A World Appears review: Can Michael Pollan crack the problem of consciousness in his new book?

What is consciousness? It is one of the most perplexing questions in science. You would expect our intimacy with it to give us a leg up in understanding how it works, but this has proven to be more of a hindrance than a help. Science prizes objectivity. So how can you study something objectively when it is also the very tool you are using to do the studying?

This conundrum forms the backbone of Michael Pollan’s latest book, A World Appears: A journey into consciousness. Pollan’s previous works include The Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind. The former helped bring the environmental and animal welfare impacts of the US food system to light, while the latter introduced the public to the psychedelic research renaissance. Both heavily influenced me as a young adult, steering me towards a career in science journalism. So I was eager for his take on consciousness.

Pollan approaches the subject with earnest curiosity. He sits, rather than wrestles, with the so-called hard problem of consciousness: how and why humans and other organisms have a subjective experience. The resulting foray is much like consciousness itself: fascinating, yet at times abstruse.

Pollan reported on and wrote this book over five years, exploring consciousness through fields as diverse as artificial intelligence, plant biology, Victorian literature and Buddhist philosophy, to name a few. Given how vast the subject of consciousness is and how little is understood about it, weaving these strands into a coherent narrative must have been a challenge. But Pollan tries his best – and largely succeeds, structuring his book in four chapters, each representing an increasingly complex dimension of consciousness.

The first of these, sentience, builds off an experience Pollan had on magic mushrooms. While under the influence in his garden, he felt certain the plants around him were sentient. This later led him to speak with numerous researchers investigating the matter. Some of the findings are remarkable, such as the ability of roots to navigate mazes. Pollan isn’t confident attributing consciousness to plants (at least not yet). He is more comfortable considering them sentient, what he calls a step below consciousness.

The next chapter turns to feelings and emotion. I would describe it as an interesting, though discomforting, pitstop on our inquiry into consciousness. We meet a series of scientists attempting to imbue machines with consciousness, including one researcher who programmed a computer to seek food, water and rest in a digital landscape. The idea is that these basic drives could ultimately give rise to consciousness – a claim that perturbed me. Could consciousness really be whittled down to a byproduct of hunger? I struggled to accept this. Perhaps it is my own desire for a bit of magic, something Pollan notes many scientists would view as a weakness in the face of objectivity. But I can’t shake the belief that consciousness, the awareness of being alive, is far grander and richer than a computer algorithm. At this point, I worried how I would get through the remaining 150 pages.

The next two sections, on thought and self, largely turn away from scientists (to my relief). Instead, they lean on philosophers, writers and artists, who, as Pollan notes, have mulled over questions of consciousness far longer than researchers. He examines how metaphors comparing the mind to machines have constrained thinking on the hard problem, leading us to presume consciousness arises from some arrangement of matter, usually a network of neurons. But these materialist approaches sometimes trivialise the vibrancy and complexity of consciousness, in contrast with the humanities.

This is just one of the reasons why Pollan ultimately concludes that the materialist approach to consciousness has hit a wall. While not everyone in the field will be ready to abandon it, he believes doing so frees us to explore ideas that would otherwise be scoffed at – among them, the possibility that consciousness doesn’t stem from the brain or body at all, but is instead woven into the fabric of reality, like gravity, an idea he simply plants rather than expands upon.

By the end of his journey, Pollan admits he now knows less about consciousness than when he began, a sentiment I share after reading the book. But, as leading consciousness researcher Christof Koch tells him, that is, in a strange way, progress. “Sometimes, not knowing opens us to possibilities that knowing, or trying to know, or thinking we already know closes off,” writes Pollan. It may be more fruitful, then, to treat consciousness as a practice, engaging fully with our present moment, rather than a puzzle to be solved – a conclusion I couldn’t agree with more.