"In A World Appears, Pollan (the author of 10 books, including The Omnivore's Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind), 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."
"Scientists, Michael Pollan acknowledges, have subsequently discovered a lot about consciousness: the sentience of plants and animals, the origin and nature of feelings, ways in which we think, why minds wander, the value of a self, and efforts to transcend it. But to date, according to Pollan, no philosopher or scientist has solved "the hard problem" Crick promised to solve: connecting activities in the cranial cortex to a seemingly subjective and immaterial consciousness that "layers perception, memory and feeling" with qualities greater than information."
Research across philosophy, psychology, biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, Buddhism, and psychedelic experience converges to map what is known and unknown about consciousness. Neuroscience has clarified sentience in plants and animals, the origins and nature of feelings, cognitive processes, mind-wandering, the adaptive value of selfhood, and practices that can alter self-experience. Despite these advances, the hard problem—how cortical processes produce qualitative, subjective experience—remains unsolved. Neurobiological evidence shows plants form memories, predict environmental change, communicate chemically, and integrate information from more than twenty senses, prompting some scientists to call plants sentient and even intelligent. Sentience differs from consciousness, and consciousness resists reduction to mere information.
Read at Psychology Today
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