Book of the Day

From the review

Reading A World Appears feels like walking beside a sharp, curious companion who keeps revising what he thinks out loud. Michael Pollan lets you watch the opinions change. He starts with mushroom experiences that left him convinced plants have inner lives, then admits the belief thinned out once he was sober again. That's the right opening gesture for a book on consciousness: take the strange idea seriously, then see what's left of it in daylight. The argument that emerges can be put in one sentence. Consciousness begins with living things keeping themselves stable, grows into feeling, and only later becomes thought and a sense of self, which makes the body the foundation and computation a late arrival. The evidence is a wide cast: plant neurobiologists, researchers trying to build feelings into AI, psychologists and novelists who try to catch the stream of experience in words. The feeling-before-computation step carries the most weight, and it pays off when the book turns to machines and explains why a system with no body gives him doubts. The plant material is more provocative than settled, but Pollan is good about pushing back on the experts he disagrees with instead of just stacking up views.