Sunday 6 September 2015

What it is Like to be Me



There is something rather than nothing

This "something" exhibits orderliness

The exhibited orderliness takes the form of a perspective upon a world

I'm referring to this "something" as conscious experience.

The exhibited orderliness encompasses both the idea of a self in the world and also the idea of a world that the self is in (we could refer to these two ideas as the subjective pole of conscious experience and the objective pole of conscious experience respectively).

Since these two ideas are stable, this something (i.e. conscious experience) must be of a form that admits of this stability.

It's my conscious experience not in the sense of ownership, but rather in the sense that it has the form of a view upon a world from the perspective of an entity (the unique physical organism that refers to itself as "me") embedded within that world.

It is clear that the idea of my conscious experience is not the same as the idea of the world that the self is in -- the former might well be described as "what it is like to be" the self that is in the world.