"I know you are, but what am I?" is perhaps the ultimate
existential question.
For I know that
I am --
cogito ergo sum, I perceive my
existence, and in so perceiving am aware that I exist -- but I cannot be certain that what presents itself to me as the
nature of my existence is
reality at all. Perhaps I am simply an elaborate computer simulation designed to believe that it is alive, with the electrical charges understood to be electrosensory perceptions of
sight,
sound,
touch,
taste, simply being something like bits and bytes being whirled around some great CPU. Perhaps I am in
the Matrix. Perhaps I am a
brain in a jar.
But the one thing of which I can be certain beyond the fact of my existence is that I am not
all that exists. For I perceive
otherness itself, the existence of other minds with which I may interact, but which are not my own, or which lie beyond my control. If reality is as it presents itself, there are other beings. If I am a
simulation, there is a great
programmer who created it. Perhaps all of other minds I believe myself to be encountering are simply different facets of a single other mind, in which event, to the extent that any other being is looking at these words crafted in mind, these others are all
you. And so I know, at the least, that
you are!! Perhaps one of you, perhaps countless multitudes. Perhaps you and I are simply
fragments of some even greater mind, but even so within that context I experience myself and not you, you experience yourself and not me, and so at some level, distinct from me, as much as I know that I
am, I know you
are.
But, the question ever lingers, what
am I?