Looking Out - Feb 20 2026

 

Looking Out

Feb 20 2026

I am not going to solve the problem of consciousness

in a few lines of a poem.

Won’t locate the voice in my head

or where he gets his ideas.

Will not peer into neurons

to see how memories are kept

and then retrieved.

Will not figure out

how my senses seamlessly meld

into one coherent whole,

or how I perceive the world

like no one else.

Because what’s the point of looking in

at how my 3 lbs of wobbly matter

conjure reality

and travel in time

when consciousness has given me the gift

of looking out?

Why not accept the fact 

unexamined

that I am who I am,

and simply be

my ineffable self?

Drinking in the universe 

until I overflow.

Immersed in the world

until my skin becomes permeable

and my boundaries dissolve.

Observing my thoughts

pass harmlessly by; 

as dispassionate

as a Zen master

who doesn’t question what or why.

Because who cares if reality

as I see it

isn’t really true?

After all, can’t an illusion be beautiful

in and of itself?

And who needs a solution

when the problem is me

and things can’t solve themselves?

Michael Pollan was interviewed by Terri Gross about his most recent book A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness. 

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/fresh-air/id214089682?i=1000750537572

I’m also fascinated by the “hard problem” of consciousness:  where does this sense of self reside, and how does such an ineffable thing arise from something as substantive as the human brain? Does “subjective experience” adequately define consciousness? Self-awareness? Suffering? (That is, not just responding to pain as an aversive nociceptive input, but with emotional distress.) Or, as he paraphrases the philosopher Thomas Nagel when he wondered what’s it like to be a bat, “if it is like anything to be a creature, if it feels like something, then that creature is conscious.” (There’s a good word for this, one which explains why “what it’s like” is so hard for us to answer: umwelt,  the unique experience of an organism depending on its sensory bandwidth and particular exigencies of survival. After all, we don’t see in ultraviolet, hear infrasound, or sense smell as acutely as a dog.)

Fundamental questions that give rise to more. Does consciousness reside wholly in the brain? Where is the dividing line between consciousness and simple sentience? Are lower animals conscious? Plants? And will machines — that is, A.I. — ever attain consciousness? After all, what’s so special about organic matter?

But in the end, one insight he achieves is that it may not be as interesting or worthwhile pursuing the mechanisms of consciousness as its contents. We have somehow been given this astonishing gift, so why not explore it to its fullest? Which is where I take the poem: as the title emphasizes, looking out, not in.

Unfortunately, my temperament is not so attracted to consciousness expansion. I’m unadventurous,  mostly content in my restricted and conventional reality. It’s the puzzle of how — the nature and mechanism of consciousness — that intrigues me more. So contrary to my own poem, I am looking for solutions, not experience. I prefer solving, logic, and linear thought to ambiguity and transcendence. I would rather solve consciousness than explore it. Would rather take on the daunting task — to paraphrase the poem — of trying to solve myself!