the ineffable sense of being an “I” or a “first person”, the intuitive sense of “being there” or simply “existing”, the powerful sense of “having experience” and of “having raw sensations” (what some philosophers refer to as “qualia”), seem to be the realest things in their lives, and an insistent inner voice bridles furiously at any proposal that all this might be an illusion, or merely the outcome of some kind of physical processes taking place among “third-person” (i.e., inanimate) objects. My goal here is to combat this strident inner voice.
