On What You Are

On What You Are

You are not what you have been told you are by the various reductionisms that have shaped modern self-understanding. You are not a ghost in a machine, an immaterial soul somehow attached to flesh, because there is no attachment problem when properly understood—the experiential and the physical are not two things requiring connection but one thing under different descriptions at different scales, and at the scale where you exist, you are not ghostly but as substantial as anything else that takes and makes differences at that scale. Neither are you merely neurons firing, reducible without remainder to electrochemical transactions, because reduction is the wrong frame entirely—chemistry does not reduce to physics in a way that makes chemistry unreal, and you do not reduce to neuroscience in a way that makes you unreal. What you are is a pattern at the experiential scale, a pattern with its own causal powers, its own dynamics, its own way of existing that is not derivative of some more fundamental level but is, at its level, as fundamental as anything gets. The question “but what are you really?” presupposes that there is a level of description that is more real than others, and this presupposition is precisely what the framework denies. You are really what you are at every scale at which you exist, and at the experiential scale, what you are is an integrated locus of cause and effect, a place where the universe folds back on itself and becomes, for a while, somebody.

This matters because how you understand what you are shapes how you relate to your own existence. If you believe yourself to be an illusion—a convenient fiction that neurons generate for reasons of evolutionary efficiency—then your suffering is also illusory, your flourishing is also illusory, and the whole project of trying to live well becomes a kind of elaborate game played by no one for no stakes. If you believe yourself to be a soul trapped in matter, temporarily slumming in flesh before returning to your true home, then this life is a waiting room, and the question of how to configure your experience here becomes secondary to the question of what happens after. But if you understand yourself as we have described—as a real pattern at a real scale, with real valence built into your structure, mortal but not therefore meaningless—then the project of living becomes neither game nor waiting room but the actual thing, the only thing, the thing that is happening and that matters in its happening.