A World Appears by Michael Pollan

Read the full post at - A World Appears by Michael Pollan I’ve been fascinated with consciousness for a long time — not the hardcore neuroscience, and not quite pure philosophy, but that strange middle territory where they overlap. The field sometimes called cognitive science, sometimes phenomenology: how do we actually experience the world? I’ve taken a few runs at it over the years. I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter got me thinking hard about where the sense of “I” even comes from. Robert Sapolsky’s Behave walked through the specific chemistry of what’s firing in the brain moment to moment. I’ve read David Chalmers on the hard problem of consciousness and David Dennett pushing back on it. And I’ll be honest — I can’t say I truly understood all of it. I’m not a scientist. I didn’t study any of this in college. It’s just a problem I can’t stop poking at. So when I found out Michael Pollan had written a book about exactly this topic, I was genuinely excited. Why Pollan Is the…