A World Appears - by Michael Pollan (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The Instant New York Times Bestseller - One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of the Summer - Finalist for the Kirkus Prize

"Pollan's real genius--the word is not too strong--remains intact. That is his uncanny ability to scent the direction in which the culture is headed. He did it with food and psychedelics, and now, though A World Appears focuses on AI only intermittently, he has done it again." --Charles Finch, The Atlantic

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, a panoptic exploration of consciousness--what it is, who has it, and why--and a meditation on the essence of our humanity

When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact that we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature's greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, when we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives--scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic--to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.

When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view--assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to "plant neurobiologists" searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants, scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.

In Pollan's dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with the world and our deepest selves.

Review Quotes

"A coherent explanation of consciousness eludes modern science. In A World Appears, Michael Pollan dives headfirst into the mystery . . . He presents a captivating exploration, one that is highly personal and sensitive. Unlike with a book that simply reports the state of the consciousness field, we receive the story through the sharp mind of a writer and the questioning heart of a seeker . . . He confronts questions about the mind not as a neuroscience expert, but as an explorer, interviewing dozens of leading voices in science and proffering a rich survey of thinking in the field . . . There are, by some counts, 22 theories of consciousness, and Pollan examines many of them, always with a winning combination of awe and skepticism . . . A World Appears is highly pleasurable to read." --David Eagleman, The New York Times Book Review

"Pollan's real genius--the word is not too strong--remains intact. That is his uncanny ability to scent the direction in which the culture is headed. He did it with food and psychedelics, and now, though A World Appears focuses on AI only intermittently, he has done it again. By patiently mapping the problem that many of the creators of large language models claim, either cynically or foolishly, to be on the verge of solving, he brings this technology--which has come to dominate recent headlines, financial markets, and political debates--into a far more realistic light . . . A World Appears, with its admirable syncretic blend of empiricism and wonder before the limits of empiricism, steals back for humanity some of the sensation of miraculousness that this era has largely outsourced to technology." --Charles Finch, The Atlantic

"Like all of Pollan's books, in his latest work, the reader goes on a voyage of discovery with him as he interviews leading scientists and looks to literature, Indigenous epistemologies, psychology and even plants themselves for answers to questions that may not have answers. Along the way, he realizes that the ethical significance of his investigation is much greater than he first imagined. What consciousness is (and who has it), he writes, should at least give us pause as we consider how governments and corporations extract resources from arguably sentient ecosystems. He examines how careful we need to be as we develop AIs that may hold the capacity for their own suffering, whether we should be selling our own awareness to social media platforms in exchange for entertainment, how we treat animals and much more." --The Los Angeles Times

"Mr. Pollan has a journalist's eye for the surprising and intriguing . . . Well-written, richly researched and a pleasure to read . . . A World Appears leaves you with a universe of questions and theories. Consciousness is about information processing, says one researcher. Or perhaps it is a way for organisms to choose between competing priorities, others assert. All of this is, by any standard, quite heavy stuff. It is a mark of Mr. Pollan's skill as a writer that it never feels that way." --The Economist

"Pollan has a knack for engaging my wonder at the sheer complexity of the world. For this experience alone, he is worth reading." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"A fabulous and mind-expanding exploration of consciousness . . . Bridging both science and the humanities, Pollan mines neuroscientific research, philosophy, literature and his own mind, searching for different ways to think about being, and what it feels like . . . Pollan likens the study of consciousness to cosmology: just as we can only examine the universe from within it, there is no way for us to position ourselves outside our own consciousness . . . Pollan's book attempts to disentangle the ideas we have inherited about our own minds, an inheritance of which we are not even aware . . . Pollan lives in the Bay Area of California, and, although his book rarely mentions Silicon Valley, it can be read as an act of resistance towards the financial and technological interests that are invested in distancing us from our inner lives and emotions." --The Guardian

"Pollan has one of the most inquisitive and accommodating minds in the higher journalism of our time . . . A World Appears is a big, generous, illuminating and beautifully written inquiry into the essence of our being-in-the-world, of being, simply, alive . . . Now more than ever, in this age of untruth, we need to have our attention directed back to the fundamental questions--however hard they may be--as to the essential nature of our existence on this ailing planet. And as Michael Pollan richly demonstrates, questions are every bit as important as answers." --John Banville, Financial Times

"In A World Appears, Pollan draws on research by philosophers, psychologists, biologists, neuro-scientists, artificial intelligence (AI) pioneers, the tenets of Buddhism, and his own experience with psychedelics, to provide a mind-blowing examination of what we know, don't know, and (since we must rely on our own consciousness to detect consciousness in others) may never know about the phenomenon." --Psychology Today

"Charming, witty, insightful, and eccentric . . . The book's most moving descriptions of conscious experience can be found in Pollan's accounts of losing his sense of self, first during a psychedelic mushroom trip and later during a Zen meditation in a cave . . . [A World Appears] is a wonderful phenomenological travelog." --Ned Block, Science

"A writer and thinker who somehow manages to be both left-field and highly influential." --New Scientist

"Humane and persuasive . . . This combination of boldness and intellectual humility, dogged curiosity and an openness to wonder makes Pollan, a veteran science journalist, an ideal guide to the mysteries of consciousness and science's many frustrated attempts to understand it. Few writers possess the same skill for translating notoriously abstruse theories into readily understandable prose." --Observer

"A lucid survey of the numerous hypotheses about how consciousness works and what it really 'is'. But it's more than a tour d'horizon. Pollan sits down over pots of tea with many experts in the field to interview them; he tests and enlarges competing ideas. He is no credulous scribe, either, but a critical listener . . . Pollan's book tells us as much as one inquiring mind can now know with any certainty (or lack of it) and is touched with brilliance in the way it is so elegantly offered up for our reading pleasure." --The Spectator

"A rewarding tour, thanks to Pollan's acute intellectual curiosity." --New Statesman

"Pollan is so honest, so interested and so clever." --Evening Standard

"Razor-sharp, reassuringly skeptical, sensitive and grounded . . . You could not hope for a more judicious or readable summary of the scientific state of affairs." --Sunday Times

"Michael Pollan's new book is an engaging and insightful account of the hard problem of consciousness and today's attempts to solve it . . . He is neither a philosopher nor a neuroscientist, and accordingly A World Appears is lucid and intelligible to non-specialists . . . Pollan is refreshingly assertive and skeptical . . . A superb writer . . . The book as a whole is engaging, readable and informative." --Times Literary Supplement

"A wry and enjoyable romp through cutting-edge science and brain-altering experiences from poetry to psychedelics." --Irish Times

"After feeding our heads with a bestselling book about psychedelics, author and journalist Pollan returns with an exploration of consciousness itself. He asks who has it (plants? AI?), how it feels and what it actually consists of. He may not come up with definitive answers, but delivers mind-boggling insights along the way." --The Guardian, 70 Brilliant Books for the Summer

"Enlightening . . . Pollan's inquisitiveness makes him an accessible and entertaining guide through the 'labyrinth' of consciousness. Readers will be captivated by this tour of the inner workings of the mind." --Publishers Weekly

"A page-turner that explores the hidden world of the mind." --Kirkus (starred review)

"As a science writer who fully immerses himself in the questions of his work, Pollan's consciousness itself is on full display, and this is thoroughly compelling reading." --Library Journal (starred review)

About the Author

Michael Pollan is the author of ten books, including This Is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. He is also the author of the audiobook Caffeine. A Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellow, Pollan has taught writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University. In 2010, Time named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.