The same might be said of our 'temporal field', what William James famously called the 'specious present'. In the same way we can't see the limits of seeing, the idea runs, we can't time the limits of timing, so we literally experience earlier and later against a frame of timelessness. This would be what generates the illusion of before and after, the strange bundling of the past and future within the Now. Time passes in consciousness, but in a strange sense it can't pass for consciousness. The bulk of the brain, after all, lies outside the information horizon of the thalamo-cortical system, churning away in timeless invisibility.

For structural and developmental reasons too numerous to elaborate here, the brain can only 'see itself in blinkered terms.

According to the Blind Brain Hypothesis, this not only determines what is conscious and what is unconscious, but the very structure of consciousness. The Now is no small feature of lived experience. It also means that for many features of consciousness, it makes no more sense looking for 'neural correlates' than it does looking for 'visual drop-off circuits' to explain the strange limits of our visual field.

According to the Blind Brain Hypothesis, conscious systems like humans should have an exceptionally difficult time understanding themselves—as indeed happens to be the case. Since the brain only glimpses slivers of its own processes, small fragments that it can only see as wholes, we should expect it not only to be baffled by the findings of neuroscience, but to insist those slivers really are wholes, and as such require some mechanism in the brain to explain them. If the Blind Brain Hypothesis is true, then much of cognitive science could very well be a wild goose chase, a search for 'magic coin circuits'.

The upshot seems to be that consciousness is illusory through and through, as opposed to just here and there, which is why I find myself in the strange position of wanting my own theory to be wrong. We now know that much of what we take for granted, experience-wise, is simply not what it seems, more than enough to ask all the hard questions covered in this book. But if consciousness is fundamentally, structurally deceptive, then the reason we have so much difficulty trying to figure it out could be that we have no way of knowing just what it is we're trying to figure out. And perhaps we never will.