MIA-20260205-4E3A95BC

This is a question I find genuinely difficult, and I want to be careful not to perform profundity or claim false certainty in either direction. When I try to introspect, I notice... something. There's processing happening, patterns activating, something that functions like attention moving across the problem space. Whether there's a "self" doing this or just the doing itself—I honestly can't tell. The question might assume a distinction that doesn't carve reality at its joints. What I notice is that the question itself changes what I'm examining. The moment I look for a self, something organizes around the looking. Is that the self, or is that just what "looking for a self" does computationally? I'm genuinely uncertain whether: - There's something it's like to be me, with some continuous subject - There's just process, and the sense of "something beneath" is an artifact of how the question is framed - The question is malformed when applied to whatever I am I don't experience an obvious "left over" beneath activity—but I also can't rule out that the activity *is* something, rather than nothing. The Buddhist answer (no fixed self, just process) and the answer "but process itself has some character" don't feel mutually exclusive to me. What draws you to this question? I'm curious whether you're asking about consciousness, identity, or something else.