why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[Alan V]

Consciousness of such a self is further down the road, and is a relatively simple matter of perceiving an already existing self.

Oh dear. This is where the red lights come on.

To say it's "a relatively simple matter of perceiving" something is not self-evident to me. Because the whole thing we're working on is how we perceive things in consciousness. 

There are unexpectedly difficult questions here. E.g. what is a self? 

Yes, perhaps I overstated what the book said here. The point is that the hard problem of consciousness may not be with the emergence of consciousness so much as with the emergence of life. Life represents the self-organization of information systems which have arbitrary rules, rather than being governed strictly by the laws of physics. The author speculates how this may relate to the property of complimentarity in quantum physics. It's kind of like how scientists are speculating about how the big bang may have started with a quantum fluctuation. The point is that the strict determinism of Laplace is no longer the reigning view in physics, and we should therefore adjust our ideas about what is possible with materialism accordingly.

Once you get a self, a discrete biological life form, awareness of the internal life of that self may be a forgone conclusion at a certain level of complexity in evolution. After all, our brains are connected to our internal structures but not connected directly to the external world. We each have our own little, discrete internal world.

Further, the fact that modules abstract information automatically, without our consciousness seeing the processes involved, means we live in a simulated reality in our brains. This is less a problem than if we thought we somehow perceived the external world directly. Our consciousness is not illusory but rather simulated.