Michael Pollan's new book explores consciousness through sentience, feeling, thought, and selfhood.

The new book offers an overview of current consciousness science.

The book’s central achievement is revealing how many questions remain open.

Michael Pollan's widely anticipated new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, brings his signature acumen and wit to one of science's essential mysteries.

Along the way, he pursues numerous related questions: Are plants conscious? Are AIs sentient? How does the brain generate the stream of thought – and can we quiet it? Is the self a fiction?

Although Pollan doesn't claim to answer these questions definitively, A World Appears is a delightful, deeply informed, and thought-provoking tour through the central mystery of what it means to be human.

Pollan begins by identifying the “hard problem” of consciousness: Why aren’t we all mindless machines? Why can’t the complicated neural processing in our brains guide our behavior without this accompanying halo of awareness?

We want to believe science can unlock all mysteries of the universe, but consciousness challenges that belief. Asking why consciousness exists is a bit like asking why anything exists rather than nothing at all. It’s quite possibly a question that science isn’t designed to answer.

He also notes that, in trying to answer the question of consciousness, we may have to reject core assumptions about the nature of reality. For example, we might ultimately embrace idealism: the notion that reality is composed of ideas.

After surveying leading theories, he chooses to explore four aspects of consciousness: sentience, feeling, thought, and selfhood.

Are plants conscious?

Chapter 1 turns to the question of plant........

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