DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
An Outstanding Look at Consciousness
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
Michael Pollan (2026)
Michael Pollan’s latest work is outstanding, the best book on consciousness I’ve read in recent years. Unlike many books about consciousness, it’s clearly written and accessible to readers who aren’t scholars. Pollan is well informed, discerning and balanced without advancing a specific theory, and candid regarding the limits of his understanding.
Pollan discusses several of the more than twenty theories of consciousness that have been proposed by scholars in recent decades, based in part on interviews with the scholars who developed them; and he also interviewed several scholars and a novelist who are skeptical that an adequate theory of consciousness is possible. A World Appears contains chapters on sentience, feelings, thoughts, the self and a chapter on his experiences during a five- day Zen retreat which left him questioning whether his efforts to find an intellectual answer to the “hard problem” of consciousness had narrowed his consciousness rather than expanded it.
Anyone who reads scholarly articles on consciousness quickly realizes that there is no widely accepted definition of consciousness. Pollan states: “For some, it is the basic fact of perception – that a world appears when we open our eyes. For others, it is that we reflect on ourselves, as in a mirror. Some think of consciousness as a lens through which we perceive the world, while others take the word to mean the space of interiority in which thinking and feeling seem to happen. … The simplest definition is “subjective and felt experience … “Awareness” is another serviceable one-word definition. “The feeling of what happens” is how the neurologist Antonio Damasio describes consciousness. John Searle, the philosopher, defines it as “those states of awareness, sentience, or feeling that begin in the morning when you wake from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until you fall asleep.”
Consciousness, it appears, is multi-faceted and layered, and occurs in relationship to unconscious processes. It is only in recent years that some scholars have made a distinction between sentience (i.e., ability to sense and respond to the environment) and consciousness or viewed sentience among animals and (perhaps) plants as an initial building block of consciousness in the evolution of mind. Pollan asserts that scientists and philosophers develop theories around a single facet or function of consciousness, while largely ignoring the others. He states: “Granted, scientists and philosophers must simplify and abstract from the messiness, complexity, and sheer variety of lived experience in order to make progress, but as philosopher Evan Thompson reminds us, it’s easy to mistake the maps we draw for the territory we seek to describe.”
Pollan comments: “One reason why consciousness has proved such a hard nut for science and philosophy is because the only tool we can use to crack it is consciousness itself. … Consciousness is the water we swim in, and in our everyday lives, we have almost as little distance on it as fish do of the sea. We can’t ever climb out of the water and stand on its shore.”
For this reason (and others) some scientists and philosophers have given up on the idea that neuroscience will be able to develop a third-party objective account of consciousness while ignoring phenomenology, i.e., the study of the subjective experience of consciousness. Pollan begins his book with the story of a debate between the neuroscientist, Christof Koch (a colleague of Francis Crick) and a young Australian philosopher, David Chalmers, at a conference in 1998. Koch challenged Chalmers to a wager, i.e.” Within twenty-five years, we would find the physical footprint of consciousness in the brain, which he predicted would compose a small set of specialized neurons” while Chalmers insisted that “Science, organized around objective third person measurement, was ill equipped to explain a phenomenon that was inherently subjective, qualitative and internal. … Consciousness ... would not yield to normal reductive science anytime soon, possibly ever.” And: “During a ceremony I attended at a consciousness conference in New York City in June 2023, Koch graciously conceded and presented Chalmers with a case of Madeira.”
There is more to this story. During the early 2020s, Koch became interested in psychedelics, as (Pollan asserts) have many other neuroscientists. “It’s almost obligatory at this point”, Koch said to Pollan. Koch informed Pollan that he had recently participated in a five-night ayahuasca ceremony. Koch stated: “I accessed the universal mind. That’s the only way I can describe it. … There was no self. There was Mind at Large,” per Aldous Huxley’s description in The Doors of Perception. “Koch had gone through an experience that told him consciousness existed beyond the brain.”
As striking as this story is, it would be misleading to suggest that Pollan argues that psychedelic experiences constitute a refutation of neuroscience or of theories of consciousness based on the evolutionary development of mind in biological species. Most of the discussion in A World Appears is about scientific theories of consciousness, or about some facet of consciousness; and Pollan also considers at length claims that AI is already conscious or will become conscious in the future.
The most compelling perspective regarding the biological evolution of consciousness is Antonio Damasio’s insistence that consciousness is grounded in feelings rather than language or abstract thought and developed in species with central nervous systems hundreds of millions of years ago as a means of achieving homeostasis. In Damasio’s view, brains evolved to serve bodies, not vice versa, by bringing needs to awareness in a way that allowed flexibility of action, instead of depending on automatic responses. Feeling also provides a moment-to-moment indicator of well-being or its lack, Damasio maintains in his great book, The Strange Order of Things.
Damasio, along with several other prominent neuroscientists and philosophers, argue that all feelings have valence, i.e. are pleasureful or painful, pleasant or unpleasant, a characteristic of consciousness Damasio has argued creates the sense of beauty and which makes all consciousness thoroughly qualitative. One of its main functions is to enhance the appreciation of experiences, both in the moment and through reflection. Consciousness is far more than information processing, reducing uncertainty through prediction, or taking over decision making when unconscious processes are insufficient.
Pollan is skeptical regarding theories of consciousness, both specific theories and as a whole, in part because of their obvious inadequacies (e.g., information processing analogy with computer operations), his periodic conversations with David Chalmers who has made a career of debunking theories of consciousness, and because they have not helped him understand his experiences on psychedelics or during extended meditation.
However, approaching consciousness through phenomenology does not fare much better in Pollan’s explorations. One of the most surprising parts of A World Appears discusses Pollan’s experience of Russell Hurlbert’s random moment time sampling approach to consciousness research. Hurlbert ‘s research utilizes a buzzer in the ear which, when activated, is quickly followed by queries regarding a subject’s thoughts in the moment preceding the buzz in the ear. Pollan had difficulty describing his thoughts during the moment in detail, and Hurlbert’s questions made him more (rather than less) confused. “However I answered it (i.e. Hurlbert’s question regarding his recollections), Hurlbert proceed to patiently chisel away – sometimes jackhammer – at the distortions of recollection, presupposition, theory, context, wording, and self-regard that inevitably colored my reports of my inward experiences.” And: “Under the press of Hurlbert’s questions, I realized I wasn’t even sure whether my inner experiences consisted of words or images or something else entirely …” Hurlbert eventually told Pollan that “he didn’t think I had much inner experience at all,” which sounds like a gratuitous insult of an author who questioned his research methods, but which Hurlbert insisted was based on Pollan’s inability to distinguish moments of consciousness from their context. If this is phenomenology, it’s highly overrated.
Inevitably, Pollan, despite his omnivorous curiosity and openness to new perspectives, misses or underestimates the importance of some features of consciousness. His discussion of the ability to control attention, one of the most important characteristics of consciousness, is limited to a few paragraphs. Small countless acts of attention are how the human mind as a whole – not just consciousness – shapes itself. Controlling attention is how humans can begin to change their experience and their character, but controlling attention first requires paying careful attention to mental processes. The importance of attention in creating the foundation for ethical behavior is a theme of the novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch’s, The Sovereignty of Good. Pollan also ignores experimental research indicating that consciousness is always a split second behind reactions in the central nervous system, a residue (so to speak) of neuronal processes responsible for initial responses to stimuli.
From his experiences with psychedelics and extended meditation, Pollan understands that consciousness is radically altered when it is freed from self-concern, and in extreme cases from awareness of self. He states: “It is the self and the memories that have helped shape the self that imbue our consciousness with its inimitable hue and qualities.” Pollan comments that it’s not obvious why self-transcendence should be ecstatic, or how it’s possible to merge awareness with objects of perception in an unfathomable blissful way. He asserts: “To witness and survive the complete obliteration of the self leaves a mark. It had never occurred to me that there could be such a thing as consciousness without a self, or at the very least, without a subjective perspective to anchor it, but there it was, and the valence of the experience was entirely positive.”
Psychedelic experiences have led Pollan to question the assumption that consciousness is “inherently subjective.” He comments: “The first-person point of view is supposedly what made consciousness intractable to objective third-person science. So what becomes of our understanding of consciousness if there exists a conscious state, such as the one I experienced, that has no hint of the first person?” To answer this question, Pollan discusses the scholarly work of Thomas Metzinger, a German philosopher, who “solicited accounts of pure awareness online, asking respondents to complete a detailed questionnaire.” Five hundred of these personal accounts, with extensive commentary, have been published in The Elephant and the Blind (2024). Pollan states that most of the responses came from meditators, some from users of psychedelics, but also from people whose experiences had no obvious cause. The accounts report a dissolving of boundaries, “no longer any chatter in the mind, no feeling of ‘I myself’, no distinction between self and other. … I no longer had any concept of Table or Door or Tree in Mind, there was just experience.” Curiously, some respondents questioned whether what had happened to them should be described as experience. Metzinger believes that the construction of self through both psychological processes and social interactions is a way of corralling ‘pure awareness,’ which he believes occurs in babies and in the moment immediately after waking in the morning.
Pollan ends his extraordinary book with a confession: “Nearing the end of this journey, I find myself not at all sure what to believe, if anything. I’m abashed to say I know less now than I did when, naively, I set out to unravel the mystery of consciousness.” Pollan admits that he’s no longer sure consciousness is a product of the brain, or that science will eventually find a material cause for consciousness, but he is also not convinced otherwise. When he states his uncertainty to Christof Koch, Koch replies, “But that’s good, that’s progress.”
Dee Wilson
7-19-26
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