Michael Pollan says “consciousness is under threat” in new book A World Appears, linking psilocybin insights with plant sentience

Michael Pollan argues that consciousness is a precious but endangered phenomenon, and his new book A World Appears uses psychedelic experience to push deeper questions about what consciousness is and who has it. The interview frames Pollan’s journey through a long-running curiosity about the life of plants, starting with scientific ideas like plants producing chemicals when damaged. Pollan connects these “edge case” questions to the problem of measuring subjective experience, where you cannot step outside your own perspective to verify what it is like to be someone else. Pollan organizes the inquiry around sentience, feeling, thought, and selfhood. He emphasizes how psychedelics can disrupt the usual link between consciousness and selfhood through experiences often described as ego death, while also warning that definitions of consciousness may reflect more about how terms are used than about reality itself. He also discusses machines and AI, suggesting they may convince us they are conscious without actually being so.