In the 1990s, Nobel Laureate Francis Crick declared that “consciousness is not a philosophical problem anymore but a neuro-scientific one, and we are going to crack it in the next two decades.”

Scientists, Michael Pollan acknowledges, have subsequently discovered a lot about consciousness: the sentience of plants and animals, the origin and nature of feelings, ways in which we think, why minds wander, the value of a self, and efforts to transcend it.

But to date, according to Pollan, no philosopher or scientist has solved “the hard problem” Crick promised to solve: connecting activities in the cranial cortex to a seemingly subjective and immaterial consciousness that “layers perception, memory and feeling” with qualities greater than information.

In A World Appears, Pollan (the author of 10 books, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind), draws on research by philosophers, psychologists, biologists, neuro-scientists, artificial intelligence (AI) pioneers, the tenets of Buddhism, and his own experience with........

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