Degrees of Consciousness

Degrees of Consciousness

“Consciousness is the water we swim in, and in our everyday lives we have almost as little distance on it as fish do of the sea. We can’t ever climb out of the water and stand on its shore .”[1]

Michael Pollan

In his excellent book about consciousness, A World Appears, author Michael Pollan identifies several abilities he considers related to consciousness. He presents them as if they were degrees of consciousness, ranging from its most basic manifestation to its most advanced, at least as far as he imagines it. The degrees are sentience, feeling, thought, and a sense of self. [2] I will draw on Pollan’s work in exploring these aspects of consciousness.

Sentience refers to the ability to sense one’s environment. Plants are often considered to possess  sentience for their abilities to respond to changes in their surroundings. When the soil they are rooted in gets too dry, they drop leaves and their root tips search deeper and farther for moisture. When something shades their leaves, they send growth out farther in search of unblocked sunlight. Members of the insect, animal, and human species are usually considered to have sentient abilities, too, but not rocks or minerals. Sentience, by some, is considered the most elementary form of consciousness, although others disagree that sentience by itself is a form of consciousness.

While we may consider sentience to be more instinctual than deliberate, the label of feeling implies an ability to have a subjective experience. This brings to mind a common attribution to consciousness that ChatGPT used when I asked it to define consciousness. It’s reply was this: “Consciousness is the capacity to have subjective experience – there being something it feels like  to be you.”[3] The capacity to feel is accepted as an indication of consciousness by more researchers than is the sole capacity for sentience. Having feelings further implies the ability to compare one thing or state of being to another. If there is a feeling about something there should be a corresponding recognition of the lack of that something. Pollan writes, “For feelings are, by their very nature, conscious; how could there be a feeling that wasn’t felt, or experienced?”[4]

The next higher degree of consciousness, according to Pollan, is thought. Having the capacity of thought implies the ability to learn from our experiences and to formulate theories about how the world around us works and thus predict future states based on current or past states, which also implies having some capacity for memory. I remember reading about lab experiments with mice and other animals where they were given certain challenges they had to solve in order to receive a reward, like food, or avoid a punishment, like a shock. In some cases they had to learn to navigate a maze; in others they had to learn to push certain buttons or levers. The ability to learn through trial and error, which the mice and other animals displayed, was considered evidence of thought and thus, consciousness. The ability to think brings with it the ability to form an intention or to direct one’s awareness toward a certain goal or purpose.

The highest level of consciousness that Pollan identifies in this context is having a sense of self. In other words, it is sensing one’s own being as separate and unique from other beings. Most researchers only grant this level of consciousness to human beings, along with sentience, feeling, and thought. Many pet owners would disagree. It is interesting to me that while many researchers see a sense of self as the highest level of consciousness, many spiritualists believe our sense of self – our ego – is the biggest impediment to spiritual growth because in order to emerge as our most evolved spiritual and material being we must find our unity or oneness with the rest of creation – to see ourselves as an integral part of a larger whole instead of separate from it. Inherent to a sense of self is the awareness of the different roles we play in the greater life around us, like partner, co-worker, child, parent, and the like. Unfortunately, we tend to use these roles to differentiate ourselves from others rather than seeing them as evidence of our interrelatedness.

While we can identify and name aspects of our environment (sentience), and we can name and identify many of our feelings and thoughts, identifying and naming our sense of self is different. We cannot observe ourselves as something outside of ourselves like we can with thoughts, feelings, and the outside air temperature. And yet, observing the self is part of and a challenge to any study of consciousness.

This is the 13^thin a series titled The Perplexities of Consciousness. Life Notes are my explorations into mysteries that interest me. They are invitations for readers to explore more deeply into life’s mysteries. Engage with me or explore contemplative spiritual direction at ghildenbrand@outlook.com.

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[1] Michael Pollan, A World Appears, Penguin Press, New York, 2026, p. xxvi.

[2] Michael Pollan, A World Appears, Penguin Press, New York, 2026, chapters 1-4.

[3] ChatGPT response to the question, “What is consciousness?”, accessed 09/21/2026

[4] Michael Pollan, A World Appears, Penguin Press, New York, 2026, p. 68.