The Mystery Looking Back at Us
A review of Michael Pollan’s A World Appears
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| Copyright: Sanjay Basu |
Michael Pollan has spent much of his career investigating things we imagine we understand until he persuades us otherwise. Food, plants, drugs: under his patient scrutiny, the familiar acquires an unexpected strangeness. In A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, he takes this method to its logical — and most ambitious — destination. His subject is no longer something we eat, cultivate or ingest, but the very apparatus by which anything becomes a subject at all. Consciousness is an audacious choice for a writer whose great strength has always been mediation. Pollan is neither neuroscientist nor philosopher, and he makes no pretense of becoming one. Instead, he occupies his customary position: the intelligent outsider wandering through territories of expertise, asking deceptively simple questions and translating the answers for the rest of us. The difficulty this time is that consciousness has resisted translation for centuries. We know increasingly much about what the brain does. Why any of this activity should produce the sensation of being someone — of seeing red, remembering a childhood room, suffering pain or hearing music — remains bewilderingly obscure.
Pollan is at his best when he allows that bewilderment room to breathe. The book moves among neuroscientists, philosophers, experiments and rival theories, but its real subject is the widening gulf between explanation and experience. A scan may show what happens in the brain when a person sees a face; it does not tell us why seeing that face should feel like anything from the inside. The closer science gets to mapping the machinery, the stranger the existence of the passenger can appear.
This is fertile territory for Pollan, whose prose has long depended upon a productive tension between empiricism and wonder. He is fascinated by science but suspicious of the assumption that naming a mechanism exhausts its meaning. Here that instinct becomes especially valuable. Consciousness attracts grand theories with alarming ease, and Pollan is generally too sensible to fall permanently in love with any of them. He approaches explanation as a traveler rather than a convert. Yet the virtues of his method also reveal its limitations. Pollan’s genial curiosity can flatten genuine intellectual conflict into an agreeable procession of intriguing possibilities. Some disputes in consciousness research are not merely differences of emphasis; they concern fundamentally incompatible ideas about minds, brains and reality. The reader occasionally wishes Pollan would stop being such a courteous host and force his guests into the same room.
There is another difficulty. The mystery of consciousness is so profound that almost any sustained contemplation of it begins to sound profound in turn. Pollan does not entirely escape this gravitational pull. At moments, astonishment threatens to substitute for argument. That we possess an interior life is indeed astonishing — but repeatedly rediscovering the astonishment does not necessarily bring us closer to understanding it.
Still, Pollan understands something that more doctrinaire treatments often miss: consciousness is not merely a technical problem awaiting the correct laboratory apparatus. It is also the condition under which the problem can be posed. We are using consciousness to investigate consciousness, attempting to stand outside the one room from which we have never exited. This circularity gives the book its philosophical charge. It also gradually destabilizes the apparently solid figure of the self. Perception emerges not as a transparent window onto reality but as an active construction; the “I” observing the world begins to look less like a sovereign occupant of the brain than a process assembled from memory, sensation, prediction and attention. Pollan handles these ideas with characteristic clarity, though readers familiar with contemporary neuroscience and philosophy may find some of the revelations less startling than he does.
The title contains the book’s most suggestive proposition. A world does not simply sit before us, complete and waiting to be photographed by the senses. Somehow, in the traffic between brain, body and environment, a world appears. The verb matters. It shifts attention from reality as an object to experience as an event — and raises the unnerving possibility that the world each of us inhabits is partly something the mind continuously makes. Pollan does not solve consciousness, and a book claiming to do so would deserve immediate suspicion. What he accomplishes instead is subtler. He restores difficulty to an experience familiarity has made invisible. By the end, opening one’s eyes, recognizing a face or noticing a thought arriving in the mind can seem briefly miraculous.
That is both the achievement and the frustration of A World Appears. Pollan takes us to the edge of explanation and shows us how much remains beyond it. The journey sometimes circles when we want it to advance, and wonder occasionally does work that argument ought to do. But the book leaves behind a useful disturbance: the recognition that the most mysterious object in our field of vision may be the one doing the looking.
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