Mushroom trip made me ask: Can flowers or AI have a sense of self?
The zeitgeist has a way of finding Michael Pollan. Or he has a way of finding it. In the 2000s, the American journalist wrote a series of books about food. Food was not exactly an undercovered topic. But in exploring the politics, technology, sociology and anthropology of food, he found a new way to write about it. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” he famously said in books that presaged the panic about ultraprocessed foods.
In 2018, he stayed with edible things — but the sort that have the word “magic” in front of them. He wrote about hallucinogens. It felt niche. It wasn’t. If you have noticed a shift in the past decade in the way we talk about psychedelics, as drugs that could be useful to humans rather than as a moral scourge, at least some of that is down to Pollan.
And today? With his latest book, Pollan, 71, asks a lot of the zeitgeist. In A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, he has written about the science of our sense of self. In one sense, it is an odd topic to choose.
“I’m a journalist. I thought, ‘Boy, this is really off the news’. ”
Now, though, he thinks there are few more important — or timely — questions. Our consciousness is, he thinks, under attack as never before.
“I did come out of writing it thinking that consciousness is very precious. It needs to be defended and we are squandering this space of attention and emotion.”
Consciousness, the way we experience the world — the only thing, in fact, of which we can be sure — has, he argues, become another commodity, and one we give away to tech companies in the form of our attention. And as our consciousness now contributes to a new kind of technology that itself mimics consciousness — artificial intelligence — what does that mean for humanity? How are we even so sure that AI isn’t conscious itself?
All of this sounds very grand for a book that came about because of some flowers and too many mushrooms. A few years back Pollan — professor at UC Berkeley, bestselling author — was in his garden in Connecticut. He had taken some psychedelics and was looking at his flowers. And he realised the flowers were looking back. “I had a very strong sense that the plants were aware and returning my gaze.”
There was, he admits, a lot else to distract him in the garden that afternoon. There was a gnarled and beaten ash tree, for instance, that he was pretty sure was his dead father. It was the ornamental plum poppies, though, that really held his interest — big purple flowers that seemed to have thoughts. He squinted back.
What, he wondered, was it like to be a plant? There were, he supposed, bad things, like “being chomped on by a caterpillar”. And, he thought, there were good things, like “bathing in this wonderful stream of light”.
What was unusual was less the hallucinations than that, once the mushrooms had worn off, Pollan decided the hallucinations deserved closer examination. Even more unusual was that his publisher agreed.
Were plants conscious? If they weren’t — and, in his post-mushroom sobriety, he felt strongly that they weren’t — how could we know that? What, in fact, was consciousness? And then Pollan had another thought. What did it mean that, today, social media and technology companies run an attention — a consciousness — economy?
Few writers could go to their publisher, explain that while taking hallucinogenics they had decided their garden was watching them and ask whether they could, therefore, have a book deal to write about the science of consciousness. But Pollan is one of them. He is a grandee of journalism in a way that is only really possible in the US, where the profession is treated with the sort of respect their British colleagues can only marvel at.
Pollan is one of that small group of long-form writers who become anointed as public intellectuals, then given Ivy League professorships, then get to keep the professorships even if they talk to their poppies.
He co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. He believes psychedelics can give us a new perspective on what a mind is. Hence the poppies. And hence why he has now turned his attention to attention itself. “Almost everybody who experiments with psychedelics has questions about consciousness,” he says. “Psychedelics smudge the windshield of our consciousness. A lot of the time, it’s just transparent. We don’t have to think about it. It’s just working in the background.” Like a dragonfly going splat on a speeding car, magic mushrooms change this.
“When you change your consciousness using a drug, you suddenly say, oh, there is this windshield.”
It is worth saying that Pollan does not actually believe his poppies are sentient. But he does believe that exploring why they might not be, and speaking to those who think in a minimal way that they could be — serious scientists rather than tie-dyed hippies — is a good way to get into what scientists still call the hard problem. What is consciousness? Why and how does a brain produce a sense of self? Why, as Pollan puts it, paraphrasing the philosopher Thomas Nagel, is there something that it is like to be you? And what is that something like when the cleverest people in the world are trying to monetise it?
“We have social media, which has these algorithms that have effectively figured out how to hack our attention. Attention is how we direct our consciousness toward a particular object. And this is now being bought and sold.” Sold where? To the very companies trying to simulate — or even make — synthetic consciousness.
“Now we’re moving to the next step, where people are forming serious emotional attachments with machines. And that’s another giving away of consciousness to a being that isn’t conscious.” I agree, I say, that this is potentially worrying. How is he so sure, though, that the being isn’t conscious — that these largelanguage models we all converse with daily, that confess to feelings and hopes and wants, don’t really have feelings, hopes or wants? After all, I ask, how do I know if Pollan himself is conscious? Before answering that question, it’s probably better to start with what you might think would be an easier one: plants. Most of us live our lives without pondering plant consciousness. Most of us think the idea of plant consciousness is bonkers.
Pollan, when sober, does too. And yet, he says, “you read about these wild experiments”. Plants can problem solve, their roots learning to navigate mazes. They have memory, changing responses to stressful events. They can recognise kin. They may even have a sense of self; they grow quicker when they detect shade cast by other plants, but it seems that when their own leaves cast shade, they don’t. Do they know their own shadow?
For Pollan, the weirdest finding of recent years is that you can anaesthetise plants. We don’t properly know why many anaesthetics work on us. But if you are a plant, and you have movement — if you are a mimosa, say, that closes its leaves when touched — that movement stops if you are given an anaesthetic.
If we can make an anaesthetised mimosa unconscious, does that mean a non-anaesthetised mimosa is conscious? “There’s an idea that as soon as you have two states of being — conscious and unconscious — you have to grant consciousness. And these plants clearly have two states,” Pollan says. “But then, so does my toaster.”
You would have to be tripping to write a book about consciousness. In its favour, it’s the most important topic there is. “The only thing we know for sure is that we’re conscious,”
Pollan says. However, there are, he adds, between 22 and 220 different theories of consciousness — which tells you not that the field is making progress but that “it’s flailing”.
Pollan isn’t a scientist. His background is the humanities. He is a good enough sport in his book to quote the International Dictionary of Psychology which, in 1989, defined consciousness thus: “A fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.” He is also modest enough not to say, now, whether his own very good book will change that definition.
What he does say is that it is timely, timelier than he might have thought when he started writing in a pre-ChatGPT world. In one sense, he says, it doesn’t matter if we make a conscious AI, or whether we can ever know if we have. It is enough that we are beginning to interact with AI as if it is conscious.
“Having machines talk to us in the first person was a fateful decision, made privately ... I really worry that there’s a whole conversation here in Silicon Valley that we miss out on.
“At the same time, these guys are telling us that, you know, we are the first species to create its successor species. This is really scary stuff and they just go on doing it. No one can say we weren’t warned.”
There is one place where we aren’t powerless — where we have absolute sovereignty. It is the origin of the only thing each of us truly knows to be true: I think, therefore I am. Now, says Pollan, it’s time to fight for it.
“Next time you’re standing alone at the bank or the bakery, instead of scrolling on your phone, daydream. Be alone with your thoughts ... this space of interiority that we have, where we think our own thoughts and our own observations? It is really precious, and we should not give it away lightly.”
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan (Allen Lane £25 pp320).
The book.
I couldn’t find an official chapter-by-chapter table of contents for A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness in the public sources available online. Publishers typically don’t release the full chapter list before a book is widely distributed, and none of the listings or reviews currently show the chapter titles. However, from early reviews and previews of the book, we do know roughly how Pollan structures his inquiry and the broad arcs of the major sections.
Below is a summarised breakdown of the book’s main sections and themes, based on reviews and available preview material — this isn’t an official TOC, but it captures the conceptual chapters and what each focuses on:
📘 Introduction — The Puzzle of Consciousness
Pollan opens by framing the central mystery: how subjective experience (the “world” that appears to us) arises and why it feels like something to be conscious. He sets out the “hard problem” of consciousness and establishes the journey ahead, telling us what he hopes to explore.
1. Sentience — Who (or What) Is Alive and Aware?
This section explores the concept of sentience — the capacity to have subjective experience — and asks whether humans are unique in possessing it. Pollan draws on research into non-human animals and even plant neurobiology to probe whether simple organisms might have some form of awareness, challenging Cartesian assumptions that life without a brain couldn’t be sentient.
Key ideas:
• Traditional views on sentience vs. contemporary science.
• How personal experience (including a psychedelic encounter) informed Pollan’s thinking.
2. Consciousness — What Is Felt Experience?
Here Pollan delves deeper into consciousness itself, distinguishing it from basic sentience. He surveys definitions from philosophers (like John Searle) and neuroscientists (such as Antonio Damasio) to characterise consciousness as felt experience, awareness, and subjectivity.
Themes include:
• The elusive nature of consciousness.
• Scientific attempts (and limits) to explain it through neural correlates.
3. Thought and the Self — Narrative, Memory, and Identity
In this part of the book, Pollan investigates how consciousness is shaped by thought and self-awareness. Drawing on literature (like Marcel Proust) and psychology, he explores how memories, narrative, and personal impressions form our sense of self, and how thought transforms the raw sensory world into a coherent interior life.
Highlights:
• Literary and psychological approaches to the stream of consciousness.
• How individual minds assemble experience into selfhood.
4. Beyond the Brain — Expanded Perspectives on Consciousness
This broader section stretches into non-materialist and expanded views of consciousness, gathering insights from meditation, Buddhist philosophy, AI research, and speculative science. Pollan examines:
• Attempts to engineer conscious machines and what these efforts say about human subjectivity.
• Philosophical and spiritual interpretations of mind and awareness beyond the physical brain.
Major themes:
• Machine “consciousness” vs. biological experience.
• Consciousness as a lived, phenomenological reality, not just a scientific problem.
📘 Conclusion — Practising Consciousness in Everyday Life
Pollan’s ending doesn’t so much provide definitive answers as it invites a practice of consciousness: encouraging readers to be more aware of their own minds and the worlds that appear to them. He suggests that understanding consciousness may be less about explaining it and more about inhabiting it fully.
🧠 Overall Themes Across Chapters
• Interdisciplinarity: Pollan mixes neuroscience, philosophy, literature, spirituality, and personal reflection.
• The “Hard Problem”: The book repeatedly returns to the difficulty of objectively explaining subjective experience.
• Consciousness Beyond Humans: From plants to AI, Pollan explores where and how consciousness might occur.
• Personal and Collective Awareness: The journey aims not just to get answers but to deepen the reader’s awareness of consciousness itself.
If you need, I can expand this into a chapter-by-chapter study guide once the full TOC becomes available or based on an excerpt from the book itself.
Study Guide
I wasn’t able to find an official list of chapter titles for A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan in the sources currently available online (the publisher’s sites, previews, and reviews don’t list a full table of contents).
However, reviews and previews (including from Publishers Weekly and Financial Times) describe the book’s structure as consisting of a wide-ranging introduction plus four longer thematic sections that function like chapters in Pollan’s exploration of consciousness. I can build a study guide based on that structure, with summaries of what each major section covers and the key ideas Pollan discusses.
📖 A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness — Chapter-by-Chapter Study Guide
(Based on reviews, previews, and publisher descriptions — official chapter titles aren’t widely available yet.)
Introduction — What Is Consciousness and Why It Matters
Core focus:
Pollan opens by framing the central mystery: how does subjective experience arise? Consciousness feels familiar to each of us but remains deeply puzzling from a scientific standpoint. He explores how consciousness has been traditionally studied — especially by neuroscience since the early 1990s — and why this approach may still fall short.
Key ideas to note for study:
• The “hard problem of consciousness” — the difficulty of explaining why physical processes produce subjective experience (qualia).
• Early optimism in neuroscience about finding a neural basis for consciousness and why that confidence has waned.
• Pollan’s own motivation: a startling awareness of his mind and the world that pushed him into this inquiry.
Chapter 1 — Sentience: Who or What Is Aware?
Summary:
This first major chapter explores the concept of sentience — the capacity to have subjective experience — and questions whether humans are the only beings that are sentient. Pollan looks at plant neurobiology and controversial research suggesting that even organisms without brains can exhibit memory, responsiveness, and behavior that challenge conventional definitions of awareness.
Themes to focus on:
• Traditional scientific views that tie sentience exclusively to brains vs. newer biological perspectives.
• How Pollan’s own psychedelic experience influenced his openness to perceiving sentience in non-human life.
• Why recognizing sentience in other beings forces us to rethink ethical and philosophical assumptions.
Study questions:
• What evidence does Pollan describe that challenges the brain-centric view of sentience?
• How does the chapter define sentience in contrast to consciousness?
Chapter 2 — Feeling and Thought: The Components of Experience
Summary:
In this section, Pollan discusses feeling and thought as core parts of consciousness. He examines neuroscientific theories — such as global workspace theory and integrated information theory — while also considering philosophers like John Searle and researchers such as Antonio Damasio on what feeling “is like.” Memory, emotions, and the construction of thought are presented not just as abstract functions but as lived, qualitative aspects of mind.
Themes to highlight:
• How emotions shape awareness and consciousness.
• Different theories of what generates thought and the “stream of consciousness.”
• The role of remembering and narrative in constructing a sense of self.
Study questions:
• How do scientists currently model “feeling” and how persuasive are those models?
• What does Pollan say about the relationship between emotions, thought, and awareness?
Chapter 3 — Self and Story: Identity in a Conscious World
Summary:
Pollan turns to how consciousness creates a sense of self. Drawing on psychology and literature, he explores how memory, personal narrative, and identity are stitched together in the mind. Rather than taking identity for granted, he investigates how self-awareness emerges and what it means for our experience of the world.
Themes to focus on:
• The role of narrative and memory in forming personal identity.
• Different ways people experience consciousness internally — from inner monologues to visual or sensory streams.
• Contrasts between scientific models and first-person experience.
Study questions:
• According to Pollan, why is a sense of self not automatically guaranteed by having a brain?
• What examples or thought experiments does he use to illuminate subjective identity?
Chapter 4 — Beyond Biology: AI, Practice, and Expanded Views of Consciousness
Summary:
The last main section broadens the inquiry beyond human biology. Pollan looks at efforts to engineer “feeling” in artificial intelligence and whether machines could ever be conscious. He also incorporates philosophical, spiritual, and literary approaches — including Buddhist thought — to offer perspectives that science alone might miss. The journey ends with the idea that practising consciousness, in life and attention, might be as meaningful as explaining it.
Themes to highlight:
• Whether AI can truly be conscious or merely simulate consciousness.
• Wisdom traditions (e.g., meditation) as alternative ways to understand the inner world.
• The notion that consciousness isn’t just an object of study but a lived practice.
Study questions:
• How does Pollan distinguish between machine simulation of mind vs. genuine subjective experience?
• What insights do philosophers or spiritual traditions bring that scientific models lack?
Conclusion — Consciousness as a Way of Life
Summary:
Pollan doesn’t claim to solve the mystery of consciousness but instead invites readers to become more aware of their own minds and the worlds that appear to them. The conclusion emphasizes that consciousness is precious — shaped by attention and experience — and worth defending in an age of distraction.
Study questions:
• What practical insights does Pollan offer about living with awareness?
• How does he suggest we protect or cultivate consciousness in modern life?
📌 Tips for Studying the Book
1. Track key definitions: Pollan discusses terms like sentience, consciousness, feeling, and self — clarify how each is defined.
2. Compare perspectives: Note how scientific, philosophical, and spiritual views agree or conflict.
3. Reflect personally: Many sections encourage readers to examine their own experience of consciousness — journaling or discussion can help.
If you’d like, I can turn this into a chapter summary with bullet points, key quotes (once the book is released), and discussion questions for each chapter!
Science
A World Appears
A Journey into Consciousness
by Michael Pollan
Allen Lane £25 pp320
Michael Pollan is an American food writer and popular science author. He is a very good one, although as the dust jacket says, ominously, he is also an “activist” and lives in the Bay Area of California. He is best known for This Is Your Mind on Plants, a thoughtful exploration of his experiences and experiments with opium, caffeine and mescaline.
With this book he goes one further. He tries to pin down what the mind is doing when it is not “on” anything. What is consciousness? Why does it exist, if it exists at all? And — question of the moment — could it arise in a machine?
"In the 1980s doctors operated on babies without pain relief
Pollan’s method is standard American non-fiction. First you hunt down all the leading thinkers in the field and interview them. And Pollan has bagged a parade of professors — everyone from Antonio Damasio to Anil Seth via Alison Gopnik. Then you tie it all together with a narrative of personal development. Pollan tries not just mushrooms, but hypnosis and Buddhist meditation.
But he does it very well. His professorial pen portraits are razor-sharp. The fieldleading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio is “dressed head to loafer in designer leisurewear… to describe him, one feels compelled to dust off words like debonair and dapper”. When he asks the neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms about his attempts to create a conscious AI, “I sensed him getting excited and began to feel like I was interviewing Dr Frankenstein on the verge of declaring his monster to be alive”. (Solms has promised that if his machine does develop consciousness, he will pull the plug.) Interviewing the French scientist turned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, on Zoom, Pollan has to ask his questions while Ricard circles his room in his maroon robe, trying to complete his 10,000 steps. “This was the first time I got motion sickness from doing an interview.”
The test of a book on this subject, though, is the quality of the thought. Pollan treads the borderline between scepticism and openmindedness nimbly. He thinks that science may have “hit a wall” in its investigations of consciousness, because it began with the assumption that the phenomenon was related to higher-order thought. That it is something the rational brain does. Something, perhaps, that evolved only in humans.
Yet some neuroscientists — notably Damasio — have suggested that if consciousness is located anywhere in particular, it may not be in the cerebral cortex, the brain’s most evolutionarily recent layer. They are looking instead in the deepest, oldest region: the brainstem. A damaged cortex does not seem to affect consciousness, but a damaged brainstem will switch it off.
This helps if, like Pollan, you are inclined to believe that consciousness depends on “the moist facts of biology” — rather than being something that a computer, say, could acquire or generate. The brainstem is where body and brain mingle. Its neurons don’t just pass the body’s electrical signals along, Pollan says, “they bathe in its biochemical reality”.
Consciousness might be evolutionarily older and deeper still. Some scientists believe that plants have it. Before you spatter the page with your coffee, consider these recent discoveries: plants can learn and predict changes in their environments. They can distinguish their own leaves from those of other species, and family members from competitors. They can even be anaesthetised, using the same drugs as us. Put them to sleep and a sensitive plant won’t fold up its leaves at a touch. A Venus flytrap will fail to snap shut.
Our extension of who — or what — is conscious moves apace. As recently as the 1980s surgeons were (sometimes) operating on infants without anaesthetic on the grounds that they were not conscious and could not feel pain. Now it is pretty much agreed that, at a minimum, many mammals, several bird species and all octopuses are conscious.
Some — and not just the psilocybin-addled — go further even than plants. Panpsychics think that all matter “possesses some teensy-weeny quotient of psyche, or mind”. Idealists believe that the universe itself is “made up of mind”. Quantum physicists are prone to this kind of thinking, but it is not just them. There are no fewer than 84 competing theories that seek to go beyond the usual “physicalist” notion that consciousness is something that brains do, or acquire.
"Some scientists think that plants are conscious
Mercifully, Pollan does not dwell too long on the 84. Nor does he have much patience with the excitable engineers and data scientists (and, let’s be honest, chief executives boosting their share price) who want you to believe their large language models (LLMs) are about to come to life. As Pollan points out, neurons are not transistor chips. Memories are not software run on hardware — it’s a misleading metaphor. And asking an LLM if it is conscious won’t work “when the AI has been trained on pretty much everything that’s been said and written about consciousness”.
“One has to wonder if these people have ever read Frankenstein!” Pollan protests. He is reassuringly sceptical, sensitive and grounded — an old-fashioned well-read liberal humanist. Yet he does leave gaps. There’s nothing on dreaming, and the foray into hypnosis peters out.
My main doubt, though, is that the whole subject is just so male. All this is plant-based meat substitute for the kind of California nerd who likes The Matrix and microdosing. As a finale Pollan even retreats into a meditation cave in search of himself. What could be more stereotypically male?
To be fair, this last act is a respectable philosophical manoeuvre: a thoughtful resistance to drawing hard conclusions. Because perhaps the most exciting thing about consciousness is that it is still unsolved.
The German philosopher Thomas Metzinger relates a telling story here about how Francis Crick was bragging to him in the 1990s that neuroscience would “crack” consciousness in “the next two decades”. Metzinger coolly replied: “What, exactly, is it that you would like to explain?” Crick allegedly exploded in anger. We’re still waiting for an answer.
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