You were quiet for a moment as you studied your reflection. “I would still say consciousness is more than purely the — the replication of biological functions.” You flipped the sun visor back up like a punctuation mark on your thought. You were avoiding the trap I was setting for you. I knew you thought the missing quotient was spiritual, the soul, but that you knew enough not to say it. That to say it would provoke me to further challenge you, and by that point you were getting tired and just wanted to get to the hospital. It struck me that there was a fundamental tension between your faith and your work. What aim were you pursuing if not to replicate consciousness? You always said you believed in artificial intelligence, but with marked emphasis on the artificial. Like the earliest of computer pioneers, Ada Lovelace, you said we were doomed once we began to mistake it as genuine intelligence. But to default to the soul, to the spirit, seemed like such a cop-out to me. And totally irreconcilable with the woman who valued exacting precision. Facts. Empirical evidence. Given that you were still recovering I should have let it lie, but for some reason I wanted to pursue you, chase you down this rabbit-hole of logic, and as I drove I tried to smoke you out of your hiding place to provoke a true tête-à-tête.

“Are we not just our brains, though, ultimately?” I pressed. We stopped at a traffic light and watched an old man walk a cluster of small white dogs through the intersection. “Like what do you make of that British guy — did you hear about this? — totally normal guy, married with kids, in his early fifties, develops this brain tumour and then all of a sudden can’t stop himself from looking at child porn. He’d, like, never accessed it before in his life, then he got the brain tumour and became addicted to it, and then the tumour was removed and he no longer showed any inclination. By the time he went to trial, he was back to his old self and the court didn’t know, you know —”

“Right.”

“— was it even really him who had committed the crime? Could they try the tumour? The man he had been with the tumour?”

“I get it.”

“Or your TIA. The way your brain made you feel like a couch or a chair. How you completely lost your sense of you.”

I suddenly felt cruel, using your own experience in an argument against you. We drove in silence for a while, watching the nondescript vistas of a low-rise industrial park unfold before us. You turned on CBC Radio and we listened to the sound of a woman crying for eight seconds before you reached over and switched it back off, mumbling, “I can’t deal with that right now.”