What Humans, Animals and Plants Tell Us About Consciousness

There is nothing we know more directly than the fact that we are having an experience. Yet explaining how that experience arises remains one of the hardest problems in science.

We can study neurons, map brain circuits, measure hormones and observe behavior. None of that, by itself, tells us why hunger feels like something, why music can move us so deeply, or why we experience ourselves as a particular person looking out at the world.

My conversation with Michael Pollan brought these questions into contact with some wonderfully concrete subjects: roots finding nutrients, bacteria influencing our biology, the feeling of awe, the practical work of gardening and the first cup of coffee after three months without caffeine.

The connecting idea is that understanding consciousness may require us to reconsider the boundaries we usually take for granted: brain and body, self and other, human and nature. That does not mean abandoning rigorous science. It means being precise about what science has established, what remains a hypothesis and what we simply do not yet understand.

Table of Contents

• What Do We Mean by Consciousness?
• What Plant Intelligence Reveals, and What It Does Not
• Self Versus Other: A Simple Rule With Enormous Consequences
• Plants Shape Us as We Shape Them
• Why Did Awareness Evolve at All?
• The Microbiome Challenges the Idea of an Isolated Self
• Does Consciousness Begin With Thought, or With Feeling?
• The Body Is Not Merely Sending Instructions From Below
• The Ego Is Both a Tool and a Constraint
• Could the Brain Filter Consciousness Rather Than Produce It?
• AI, Memory and the Limits of the Brain-as-Computer Metaphor
• Gardening Turns Our Relationship With Nature Into Practice
• Hope Becomes Useful When It Offers Agency
• Food Systems Need More Than Individual Willpower
• Psychedelic Medicine: Substantial Promise, Real Responsibilities
• What Three Months Without Caffeine Revealed
• A Richer Understanding of Consciousness Starts With Better Questions

What Do We Mean by Consciousness?

A useful starting definition is subjective experience. There is something it feels like to be you.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel captured this question in his essay about what it is like to be a bat. A bat encounters the world partly through echolocation, a sensory capacity very different from our own. We cannot fully inhabit that experience, but we can ask whether there is something it is like for the bat to exist.

That question separates consciousness from the mere performance of a task. A machine might identify an object or generate a sentence without necessarily experiencing anything. Intelligence, behavior and subjective experience are related questions, but they are not interchangeable.

Human consciousness also includes capacities that go beyond basic awareness:

• Metacognition: awareness of our own thinking and awareness.
• Self-reflection: the ability to consider ourselves as individuals.
• Mental time travel: remembering the past and imagining possible futures.
• Meaning: connecting sensations, memories and events to personal significance.

Pollan finds it useful to distinguish this elaborated human consciousness from a more basic form of sentience: sensitivity to the environment and to whether changes are beneficial or harmful. In his account, sentience might extend much further across life than we ordinarily assume.

That is a proposal, not a settled definition. Researchers disagree about where sentience begins and what evidence would establish it. The important point is not to assume that every organism must possess our particular form of consciousness to have an experience of its own. For background on the philosophical distinctions, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s overview of consciousness is a useful resource.

What Plant Intelligence Reveals, and What It Does Not

Plants complicate any simple distinction between passive matter and active problem solving.

They cannot walk away from a threat or move themselves into a better neighborhood. Instead, they respond through growth, chemistry and an impressive range of sensory capacities.

Pollan described research in which roots navigate experimental environments toward nutrients, plants respond defensively to recordings of caterpillars feeding, and roots respond to cues associated with moving water. Plants also detect changes in light, chemical conditions and nutrient availability.

These behaviors are fascinating precisely because they do not look like our behavior. A plant’s actions often unfold too slowly for us to notice without deliberately changing the timescale of observation.

Does responding mean experiencing?

Here is the difficult step: a response to the environment does not automatically establish subjective experience.

A bacterium can move toward a useful chemical and away from a harmful one. A plant can change its growth in response to light. But does it feel anything? Does it know that it is responding? Or can those behaviors be explained without awareness?

My instinct as a neuroscientist is to keep those questions separate. Pollan’s point is that we should also avoid explaining away every unfamiliar behavior as a simple, inflexible reflex. Organisms encounter novel circumstances, and some of their responses suggest more flexibility than our everyday picture of plants allows.

Evidence of sensing and problem solving is not the same as proof of consciousness. Both parts of that statement matter.

The puzzle of anesthetized plants

One especially curious example involves anesthesia. A Venus flytrap normally closes when appropriately stimulated. Under certain anesthetics, that response can disappear.

That does not prove that the plant has lost consciousness. It raises a narrower and very interesting question: what biological processes are being interrupted, and what do those processes share with the mechanisms affected by anesthesia in animals?

Pollan prefers the language of sentience rather than consciousness when discussing plants, while acknowledging that some researchers go further. The uncertainty is a reason to investigate, not a reason to jump to a conclusion.

Self Versus Other: A Simple Rule With Enormous Consequences

Long before we reach the human sense of identity, biology already contains mechanisms for distinguishing self from other.

Consider a developing neuron. Its branches respond to signals that encourage growth in some directions and discourage it in others. Branches of the same neuron can also avoid one another, helping produce an orderly architecture rather than an indiscriminate tangle.

A relatively small set of rules can therefore generate extraordinary complexity.

Plant roots offer a useful parallel. Pollan described evidence that plants can respond differently to neighboring plants depending on relatedness, and that a plant’s response to shade can depend on whether the shading comes from itself or another plant.

These are not examples of a plant thinking, “That is me.” They are examples of biological discrimination that may help us think more clearly about the foundations of selfhood.

At the human level, the distinction becomes much richer. I know the difference between my body, another person and the microphone in front of me. That distinction organizes perception, action and social life.

But it may not be required for every conscious experience.

Can consciousness exist without a strong sense of self?

Pollan argues that it can. Meditation and psychedelic experiences can involve awareness without the familiar, organizing sense of “me.” Even the brief transition out of sleep can offer an ordinary hint of this distinction: awareness returns while our location and personal circumstances are still being reconstructed.

The exact timing is not the important point. The conceptual distinction is: being aware and possessing a fully assembled personal identity may be different processes.

That becomes important when we discuss the ego. The self can be useful without being the whole of consciousness.

Plants Shape Us as We Shape Them

Our relationship with plants is not simply a story of humans selecting and controlling passive organisms.

In The Botany of Desire, Pollan explored the relationship from the other direction. Plants that appeal to human desires can become extraordinarily successful. We carry them across continents, protect them, breed them and devote enormous areas of land to their reproduction.

Food, beauty and changes in consciousness all participate in this exchange.

When Pollan says a plant has “figured out” how to appeal to us, he does not mean it held a planning meeting. He means that variation and selection produced a result that, in retrospect, looks strategic. Plants with traits humans valued were more likely to be propagated.

Cannabis, coffee and tea make this particularly vivid. Chemicals that affect animal nervous systems can become the basis of an extensive relationship with humans.

Chemistry is a plant’s way of acting

Because plants are rooted in place, chemistry does much of the work that movement does for animals. Chemical compounds can discourage feeding, alter an animal’s behavior or help a plant manage threats.

Pollan illustrated this with his cat, Frank, who repeatedly sought out catnip in the garden. The story is funny, but the larger point is serious: plants can profoundly alter the behavior of animals that interact with them.

Not every effect is an adaptation specifically designed for humans, and not every appealing evolutionary explanation has been demonstrated. Still, the relationship is more reciprocal than the familiar picture of an all-powerful human manipulating nature.

How should we evaluate an unusual insight?

Pollan’s interest in plant sentience was partly stimulated by a psilocybin experience in which the plants in his garden seemed aware and benevolent.

He did not treat that experience as scientific proof. Drawing on William James, he approached it in two ways:

1. Ask whether the idea is useful. Does it support a more attentive, responsible relationship with the world?
2. Treat it as a hypothesis. Can independent forms of investigation provide evidence for it?

That is an important discipline. An experience can be meaningful without its interpretation being literally true. Curiosity becomes more productive when it is paired with a willingness to test what we believe.

Why Did Awareness Evolve at All?

The brain performs an enormous amount of work without our awareness. It monitors bodily conditions, coordinates adjustments and processes environmental information continuously.

Why, then, does anything need to become conscious?

One possible explanation is social complexity. Living among other people requires anticipating behavior, interpreting intentions and responding to situations that cannot all be specified in advance. Imagination and a capacity to model another person’s mind could be extremely useful under those conditions.

Pollan regards this as a plausible evolutionary story, while recognizing that plausibility is not proof.

He also pointed to biologist Michael Levin’s work on cellular collectives and organisms assembled from cells, including xenobots. This research challenges the assumption that all flexible behavior must depend on a conventional nervous system or on a detailed genetic script for each possible action.

The broader question is whether evolution produces not just fixed instructions, but biological systems capable of pursuing goals under unfamiliar conditions. That does not settle consciousness. It does widen our understanding of what living matter can do.

The Microbiome Challenges the Idea of an Isolated Self

One question I raised with Pollan has genuinely kept me thinking: how much of what we regard as our own behavior is influenced by the microbes living in and on us?

Our microbiota participate in the production and transformation of compounds relevant to health. They interact with immune, metabolic and nervous system processes. Their influence makes the boundary between “my biology” and “their biology” less clean than it first appears.

Taking a deliberately provocative perspective, perhaps a sociable human is also an excellent vehicle for microbial dispersal. Handshakes, close contact and travel create opportunities for microbes to move.

That does not establish that microbes direct our ambitions, relationships or technological projects. It is a thought experiment that exposes how easily we assume the human perspective is the only perspective.

Manipulation or cooperation?

Pollan offered a helpful reversal. We can describe microbes as using us, but we can also describe humans as hosting organisms that perform useful chemical work.

Microbial metabolites, including short-chain fatty acids, participate in the larger physiological system that supports us. From one angle, microbes gain food and habitat. From another, we gain biological functions.

Symbiosis is a better starting point than a story with one controller and one victim.

The same reframing applies to plants and domesticated animals. Relationships can change both participants without either one consciously designing the arrangement. We are not independent of those relationships. We exist through them.

Does Consciousness Begin With Thought, or With Feeling?

It is tempting to locate consciousness in the most elaborate parts of the human brain, especially the cortex. We associate it with reasoning, language and reflection, so we assume it must begin there.

Pollan found a different approach compelling: the work of Antonio Damasio and Mark Solms, which places bodily feeling near the foundation of consciousness.

The starting point is simple: the brain helps keep the body alive.

Hunger, thirst, temperature, discomfort and other bodily conditions matter because they signal needs. In this framework, conscious feeling is tied to the regulation of a vulnerable living organism.

The cortex can then help interpret the situation and plan a response. Hunger might lead to imagining food, remembering what is in the kitchen or arranging a meal. But the feeling is not necessarily created by the same processes that construct the plan.

Why the brainstem matters

This approach draws attention to the upper brainstem and to evidence concerning affective behavior in animals and people with profound cortical abnormalities.

Such evidence is difficult to interpret, particularly when an individual cannot verbally report experience. Still, it challenges the idea that a fully developed human cortex is the only possible basis for conscious feeling.

If bodily feeling is foundational, the implications are substantial. Consciousness could extend to a wider range of animals, and a disembodied information processor might be missing something essential.

But the theory does not eliminate the central mystery. Saying that feelings are conscious still leaves us asking why a biological signal should feel like anything at all.

The Body Is Not Merely Sending Instructions From Below

We often describe brain and body as if the brain were a commander and the body a subordinate. The anatomy itself should make us question that picture.

Roughly 80% of vagal nerve fibers carry information toward the brain. The precise proportion varies with how it is described and measured, but the overall point is clear: there is an enormous flow of information from the body to the brain.

What does that information become in experience?

Sometimes the answer seems obvious. We feel pain, fullness or nausea. Much of the time, however, bodily signals contribute to a less easily named state: unease, energy, irritability, readiness or a vague sense that something is wrong.

Language helps interpret feeling, but it is not the feeling itself

Emotion researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work raises the importance of the concepts and words available to us. Different people and cultures can interpret similar bodily conditions differently.

Parents see a basic version of this with children. A child may be distressed without knowing whether the problem is hunger, fatigue or something else. Part of development involves learning to interpret those signals.

Yet language also creates a limitation. The body’s information does not necessarily arrive in tidy categories corresponding to our emotion words.

We also do not know enough about its timescales. How I feel now may reflect not only an immediate signal, but accumulated sleep, food, stress, inflammation and events across many hours. Asking what the body is communicating requires more than taking a snapshot of the present moment.

A stomach-calming intervention and moral disgust

Pollan described an experiment that makes this integration especially tangible. Participants received ginger or a placebo before responding to morally repellent written scenarios. Those receiving ginger showed less severe judgment in the relevant conditions.

The proposed connection is that calming gastric responses altered an aspect of disgust, which in turn influenced judgment.

It is one experimental example, not a general prescription for changing morality. But it challenges the idea that moral evaluation happens in an abstract mind untouched by bodily state.

Most of us recognize a less dramatic version: when we are in pain, we become less patient. When we feel well, attention can move more easily toward other people. The body is participating in how the world appears to us.

The Ego Is Both a Tool and a Constraint

The ego gives us continuity. It helps us defend boundaries, make plans and work toward a future.

As Pollan pointed out, writing a book for six years requires some confidence that the person who begins the project will remain connected to the person who finishes it.

But self-protection can become self-absorption. The same structure that helps us function can make us defensive, excessively critical or unable to see beyond our own interests.

This is why the phrase “collective consciousness” needs care. It can refer to greater social connection, reduced self-preoccupation or the much stronger claim that consciousness exists as a shared field. Those are not the same proposition.

What ego dissolution can feel like

Pollan described a high-dose psilocybin experience in which his familiar identity seemed to dissolve into a visual image of blue fragments and then blue paint. Awareness continued, but it no longer felt organized around his ordinary self.

Later, while a Bach cello suite played, the usual distinction between himself and the music seemed to disappear.

The enduring value, for him, was not the permanent elimination of ego. It was gaining perspective on it. He could more readily recognize a defensive or self-critical reaction as one part of his mental life rather than an unquestionable account of reality.

That distinction matters. A temporary altered state does not mean someone becomes permanently selfless, and psychedelics do not reliably produce humility. Pollan emphasized that ego inflation can occur too.

Awe and meditation offer other routes

Psychedelics are not the only way to loosen self-preoccupation.

Meditation can change one’s relationship to thoughts and identity. Religious experience, intimacy, music and encounters with nature can also make the self feel less dominant.

Pollan discussed psychologist Dacher Keltner’s research on awe, including an example in which people drew themselves smaller after an awe-inducing experience. The significance is not that they thought less of themselves. Their sense of personal scale had changed.

We can value confidence and still benefit from moments when we are not the center of our own attention. The goal is not to abolish the self, but to become less trapped inside it.

Could the Brain Filter Consciousness Rather Than Produce It?

The usual scientific starting point is that conscious experience arises through brain activity. How that happens remains unresolved.

Pollan’s study of the subject left him more open to alternatives, including filter theories associated with Henri Bergson and Aldous Huxley.

In these accounts, the brain does not generate consciousness so much as constrain or channel something more extensive. Huxley’s metaphor was a reducing valve that admits what an organism needs to function.

A receiver offers another analogy. Looking inside a television does not reveal the person presenting the weather because the device receives a signal originating elsewhere.

That is an analogy, not evidence that brains receive an external consciousness field. The distinction is essential.

Our senses certainly filter reality. Bees detect ultraviolet light that we cannot see, and some snakes detect thermal information unavailable to us. But the established fact that perception is selective does not establish a separate field of consciousness.

Pollan also became more willing to consider panpsychism, the philosophical proposal that basic aspects of experience belong to the fundamental constituents of reality. This, too, faces unresolved problems, including how such basic properties could combine into a unified experience.

He cited neuroscientist Christof Koch’s publicly discussed psychedelic experience as an example of a researcher becoming convinced that consciousness extends beyond brains. Pollan respects that conviction without claiming to share its certainty. Personal conviction and scientific demonstration remain different things.

Perhaps consciousness is not one problem

Another possibility, raised through Pollan’s conversations with psychologist Alison Gopnik, is that we are trying to explain too many things with one word.

Feeling, selfhood, attention, reflection and agency may need partly different explanations. We might make progress by separating them rather than waiting for one theory to explain everything at once.

That possibility becomes particularly important when considering artificial intelligence.

AI, Memory and the Limits of the Brain-as-Computer Metaphor

An AI system can produce intelligent behavior without that behavior settling whether it has an inner life.

Pollan is skeptical that current silicon-based systems are conscious. His reasoning is partly tied to embodiment: if consciousness begins in feelings associated with maintaining a vulnerable body, what would provide the equivalent foundation in a computer?

A simulation of a feeling may not be the same as a felt experience. Producing convincing language about pain is not, on its own, evidence of suffering.

Efforts to build conscious AI could nevertheless teach us something important, provided we can establish meaningful criteria for judging the result.

Brains do not have a clean hardware and software split

The brain-as-computer metaphor is useful in some contexts, but it can also mislead.

Neurons are influenced by chemicals, timing, oscillations and their changing connections. Learning alters the physical system. A person’s history is not simply a file stored in otherwise unchanged machinery.

I also raised experiments involving the reactivation of neuronal ensembles associated with learning. In the examples we discussed, activating a relevant group of neurons could reproduce a learned behavioral response without replaying the original activity in precisely its original order.

That challenges an overly simple idea of memory as a fixed sequence that must be replayed like notes in a recording. It does not mean timing is irrelevant throughout the brain. It means the relationship between neural activity, memory and behavior is more complicated than that model suggests.

Quantum explanations remain speculative

We also touched on proposals connecting quantum physics and consciousness. Both of us were explicit about the limits of our expertise.

The fact that quantum physics contains surprising phenomena does not establish that those phenomena explain conscious experience. Nor does a puzzling memory experiment, by itself, point to a quantum mechanism.

The useful posture is openness with discrimination: investigate possibilities, but do not use one mystery as an explanation for another.

Gardening Turns Our Relationship With Nature Into Practice

For Pollan, these questions are connected to a much older experience: growing a watermelon.

As a young child on Long Island, he covered some watermelon seeds with dirt and forgot about them. Months later, he discovered a fruit. Excited to show his mother, he ran toward the house, tripped and splattered it across the patio.

The watermelon did not survive the celebration, but the relationship with gardening did. By about eight, he was growing strawberries and selling small quantities to his mother.

Gardening matters because it makes our relationship with nature active. Admiration alone will not produce dinner. You must decide what to plant, how to manage weeds and how to respond when another organism wants the same food you do.

Wendell Berry’s practical lesson

Pollan credited Wendell Berry with helping him move beyond a picture of nature in which humans should only stand back and admire.

A garden requires intervention. The question is not whether humans will change nature, but how we should do so.

Berry’s influence helped Pollan imagine that relationship as a partnership with obligations rather than a project of domination. Plants have requirements of their own. Meeting those requirements is often how we obtain what we need.

This perspective does not diminish wilderness protection. It adds another responsibility: learning how to behave in the landscapes where people already live, farm and work. The choice cannot be only untouched nature or exploited nature.

Hope Becomes Useful When It Offers Agency

Pollan’s practical orientation also shapes his writing about food.

While reporting on industrial beef production, he followed an animal through a system heavily dependent on fossil-fuel-intensive feed production and other industrial inputs. It was a dark account, but he insisted on including an alternative: cattle raised and finished on grass.

His contrast was between a food chain organized around fossil fuel inputs and one more directly organized around sunlight captured by grass.

The alternative occupied only a small part of a long article. Editors questioned whether it belonged. Pollan argued that it was essential because it gave readers a direction rather than leaving them with helplessness.

Later, when he asked an Oakland butcher about grass-fed beef, the butcher told him that several other people had recently asked the same question. That kind of response matters to Pollan: information had become demand, and demand could change what a business offered.

His optimism is not simply a cheerful temperament. It is a commitment to identifying places where people can act.

Food Systems Need More Than Individual Willpower

Pollan is clear that public awareness has improved without the food system being transformed.

People may know more about where food comes from and how diet affects health, yet still live in an environment where inexpensive, heavily marketed foods dominate.

His argument is that cultural change and policy change must work together. Encouraging people to eat differently has limits when subsidies, procurement systems and market incentives keep pushing in the opposite direction.

Making healthier food more affordable relative to less healthy food is therefore part of the problem, not an optional extra.

Cooperation does not require agreement on everything

We discussed the possibility of alliances across political divisions on issues such as school food, pesticides and ultraprocessed food.

Pollan distinguished between political rhetoric about healthy eating and the policies he believes would meaningfully change the food system. He was sharply critical of the administration’s approach, particularly where deregulation and funding decisions appeared to conflict with its stated goals.

At the same time, he saw value in the increased visibility of parents who care intensely about food quality, including people outside the traditional food movement. He recalled meeting families willing to drive long distances to Joel Salatin’s Virginia farm for pastured meat and eggs.

These groups do not necessarily agree on every scientific claim. The opportunity is to identify specific, evidence-informed goals on which they can cooperate.

That is a more workable form of collective action than pretending everyone has identical beliefs or interests.

Psychedelic Medicine: Substantial Promise, Real Responsibilities

Psychedelic medicine offers another example of unexpected alliances.

Veterans and their advocates have helped move these substances beyond their association with the 1960s counterculture. Pollan and I discussed the contributions of people such as Rick Perry and Rick Doblin, who approached the subject from very different political backgrounds.

Doblin’s willingness to build relationships across ideological lines helped expand the coalition supporting research and access. The larger lesson is not unique to psychedelics: meaningful change often requires working with people who disagree with you elsewhere.

Approval predictions are not guarantees

Our discussion covered MDMA for trauma, psilocybin and the growing interest in ibogaine, especially among veterans.

Pollan described the development programs and political pressure he believed could accelerate access. He also emphasized that predictions about approval had repeatedly proved uncertain.

Those expectations should not be confused with approval itself. Research momentum, expedited review and an established, approved treatment are different stages. Regulatory decisions require evidence about safety, efficacy and the conditions of administration.

Pollan also questioned the role of personal political influence in accelerating drug development. Supporting investigation does not require abandoning scrutiny of how decisions are made.

Medical promise is not a declaration of universal safety

Pollan has interviewed people who describe profound improvements in addiction, depression and other difficult conditions following psychedelic treatment experiences. That is part of the reason he sees substantial hope in the field.

But these substances are not appropriate for everyone. Psychiatric vulnerability, including susceptibility to psychosis, and medical factors such as cardiac health can be crucial considerations.

Wider availability will require better public education, appropriate screening and careful administration. A substance being discussed as a medicine does not mean that unsupervised use is safe or that every person will benefit.

The responsible position can hold both ideas at once: some people may benefit enormously, and doing this well will require considerable care.

What Three Months Without Caffeine Revealed

One of the most illuminating experiments we discussed involved a much more familiar psychoactive substance.

Before his landmark work on psilocybin, psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths studied caffeine. When Pollan began researching it, Griffiths proposed that understanding a drug used habitually required experiencing life without it.

Pollan accepted the challenge and stopped caffeine for about three months.

The difficult part was not just withdrawal

His relationship with coffee began early. As a child, getting up to have coffee with his father offered a chance to spend time together. Later, caffeine became tightly connected to writing.

Stopping disrupted concentration and made work difficult. He felt unfocused and unlike himself.

As the initial withdrawal symptoms eased, something more interesting remained: he still did not feel quite like himself without caffeine.

That is a revealing observation. A familiar state can become part of identity even when a drug helps produce it. Our everyday experience of “normal” is not necessarily an unaltered baseline.

The first cup back was extraordinary

When Pollan resumed coffee, its effect was striking. He felt energetic, productive and unusually motivated, cleaning his closet and working in the garden.

The next cup was less remarkable.

He tried restricting coffee to Saturdays to preserve that sensitivity. It worked for a while, until a deadline supplied a very persuasive reason to make an exception. Eventually, daily use returned.

The story is not an argument that everyone must quit caffeine. It illustrates tolerance, habit and the difference between a powerful acute effect and the familiar experience of returning to baseline.

A useful substance still deserves a thoughtful relationship

Pollan remains enthusiastic about coffee and tea. Caffeine can support alertness and focus, while those beverages also contain compounds beyond caffeine, including polyphenols.

But enthusiasm should not obscure individual variation. Some people become jittery at amounts others tolerate comfortably. His personal experiment is not a universal dosing recommendation or proof that everyone would benefit from stopping.

Its deeper lesson is about attention: a substance can be useful and still be so embedded in daily life that we rarely notice what it is doing.

A Richer Understanding of Consciousness Starts With Better Questions

The most valuable outcome of this discussion is not a single theory of consciousness. It is a clearer sense of the questions worth asking.

Can an organism solve problems without subjective experience? Can awareness occur without a familiar sense of self? How much of emotion begins in the body? What distinguishes an intelligent response from a felt one?

Pollan explores these questions further in A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, part of his broader work on food, plants and the human relationship with nature.

The practical thread is just as important as the theoretical one. We can become more attentive to bodily states, less unquestioningly identified with defensive thoughts and more aware of the living relationships that sustain us.

None of that requires pretending the science is finished. In fact, it depends on admitting that it is not.

We are embodied beings, participants in ecological relationships and capable of experiences that sometimes loosen our familiar boundaries. Understanding those facts more carefully may not solve consciousness immediately. It can still change how we live.