What is it like to be you?
What is it like to be. Period.
This question has bedeviled and bewondered (is that a word? It should be…) human beings for a very long time. Well, some human beings — the ones stirred by a flicker of curiosity, in which a sudden spark of awareness of being aware wakes up.
You might dismiss it as “just the brain.” But think about it. You’ll see the obvious fact: there’s something more to awareness than just the contents of your mind — and more than simply not being asleep. Sure, you're sentient rather than insentient — but what is aware of that sentience?
In other words, there is a perception of perceiving itself to point to. And the fact that it's hard to describe doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Indeed, there are other things that are hard to point to or grab onto, yet we still recognize them as real and significant, despite their intangibility. Take space, for example. It’s a useful illustration, because space is sometimes used as a metaphor for awareness or consciousness (which I’m using interchangeably here). Even those who deny that consciousness exists—as some modern philosophers oddly do—still acknowledge space.
The “space of awareness” metaphor is also a particularly useful lens for examining what I’ll call the “brain maneuver”—a kind of sleight-of-mind that doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny.
Let’s say you ask someone, “What is space?”
And they answer: “Isn’t the brain amazing?”
You blink. “Wait, what? What do you mean?”
And they say, “Well, it’s just the brain, obviously.”
To which I’d reply: “Hmm, not sure I’m following. Yes, we have a word for space. And yes, we can think about it—so in that sense, sure, it shows up as a content in the mind. But that doesn’t mean space is the brain. The word is pointing to something more than a little blip firing in the skull.”
Now I’ve got this image in my head: a cross-section of a person’s noggin, a bright little blip in the brain, and a kind of invisible arrow labeled aboutness—pointing toward “space” out there somewhere.
The Taboo of Subjectivity
Can you see how this whole picture is already looking at things from the outside? It’s making an object of a mental object, and objectifying the relationship between objects. We’ve already abstracted away from the immediacy of experience. Philosophers call it “aboutness,” but what it really is, is a conceptual sleight of hand.
And all of it—this whole model—is based on an assumption: that there is an outside position from which all this can be seen.
But no such position exists. It’s imagined.
I might say to them, “You have a good imagination.”
You can start to see the absurdity of this kind of “reductionism” as it’s called in philosophical circles.
Now, granted, the space example isn’t perfect. It still refers to something “out there”—a phenomenon in the external world. Whereas what we’re trying to talk about here is something “in here.” And that “in here” is maddeningly subtle, slippery, and hard to get our clever little mental hands around. It leaves us Homo sapiens scratching our respective heads and furrowing our beautifully evolved brows.
The Taboo of Subjectivity, and Begging the Question
There’s something that isn’t reducible to information—or to formulas and models— even though those formulas and models have helped take our spacecraft to Pluto and beyond, or created the marvelous tools and toys like the one you’re probably reading this essay on.
It’s been said, “It’s all just information”. That is, specifiable with numbers or bits, and formulas.
Even atoms and quarks, all part of some vast, Matrix-like Master Computer.
Or: it’s all just neural nets firing.
Do you see the pattern? “It’s all just…” — some elegant model that appeals to the psyche.
But wait—what is aware of that model?
Who, or what, in essence, fundamentally, is now seeing the simulation? Can you see what I’m getting at?
Mr. Homunculus
There’s another form of reductionism that leads us into absurdity. This time, it goes in the opposite direction. Instead of projecting outward—trying to find something “behind” or “outside” of everything—it dives inward, into the brain. It’s what philosophers call the homunculus fallacy.
It goes something like this:
We’re trying to understand how the brain perceives. Information comes in from the eyes via the optic nerves and lands… somewhere.
Presumably, it gets processed in some internal viewing chamber—some hypothetical Optical Center.
And since there’s clearly perception happening, we imagine there must be something—some who or what—that sees all of this.
A little entity inside.
A witness.
A see-er.
Let’s use that wonderfully archaic word: homunculus.
(It literally means “little man.”)
But if you’re perceptive (pun fully intended), you’ll spot the problem right away:
What in the homunculus is doing the seeing?
Who—or what—is perceiving that inner screen?
Does the homunculus have his own Optical Center?
His own see-er?
Then surely he must have his own homunculus…
And just like that, we’re tumbling down the rabbit hole of infinite regress—a hall of mirrors, Russian dolls nested within dolls, seers watching seers watching seers.
We haven’t explained anything.
We’ve just delayed the question.
We’ve kicked the can down a very long, recursive hallway.
So where, exactly, does the perception buck stop?
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What’s Missing?
Given the apparent success of science and technology—and the ease of adopting a ready-made worldview handed down by schools, media, and modern culture—it’s not surprising that many fall into what’s been called scientism.
Scientism is the belief that scientific methods and models are not only useful, but the only valid way to understand reality. All questions, in this view—even those about consciousness, meaning, or value—must either be addressed by science, or dismissed entirely. Everything else is superstition, “woo woo”, or relegated to another department. Or seen as noise...
But this belief itself is not a scientific conclusion. It’s a kind of cultural inheritance—an unexamined assumption dressed in the clothes of rationality.
And like the homunculus, it leaves something important out.
Something is missing from that picture.
We have to scratch beneath the slick, speedily moving surface, and wipe the fog away—twice—to glimpse what’s being overlooked.
Even before the rise of modernity—the age of rational machines, scientific triumphs, rampant materialism (not to mention consumerism)—humans were grappling with this same question: What is this awareness?
It’s not a new pondering.
It echoes all the way back to the Upanishads (ancient Indian philosophical texts exploring the nature of reality, consciousness, and the self), and likely much earlier.
And all the shiny new toys and astonishing tools—rockets, quantum computers, dazzling AI demos—do not erase a single speck of the mystery.
They do not touch the fact of what is right in front of our eyes—or rather, behind them.
Way behind them.
So let us pause for a moment and look.
What is, in fact, behind the eyes’ experience?
What is behind perception—not the content of it (what’s in front of you), not the word “brain” or the image that comes with it—not even the sound or shape of the word “brain” itself.
What is aware of that idea?
That concept?
That belief?
What is aware of any belief, idea, image, or concept?
We cannot appeal to another concept to explain this, because that only brings us back to the beginning:
A concept can’t grasp another concept.
A thought can’t think another thought.
There must be something deeper.
Something behind the concept.
Something that is aware of the concept—whether the concept is “brain,” “space,” or anything else.
So whatever that is—that non-objective, ungraspable something—whatever is reading these words right now—that is what we’re pointing to
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