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 psychedelics, to provide a mind-blowing examination of what we know, don’t know, and (since we must rely on our own consciousness to detect consciousness in others) may never know about the phenomenon.

Neurobiologists, Pollan indicates, found abundant evidence that although plants lack brains, they form memories, predict changes in the environment, send and receive signals from other plants, infer they are under attack by insects and send noxious chemicals to their leaves, and integrate information from more than 20 “senses,” including the five senses humans possess. Because plants identify and address problems, some scientists are willing to call them “intelligent” as well as sentient.

Pollan recognizes, of course, that sentience is not the same as consciousness. Nor does he believe that consciousness should be reducible to information. At a time in which 19 leading scientists and philosophers proclaimed in an 88-page report that there are “no obvious barriers to building conscious AI systems,” Pollan is applauding scientists for incorporating feeling “and its wellspring, the body” into their investigations of consciousness, and hoping more of them will take up daydreaming, mind wandering, and thoughts that come out of nowhere.

Throughout A World Appears, Pollan leaves no doubt about his views. In the AI community, he writes, conversations about consciousness are “relentlessly abstract, bloodless, bodiless.” Can a machine, he asks, “comprehend, much less feel,” what it’s like to be mortal and “organize its existence around that inescapable fact?” Can a machine, which understands emojis as proxies for emotions, interpret “body language, eye contact, the parade of facial expressions” as conveying empathy, confusion, pain, and fear?

As AI technicians “translate our wet, sloppy biology into intricate Apollonian patterns etched into silicon,” the ersatz consciousness they install into computers depends on feelings “that will be weightless, absent the vulnerabilities of our mortal flesh.”

The self, Pollan asserts, “is by far the most interesting and most mysterious creation of consciousness, if indeed that is what it is.” Adaptive, and “conferring an advantage” in the struggle for food and survival, the self is also a source of isolation and suffering. Drawing on his experiences with meditation, Buddhism, and psychedelics, Pollan points out that even as we value autonomy, self-confidence, and self-esteem, many of us seek to transcend ourselves.

Ten years after an experience “by way of a psychedelic,” Pollan reports that he still feels less tightly tied to his ego and willing to entertain the notion of a conscious state “that has no hint of the first person.”

Pollan concludes with that notion, which many of his readers may or may not have hoped for or expected. Breaking “the spell of self and its distractions” and letting go “into not-knowing,” he emphasizes, is another way to look at consciousness, a way to be “present to life and this vault of stars.” A miracle and still the deepest of mysteries, consciousness also fits into one sentence: “I open my eyes and a world appears.”

© Psychology Today