“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 feel and think and enjoy an endless stream of subjective experience? How does the brain generate a unified sense of self?
Pollan is not able to furnish the answers (no one can, yet), but he presents a captivating exploration, one that is highly personal and sensitive. Unlike with a book that simply reports the state of the consciousness field, we receive the story through the sharp mind of a writer and the questioning heart of a seeker.
Pollan, a professor of science and environmental journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-founder of the Center for the Science of Psychedelics, has written many well-received books about food, plants and mind-altering drugs — but here he takes on a new challenge. He confronts questions about the mind not as a neuroscience expert, but as an explorer, interviewing dozens of leading voices in science and proffering a rich survey of thinking in the field.
Pollan writes: “My hope is that this book smudges the windowpane of your own consciousness and serves as a tool to help you fully appreciate the everyday miracle that a world appears when you open your eyes — a world and so much else, including you, a self.”
The central question is, why do we have internal experience? The majority position in neuroscience today tends to deal with the strictly physical: It’s assumed that consciousness somehow emerges from the interaction of our 86 billion neurons. After all, even slight alterations to brain chemistry or structure — through drugs, injury or illness — can dramatically change what we experience and how we experience it.
Yet we still have no idea how to assemble parts such that the final result is possessed of internal, private experience. Imagine I were to hand you billions of Tinkertoys and asked you to build them into a machine that is conscious. Where would you begin? We don’t have the science that tells us how to render the physical mental. As Pollan reflects: “The idea you could step outside of experience and say you know what it is in terms of something else, such as biology or physics, that just seems impossible.”
Pollan suggests that the popularity of a purely physical, algorithmic model of the mind traces its origins to the advent of the digital computer. As a side note, I don’t totally agree with that — instead, it is popular because physical explanations have repeatedly proved the winners in biology (for example, the centuries-long metaphysical puzzle of why your face looks like your father’s turned out to have a simple biological solution in the inheritance of DNA).
So consciousness may well emerge naturally from information processing. And if it does, it might not matter from what material one builds a brain (be it neurons, computer circuits, or soda cans and tennis balls). As long as the right algorithms are running, consciousness would be the result.
But perhaps the physical model isn’t sufficient for exploring something as strange and subjective as experience, and Pollan does a wonderful job digging further. “Panpsychism,” he tells us, proposes that everything in existence (even a grain of sand) possesses a tiny spark of proto-consciousness — and that these minute elements of awareness combine to form our rich mental experiences.
Another framework, “idealism,” suggests that consciousness is not produced by matter but is rather a field that exists outside the physical — the brain doesn’t create consciousness but rather acts something like a radio tuning into signals already present. There are, by some counts, 22 theories of consciousness, and Pollan examines many of them, always with a winning combination of awe and skepticism.
Pollan begins the reader’s journey by asking whether plants could be sentient. Soon other questions arise: Is the root of consciousness the basic biological demand to keep things steady (homeostasis), and if so, might all self-organizing systems possess some flavor of awareness? Does consciousness rely on the body as well as the brain? Why are we capable of being surprised by our own thoughts?
The question of consciousness has always been important, but in the last few years it has taken on a new intensity: With the rocketing acceleration of large language models and, soon, humanoid robotics, we will need to understand whether our artificial neural networks are indeed having experiences. And if so, might we be causing suffering?
“A World Appears” is highly pleasurable to read. My one complaint is that Pollan sets up Western science as a monolithic enterprise that virtually ignores consciousness. Yet many of the scientists he interviews or mentions are Western — from Charles Darwin to William James to all the many contemporary scientists he cites as running experiments and building theories.
In the end, Pollan does not (and cannot) tell us which theory of consciousness wins. After his wide-ranging exploration, he expresses the feeling that all the available theories seem, equally, like magic. As he puts it, this feeling “argues for keeping an open mind.” And he asks, “Couldn’t there be, somewhere out there in the space of all possibilities, some idea about the fundamental nature of reality and consciousness that the human mind hasn’t conceived of yet?” Let’s hope so, and let’s hope we’re lucky enough that Pollan writes the follow-up.
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and the author of eight books, most recently “Livewired.” You can also find this review on the New York Times website.