This book is about how we come to be a person, how we develop a mind of our own and how we come to have an impact on the lives of others through the acts of consciousness we make in the world about us. I want to engage you and I hope you might suspend belief and test your worldview against mine. I will write as plainly as I can about life and living and discuss the familiar, commonsensical and commonplace.

I will discuss three stories as a way of examining our basic beliefs about life and living. The three stories are written as ‘thought experiments’. A thought experiment is an exercise in thinking about something we wish to investigate for which an actual experiment would be unethical and / or impossible to carry out with current technology. I’ll take a fresh look at the stories from a different standpoint.

My focus will be on the familiar features of persons and places, such as minds, points of view and experiences, but with the emphasis on action. I’ll take the root verbs – ‘to be’, ‘to have’ and ‘to know’ – and use these as a starting point for an investigation of consciousness and as headings for the three parts of this book.

I will draw on the accounts of former hostages and political prisoners and the research I carried out with their help. I think that the extreme situation of solitary confinement amplifies what it is to be human. Our everyday lives may be drowned out by the noise of normal life such that we are caught up in all manner of matters that take our attention. I’ll systematically examine what happens to people in solitary confinement and apply understanding from this to the burning question: what’s this life and living all about?