Michael Pollan: “Consciousness is truly under siege”

Author Michael Pollan has covered plants, food and psychedelics in best-selling books including The omnivore’s dilemma and How to change your mind. Now he took up the vexing problem of consciousness. In his latest book The World Appears: A Journey into ConsciousnessPollan charts the work of scientists and philosophers, weaving in literary perspectives along the way. He spoke with The new scientist about the value of writing a book where you end up knowing less than you did before you started.

Olivia Goldhill: Let’s start with a deceptively tricky question: how do you define consciousness?

Michael Pollan: The easiest way is to define it as a subjective experience. We have subjective experience; toasters do not. You can even take off the “subjective” because to have an experience is to be aware that you have an experience.

Another definition I like comes from a philosopher Thomas Nagelwho wrote the famous essay “What is it like to be a bat?” in 1974. Bats are very different from us, but we can still imagine what it’s like to be them. That is the question to ask of any species or individual: if it is like something to be you, then you are conscious.

The cortex is the newest, evolutionarily newest part of the brain, and for a long time it was assumed that consciousness must be in the cortex. But I was sold on the idea that consciousness begins with feelings, not thoughts. The work of Antonio DaMasio and Mark Solms and Anil Seth convinced me that consciousness begins with sensations such as hunger or itching and therefore begins in the upper part of the brainstem. This has huge implications. It tells us that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon. You need a body that, like ours, is vulnerable and has feelings that have survival value.

You write about how much we don’t know about consciousness and how science has struggled to make progress. Do we need an entirely new form of science?

We have organized the physical sciences so that they are limited to objective, quantifiable things from a third-person perspective, and consciousness is a qualitative, first-person thing. This goes back to Galileo – he proposed a division where we leave the subjective, qualitative things to the church. It is not that Galileo did not believe in subjective or qualitative things. He did it. He just said it’s too risky, we don’t want to upset the church more than we already have. This kind of science has come to us, and there is reason to doubt whether these tools are sufficient.

You must also study consciousness from within consciousness. A book that had a big impact on me Blind spotpoints out that science itself is a manifestation of human consciousness. The problems we choose to work on, the way we measure things… these are all products of human consciousness.

Maybe we need a different kind of science. Surely we need the kind of science that invents a way to bring in a first-person perspective. There is one attempt to do this in consciousness studies with integrated information theory, which starts with subjective experience as defined by the five axioms and then looks for the kind of structure that would support that kind of experience. I didn’t find it very convincing, but it’s an interesting attempt.

You describe plants having memory and intelligence and it sounds like you are open to plant consciousness.

I made a distinction between consciousness and awareness. Sentience is the ability to perceive your environment, but also recognize the valence of changes, whether they are good or bad for you, and react accordingly. So it is a very basic kind of awareness and has no self-awareness. I think plants have it.

I have spent a lot of time researching the field of “plant neurobiology” as it is jokingly called. There are several notable findings. Plants have about 20 senses. We only have five or six. They can move in a maze. If you play the sound of a caterpillar chewing on a leaf, the plant will respond and send toxins to its leaf. When a predator is there, they send signals to nearby plants. They will share soil with a related plant but not with an unrelated plant – so they get to know their relatives and themselves.

And the scariest thing of all is that they react to the same anesthetics that we do. If you give a flycatcher an anesthetic, the same as it does to us, it won’t react [to nearby flies].

Then comes the question: what has the plant lost when it is under anesthesia? Some would say consciousness. Certainly his sense of awareness – he is no longer aware that a fly is crossing his threshold. So I find that very suggestive.

People might be relieved that you seem pretty confident that the AI ​​won’t be conscious.

I’m talking about artificial intelligence in the near future – large language models and other forms of artificial intelligence projected within 10 years. Computers can simulate thoughts, but they cannot simulate real feelings. Feeling is more than just information, it has this qualitative dimension. Feelings are rooted in a body that is vulnerable.

In the book, I profile someone, Kingson Man, who is trying to create a computer that is vulnerable. He’s covering the thing with this tearable skin that’s going to have sensors in it. I asked him, “Do you think the feelings will be real?” And he wasn’t sure.

To what extent did your earlier work on plants and psychedelics ultimately influence your investigation?

Oh, deep. My interest in plants goes back to my first book and I wanted to work on plants because I love plants. I really care if they are sentient or not. But there was also a psychedelic experience that informed this search, of being in my garden in Connecticut and having this distinct feeling that the plants were conscious. It was this group of plumes of poppies in particular that were as tall as me and returned my gaze and were completely indulgent towards me.

There’s always the question: what do you do with psychedelic insight? Does it have any value? I wasn’t sure. I read William James about mystical experiences and he said that you treat it as a hypothesis, which means you look for other ways of knowing that might confirm or disprove it. That sent me on this journey.

Christof Koch has a psychedelic experience in my book, a radical one where he saw consciousness outside the brain. This is someone who assumed the brain was at the center of things. I asked why he changed his mind and he said “nothing I’ve experienced is as real as this”. So psychedelics found their way into this book, and I was surprised at how many scientists work with psychedelics and find them useful in various ways.

More broadly, psychedelics made me think about consciousness. Psychedelics have a way of blurring the windshield of experience. You suddenly realize that the world is mediated by something. And that is consciousness. Once you realize that, it’s hard to think about anything else. It becomes something of an obsession.

I like the part in your book where psychologist Russell Hurlburt tracks your thoughts, although you seem to welcome his point that you don’t have many.

I feel like a lot of my ideas are not formulated but could do with some work. James calls it premonitions – that you’re on the verge of something, and sometimes I take the trouble to translate it and sometimes I don’t.

But what Hurlburt was saying about me was that nothing was going on. We argued a lot because at no point could I separate my thoughts from the context. He took it to mean that there was a big void that I was filling with contextual things. I meditate, and when I meditate, there is a lot of thinking going on. So I reacted a bit defensively. But it was interesting.

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Consciousness is this private space where we think what we want and give it to companies
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He’s been doing the same experiment for 50 years and found that there are real differences between how people think. We assume that this word “thought” describes the same phenomenon for everyone, but it does not. There are people who think in fully formed words, people who think in pictures, people who think in what he calls “unsymbolized thoughts.” The percentage of verbal thinkers is much lower than we assume.

Can thinking about awareness increase our awareness and take us away from awareness?

Alison Gopnik talks about spotlight consciousness [narrow, intense focus] versus lantern consciousness [general, exploratory awareness]and I really went the spotlight route. As I got more and more frustrated trying to find a solution to this problem [of consciousness]my wife, who is an artist, said that not knowing is a wonderful thing – sitting with uncertainty is really valuable. My first reaction was “yeah, yeah, yeah – I’m a journalist, I need an answer”.

But when I met Joan Halifax, the Zen teacher, at the end of the book and spent time in a cave, I realized that she was right and that there was another way to think about it. There was the problem of consciousness, but also of his experience. And focusing on the problem got in the way of the experience.

We can be more aware and there is a certain urgency to this because consciousness is really under siege. [It] it is very valuable. It’s a private space where we can think what we want and give it away to businesses. We have to defend it. Even if you know less about the science of consciousness than when you started this book, you will learn something else that I think is even more important.

If understanding consciousness is potentially impossible, what is the value of this quest?

Searching is all you learn along the way. When I read James in particular, I have a sense of wonder at how complex this laboratory of our own mind is. You leave with a deeper appreciation for something you may have taken for granted. That’s what I hope – that the book will make you more aware than you were before you started.

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