A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

By Michael Pollan

Allen Lane. 320 pages. £25. ISBN-13: 978-0241509470

Reviewed by Tony Roberts

How do brain processes give rise to consciousness and how is what Henry James called ‘felt life’ to be explained? As the problem is expressed in Philosophers of Consciousness (edited by Jack Symes): ‘It’s as if the sensory processes in your brain don’t just extract information about things and produce reactions to them, but also generate accompanying mental qualities —the qualities of taste, smell, colour and so on —which are sent to an internal arena, where they are appreciated by an internal observer: the inner you, your conscious self.’

In his new book, A World Appears, Michael Pollan gives an impressive survey of current thinking on these questions. His book is informative, entertaining, provocative and wilfully inconclusive. I say ‘wilfully’ because Pollan admits he ‘fervently’ hopes ‘that the mystery [of consciousness]will either never be cleared up or that the clearing it up will mean invoking some fantastic new kind of magic.’ Pollan loves magic —and magic mushrooms. He is also well-versed in literature and, not being a professional scientist himself, he is open to the insights gained in the fields of philosophy, literature and religion as well.

Through his conversational journey we learn many interesting things, though not the solution to ‘the hard problem’. Consciousness was dubbed the hard problem when, at a Tucson conference in 1994, a young Australian philosopher, David Chalmers, made the distinction between the easy and the hard problems related to it. The easy problems include the mechanisms and functions of the brain in learning, memory, perception and such. The hard problem is the question of how subjective experience could arise from objective events in the brain.

Some questions, of course, cannot be answered. Kant reckoned there were limits to human reason and, to date, this one exemplifies that. The problem is that consciousness can only be pursued consciously. Today we talk of not having a point of view from outside the box. This is why there are so many hypotheses (and why the well-known cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker believes that none is finally defensible). Consciousness science has become a battleground of intuitive and counter-intuitive theories proffered by warring proponents using, as psychologist Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva tells the author, ‘very male metaphors’ (including those in this sentence). 

In order to approach current thinking on the hard question Pollan —humanist and romantic—interacts with specialists in various fields of psychology, biology, psychedelic experience and Buddhism. A World Appears in five parts: The Wager, Sentience, Feeling, Thought, Self, and a coda, The Cave.

The book opens with the neuroscientist Christof Koch who, in the late 1980s, joined the Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick in the search to identify the neural correlates of consciousness, thereby stimulating enthusiasm for modern consciousness science. The wager refers to a failed bet Koch had in 1998 with Chalmers that all would be revealed by brain science within twenty-five years.

The reason science had largely avoided the question of consciousness hitherto was that ‘Science, organized around objective third-person measurement, was ill-equipped to explain a phenomenon that was inherently subjective, qualitative, and internal.’  Science and philosophy (think Descartes’ mind/body split) have left the field to writers and artists — Freudians and Darwinians aside. Now, however, we are set on dispelling its magical aura and, in attempting to do so, have begun acknowledging levels of consciousness in non-human organisms, in mammals and birds and many invertebrates (e.g. insects).

Materialism —the approach of scientific enquiry —is the dominant philosophical theory. It sees matter (solids, liquid, gases) as the fundamental substance of nature, which therefore accounts for brain processes and everything else. Yet in October 1974 philosopher Thomas Nagel exposed a problem with materialism while giving the best definition of felt life, of consciousness, we have to date. This was in a paper published in The Philosophical Review entitled ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ As Nagel expressed it: ‘the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism’. In his example, he argued that although we can perhaps imagine how a bat behaves, we cannot know what it feels like to be a bat. We are locked out of its point of view. In  arguing this, he raised the question of whether a physical (materialist) theory of mind is capable of explaining consciousness. Alternatively then, is the universe made up of mind, as the idealists believe, and not matter?

We are an Alice in Wonderland theoretical world in which nothing is not contestable. For example, while Nagel’s idea seems to make excellent sense, German philosopher Thomas Metzinger tells Pollan that Nagel’s view is ‘hopelessly vague’, countering with, ‘What if pure awareness were a state of consciousness that did not really resemble anything and that was not subjective either… not tied to an experiencing self.’

In his next chapter Pollan attributes sentience (sense perception) to plants, though he himself does not go as far as to argue for their consciousness, as some do. We are told soil scientists believe, ‘The intelligence exhibited by plants in the face of so many different and constantly shifting environmental variables indicates that something more than genetics is driving their behavior— something more like a mind.’

The problem the reader faces here is that the language is off-puttingly anthropomorphic. I am hardly won over by lines like, ‘The more I read about roots, the brainier they seemed.’ Or: ‘After selecting a target, the vine then performs a kind of cost- benefit analysis before deciding exactly how many coils it should invest.’ For me, Pollan is rescued here by citing cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, who distinguished ‘competence’ from ‘comprehension’, only the former of which he attributed to plants. 

In ‘Feeling’, we are reminded that the nervous system and the brain evolved to sustain the body and not the other way round. Consequently ‘one of the brain’s most critical functions is keeping the body stable and balanced (temperature, blood pressure, blood chemistry, hydration and so on). Yet brain-based theories of consciousness mostly see it as independent, as a computer, with the view that consciousness arises from merely processing information. Computers have hardware and software, it is argued, while brains have so-called ‘wetware’ and consciousness. But simulations that claim to go further, that attempt to build computers with feelings, are creating models that radically simplify what it is really like to think and feel.

Pollan, who finds irony everywhere in his explorations, sees it again in the fact that machines can more readily capture the traditionally ‘higher’ capabilities (reason, intelligence) than the so-called ‘simple’ feelings. More irony, he says, lies in the fact that we have spent history denying to other organisms what we seem ready to grant to machines. Fortunately the author settles us with this conclusion, ‘Just about any place you push on it, the computer-as-brain metaphor breaks down.’

Pollan enumerates some of the contents of consciousness in his next section, on ‘Thought’: ‘sense impressions, feelings, words, images, daydreams, mind-wanderings, ruminations, deliberations, observations, opinions, intuitions, and occasional insights.’ Few of us, we learn, are ‘inner speakers’. It is an ‘unwarranted assumption’ to believe that other people’s inner experience is like our own. We might think consciousness is already sufficiently complex, but Hadjiilieva compounds the complexity when she speaks of ‘the really hard problem of consciousness —how the contents of the unconscious form into thoughts that sometimes find their way into our awareness, and sometimes don’t.’

It is difficult to believe now that ‘behaviourism’, which led the science of mind in the first half of the last century, denied subjective phenomena like feelings and looked at behaviour as the key to the psychology of animals —just as the computer metaphor overshadows much current thought.

When he considers the ‘Self’, consciousness’s mysterious masterpiece, Pollan quotes Metzinger, “The human self-model is a triumph of evolution. It made us very successful, enabling us to form large societies, for example. And yet it creates a lot of suffering. This is the core insight of the Buddhists, that this whole phenomenology of self is a constant source of discontent’, attributable to the fear of death.

There is an interesting seven page section, ‘Predicting the Self’, in which Pollan spends a day in discussion with neuroscientist Anil Seth, author of the popular Being You (2021). In that book he argued that the brain is a kind of prediction machine and that we have only ‘hallucinations of selfhood’, that the hallucinator of them is the brain. (‘Baldly stated, his theory is that “the self is not the thing that is perceiving; it is itself a kind of perception constructed by the brain.’) I share our author’s doubt on this one.

I must admit though, that I find it hard to keep an open mind (unlike Pollan, fortunately). As a layman I do not believe, as do many professionals (illusionists, Seth and the late Dennett among them), that the self is an illusion. I prefer to hold tight to the ‘psychological continuity theory’ of Derek Parfit (Reasons and Persons), which sees personal identity, the self, as a phenomenon that changes but is maintained through memory, personality characteristics, beliefs and desires.

If there is a downside to memory —and surely there isn’t ?— it is that it shrinks our perceptions from birth onwards. As Pollan says: ‘Consciousness begins as this wide-open aperture in which “the world appears” but with the arrival of memory it soon contracts into a subjective point of view and, eventually, for better or worse into a self.’

On a personal level Pollan admits: ‘Most of what I thought I knew or took for granted, like the assumption that consciousness is a product of our brains and materialism will eventually explain everything, turned out to be unproven or wrong.’ In the end  he confesses that he knows less than he did when he began, but takes solace in a stay in ‘The Cave’, a retreat offered him by Joan Halifax, a Zen Buddhist teacher. He has decided to ‘look at consciousness less as a scientific or philosophical puzzle to be solved and more as a practice’ allowing him to appreciate the living world.

What gave me comfort, after some of the hair-raising ideas Pollan engages with, is his conclusion that ‘Sooner or later, all these theories challenge plausibility— as do physicalist theories [materialist] it must be said. And because most of them are, or rest upon, metaphysical concepts, they can’t be proved or falsified by science.’

I should stress that A World Appears is not a heavy read. Pollan has a light touch and is likeably irrepressible. He has a well-developed sense of humour. In one anecdote, after faithfully recording the contents of his thoughts when an attached beeper sounds at random, he is finally told that he has a superficial inner life (‘My interiority, [Professor Hurlburt] seemed to be suggesting, was sparsely furnished.’). His interviewees also can be stirred to amused irritation. When told of Kingson Man’s  blueprint for a robot with feelings, Hadjiilieva wonders why they don’t make a baby instead: ‘We already know how to do that!’