The bestselling American author’s new book is an illuminating inquiry into the essence of being alive.
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At a philosophy conference in Tucson in 1994, David Chalmers, a young Australian studying in the US, delivered a paper in which he formulated what he called the “hard problem of consciousness”. At its simplest, the question Chalmers posed was, how is it that seemingly inert physical matter — quarks, atoms, molecules, brain tissue — give rise to qualia, that is, thoughts, feelings, sensations, the “what-it-feels-like” of things, such as the colour red or the savour of wine.
Four years later, in a bar in Bremen, Chalmers had a drink with a brilliant young German neuroscientist, Christof Koch, who made a bet with him that within 25 years, science would have identified, as Michael Pollan puts it, “the physical footprint of consciousness in the brain”.
As it turned out, Chalmers won the bet. Pollan writes: “During a ceremony I attended at a consciousness conference in New York City in June 2023, Koch graciously conceded and presented Chalmers with a case of Madeira.” The “hard question” remained, remains, and most likely will remain unanswered, despite what the AI billionaires in Silicon Valley may tell you. Artificial intelligence is what it says it is — artificial. There is no ghost in the machine; there is only a machine in the machine. And Koch himself is one of those who have come to accept this inconvenient fact. “We can agree that there are physical mechanisms in the brain that correlate with consciousness,” he told Pollan when the two men met at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science, where Koch works. “But finding those mechanisms is never going to explain how consciousness arises.”
Of course, the religious-minded will look upon all this vain interrogation with a knowing smile.
Bergson was judged the loser in the debate with Einstein, but his theories have been enjoying a long-delayed renaissance Pollan has one of the most inquisitive and accommodating minds in the higher journalism of our time. In previous books he has ranged over subjects as diverse as food in all its ramifications, our encounters with plant life, and what he calls the new science of psychedelics.
He is also one of a small but growing number of thinkers who recognise that science, for all its stupendous advances in technological knowledge, cannot begin to address much less solve some of the fundamental mysteries of the world and our place in it. Most startling, perhaps, and most welcome, is his suggestion that not only philosophers but artists — poets, painters, even novelists — may have insights into the fundamental conditions of being that are beyond the ken of scientists.
Until very recently, such a notion would have been laughed out of the laboratory at Cern or MIT or Caltech. However, the many hard problems presented to us since the early 1900s by quantum theory, which in place of Newtonian certainty posits a world governed by the laws of probability, have shaken the confidence of even the most hardened believers in the overarching dominance of technology.
As long ago as 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson — at the time the most famous philosopher in the world, known for his radical theories on the nature of time — engaged in a public debate on the ways in which what Bergson called durée differed not only from the Newtonian but also the Einsteinian concepts of time. Durée carries more weight than the English word “duration”, and is akin to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, literally “being-there”, existing as a conscious individual in space and time. Bergson was judged the loser in the debate, but nowadays the theories of the French maître, which are as much poetical as they are philosophical, have been enjoying a long-delayed renaissance.
Bergson, like his good friend and cousin-in-law Marcel Proust, knew a thing or two about the mind and its mysteries. And one of the things he knew, which is too often forgotten, is that the only tool we have with which to investigate consciousness is, well, consciousness.
Archimedes claimed he could move the Earth if only he could get a purchase on it from a point in space; we are in the same predicament when it comes to consciousness: we cannot think outside the box, because we are locked inside it. Or as Pollan puts it: “Consciousness is a labyrinth from which there is no exit.”
But what is consciousness? A World Appears offers some sample definitions. It is variously “subjective or felt experience” or just “experience”; or “awareness”; or “the basic fact of perception — that a world appears when we open our eyes”. Alternatively, or at least in other words, the neurologist Antonio Damasio offers, poetically, “the feeling of what happens”, while the philosopher John Searle is more elaborate, and more prosaic, defining consciousness as “those states of awareness, sentience, or feeling that begin in the morning when you wake from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until you fall asleep”. As we see from these inevitably vague gropings, consciousness, whatever it may be, is damned elusive.
In A World Appears, after a wide-ranging introduction, Pollan follows his “journey into consciousness” through four long chapters. The first is headed “Sentience”, which introduces another tricky concept. Are we the only truly sentient beings, as traditional science takes for granted, and as Descartes insisted is the case? It is convenient to think so, Pollan writes, since thereby we are given “license to exploit nature without limits in ways that have advantaged us, though only in the short term”. (My italics.) Pollan has given a great deal of thought to the question of a dead world and we the only living beings in it. After undergoing a psychedelic experience some years ago in his garden at home, when he ate a handful of magic mushrooms, he began to see the world around him — natural as well as human — as pulsating with life.
Reading this, those of us who lived through the many false dawns of the drug-addled 1960s will be inclined to reach for our pistols. However, Pollan is no spaced-out flower-child, and his claims here are measured and, yes, persuasive. With mushroom magic firing up his synapses that Edenic afternoon, he “was as certain of the sentience of the flowering plants around me as I had been of anything up to that point.” Then he takes a step back. “To be clear, I didn’t think these plants possessed the sort of mind that could reflect on experiences and form opinions; I didn’t imagine them to have interiority. But these beings were definitely awake and, in their own plantlike way, watchful.”
But such a conviction is not exclusive to the mushroom-minded man; ask any painter — ask any artist — what it is like to concentrate on the objective world, human and non-human, for hour after uninterrupted working hour, and you will get the same response. Look into the abyss for long enough, says Nietzsche, and the abyss will look back into you.
There is one issue Pollan does not address. If everything, including quarks, atoms, molecules and brain tissue, is sentient, is it not possible that everything has agency, and consequently the capacity to generate consciousness? This could go at least some way towards a collective answer to Chalmers’ “hard question”. If all things feel, can it not be said that all things must be in some way conscious?
A World Appears is a big, generous, illuminating and beautifully written inquiry into the essence of our being-in-the-world, of being, simply, alive. Although Pollan at the close of the book makes a rueful disavowal of his initial confidence — “I find myself not at all sure what to believe, if anything” — let us leave him at the dawn of his bright day, signing off his introduction with a grand flourish:
“This, then, is the wager of A World Appears: that by the end of this journey, you will be more conscious than you were before it. Conscious of what? Of the rhythms and workings of your own mind; of the sentience that is all around us in nature; and of the improbable fact — the miracle! — that in this universe of rock and fire and ice and infinite space, we are somehow not only here but aware.”
Now more than ever, in this age of untruth, we need to have our attention directed back to the fundamental questions — however hard they may be — as to the essential nature of our existence on this ailing planet. And as Michael Pollan richly demonstrates, questions are every bit as important as answers.
John Banville is a novelist, playwright and screenwriter. His most recent novel is ‘Venetian Vespers’