What is consciousness, and can it actually be simply defined?
Consciousness is simply subjective experience — or, stripped down even further, just experience itself. That is Michael Pollan's working definition: the fact that you have awareness, that there is something going on from the inside. He also endorses philosopher Thomas Nagel's formulation from the 1970s: consciousness is present whenever there is "something it is like" to be a creature — a test made famous by Nagel's essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
The bat example is deliberately disorienting. We have no idea exactly what it feels like to navigate the world by sonar rather than by sight. But we know it feels like something. That irreducible sense of interiority — however alien — is enough to confirm consciousness. Your toaster, by contrast, has no experience at all. There is nothing it is like to be a toaster. The distinction is that clean.
"Something it is like" — Thomas Nagel's phrase, first published in the 1970s, has become the most widely adopted test for consciousness among neuroscientists. If there is a felt quality, a subjective perspective, from inside a system — then that system is conscious. If there is nothing, not even a dim flicker of experience, consciousness is absent.
What makes Pollan's framing valuable is its refusal to overcomplicate. The word "consciousness" carries enormous philosophical and scientific baggage, yet at its core it names something everyone already knows from the inside. The deeper mystery — and the one Pollan pursues in his book A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness — is not what consciousness is, but why we have it at all. The brain performs an enormous amount of work without it: monitoring the body, processing environmental signals, running computations. Awareness is, in some ways, the remarkable surplus. Hear the full conversation on Listenly.
"Consciousness is precious, consciousness is under siege, and consciousness is worth defending."
— Michael Pollan, 3 Takeaways™ · Episode #314
About Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan has built a career out of following deceptively simple questions to their strangest and deepest roots. As a journalist and professor at both Harvard University and UC Berkeley, he brings rare intellectual range to subjects that span food systems, plant biology, psychedelics, and now consciousness itself.
His latest book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, turns that same investigative instinct toward the hardest question in science and philosophy: not what we think, but why we experience anything at all. It is a natural extension of a body of work defined by its ability to make difficult, counterintuitive ideas feel urgent and accessible.
Pollan's credibility on consciousness comes not from a neuroscience lab but from his established track record of synthesizing cutting-edge research for a broad audience — and from his direct engagement with the researchers and philosophers, including figures like Thomas Nagel, Donald Hoffman, Christoph Koch, and Daniel Dennett, who have shaped the field. His grounding in both academic rigor and narrative journalism makes him an unusually trustworthy guide to a subject where clarity is genuinely hard to come by.