In A World Appears (2026), Michael Pollan explores consciousness from scientific, philosophical, literary, personal, psychedelic, and spiritual perspectives.
Science, organized around objective third-person measurement, was ill-equipped to explain a phenomenon that was inherently subjective, qualitative, and internal.
Materialism is the metaphysical belief that everything, including our mental states, can be explained in terms of matter.
Panpsychism is the ancient idea that everything, right down to the subatomic particles in the ink on this page, is conscious to some infinitesimal degree.
Idealism is the equally ancient idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like charge or spin or mass, and in fact precedes matter.
Illusionism is the idea that consciousness—perhaps the thing in life we are most certain is real—is just an illusion.
Quantum theory [may suggest that] consciousness is an active force in the construction of reality.
Sentience is where consciousness begins: with the ability of living beings to register sensations and respond intelligently.
It used to be that scientists associated consciousness with reason and other higher-order forms of thought presumed to take place in the neocortex. Consciousness may instead begin with feelings generated in one of the most ancient parts of the brain—the upper brainstem.
We moderns in the West are the exceptions in our reluctance, at least as adults, to grant the spark of subjectivity, or personhood, to the wider nonhuman world.
Neuroscience has yet to identify the biological structures necessary to generate consciousness.
Sentience lacks the more evolutionarily advanced aspects of consciousness, such as a sense of self, emotion, reasoning, and the ability to reflect on one’s own thoughts.
Confusing matters further, sentience and consciousness exist on a spectrum, with a dense fog of uncertainty clouding the precise spot where one shades into the other.
Being conscious or aware serves intelligence by supplying it with information and goals; intelligence serves consciousness by enhancing an organism’s ability to make good decisions and achieve those goals.
Mind is a broader term than either sentience or consciousness, because it encompasses everything that the brain does, both consciously and unconsciously.
Plants can predict changes in their environment and take appropriate steps.
Plants can send and receive signals from other plants and alter their behavior in response to those signals.
Plants can also integrate information from more than twenty distinct “senses,” including all five of ours.
The more I read about roots, the brainier they seemed. In addition to sensing gravity, moisture, light, pressure, and hardness, root tips can also sense volume, nitrogen, phosphorus, salt, microbes, various toxins, and chemical signals from neighboring plants and fungi. Roots about to encounter an impenetrable obstacle or a toxic substance change course before they make contact with it.
Roots can tell whether those nearby are self or other and, if other, kin or stranger.
“Neurons perhaps are overrated,” Mancuso told me. “They’re really just excitable cells.” Plants have their own excitable cells, many of them in a region just behind the root tip.
Remarkably, plants can be rendered “unconscious” by the same anesthetics that put animals out.
“This suggests consciousness has something to do not with chemistry but with physics,” Mancuso said. Perhaps it has something to do with the body’s electrical fields.
When plants are injured or stressed, they produce ethylene, an anesthetizing chemical, akin to how humans produce endorphins when injured.
Our perceptual systems are tuned to recognize only a familiar kind of agency—that of medium-size beings navigating three-dimensional space. With plants, we’re looking at the wrong space. Look at physiological or behavioral space instead, and you can see they’re way smarter.
All cells can communicate (both electrically and chemically), form networks, and store information.
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.
All cells, not just neurons, exchange information and store memories in these networks.
The memory had been stored not in its brain or neurons but in its body—in the bioelectric field.
Purposeful, intelligent behavior can emerge more or less spontaneously from the interaction of ordinary cells joined in an electrical network.
His Xenobots suggest that sentience, or something like it, emerged in evolution long before animals or possibly even plants.
Levin is not the only biologist willing to push the emergence of sentience, or something like it, all the way down to the cell, if not further. Arthur S. Reber, until his death in 2025 a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, has proposed a theory called the cellular basis of consciousness (CBC) model.
“When some event is sensed, it is felt,” he writes. “It is experienced. It is encoded as a subjective phenomenal state—even when the organism doing the sensing is unicellular.”
Even for a single-celled protozoan, Reber argues, an experience will have either a positive or negative valence—a sense of pleasantness or discomfort.
“It starts with goal-directness,” Levin explained. “And the atom of goal-directness is homeostasis”—an entity’s desire to maintain a certain range of internal conditions necessary to survive, such as a normal temperature.
Levin can sound much like a panpsychist, but he has little use for that theory, or at least not in the way it is currently conceived.
“If you fundamentally see science as a third-person activity, then I think that consciousness is always going to be beyond you,” he said. “I don’t buy any third-person theory of consciousness.”
“Because if you’re going to learn something about consciousness—what it’s like to be this or that particular creature—it’s only going to happen by you experiencing it yourself. And the only way to do that is to soften your boundaries and merge with the other, undergo some kind of weird Vulcan mind meld.”
The Bayesian brain hypothesis holds that perception is less a matter of taking the world in through our senses than a matter of generating a continual stream of predictions about what’s happening in the world based on our prior experiences and the laws of probability.
All complex systems rely on inference to construct an image, or model, of both themselves and the outside world and, on that basis, make predictions about what is likely to happen if they do this or that.
Consciousness is just one way—call it the human way—of being sentient, an especially elaborate mode (complete with such “advanced” features as self-reflection, metacognition, and the ability to do philosophy).
The seeming immateriality of consciousness has so far resisted all the tools of reductive science, and this is what has allowed an aura of magic to bloom around it.
This is the reductive faith of our time—the belief that the brain is essentially a computer and that conscious awareness emerges, somehow, from the processing of information. And it is a faith that goes unquestioned by most neuroscientists today. This should not surprise us: The whole field of cognitive neuroscience traces its origins to the advent of the computer in the 1940s and, with it, the rise of the brain-as-computer metaphor.
The centrality of feeling and emotion to our experience of consciousness is scarcely mentioned in most theories of consciousness currently on offer.
But pain, fever, itch—these are the inaugural events of consciousness.
Feelings are fundamentally different from other kinds of mental information in that they are necessarily conscious; they are also inherently subjective, inextricably tied to the individual experiencing them in a way that other kinds of thought are not.
Chalmers’s hypothetical zombie—identical to a human in every respect, except without inner experience—becomes inconceivable as soon as you add feeling to the list of its characteristics. A zombie with affect is no longer a zombie.
We humans have spent a few thousand years defining ourselves in opposition to the “lesser” animals. This has entailed denying animals such supposedly uniquely human traits as feelings (one of Descartes’s most flagrant errors), language, reason, and consciousness. In the last few years, most of these distinctions have disintegrated as scientists have demonstrated that plenty of species are intelligent and conscious, have feelings, and use language and tools, in the process challenging centuries of human exceptionalism.
After the brain, the digestive tract has more neurons than any other part of the body, which is why it is sometimes called the second brain.
It is one of the paradoxes of computer science that the “higher” capabilities we once thought of as uniquely human—reason, language, intelligence—have proved easier for machines to master than the more elemental capabilities we share with animals, including feelings and emotions.
As a school of philosophy, phenomenology rejects the bifurcation of nature we inherited from Galileo and Descartes. It maintains that the subjective appearance of, say, the color red in the human mind is just as real—just as much a fact of nature—as the specific frequency of light that science would tell us “really” constitutes redness.
Phenomenologists such as Thompson like to remind us that the “view from nowhere”—the perfectly objective third-person perspective to which science lays claim—is unattainable, because we can never step outside the bubble of human consciousness in which we live.
The objects of our thoughts can never be completely disentangled from what James variously calls their “auras,” “halos,” “accentuations,” “associations,” “suffusions,” “feelings of tendency,” “premonitions,” “psychic overtones,” and, perhaps my favorite, “fringe of unarticulated affinities.”
James says that catching a thought is as futile as trying to hold a snowflake or turning on the lights to see the darkness.
“Has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it?”
Thoughts precede both words and images, James argues, and there is something else—that pregnant absence—that precedes a thought.
As James himself admits, the effort to capture a thought in flight invariably changes it, transforming the crystalline structure of this mental snowflake into a mere drop of water.
Fewer than a quarter of the samples that Hurlburt has gathered report experiences of inner speech. A slightly lower percentage report either inner seeing, feeling, or sensory awareness. Still another fifth of his samples report experiences of unsymbolized thought.
Christoff Hadjiilieva studies what is now called “spontaneous thought”—mind-wandering, daydreaming, creative thinking, mental flow, and those mysterious thoughts that come to us out of the blue.
Consciousness moves more like a spiral.
As recently as the 1980s, surgeons routinely operated on infants without anesthetizing them, confident in the belief that their lack of consciousness meant they could feel no pain.
“Now you have a past and a future that are connected to one another in a coherent way,” Gopnik said. “But it’s a bit of a fiction,” because the memories have been selected and shaped to tell a story about you that is likely more coherent than true.
What Gopnik calls “spotlight consciousness,” the ability, demanded in school, to sit in a chair and concentrate on a task for long periods of time, as well as the ability to plan and exert a measure of self-control and willpower.
Gopnik calls this mode “lantern consciousness,” which she describes as “that vivid panoramic illumination of the everyday.”
Lantern consciousness is ideally suited to exploring one’s environment and learning how the world works.
Spotlight consciousness, by contrast, is ideally suited for exploiting rather than exploring one’s environment, a job that depends on a strong sense of self and self-interest.
This process of repurposing the past in service to the present and future, Levin has suggested, may be an essential function of consciousness. He asks us to think of the self not as a thing but as a process of sensemaking, continually rewriting the story of its past in order to equip itself for life in the present and future.
“It was extraordinary,” he said. “I accessed this universal mind. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was what Aldous Huxley described in The Doors of Perception. There was no self. There was Mind at Large. I don’t know how else to describe it.”
For years, Koch, like just about everyone in the field, had taken it for granted that brains generate consciousness—somehow.
For Koch, that failure was exemplified by the move on the part of die-hard physicalists like Daniel Dennett “to simply deny its existence and call it an illusion.”
The other physicalist Hail Mary is to describe consciousness as “an emergent property” of matter—neurons somehow properly arranged—but no one has yet specified how or why that might actually happen, making emergence sound less like a scientific explanation than an abracadabra. The second reason for Koch’s abandonment of physicalism is quantum theory, which has shattered scientists’ confidence that they can say with any certainty what matter is, exactly, or how it behaves.
“And bye-bye to subject-independent reality,” by which he meant quantum physics’ refutation of the idea that there exists a reality independent of our observations and measurements.
And for most areas of scientific research, materialism “works” just fine—until, that is, you get to the two metaphysical deal-breakers: quantum physics and consciousness science.
So then why, he asks, do we persist in believing that experience—the one and only thing we know for certain—can somehow be reduced to matter, something whose existence we can only infer through experience?
In addition to idealism, panpsychism, and dualism, there are quantum theories of consciousness, simulation theories (in which we and our world are all creations of some unseen übermind that is running the simulation), and “transmission” theories that describe consciousness as a field of information our brains tune into in the same way that radios and televisions tune into electromagnetic waves and turn them into perceptible sounds and images.
I’m abashed to say I know less now than I did when, naively, I set out to unravel the mystery of consciousness.
Book Notes
I enjoyed immersing myself in A World Appears. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in years. My one criticism is that it’s unhelpful to split sentience and consciousness into two separate categories; in my mind, sentience is consciousness, and it exists on a spectrum. The interesting question is whether or not consciousness is universal. Ever since I stumbled upon the work of Michael Levin, I’ve been fascinated by the possibility of universal mind, and by the transmission theory of consciousness as proposed by William James in 1898. It was encouraging to see those unorthodox ideas covered here.
As I work on Natural Information Architecture, I’m sharing notes and quotes from my sources of inspiration and provocation. As always, your questions and suggestions are welcome.