A World Appears — Book Notes

A World Appears is a primer on how philosophers, scientists, and psychologists have attempted to unravel the mystery of consciousness throughout history. The book itself is pretty “meta”: we traverse working theories of consciousness (past, present, all unproven) while Pollan invites us into his own mind, wrestling with what he believes is or isn’t true given his deep knowledge of plants, his personal experiences with meditation, psychedelics, and writing, and conversations around AI.

I enjoyed this book. Pollan made the research arc approachable and compelling, and he found fascinating characters and anecdotes that brought the drama around consciousness to life.

Who should read it

Anyone interested in mindfulness and contemplative practice, or machine intelligence
“Pollanators”

William James
Antonio Damasio (Descartes’ Error)
Anil Seth (Being You)
Alison Gopnik

How this book changed me

Interventions like meditation or psychedelics are “smudges” on the windshield. I love this image. It’s a great way to describe the impact of my ten-year, off-and-on journey with meditation.

A brain is not a prerequisite for consciousness. The chapter on sentience was eye-opening, and felt like a brilliant grounding for Damasio’s work on emotions and the brain stem. I feel good in nature, held in forests, motherly toward my houseplants. This chapter gave me some explanation for why I might sense these things, and has made my days since feel more alive and connected as a result.

“Self” as a continuous process of sense-making. There are of course challenges with pathologizing human experience, or getting stuck in rumination loops, but Pollan’s point about shifting our perspective on “self,” seeing it not as a thing but as a continuous process of rewriting our story, makes a lot of sense to me. My own contemplative practice has helped me learn to see my “self,” or ego, more clearly, and then there’s the work to shed it. But for most of us, our “self” is our lens on everyday reality. We are in our own simulation, and the simulation is never fixed. Experience is constantly changing us. Why wouldn’t we want to examine how our minds are evolving, to make sure we’re maximizing our contact with reality?

Literature and art as ways into other people’s consciousness. I love thinking about books and art as “empathy machines.” It’s another form of transcendence that doesn’t require years in a monastery.

Puzzle × practice. This frame has helped me orient myself in my own journey through mindfulness, philosophy, psychology, and science, to find some core idea or node for “what is this all for.” I loved hearing him articulate the shift from solving the puzzle of consciousness to learning how to make better use of this special and seemingly uniquely human ability to be aware that we are aware.

Top quotes

“Consciousness is the water we swim in, and in our everyday lives, we have almost as little distance on it as fish do of the sea. We can’t ever climb out of the water and stand on its shore.”

“I see an incredibly mindful world. A world full of cognition.” — Michael Levin

“Kids are the species’ way of getting it out of cultural dead ends.” — Alison Gopnik

“To transcend the self, force yourself to be alone with it long enough to get so bored and exhausted that you are happy to let it go.” — Pollan

Summary of key concepts

Three questions of the universe

Why is there something rather than nothing?
How did life arise from dead matter?
What is consciousness?

Easy vs. hard problems

The “easy problems” relate to figuring out the mental operations of the brain: learning, memory, perception. Still complex, but we can understand these functions in terms of specific measures of brain activity.

The “hard problem” is understanding why consciousness accompanies these mental operations. Why do we need an inner feeling to go with the behavioral and cognitive functions at all?

Science vs. religion

I loved the story of Galileo’s negotiation with the church, where he agreed to pursue science that didn’t touch the mind or soul, leaving those areas to the priests. The rationale was to minimize political interference from the Church, and also to steer science toward objective measurement.

Major theories

IIT (Integrated Information Theory). Makes the origin of consciousness lived experience, not the brain. Distinct phenomenal parts (perception, memory, feeling, imagination) are all joined together into one single experience at a time.
GWT (Global Workspace Theory). Starts with the brain: a continuously processing system taking in information from internal sense organs, memory, emotions, and more. The most urgent and useful information rises to the top and gets broadcast to the entire brain. The value of information becoming conscious is that it can be used to guide behavior (versus automatic processing).
CBC (Cellular Basis of Consciousness). Consciousness begins with cells’ ability to sense their environment. When some event is sensed, it is felt and experienced.
Bayesian Brain Hypothesis. Less a matter of taking in the world through our senses than of generating a continual stream of predictions about what’s happening in the world, based on prior experience and the laws of probability. Our senses exist merely to error-correct the predictions of our minds.
Inference (as a theory of everything: evolution, consciousness, life itself). All complex systems rely on inference to construct a model of both themselves and the outside world, and to make predictions about what is likely to happen if they do this or that. It comes in two flavors: sensory inference (guessing the hidden causes of our perceptions) and active inference (doing something that allows us to make better inferences, like moving to obtain a different perspective). Both work in service of reducing uncertainty and maintaining homeostasis.
Embodied consciousness (Damasio / Solms). Consciousness is the brain’s way of feeling the body’s needs and using those feelings to guide adaptive behavior. This work refocused the field’s attention on the role of feeling in our mental lives and relocated the origin of consciousness in the brain stem. It reminds us that the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around. Feelings let us internally try out different courses of action before committing: a gut check that accelerates and improves decision-making. They are the vital bridge between mind and body, a mental phenomenon deeply rooted in flesh. Feelings come first, sent up from the basement, and they drive the higher-level operations of the neocortex (reasoning, planning, decision-making, judgment), which can in turn generate new feelings as the body responds to whatever the mind has cooked up. To survive, all biological beings must maintain themselves within a narrow range of optimal states across many parameters (temperature, blood pressure, blood chemistry, hydration). One function is homeostasis, keeping the body stable and balanced. A second is allostasis, helping the body adjust to new challenges. Both require the brain to stay closely connected to what’s happening in the body. Most of this back-and-forth happens beneath the threshold of consciousness, but some homeostatic set points demand our attention to maintain or restore: hunger, thirst, temperature.
Idealism. Consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe.
Panpsychism. Everything is conscious.
Quantum theory. Consciousness as an active force in the construction of reality.

Capacities of machines vs. living things

Cognition and intelligence are capacities we share with machines, while sentience and consciousness remain the domain of living things.

Sentience. Proto-consciousness: the ability to sense changes in your environment, recognize whether those changes are good or bad for you, and respond by moving toward beneficial conditions and away from harmful ones. It does not require self-awareness or an inner narrative, and it may be a property of all living organisms, from bacteria to plants to animals.
Intelligence. A capacity above instinct: a fixed goal with variable ways to achieve it.
Cognition. The acquisition and processing of information about the state of one’s environment and self (what happens between sensing and responding).

Gopnik: lantern vs. spotlight

Lantern consciousness. A vivid, panoramic illumination of the everyday, for exploring the world around you and learning how it works.
Spotlight consciousness. The ability to focus on a task for long periods, for exploiting one’s environment (depends on a strong sense of self and self-interest).
Adult brains favor stability over plasticity.

A Buddhist principle

Overcoming one’s own small self should lead to greater compassion for others. The suffering alleviated when we transcend the ego is not only our own.

Silence removes self-presentation.
Rituals relieve decision-making.
Both are tools to breach the hard shell of self.