A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

You already know what consciousness is; you live it. But you might not easily describe it, much less explain it. Michael Pollan learned a lot about consciousness by reading the work of leading experts and talking to them at length to understand what they are thinking. You will learn from the experts too. But the best part of this book for me was learning what Pollan thinks. He takes you systematically through the evolution of his thinking as you go through the book. He’s an ideal learner—an open minded yet critical thinker. You’ll also have a good guide to further reading. You will be exposed

A World Appears is ambitious. The author tries to tackle consciousness and its emergence which is almost inevitably doomed to fall short given agreeing on what consciousness is remains a challenge among experts, let alone anybody. The author tackles the topic through a somewhat unorthodox route in that his motivation came from his ability to alter his consciousness with psychedelics. These experiences let him, while his consciousness was altered, to believe that more forms of life have consciousness and led him to try to write a book on this impossible topic. One will unlikely come out at the

I had a mystical experience with psychedelics over Thanksgiving 2020. It felt similar to a deep meditation state that I had experienced in my 10-day Vipassana retreat in 2018. This surprised me no end and I became obsessed with figuring out how the two could be similar. That’s when I discovered Pollan’s “How to Change your Mind”. The book gave me some hints, one thing led to another, and as a fellow Berkeley resident, I got involved with a breadth of work by the center for psychedelic sciences that he co-founded at the university.After that question was well answered, I was taken by a second q

A very interesting thought-provoking book. Explores what is consciousness and awareness. I highly recommend this book.

“The self is by far the most interesting, and most mysterious, creation of consciousness.”Delving into topics such as plant sentience, artificial intelligence, memory, and the nature of the self, Michael Pollan’s latest book, A WORLD APPEARS, is an engaging survey of the scientific and philosophical explanations of our awareness.No great mysteries were solved in this reading, to the extent I found most of the rationales related to the ‘how’ of our subjective reality only a little more convincing, in their current form, than the hocus-pocus factors that explain the nature of our awareness in mo

The first half of this book was full of surprising information page after page, but the last half was both disappointing and boring. However, a good read on a tough subject.

This is a book that will challenge your conceptions regarding consciousness. Michael Pollan writes lucidly about a topic that has perplexed a great many outstanding minds over the centuries. This is a unique take on a topic we all know something about but not to the depths discussed in this book. Highly recommended, but not a beach read.

There was a lot I enjoyed about this book. The author organizes the science well and pushes back where he disagrees rather than just bringing together different viewpoints. The idea of what we can truly know about our very consciousness and the inability to divorce the object from the subject is fascinating.But like with many books in pop science, the author veers often into “hey I’m just a guy” folksiness that is distracting and a little disingenuous, as for someone who purports to be so humble his ego shines through in multiple places.His physical descriptions of the people whom he interview