Reflection: What Is It Like to Be You?

Prompts to consider

• Right now, without moving, attend to your current experience, the visual field, the felt weight of your body, the ambient sounds, any current emotion. This is qualia: the raw feel of being you, right now. Now try to describe it completely in functional terms, what it does, what it causes, how it relates to your behavior. Do you feel like something is left out of the functional description? What exactly is the residue?
• The zombie thought experiment: a being physically identical to you but with no inner experience. Does this seem conceivable to you? If you imagine being a zombie, going through all your behaviors with nothing it is like to do so, does that scenario make sense? If it does, does it trouble you that physicalism might not be able to explain why you are not a zombie?
• If panpsychism were true, if experience in some form were a fundamental feature of the universe, present at every scale, what would that change about how you relate to the non-human world? Would it feel like a strange and uncomfortable view, or like a recognition of something you half-believed anyway? What is your gut reaction, and what does it reveal?