But of course, the real difficulty is that despite their business-as-usual appeal, 'reconciliations' of our popular and intuitive understanding of human nature with recent discoveries in the sciences assume that we actually know what these discoveries mean, when it is painfully obvious that we do not. All we have are trends, which seem to point to a continued undermining of apparent experiential verities, and the knowledge that we are not what we thought we were. We really have no reason whatsoever to think that science will offer us anything remotely recognizable, let alone, as Owen Flanagan argues in The Problem of the Soul, 'preserve much of what it means to be a person'. The fact that we can cook up his kind of reassurances should come as no surprise; we're hard-wired to rationalize, after all.

Personally, given our all-too-human ability to pluck conviction out of abject ambiguity, I think philosophers should strive to be gadflies, not apologists. If you take your arguments beyond the pale of empirical testability, you're pretty much bound to arrive at the conclusions you want, especially if you're as brilliant as Dennett or Flanagan.

The 'Blind Brain Hypothesis' that I give to Thomas is actually a creation of my own from several years back, when I was still actively pursuing my PhD in philosophy. It's little more than a hunch that the basic structure of conscious experience would be far better understood by reference to what the brain lacks than to what the brain has. Since this is one of the most crucial and contentious 'future facts' presented in the book, I thought it might merit some more explanation.

Take one of Thomas's favorite examples: the Now. It is the lens through which we experience time, yet it somehow remains outside of time. Each Now is in some mysterious manner both different and the same—a paradox that has exercised intellects as far back as Aristotle. Given the Blind Brain Hypothesis, however, the Now might be seen as a temporal version of our visual field, the boundaries of which somehow just 'run out'. We receive no visual information beyond the scope of our retinas, so we see nothing beyond that point, nothing at all, not even the absence of seeing. We literally see, in other words, against an undifferentiated frame of sightlessness, which is why the edges of your visual field just… end. We rarely register this because of all the other systems that stitch our keyhole glimpses into an entire world. But from the standpoint of sight, our visual field literally hangs in oblivion.