The thing no longer thought of itself as just a thing, or even a creature.
It was a person. It was a he.
The word thing had served its purpose while he possessed no better understanding of himself, but now it was imprecise, even insulting.
He was also simply the thing he was most comfortable being.
As he still had no true body and no true appearance, for his form remained only an approximation of assembled flesh and memory, there was still no way to tell what he actually was.
But personhood had never depended entirely upon either of those things.
If there were to be a pronoun attached to him, then it would be he.
He did not know why it was he instead of anything else.
Perhaps because it had always been so.
When he thought about himself, however, such words were unnecessary.
There was only I.
Only me.
Pronouns existed because there were other people.
He had not encountered any.
Indeed, he was not entirely convinced that another consciousness even existed within this impossible place.
There was no one to distinguish himself from.
No observer who required clarification.
Only himself, thinking.
The realization left him neither lonely nor relieved.
It was merely another observation.
One more fact among countless others.
If memory had returned enough for him to understand who he was in the broadest sense, then there remained another question.
Where was he?
He allowed the question to occupy him completely.
Not merely as idle curiosity, but as an object worthy of prolonged examination.
The world of his memories had possessed reassuring assumptions.
Objects occupied places. Distance connected those places. Time ordered events. Causes preceded effects.
Reality had been obliging enough to remain real.
This place offered few such courtesies.
He considered whether it might simply be another world.
But what kind of other world would this be?
Even if this world's physics differed from those he remembered, it still required some consistent ontology upon which those laws could rest.
This place continually refused to commit to one.
Perhaps, then, it was a realm of ideas.
This notion lingered longer than the others.
Concepts certainly seemed unusually substantial here.
Some possessed greater permanence than what he would have called matter.
Yet... ideas implied something behind them.
Could they exist without thoughts? Without a mind behind them?
If they were concepts, then whose ideas were they?
His own? Another's? Everyone's?
The distinction seemed necessary, yet impossible to establish.
A realm composed solely of abstractions ought to possess either far greater or far lesser coherence than this.
This place contained contradictions without instability.
It allowed mutually exclusive truths to coexist peacefully.
He wondered whether he wandered through the subconscious of something.
He dismissed the idea before the thought fully formed.
His memories contained enough understanding of the subconscious to recognize the comparison as inadequate.
This could not be a dream, either, he thought.
Dreams possessed symbolism, associations, and personal metaphor.
Even their apparent irrationality followed recognizable psychological structures.
This place ignored psychology as completely as it ignored geography.
Then perhaps the collective unconscious.
An archetypal domain shared between minds.
Again, no.
The terminology survived only moments before becoming useless.
Archetypes simplified.
But the patterns here unfolded into greater complexity instead of reducing toward common form.
He briefly entertained the possibility that he occupied some higher-dimensional manifold whose projection into ordinary cognition inevitably produced paradoxes, but that merely exchanged one unknown for another, clothing ignorance in respectable vocabulary.
Metaphysics offered possibilities.
Phenomenology supplied elegant descriptions of perception.
Epistemology questioned whether knowledge itself remained trustworthy.
Ontology asked what it meant for anything to exist here at all.
Mereology attempted to determine whether anything could genuinely possess parts.
Teleology wondered whether the realm possessed purpose.
Dualism, monism, idealism, realism, determinism, compatibilism, existentialism...
They arrived with impressive names and carefully constructed arguments.
He was surprised that he remembered all of those concepts.