HE'S BACK WITH AN APPETITE FOR CONSCIOUSNESS

After changing how we eat and trip, Michael Pollan returns to his garden — and the page — to examine mysteries of the mind

- BY SHELBY HARTMAN

CAROLYN FONG For The Times AUTHOR Michael Pollan, at his Berkeley home, embarked on a journey inspired by a shroom trip to understand consciousness in his latest book, "A World Appears."

It was the plume poppies in Michael Pollan's garden that seeded his new book. On a warm September afternoon, he was tripping on shrooms when the spindly, whimsical flowers appeared to be returning his gaze as they happily bathed in sunlight.

"I came out of that, thinking: What do you do with that, with an insight on psychedelics? I mean, do you just dismiss it as fantasy or do you accept it as true?" he says, reflecting on the experience from his couch on a winter day in Berkeley.

The experience sent Pollan on a journey to understand consciousness (what it is, who has it and the moral implications) — alongside other age-old queries, such as how we know anything at all. From this inquiry comes his 10th book, “A World Appears,” released this week.

Like all of Pollan’s books, in his latest work, the reader goes on a voyage of discovery with him as he interviews leading scientists and looks to literature, Indigenous epistemologies, psychology and even plants themselves for answers to questions that may not have answers. Along the way, he realizes that the ethical significance of his investigation is much greater than he first imagined.

What consciousness is (and who has it), he writes, should at least give us pause as we consider how governments and corporations extract resources from arguably sentient ecosystems.

He examines how careful we need to be as we develop AIs that may hold the capacity for their own suffering, whether we should be selling our own awareness to social media platforms in exchange for entertainment, how we treat animals, and much more.