There is no experience more familiar than what it feels like to be ourselves.

No matter what we might be doing, it always feels like something just to be alive and awake.

So how is it possible that so much about consciousness is still a mystery? From KERA in Dallas, this is Fink. I'm Chris Boyd.

If there was low-hanging fruit to be picked in studying consciousness, it was figuring out how

the brain works, how neurons interact and which ones go to

work when we're recalling a memory or having a conversation or trying to solve a problem.

The why of it all, why should it be those brain processes somehow result in a particular

sense of feeling like an individual person? That is the hard problem of consciousness, and it will probably

never be solved under a microscope or in a scanner.

Challenging as they are, these questions are irresistible to curious minds.

So it makes sense that writer Michael Pollan has taken this on for his most recent project.

It's a book called A World Appears, A Journey into Consciousness.

Michael Pollan is a Guggenheim fellow and a Radcliffe fellow.

Michael, welcome back to think.

Thank you, Chris.

Good to be here.

I realize we could spend the rest of the hour talking about this, but what is the best

definition you have found for what counts as consciousness?

Well, you alluded to one, the fact that it feels like something to be you.

There was a philosopher in the 70s named Thomas Nagel who wrote this wonderful essay called

What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

And he said, if it's like anything, if there's any sort of, if it feels like anything, any kind of qualitative dimension, then that creature is conscious.

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