The bean plant didn’t grow in all directions. It made a bee-line, a very slow bee-line that carried it exactly to the pole, which it then twined around. Review photos of its progress and the plant looks like it’s making repeated efforts at a target. That’s the testimony of the writer Michael Pollan, as reported in his book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. “All of this may be an illusion of time-lapse photography, an artifact of our technology,” he allows. But plant and human may have more in common than we think: consciousness, in fact. Or possibly they don’t, since there’s a lot here we’re just starting to find out.
Those last 10 words could be the motto of A World Appears, which describes the work of various researchers who are consumed by what consciousness is and/or what entities might have it. Proceeding chapter by chapter from sentience to feelings to thoughts to the self, Pollan arrives at many possibilities but few conclusions. Above all he doubts that “third-person science,” the “God’s-eye ‘view from nowhere,’” can fully understand consciousness, a thing whose checklist of traits includes a viewpoint—subjectivity, which must be first person.
By one count, Pollan says, there are 22 theories purporting to explain consciousness. By another, he says, there are 84 “non-physicalist” theories, meaning they hold that “consciousness, rather than matter, is fundamental”; he gives no count for the physicalist ones. So theories of consciousness would appear to swarm. Pollan doesn’t vouch for their provability, and he warns that specialists disagree about the nature of the thing they’re trying to explain. Is consciousness simply awareness, as in awareness of the surrounding world, or does self-awareness have to feature as well? Pollan goes for choice two, but apparently there’s no consensus. All in all, consciousness is a topic that appears to boggle the people who look into it. A World Appears opens and closes with a bet: will science locate the exact neurons that make consciousness possible? After a quarter of a century, the man who bet yes decided he was wrong and presented his colleague with a case of wine. Quantum physics had helped change his thinking, as had psychedelics. Anyway, no more “physicalism.” Matter can be broken into atoms for closer scrutiny, but I’ness calls for a different approach—mushrooms possibly.
Amid the uncertainty, one appreciates the active, directed bean plant showcased by Professor Stefano Mancuso when Pollan visited his lab. It’s a solid thing displaying a bold pattern of behavior, one that raises a bold possibility. Descartes was sure that consciousness belonged only to humans; now maybe it will be extended all the way to plants. Mancuso’s bean root would appear to size up its environment and then choose a suitable action. If so, it must be sentient, maybe conscious (depending on your view of self-awareness as being necessary or not to consciousness).
Of course, how that sentience, or consciousness, how it’s distributed along a physical network of… not neurons, but cells of some kind… it’s a challenging matter. A flock of birds, possibly, shares an intelligence, meaning the birds don’t just exchange signals, they don’t just follow the same built-in reflexes, they share thoughts that physically travel among them, through them, by some network that remains to be determined. The same, possibly, for plants, with the root tips traveling together like birds in a flock, sharing perceptions and decisions. Though, as a layman, I couldn’t rule out DNA as the mover behind whatever plants or birds get up to. For all I know everything might be programmed, with no choice involved, nothing at work but perception and instinct.
“Nearing the end of this journey, I find myself not at all sure what to believe, if anything,” Pollan reflects. His concerns are large. For instance, he wonders why there’s consciousness at all. Can’t facts be taken in and options selected without the person or animal or plant or machine knowing that it exists and is doing these things? I wonder that nobody’s ever noticed that a bean plant will head straight for a pole. This can’t be the first time one has been near the other; you’d think peasants would’ve remarked on the results, passed along some folk wisdom. Instead the centuries waited until Professor Mancuso of the Università di Firenze stepped in. I don’t say the preceding out of skepticism, just the dim but persistent awareness that nothing here makes much sense to me.