Michael Pollan begins his journey into what consciousness means by looking at some of the definitions philosophers and scientists have offered

To delve into the subject of consciousness is to quickly discover how little we know about a phenomenon we all know so well. It doesn’t help that scientists and philosophers who work on the problem don’t agree on what they mean by the word consciousness or on what, exactly, they are trying to explain.

For some, it is the basic fact of perception – that a world appears when we open our eyes. For others, it is that we can reflect on ourselves, as in a mirror. Some think of consciousness as a lens through which we perceive the world, while others take the same word to mean the space of interiority in which thinking and feeling seem to happen.

The fact that all of us have an intuitive sense of what consciousness is doesn’t make it any easier to define. The simplest definition is “subjective or felt experience” or, to prune the redundancy, “experience,” plain and simple.

“Awareness” is another serviceable one-word definition.

“The feeling of what happens” is how the neurologist Antonio Damasio describes consciousness.

John Searle, the philosopher, defines it as “those states of awareness, sentience, or feeling that begin in the morning when you wake from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until you fall asleep.”

Thomas Nagel, another philosopher, suggests that a being is conscious if it is “like something” to be that being. It is presumably like something to be a bat, in his famous example, but not like anything to be a toaster. (What about a plant? We shall see.)

But while the experts know surprisingly little about consciousness – little definitively, that is – all of us know a lot. Maybe not about the how or why of consciousness but surely about the what of it, something we can all investigate in the laboratories of our own minds.

The fancy philosophical term for that investigation is phenomenology. Today, many consciousness researchers, Chalmers and Koch among them, have come to believe that it needs to play a more prominent role in our research – the phenomenology of both normal consciousness and various “nonordinary” states of consciousness, such as meditation, dreaming, and psychedelic experience.

First-person experience, after all, lies at the heart of consciousness, yet the theories currently on offer have only the most tenuous relationship to recognizable human experience. […]

Shortly after I began looking into the subject, I had lunch with a UC Berkeley colleague, the psychologist Alison Gopnik. She reminded me that much of what we know about consciousness comes from people who experience the phenomenon in a distinct and atypical way. “These are people who can sit in a chair for a really long time, engaged in rational and abstract thought,” she said. “I call it professor consciousness, and it’s a special type.” The unusual phenomenology of such people may predispose them to a particular flavour of consciousness, prompting them to overlook others.

Granted, scientists and philosophers must simplify and abstract from the messiness, complexity, and sheer variety of lived experience in order to make progress, but as philosopher Evan Thompson reminds us, it’s easy to mistake the maps we draw for the territory we seek to describe. Take the concept of information, which many in the field believe constitutes the very essence of consciousness. That sounds plausible, but think about it: Are the nuances of your subjective experience – the bittersweet feeling-tone of an autumn afternoon or the briny tang of an oyster – reducible to information, to bits? Or does information belong to the category of map, not territory?

By the same token, what are we to make of the bifurcation of the world into mental stuff and physical stuff? Does that divide reflect something essential about the nature of reality, or is it, too, a tool, or a map, useful for getting certain things done?

Phenomenology can also mislead us: The duality of mind and body feels intuitively true to most of us, but that could be the legacy of growing up in a culture shaped by Descartes. We should be open to the possibility that it, too, is a construct, one peculiar to Western civilisation, and one that has outlived its usefulness.

The question is important, because the very framing of consciousness as a uniquely difficult problem depends on the reality of that Cartesian split. We’ll meet several scientists in these pages who are bent on erasing that line and firmly rooting consciousness in our bodies and in the natural world.

This is an extract from A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (Allen Lane, £25) by Michael Pollan. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

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