Consciousness

“In consciousness—and there alone—we are on the inside of nature” R. W. Sellars[1]

This review was published in issue number 549 of The Literary Review, March 2026 (pp. 41–42).

“Something Like It”

A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness By Michael Pollan (Allen Lane 320pp £25)

The philosophy of mind, as the philosopher David Wiggins once remarked, is a terminological slum. At its heart sits the word “consciousness”, like Proteus the shapeshifter, beset by a gang of Procrusteans hacking and chopping away and saying that really it means this, that or the other. The slum now extends into AI, IT, physics, psychology, neuroscience and science in general, and it envelops Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, despite his best efforts to control it.

What I mean by the word “consciousness” is what Thomas Nagel and many others mean when they say that it is like something to be a dog or a human being or a bat, and like nothing to be a glass of water or a corkscrew. The idea behind the definition is crystal clear (it’s characteristic of the shabby nature of the consciousness debate that people regularly try to twist it out of shape), and it’s this “something it is like” that is what most people mean by “consciousness”, including, I’m glad to say, Pollan. It’s also, quite certainly, the best thing to mean, if one wants to address the real issue.

“Consciousness” isn’t an abstract noun (the “ness” of “consciousness” can mislead). It’s a word for actual conscious experiences, conscious goings-on, colour experiences, taste experiences, pains, emotions, understanding experiences and so on. (What is an understanding experience? You’re having one – or so I hope – right now.) It’s a word for something that there can be a greater or lesser quantity of: there’s a lot more human (and canine) consciousness in England right now than there is in Antarctica.

According to Pollan, consciousness is “perhaps the greatest mystery in science”. It’s still “a miracle” on his last page, “the deepest of mysteries”. It’s not just that the nature of consciousness is a mystery, according to the massed ranks of the mysterians; its very existence is also a mystery.

I disagree. As for the nature of consciousness, we know exactly what it is. There’s literally nothing we know better. We live it, we live in it (in its human version) all day long. As for the existence of consciousness, it only looks like a special mystery if one assumes something one has no good reason to assume: that one knows enough about what matter is to know for sure that consciousness isn’t somehow part of its essential nature. To assume this, however, is to beg the question, in the original sense of this expression. (Begging the question is a form of cheating: you set up an issue for debate in a way that builds in your own preferred answer in advance, thereby excluding other answers.) For there are in fact extremely powerful reasons for thinking that consciousness is – in some no doubt primitive form – part of the essential nature of matter; and that it’s matter in general, not consciousness in particular, that is the mystery. There’s nothing in physics (or science generally) that conflicts with the idea that consciousness is in some manner inherent in matter. It’s an elementary mistake to think otherwise. Like love, “matter is / Much odder than we thought”, as Auden observed in 1940.

Once one has got this – admittedly difficult – point, the special mystery of the existence of consciousness dissolves. As for the existence of a complicated and interesting consciousness like ours, that’s no more mysterious than the existence of complicated things like immune systems or mosquitoes, living cells or opposable thumbs: it’s fully explicable by evolution.

One does have to do some work to arrive at this understanding, given the current climate of opinion. One has to stop and think hard. It is, however, the key to the whole issue, and it’s unfortunate that it hardly features in the contributions from the philosophers, Buddhists, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists and psychoanalysts whom Pollan consults in this book – among them Evan Thompson, Mark Solms, Anil Seth, Thomas Nagel, Michael Levin, Christof Koch, Russ Hurlburt, Alison Gopnik, Karl Friston, Antonio Damasio, Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva and David Chalmers.

Most of them are genuine realists about the nature of consciousness, and this is a relief, in an age when a good number of thinkers still follow Daniel Dennett in denying the existence of consciousness, even as they deny that they deny it. Still, Pollan would have got a lot further in his journey if he’d set out one hundred or so years ago and had talked instead to people like Mary Whiton Calkins, Grace de Laguna, Arthur Eddington, Bertrand Russell and Moritz Schlick; along with a few winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics like Louis de Broglie (“consciousness and matter [are] different aspects of one thing”), Hendrik Lorentz (“the mental and the material … are two sides of the same thing”), Erwin Schrödinger (“the material universe and consciousness are made out of the same stuff”) and Max Planck (“I regard consciousness as fundamental … [and] matter as derivative from consciousness”). Actually, he would have been better off with Charles Darwin, who already in 1838 had no doubt that the brain “secretes” consciousness just as the liver secretes bile: “What is matter?”, he wrote. “The whole a mystery.”

Pollan, on this account, has the misfortune to be in the wrong century. (I’m not looking forward to the coming years, in which a Sargasso Sea of slop, generated as much by humans as by AI, will close over our heads as people argue about whether sophisticated AI models are conscious or not.) He would have got closer to the core of the matter even further back, with Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway and Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, or Kant, Leibniz, Diderot and Priestley in the 18th.

Pollan is for all that very level-headed. He instinctively steers away from the crazy stuff. He pulls up short when the neuroscientist Karl Friston argues that “consciousness is … just one more of nature’s methods for making inferences”, where inference is something that a currently existing machine could do. And when the psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist Mark Solms, seduced by Friston, tells him that consciousness is nothing but “felt uncertainty”.

Solms used to agree with Antonio Damasio, a neurobiologist who is fully realist about consciousness and places affect or emotion at its heart, as, for example, in his book The Feeling of What Happens (1999). Now, however, he has fallen hard into the Friston camp and embraced the error of thinking that we know for sure that consciousness is not part of the essential nature of matter. This is the error that spawns the “great” but in fact non-existent “mystery” and eventually leads people to embrace a “computational functionalist” account of the thing they call “consciousness”, an account according to which consciousness is just a series of sufficiently complex algorithmic executions and nothing at all to do with the experience of being … conscious.

Ah well. Pollan is a good man to have as a guide through the coils of the current discussion. He struggles, understandably, with the shifting terminology, but draws nicely on his extensive experience of psychedelic substances, brilliantly chronicled in his book How to Change Your Mind (2018). His discussion of the self is all at sea (like so many, he wrongly takes David Hume to be denying that we have any experience of self), but his various (usually psychedelically assisted) accounts of so-called ‘nonegoistical awareness’ are plausible and valuable. I don’t, however, think that he has really got hold of the issue. He has talked to people who are in the public eye and has bought the standard ‘hard problem’ story, the mystery story, without sufficiently realising that it depends on the mistake already mentioned: the mistake of thinking that we know enough about the nature of matter to know that it cannot be conscious.

But here is Moritz Schlick, a member of the Vienna Circle, in 1925:

“the worst mistake that can be made in viewing the psychophysical [or mind–body] problem – a mistake that, strangely enough, is made time and again – is, without noticing it, to substitute for the brain processes themselves, which are to be regarded as identical with the mental processes, the perceptions or images of the brain processes.”

The mistake still dominates the discussion. It ignores the fact that what physics and neuroscience come across when they look at consciousness processes in the brain is just an appearance of something, a view of structure, but not the intrinsic something we know as it is in itself by being, ourselves, conscious. In being conscious, and only then, “we are on the inside of nature”, as the great Roy Wood Sellars put it in 1927. Physics is magnificent on the mathematically expressible structural-relational features of physical stuff, but it says nothing – nothing at all – about the intrinsic non-structural nature of the stuff that has the structure. It can only look at it from the outside – from the external third-person point of view. And consciousness is nothing if not first-person.

“What is matter? The whole a mystery.” Darwin was right. When one sees this, the classical hard problem disappears. What’s left is our ignorance: our vast ignorance of the intrinsic (non-structural) nature of matter, apart from what we know of it simply in being conscious in the way we are.[2]

[1] R. W. Sellars (1938) “An Analytic Approach to the Mind-Body Problem” Philosophical Review 47: 461–487, p. 483.

[2] See for example “Consciousness Isn’t A Mystery. It’s Matter” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html?_r=0