By Michael Pollan

WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

Review by Gunnel Minett

As the title indicates, Michael Pollan takes the reader on a journey into consciousness. The way this journey is conducted is by Pollan, who is a journalist by profession, is to travel the world in order to conduct interviews with people who have studied consciousness in some form. 

It is a thorough journey that starts with the world’s smallest organisms. Despite the fact that they have nothing like a human brain, research in this field has established that all living organisms have some form of consciousness. To avoid the obvious mistake many people make, Pollan makes clear that the word consciousness in this broader context does not stand for highly sophisticated human consciousness! He prefers the word ‘sentience’, which he defines as having the basic faculty of sensing one’s environment, whether it has a positive or negative value for the organism, and the agency to react or move toward the good and away from the bad. This is something that can be found even in the most primitive organisms, though it’s a long way from human consciousness. 

Having establish where the journey into consciousness begins, the next stop is to explore the role of feelings. Unlike many of the philosophers who study consciousness, Pollan is not happy to exclude feelings and their role in human consciousness. Following in the footsteps of Descartes, much of the exploration of consciousness focuses on the material world, posing questions as to how, when and where consciousness appears in the brain. Feelings are ignored in this approach. Pollan writes: “I suspect that the ‘problem of consciousness’ has become a proxy for our own resistance to reductive explanation, which in turn must have something to do with our fear of mortality—that final unwished-for reduction of all that we are and all that we value in life to mere matter—to ashes or compost.” [p.65]

As part of his investigation of feelings, Pollan looks at the possibility of AI becoming conscious. So far nobody had been able to build a computer that can feel things. Even a robot built like a human body lacks feelings. To find out more, Pollan interviewed computer engineers in Silicon Valley who claim that they have developed computers that have become conscious. They apparently established this by communicating with their computers and became convinced that computers can express emotions just as well as human beings. It’s reassuring to see that, in response to this conclusion, Pollan questions the engineers rather than their products’ apparent consciousness; “The internet is not the world so much as it is a shadow cast by the world. Filtered through human culture, it is at least once removed from reality.” [p.116]

The next step in the journey is to question thoughts. How and why do we think. Here Pollan points, not just to the conscious thought process that we are all aware of, but also to unconscious thought processes. He interviews people who have spent their whole working life on recording, or trying to record, the unconscious and semi-unconscious thoughts that pass through our mind during the day. Interestingly the focus here is on ways to capture the unconscious thoughts while we are awake. (Usually dreams are regarded as a major road to revealing our unconscious thought processes, but dreams are not included here.)

The end of the book looks at our understanding of the self. Although it seems obvious that we should be able to describe this, Pollan finds the self an unexpectedly difficult phenomenon to explain. He concludes that during the first period of our lives, we live without a perception of a self, something which later in life can be both a challenge and a blessing. This part of his investigations leads him into mediation and participation in retreats. He also discusses the effects of psychedelic drugs on the mind and the perception of self. 

At the end of his journey Pollan arrives at the conclusion that he knows less than he thought he did when he set out, even though he has learned a lot along the way. He concludes: “Consciousness is a miracle, truly, and remains the deepest of mysteries, yes, but it is also so very simple it can fit into a sentence. I open my eyes and a world appears.” [p.239]

Allen Lane,  2026, ISBN-13  : 978-1984881991