Pollan, Michael. A World Appears. Penguin, 2026. NF 7/26.

If you’ve ever written a book that wasn’t a great publishing success you will understand my envy of writers like Pollan. I’m sure it was envy that prompted me in my book on diet – which no publisher would publish – to mention Pollan’s recommendations in his In Defence of Food: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I said his advice was backed by about as much evidence for benefit as dressing carefully in the style of the season. To me Mr. Pollan’s strength as a journalist is an extremely accurate sense of what most people want to hear. And here in the age of AI he’s at it again.

First, you have to give him his due. He has a great way with words, he really does his research, and now at over 70 with a dozen books to his credit he’s a much-listened-to voice. So what does he have to say about what human consciousness is and what many of us are wondering: could a machine ever have such a thing?

A quick word on my thinking about this topic which got an early wakeup when about 25 years ago I read philosopher David Chalmers 1996 book The Conscious Mind. Chalmers illustrated his belief in what he called the “hard problem” of consciousness by a thought experiment involving humans who didn’t have any consciousness, which he referred to as “zombies”. That hard problem is similar to what they call the “mind-body” problem: how can a physical thing (the brain) produce or be influenced by something insubstantial (a thought)? I ran across a partial solution in Denis Noble’s 2016 book Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity. But it remains the answer of most scientists, and philosophers like the late Daniel Dennett that because there are only physical things in the universe (locked I would say in an inexorable determinism) ideas literally don’t exist.

My response (reviewing Noble’s book): “This is as every child knows complete nonsense: of course ideas exist! I’m having an idea as I write this sentence… And as you read my inept sentences my ideas could literally change the world by causing you to read (something else)”. So how does this happen exactly? I’m a way-distant agnostic on that one.

But I digress. Mr. Pollan divides his areas of interest in consciousness by chapters: Sentience, Feeling, Thought, Self, and then “Coda: The Cave”. He interviews a dozen or more experts who influence his thinking. These characters are made interesting and lively by Pollan’s evolving understanding and his writing. The experts hold diverse thoughts about what consciousness is and whether it can exist artificially. I’ll sample a few of these salient interviews under Pollan’s headings.

“Thought” expands the idea of an idea to non-human life including plants. Our human-centred approach to an idea assumes it can only arise from a human brain. Although their actions may not seem conscious to humans, plants do all sorts of things to their advantage but do them much more slowly than we do. Philosopher Evan Thompson works in this area and suggests “… sentience is woven into life from the beginning,… Not that this can be proven or demonstrated. But it’s a more promising research approach than splitting consciousness off from life and then trying to say what it is about the nervous system that suddenly supports consciousness.” We are introduced to Michael Pollan’s philosophical and political posture reading statements like “(there are) terrible moral and environmental consequences of a worldview that has alienated us from nature by failing to perceive just how alive with mind it is.” He assumes we’re on the progressive side of the spectrum.

“Feelings” reminds me of an experience I had many years ago having dinner with a professional philosopher (I don’t remember his name) who when I asked what’s going on in Philosophy of Mind these days answered “Damasio”. Antonio Damasio turned out to be a neurologist whose book The Feeling of What Happens I read and reviewed. Pollan’s interview with him (and others) introduces us to the idea that humans are products of evolution and our bodies including brains are unique contraptions. Our “consciousness” may also be unique as it is informed by hunger, fear, sex, and other evolved body and brain unavoidables. To have consciousness you have to have a body is the idea.

Damasio however had a protégé Mark Solms with whom he had a falling out who is involved in a project to try to define consciousness and then create it artificially. My problem with this endeavour and others like it is that Solms et al are a priori metaphysical materialists which commits them to determinism. They’ve already decided the answer. But there are hints that they may be trying to prove their hypothesis is wrong by the impossibility of their Frankenstein project. Pollan worries that

(h)umanism, which I suppose is what I’m struggling to uphold and defend here, is hopelessly obsolete to those who … are comfortable with the idea that minds are machines.

“Thought” delves into the ideas of late 19^th century philosopher and psychologist, William James. He said it “is the essence of lived life I’m preoccopied with, but don’t want to be overpreoccupied with.” A pragmatist’s warning about speculation and extreme ideology. Pollan for example spends time with a University of British Columbia psychology professor Christoff Hadjiilieva. She brings a feminist perspective to the conversation, seeing:

testosterone at work in the metaphors used to characterize consciousness. She noted the widespread use of mechanical metaphors for the mind—the computer analogies …. “These are very male metaphors.”

“Self” seemed to me possibly the wrong word for this chapter which concerned itself first with

a sense of timelessness and boundlessness, a merging with some entity larger than (our)selves, experiences of universal love, and encounters with the divine or a universal consciousness—what Aldous Huxley called Mind at Large. The word universal is key here…

but also tackles a relevant issue in traditional philosophy, “metaphysical materialism” versus “metaphysical idealism”. What after all is the furniture of the universe? Things or ideas? Questions like that seem to appear practical as we view the potential for human experience to be radically maybe dangerously changed by artificially intelligent machines which must be on the horizon. Pollan after interviewing a lot of the greatest experts he could find concludes

It does seem like the materialist approach to the hard problem of consciousness has hit a wall. This will come as news to the rest of biology, which still rests comfortably on a metaphysical foundation that assumes all phenomena can ultimately be reduced to matter.

I was reassured to see him considering that old question about which science and philosophy had to veer toward materialism in the 20th century to oppose mystical religion.

“Coda: The Cave” involves Michael Pollan’s story of his own experience of consciousness including a couple of psilocybin experiences and culminating in some time with Zen priest and anthropologist Joan Halifax. She isolates him in a cave.

To “drop in,” Halifax explained, is to enter a state of being completely present in time and space, experiencing “the sense field” without conceptualizing, and surrendering the sense of a separate self. The recipe was simpler (and much less appetizing) than I would have imagined: To transcend the self, force yourself to be alone with it long enough to get so bored and exhausted that you are happy to let it go. Poof!

Poof? There’s a lot more to this inquiry than that. But if we are looking for rational or even experiential artistic enlightenment we – I think properly – don’t find it. It’s individual. The book has been called a memoir which it is, especially at the end. How helpful and convincing this carefully researched gathering of opinion, crediting drug experiences and spending a long time alone in a cave I think depends on our own experience of the book, and life.

Michael Pollen is a wonderful journalist and I think probably a very nice person. His genius to me is being so spot-on about what is on people’s minds that his success is guaranteed. And he is entertaining and really has something to say.

Everyone thoughtful wonders about where artificial intelligence is going and what the effect of it on our own life and experience is going to be. As an inveterate downsider I fear we could find ourselves convinced that our most complex and dearly held inner thoughts and feelings begin to look idiotic and meaningless. Advanced AI might show us that love, sentiment, intellectual achievement, experience of joy, morality, art in every form are unarguably inferior to the “experience” of increasingly sophisticated machines. They wouldn’t need to exterminate us, all they’d have to do is extinguish meaning.

I hope not, but suspect I’m not going to find out.

9.1/8.8