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 D
