims, is memory reworking itself as circumstances demand, and consciousness the feeling of being “in charge of constant self-construction.”
Paul Cézanne said that “color is the place where our brain meets the universe.” The brain scientist Christof Koch agrees. He experienced Huxley’s mind at large during a five-night, shaman-assisted ayahuasca ceremony on a beach in Brazil that convinced him that consciousness was beyond the brain. Mr. Pollan’s journey leads him to an emerging brew of physics, psychedelics, Zen meditation and idealist philosophy. It sounds a lot like California in the 1960s. Will the doors of perception ever be cleansed?
Dominic Green
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