A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, by Michael Pollan: What Is It Like to Be Human?

Dan Brown’s latest novel The Secret of Secrets is all about an intriguing concept called noetic consciousness. When I read the book last year, I was like “Huh. Fascinating. I wonder if that’s actually a prevailing theory. Or is it just sort of a Brownian crackpot theory of consciousness, like the Da Vinci Code stuff?”

So to learn the answer to that question is the main reason I picked up Michael Pollan's new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. Hey, there are lots dumber reasons to read nonfiction, right? 😅

It turns out, Brown's plot device is as good a theory as anything else going right now. We actually know very little about consciousness — and Pollan admits he knows less after finishing writing the book than he did when he started.

Consciousness, like cosmology, has the problem that there is no way to study it from the outside. We can't leave the universe to observe it externally. And similarly, your consciousness is what allows you to think about being conscious. And that just blows it. By observing it, you're changing it.

Pollan takes us through the prevailing scientific and philosophical views of consciousness, starting, interestingly with a question of whether plants are sentient, conscious, or something else. That discussion gives us a baseline way to think about consciousness in animals and us. 

There's no agreed upon definition of consciousness even, but the most commonly used phrase to describe consciousness is "what it is like to be" something. If you can tell, say, what it is like to be a bat, then that bat is conscious. But what is it like to be a tree? Harder question. 

Speaking of hard problems, Pollan devotes much ink to the "hard problem" of consciousness — pinning a specific biological part of the brain (or in the case of plants, something else) or chemical function to “Aha, that’s consciousness.” So far, we can’t do it. Which makes the "tuning" theory of consciousness, that are brains are just tuned to an external collective consciousness and we're receiving signals like a radio antenna (incredibly simplified), intriguing to some (me included) for now.

There's a discussion of consciousness in artificial intelligence -- not just whether it's possible, but whether it's already happened. Probably not, to that latter question. Pollan details the case of the Google engineer who got fired for going public after claiming a chatbot was sentient. Pollan subtly makes fun of the guy and guys (they're always guys) like him: Maybe they're just really lonely. Of course, it's more detailed than that, but that's the tenor. 

There’s even a foray into psychedelics — a way, like meditation, of expanding consciousness. Even some leading scientists are beginning to think that there is something to studying psychedelics from the standpoint of how they alter our consciousness and divorce us from the Self.

Even if reading the book leads to more questions than answers, what it does is give you the framework of knowledge to be able to consider those questions. And that's why I liked it. Pollan does tend to insert himself into the discussion maybe a little too frequently for my taste, but he's an affable intruder. And we don't mind so much that he's there. Glad I read this. My brain hurts a little, though. Can someone pass the magic mushrooms?