Michael Pollan

So on the one hand, this idea that there is something, at the very least, that is attracting the spotlight of my attention to uncertainty feels true.

But I also have a couple of questions and problems with it.

One is that it doesn't seem like what we're talking here about is exactly consciousness.

I mean, what you were just saying about the child or about the adult on psychedelics is

They are not attracted to uncertainty in the same way.

The experience of psychedelic consciousness expansion is in many ways, I think, less of the experience of felt uncertainty.

It's a very good point.

It becomes much more about experience.

Whereas uncertainty, at least in the way I experience it in my consciousness, tends to be...

a much more spotlighted, much less experiential, like it's a distraction from experience.

So the other thing I was thinking about with this was consciousness is felt uncertainty, right?

Felt where?

Because I think we think of consciousness as a thing happening in our minds.

Something I think actually that has come out of my meditation for me, but then I loved seeing how much of it there was in your book is recognizing how much is happening in the body.

There's no doubt, I think, that the experience of consciousness is some interplay between both.

I feel uncertainty in my solar plexus.

I think about things I'm uncertain around in my brain.

Could you describe that?

I want to describe an experience I just had while we were doing that.

I wrote a note to myself to come back to this part of the conversation later to maybe clip it out because I think it's particularly good.