Conversation about Michael Pollan's New Book: A World Appears

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Conversation about Michael Pollan's New Book: A World Appears

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Fire PhilosophyOn Michael Pollan’s A World Appears: A Journey into ConsciousnessA conversation between Krzysztof Piekarski and Dale WrightKrzysztof: Greetings, Fire Philosophers. I’m here with Dale Wright, and we’ve both just finished reading A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan. Pollan enters the world of Zen in this book, so it felt like an appropriate text for us to take up.Dale: When you first suggested it, I said something like, “Yeah, good idea.” But my real inner thought was, “Really?” Consciousness is what’s called a really hard problem, because you can never get out of it to look at it. You can’t bring it before you as an object. We’re at war, our institutions are in chaos, our culture is deeply divided, and we each have our own problems. Do we really want to go there?Dale: And yet I did, and it was just the tonic I needed. It lifted me out of the concrete issues I struggle with every day and up into a place where you’re thinking broadly. That breadth gets brought back to bear on the practical, difficult issues. So it was good for me, even though my first response was resistance.Krzysztof: Look at you persevering. Let’s start with definitions. There’s another book I’ve had on my shelf called Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness, and a good rhetorician starts by defining terms. What landed for me, maybe reductively, is that there are layers of increasing complexity. We go from the inanimate, like a rock, to intelligence, something like a computer, to sentience, where we look at plants and say, “Okay, they obviously feel things,” to the animal layer, where we apply the word consciousness, and then ever-increasing amounts.Dale: Layer or level is a good word. The structure of the brain has those various layers, from the brain stem up to the cerebral cortex.Krzysztof: Having read the book, what is your working definition of consciousness, and is it different than when you began?Dale: I doubt it. This is something I’ve been pondering and meditating on for most of my life. But I really appreciated the book. To the title you mentioned, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness: for me, that’s nineteen ways of using this one word, nineteen meanings we apply when we use it. The word itself is creating more confusion than clarity. We get stuck on it, as if consciousness is one important thing in the world we have to define. Really, our awareness of it has to do with our vocabulary for it.Dale: Pollan helped clarify what I’ve always thought of as layers of deepening consciousness. From sentience at the bottom: a tree is sentient in that when the sun comes out, trees that close down at night respond and turn toward it. Plants have this kind of awareness. Awareness is a more helpful word than consciousness. Then, working up to self-awareness, you get more sophisticated forms.Krzysztof: Plants are how Pollan enters this world. There’s an interesting part where some plant biologists are saying, look, if it has a kind of memory, and we can anesthetize it, then you have memory and the feeling of pain or no pain. Maybe the difference is really time. Maybe plants are beyond sentient, and we’re just imposing our timeframes onto them. Pollan mentions that thought experiment about aliens looking down at humans at thousandth speed, who would see us as plants just standing around.Dale: It’s helped some botanists actually push in that direction. They’re finding things we just don’t see. No doubt projecting consciousness onto plants. But there’s an awareness there that’s really interesting, that we’re only beginning to explore.Krzysztof: We’re going into the deep end. You know all the recent studies about rainforests as ecological systems: families, awareness of which tree is kin, which is enemy. This gets dicey faster than it gets resolved. I’m a vegetarian mostly for ethical reasons, because I don’t want to cause unnecessary suffering on conscious beings. But if plants are more conscious than I assumed, what am I going to eat? Cotton candy all day?Dale: Rocks. Just rocks. A nice bowl of sand.Dale: There’s a tradition among some physicists and some religious seers called panpsychism. There are scientific versions where you study elementary particles and see a certain kind of spirit in matter, because matter is energy, matter is movement. Physicists have done experiments where it seems like particles will opt for one thing or another: wave, not wave. Panpsychism is the view that there is no ultimate split between matter and mind, that all the way down into the tiniest elementary particles there is what’s called proto-consciousness. The whole split between life and non-life begins to fade. Hindus, going back thousands of years, worked on a version of this, where pantheism saw everything as having a divine element, from the highest seers down into matter. Some kinds of physics and neuroscience are now leading back toward that ...

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