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.

I suspect that in the not-too-distant future, when aliens pick over the bones of our failed civilisation, trying to find out what went wrong, they will tag the 2020s as The Scamming Era. Although scamming has been around for a long time, in the form of confidence tricksters, swindlers and fraudsters, etymonline.com tells me that the words ‘scam’ and ‘scammer’ have only been in use since the 1960s. 

Indeed, when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I never heard the word used, nor knew of anyone who had been scammed. Apparently, it may be derived from the British slang word ‘scamp’, which I remember my parents using in an affectionate way to describe a mischievous child, as in “you little scamp”.

I’m not saying that my childhood was a golden age of people behaving well, though it might be tagged The Decent Era by contrast. It’s just that nowadays it seems perfectly acceptable, even praiseworthy, to be a successful scammer. This involves exploiting common characteristics such as vanity, gullibility, opportunism, greed and naivety.

Like most humans, I possess these characteristics in some measure and have been subject to potential scams that have almost sucked me in. And though I feel I now know the signs to look out for (unusual email addresses, too-good-to-be-true offers and praise for my ability, especially as a writer), the only way that scammers can succeed is by staying one step ahead of their victim.

The result is that scams are becoming ever more sophisticated and difficult to identify, in the same way that it’s increasingly difficult to tell fake news from real news. Recently I received emails supposedly from commissioning editors of big publishing companies offering representation, which turned out to be impersonations of real editors, the only clue being unusual email addresses. When I did a little research on the topic, I found a website called writersbeware.blog that is flooded with complaints from other writers about similar scams.

I live in Thailand, which has entire scam cities perched on all its borders—with Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. Thousands of victims of scams are drawn to and entrapped in these places and then forced to scam others around the world into romantic or financial disaster.

I don’t consider myself a moralist, but I do feel that for a species to survive and thrive, it needs to show compassion and empathy for others rather than selfishness and lack of consideration. The Buddhist notion of ‘right livelihood’ seems appropriate here, which means earning a living in a way that does not harm oneself or others. 

Of course, an era by definition is a finite period of time, and one day, The Scamming Era will end. So, what comes next? Let’s second-guess those aliens and predict that the 2030s, which already many see as the deadline for environmental apocalypse, will be tagged The Self-Destruct Era.