Fire Philosophy
On Michael Pollan’s A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
A conversation between Krzysztof Piekarski and Dale Wright
Krzysztof: Greetings, Fire Philosophers. I’m here with Dale Wright, and we’ve both just finished reading A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan. Pollan enters the world of Zen in this book, so it felt like an appropriate text for us to take up.
Dale: When you first suggested it, I said something like, “Yeah, good idea.” But my real inner thought was, “Really?” Consciousness is what’s called a really hard problem, because you can never get out of it to look at it. You can’t bring it before you as an object. We’re at war, our institutions are in chaos, our culture is deeply divided, and we each have our own problems. Do we really want to go there?
Dale: And yet I did, and it was just the tonic I needed. It lifted me out of the concrete issues I struggle with every day and up into a place where you’re thinking broadly. That breadth gets brought back to bear on the practical, difficult issues. So it was good for me, even though my first response was resistance.
Krzysztof: Look at you persevering. Let’s start with definitions. There’s another book I’ve had on my shelf called Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness, and a good rhetorician starts by defining terms. What landed for me, maybe reductively, is that there are layers of increasing complexity. We go from the inanimate, like a rock, to intelligence, something like a computer, to sentience, where we look at plants and say, “Okay, they obviously feel things,” to the animal layer, where we apply the word consciousness, and then ever-increasing amounts.
Dale: Layer or level is a good word. The structure of the brain has those various layers, from the brain stem up to the cerebral cortex.
Krzysztof: Having read the book, what is your working definition of consciousness, and is it different than when you began?
Dale: I doubt it. This is something I’ve been pondering and meditating on for most of my life. But I really appreciated the book. To the title you mentioned, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness: for me, that’s nineteen ways of using this one word, nineteen meanings we apply when we use it. The word itself is creating more confusion than clarity. We get stuck on it, as if consciousness is one important thing in the world we have to define. Really, our awareness of it has to do with our vocabulary for it.
Dale: Pollan helped clarify what I’ve always thought of as layers of deepening consciousness. From sentience at the bottom: a tree is sentient in that when the sun comes out, trees that close down at night respond and turn toward it. Plants have this kind of awareness. Awareness is a more helpful word than consciousness. Then, working up to self-awareness, you get more sophisticated forms.
Krzysztof: Plants are how Pollan enters this world. There’s an interesting part where some plant biologists are saying, look, if it has a kind of memory, and we can anesthetize it, then you have memory and the feeling of pain or no pain. Maybe the difference is really time. Maybe plants are beyond sentient, and we’re just imposing our timeframes onto them. Pollan mentions that thought experiment about aliens looking down at humans at thousandth speed, who would see us as plants just standing around.
Dale: It’s helped some botanists actually push in that direction. They’re finding things we just don’t see. No doubt projecting consciousness onto plants. But there’s an awareness there that’s really interesting, that we’re only beginning to explore.
Krzysztof: We’re going into the deep end. You know all the recent studies about rainforests as ecological systems: families, awareness of which tree is kin, which is enemy. This gets dicey faster than it gets resolved. I’m a vegetarian mostly for ethical reasons, because I don’t want to cause unnecessary suffering on conscious beings. But if plants are more conscious than I assumed, what am I going to eat? Cotton candy all day?
Dale: Rocks. Just rocks. A nice bowl of sand.
Dale: There’s a tradition among some physicists and some religious seers called panpsychism. There are scientific versions where you study elementary particles and see a certain kind of spirit in matter, because matter is energy, matter is movement. Physicists have done experiments where it seems like particles will opt for one thing or another: wave, not wave. Panpsychism is the view that there is no ultimate split between matter and mind, that all the way down into the tiniest elementary particles there is what’s called proto-consciousness. The whole split between life and non-life begins to fade. Hindus, going back thousands of years, worked on a version of this, where pantheism saw everything as having a divine element, from the highest seers down into matter. Some kinds of physics and neuroscience are now leading back toward that as a plausible suggestion.
Krzysztof: I’m glad you brought that up. Buddhism 101: you wrote a book about it, so you’re the guy. There’s atman, which I always understood as oneness. Whereas in Buddhism, the teaching is anatman, the not-that. Is Buddhism’s response to Hinduism a critique of panpsychism, because you’re starting to get closer to wanting there to be an essence again?
Dale: Maybe a little, but more it’s that the word atman, going back into earlier Sanskrit, was a reflexive pronoun, like myself. The formula in Vedanta is that atman, your deepest self, is brahman, the divine spirit. The religious message: you don’t have to look outside yourself for divinity. Buddhism is a denial, in part, of there being a deep, eternal self. They want to think of what you call yourself as a finite, temporal phenomenon: comes into the world at a certain time, goes out at a certain time. There’s nothing permanent about you or anything else.
Krzysztof: So the Buddhist critique doesn’t apply exactly to panpsychism? The construction of self is a local critique, but the total field, in early Buddhism, is not part of the picture, while as Buddhism evolves, it comes back?
Dale: That’s right. Versions of, okay, there is a spirit operating in the world of impermanence. What’s the ground of that? That gets back toward a divine essence. So Buddhism denies it, brings it back, denies it, brings it back.
Krzysztof: And the emptiness teachings disrupt it when it gets too solid for the Buddhists’ liking.
Krzysztof: This is how we started before we hit record: hard problems of our own. Famously, David Chalmers said consciousness splits into two problems. The easy one: map where this is happening in our brains using MRIs. The hard problem is hard because, well, why does it seem so hard from his perspective?
Dale: Structurally, it’s the only thing we want to examine where you can’t get behind it. The examiner is always that thing, that consciousness. I can’t step behind myself and analyze my consciousness, because consciousness is the one doing the analyzing.
Dale: It’s also made hard, as Pollan points out, by the fact that many of the scientists and philosophers who study consciousness rarely explore their own. They don’t engage in meditation. They don’t work in phenomenology, which says, go inside and see what experience looks like from the inside. They don’t engage in psychoanalysis. On the one hand, they’re smartly engaging with consciousness as an object of study. On the other, they’re missing the chance to attune that objective analysis with what it looks like from the inside.
Krzysztof: Pollan equates Chalmers with Descartes, Galileo, and Locke, the philosophers who basically split subject and object. Any time I teach my Zen students the basics, I point them to this: what is the difference between duality and a Buddhist sense of non-duality? My question is whether Dogen would read this and think, “Yeah, I get it, this is a hard problem,” or “No, that’s the whole problem. You’re thinking dualistically, and if you get out of that, the hard problem disappears.”
Dale: Great question. Let me come back to it. I want to stress that Descartes is the beginning of modern philosophy, but he’s really mapping what had been developing for several millennia. Go back far enough in any culture and there’s no self-consciousness. It’s an emergent property at some point. A few centuries BCE, soul theory begins to develop: mind versus matter, spirit versus body. That’s when you get ascetics out torturing their bodies because they’ve learned to say, “I’m not my body. I am my soul.” That setup leads further and further into monasticism, into meditative monasticism, into philosophers like Descartes.
Krzysztof: It’s the seed for how science is born.
Dale: That’s right. Separate yourself out. Be objective. Get your consciousness out of the picture. What we’ve learned more recently is, no, you are there. Pollan mentions a great line from Milan Kundera: the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” is a statement from an intellectual who underrates toothaches. Descartes’s conclusion comes from being in a monastic lineage where it’s only spirit and mind, forgetting the deep levels of feeling and sentience from which consciousness emerges. Interest in the body is back now. From the 19th century, the Olympics return. Medical science teaches us about the body. Diet matters. All of that is a movement beyond Cartesian focus on mind alone.
Krzysztof: So back to the question. Would Dogen dismiss this question outright? Or is there something he would acknowledge as hard about the way we trap ourselves?
Dale: Much of what Dogen writes is a response to this inner problem. But he’s finding solutions. He shows us we can enter experience where we merge with mountains and streams, enter pure awareness, go deep into meditation. We have to realize, too, that the reason we love Dogen now is that he gets read through the Romantic turn in Western culture. You and I are Romantics, if you trace our lineage. We want spiritual depth. We want to see past materiality, past money, past career. That comes from the Romantic tradition, a turn against industrialization. So maybe your first point was right: Dogen wouldn’t even understand the question. But I can’t help reading Zen as an introspective culture that does see consciousness as an issue. How do we not let it bog us down and trap us in self-absorption?
Krzysztof: What I love about Pollan is that he puts himself into the experiment and critiques himself. As a journalist, he’s not above any of it. He goes to a Zen retreat, and Joan Halifax, his teacher there, tells him to look for a thief. Imagine your mind as a series of rooms; you’re looking for the thief, which I think is a stand-in for the self. The implication: when you don’t find that thief, you experience relief.
Krzysztof: Simultaneously, from a more scientific perspective, he talks about why our minds evolutionarily constructed this sense of self. I found a delicious tension between relief on one hand, and on the other, oh, if you want relief, you’re messing with something potentially disastrous if you completely unlock it. Probably this is why in Zen you work with a teacher: so you’re not just in there poking around dissolving your sense of self. And maybe also why some psychedelic trips go very poorly: too much too soon, and you can’t reconstruct, can’t unsee something. What’s your sense of this?
Dale: There’s something called Zen sickness. An acolyte goes into a temple and they say, “Sit down, shut up, start meditating.” For some people, if they took the picture of looking in the rooms of your mind for a thief, the answer would be, yes, in fact there are several. They’re looting the pantry.
Dale: So you need help, and that’s what a Zen master is for. They can see, and hopefully will say, “Okay, I could take you further into this, but go home. Go back to the family farm. Plant some rice. This isn’t the right thing for you, maybe not now, maybe not at all.” That kind of inner exploration carries risks. The point of looking in every room for a thief and discovering it’s not there is liberating. It doesn’t mean there aren’t issues in those rooms. If you take it as no thief, no need to think about anything, then you’re really screwed.
Krzysztof: I was wondering whether we’d bring Nietzsche into this. There are many theories about the end of his life. What I think I know about him, his greatest accomplishment, is his fortitude in continuing to explore. Hell or high water, he was going to explore. A facile thesis: maybe he explored a little too much. It feels like there ought to be a Pandora’s box warning on all of this.
Dale: Either he couldn’t stop, or he just wouldn’t. His introspective capacities were enormous. He felt alone. A few people who read his writings would say, “This is unbelievably great, but dangerous. Let’s pull back.” My sense is he felt, “This is brilliant, this is insight, and I’m going to go get it and speak it. I’m not going to be afraid.” What his end-of-life insanity was about, who knows. We can’t analyze somebody who lived over a century ago.
Krzysztof: There’s a sort of villain in this book, to my readerly eyes. Overstating it. But there’s one interlocutor: Hurlburt. His instructions to Pollan were, in effect, “Be as precise as possible when describing what you actually experience.” Phenomenology 101: not the content, but the process. Pollan tries it, and what he gets back from Hurlburt is that his inner life is quite shallow, because he can’t put a pin on what is actually happening. Pollan ends up critiquing that approach. What was your take on their dance?
Dale: The inability to describe in detail what’s going on in your mind is one we all share. We’re all shallow in that respect. If there’s a spectrum from unintrospective to introspective, Pollan’s way along the line. This book is part of that.
Dale: One of the brilliant dimensions of this book, and of him as an interrogator, is how he explores theories. He doesn’t just read a book and say, “Here’s what I learned.” He reads the book, then flies to London or gets them on Zoom and interviews them. The whole book is interviews with neuroscientists, philosophers, others exploring consciousness. He never settles into any of them. Just explores this one, raises questions, looks at another, puts them in juxtaposition. I can’t name what he doesn’t work on.
Dale: One of the great things about living in our time is that we can do that. We don’t have to follow the rabbit hole of one teacher or one religious group or even one culture. We have access to all of these things. We can see them in relation to each other, see strengths and weaknesses, see how they merge and don’t. That’s something previous cultures didn’t have.
Krzysztof: I found it delicious. That’s why I skipped ahead to say he ends at a Zen retreat, which from my biased perspective, and probably yours, is a very obvious place to end.
Dale: He uses the word practice. He says at the very end, “What I really learned is that all kinds of theory is great, but practice is the key.” Practice of interiority. That’s his lesson in the cave at the end of the Zen retreat.
Krzysztof: I sensed something while reading this. If I were a Zen teacher and Michael came to me, knowing his brilliance and willingness to experiment, but he’s an academic, a writer, up in his head, how would I give him a taste of Zen practice? Pretty much what Joan Halifax does. She sits him in a cave and says, in effect, do what you would do in a cave by yourself. Look at the stars. Sit and feel. Otherwise it’s just another theory among theories. He gives us a little of it: the clouds parted, and in his experience, he dropped in. Dropped into that larger cosmic space. I love the way it ends there.
Dale: Me too. And it was partly that there wasn’t one theory he could in the end say was his. He wasn’t able to synthesize them all into his own. In a way he’s saying, “I’m not sure I care. I’ve learned so much, but what I’ve learned primarily is that practice is the key. Observe my consciousness. I’ve only got so many more years to live. Deal with the self-inflicted pain. Learn to relax. Learn to appreciate the consciousness that animals and babies and children have, that’s not caught up in planning and imagining, that’s really just taking in the world. Learn how to do that again.”
Dale: One of his interviewees said the older we get, the more our mind is taken out of the world, out of direct experience, and the more we’re in planning, daydreaming, worrying, anticipating consequences. Communicating with people, on our phones, scrolling. Not really in direct contact with the world. Maybe especially true of intellectuals, but I think it’s true for all of us.
Krzysztof: This is where some people encounter a danger zone. You used the phrase return, almost as though you meant the intention is to return to the more childlike state, where wonder isn’t yet hardened. T. S. Eliot spoke about this: returning and seeing it again as if for the first time. The danger is that it’s always a sequence. You start there, you’re born a child, you have to construct an ego. When you deconstruct it, your memory isn’t wiped out. You don’t actually return to the childlike state. Literally, you would be a child again. You’ve retained enough from the mid-journey to know you’re both an adult and a child at the same time. In Nietzsche’s transformations, the highest form is the child again. But it’s not as simple as that.
Dale: That’s right. Nobody really wants to become a two-year-old again. They’re wailing. As we know from neuroscience, everything you’ve done with your mind is there. The activity of meditation, or any form of self-transcendence, or engagement in music or art, is to open up some portal back into a powerful direct experience that you’ll experience along with all the planning and cogitation that go on inevitably. You will never get out of that. If somebody did get out of all the development of their mind, it would be a form of insanity.
Krzysztof: That is one of the issues with the so-called psychedelic shortcut, though I’m not sure shortcut is the right word. It’s treacherous because, chemically, it disarms you. You return to that state, but you don’t have the relational perspective from which to gauge it. You almost become incapacitated, as though you were a child.
Dale: Reasonably controlled use of hallucinogenic substances is just a taste of something quite other than ordinary consciousness. In my own limited experience, you do feel it as a retaste of childhood. One of my earliest memories is being a three-year-old finger painting: the blue and the red, so vivid, my hands in it, the color is everything. There’s a taste of that in a hallucinogenic experience. Fortunately, it only lasts a couple of hours.
Krzysztof: Or an infinite amount of time, from the perspective of the person on the journey.
Krzysztof: One of the best definitions in the book, the one that made me pause: consciousness is felt uncertainty. I thought, is that good enough for a tattoo? In Zen, at least some forms of it, we’re encouraged to tap into don’t-know mind, to luxuriate in uncertainty, as Keats said about negative capability. You’re there to not know. The flip side is that the uncertainty will always be there, but the perceiver is what’s at issue, and we want to dissolve the one who feels the uncertainty. I don’t know if that’s a tension, or two sides of the same coin.
Dale: I was struck by it too, and I’d never come across that. Consciousness is felt uncertainty: the is seems too strong. But if I think back into early human, prehistorical life, and into evolutionary levels of animals, that uncertainty does generate consciousness. You’ve got to find food, stay out of danger. The vulnerability, the sense that our bodies are real and destroyable, gives rise to a lot of consciousness. And the realization humanity comes across at a certain point: it’s not just that I see other people die, but I can die. That gives rise to enormous inner speculation.
Krzysztof: Let me unpack the formula for listeners who haven’t read it yet. When you’re operating on habitual mind, say you’re driving a familiar route, we’ve all warped from point A to point B and not remembered anything in between, because everything was as expected. In that sense we weren’t conscious of that bit of road. The moment a tiger jumps out, or there’s an unexpected bike, we notice, because we couldn’t have predicted it. That creates the feeling of, oh, we’re back.
Dale: Good. But I’d say during that half hour you can’t remember, you weren’t unconscious. Your mind was really active. You were daydreaming. You were drooling over the Porsche in the lane next to you. Lots was going on. So it’s not that consciousness arises out of uncertainty in those instances. You’re conscious of many different things. When something dangerous pops up, consciousness leaps into a special mode, a heightened form. But you’re always conscious.
Krzysztof: So this is the fine distinction between consciousness as the base, and awareness, which is conscious of what. Just because you weren’t aware of the road, you were conscious but not aware. We need both.
Dale: You were conscious of the road, but aware of your daydream.
Krzysztof: Both simultaneously, unless you practice.
Krzysztof: You raised another point, which Pollan himself says you can only experience and can’t talk about: pure awareness has no subject. People who’ve taken massive doses of the most potent psychedelics report there was no anchor, and yet it was the truest thing they experienced. I was thinking of one of the most famous philosophical papers of all time, which Pollan alludes to: Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat? I assign it all the time. From this perspective, it makes a grand assumption: that you need subjectivity for consciousness. These explorers are saying something else.
Dale: There is subjectivity right there, because there is experience. You’re experiencing. There’s no “I’m the experiencer, here’s what I’m experiencing.” There’s just the experience. That’s all you’re aware of.
Krzysztof: Pure experience the way we’re talking about it: the subject piece is just extra mechanics. You don’t need it. Maybe that’s the same thing as panpsychism. There is no inside, outside.
Dale: No hard line between inside and outside.
Dale: One thing that’s important: oftentimes the claim is made, and experientially you can see, that what comes out of pure experience beyond individual subjectivity is a deep relationship to everything. Moral behavior becomes natural. It’s not that you need to make yourself treat the other nicely. You just are, because that line of separation is at least temporarily eased. You begin to sense the feelings of others as you sense your own. The claim that a sort of pure, isolated subjectivity in self-control is needed for morality is at least partly false.
Krzysztof: Right, which calls up my favorite line of all time. Dylan: “to live outside the law, you must be honest.” That’s my own life koan: how do you get to that space where you just know, you don’t need to be told.
Krzysztof: Speaking of koans. I find a delicious tension running through all of this. We need form, we shape our sense of self. We can’t allow ourselves to get run over by a bus.
Dale: Like a three-year-old would.
Krzysztof: And simultaneously, this is what drew Nietzsche to the Greeks: how they explored the boundlessness, but were just as interested in the form of things. The tension between form and boundlessness, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Why are we so fascinated by trying to transcend the self, and yet we work so damn hard to reify it and achieve, achieve, achieve? This is maybe the mess of humanity. We want both.
Dale: We do. Both are important. We can plan and scheme as well as anyone. But we sense there’s something outside and beyond that, and that there’s a trap, where the controlled state of consciousness is a closing down. For me, artists and musicians are a counterbalance for anybody who’s in my state of excellence at planning. An artist or musician strives to open up, let something in, block out the plans. Wander through the natural world. Hear things in ways we ordinarily don’t. We walk through the park and never hear a bird, never see a leaf, because we’re totally in our heads.
Dale: But they need the other side too. At a certain point, the artist has to close the door and look at what came in. How are you going to write a song out of those noises the creaky truck made? How are you going to turn a bird in flight into something you saw that’s another dimension of reality? Now you’ve got to think. Now you’re back with us. It’s painful, and artists hate it, but it’s the only way to create. So we want both. They’re a matched set.
Krzysztof: This was one of the more obvious takeaways I got, and yet it surprised me. I’m referring to my own curiosity about myself. I wondered why I decided to get a PhD in literature. I came from the world of science, biology and chemistry on my way to pre-med, and there was a flip. A switch came on, and wondering what this all is took precedence over labeling and dissecting. To me, every work of art is its own little encapsulated consciousness. There’s no other way to experience that thing besides through the medium of the artist. You’re sampling multiple realities.
Dale: That’s what art is. Novelists are the premier phenomenologists, where phenomenology means interior introspective examination of what is appearing. Novels were born in the 18th century, you’re the expert here, and really get going in the 19th. Then modernism: Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Henry James, whose ability to introspect and describe what’s going on in their characters’ minds, by virtue of describing what’s going on in their own, is just extraordinary. And Krzysztof, you wrote your dissertation on David Foster Wallace, who was a next-stage genius at that same thing.
Krzysztof: Pollan takes us back to Joyce and Woolf, and Proust to some extent, as novelists who are extremely brilliant at almost looking at the outside minutely, with all the nuances of which words exactly float to the top. You know what always surprised me? People classify those novels as impossible. “Oh, Joyce, I can’t read him.” Woolf doesn’t make sense. There’s a counterintuitive thing going on. If, in our own minds, we’re always looping in these ways, you would think reading those stream-of-consciousness novels would be a relief. Finally, here’s a thing I could resonate with. But it’s the opposite.
Dale: Here’s a chance to see what you’ve been doing. But that seeing is painful and awkward. If you’re not at least partly introspective to begin with, you won’t even see it. Just, ugh, nonsense, a bunch of words. So it is hard. Introspection is difficult. The difference between knowing what’s going on in your mind and knowing what’s going on around you is huge. We know a lot about what’s in front of us. But what’s going on in our mind: that’s much more difficult.
Krzysztof: And scary. I remember one of the first times I sat zazen. There was this quality, not of physical discomfort, but a sort of surface-level terror. What am I going to discover when I slow down enough to see what’s actually happening, especially in our productivity-juiced, capitalistic conveyor belt? Did you experience something like that?
Dale: Difficult, yeah. I began meditating in a chair, so when I got to Zen, the pain of sitting was real. But the Zen teacher’s going to say, “That’s interesting. Experience that. Feel that. Is that damaging you? No. Then observe it. Find out what part of your mind it is.” So you begin to examine things, explore them. If they’re things you want to avoid, what do you do about it?
Krzysztof: Dale, here at Fire Philosophy we always ask, implicitly, how we should live, given whatever text we’re examining. I think I know how you might answer, but I’ll let you speak for yourself.
Dale: You tell me what you think I’m going to say. You want me to guess? That’s boring.
Krzysztof: This was a delightful book, in part because Pollan was flexible through the different theories. He wasn’t aiming to prove one thing above another. He lived with the heart of a true journalist: no matter what he encountered, he learned something, tested it, then went to the next thing. That’s a life of curiosity. That’s what was on display.
Dale: Curiosity about something close to home, right back in his own head. If you want to read one book about consciousness, this is the book. The other ones I’ve read are anything but delightful. Part of my resistance to this one was that they seem so abstracted, so caught in feedback loops that aren’t going anywhere. From the neuroscience, maybe you can figure out a lesson about how to live, but I’m not sure what it is. From the practical, exploratory point of view, where everything I’m studying has some relationship to how to live, it’s more difficult to draw a connection. But if one person has done it, it’s Pollan. Partly because he’s such a delightful person. Big smile. Asks good questions. It’s all in dialogue. He doesn’t pontificate. He offers his own rebuttals. Never steps up to a soapbox.
Krzysztof: You reminded me, in the early days of Fire Philosophy I really wanted to read Robert Sapolsky’s Determined, about free will. I remember your resistance, and that’s interesting because it’s the same flavor. When somebody has a theory, they can’t see beyond that wall, and for our purposes, that’s not how to live. As in your piece on Goethe: live with imagination. Live from imagination, not certainty. That’s what this book showed in spades.
Dale: If there’s a koan that has stumped Western thought, it’s the standoff between free will and determinism. From other points of view, you’ve got the question wrong. You’re going to get stuck in it forever. Analytic philosophy is beginning to work out ways to slip out of the knot, but not so quickly.
Krzysztof: So, Dale: five fireballs?
Dale: Five fireballs, indeed. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Krzysztof: We’d love to hear from our listeners and readership. We invite your comments and further dialogue!
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~ Krzysztof and Dale
