Voyage to a new world

A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
Michael Pollan
2026, Non-fiction, 318 pages

 

Until recently scientists avoided discussing consciousness. Such topics defy scientific investigation and make investigators look unscientific. Michael Pollan thinks the topic would still be taboo if Christof Koch and Nobel Prize winner, Francis Crick, hadn’t teamed up to study it during the 1980s.

As Koch and Crick were attempting to find the “neural correlates” that drive conscious experience, another idea began to take hold. Philosopher, David Chalmers, first voiced this idea in 1994 and followed up with a paper addressing it in 1995. The idea is simple, but it’s slippery for some. Chalmers wondered about the “hard problem” of consciousness: “The puzzle of why any of these mental operations are accompanied by any conscious experience whatsoever.”

If mental operations simply did things, science could explain them. However we experience things through a variety of sensations and feelings. And that defies explanation.

Philosopher, Philip Goff, argues in his book, Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, that Galileo advanced science by focusing on mensurable phenomena and excluding their qualitative properties. Science can identify the wavelength of indigo, but not describe its mood. Only Duke Ellington can do that.

Psychology has generally followed Galileo’s method. It excludes qualitative and subjective explanations. First published in 1989, The International Dictionary of Psychology considered consciousness

“A fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.”

Chalmers and other writers made consciousness a respectable topic, one that earns its place in contemporary thought. Chalmers leans toward panpsychism; in his version the universe is pervaded with consciousness. Perhaps even at subatomic levels.

Pollan admits that:

 Except for a brief period in my teenage years when I was reading Hermann Hesse, writing bad poetry, and thinking about the Big Questions, I never gave much thought to consciousness. What pushed the question front and center for me were a couple of psychedelic experiences I had in my fifties and sixties.

Others, too, have engaged with consciousness while influenced by psychedelics:

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that a single psychedelic experience dramatically increases the likelihood that a person will attribute consciousness to other entities, both living and nonliving. Among the entities mentioned in the study, plants saw the greatest increase in conferral of consciousness: Before their psychedelic experience, 26 percent of participants believed plants to be conscious; afterward, this figure climbed to 61 percent.

Pollan acknowledges that many of those who study consciousness, begin with human consciousness. Beginning with human consciousness adds complexity since humans can have awareness of being conscious – they can experience metaconsciousness. We’re not too sure that other animals are capable of metaconsciousness. Pollan begins his inquiry with plants. Can plants be conscious? There are some who think they might be. Of course, plants lack brains. Could they have some form of distributed consciousness? Scientists are finding plants respond to their environment in ways that seem conscious. One-celled organisms can do so as well.

Unlike most books on consciousness, Pollan doesn’t just stick to science and philosophy. He adds an extra dimension with his exploration of stream-of-consciousness literature, such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Pollan is easy to read. He makes complex topics accessible and entertaining.