Michael Pollan walked onto the stage on Wednesday night to a warm welcome. He was in good spirits, buoyed by the news that the Democrats had taken back the House in the United States. He had returned to Australia to discuss his new book, A World Appears, a wide-ranging journalistic exploration of consciousness—one of the last major scientific mysteries, yet strangely under-examined.
The talk was part of Curious, the Sydney Opera House’s ideas festival, now in its second year. Launched in 2025 and presented with the University of Sydney as official event partner, the series is designed to unpack questions shaping culture, politics, technology, and how we understand ourselves.
The conversation was facilitated by Sarah Kanowski, host of Conversations on ABC Radio. The in-conversation format suited the material. Kanowski’s warm, supportive style kept the ideas accessible by focusing on Pollan’s narrative and observations of his own creative process as he researched and wrote the book. She drew his arguments out of that process—how he had gone about the work, what he had tried, what had surprised him—while her questions created natural breaks and shifts in focus across the ninety-minute event.
Consciousness is a subject that can easily become dense if one focuses only on brain architecture. Pollan is known for participatory, first-person research, and he remained transparent about being a non-expert who learns by doing. Audiences already knew him from How to Change Your Mind, in which he underwent guided psychedelic experiences (including psilocybin and LSD) as part of understanding both the research and the subjective effects. Those experiences of altered states also informed his decision to tackle consciousness itself.
He started from the premise that consciousness is irreducibly subjective, and that the scientific approach we have inherited is in some ways an artefact of an earlier era. He asked the audience to de-familiarise the idea. We know we are conscious, yet we rarely interrogate the fact. That first-person character sits awkwardly with the scientific method as usually practised, which prefers third-person, publicly observable data. Instruments can measure brain activity and behaviour, but they do not capture the experience itself. He treats the awkwardness as part of what makes the subject both difficult and important.
Pollan began with a broader definition of sentience that includes plants and animals. Sentience, in this sense, is the capacity to have experiences or to feel, which also implies some form of memory and agency. He has long had an interest in plants and food, and he is curious about research on plant behaviour, signalling, and responsiveness, asking whether any of this warrants thinking in terms of a primitive form of experience. Rather than a binary of conscious humans versus everything else, he considers consciousness on a continuum. Consciousness is something humans do; sentience is something potentially more widely shared.
Existentially and biologically, he suggested, we are closer to plants and other animals than to computers. AI does not have feelings. Feeling is a large category, but Pollan draws on thinkers such as Antonio Damasio who contend that consciousness begins with feelings, and that the body is therefore the primary vehicle. The brain is the seat of thought, which comes later. Living things share the conditions of being alive: a vulnerable body, the need to maintain ourselves, some form of sentience or feeling, and mortality. Computers are tools we have built. They can simulate aspects of thought, but they lack the embodied vulnerability that defines living systems.
He also sounded a warning. We are strongly disposed to attribute mind to AI language models because they speak our language. Consciousness is a finite capacity, and we are currently squandering it. Attention is being hacked by systems engineered to capture and monetise it, systematically narrowing the field of awareness. Our feelings and our capacity for attachment can be hacked too, as people form significant emotional bonds with AI chatbots.
It was moving to hear Pollan describe how, after five years, he had to stop the search. There were not going to be firm answers. Near the end he visited Joan Halifax, Zen Roshi and abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. He had planned a conventional stay of interviews and meditation with the community. Instead she diagnosed him as “hopelessly stuck in his head” and sent him alone to a small cave in the mountains for several days of solitary meditation, with no phone, electricity, or comforts. What he took away was the value of “don’t-know mind.”
The long research process itself, he reflected, had required this unlearning. The more he tried to know, the more he narrowed his awareness. Sitting with not knowing reopened a wider field of attention and reminded him that consciousness is not only a hard problem but also a simple gift of being in the world. The evening completed the Curious festival and fulfilled its brief: an opportunity to think together about an important and interesting idea.
Curious Festival, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, 4 November 2026.
