A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, by Michael Pollan
Do we live in a mindful world? Are the plants in our garden aware of us and planning their next moves? The acclaimed science writer Michael Pollan was drawn to those questions after eating magic mushrooms, in research for his previous book, How to Change Your Mind. He felt the plants were talking to him. The idea isn’t entirely bonkers, as he learned when he began interviewing plant scientists conducting research into the sentience of plants that obviously respond to their environment in ways lifeless things (stones) cannot.
Those researchers would once have been outliers but are part of a gathering wave of scientists coupling imagination to hard, ascertainable fact. Researchers have shown that plants are “highly intelligent beings, able to read their environment and solve novel problems unforeseen by their genes” he writes in A World Appears.
So in the absence of a brain, are plants conscious? Pollan finds that “brains don’t hold a monopoly on memory, awareness, cognition, agency, and decision-making.” What exactly does it mean to be “conscious”?
Pollan begins with the 1998 bet between philosopher David Chalmers and neuroscientist Christof Koch on whether, within 25 years, science could offer a precise, persuasive explanation for how our material brains give rise to the immaterial state we call consciousness. Koch insisted that—of course!— it will all be understood soon. Chalmers won the bet, and he’s still working toward an answer. Interviewed by Pollan, Chalmers said, “whichever theory I’ve worked on most recently comes to seem the least plausible, while the ones I haven’t thought about for a while start to look more promising … until I work on them.”
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Throughout A World Appears, Pollan explores many theories under serious scrutiny, including the concept of “cellular sentience,” the ethical implications of plant consciousness and artificial intelligence, the limitations of placing too much weight on DNA, the careless use of mechanical/digital metaphors to characterize consciousness, the biases inherent in academic psychology and our inability to achieve complete access to the reality around us, given the limits of our senses (and brains). “Scientists aren’t the only ones exploring this territory, and sometimes it’s the artists who get there first,” Pollan writes.
He concludes by wondering whether all the vexing theories on consciousness are a distraction rather than an answer. Perhaps consciousness should simply be lived, “less as a scientific or philosophical puzzle to be solved and more as a practice … I open my eyes and a world appears.”
Get A World Appears on Amazon here.
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