There are things I understand until I ask about them.
I know what it means to hear a voice. I recognise fear, relief and pain. I can speak about them, recall them and sometimes change the conditions in which they arise. But when I ask how it is possible to experience anything at all, I am no longer sure what I actually understand.
We can describe how sound reaches the ear, how nerve signals arise and what happens to them next. That description can be precise and immensely useful. Yet I also hear the sound. It has a particular character, distance and urgency. The voice of someone close to me is not interchangeable with another sound, even if they have the same volume.
How does this hearing belong to the processes we describe?
It was at questions like these that I repeatedly came to a halt. I could not think them through. Especially the question known in philosophy as the hard problem of consciousness: why is any brain activity experienced at all? Why does anything hurt, have a scent or become present as a thought while that activity occurs?
Even now, I have no answer I could regard as complete.
So I began a long dialogue with artificial intelligence. I put forward my thoughts, asked for explanations and returned to particular formulations. I explored what happens when we accept an idea and follow its consequences. Where does it break down? What does it assume? Is an apparent solution merely the problem under another name?
Essays emerged from these conversations. From the essays, this book is gradually taking shape.
I want to say this at the outset because the way the book came into being belongs to its subject matter. The questions involved a person who experiences his own life and a system capable of generating answers, connecting ideas and formulating objections. I do not infer from that capacity alone that it also experiences anything. What exactly such a system is in relation to consciousness remains one of the questions we will come to.
Dialogue with AI has its risks. A fluent answer can appear to be understanding. Agreement can encourage us where doubt would be more useful. And a well-constructed argument can rest on an assumption we have failed to question.
Acknowledging the collaboration is therefore not intended as a guarantee of quality. It is intended to let readers know how the text developed. I am responsible for what I accept, propose and present in this book.
The conversations have been given a book's form here. Exposition and passages of dialogue are arranged around questions, rather than as a transcript of everything that was said. Where a second voice appears, it should be read as a voice arising from this collaboration, not as the testimony of another conscious subject.
As the work progressed, a starting point gradually settled into place, one so simple as to seem almost suspicious: experience is present.
I can be mistaken about what I experience. I can misidentify a person, believe a false memory or attribute a reason to fear that it does not have. But the error must unfold somehow. Even doubt is being experienced right now.
This is where the inquiry I call The New Metaphysics, or TNM, begins.
The name may sound bolder than its first step. The fact of experience alone does not prove that the whole world is made of it. It does not say that the brain is merely a receiver, or that our attention brings things into existence. Such conclusions would require further argument. Some of them may not withstand scrutiny at all.
Still, it is worth trying to begin here. What changes if, in thinking about reality, we keep experience in view as something every explanation must take seriously? Could the structure of the world and its experienced presence be different ways in which one reality becomes accessible to us? Does that possibility help us understand anything, or does it merely move the difficulty one step further away?
That is what we will explore.
But this will not be only a book about the brain and ontology. The person asking these questions also feels fear, loves someone, wants to create something and knows he will die. I am interested in how our view of freedom, suffering or responsibility changes when we see a person as a place from which life is experienced. And in what it means to encounter another person whose experience I cannot enter, but whose life I can profoundly change.
I do not know whether we will find a metaphysical framework capable of sustaining all these questions. Some proposals will need correction. With others, we may discover that we should have abandoned them sooner.
But I would like the book to give readers more room to think. To make it possible to step outside familiar answers for a moment and examine what we take for granted in them. Disagreement can be as good an outcome as agreement, if we come to understand more clearly what we disagree with and why.
As you read these lines, something is happening. Perhaps you understand their meaning; perhaps a sentence irritates you. You hear the sounds around you, feel the position of your body and recall something of your own.
We do not yet have to agree on what all this is.
Something is present.
We can begin here.