A Journey into Consciousness

It strikes me as strange that we humans are on the cusp of creating a thinking, feeling entity (AI), which might succeed us as guardians of the planet, while at the same time we have no idea what’s going on between our ears.

My curiosity about this odd state of affairs led me to read A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, in which Michael Pollan delves into contemporary theories on the elusive topic of consciousness. Research in this field faces an intriguing dilemma: how can we analyze the concept of consciousness when our only tool for doing so is our own (subjective) consciousness?

The title comes from a quote by British neuroscientist Anil Seth – “I open my eyes and a world appears” – a sensation we all experience each morning as we wake up. Yet the world that appears is different for each of us; think about it when you wake tomorrow. Nobody else puzzles over that odd dream still echoing in your head; nobody else sees exactly the same surroundings that you wake in; and nobody else has a plan for the new day quite like yours.

Pollan sets out to break down the common analogy between the human mind and computers. We may ‘process information’ in the same way as computers, but we also think and feel independently, and our subjective experience is unique. He also challenges the long-standing notion that humans are the only sentient beings in the universe, which gives us license to exploit nature without limits. Partly through his experience with magic mushrooms, he has a adopted a world view, familiar for animists and Buddhists, that we should respect nature in all its forms.

After summarizing neuroscientific theories concerning consciousness, none of which can answer the simple question of how it arises, Pollan looks to philosophers and writers for insight into how consciousness works. His references include the philosopher William James and the stream-of-consciousness writers James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, whose quirky characters strike many readers as familiar due to their erratic flow of consciousness.

Ever eager to experiment on himself, Pollan hooks himself up to a beeper with the simple task of recording what he is experiencing at the unpredicted time of the beep. Rather than shedding light on what his consciousness contained, he found that in many instances the experience was inexpressible in words.

In the last chapter, which takes on the thorny subject of selfhood, he points out that Western civilization reveres concepts like self-importance and self-confidence, while Eastern modes of thought like Buddhism see the self as an illusion, and urge us to transcend the concept of self. Such is the goal of meditators who try not to reflect on the past or fantasize about the future, immersing themselves in the eternal now.

Pollan begins his book with a bold wager – that by the end of the book, readers will be more conscious than they were before starting it. And while his ruminations throw up more questions than answers, I for one concede that the author has achieved his goal.