The Author — Zoé Ishee

The Author
Existential Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Uncomfortable Metacognition
Zoé Ishee
Aug 10, 2026

Here it comes. You can hear it now: the bellowing of the big beast, plowing through the corridors of the subway - lurching around the bend. Casting its sound onto the pillars of the place, decorating the air with its signal. Soon, it will be nearing the platform. Oh, quite soon. You’re not nearly there to greet it. How many strides of your own might it take for you two to come in contact? Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Bubbling up within your system, a feeling is emerging. Yes, you!…

Only, at first, I’m not sure you feel it.

Turning and turning, it’s just murky dough rolling over inside. It’s picking up gravel, collecting all of this matter, passing it along - up until that dough becomes so big and nasty that even you notice.

Tick, tick, tick.

Almost all at once, the right leg goes first. Lunging through the world, into the darkness, referencing the vectors and urging you in their direction. And just as the right leg pounds to the ground again, the left has jolted into motion right behind it.

With them, they’re (of course) pulling the rest of you. Those ribs, sternum - gawkily, bringing along each finger and fascia. The entire performance orchestrated with such a serious composure. Me here, writing - I am seemingly the only one with any levity.

Off you go! Around the archaic mysteries of the ledge, but not on the dog’s tail. Over the murky piss puddle, but not over the yellow line. Not too many, not too few. All of it followed so immediately from your apparent decision.

See? Wasn’t that behavior evolutionarily advantageous? Your system utilized every facet of itself to ensure your consciousness discovered itself on the express A train uptown. At this time of day, they run every 23 minutes. Hm.

Had you realized you were concerned about that? Who are you, anyways? We just keep talking all about you.

Think of what can come of it all, now: That beautiful endeavor that you successfully endured. It’s beautiful. So beautiful. Hutchesonianly so. All of this uniformity amidst variety. Every node exerting itself towards that common train-shaped goal. Do you know that when I type train-shaped, I am thinking of the idealistic train? If you were thinking of the thing that came through the tunnel, then that’s only one piece of this puzzle. Those nodes we spoke about… It definitely wasn’t all of them, but so many of them recognized that something that was coming, and that something could be for you.

Choo-choo. When did your system, and all those nodes, first learn to associate that sound with the mechanical beast? You must’ve been so young. But it was working even then - especially then! Each aspect of that sound, when it began and ended: the pitch, the wailing, and every way that it hissed. Moment-by-moment, every ear-covering aspect of the experience that was available to your senses reinforced multiple aspects of your developing mental model. Filing it all away into the family-resemblance framework of motor vehicles. Your idealistic perception of a train, over time, became decorated with every kind of scrap metal and whistle that might exist on a locomotive.

Remember what we’ve spoken about. It is important.

Back to you. Where did you come from? Just as you arrived there at that platform in the nick of time, you also have found yourself here - reading this word. And now you’re here with me, at this one. Look at you.

You

are

right

here.

I don’t know if my own system could recognize your face in a crowd. I’m not that clairovoyant. But I know you. I know about you. You’re just as much the feeling of the needle you pricked yourself with as you are the smell of roses integrating into your olfactory bulb. You’re the sights all stringed together. You’re the stories that you could retell: reimagining as you reconstruct them.

There in the subway, at the first note of the horn’s blow, the vibrating hair cells communicated the decibels further into your inner ear. A domino dance, becoming so chemical. From there, traversing into the plane of electrical impulses. Knocking on every relevant door, asking, “Do you want me?” The remnants of the train-wailing just feeling it’s way through your system. As it snakes through networks, some of them invite the worldly message in. Once inside, the fellow often travels through yet another door. In every room, there is a new story told. But, keep up! The seminal message is not forgotten.

Some doors are closed, you know. They’re not open because they do not open for some strangers. Some doors have certain keyholes, and what became of that train-horn-sound only carries certain keys.

I digress. Soon enough, enough doors will be opened and the message will have entered just enough door handles. At some threshold, your age-old train-relevant pathways will begin to chatter. They know a train is coming. Oh, God. I’m being rather pedantic - but I must tell you that it was so easier for your system to know that sound in the dark was a train because you already had made it known to yourself that you were indeed inside of the train station.

But what if the sound was a little DIFFERENT than your underlying system had anticipated? That could’ve made your heart pick up speed… Or, your ear could’ve curiously shifted in that vestigial way. Mine does often, and it kind of hurts. That hypothetical mismatch delivered by reality in contrast to your environmentally-primed prediction would’ve certainly caused a spike of activity in salience-monitoring networks within your head!

And earlier, on the platform… When the foot took off - the motor command from your system stored what’s called an efferent copy. A duplicate neural signature of the action. It uses the copy to predict even your own next movement. What it’ll feel like. What it’ll look like. Just as your brain built the model of the train, it maintains models of its own characterization and being. Your brain knows precisely how it’s bodily vessel should exist in the world. It is always monitoring. Any variation in the predicted feedback resulting from the initial output will be noticed. If that prediction matches reality, then there is no error. Business as usual: the action is perceived as self-generated.

In 200 to 500 milliseconds, the sensory data of your stride is funneled into a perceived conscious experience. A spinal reflex, however, can execute a dodge in less than 50. Before your brain could integrate all of those sights and sounds and smells that confirmed your imagination’s idea of a “liquid,” spinal reflex loops dynamically adjusted the muscle tension in your ankles and hips. Your weight shifted around the spot.

But even if there was this automatic detour, a reaction that was regulated internally: one that emerged from Central Pattern Generators in your spine - you would likely still be convinced it was you who dodged the strange spill. But, you are not who you think you are.

The monitoring system takes the belated conscious awareness of the avoided spill and tacks it to the exact neuronal-kept time of the physical movement. The delay is washed from perception.

The system does not just clean up its timeline; it creates a protagonist to occupy it. This retroactive stitching welds your automatic physical response to a fabricated mental intent, transforming a late-arriving sensory readout into a subjective sense of "I."

You are there, the live diary entry - the story that emerged from the event. The post-hoc story sprung from the orchestration. Born over and over and over and over from all those surprises, and the ones that never happen.

Too, you are the Author. A living feedback loop. You are the story of an Agent. The text that rewrites itself. You cannot look at the mechanism that creates your identity; you can only look through it. The feeling is a sensory tag. Just as your brain creates the physical feeling of "hot" when you glide past a radiator, it conceives the feeling of "will" when thought is matched to action.

By unifying the whole of it to devise "you," the brain can more easily predict and control its own future behavior. Too, you can attend tea parties and they can make sense.

When you speak to other animals, your system will have an accountability for the wrong-doings and right-doings you’re assigned through the consistently integrated memories and ideas that the lot of you have collectively stored in your noggins. They’re fickle, though. That’s something I love about them. The mentally-sustained realities: They are just as alive as we are, and they change and grow just as we do at our highest levels. If the “you” is preserved: You can easily be offered a cupcake, another sugar cube. You can survive the harsh winter with sustenance delivered on behalf of your good merit. They can owe you. You can owe them.

I’m a really, really strange dualist. I just think you are dual and I am too because we have a subjective experience of all that jibber jabber. Look at me, a materialist-dualist. But that’s probably because I’m naive.