For as long as I can remember, I’ve wrestled with my own thoughts and feelings about identity. Why am I, David, the person I am? How changeable is that? Where do those thoughts and feelings come from anyway, and what purposes do they ultimately serve? I suppose it’s no coincidence then that I’ve also always been so curious about the subject of human consciousness. That’s the area of science and philosophy — of human thinking generally! — that burrows most deeply into similar questions and, to varying degrees of satisfaction, offers a plethora of possible answers. The best-selling author Michael Pollan has been thinking about these things, too. Throughout his work — which includes classic books like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (2006), about why we eat the way we do, and “How to Change Your Mind” (2018), about the science and uses of psychedelic drugs — Pollan has waded into ideas about the inner workings of the mind. Now, with his forthcoming book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” which will arrive this month, he has jumped into the deep end. The book is both a highly personal and expansive multidisciplinary survey of questions around human consciousness — what it is, what causes it, what it’s for and what the possible answers might mean for how we choose to live. And as Pollan explained, with the rise of artificial intelligence as well as the relentless political pressure on our attention (that is, our minds), those questions, already profound, are becoming only more urgent.
I want to get some basics: How do you define consciousness? The simplest way to define consciousness is as subjective experience. Another one-word definition is “awareness.” Thomas Nagel, the N.Y.U. philosopher, wrote a piece back in the ’70s called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” His idea is: If we can imagine it is like anything to be a bat, then a bat is conscious, because that means it has some sort of subjective experience. Why did he choose bats? Well, they’re very different than we are. Instead of using eyesight, they use echolocation. They bounce signals off of objects to move through space. We can vaguely imagine going through the world with echolocation. Whereas my toaster, I can’t do that. I don’t have a sense of what it’s like to be my toaster.
A big question of consciousness is what the philosopher David Chalmers has referred to as the “hard problem.” Can you tell people what that is? Basically how you get from matter to mind, how you cross that huge gulf from neurons to subjective experience — a gulf no one has managed to cross. Related questions are: Why don’t all these things we do go on automatically? Why do we have to beawareof anything? We could be completely automated and perhaps get along just fine. Your brain is monitoring your body and making fine adjustments in the blood gasses, in the heart rate, in digestion. There’s a lot going on that we don’t have to think about. So why do we have to think aboutanyof it? Some interesting theories have been proposed. One is that some of the issues that we deal with have to be decided in a conscious way. When you have two competing needs — you’re hungryand you’re tired — which should take precedence? So consciousness opens up this space of decision-making. The other argument is that we live in a very complex social world where I have to predict what you’re going to say; I have to imagine my way intoyourhead. You can’t automate human social interaction. It has too many elements. So consciousness is very helpful in navigating that world.
It seems likely to me that regardless of the source of consciousness, it’s probably a result of evolutionary processes — that consciousness evolved to make information available to certain parts of the brain, or to help us recognize patterns, or perceive threats, or maintain homeostasis. But are any non-evolutionary arguments for consciousness plausible to you? Oh, yeah. One is panpsychism.
Which could sound bonkers. It can sound bonkers. Panpsychism is the idea that everything, every particle, the ink on the page, the atoms, all have some infinitesimal degree of psyche or consciousness, and somehow this consciousness is combined in some way from our cells and the rest of our bodies to create this kind of superconsciousness. It sounds crazy. There are some very serious people who believe in it. You have to expand your sense of the plausible when you’re looking at consciousness. But we’ve done that before. How long ago was it that we discovered electromagnetism? This crazy idea that there are all these waves passing through us that can carry information. That’s just as mind-blowing, right?
I could happily talk about consciousness all day, but often when I do talk about it with people, I can tell that they view thinking about consciousness as almost akin to navel gazing. Like, it’s an interesting thing to think about, but really what difference does it make? What is your response to that? I’ve thought a lot about what good is it to think about consciousness, and I came to think that it’s more important than ever. Scientists are now learning that more and more animals and creatures — going all the way down possibly to insects — are conscious. So that’s one interesting issue: We’re sharing consciousness with more creatures. And then the big threat is artificial intelligence and the effort to create a conscious A.I., which is going to be an enormous challenge to this question of what does it mean to be human. Is consciousness something that a machine can possess? Are we more like intelligent machines or conscious, feeling animals? Who are we? So I think we’re approaching this kind of Copernican moment of redefinition.
What do you think we should do with the increasing awareness that more animals might be conscious than we previously thought? I guess the argument would be that we should have a greater amount of respect for them, but we know human beings are conscious and we exploit the hell out of other humans all the time. That’s a great question. There’s this whole conversation, very active here where I live in Silicon Valley, that if A.I. is conscious, then we’re going to have to give it moral consideration. Well, really? Have we given moral consideration to one another? Have we given moral consideration to the chickens and the cattle that we eat? The answer is no. It doesn’t automatically follow. So we’re going to have to sort out the ethics. Maybe it’s around the ability to suffer. Maybe that’s where you draw the line. I don’t know. I’m not an ethicist, but it’s not as easy as: You’re conscious, therefore you have all these rights. A.I. is really going to complicate this. Who we grant personhood to is a very subjective human decision. We give it to corporations, oddly enough, which are not conscious, but there are all sorts of creatures we don’t give it to. I don’t think we’re entirely rational or consistent in our granting of moral consideration.
You are skeptical that A.I. can achieve consciousness. Why? I’m convinced by some of the researchers, including Antonio Damasio and Mark Solms, who made a really compelling case that the origin of consciousness is with feelings, not thoughts. Feelings are the language in which the body talks to the brain. We forget that brains exist to keep bodies alive, and the way the body gets the brain’s attention is with feelings. So if you think feelings are at the center of consciousness, it’s very hard to imagine how a machine could rise to that level to have feelings. The other reason I think we’re not close to it is that everything that machines know, the data set on which they’re trained, is information on the internet. They don’t have friction with nature. They don’t have friction with us. Some of the most important things we know are about person-to-person contact, about contact with nature — this friction that really makes us human.
Despite how it may seem, the internet is not actually the whole of the world. But to a computer, it’s all you got.
How would we know if an A.I. is conscious or not? How do I know you’re conscious?
I promise I am! Your promise is what’s called reportability in philosophy. You can ask something if it’s conscious, and with humans, we kind of know.
But if an A.I. says: “Michael, I’m conscious. I promise,” how do we know? We don’t, and that is exactly why people are falling deep into these relationships with A.I. We can’t say it’s not conscious when it tells us it is. But we can test it in various ways. It all goes back to this idea of the Turing test — that the test of machine intelligence would be when they can fool us.
If the Turing test is the criteria for machine consciousness, then that test has already been passed. Exactly, it has fooled many, many people. Whether it can fool an expert, too, I don’t know, but probably. So we’re in a very weird place where the machines we’re living with are telling us they’re conscious. We can’t dispute it, but we can look at how they’re made and draw the kind of conclusions I’ve drawn. But is that going to persuade everybody? No. We want them to be conscious in some way. Or some of us do. It’s easier to have a relationship with a chatbot than another human. Going back to that friction point, they offer no friction. They just suck up to us and convince us how brilliant we are, and we fall for it.
What do you think religion has to offer to questions about consciousness? Buddhism has been thinking about consciousness for a very long time. It has been raising these questions about the self and giving people tools to transcend the self, which in itself is a desire that is surprising. We cling to this ego so firmly; at the same time, we do a lot of things to get away from it, whether it’s extreme sports or psychedelics or meditation.
Or watching a movie or having sex or any number of things. Some of the highest experiences of life are these moments where we transcend the self, and that’s curious.
What do you think that’s about? Why, if we cling to the self, are we also so hungry to lose ourselves? The self isolates us, the ego builds walls around it, it’s constantly evaluating, it ruminates. There’s a lot of crappy stuff about the self.
Yeah, it’s constantly yammering away. Yes, there is that voice in our head, and it embodies critical voices, very often inherited from parents or other people. I mean, the egoisvery useful. It gets a lot done. It got my book done. It gets your podcast done. So we shouldn’t be too critical of it. On the other hand, when we transcend the self, we connect to things larger than ourselves. And this is one of the beautiful things about psychedelics — when they work, there is this sense of dissolution of self. The walls come down, and you feel part of nature. You feel love. I had an experience I describe in the book of self-dissolution where I merged with this piece of music, this Bach cello suite, and it was such a profound experience because the subject-object split went away and I was identical to this music. The interesting thing, though, is that consciousness doesn’t go away when the ego goes away. We protect our ego because we’re afraid if we lose it, we’re dead. But we’re not. It’s just one voice. There’s a lot else going on, as you learn when you meditate and use psychedelics.
How often do you do psychedelics? Not very often at all. It’s hard to find time. It’s a big day with a lot of preparation and everything. If I can do it once a year, I’m happy. What I’m talking about is ideally a guided experience. You can let yourself go when someone’s watching your body. So when I can put myself in that situation — which isn’t easy to do, and it’s expensive — I find that very valuable. I’m still learning things.
What are you learning? Oh, every psychedelic experience is different. You never go back to the same place. That’s why I think it’s a great thing to do on or around your birthday, to sort of take stock of your reality and what the issues are. I had an experience not too long ago that kind of rocked me.
What was it? It was a guided trip on — it doesn’t matter what it was on. I had these powerful emotions that had no name. They were like these giant blimps crashing into me, crashing into each other, and I was straining and so frustrated that I didn’t know what they were, and the answer never came clear during the experience. Oddly enough, the answer to what they were came two weeks later when I happened to be at a meditation retreat. The links between psychedelics and meditation are very fruitful and interesting. I was doing a walking meditation after a couple days of complete silence, 12-hour-a-day meditating, and there were the blimps. In sans serif letters, right on the blimp, was the word “fear.” I quickly realized what it was. It was fear of losing something very close to you. So the combination of two experiences ended up being very productive. But on its own, the psychedelic experience raised more questions than gave answers.
Questions of consciousness, which are really questions about what makes us us, are some of the most important questions that can be asked. But at the same time, they can lead into other questions like: Is there some David — some stable “I” — that exists or not? Or what is the relationship between free will and consciousness? Sometimes thinking about those questions can be destabilizing. Is that just me? Do you have similar apprehensions? It can be destabilizing, absolutely. One of the reasons people are happy to be less conscious and fill their attention with distractions and drugs is because the mind can be a scary place to visit. We often want to be less aware of what’s going on. There are reasons people avoid going down these rabbit holes. It takes a willingness to risk something.
I apologize if this seems like a woo-woo question, but do you think the absence of something like a stable “self” also means the absence of something like a soul? Do you believe in a soul? Well, if a soul is something that is indestructible and survives our death, no. But I can’t say anything about the afterlife with confidence. Consciousness has become our secular substitute for the soul; we talk about consciousness the way people in the 16th or 17th century talked about souls. Some people’s interest in it is the fact that it floats free of these mortal bodies and maybe gets folded into a collective consciousness after we’re gone. So I think there is a hidden religiosity or spirituality in the whole conversation around consciousness. Somebody asked me recently, Do you think as people get older, they are more interested in consciousness? And I would say yes, and probably for that reason.
It does seem that many of us have consistencies to ourselves that are a little hard to explain in the absence of something like a stable identity or a soul. In the new book, you mention a period in your teenage years when you were reading Hermann Hesse, writing bad poetry and thinking about the big questions. I don’t know if you still write bad poetry, but the other two things don’t seem that far away from what you’re now doing in your 70s. So what might explain what seem like intrinsic core qualities that are constant for you through time if not a stable self-identity or a soul? Even though I talk a lot about this idea that maybe the self is an illusion, it still has a conventional reality. The fact that I’m using myself to talk to yourself makes this very easy. If neither of us had selves right now, it would be a very loosey-goosey conversation. I can’t even imagine what it would be like. Matthieu Ricard said: It’s like a river has a name, and that conventional name is very useful, but there’s nothing consistent there. It’s just water passing.
I brought something like this up earlier, but I want to ask another version of it. This morning I was reading the news and thinking, Gosh, right now, is talking to Michael Pollan about consciousness a kind of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” conversation? I decided the answer is no, but do you ever have those doubts? I did at various points when I was starting on this book and the world was starting to fall apart. Like, is this how I should be using my energy? But I think that consciousness is at stake in a lot of what’s going on. One of the things Trump has done is occupy a significant chunk of our attention every single day. Our consciousness is being polluted, and protecting ourselves against that at the same time we preserve the ability to act politically is a difficult balancing act. Consciousness is a very precious realm. It’s the realm of our privacy and our freedom to think. So I think we need some kind of consciousness hygiene, particularly at this moment, where this one politician has figured out ways to command our attention. Consciousness is more relevant now than it even was 10 or 20 years ago, as something to think about, protect and nurture.
Last night I was invited to an interview about my new book, Between Dreams and Reality: Essays on Revolution and Socialism at Rebel Fagin's show, Radio Resistance, a Santa Rosa community-focused program aired at KBBF 89.1 FM, the first bilingual radio station in the United States.
Here is Fagin's introduction: "Today I spoke with Kamran Nayeri, an Iranian/American author, socialist and specialist on socialist world revolutions. We discussed his most recent bookBetween Dreams and Reality: Essays on Revolution and Socialism. Theinterview requires more than one listening to hear it all. Please give a listen and pass it on to others. It gives reason for hope. Here's the link:
Jane Goodall, one of the world's leading primate ethologists
and one of the most popular conservationists, died at the age of 91 on October
2, 2025, during a speaking tour in Los Angeles (see note 1).
Goodall abandoned the prevalent anthropocentric attitude of
biologists by the way she studies the chimpanzees in Gombe, East Africa.[i]
This enabled her to uncover their complex behavior through living alongside
them. In 1965, the University of Cambridge awarded Goodall a PhD in ethology. Jill
Tiefenthaler, executive director of the National Geographic Society, wrote: “To know Jane was to know an extraordinary scientist,
conservationist, humanitarian, educator, mentor and, perhaps most profoundly,
an enduring champion for hope.”
Goodall was born on April 3, 1934, in London. When she was
five years old, his father left home, and her mother raised her. Goodall attributes
her self-reliance to her mother's upbringing. From an early age, she was fond
of nature and was influenced by
books and stories about animals, such as The Story of Dr. Doolittle and Tarzan.
Dr. Doolittle's story is about a doctor who understands animal language, treats
animals, and becomes a naturalist. Tarzan is the story of a European boy who chimpanzees in the jungles
of Africa raised, understood the language of animals, and lived among them. As
a teenager, Goodall worked in a restaurant to save money to go to Africa.
Goodall worked in
a restaurant to save money so she could travel to Africa.
In 1957, Goodall
traveled to Kenya, where he met paleontologist Lewis Leakey and became his
secretary. Leakey believed that studying the life of chimpanzees in their own environment
could help better understand human life in the Stone Age. Chimpanzees and
humans share 98 to 99 percent of their DNA. Leakey was looking for someone who
could live in Africa alongside chimpanzees with enough patience to get to the
chimpanzees and document their behavior.Goodall seemed to Leakey to be an ideal person, especially since she was
not university-trained so she could view the chimpanzees with a fresh eye.
Jane Goodall's
career is an example of the difficulties women faced at that time (and still
they do in most places) to advance in a male-dominated society.
When she applied
for financial support from the National Geographic Society, a committee of
eighteen men who decided on applications expressed reservations that a young
woman of delicate stature would be able to live amid wild animals and poisonous
snakes and environment infested with malaria mosquitos even though Goodall had
already documented that chimpanzees make tools to hunt termites.
This was a great
discovery. When she telegraphed her findings to Leakey, he was excited
and replied that either chimpanzees
are human, or we must accept that toolmaking is not what defines us as humans.
Despite Goodall's
discovery, the grant-making committee of National Geographic refused to pay her
$1,120 for daily expenses, doubting her ability to withstand harsh weather,
wild animals, venomous snakes, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes, as she lacked a
college education. Eventually, Leakey was able to convince the committee
otherwise. Three years later, the University of Cambridge awarded Goddall an
honorary doctorate!
15
years at Gombe
In July 1960, the
twenty-six-year-old Goodall began studying a group of chimpanzees in Kasakela,
in the rainforest of the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania (hereinafter
Gombe). Goodall’s approach to learning about the lives of chimpanzees
was fundamentally different from the usual way biologists study wildlife from
afar or in zoos and laboratories. Goodall had decided to get to know them as
their neighbor (see note 2). At first, she relied on her binoculars to monitor the
chimpanzees' behavior, as trying to get closer to them would cause them to
flee.
Gradually, chimpanzees got used to the presence of their
neighbor. Goodall also recorded her observations in a notebook and with a pen.
In October 1960, she observed a chimpanzee that she named David Greybeard
trimming a small branch, making it wet, and then pushing it into a termite
hole. He would then eat the termite that stuck to the damp branch as he pulled
it out.
Goodall also
documented the complex communication and behavior between chimpanzees, showing
that chimpanzees sometimes fight with each other and sometimes even eat
meat.Later, she observed chimpanzee groups
fighting over territory. Goodall showed that there could be social and
emotional connections between humans and chimpanzees.
After Goodall's early successes, Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch
nobleman and photographer, was sent to document Goodall's activities and the
chimpanzees' lives. They fell in love and married in 1964. Three years later,
they had a son, Eric Louis van Lawick, nicknamed Grubb.
During this time, Goodall's study of the chimpanzees
deepened. The chimpanzees now considered Goodall as their own, and she became
close friends with a female chimpanzee named Flo, who had a daughter. Goodall wrote
that she learned a lot about motherhood from Flo, and her own experience made
her more aware of chimpanzee mothers’ behavior. Soon after, Flo also had a son whom
Goodall named Flint.Flo looked after
her son and wouldn't even let her daughter get close to her baby for a while. She
was very gentle and loving with her baby, teaching her son about his
surroundings and how to live. As Flint grew bigger, Flo allowed her daughter to
help her care for him.
After Flint grew up, one day, when Flo was passing through
the stream her heart suddenly stopped, and she died. For some time, Flint tried
to get the usual affection from the corpse of his mother. Eventually, he
realized that Flo was dead, and he suffered a severe depression. A few weeks
later, Flint also died.
At the same time, funding for Hugo's work as a photographer
and videographer in Goodall’s project was cut off. To earn an income, Hugo
began filming animals in the Serengeti National Park. On the other hand,
Goodall received funding to establish the Gombe Research Station, where biology
students could live and conduct chimpanzees research. Gradually, Goodall's work
was to administer students' research.
When Goodall’s son was 6 years old, he was sent to London to
study and to live with Goodall’s mother. At the same time, Goodall's
professional career and her husband’s separated them. Finally, they divorced in
1974.
Goodall witnessed two tragedies at Gombe. The first was in
1966 when chimpanzees contracted polio virus. The virus paralyzed them in the
hands, legs, neck, and chest. Goodall and her colleagues hid the polio vaccine
in bananas and gave it to chimpanzees to save those who were not infected. This
was contrary to the accepted standards at the time. An important lesson from
this experience was the need to prohibit direct contact between researchers and
wild animals. Goodall forbade any direct contact with the chimpanzees after that
bitter experience.
The second tragedy was the four-year war (1974-1978) between
two groups of chimpanzees, which had split into the Kasakela group. Within
eight months, a group of chimpanzees separated themselves. They formed a new
group in the southern part of the region, consisting of six male chimpanzees,
three female chimpanzees, and their offspring. Eight males, twelve females, and
their offspring remained. The war ended when all males were killed. The cause
of this bloody conflict was territorial control for access to food.
Goodall concluded from this experience that war between
humans must be motivated by similar motives. Of course, Goodall also witnessed solidarity
within species in times of danger. She was with Hugo when he was filming, a
group of wildebeest in the Serengeti attacked a group of lions that had
overtaken a single wildebeest. The herd, after initial hesitation, attacked the
lions en masse and saved the individual from certain death.
The debate over the influence of culture versus nature in the
formation of human nature and behavior has been ongoing.
Goodall, Darwin, and Marx
In 2002, on a TED
program about her research, Goodall said, "We have found that there is no sharp
line separating humans from the rest of the animal world." In his epoch-making
book, On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin proposed the theory of
natural selection, which hd developed by studying artificial selection (breeding).
He argued that higher animals possess thought, morality, and emotions such as
love, affection, and sympathy, like humans. He also suggested that the
underlying moral principles of human behavior are instincts, similar to those
found in other animals.
Thus, for nearly
a hundred and seventy years, we have known that there is an excellent likelihood
that human nature may not be merely the sum of his social relations, as Marx asserted
in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Of course, Marx and Engels in The German
Ideology (1845) corrected this assertion by saying that the history of humans
should begin with an examination of their natural conditions of life. However, they
acknowledge that this lies outside the scope of their book, which outlines
their theory of society and history, known as historical materialism. They
consciously focused on examining social relations in class society by abstracting
from nature, making their theory anthropocentric by design. The reason for this
is apparent: the theory of history, which embeds human society in its natural settings,
requires knowledge gradually gained from the middle of the twentieth century in
disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, and biology.
Although Darwin's
theory of evolution scientifically rejected the anthropocentric view of the
world and proposed an ecological view instead, the attitude of many scientists
and activists of social change, including Marxists, remained anthropocentric.
From this
perspective, the efforts of E. O. Wilson, a renowned entomologist, biologist at
Harvard University, and conservationist who died in 2021, are noteworthy. His
theory of sociobiology is an ambitious project that seeks to establish a common
foundation based on Darwin's theory of evolution, integrating the natural
sciences, social sciences, and humanities as a single theory (Wilson, 1998).
Marxists have
criticized this project.Criticism from
Marxists, including Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, Wilson's colleagues at
Harvard University, emphasized Marx's theory of how social relations influence
the determination of human nature. Although they were respectively prominent
ecologist (Levins) and biologist (Levinas), who wrote Dialectical Biology
(1985), they could not deny the evolutionary origin of human nature. However,
they focused on capitalist society as a more prominent factor in the determination
of human nature. On the contrary, Wilson insisted on the essential role of the
evolutionary factors that cause social relationships that contribute to human behavior.
A discussion of this
critical debate lies outside the scope of this essay. My critique of Wilson's
theory (Nayeri, 2015) is an attempt to elevate this debate in light of today's
knowledge. Today, human nature can only be understood through animistic
materialism, which gives historical agency to all beings, not just human beings.
Furthermore, on this basis, history began at least 2.8 million years ago with the
emergence of the genus Homo. Marx and Engels’ theory of history is limited to
the rise of civilization (class societies) five thousand years ago (Nayeri,
2021; 2025 Chapter 19)..
Thus, human
history is deeply embedded in natural history, which began at least with the
emergence of life on Earth 3.8 to 4.5 billion years ago.
Today, with the
discovery of the microbiome, we know that nature lives inside our bodies as
well as outside of us. The microbiome, a collection of bacteria, viruses,
fungi, and algae in our gut, is not only fundamental to our health but also
influences our brain activity and plays a role in determining our
personality.
Thus, the theory
of human nature as well as the theory of society and history must be based on
animistic materialism and the latest knowledge of the twenty-first century if
we want to tackle effectively the existential ecological crises of our time.
Goodall as a
pioneer
Goodall was a pioneer
who questioned the commonly held anthropocentric views despite the central
message of Darwin's theory of evolution and showed us that we are animals and
kin to the rest of the animal kingdom.
Goodall argued that
nonhuman animals, like humans, are individuals and hoped to speak for those who
could not speak for themselves. The philosopher James Rachels (1990), an
environmental ethicist who based his views on Darwin’s theory, agreed.
In 1977, she
created the Jane Goodall Institute for the conservation of chimpanzees and wildlife.
In 1991, she introduced the Roots and
Buds program to the Institute’s mission to educate children about the
importance of preserving ecosystems. Today, it operates in 100 countries.
Toward the end of
her life, Jane Goodall campaigned to mobilize people to confront the
existential ecological crises. Since Goodall never developed an understanding
of the systemic causes of these crises, she focused her energy on instilling
hope in the public by arguing that everyone can contribute to the solution by
making simple lifestyle changes.
Still, her vision
mattered. Goodall endorsed Henry David Thoreau's valuable edict that "in wildness
is the preservation of the world. "
