A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
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Michael Pollan on A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A windshield he hadn’t noticed beforeThe book began not at a desk but in a Berkeley garden, on psilocybin. That afternoon Pollan became convinced the plants around him were sentient, and though he didn’t accept the experience at face value, he couldn’t dismiss it either. The conviction lodged a question he spent the next five years trying to answer.
becoming convinced that the plants in my garden were conscious, that they were returning my gaze and had feelings toward me. Now, I didn’t automatically take that to be true, but it did make me wonder: How conscious are they? Are they conscious at all? So yeah, that’s what posed the questions that I’ve spent the last five years trying to answer.
Before that afternoon in the garden, consciousness had been invisible to him, the medium he moved through without examining. Reporting on psychedelics for his previous book, How to Change Your Mind, had already begun to destabilize that invisibility. He described the perceptual shift those substances produced.
Psychedelics have a way of kind of smudging the windshield through which we normally see reality. And suddenly, we notice, wow, there is a windshield. There’s something between us and the world, and it could be different than it is.
That recognition, that a medium exists between the mind and the world, is where A World Appears begins. The garden experience gave the question a body; the windshield metaphor gives it a direction.
As the project developed, a third pressure arrived from outside the laboratory and outside the garden. The spread of AI chatbots and social media algorithms gave the question of consciousness an urgency that felt commercial as much as philosophical.
Your consciousness is the most precious thing you own. It is that space of privacy and freedom in our minds. And it’s under siege right now from so many things in our world.
How he wrote it
From science toward poetryPollan reported the book for six years. He expected to write a work of science journalism. What he found instead was a field in worse shape than almost any he had covered: by one count, twenty-two competing theories of consciousness are currently active; by another, the number is 222. The announcement he published on Substack captured the disorientation of discovering how deep the problem ran.
I began reporting on the book six years ago, and the journey took me places I never expected to go — not only deep into the modern science of the mind but also into philosophy, literature and religion. I quickly discovered there’s a very good reason philosophers call consciousness ‘the hard problem.’ While I won’t claim to have solved it — it may be unsolvable — along the way, I not only learned a great deal — about how we perceive, feel and think — but had some of my fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality overturned.
The hard problem, a phrase coined by philosopher David Chalmers to name the gap between physical brain processes and any felt experience they produce, had already defeated neuroscience for decades. Pollan’s response to that defeat was structural: he widened the roster of sources. In a Harvard Crimson interview before publication, he described the trajectory that resulted.
One of the things you learn when you study consciousness is that science has been structured since the time of Galileo to ignore consciousness, and, in fact, doesn’t have the tools to understand consciousness. So there’s a real question of whether science will ever be able to solve this problem, at least the way it’s currently constituted. Realizing that, I looked at other ways of thinking about consciousness. I interview philosophers, I interview Buddhists, I interview poets, I interview novelists. I think this is one area where the humanities is perhaps ahead of the sciences, and the trajectory of the book moves from science to poetry.
One specific gap Pollan identified in the scientific literature was the contents of consciousness, what the mind actually holds from moment to moment, as opposed to the mechanics of how it arises. Scientists tend to leave that territory alone. He decided he wasn’t bound by the same disciplinary caution, and it led him to novelist Lucy Ellmann, whose Ducks, Newburyport is roughly a thousand pages long and essentially one continuous sentence, a formal attempt to render the flow of a single mind.
One of the things I noticed when I started working on my book is that scientists don’t often focus on the contents of consciousness. I think they just assume that it’s completely beyond them. But I thought, Well, I’m not limited by the kinds of things scientists are limited by, so I decided that I wanted to talk to an author who had worked in this mode — and the author I interviewed was Ellmann.
The garden section of the book required Pollan to take seriously a hypothesis that most neuroscientists would not touch. He used William James’s argument that mystical experiences cannot be judged true or false but should be treated as hypotheses worth testing with other evidence. That framing freed him to report the plant-sentience literature on its own terms.
I dove down a long, deep rabbit hole, researching plant intelligence and consciousness. I discovered scientists who are actively working on this topic and genuinely believe plants possess some form of sentience. This became an important part of my book, exploring how deep into nature consciousness extends. I doubt I would have pursued this research if I hadn’t had that psychedelic experience. In that sense, it was an inspiration.
The personal thread
An afternoon in a garden, days in a caveDuring reporting, Pollan experienced self-dissolution on psilocybin, the collapse of the boundary between subject and object that meditators and mystics have described for centuries and that neuroscientists struggle to explain. He described one instance of it in a conversation with The Interview.
I had an experience of self-dissolution where I merged with this piece of music, this Bach unaccompanied cello suite. The subject-object split went away, and I was identical to this piece of music. [paraphrased from audio]
Near the end of his reporting, a Zen teacher he had interviewed concluded that Pollan was approaching consciousness as a problem to be solved rather than an experience to be inhabited. She sent him to spend several days alone in a cave at a mountain retreat in New Mexico. He described, in a KATU Lifestyle interview, what the isolation surfaced.
It made me realize I had narrowed my focus trying to solve a problem, the problem of consciousness. And I was overlooking the fact that it’s an incredible gift that we have this. That we have this internal space of complete mental freedom. And frankly, we’re squandering it now. [paraphrased from audio]
The cave functions as the book’s hinge. Pollan arrived at the retreat as a reporter after an explanation and left with a different question: not how consciousness works, but what we owe it.
What he wants us to sit with
The body, the algorithm, and the moral stakesPollan’s argument against machine consciousness does not rest on the complexity of computation. It rests on the body. Feelings, in his account, are how the body reports its own condition to the brain, and that link to flesh and vulnerability is what makes experience possible. He laid out the case on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Computers are very good at simulating the so-called higher functions of the mind — abstract reasoning, symbolic representation — but they’re not really good at the more emotional, physical things. Current thinking about consciousness is rooted in the body. It’s rooted in our flesh, in our vulnerability, in our ability to feel pain. An immortal computer, it’s hard to think will ever feel, because our feelings are tied to our mortality.
Whether or not AI ever develops genuine interiority, Pollan argues that something alarming is already in motion. In his KQED Forum interview, he noted that 72 percent of American teenagers now turn to AI for companionship. He named what he considers the next escalation beyond attention capture.
We live in a world where corporations want to monetize your consciousness. When you submit yourself to the algorithms of social media, they’re hacking your attention...Now we’re going a step further with artificial intelligence — more sophisticated algorithms that are not just hacking our attention, but hacking our ability to form emotional attachments with other people or other entities. That’s a huge step — allowing machines into the space of our mental lives.
The outward argument of the book concerns what consciousness in the natural world would mean for how humans treat it. If sentience extends further into plants and animals than standard biology assumes, our moral relationship to the rest of nature has to be renegotiated.
Thinking this way, that we don’t have a monopoly as a species on consciousness and the moral consideration that I think comes with this could act as a curb on the ease with which we exploit nature and extract from nature.
Pollan does not resolve the hard problem, and says openly it may never be resolved. What the book presses toward instead is the recognition that consciousness, wherever it exists, is a condition that carries obligations, ones we are currently failing to honor in both directions: toward the natural world we extract from, and toward the inner life we are letting be colonized.