Finished reading: A World Appears by Michael Pollan 📚

My Thoughts

What can I say, any book by Michael Pollan is sure to be gold, and this one does not disappoint. If you have any interest at all, or even if you don’t, you’ll understand what all this hubbub about consciousness is.

Michael dives deep into all the dusty corners and talks to all the current experts to explain, as best he can, what this is all about and why we still don’t know that much. Well, we know a lot. We just don’t know what it is or where it comes from.

Michael says it best:

When I confessed to Koch my fear—that after my five-year journey into the nature and workings of consciousness, I somehow knew less than I did when I started—he simply smiled. “But that’s good!” he said. “That’s progress!”

The book is outstanding; I highly recommend you read it. You’ll find yourself thinking a lot about who you are and why you are. You’ll think about your thoughts and wonder where they come from. You’ll wonder what makes you, you, and how fragile “you” really is. You’ll think about the thinker, are you the thinker of your thoughts…

Quotes

Remarkably, plants can be rendered “unconscious” by the same anesthetics that put animals out. This whole class of drugs, which is notably varied in its chemistry, induces a state of unresponsiveness in plants.

(When asked if he thought plants were conscious, the late ethnobotanist Timothy Plowman replied with some exasperation: “They can eat light, isn’t that enough?”) What good would consciousness do them? It seems to me that something different—more minimal, stripped down—might describe them better, something more like intelligence or sentience. But most of the plant neurobiologists are sticking with consciousness.

There’s a parable here: Cell biologists typically study dead cells, and because DNA survives the death of cells, it got all the attention—more than it deserved, in Levin’s view. Conversely, because bioelectricity vanishes at the moment of death, it was largely ignored. “Kill the cells and you can see the hardware,” Levin said, “but you’ll miss the software.”

I was reminded of the ayahuasqueros, the shamans of the Amazon Basin, who will tell you, when asked about the source of their astonishing ethnobotanical knowledge (including the not-at-all-obvious recipe for combining two plant species to make ayahuasca), that the plants, through dreams and visions, teach them what to do.

The chameleon vine (Boquila trifoliolata) changes its leaf shape to mimic the plant it climbs on, even when that plant is plastic. This indicates it has some way of “seeing” the host plant’s leaves.

“I worry quite a lot these days that people might think I’m crazy,” he said, “so I say this to you very cautiously. We are all living in a simulated environment, in a manner of speaking, all the time. You and I are not seeing one another now—I’m seeing this screen where there is a representation of you. But it goes even deeper than that. I’m receiving light from this screen that is being transduced from my rods and cones into nerve impulses, and from these spike trains, I create this image. It’s an image in me of you. So that, too, is a simulation.

“Be wary of the desire for magic.”

Here was a tidy restatement of the “hard problem” as framed by David Chalmers in the 1990s. Why don’t all the many mental operations that our brains perform go on “in the dark”? In fact, most mental operations do. Our brains are minding our bodies twenty-four seven, taking in and processing tremendous amounts of information, both external and internal, without any of it crossing the threshold of our awareness. And yet as long as we are awake, there is an ever-present feeling—a something-it-is-like to be us, alive.

“The first dose was the most profound experience of my life. I disappeared, fell out of time, and then came back with the realization that everything in the world is love. I know, ridiculous! As a scientist, there’s no reasoning about it. But I understood for the first time that everything is connected by the same substance, and that substance is love. “Afterward, I was overflowing with love. For every person on the street!

Couldn’t there be, somewhere out there in the space of all possibilities, some idea about the fundamental nature of reality and consciousness that the human mind hasn’t conceived of yet? We can hope so. But how will we ever know if that new idea—which will itself be the product of consciousness—is true? Because consciousness is the only means we have of knowing anything, we can’t step outside it and take up a godlike perspective from which to render a final judgment. So where does that leave us? Exactly where we already were: wandering in the exitless labyrinth of consciousness.

Iain McGilchrist, a Scottish psychiatrist and philosopher, is a proponent of the idea—first proposed by Henri Bergson—that the brain is a receiver rather than an originator of consciousness. “I know of no way of proving the point one way or the other,” he writes, “since the observable facts look the same whether [the brain] gave rise to, or simply mediated, consciousness.”

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives,” the filmmaker Luis Buñuel wrote late in life. Memory plays a crucial role in the construction of a self; indeed, it is the essential raw material from which selves are made. “Life without memory is no life at all,” Buñuel writes. “Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.”

“The Buddhists were right about this, that getting attached to any goal in the world, like career success or sensory pleasure, is an attempt to create stability. But the world being as it is, and systems like us being as they are, we will always be frustrated,” he said, because control—whether of the world or even of our own selves—is ultimately futile. “The nasty thing is that evolution has developed this mechanism”—the self—“to drive us forward mercilessly.” We helplessly strive to control the uncontrollable.

Always keep a don’t-know mind,” Roshi Joan had said to me. Sometimes not-knowing opens us to possibilities that knowing, or trying to know, or thinking we already know, closes off.

And let go into not-knowing. My time in the cave had shown me another way to look at consciousness: less as a scientific or philosophical puzzle to be solved and more as a practice, a way to once again be altogether here, present to life and to this vault of stars. That, I guess, is the prize won on this quest, in place of the definitive theory or clinching argument I had once, naively, hoped to bring back from it. Consciousness is a miracle, truly, and remains the deepest of mysteries, yes, but it is also so very simple it can fit into a sentence. I open my eyes and a world appears.