Meditations on Consciousness

The Architectural Principles of the Philosophy of Mind

Meditation 1: What Is It Like to Be a Void Human?

An Introspection on Consciousness without Content

I.

In 1974, Thomas Nagel asked what it is like to be a bat. He was not asking about the bat's evolutionary history or the neurophysiology of its sonar. He was attempting to understand something else: what it feels like, from the inside, to be that creature.

Since then, fifty years of debate have produced many theories and little consensus in the Philosophy of Mind. Positions have multiplied and hardened. The mystery remains, and around it is a Gordian knot of arguments, counterarguments, and entrenched commitments.

I do not propose to untangle it. I want to set it aside and begin elsewhere. I want to start from nothing, and see what we can find out. Let us find out together.

But first, I want you to consider something.

You know what it feels like to be you, from the inside, to be a human being living in this time and place, reading these words. There is a felt quality to your experience, difficult to conceptualise but impossible to deny, that you have known all your life. When you see red, it feels like something. When pain moves through your body, it feels like something. When you love someone, it feels like something. All of this, woven together, constitutes the distinct what it is likeness to being human.

There is nothing it feels like to be a rock, even though we are presumably made up of the same fundamental particles. But there is something it is like to be conscious.

Nagel asked what it is like to be a bat. I ask a different question.

I do not ask about a foreign creature with alien physiology, with sensory dimensions beyond our access. I ask about a human being, genetically identical to you and I, who has existed since conception in a perfect Void.

No sensory input. No physical feeling. No interaction with anything or anyone.

A Void Human.

What is it like to be this creature? I do not know. Let us find out.

II.

Let me construct the thought experiment carefully.

A Void Human is a human being. Genetically identical to any of us. A fully formed human brain with a hundred billion neurons, a hundred trillion synaptic connections. All the biological machinery that, in us, supports the rich theater of conscious experience.

But the Void Human has existed from conception in complete sensory absence. No input has ever reached them. No light, no sound, no touch, no smell, no taste. No sense of their body in space. Nothing from outside; nothing from within.

And I want to push further. Let me stipulate that the Void Human has been somehow sustained without biological needs. They feel no hunger, no thirst, no discomfort of any kind. Their body exists but makes no demands. No urges, no drives, no wants pressing upon them.

This is, I recognize, an impossible scenario. No biological human could survive such conditions. The thought experiment describes something that could never actually exist.

But I am not interested in biological possibility. I am interested in isolating a question. I want to know what happens to consciousness when you subtract everything that consciousness is typically of. When you remove all content, all input, all engagement with a world.

The Void Human is a conceptual instrument. A way of asking: is consciousness the kind of thing that could exist without anything to be conscious of?

I genuinely do not know.

So I ask: what is it like to be a Void Human? Let me try to find out.

III.

I close my eyes and try to imagine the Void Human’s experience.
The first image that comes is darkness. A black space, empty and silent. I am suspended in it, weightless, alone. Nothing to see, nothing to hear. Just this. Darkness, and me in it.

But wait. Let me think more carefully about what I have just imagined. I think already I have made several mistakes. Let me take them one at a time.

Darkness. When I close my eyes, I see darkness. But see is the operative word. Darkness is a visual experience. There is something it is like to see darkness, a particular quality, a character. The visual field has not vanished; it has gone quiet. It still presents itself as a field and still offers itself to my awareness, only now it is filled with black rather than colour and shape. Darkness is what vision looks like when there is no light.

But the Void Human has never seen light. This means they have never seen darkness either. They have no visual experience at all, not reduced, not impaired, not the black of a lightless room. The modality itself is absent.

This is difficult to imagine. Let me try to find an analogy.

I have no experience of echolocation. Bats perceive the world through sound waves bouncing off surfaces, building a picture of their environment through echoes. I do not have this capacity. But here is the crucial thing: I do not experience a blank where echolocation would be. There is no echolocation-shaped hole in my experience, no absence that presents itself as absence. There is simply... nothing. The modality is not part of my experiential repertoire. I do not miss it, because there is no it for me to miss. I have no idea what I am not experiencing.

This, I think, is closer to the Void Human’s relation to vision. Not darkness. Not the visual field presenting as empty. But the absence of the visual field altogether. No black. No blank. No absence experienced as absence. Just no vision. The way I have no echolocation.

But I cannot quite get there. When I try to subtract my visual field rather than merely empty it, I find I cannot do it. I keep generating darkness, which is to say I keep generating visual experience. My visual system will not turn off from the inside.

Perhaps this is simply a limitation of imagination. I cannot imagine the Void Human’s lack of vision, but that does not mean there is something positive there for them. My failure to imagine nothing does not entail that they experience something.

Let me set vision aside and move on.

I return to my image: suspended in darkness, weightless, alone.

Suspended. Weightless.

Here is another mistake. When I imagine myself suspended, I feel something. A lightness in my stomach. A sense of my body hanging in space, unmoored from ground. My vestibular system reporting the absence of solid support beneath me. My proprioceptive system telling me where my limbs are, arms here, legs there, torso oriented this way, even though they touch nothing.

I have smuggled in the body.

The Void Human has no proprioception. Proprioception is the sense that tells me where my body is in space, the position of my limbs, the configuration of my joints. It is why I can touch my nose with my eyes closed. It is the felt sense of having a body arranged thus rather than so.

But the Void Human has never felt their body. They have no sense of where their limbs are, because they have never had such a sense. They have no experience of bodily configuration.

And not only proprioception. There is also the vestibular sense, the sense of balance, of orientation relative to gravity, of acceleration and rotation. When I imagine floating, I imagine the vestibular system reporting a particular state. Weightlessness. The absence of gravitational pull. A certain orientation in space. But the Void Human has no vestibular experience. They have no sense of up or down, no feeling of being oriented in any direction, no experience of balance or imbalance.

So not suspended. Not weightless. Not floating. These words all imply a felt body that I must subtract.

What would it be like to have no felt body? Again I reach for analogy. When my arm falls asleep, it goes numb. There is a strange deadness, a limb that feels like it belongs to someone else, a region of my body that has gone quiet. But numbness is itself a tactile quality, the feeling of reduced sensation. There is something it is like to feel numb. The arm has not vanished from my experience. It has merely changed character.

The Void Human's body has not gone numb. It has never been felt at all. There is no deadness, because deadness implies a prior aliveness that has been lost. There is no absence-of-feeling, because absence-of-feeling is still a way the body can feel. There is simply no body in experience. Not a numb body. Not an absent body. Not a body-shaped hole. No body.

I try to imagine this and fail. I am always somewhere, always oriented, always in possession of a felt body even when I am not attending to it. The body is the background of my experience, the stage on which everything else occurs. To subtract it entirely—I do not know what remains.

Let me continue.

Sound. In my original image, there was silence. Let me examine this.

Silence, I notice, is an auditory experience. When I sit in a quiet room, I hear the silence. This sounds like a contradiction, but it is not. The auditory field is still present, still offering itself to my awareness; it is simply empty of content. Silence has a quality—a texture, a character. The particular stillness of a quiet room is different from the silence after a loud noise, which is different from the silence of a library, which is different from the silence of snowfall. These silences have different feels. There is something it is like to hear each of them.

The Void Human has never heard sound. This means they have never heard silence either. Silence is meaningful only against a background of possible sound—it is the auditory field presenting as empty. But if you have never heard anything, there is no auditory field to present as empty. There is no silence. There is no auditory experience at all.

The same move I made with vision: not silence, but the absence of the auditory modality altogether. The way I have no magnetic field perception. Some animals can feel the Earth's magnetic field and use it for navigation. I cannot. But I do not experience a silence where magnetic perception would be. I do not experience anything at all in that dimension. The modality is simply absent.

Touch. In my image, nothing was touching me. But "nothing touching me" is still a tactile description—it describes the skin as not currently in contact with anything. This is itself a way of feeling: the feeling of skin that is bare, exposed, open to air. There is something it is like to feel untouched.

The Void Human has never felt anything touch their skin. But more than this: they have no tactile experience at all. Not the feeling of contact, not the feeling of exposure, not the feeling of nothing-touching. No pressure, no texture. The tactile modality absent entirely.

I am beginning to see the pattern. Each time I try to subtract a modality, my imagination fills it with the empty version of that modality rather than removing the modality altogether. I imagine darkness instead of no vision. Silence instead of no hearing. Weightlessness instead of no proprioception. Nothing-touching instead of no touch. My experiential field does not want to contract; it only wants to empty out.

But emptying out is not the same as subtracting. Darkness is still visual experience. Silence is still auditory experience. Weightlessness is still vestibular experience. These are experiences of absence, not absences of experience.

The Void Human, I am beginning to think, does not have experiences of absence. They have absences of experience. The modalities themselves are not present.

And there is more. I have not mentioned temperature—but I am always experiencing temperature, even now, even when I do not attend to it. The slight coolness of my hands. The warmth of the air. There is something it is like to feel thermally neutral, and something different it is like to feel cold, and something different again to feel warm. The Void Human has none of this.

I have not mentioned taste—but even now, with nothing in my mouth, there is a gustatory quality: the taste of my own mouth, the neutral baseline against which flavors would register. There is something it is like to taste nothing in particular. The Void Human has never tasted anything, including this nothing-in-particular.

I have not mentioned smell—but the "odorless" air I breathe has its own olfactory character. It is not the absence of smell; it is smell presenting a particular content: bland, unremarkable, "nothing." The Void Human has no sense of smell at all.

I find myself pausing here. These are modalities I have lived with my entire life. My entire life. I have never drawn a breath without some olfactory quality accompanying it. I have never existed for a single moment without temperature. I have never been without the taste of my own mouth. These experiences are so constant, so utterly pervasive, that I do not notice them. They are the water I swim in.

And yet to truly approach what it might be like to be the Void Human—if it is like anything at all—I must strip all of this away. Not just the obvious senses, vision and hearing, but everything. Every channel. Every modality. Every quality that I have taken to be inextricable from consciousness itself.

Perhaps this is what makes the thought experiment so difficult. I am not merely imagining a different experience. I am trying to imagine the removal of things I have never been without. Things I did not even know were things until I tried to subtract them.

Let me continue. There is one more modality I have not addressed, and it may be the most important.

Interoception. The sense of the internal state of the body. The feeling of my heart beating, or the absence of that feeling when I am not attending to it. The sensation of breath moving in and out. The subtle pressure of a full bladder. The warmth of blood circulating. The general felt sense of how my body is doing—tired, energized, tense, relaxed, healthy, unwell.

This is easy to overlook. When I think of the senses, I think of vision, hearing, touch—the modalities that tell me about the external world. But there is also a sense that tells me about myself. The interior of the body is not dark to experience; it has its own felt quality, its own way of showing up.

I have stipulated that the Void Human has no biological needs. They feel no hunger, no thirst, no fatigue. But even without needs, there would normally be interoceptive experience—the simple feeling of being a living body from the inside. The Void Human has none of this. No sense of heartbeat. No sense of breathing. No felt interior at all.

What is left?

I have subtracted vision, hearing, proprioception, vestibular sense, touch, temperature, smell, taste, interoception. I have removed the felt body and the sensed world. I have removed every channel through which experience might flow.

Let me try once more to imagine what remains.

I attempt to picture—no, not picture, that is visual. I attempt to conceive of a point of view that has no sensory experience whatsoever. No qualities of any kind coming in from any channel. Not darkness, not silence, not emptiness, not blankness. Not the absence of sensation experienced as absence. Just... no sensation. The modalities not merely empty but not there at all.

I find I cannot do it. My mind will not give me nothing. Every time I try, I generate something: a vague sense of space, a dim feeling of presence, a subtle awareness of being here even though there is no here. But these are experiences. They have qualities. They are something rather than nothing.

Is this failure mine? A limitation of imagination, trying to conceive of something that is genuinely inconceivable from the inside?

Let me retreat further. Perhaps there is something more fundamental than any sense. Perhaps, beneath all the modalities I have subtracted, there is a bare awareness that does not depend on any of them. Not awareness of anything—just awareness as such. The light of consciousness itself, prior to all content. Some philosophers speak this way: pure phenomenal presence, the simple fact of experience occurring, independent of what is experienced.

If this exists, perhaps the Void Human has it. Perhaps they are this bare witness, this pure awareness, simply witnessing nothing.

Let me try to find it in myself.

I turn my attention inward, looking for raw phenomenal presence independent of all content. Awareness itself, not awareness of anything in particular. The light, not what it illuminates.

I cannot locate it.

What I find is always specific. The feeling of my body in this chair. The hum of my thoughts. The quality of this moment as distinct from the moment before. A faint pressure behind my eyes. The sound of my own breathing. There is always something. When I try to subtract all of this, to find the awareness that remains when everything else is gone, I either find more content—subtle, quiet, but still content—or I find nothing at all.

The "pure awareness" I was looking for: perhaps it is not a discovery but a projection. Perhaps when I imagine bare phenomenal presence, I am really imagining very quiet phenomenal presence—experience with the volume turned down but not off. And perhaps this quietness is itself a quality, a character, something rather than nothing.

If so, then the Void Human would not have even this.

I am not certain. Perhaps there is a bare awareness that I cannot introspect because it is the very thing doing the introspecting. Perhaps it is too close to see. Perhaps the Void Human has this, and I simply cannot confirm it from here.

But I notice: every time I reach for contentless consciousness, I either find content or nothing. The middle term—awareness without qualities, experience without character, the light shining on nothing—keeps slipping away. It may be that this middle term does not exist. That "pure awareness without anything to be aware of" is a phrase that sounds meaningful but refers to nothing real.

I will hold this as an open question. But the suspicion is growing: perhaps there is no residue. Perhaps consciousness is not a light that could shine on nothing, but something more entangled with its objects than that. Perhaps, in the Void Human, there is no one home.

IV.

Let me approach from another angle. Let us think about thought. Thought, thinking, imagination, that voice in our head; these seem nearly an inevitable result of a conscious mind, and it is difficult to imagine a conscious being without thought.

Instead of trying to imagine the Void Human's experience directly, let me ask what thinking requires, and then perhaps be able to inhabit what its thinking is like, if there is any at all.

I notice that I think in various media. I think in language: an inner monologue, a stream of words that I direct toward problems, memories, plans. The voice in my head, commenting, questioning, narrating.

I think in images. Visual imagination, the capacity to picture things in the mind's eye. I can see a face, conjure a place, envision a scene that is not before me.

I think in sounds sometimes. A melody running through my head. The remembered voice of a friend. The way a sentence will sound before I speak it.

I think in bodily feelings. Kinaesthetic imagination, the sense of what it would be like to perform an action, to move in a certain way. When I imagine throwing a ball, there is something motor in the imagining.

Every modality in which I think is closed to the Void Human.

They have no language. Language is socially acquired. It requires exposure to other language users, to a community of speakers who share meanings and conventions, or at the very least, things to be the objects which language manipulates into syntax and semantics.

The Void Human has encountered no other minds, heard no words, seen no gestures. They have nothing to think in, linguistically speaking.

They have no visual imagery. The capacity to picture things requires having seen things. The Void Human has never seen anything. They have no visual experience to draw on, no stock of images to manipulate. They cannot picture a face because they have never seen a face. They cannot picture anything.

They have no auditory imagery. They have never heard anything.

They have no kinaesthetic imagination. They have no sense of their body, no proprioceptive experience to draw on.

Every modality of thought is absent. The Void Human has no medium for thinking.

But perhaps there is more to this. Even abstract reasoning, even thought that does not seem tied to any particular sensory modality, seems to require something. We manipulate concepts. But where do concepts come from?

The concept of red originates in encounters with red things. The concept of larger originates in comparisons. The concept of cause originates in observing regularities, in pushing and pulling, in seeing one thing follow another.

Where do the Void Human's concepts come from? They have no experience from which concepts could be abstracted. They have never encountered anything. The machinery of conceptual thought is perhaps present (the neurons that could encode concepts) but there is nothing encoded. The system has never been given anything to work with.

And what would the Void Human think about? Thinking is typically directed at something. A problem to solve. A memory to examine. A possibility to entertain. A desire to fulfill.

The Void Human has no problems. Nothing has ever challenged them.

They have no memories. Nothing has ever happened to them.

They have no sense of possibility. They do not know that things could be otherwise than they are. (Otherwise than what? There is no what.)

They have no desires. Nothing has ever been lacked, so nothing has ever been wanted. (Here is a good time to note the initial stipulation that the Void Human has no bodily needs and is sustained by the Void; I think the addition of bodily needs would change this thought experiment massively, as we shall see in the next Meditation).

I am growing more and more sure – though not certain – that the Void Human does not think.  Their cognitive machinery may be intact in some biological sense: the neural circuits are there, waiting. But they have never been given anything to think about or think with.

V.

But wait. Perhaps thinking is not required for experience. Perhaps there could be raw feeling without cognition: pure sensation, pure affect, pure phenomenality.

Even if the Void Human cannot think, perhaps they can feel.

Let me consider this carefully.

What would feeling without content be?

I think first of emotions. Fear. Joy. Sadness. Anger. Perhaps the Void Human feels some dim feeling of loneliness, of boredom. Perhaps they long to be a Human like you and I full of rich sensory experience, and escape their miserable Void. Perhaps they feel a stark, bare sadness because of the irrevocability of their situation. Yes, I think, maybe this is the bare feeling of what it is like to be a Void Human!

But wait. I hesitate now, and catch myself making a mistake. When we assert that the Void Human might feel some thin emotion, look at what we have quietly smuggled in! “Loneliness because they long to be a Human”, “Boredom because they desire to engage their mind with rich sensory experiences and thought’, “Sadness because of the misery of the situation and their desire to escape it, to be normal.”

We have smuggled in belief, desire, knowledge of other possibilities, aspiration, counterfactual thinking, and more! We have smuggled in a whole world the Void Human has no access to!

Fear is fear of something. Even when the fear is vague, diffuse, objectless (the free-floating anxiety that sometimes visits) there is a sense of threat, of something wrong, of danger that cannot be located but is nonetheless there. The intentionality is built into the emotion. Fear points.

Sadness is sadness about something, caused by some other thing. A loss. A disappointment. A recognition of transience. A desire to escape a situation.

 The Void Human has no objects, no situations, no others, no events. They have nothing to fear, nothing to rejoice in, nothing to mourn. The very structure of emotion, its intentionality, its directedness, seems unavailable to them. They cannot feel afraid because there is nothing to be afraid of and they have no concept of threat. They cannot feel happy because there is nothing to be happy about and they have no concept of good fortune.

With this, I am growing more and more sure that the Void Human cannot experience even the most dim sense of an emotion.

Perhaps I should look for something more primitive. What about basic hedonic tone? The most fundamental dimension of feeling: feeling good versus feeling bad. Pleasure and pain as raw qualities, prior to any cognitive interpretation.

Surely there is something it is like to feel good. And something it is like to feel bad. And perhaps these do not require objects. Perhaps there is a brute phenomenal positivity or negativity that is prior to all content, all interpretation, all thought.

I find myself uncertain here.

Even hedonic tone, when I examine it, seems to require contrast. Good is meaningful against bad. Pleasure is defined against pain. The positive is positive relative to the negative, or at least to the neutral.

The Void Human has never experienced anything that felt bad. So they have no basis for recognizing something as good. They have never experienced variation in hedonic tone, so they have no scale, no gradient, no comparative framework within which good or bad could have meaning.

One might respond: perhaps there is a constant hedonic tone. Neither experienced as good nor as bad, because there is nothing to compare it to, but still present, still felt, still constituting a what it is likeness.

I struggle to make sense of this. A constant phenomenal state with no variation, no contrast, no differentiation: would it be experienced at all? Or would it be like a background condition that is always present and therefore never noticed?

Consider: I do not experience the constant pressure of the atmosphere. It is simply the baseline against which variations are felt. When the pressure drops, I notice. But the constant baseline is invisible to me. I do not feel it.

Perhaps a constant, unvarying hedonic tone would be similar. Not experienced as anything at all, because there is no contrast to make it salient. Not dim experience, not quiet experience, but no experience: the constant signal that drops out of awareness entirely.

Let me retreat even further.

Perhaps hedonic tone is the wrong place to look. Perhaps I should ask about something even more basic: the activity of the brain itself.

The Void Human has a brain. A hundred billion neurons, a hundred trillion synaptic connections. And neurons do not sit inert. They fire. They spark and cascade and form patterns, driven by their own electrochemical dynamics. Even without input from the world, there would be activity. Spontaneous firing. Neural noise. The brain doing something.

Could this be enough? Could sheer neural activity, even unstructured, even unformatted by encounter with a world, constitute some flicker of experience?

I sit with this question.

The neurons fire. But is this enough for a what-it-is-likeness? For subjective experience? After everything we have stripped away—the senses, the body, the self, thought, time, mattering—could mere electrochemical activity, on its own, give rise to something it is like to be?

I think about rocks. The molecules in a rock jostle and vibrate with thermal energy. There is activity there too—constant, ceaseless movement at the microscopic level. And computers: circuits flickering with electrical activity, signals propagating through silicon.

We do not usually think there is something it is like to be a rock. Or a computer. But why not? What makes neural activity different?

Perhaps it is the type of activity. Neurons are special, doing something that molecules and circuits do not. But what is that something? And would the Void Human's neurons be doing it, given that they have never been shaped by input, never been organized into sensory modalities, never been formatted by encounter?

Perhaps it is the organization of the activity. Not just firing, but firing in structured patterns, patterns that constitute representations, that are about something. But then I am back to the same problem: the Void Human's brain has never been given anything to organize around. The patterns, if there are patterns, are not patterns of anything.

I find myself uncertain.

Perhaps there is something here. Perhaps unstructured neural firing constitutes some thin phenomenality that I cannot imagine from my position. Some what-it-is-likeness so minimal, so formless, that it shares nothing with the rich experience I know. I cannot rule this out.

But if so, I do not know what to make of it. It would be experience without content, without structure, without differentiation, without a self to whom it appears. At some point, I have subtracted so much that I am no longer sure what I am pointing at when I use the word "experience." The concept starts to dissolve.

Perhaps the Void Human has this dissolving thing. Perhaps there is some flicker in the noise.

Or perhaps the flicker requires more than noise. Perhaps it requires the noise to have been shaped into signal. And perhaps, without a world to do the shaping, there is no signal at all.

I do not know. But I notice that even here, at the most basic level I can imagine, I cannot find solid ground. The retreat continues, and I am not sure where it ends.

VI.

Let me try some comparisons. The Void Human is not a case we encounter in nature, but there are natural cases that might illuminate aspects of the question.

What is it like to be a human embryo, a few weeks after conception?

At this stage, there is a cluster of cells, then a developing organism. The neural tube is forming but not yet organized into anything resembling a brain. There are no sensory organs, no capacity for input, no structures that could plausibly support experience.

Is there something it is like to be a three-week-old embryo?

I am inclined to say no. The embryo is alive. It is human in the genetic sense. It is developing according to a biological program. But there is no apparatus for experience. The lights are not dim; they are not on at all. There is no perspective from which things appear. There is no someone there, not yet.

Now consider the newborn.

Here there is clearly something happening. The infant is bombarded with sensory input. Light, sound, touch, temperature: the overwhelming novelty of everything. William James called it a "blooming, buzzing confusion." The newborn does not understand any of it, cannot categorize or interpret, has no concepts with which to organize the flood. But there is raw phenomenal experience occurring. There is a what-it-is-likeness to being a newborn, however chaotic and unstructured.

What is the difference between the embryo and the newborn?

It is not merely neural complexity. The late-term fetus has a brain not radically different from the newborn's—and indeed, it already receives input: muffled sounds, the sensation of movement, the beginnings of engagement with a world. What matters is not the complexity of the machinery but whether the machinery is running. Whether it is being shaped by encounter.

The newborn's brain is being activated. Formatted. Carved into patterns by the regularities and variations of the world. Light hits the retina and triggers neural responses that propagate through the visual system. Sound activates the auditory cortex. Touch stimulates the skin and sends signals cascading inward. The machinery is being initialized.

The embryo, by contrast, has no such engagement. Its proto-neural structures are developing but not yet receiving input, not yet being shaped by encounter with a world. It is like a machine being assembled but not yet turned on.

And here I notice something important about the Void Human. They are a strange hybrid of these cases. They have the neural complexity of an adult—all the machinery, fully formed. But they have something like the experiential situation of the embryo. The machinery has never been initialized. Never been formatted by input. Never been turned on.

This suggests something that feels important: neural complexity, though necessary, may not be sufficient for consciousness. The brain does not spontaneously generate new forms of experience just by existing.

One might object: what about dreams? Hallucinations? Here the brain generates experience without current input. Does this not show that the machinery can run on its own?

But consider what dreams are made of. I can dream of a pink elephant presiding over Mars. I can dream of flying through pre-historic Earth. I can dream of people I have never met, places I have never been. I can even dream of a massive dinosaur falling in love with a bottle of Sprite. But every element of these dreams is drawn from experience I have had. The elephant is composed of elephants I have seen and the colour pink I have encountered. The flying draws on sensations of movement and weightlessness and ideas presented in books and movies. The strangest dream is still a recombination of experiential materials I have gathered.

What I cannot do is dream in entirely new forms of experience. I cannot dream in five dimensions. I cannot hallucinate the unique what-it-is-likeness of a shark's ability to feel electric fields. I can understand that sharks have this capacity. I can state it, describe it, explain the biology if I have studied it. But I cannot dream the unique what-is-it-likeness. The quale is unavailable to me because I have never had the raw material from which such a quale could be constructed.

And this makes me wonder whether the Void Human's situation is similar. Perhaps experience is as unavailable to them as electric-field-perception is to me—not merely difficult to achieve, but impossible without the raw materials. The Void Human has never encountered anything. They have no experiential vocabulary, no stock of qualia, no materials from which even the simplest experience could be composed.

The machinery is there. But machinery that has never been given anything to process, that has never been formatted by encounter with a world—perhaps such machinery does not produce experience. Perhaps it sits there, inert, like a computer that has never been booted.

I do not know. But the comparison suggests a direction: consciousness may not be intrinsic to brains. It may be what happens when brains engage with worlds.

VII.

I want to think now about selfhood. Does the Void Human have a self?

The question of what the self is has occupied philosophers for centuries, and I do not intend to resolve it here. But there is a minimal notion that seems relevant: the self as a locus of experience, a perspective from which things appear, an I to whom experiences happen and from whom intentions and actions originate.

This feels like the most basic thing. Before all the complexities of identity—personality, memory, narrative, social role—there is simply this: a subject. A someone. A point of view that is mine rather than yours or no one's.

Does the Void Human have even this?

Let me think about how selfhood originates in ordinary human beings.

Newborns, I am told, do not distinguish self from world. The breast might as well be part of them; their own hand is as foreign as anything else. There is experience, I have suggested—the blooming, buzzing confusion—but it is not yet organized around a self-world distinction. There is sensation, but no me having the sensation as opposed to a world producing it. No inside and outside. Just: this.

How does the distinction emerge?

I think it begins with agency. With discovering what responds to the will and what does not.

Consider: some things in the infant's experiential field are controllable. There is an impulse, and then the arm moves. Another impulse, and the hand closes. There is a correlation between something—we might call it willing, or intending, or trying—and something happening. The infant does not have these concepts, but they have the experience: this responds to that.

Other things do not respond. The face above them moves according to its own logic. The sounds in the environment happen independently of any impulse. The mobile spins whether the infant wills it or not.

This difference—between what moves when I try and what moves on its own—creates, I think, the first boundary. The first crack in the undifferentiated field. On one side: the sphere of agency, what responds to my will. On the other side: everything else, what I merely encounter.

This is not yet a concept of self and world. It is more primitive than that. It is a felt difference. A boundary that shows up in experience before it is thought.

But there is more to selfhood than agency.

Let me think about other minds.

From the beginning, the infant is surrounded by others who see them. Faces that respond, that mirror, that treat the infant as a someone. The mother's gaze meets the infant's gaze and something happens—a recognition, a response, a loop of mutual attention.

This is not passive. The others are not merely part of the environment. They are actively constituting the infant as a self.

They name the infant. "You are Sarah." A word that picks out this particular being, that follows her through time, that she will eventually use to refer to herself.

They address the infant as you. "You're hungry, aren't you?" "You want to be held?" The pronoun that creates a second-person perspective, that positions the infant as someone who can be spoken to, who has states that can be inquired about.

They treat the infant as a persistent entity with a history. "You were fussy yesterday." "You always smile when you see the dog." They weave narratives in which the infant is a continuing character, someone who did things in the past and will do things in the future.

The self, I am beginning to think, is not something we simply have. It is something that crystallizes through being seen. Through being named, addressed, narrated. We become selves partly because others treat us as selves.

And then there is language.

Language does something peculiar to selfhood. It gives us the word I.

I is a strange word. It refers to whoever is speaking it. When I say "I," it means me. When you say "I," it means you. The reference shifts with the speaker. And yet the word remains the same. To use the word I is already to have a self-concept—to understand that there is a perspective here, a someone who is speaking, a subject who can refer to itself.

Before language, is there an I?

Perhaps there is something like a felt self. The boundary created by agency. The subject constituted by others' recognition. But the explicit self-concept, the ability to think I am, I want, I did—this seems to require the linguistic tool. The pronoun that lets me refer to myself as an object of my own thought.

The Void Human has no language. They have never heard a word, never been taught to speak, never acquired the symbolic system that would let them think in propositions. They have no I. Not just no word for themselves—no capacity for the kind of self-reference that the word enables.

Now let me consider what all of this means for the Void Human.

They have no agency because there is nothing to act upon. To discover the boundary between self and world, you must try to move something and see whether it responds. The infant learns that their arm responds to their will but the mobile does not. This requires a world with things in it—some controllable, some not. The Void Human has no such world. There is nothing to try to move. No feedback. No discovery of the difference between what responds and what merely happens.

Without this difference, there is no boundary. No inside and outside. No self and world.

They have no others. No faces that see them, respond to them, name them. No one has ever addressed them as you. No one has ever treated them as a persistent someone with a history and a future. The social constitution of selfhood has never occurred.

They have no language. No I with which to refer to themselves. No capacity for the kind of explicit self-concept that lets me think about myself as myself.

Every source of selfhood I can identify is absent.

And I notice something: the same pattern I found with the senses. In Section III, I discovered that each modality requires contrast to show up as experience. Darkness is meaningful against light. Silence against sound. The empty version of a modality is still experience; the absent modality is nothing at all.

Perhaps selfhood is similar. Perhaps the self is not a thing I simply am, but a boundary that emerges through differentiation. Me versus not-me. What responds versus what merely happens. What I control versus what I encounter.

If so, then the Void Human has no self. Not because they lack some metaphysical soul-substance, but because the conditions for differentiation have never been met. There is nothing to differentiate from. The entire field—if there is a field at all—is uniform. No boundary. No contrast. No figure against ground, because there is neither figure nor ground.

And this raises a disturbing possibility. If experience requires a subject—if there must be a someone for there to be something it is like to be that someone—then the Void Human's lack of self is another reason to doubt that there is experience present at all.

Perhaps it is not merely that the Void Human has no experiences. Perhaps there is no Void Human. No one there to have or lack experiences. Not a someone in darkness, waiting. Not a bare witness, watching nothing.

No one at all.

VIII.

I keep finding the same structure everywhere I look.

Sensory experience requires contrast—darkness against light, silence against sound. The Void Human has no contrast, so no sensory experience. Selfhood requires differentiation—me against not-me, what responds against what merely happens. The Void Human has nothing to differentiate from, so no self. Thought requires materials—concepts drawn from encounter, a medium in which to think. The Void Human has no materials, so no thought.

The same pattern, again and again. Consciousness, it seems, is not a self-sufficient thing. It requires conditions. And the Void Human meets none of them.

But let me push a little further. There are aspects of experience so fundamental that we barely notice them—so woven into the fabric of consciousness that they seem to be the fabric itself. Even these, I suspect, are absent for the Void Human.

Consider time.

What is it like to experience time? I try to attend to it directly. There is... a flow. A movement. Something like a current that carries me forward. This moment arises, blooms, and is already fading as the next one emerges. A thought forms, lingers, dissolves into another thought. A sensation peaks and subsides. There is a texture to this, a particular what-it-is-likeness to temporal experience. The felt sense of now constantly refreshing itself.

But what is this flow made of?

When I look closely, I find that time shows up through change. This moment feels different from the last one because something has shifted. A thought has completed. A sound has faded. My posture has adjusted slightly. The quality of light has changed. Even when I sit perfectly still, trying to experience pure duration, there is micro-change: the breath moves, attention wanders and returns, subtle sensations arise and pass. The flow of time is constituted by the flow of changing contents.

What would time be without change?

I try to imagine it. A moment that does not give way to another moment. A now that does not refresh. But I cannot get there. Every time I try to imagine a static now, I find myself imagining waiting—and waiting is already temporal, already involves the felt sense of duration, of time passing slowly. I cannot imagine time without change because I have never experienced it. Perhaps it is incoherent. Perhaps time without change is not time at all.

The Void Human has no change. Nothing happens. Nothing shifts. There is no this-then-that, no arising and passing, no succession of contents. If all moments are identical—if "moments" even means anything when there is nothing to distinguish them—then there is no flow. No current. No temporal experience.

They have no memory, because nothing has happened to remember. Memory is the trace of past experience, and there is no past experience to leave traces. They have no anticipation, because anticipation requires a basis for expectation—patterns observed, regularities learned, futures that might unfold. The Void Human has observed nothing, learned nothing, has no basis for expecting anything.

What is left? Not an eternal present. "Present" is defined against past and future; it is the moment that is not-past and not-yet-future. Without past and future, there is no present either. What remains is not even stillness, because stillness is a temporal quality—the felt sense of time passing slowly, of nothing happening yet. What remains is something more like... no time at all. Atemporal existence. If "existence" is the right word.

I do not know what this would be like. I suspect it would not be like anything.

And then there is mattering.

When I examine my experience, I find that things matter to me. This is not an occasional feature of consciousness; it is pervasive. The world shows up with valence. This is pleasant, that is unpleasant. This is interesting, that is boring. This matters, that does not. Even the most neutral experience—sitting here quietly, nothing much happening—has a texture of okayness. A low-level sense that things are basically all right. And that okayness is meaningful; it could have been otherwise. Things could be not all right. The okayness registers against a background of possible not-okayness.

What is it like, this mattering? I try to attend to it. There is... a directedness. A caring. Some things pull me toward them; others push me away. Some things feel important; others feel trivial. The coffee I am drinking matters to me—its warmth, its taste, the small pleasure of it. The discomfort in my lower back matters—it nags, it wants to be addressed. Even abstract things matter: whether I am making progress on this meditation, whether I am understanding something or fooling myself.

Mattering structures everything. It determines what I attend to, what I pursue, what I avoid. It gives experience its shape, its priorities, its meaning. A world without mattering would be... what? A world in which nothing is good or bad, nothing is important or trivial, nothing calls for attention or action. A world of pure indifference.

Could the Void Human have mattering?

I think about what mattering requires. It seems to require stakes. Something must be at risk, something must be capable of going well or badly, for anything to matter. My coffee matters because I have preferences, and those preferences can be satisfied or frustrated. My discomfort matters because I have a body that can be comfortable or uncomfortable, and I care about this difference.

But stakes require... so much. They require needs—things that must be satisfied for the organism to thrive. They require preferences—a history of experiences that were pleasant or unpleasant, from which preferences could be learned. They require a self for things to matter to. They require a world in which things can go various ways.

The Void Human has none of this. They have no needs—I stipulated this at the outset. They have no preferences, because preferences require encounters with things worth preferring or avoiding. They have no self for things to matter to. They have no world in which things could go well or badly.

Mattering, I realize, is not a primitive feature of consciousness. It is downstream of everything else. It requires sense experience, through which pleasures and pains are felt. It requires memory, through which preferences are learned. It requires anticipation, through which futures can matter. It requires selfhood, a someone for whom things can be at stake. It requires thought, through which importance can be assessed.

The Void Human lacks all of these. Mattering is not just absent for them—it is so far removed from their situation that the concept barely applies. It is like asking whether a rock has preferences. The question misfires. The preconditions are not met.

Time and mattering. Two things so fundamental to my experience that I cannot imagine consciousness without them. And yet both require foundations the Void Human lacks. Succession requires change; the Void Human has no change. Mattering requires stakes; the Void Human has no stakes. And stakes require sense, memory, anticipation, selfhood, thought—the very things I have already found to be absent.

The absences compound. Each one I identify turns out to depend on others already missing. They do not leave a residue. They do not leave a thin, impoverished experience. They leave, I am increasingly convinced, nothing at all.

IX.

I have been circling the question from many directions. Let me try to articulate what I think I have found.

The Void Human lacks:

Perceptual content. No sensory experience of any modality.

Bodily content. No interoception, no proprioception, no needs or drives.

Emotional content. Nothing to feel about. No objects of emotion.

Cognitive content. No language, no concepts, no material for thought, nothing to think about.

Memory. Nothing has happened. There is nothing to remember.

Anticipation. No basis for expectation. No future-directedness.

Self-world distinction. No differentiation. No boundary. No me and not-me.

Temporal experience. No succession. No flow. No now distinguishable from then.

Mattering. Nothing good or bad. Nothing at stake. No caring.

When all of this is subtracted, what remains?

I find myself inclined to say: nothing remains.

The Void Human is not a someone in the dark, waiting for light. They are not a bare witness anticipating something to witness. They are not a light shining on nothing, still luminous in the absence of objects.

There is, I think, nothing it is like to be them.

But I want to hold this carefully. I am not certain. I am reasoning at the edge of what I can conceive, and conceivability is not a reliable guide to possibility. My imagination is limited. My concepts are forged in a life of rich experience. Perhaps there is something here that I cannot grasp. But I will state that my intuition is this: there is no ‘what is it likeness’ to a Void Human, just as there is no ‘what is it likeness’ to be a rock. Although, I suppose, the difference is the Void Human has the immediate potential to gain subjective experience.

What I can say with confidence is this, after all of this ruminating: even if there is something, some bare flicker, some minimal presence in the Void Human, it is so impoverished as to approach nothingness.

X.

I have been circling the question from many directions. Let me try to articulate what I think I have found.

The Void Human lacks sensory experience—not darkness and silence, but the absence of the visual and auditory modalities altogether. They lack a felt body—no proprioception, no interoception, no sense of being a physical thing. They lack thought—no language, no concepts, no materials with which to think and nothing to think about. They lack a self—no differentiation between me and not-me, no boundary carved by agency or recognition. They lack time—no succession, no flow, no change to constitute a before and after. They lack mattering—no stakes, no valence, no caring.

When all of this is subtracted, what remains?

I find myself inclined to say: nothing remains.

The Void Human is not a someone in the dark, waiting for light. They are not a bare witness anticipating something to witness. They are not a light shining on nothing, still luminous in the absence of objects.

There is, I think, nothing it is like to be them. Just as there is nothing it is like to be a rock—though the Void Human, unlike a rock, has the potential to become conscious, should the world ever reach them.

But I want to hold this carefully. I am reasoning at the edge of what I can conceive, and conceivability is not a reliable guide to possibility. My imagination was forged in a life of rich experience. Perhaps there is something here that I cannot grasp.

What I can say is this: even if there is something—some bare flicker, some minimal presence—it is so impoverished as to approach nothingness. Almost everything we associate with consciousness is absent.

I began by invoking Nagel's bat. But the Void Human raises a different kind of question.

Nagel was concerned with the limits of knowledge. Can we understand an alien form of experience from the outside? The bat is conscious; we simply cannot access its consciousness from our human position. The gap is epistemic. We lack the knowledge, perhaps necessarily.

The Void Human raises a question not about the limits of knowledge but about the conditions for experience itself. There may be no consciousness here for us to fail to understand. The question is not what the Void Human's experience is like. The question is whether there is experience at all.

The bat shows us that consciousness comes in forms we cannot fully imagine—forms shaped by sensory modalities and ways of life foreign to our own.

The Void Human shows us that consciousness does not come for free. It requires something. Engagement. Differentiation. Content. A world.

And this suggests something about the nature of qualia themselves. The redness of red, the painfulness of pain—these are not intrinsic properties that brains simply produce. They are relational. Carved out through encounter. Through contrast. Through a history of engagement with a world that has varied features to which a brain can respond. Take away the encounters, the contrasts, the structure, and there is no redness. Not because the neurons are absent, but because redness requires more than neurons.

The Void Human marks something like a zero point. The absence from which consciousness must be built.

I do not know exactly what it requires, what the minimum is, what ingredients are essential and which can substitute for others. That seems like a question for further investigation.

But for now, let me sit with what this meditation has suggested: that we are not guaranteed by our biology. That the self is achieved, not given. That consciousness is constructed through encounter something, and without that encounter, the construction may not occur.

And this possibility—a human brain with no one home—is strange and unsettling. It suggests that what I am, what it is like to be me, is not a necessary consequence of having neurons arranged just so, as we are so apt to think. It is a consequence of having lived. Of having encountered. Of having been shaped by a world that gave me something to be conscious of.

Without that world, perhaps there is nothing.

I am not sure. But let us stop here, and rest. The next Meditation calls.