I'll have more to say about this book in due time (I'm on p. 75 right now).

### A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

Michael Pollan’s excellent new book serves as a paginated retort to that last claim [that nothing worth reading has ever been written on consciousness]. The author, an American journalist, is best known for his work on food and diet. (His pithy distillation of decades of research—“eat food, not too much, mostly plants”—is the crème de la crème of dietary advice.) More recently he has been writing about mind-altering drugs, from psychedelics such as magic mushrooms to opium and caffeine.

Title of the book comes from the sheer magic of us opening our eyes in the morning and actually have a world appear before us -- a world in which we think, feel, act, plan, predict, ponder, go about things. What is this thing, this self, this me, that's doing the thinking, feeling, acting, planning, predicting, pondering and going about things?

In the JRE episode from the other day (which I finished today on a long drive) Pollan and Rogan discussed AI at length and whether the emergence of super-intelligent machines would ever be conscious

Rather than pitch his own favoured explanation, Mr Pollan’s book offers a well-reported tour of several theories. Academic philosophising is not always known for being page-turning. But Mr Pollan has a journalist’s eye for the surprising and intriguing.

Disagree about "page-turner" since the prose is dense and the topic insanely academically complicated neurobiology, but def worth having a look at.

Here's a nice one for us yogi-unified-body types:
"Feelings are the language in which the body speaks to the mind" (pp. 67-68)