A World Appears Quotes

“Historically, brain metaphors have often drawn on the impressive machines of the day. For example, brains were once analogized to clocks and mills when those were cutting-edge technologies. More recently, scientists have compared minds with looms, as in one precomputer-era quote comparing a brain to that "enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“to date, no scientist or philosopher has charted a plausible path from the intricate gray-and-white folds of the cortex to the felt experience of an early winter’s day at the end of fall semester, an experience that layers perception and memory and feeling—all that information—with something that seems so much greater than information itself, a purely subjective quality that feels rich beyond words and indelible.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“Yet what are we to make of the fact that there is a whole suite of chemicals that, when introduced into the brain, utterly change our experience of consciousness? Think of how the caffeine in coffee subtly sharpens the feeling of being alive (or at least awake), or how the psilocybin in a mushroom (and what could be more material than a mushroom?!) can radically alter our sense of self and our subjective experience of the world. The fact that consciousness can be altered by chemicals does not necessarily prove that consciousness is, at its core, a material phenomenon, but it would seem to lend at least some credence to the idea.[* 7]”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“It's pretty much what novels do- take us into the minds of characters to satisfy our deep human curiosity to find out what, but also how, other people think.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“The wonder is that after having our internal power grids shut down by anesthesia, we wake up the same people we were before, with the same memories intact.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“Our senses exist mainly to refine, or error-correct, our minds’ best guesses as to what we’re experiencing.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“nowhere,” because none of us, not even scientists, can ever step outside the bubble of conscious experience. “Consciousness is not just another object of knowledge,” as Thompson writes, “but also, and more fundamental, that by which any object is knowable.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“He thinks of sentience as simply “the capacity to feel,” but to him, being able to feel is something “more than mere responsiveness to stimulation” or excitability. Feelings, Thompson suggests, are always valenced; they will invariably have a quality of pleasantness or unpleasantness, depending on whether whatever caused them is good or bad for the organism. (Friston would say that good feelings are tied to a reduction in uncertainty and bad ones to an increase, which sounds about right.) It was with the advent of feelings that value, meaning, and subjectivity all came into the world.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“Friston’s schema argues strongly for biopsychism (the idea that all life is sentient), if not panpsychism (the idea that all matter is sentient to some degree).”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“Complex systems like us never directly perceive the world; rather, we must infer what’s happening out there based on the information available to us, which will always be imperfect and incomplete.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“and chemistry. This is why he became a developmental biologist. “That’s the journey every one of us takes,” he noted. “We all started out as a little quiescent bag of chemicals. And somehow we got all the way to this! From physics and chemistry to mind.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“If true, Reber’s arresting vision—the breathtaking generosity of his biopsychism—would go a long way toward reanimating a world that science has disenchanted. If you buy it, that is. Not everyone does. The late philosopher Daniel Dennett, for example, drew a bright line between mere “competence,” which is hardwired, and “comprehension,” which is not, and was willing to assign only the former to creatures like bacteria and plants. But for Reber, as for Levin, survival in an ever-changing environment requires more flexibility and resourcefulness than a genetic algorithm can provide.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“true, Reber’s arresting vision—the breathtaking generosity of his biopsychism—would go a long way toward reanimating a world that science has disenchanted. If you buy it, that is. Not everyone does. The late philosopher Daniel Dennett, for example, drew a bright line between mere “competence,” which is hardwired, and “comprehension,” which is not, and was willing to assign only the former to creatures like bacteria and plants. But for Reber, as for Levin, survival in an ever-changing environment requires more flexibility and resourcefulness than a genetic algorithm can provide.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“How does any kind of complex system[*13]—anything from a virus, a cell, an organ, an organism, or even an entire ecosystem—survive in a universe governed by the second law of thermodynamics?”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“this memory collapses time like a rhyme;”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“If you fundamentally see science as a third-person activity, then I think that consciousness is always going to be beyond you,” he said. “I don’t buy any third-person theory of consciousness.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“Arthur S. Reber, until his death in 2025 a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, has proposed a theory called the cellular basis of consciousness (CBC) model.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“As with reproduction, another basic biological function, different species have hit on very different ways to achieve the same result. Consciousness, he believes, is no different: a basic biological function that can take many different forms.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“encompasses everything that the brain does, both consciously and unconsciously.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“sense of self, emotion, reasoning, and the ability to reflect on one’s own thoughts—”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“ability to sense one’s environment and respond intelligently to both positive and negative changes within that environment.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“vivisections—dissections of live animals, including in his case rabbits and dogs—as his philosophy convinced him that animals, lacking souls, couldn’t possibly feel pain. As for the shrieks and howls of the creatures he tortured, these he dismissed as the meaningless noise of automatons, having nothing to do with feelings as we—and only we—know them.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“I’ve focused on the ones I found most helpful in illuminating the phenomena of sentience, feeling, thought, and selfhood.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“the intuitive sense that we each have located somewhere within our heads a continuous, stable, and abiding “I” that is the subject of all our experiences.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“But recent research suggests that consciousness may instead begin with feelings generated in one of the most ancient parts of the brain—the upper brainstem.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“Sentience is where consciousness begins: with the ability of living beings to register sensations and respond intelligently.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“warm little pond.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“I open my eyes and a world appears.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness