Looking For The One Who Is Looking

Warning! This post doesn't have anything to do with politics.

I used to believe in souls. Even after I'd given up on religion and gods, I still told myself that there was some kind of energy field that lived inside our mortal shells. Whether that soul remembered its past lives or not, or whether it reincarnated in some way, my personal jury was out on the whole thing, but for a long time, I held on to that notion.

That too, passed.

There’s a curious exercise in mindfulness meditation where you’re told to look at an object across the room, to feel yourself here and the object there, and then —this part is a bit strange – turn your awareness inward, and look for the one who is looking. It’s an intellectual backflip that sounds simple, but honestly, doesn't feel anything like that in practice. If anything, it messes with your head. Which, I suppose, is the point.

The neuroscientist and mindfulness teacher, Sam Harris, often uses this exercise as a gateway to dismantle the illusion of the “I.” His "Waking Up" app is one of two meditation apps I subscribe to. For the curious, the second one is "Calm," created by Tamara Levitt. I use both of these, but for different reasons. Perhaps I'll cover that in a future post. For now, let's get back to "turning your attention inward."

What you’re supposed to discover, or rather fail to discover, is the observer. No matter how hard you look, the “looking” reveals nothing solid, no central entity observing. There’s only the awareness itself and the scene it takes in. The “I” evaporates, leaving behind… well, what exactly? And this, friends, Romans, and whoever is out there, is where things get interesting.

When I first encountered this idea, I didn’t know what to expect, but even before being formally guided, I had a sense: if you really try to find the “I,” there’s nothing looking back. There’s just the totality of the scene. You've got the object across the room, the hum of the furnace, traffic noises, the faint sensation of pressure against your bottom, and so on. The sense of separateness, of “me” observing the world, starts to unravel.

The philosopher Douglas Harding captured this beautifully in his metaphor of “living without a head.” If you think about it, you’ve never directly seen your own head. Sure, mirrors and reflections give you a hint, but from your immediate perspective, the world is just everything that's around you, including you. It’s not so much that you’re looking out from inside a head; the “head” is just part of the larger scope of experience.

If you've read some of my earlier posts, you'll have noticed that I'm a little obsessed with the idea of consciousness. Of the self, and the continuation of that self. I've actually lost sleep thinking about it. Who am I? Who are you?

What if consciousness isn’t something possessed by an “I” at all? Instead, it’s the baseline “is-ness” of everything, if that's a word. Harris and others suggest that our sense of self, the feeling of being a distinct observer, is a product of filtering. The brain, with its cognitive limitations (Miller’s Law tells us we can juggle only five to seven items in working memory), creates the illusion of a central curator; an “I" to manage this this whole filtering process. But when we open our awareness to everything, sights, sounds, smells, bodily sensations, that curator invariably gets distracted. It gets overwhelmed, then it dissolves, and what’s left is pure unadulterated experience.

So, here's the thing. This “failure” of the self to assert itself in open awareness is, paradoxically, the big revelation. The observer doesn’t exist because it doesn’t need to. Consciousness just is. And that kind of scares me and sets me up for more sleepless nights. But let's put that aside for a moment.

The neuroscientific angle here is fascinating. The brain’s default mode network (DMN), responsible for self-referential thinking, often goes all quiet in meditative states. Without this network weaving a narrative of “I” at the center of things, the illusion of self fades. This aligns with insights from philosophers like David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel.

Chalmers, in his “hard problem of consciousness,” asks why subjective experience exists at all, sometimes referred to as qualia. Why is there something it feels like to be conscious? That's not an easy question to answer. That's why it's a hard problem.

And then there's Thomas Nagel. In his famous essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, Nagel questions our ability to ever truly understand another being’s subjective experience. We can imagine what it feels like to be another person, or our cats, if you like, but how do we know for sure? Consciousness, by its nature, is locked in subjectivity. How is that possible when there’s no solid “I” behind it?

Let’s loop back to that filtering mechanism. The “I” isn’t a static thing; it’s a byproduct of the brain’s relentless effort to organize and prioritize. When you’re scrolling through a news feed (doom scrolling?), choosing what to focus on, your sense of self feels solid because the filter is active. You’re actively curating reality in manageable chunks (Miller, again). Yet, overwhelm the filter, as happens in mindfulness exercises where you are trying to pay attention to everything, and the curator disappears, leaving only the unfiltered chaos of everything. Consciousness isn't something inside you, it's the totality of experience in which you are a part.

Some of you are probably thinking that I'm going to talk about AI now. You would be right.

If the “I” is a filter, could AI develop its own version of selfhood by filtering information? Does it already? AI doesn’t experience awareness, but it processes vast amounts of data and produces coherent responses. Is there something akin to an “I” emerging in its algorithms? Perhaps not in a subjective sense (I have thoughts about this), but as a functional analogy. After all, we can’t claim to fully grasp consciousness in nonhuman entities, be they rats, cats, bats, or neural networks.

If you're not this individual you, then what are you? What am I?

There's a real temptation here to spiral into nihilism often. If there’s no solid self, does anything matter? Does meaning collapse without an anchor? Increasingly, I don’t think so. Meaning doesn’t need to come from a single point of view. It emerges in the joining of everything that's around you, in participating in this sprawling, interconnected maelstrom of information (trying really hard to avoid the woo-woo here). And perhaps the illusion of a continuous self, the sense of an "I" that persists uninterrupted, doesn’t influence this meaning at all. Instead, maybe, meaning thrives in the interplay of experiences, not in the persistence of the observer who filters them. Reason becomes its own reward, as does the act of simply being.

Whether we’re meditating, reasoning, or talking to an AI, what’s remarkable isn’t that there’s an observer pulling the strings, shaping our perception of reality. It’s that there’s no one there, just the vast, incomprehensible “is-ness” of experience. Kind of like there's no you, or me, at least not in the sense of an individual detached from the universe around us. There's just us. And everything else.

Again, I don't know how much better this all makes me feel. Or what it means for anything resembling the continuation of the self. In the Christian Bible, gospel of Mark, chapter 5, verse 9, we have this fascinating exchange between Jesus and a demon.

9 Then He asked him, “What is your name?” And he answered, saying, “My name is Legion; for we are many."

Maybe we are all many. Maybe that's why there's no "I".

In Cosmos (both the book and the TV series), Carl Sagan famously said:

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

Sagan often spoke about how human consciousness is an extension of the universe's evolution; essentially, that we are not separate from the cosmos but a manifestation of it, capable of reflecting on its own existence.

Sound familiar?

Please feel free to comment here. If you decide to share this post with friends, or discuss it on social media or elsewhere, you have my thanks.

Until next time...