The modern world can seem disenchanted and meaningless. Tempting, then, to find mystery in the fact we experience anything at all. A new book about the nature of human consciousness subtly encourages us to do just that. So here I am, four days later, unexpectedly gazing at the blueness of candle flames, rapturously reciting Wordsworth to myself, and attempting to source psychedelics on the dark web.
It’s hard to offer a pithy summary of what A World Appears is about, but one can scarcely blame its author Michael Pollan for that. As the science journalist and polymath acknowledges, there is just too much vagueness in how “consciousness” gets used. One split is between those who use it loosely to mean awareness or experience generally, and those who insist the term refers only to subjective aspects in particular. The latter are interested in our capacity to mentally focus on “the windowpane” — Pollan’s metaphor — and not just what can be seen through it.
According to the standard story, conscious experience has an internal perspective built into it, and so implicitly refers to a self — as the sight of a candle flame also indicates your own (distant or near) spatial position to it. Or as philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote in his famous essay “What is it like to be a bat?”: “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism”. And if that doesn’t help, just focus on what it is like to be a reader now, failing to understand Nagel’s deathless prose.
The “subjective” part has made many a philosopher conclude that the inside is less real than the outside. Galileo split the world in two, putting quantifiable, objectively detectable stuff like mass, weight, and number in first place, and relegating private subjective aspects like color and taste to the realm of so-called secondary properties. Other thinkers followed; eventually, as Pollan nicely puts it: “the method morphed into a metaphysics”. We got the idea that the felt reality of consciousness is deceptive, and despaired of it ever being fruitfully studied by science at all.
Yet more mystical types have suggested that it is possible to drop the subjectivity completely — to reach a state of pure “self-less” awareness — and that counts as consciousness too. Thomas Metzinger, a German philosopher, tells Pollan that this idea would be better understood if researchers did more meditation and more drugs. “You have these people who are superambitious and dominating the discussion yet in their own mental lives are … completely impoverished” he complains.
The temptation to take your own inadequate mind as your only laboratory seems to be a frequent hazard. Pollan relates how some of the loudest voices in the field possess what psychologist Alison Gopnik calls “professor consciousness”, a fact which tends to skew their findings in a different way. Socially clueless, screen-bound boffins discover that the essence of consciousness lies in the capacity to process information, while being physically embodied and having feelings turn out to be of negligible interest. What are the chances?
Worse: effectively, these theorists are then rewarded for their literal narrow-mindedness. For if you define the thing you are investigating in a relatively circumscribed way to begin with, you’re more likely to derive a sexy-sounding answer to a hot button question like “are computers conscious?” later. If, for instance, consciousness is simply equivalent to information processing, then by definition you won’t need a human brain for it. Abracadabra! — information-processing computers can now be conscious too.
Alternatively, if you treat consciousness as a kind of sentience, involving positive or negative responses to a changing environment, then it will turn out that plants can be conscious as well. Wordsworth’s “faith that every flower/ Enjoys the air it breathes”, vindicated at last. Again, this is a cool-sounding result; except that by stripping the original phenomenon down to something so minimal, you conveniently changed the subject.
Pollan avoids this mistake, as you might expect from someone who co-founded a center for the science of psychedelics at UC Berkeley. He is interested in the whole shebang: “the sense impressions, feelings, words, images, daydreams, mind-wanderings, ruminations, deliberations, observations, opinions, intuitions, and occasional insights”, not to mention the “the banalities, the trivialities, and all the seemingly arbitrary bits and bobs of mental flotsam”. At one point he takes part in an experiment, wearing an earpiece which beeps randomly throughout the day, so he can then write down everything he is aware of at that moment. Having hoped for mental brilliance or even just a bit of edgy transgression, he is dismayed at “the sheer tedium” of his inner world.
He agrees that there can occasionally be self-less consciousness, recalling a markedly non-tedious mushroom trip where he saw himself dissolve into a puddle of blue paint, yet from “a completely unfamiliar vantage — perfectly disinterested, uninflected, unruffled, and utterly indifferent … a state of consciousness without a subjective perspective or qualities of any kind”. At this point, the skeptic in me sprang briefly to life, as I wondered how you can see anything without at least an implied spatial perspective, indicating the position of a self that is looking. But maybe I just haven’t taken enough drugs yet.
Casting your net this widely increases the complexity of what is to be analyzed, and makes a complete physical explanation of consciousness look further off. Understandably, a central question of the book is what recently has become known as the hard problem of consciousness: how to explain all that subjective, ephemeral, flickering mental stuff in a way that shoves it firmly back into the brainbox. Or as Pollan puts it, more beautifully: “no scientist or philosopher has charted a plausible path from the intricate gray and white folds of the cortex to the felt experience of an early winter’s day at the end of fall semester.”
In my view, there are better and worse defenses of the ultimate insolubility of the hard problem. The philosopher who coined the phrase, David Chalmers, has argued that materialism — that is, the attempt to tether every aspect of consciousness to a physical cause — must be false, because he personally can imagine the existence of a zombie duplicate, physically identical to a human, who does not have consciousness at all. Quite why we are supposed to take what Chalmers can or cannot imagine as relevant is unclear, though. Imagination, precisely, thrives on an absence of knowledge about the limits of reality; and philosophers’ imaginations especially so, in my experience.
But there are better reasons to think consciousness can’t smoothly reduce to the physical, as Pollan explores. One is that “the very act of sneaking up on our experience becomes part of the experience”, so that we can’t get a stable hold on what is to be explained. When the beeper goes off and the mind dutifully looks inward to monitor its own stream of thought, does it actually create something new? Is there really a fact of the matter about whether the thoughts I had 10 seconds ago took the form of images or words, before I stopped to inspect them? We are tempted here by a homunculus fallacy, imagining consciousness like a livestream or ticker tape, passively watched by a miniature version of the self. But there is no clean separation between the watcher and the watched. Nor, says Pollan, is there even a sharp distinction between hardware and software; for experience is constantly rewiring the circuitry.
“There is no clean separation between the watcher and the watched”
And there’s also the fact that — thanks to Galileo and co — moving from the third-personal, objective idiom of science to the first-personal stance feels like moving beyond the official remit of science altogether. But even if this inference is unfair, it still looks improbable that we could ever get a satisfying translation manual, exhaustively transforming the experience of a memorable meal or a terrible dream into information about neuronal activity, electric pulses, and hormones.
And nor is the inert language of scientists or philosophers ever likely to properly capture our feelings of awe at the mystery of it all. For this we have poetry — specifically Wordsworth, described by Pollan as the “great poet of the numinous”. His Prelude, for instance, gives us: “Dust as we are/ The immortal spirit grows/Like harmony in music/ There is a dark/ Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles/ Discordant elements, makes them cling together”. It’s a magisterial riposte to the hard problem, and without a stupid zombie in sight.
Not surprisingly, scientists intent on formulating the evolutionary purpose of consciousness tend to play down such issues. They say they don’t require a physical explanation for every fleeting thought, but only a general account of consciousness’s function and origin. According to one approach — championed by figures such as Karl Friston, Antonio Damasio, and Mark Solms — the point of consciousness is to advance the system’s basic goal of homeostasis: maintaining internal equilibrium in response to changing external conditions. Just as hunger prompts us to find food, and feelings of cold to find warmth, more sophisticated conscious feelings — including the capacity to reflect on one’s own perspective, as such — help us to explore, understand, and predict the behavior of complicated fellow humans, again for the purposes of survival. Summing up the depressingly disenchanted thrust, Solms tells Pollan that “the mind’s ultimate goal is to render consciousness superfluous by reducing uncertainty to zero and putting the maintenance of life on autopilot”.
But again here — this time, thankfully — we run into the unbridgeable gulf between the scientist’s bloodless coding of the material world, and what goes on in the private here-and-now. From the inside, as it were, rendering consciousness superfluous is absolutely not on my bucket list. On the contrary: having read Pollan’s illuminating book, I long to dive further in. What count as adaptive goals for a species or an individual, couched baldly in scientific terms — the passing on of genetic material, fuel acquisition, the hoarding of resources, or whatever it is — are scarcely ever recognizable amongst the desires, fancies, whims, and wishes a person is aware of right now. Nobody can stay in the language of science for very long; not even the scientists. It’s too inhuman.
Why, then, do we fear that this consciousness stuff somehow lacks reality, even when we each know our own version so intimately? After all — as idealist philosopher Bernard Kastrup points out to Pollan — “matter is an inference” while “mind [is a] given”. Right now, each of us has already access to a boundless, telescoping universe full of fascinating transformations. All we have to do is go in.