EEvery day when you wake up, you come back to yourself. You look at the room around you, feel your body moving through your clothes, and think about your plans, worries, and hopes for the day. This daily inner experience is miraculous and mysterious, and the subject of Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears.
It may also be under siege, Pollan said. He recently suggested People need “consciousness hygiene” to protect our inner world against invaders trying to get inside. He argues that our ability to sit with our thoughts and understand the world is increasingly being disrupted by algorithms engineered to tickle our dopamine receptors and grab our attention. Meanwhile, people are forming associations with non-human chatbots, projecting consciousness onto entities that do not possess it.
I spoke with Pollan by phone about what consciousness hygiene looks like in practice. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You have said that consciousness is a “precious field” and that we should practice “consciousness hygiene.””. This idea is interesting – can you first tell me what kind of cleanliness we are developing around us?
In this case, I’m referring specifically to human consciousness – this private space of interiority where we enjoy a very high degree of mental freedom. This is where we daydream, mind wander, talk to ourselves and it is a very precious thing.
While writing the book, I realized that our consciousness is under siege, and it is being polluted by many different things.
what things?
One is our President, who dominates our top position to a remarkable extent. I can’t remember any other time when politics and a person’s actions and expressions came to our minds in the same way.
There is also social media. We are all living with algorithms designed to get our attention. Meditation is consciousness. It is a part of consciousness. This is how we direct our consciousness where we want to go – but we’re missing it want Piece. Algorithms are very good at trapping us and taking our attention not where we want it to go, but where They Want to have it because they’re monetizing it. They are selling our attention.
Another, new problem: We have chatbots, and they’re hacking not only our attention, but also our ability to form emotional connections. I read a very shocking statistic in the New York Times, that 72% of teens are turning to AI for companionship. We’re reading about people who are falling in love with chatbots, people who are using them as therapists, people who are using them as friends, kids who come home from school and they want to tell their chatbot before telling their parents what happened during the day.
These chatbots are not conscious, but they claim to be and people treat them as such. That, too, is an attack on our consciousness, and there is a much deeper and more meaningful part than mere association.
You and I share a connection With psychologist William James, who once described consciousness thus: “Now we are seeing, now hearing; now reasoning, now desiring; now remembering, now hoping; now loving, now hating; and a hundred other ways we know of that our minds are engaged by turns.” I love this ping-ponging of thoughts because it shows how busy our minds are. When you talk about these attacks on our consciousness, is the goal of consciousness hygiene to completely silence the noise – all of it?
This is not emptiness by any means. It’s about capturing the noise. It’s about making it your noise.
Sanitation is actually an attempt to regain sovereignty. I’m still developing these ideas, but so far, I see that meditation is an important part of it. It’s a way of drawing a fence around your consciousness. When you’re meditating, you put your phone down and you’re not using any kind of technological media, you’re alone with your thoughts and in touch with what you described in James – how little control you have, how much is going on at any one time. Things are boiling from the unconscious. You are taking information from the environment, but it is all yours. It is not being manipulated by any other person to earn money.
It is not that people who engage on social media or through chatbots are not aware. It’s just that the space of their consciousness is being deliberately manipulated.
I’m a writer and you’re a writer, and we manipulate people’s consciousness with our words, and try to change their minds in some ways. I’m struggling with this: How is this different? Firstly, it is voluntary. As a reader or a person watching a movie, you agree to hand over a large part of your consciousness to someone else for a period of time, because you are going to get something that you want from it. In reading, there is a real collaboration going on. All you have is black ink on a page, and you’re conspiring with the author to create imaginary places, ideas, and characters.
A few years ago, I was at a café that made blueberry compote individually for every order of oatmeal, and I remember thinking, this is so ineffective, they should just make a bigger pot of this thing. However, as I sat there waiting for it, I felt like it was worth the wait for the blueberry compote.
You have to turn it into practice. Turn these moments of everyday life into an intentional practice instead of being passive and letting your mind focus on TikTok or Meta just because you don’t know what to do with it.
It must be said that for some people, it’s really hard to be alone with your thoughts, and your own mind can be a scary place. For people who have trauma and tend to ruminate, I understand why they would want a dull psychotic experience. That’s really just a painkiller. This is not going to solve any problem.
At the end of the book is a line from a poem by Jorie Graham that had a huge impact on me: “This is wrong: We, only we, human beings, can withdraw from ourselves and not be fully here.”
When she puts it in that context – “Only us, humans” – you realize: What animal can afford to be anything less than fully conscious? They will eat. You realize that it is our technology, and this elaborate structure of civilization, that gives us the freedom to not exist, that is, to be conscious. We generally think that we are more conscious than animals, but there is also a feeling that they are more conscious than us. Checking consciousness is a luxury.
You don’t think AI is conscious. Is consciousness part of the hygiene of who or what do we attribute consciousness to? From plants to animals to chatbots?
It’s very interesting to compare AI to animals, because the thing about AI is that they talk to us in our language, in the first person. This is an amazing fact which we all have already accepted now.
We get excited when whales communicate with each other, but we don’t know what they’re saying. But whales are definitely more aware than chatbots. We are easily fooled.
We anthropomorphize everything, so this isn’t surprising. I worry that we will think that all these machines are conscious. When you form these relationships with them, they are not real relationships. They are sycophants, there is no discord. In every human relationship, even a loving one, there is friction. That friction is what helps us define our identity and understand what we think. You don’t get that from a chatbot; They suck you.
When I consider AI practitioners, I think of the psychoanalyst I observed for years, and how significant his frustrations were with the potential. I cared a lot about what she thought.
That transference is very important to carrying out relationship therapy. I’ve read articles that suggest chatbots would be good for certain types of therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy, where there doesn’t have that kind of deep emotional attachment at the heart of it. I can see that point, but for that kind of therapy where relationship is at the center of the work, it seems like a very risky thing to do.
We’re just walking in this darkness. I’m hoping that if people think about hygiene, and work is done to protect your sanity, people will be a little more self-conscious about these things.
I would also say that a revolutionary form of sanitization is the use of psychedelics. The psychedelic experience and meditation have a lot in common. It draws a line around your consciousness so you can stay with it and see where it wants to go on its own. In those periods, you obviously don’t use technology. I would add this to the list of things that involve taking back control of our minds, even if it is an experience with very little mental control.
Consciousness has become the cosmic alternative to the soul. Should we think more critically about consciousness as a result? Should we gravitate towards it in the same way as religions gravitate towards the soul?
Souls are different from consciousness. Souls are indestructible – although some believe that consciousness is indestructible. I think the best guess is that it disappears when you die. But who can say for sure? We don’t know. The big lesson of the book is that we have to keep an open mind.
The focus on the state of your soul, which is central to Christianity, was kind of the right idea. Part of it was just to help you not go to hell. I don’t think that part applies. But care, care of the soul, is much like the cleanliness of consciousness.
