"A World Appears" by Michael Pollan.
Author Michael Pollan is both a journalist and a professor at Harvard and Berkely, where he is the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. According to his wikipedia page, “Pollan is best known for his books that explore the socio-cultural impacts of food, such as The Botany of Desire (2001) and The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), as well as those that explore the impact of drugs on society and consciousness, such as How To Change Your Mind (2018) and This Is Your Mind On Plants (2021).” He seems eminently qualified to interview experts on the mind and human behavior.
Pollan’s most recent book is “A World Appears,” a fascinating attempt to cover the scholarship on a fascinating topic: human consciousness. Unfortunately, through no fault of his own, the reader is likely to be disappointed–the simple fact is that science hasn’t come to very many firm conclusions about consciousness, mostly because it is very difficult to study. There are a lot of theories in this field, but not enough facts to test them.
Regardless, we have learned some things, and what we have learned is sometimes counter-intuitive (plant sentience?) but also very interesting. Pollan does an excellent job of presenting what we know (and don’t know) in an engaging and easy to understand way.
Pollan does his best with this material. His writing style is easy and engaging, even while discussing very complex ideas. He does his best to humanize what could have been a very dry topic, by organizing his treatment as a series of interviews, and never losing sight of what makes his subjects interesting as people, not just on their research. There are downsides to his approach–those who simply want a primer on consciousness science will be bored by many of the sections, esp. Pollan’s extensive reflections on his own experiences. Consciousness is a phenomenon in which everyone is a first hand observer, and Pollan doesn’t except himself.
One particular aspect of Pollan’s self-reflective approach may bother some people: He spends a lot of space describing his experiences with psychedelic substances, as well as what he thinks these experiences mean. (To be fair, many of his interview subjects have also experimented with such substances, “It’s practically a requirement” of consciousness research, one of them says.)
This, in part, reflects Pollan’s attitude toward science, and positivism itself: He’s clearly ambiguous about it. He says so explicitly: “Part of me has always bristled at the arrogance of reductive science…” he says, “Yet there is another part of me, the part that became a science writer, that is sympathetic to the quest to explain everything in material or physical terms.”
Pollan throughout the book compares the progress that the scientists have made (or rather the lack of it) unfavorably with the philosophical approach of phenomenology, which in his treatment of it includes anyone who relies or has relied on first person introspection as the primary basis of conclusions about the mind, from William James the late 19th century psychologist, to 20th century philosophers like Sartre, to stream of consciousness writers like Proust.
As I am myself highly committed to standards of objectivity and the materialist paradigm (at least with respect to material phenomenon), I personally found these sections distracting (get back to the Hard Problem!), but others perhaps less so.
Pollan begins his book with a discussion of what has become known as the “Hard Problem” of consciousness. Originally coined by philosopher David Chalmers as the result of a bet he made with neuroscientist Christof Koch, it asks “Why does thinking feel like anything?” In contrast with so-called “Easy Problems” such as visual recognition, encoding memories and carrying out behavioral functions like eating and exploration, Chalmers asks why these activities are accompanied by an internal experience, why don’t they happen “in the dark” with no qualitative, subjective aspect to them? Why does thinking feel like something?
The disappointing result of consciousness research is that no one has ever plausibly answered this question. Indeed, there is no agreed upon objective definition of “Consciousness” within the scientific community, which perhaps helps explain the relative lack of research on it. As we will see, some scientists dismiss the hard problem, and others regard it as unanswerable.
The “Four Chapters” Framework
Pollan organizes his interviews into four chapters, each of which covers an increasing level of complexity, starting with the simplest and culminating in the most complex. (So far as I can tell, Pollan came up with this scheme himself.) I found it to be a very useful approach, helping to clarify what otherwise might have been a very confusing range of theories and models. The four chapters cover, in order, Sentience, Feeling, Thought, and the Self.
Sentience corresponds more or less to what we might regard as the least complex form of environmental awareness, perhaps not accompanied by any form of qualitative experience at all, and yet which seems to allow, in those organisms that display it, surprisingly complex exploratory and problem solving behavior.
Feeling is the first level at which qualitative experience must be present, by definition–it makes little sense to speak of “feeling something” if that feeling isn’t a subjective internal experience of some kind. It also turns out that feelings and emotions play a surprisingly core role in human decision making, with implications regarding what consciousness might be for.
Thought is where a lot of the phenomenology comes in, as Pollan explores the mystery of where our conscious thoughts come from, and what role they play in our daily lives. It turns out that most of us know very little about our own thoughts, which raises some fascinating implications all its own.
Finally, the Self is, in some ways, the least satisfying chapter, as it appears less research has been conducted on the self than on other aspects of consciousness. The questions asked are, however, compelling: is our sense of self in some sense an illusion, and if so, what benefits does that illusion provide us?
The research Pollan presents raises more questions than it provides answers. And yet these might be some of the most profound questions humanity can ask. It speaks to our sense of purpose and meaning–what is it to be human? What does it mean to be “aware?” Consciousness is the one thing we know exists (Descartes famously said “I think therefore I am”, to which I would add “All else is inference.”) And yet it may also be the one thing we know the least about. The very fact that this should be true is itself a fascinating quandary.
Sentience
Pollan divides this chapter into two parts: the first on plant consciousness and the other on a discussion of living homeostatic systems. Both shed light on what we might mean when we consider that something is “conscious.”
He opens with interviews of two scientists: Paco Calvo and Stephano Mancuso. Paco Calvo is the director of the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the University of Murcia in Spain. He also calls himself a “plant neurobiologist”, a deliberately provocative term since plants do not have neurons.
All the way back in 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel published an article titled “What is it like to be a bat?” in which he made the famous assertion that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."[1] He also asserts that it is impossible for human beings to know this–what it is like for a bat to be a bat– without actually being a bat. Therefore the problem may be unanswerable.
But not everyone is ready to give up. In 2017, Calvo published an article titled “What is it like to be a plant?” and actually goes about trying to provide an answer[2]. According to him, the more we know about plant behavior the easier it is to imagine what it is like to be them. “Being able at all to envisage what it is like to be a plant…has a lot to do with how much we know about the neurobiology of plants…and the way that, as agents, they interact with their environment.”
So how much do we know about plant behavior? According to Calvo, quite a lot. Plants learn and form memories. They predict changes in their environment and take appropriate action, before the change occurs. They can send and receive signals to and from other plants and alter their behavior in response. They can distinguish relatives from non-relatives of the same species, and distinguish both from themselves (for instance, they can distinguish their own shade from the shade made by other plants). Plants integrate information from a wide array of electrical, magnetic, chemical, vibratory, photosensitive, and other senses.
Plants also engage in goal-directed intelligent behavior, according to Calvo’s collaborator, Stephano Mancuso, a plant scientist and director of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology at the University of Florence. Here, he conducts experiments on plant intelligence and problem solving.
For instance, in one experiment he constructed a maze and allowed plants to explore it with their roots in search of some hidden fertilizer. He compares the results to similar results obtained with mice and rats. The most interesting result is that, based on time lapse photography, the plants do not simply fill the maze with roots–they are clearly searching, almost certainly based on their chemical senses.
Most of this processing capacity appears to be located in the root tips. As Pollan describes it, “Roots about to encounter an impenetrable obstacle or a toxic substance change course before they make contact with it.” If an animal does this, most people would describe such behavior as intelligent.
“Intelligence is the ability to solve problems,” Mancuso says, although it must clearly work differently in plants than in animals. He theorizes that plants have a kind of “swarm intelligence” distributed throughout their roots. Mancuso and his collaborators have detected the presence of cells just behind the root tip that show unusually high levels of oxygen consumption and electrical activity. They speculate that these cells may be the plant equivalent of neural processing, but if so the process is not yet well understood.
Another fascinating discovery is that plants sleep, and can be anesthetized by the same drugs that anesthetize animals. Under the influence of such chemicals, a venus fly trap won’t snap shut, a plant that normally closes it’s leaves in response to touch remains still. He also claims that plants meet all the criteria for sleep that scientists typically apply to animals, including insects. They can even become sleep deprived, by constantly vibrating their pots.
If true, then this implies that plants, like animals, have at least two modes of awareness. Is this the same as a mode of consciousness? That question goes hard up against Nagel's warning: how can we know without being a plant? But the evidence is certainly suggestive.
[Micheal Levin and cellular bioelectrics? Xenobots?]
Does goal driven behavior equal conscious behavior? This seems to be the underlying conundrum. Computers pursue goal directed behavior, but so far, few people seem to think they are conscious (though we will meet some exceptions later). For me, potentially the most interesting implication goes the other way: Chalmers asked why intelligent behavior feels like anything–why doesn’t it go on “in the dark?” With plants, perhaps it does. Even if plants do exhibit intelligence, there seems to be no direct indication that they possess qualitative experience. Apparently it isn’t needed. But if so, then why do we have it? If phenomenal consciousness is not required for goal-directed intelligent behavior, then what is it for?
But there is another way to look at it: perhaps consciousness isn’t a binary phenomenon, either “on” or “off.” Perhaps it's a spectrum, running from “None at all” at one end of the spectrum, to “human-like” at the other. Plants, in this scheme, would be somewhere toward the bottom, but not at “zero.”
Living Systems and Consciousness
One scientist who thinks that intelligence does not require consciousness is Karl Friston. Friston is a physicist, a neuroscientist, and a psychiatrist at University College London. He has conducted a wide range of cognitive research, including brain scan modeling, the brain’s capacity to predict changes in the environment fractions of a second before they occur (and the role this plays in creating a visual simulation of the environment.
Friston’s work, Pollan reports, is focused on how simple living systems protect themselves from entropy, what Friston calls “Free Energy” (free in the sense of being relatively unstructured). Structured systems tend to lose their internal organization in the presence of a less structured environment. For example, heat tends to dissipate into cold, thus causing an animal to freeze to death. This is what “Entropy” means.
According to Friston, any living system requires three basic components to protect itself from free energy: a border or boundary between it and the environment, one is a border or boundary between it and the environment, thus preventing its own structured system of processing energy from leaking outside. But any living system also needs to explore that environment to find the resources it needs, thus another component is a sensory organ of some kind. Finally, the organism needs a way to act on the environment, thus it will develop some sort of behavioral mechanism, like arms and legs, or a mouth.
Any living system must maintain its various internal systems within certain desirable states–body temperature for example. This process is called “homeostasis” because each internal system has a set point that it cannot fall too far below, or rise too far above (lest we boil). Hunger is another good example: too little energy and we feel hungary, too much and we feel full. (Our ability to detect internal states is sometimes called “interoceptive senses”).
Fiston believes that homeostasis is basic to all life, and therefore the most fundamental drive is to reduce or eliminate surprises–unexpected events or conditions that could threaten homeostasis. They do this by attempting to predict the future.
But this creates a problem for living systems–sensory organs are never perfect, and therefore the information they provide may contain inaccuracies. Thus, any living system must infer what the true situation is out in the environment based on incomplete sensory data.
Inference is Friston’s term for the process of developing a model of the environment, and it is central to his view of life.
But this does not imply the presence of a mind. “An inference need not require a conscious inferrer, nor a prediction a predictor,” Pollan reports him saying. Even something as simple as a virus makes inferences about its environment, but that does not mean it thinks.
Friston even takes this beyond living systems. Even something as simple as a thermostat makes inferences, he says, in order to maintain homeostasis (the temperature it has been set to). It has a sensory device (its thermometer), a boundary (the house or building), and can act on the environment (by turning the heat on or off).
Inference, therefore, became the evolutionary basis of developing more complex forms of mind, according to Friston. He sees the evolution of human consciousness as a series of steps of increasing complexity, each defined by how far ahead the organism must predict. “The virus’s time horizon can be measured in milliseconds, the fish in seconds, probably, but with increasing complexity comes a longer memory and a deeper reach into the future–until you get to us humans,” he says.
At some point organisms must acquire the ability to predict the consequences of their own actions, and then the ability to model counterfactuals–what would happen if they did one thing or another. This, according to Fiston, is the basis of imagination and the self.
This, along with the ability to control one’s attention, both internally and externally, in other words the ability to pay attention to one’s own attentional processes, provides the basis of qualitative experience. Qualia, the redness of red, the aroma of coffee, is the product of metaconsciousness, the ability to notice our own experiences, as experiences.
Friston goes further. He also proposes that human consciousness is what allows us to predict the behavior of other consciousnesses, to model counterfactuals of ourselves, and to act, especially in the form of communication. “The only purpose for all of this,” Friston says, “for doing things in awareness and not in the dark, is to allow me to talk to things like myself.”
All this, in the service of reducing uncertainty.
Chalmers, though, might have some objections. Why does paying attention to one’s own attentional processes feel like anything? But perhaps this leads to the same inference as Calvo and Mancuso's description of plant consciousness: if even a virus can do all this in the dark, what is phenomenal consciousness for? Mere increasing complexity seems inadequate as a causal mechanism. Where is the line drawn–at what point in evolution did living minds “light up?” Friston provides no answer.
This may be why Pollan chose to call this chapter “Sentience”, as a way of creating a distinction with what humans understand as “consciousness.” If so, then the research covered by his next chapter might provide another way of approaching it. While intelligent goal directed behavior may not require consciousness, surely feelings and emotions do.
Feeling
Pollan begins this section by quoting [insert] “Be Wary of the Desire for Magic.” What he means by this is that there is a will to believe in the mind as a non-material manifestation, and a concomitant willingness to suspend skepticism whenever someone proposes an inspiring explanation, regardless of facts. In other words, responding to the idea of consciousness as an emotional response. This is an especially appropriate reminder with respect to this chapter, which deals with emotional responses.
Antonio Damasio is a very well known biologist
The Importance of Internal Feelings–Kant and babies; 2 factor theory of emotion
Homeostasis is Feeling Good (but why does it feel like anything?)
Mark Solms and AI
“Consciousness is Felt Uncertainty”
We can model this
POMPD
“Any system that has the same functionality will have feelings”
Kingston Mann
The Butlin Report
Cargo Cult cognitive science? (Field of Dreams model: If you build it, it will come.) A system cannot be explained entirely by its outcomes.
Thinking
Against objective theory
Phenomenology
William James and the observer problem
Russell Hurlbert’s Beeper Study–”Pristine inner experience” “unspoiled by the act of observation or reflection”
Record Report, and Interrogation
Pollan’s Example (in a bakery)
Pollan Pushes Back
Findings
Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva and Spontaneous Thought
“Neurophenomenology”
Mind as its own input
The executive control network vs the default mode network
Four seconds before a conscious thought
Where do spontaneous thoughts come from?
Stream of consciousness writing
Lucy Ellman
The Hard Problem Again. Why do thoughts feel like something? Why is that feeling so hard to define?
Self
David Hume and the Cartesian Theater
Alison Gopnick and Baby Consciousness
Spotlight vs Lantern Consciousness
Children and the numinous (vs Professors)
Anil Seth and the Prediction Machine
The Controlled Hallucination
The Self as a perception, and interoception
“We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike”
Emotions are how the brain's predictions about the body feel
The point is homeostasis
“You don’t need an inferrer to make inferences or a perceiver to make perceptions.”
The phenomenology of the self
Is the self an illusion? The color red
Michael Levin and Caterpillar learning
Reconstructive Memory
“Could consciousness be what it feels like to be in charge of constant self construction?”
Telling ourselves stories
Carlos Montemayor–familiarity, not just knowledge.The uniqueness of our experience.
Transcendent experiences all alike
Matthieu Ricard and Buddhist experience
Pollan’s transcendent experiences
Thomas Metziger and the Minimal Phenomenal Experience Project
Pure awareness not even subjective, not tied to a self, simple sentience
Some neurology
Christof Koch and the shortcomings of physicalism
When scientists can’t explain something, they call it an illusion, or emergent phenomena.
“Matter is an inference, and mind is a given.”
Last word to Chalmers: “No position on the mind-body problem is plausible… but one of them must be true.”
Is functionalism enough?
All these scholars define consciousness by what it does, not by what it is or what causes it. What we need is a theoretical mechanism that would plausibly create it. It is possible to comprehensively document the behavior of a thermostat, the rise and fall of temperature, the effect of changing its set point, and never gain any insight into how and why it carries out that behavior.
The one aspect of the mind that stands out by its absence is memory. Surely, if the self exists, it resides in memory. Perhaps consciousness is what it feels like to occupy a series of memories that appear to change continuously over time from a single point of view, and which continues to add more memories even in the present moment. This series of memories are characterized by two salient features: one is that they all occur from a particular point of view, different from that of others, and the other is that they are all suffused with a sense of moving toward or away from various goals and needs.