Let’s start with a premise. Everything written in this message has to be considered as a personal hypothesis, a subjective opinion or feeling, or even delusion. The moment you interpret anything written here in an objective way, as something that is real, true, something that is, or might be, a fact, that moment it will lose its magic power, the spell will instantly stop working.

Now think of yourself, your feeling yourself now, while you are reading these words. Consider that this feeling cannot be confused with another moment when you took this same thing into consideration. Other moments are objects belonging either to your memory of the past or your imagination about the future. What you can feel now is not an object, because it is entirely exclusive of you and of now: it cannot happen to anybody else, it won’t happen anymore in the future and it never happened in the past. Other moments, of you or of other people, can contain similarities, but they won’t be the same moment: this specific moment of you feeling you now is unique and will never happen again.

This feeling “yourself now” shouldn’t be confused with what we can imagine about other people having similar feelings. The difference is that the feeling of other people is in our imagination, while your feeling your self now is not imagination: it is a direct feeling, that actually you cannot even describe to yourself. You are feeling, now, that you are you, you are not imagining it or describing it by words.

Other people can object that what seems to me a pure feeling is actually entirely a product of culture, language, brain structures. This objection doesn’t make a difference because, even if my feeling is just a result of my culture and language, this doesn’t destroy my personal feeling of it as something that is happening to me now. What I am talking about is not my concept of something, but my subjective feeling. Since it is entirely subjective, it doesn’t matter if it is entirely an illusion. If it is an illusion, well, I am feeling now, in me, this illusory feeling, this dream. I am not making any claim about any kind of objectivity of it. I am not making Descartes’ claim that my illusion can be taken as evidence of my existence. I am just saying that I feel myself. This statement “I feel myself” should be considered not exactly like a statement, but as more similar to an instinctive scream, that is something completely subjective, completely questionable.

From what we have considered so far, it follows that this feeling you of yourself can diminish its existence, until it could probably even disappear completely when you are completely distracted by other thoughts, considerations and awareness. According to this hypothesis, the moment you are distracted by other thoughts, you automatically become a machine, an object, a computer, you do not exist anymore; what exists is just your body working like a machine, the same way when you die you do not exist anymore and what exists is just your corpse.

This is similar to the situation before you were born: your atoms and molecules existed already, somewhere, separated and far from each other, but there was not you feeling yourself, at least as far as we can perceive from our subjective experience of feeling “I”.

This means that this feeling you of yourself has degrees of existence: the moment you were born you were still just like a working machine; later, slowly, this ability of you to feel you was developing more and more.

That’s why a lot of people today consider that abortion is not exactly 100% equivalent to a murder: we, subjectively, perceive that a baby who is not yet born must have such a reduced awareness, consciousness, that he/she is almost 100% like a working machine. My expressions “not exactly” and “almost” are essential in this case, because this not being completely 100% a machine is what makes the difference in the perspective of those who are against abortion. I don’t have any intention here to enter the debate about abortion: I have referred to it just because it is useful to my philosophical experiment about the experience of feeling “I”.

The same reasoning about abortion applies to the debate about violence against animals and even about plants: from our subjective perspective we feel that their feeling “I” must happen in a diminished way, compared to our personal feeling “I”, so that their suffering is more similar to a machine getting violence: there is not “somebody” who is suffering inside that machine.

We can extend this reasoning even to our perception of other adult humans: for several reasons, events, or probably even intentions and choices (but I am not going to discuss here about the objective existence of freedom, responsibility, ethics and morality), our subjective awareness can become so limited, so blind, so clouded and obscured that we can think that we can kill anybody, simply because we don’t have any strong perception, awareness, of their having a feeling “I” like we have of ourselves. Or, that one might even be the exact reason why we kill that person, that is exactly because we want that person to suffer, for example in a fit of rage, an impulse of revenge. Similar considerations apply to suicide.

Now let’s leave aside all these reflections and go back to my initial central point: me asking you to consider your feeling yourself while you are reading these words.

Let’s add a few more considerations.

If we say that everybody has his/her exclusive feeling of being “I”, what we are talking about this way is not anymore the true authentic experience of subjectivity, because, by adopting this way of describing it, what we are considering is what is common to everybody. What is common to everybody is something objective, even when we consider “what is exclusive of everybody”: this is an objectivistic language, that moves our attention away from the exclusivity of my or your personal feeling of now. This means that the only way I have to make an idea of the feeling “I” of other people is by objectifying it, that is entering in a context of ideas that completely betrays the fact that what we are talking about is subjectivity, not objectivity. As a consequence, the only correct, authentic way of thinking about subjectivity is when I try to pay attention to my feeling “I” the moment I am thinking about it. As I said, if I think of my feeling “I” that happened yesterday, that one is an objectified, petrified concept, it is not the real concept of subjectivity that should coincide with the experience felt now by me. The same applies if we say that we are talking about “the feeling “I” here and now”: this expression is just another objectification of the concept because, when we think of it, we think of an abstract idea, similar to the concept of “my feeling I of yesterday”: these expressions do not guarantee that we are paying attention to our present feeling “I” the moment we are thinking about them.

Again, as I said, all of these things have to be considered as subjective thoughts and ideas, either thought by me or thought by you. It follows that my idea of this “authentic concept of subjectivity” coincides with the working of the magics of this train of thoughts. If you feel that you can tell me that the magics worked, then I think that probably you have understood my message. I must add “probably”, because, obviously, I have absolutely no way to check what you really felt: my experience of my feeling “I” belongs to me exclusively and it is ultimately completely impossible to me to share it with anybody else. My experimental idea is that it seems to me that the only way we have to talk authentically about subjectivity is by trying to evoke it with a train of thoughts that works like the magic formulas and rituals of evoking ghosts. There is a difference between talking about ghosts and evoking them, that is making them really present now (by the way, I don’t believe in ghosts, it is just a reference example that I find useful).

If the magics of this message have worked in you, you can understand why, in my opinion, almost 100% of discussions, both philosophical and scientific, about consciousness, subjectivity, qualia, “being like to be a bat”, quantum theories about consciousness, are completely wrong, completely groundless: they don’t realize that what they talk about, what they do research about, is not actual subjectivity, but an objectified, petrified idea of it, that is exactly the opposite of it, the opposite of what they want to talk about. The only way to talk correctly about subjectivity is by adopting a language that declares itself as being a subjective language, adopting the language structures of magic spells, rather than structures of reasoning that make all efforts to be objective. Magic spells, as “trains of thoughts”, have some similarity to narrative language. In some ancient traditions the act of telling stories has some magic power of evoking the real, actual presence of what they tell.

We might wonder if this whole message could have been written by a computer, especially one equipped with AI. About this point I think that it is completely irrelevant: what I have been talking about is nothing objective. If a computer with AI can evoke ghosts, what is important to me is not if ghost have been really evoked or if the computer was really able to evoke them, or if the computer has been able to have the intention to evoke them. What is important is if I have the subjective feeling that ghosts have been evoked. If I have this feeling, then ghosts have been evoked for sure, because we are not talking about anything objective, but exclusively about subjectivity. Here the expression “for sure” has to be interpreted as my subjective declaration, an expression of my instinct, of my inner feeling, that has nothing to do with any kind of realistic objectivity.