I.

Imagine a genie appears before you and makes you a simple offer: you can ask him any question you want, and he'll answer it. No tricks - genie society has seen sweeping reforms and made great moral progress, and the days of the malicious trickster genies have been left long behind. No, this genie is entirely benevolent: if your question turns out to have been ill-formed, he'll explain exactly why it was ill-formed, and then answer the question you intended to ask. No matter what question you pose to him, you'll find yourself completely satisfied with the answer he gives.

However, genies being genies, he still feels the need to follow ancient tradition and impose some kind of a ternary restriction on his gift. So he stipulates that the question can only be three words long.

What question do you ask him?

Even with only three words, there seems no shortage of good options to pick from. You might, for instance, ask him: Why am I? That is, for what reason do I exist? What, if anything, is my purpose in life? Where can I find meaning, what ought I to do with my time?

Or perhaps: How am I? How, by what means, did I come to be, and do I persist in being? What are the mechanisms and operations of creation and existence?

Or maybe it's wisest to ask: Who am I? How do I fit into the world, how does my life relate to the lives of others? What is the truest story I can tell about the person that I am?

All excellent nominations, and a case could be made for any of them. For myself, though, I find that I stumble long before I reach anything nearly so lofty. My confusions are more basic than that, my lack of understanding more fundamental. No, I'd be happy getting the answer to a much simpler question: What am I?

What, exactly, am I? If I can't answer that then it's hard to see how I can make much sense of the other questions, or really any question at all. And troublingly, I find that I can't, in fact, answer it.

What do I mean by that? Is it not obvious what we are? I worry some of you might think I'm being deliberately obtuse here, in service of some ultimately irrelevant philosophical point I'm trying to make. Not my intention at all. I mean what I say: at a basic level, I really have no idea how to think about what kind of thing it is that I am. My confusion runs deep. And far from being an irrelevancy, it was confronting this mystery in full that forced me to rethink much of...

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