Author: Michael Pollan
My Rating: Pending...
My Review: Pending...
Description (Audible): 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.
Pollan’s strength lies in his curiosity and storytelling. Rather than presenting definitive answers, he interviews scientists, philosophers, and spiritual practitioners while reflecting on meditation and psychedelic experiences that shape his own thinking about the mind. The result is an engaging, accessible journey through competing theories about sentience, emotion, the self, and the limits of scientific explanations. (Library Journal)
The book is less about solving the “hard problem” of consciousness than about expanding the reader’s sense of wonder about it. Thought-provoking and readable, A World Appears invites us to reconsider what it means to be aware—and how precious that awareness might be.
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