Penguin
Review by Walter Cummin
In A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, Michael Pollan makes an offhand reference to Plato’s cave, “where artificial agents are confined and forced to rely on the shadow as their sole source of knowledge about the world.” He used it when asking about the internet, but I consider the concept central to his dilemma in writing a book that attempts to define consciousness for humans and other life forms, including those not usually considered alive, like AI.
Pollan may have set himself an impossible task, as stated in another analogy from psychologist Daniel Gilbert who told him he “was about to embark on an expedition to hunt for crocodiles in a swamp while blindfolded.” That’s even harder than hoping to decipher the shadows on a cave wall.
Pollan’s shadows are the information he gathered from scientists like Gilbert who are deep in the research to define consciousness. The book is essentially Pollan’s organizing their reports of the findings of their studies into related groups of theories. The explanations are much more lucid than just shadows and are the reason A World Appears is so interesting and worth reading because of Pollan’s ability to present them so effectively. He has learned so much about the behaviors of a wide range of living creatures, all very informative.
Consider plant expert Paco Calvo’s finding that unrelated plants will compete for nutrients while those related will cooperate and share, or the late Arthur S. Rebus discovering that even a single-celled protozoan exhibits a sense of pleasure or discomfort. Should we regard such actions the results of consciousness? Studies reveal that creatures do such things, some surprising, but what does that mean? Is there a word or a concept that offers an explanation behind the totality of all life forms’ behaviors? Can we group them all under the single umbrella of some phenomenon called consciousness?
To return to the cave, we can visualize all those scientists, expert as they are, seated in rows facing the wall. Perhaps they focus on different shadows for their perception of the world, directed by their training and inclinations to seek specific types of knowledge. They might even debate among themselves about what the shadows mean.
Pollan sees a fundamental dilemma involving an actual debate for the consideration of consciousness: “To delve into the subject of consciousness is to quickly discover how little we know about a phenomenon we all know so well. It doesn’t help that scientists and philosophers who work on the problem don’t agree on what they mean by the word consciousness or on what, exactly, they are trying to explain.” Does that word have a single actuality behind it? Or at most we can have just information about a collection of disparate traits among living creatures that don’t all fit under a singular definition.
Is his chapter “Self,” Pollan focuses on the question of the human conception of self, citing David Hume, Buddhism, and other sources that deny the existence of a self. He also brings in theories about the nature of any self that does exist, quoting, for one, Anil Seth: “the self is not the thing that is perceiving; it is itself a kind of perception constructed by the brain.”
Beyond the matter of the self, Pollan notes that he is surprised that the many scientists he has interviewed do not talk about the unconscious, ignoring it to focus on conscious perception. The psychologist Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva argues that such a focus on consciousness tells us every little about the dynamics of thought. Following her emphasis on unconscious “mind-wandering” for creative thinking, Pollan discusses fiction writers who explore the inner lives of their characters, especially those who like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf use stream of consciousness.
At this point in the book, when the subject turns to the self and the unconscious, the attempt to define consciousness is limited to human beings, unless one is prepared to argue that one-celled creatures possess a sense of self and an inner life. Even that definition for just humans becomes elusive. He concludes, “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.”
That conundrum suggests that Pollan has given up, but the final section, a Coda called “The Cave,” adds one more very different way of searching. When I saw that title, I thought he was returning to Plato’s cave. Not so. This cave is a real one in Nepal, a barren twelve-by-fifteen dirt-floored cell with a bed and a woodstove, but no toilet. His host and guide is Joan Halifax, the abbot at a Zen center who is addressed as Roshi Joan. She judges the quest he reports in this book useless, advising that it would be wiser to meditate and walk in the hills. That would serve the Zen goal of transcending the self.
For Pollan, the experience of the cave has given him much more than shadows on the rock wall: “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.” In that sense a world has appeared.
