Sam, her eyes still blank, shook her head. 'But it doesn't feel that way. I mean, here I am, in the real world, seeing everything I need to see, driving to meet Mackenzie, listening to your madness…'

'Have you ever heard of something called "Hindsight"?'

She shot him a quick Yes-I'm-an-idiot grin. 'I saw it in a kung fu movie, I think. Blind people who can see, somehow, right?'

'It's a real phenomena, suffered by people with damage to their primary visual cortex. Some can navigate rooms despite the complete absence of visual experience, or duck if you throw pillows at them. There's even cases of people who can draw pictures they can't see.'

Thomas referenced these examples so often that they had come to seem commonplace. But every so often—like now—something deep within him balked. How could it be possible to draw something you couldn't see, or write something you couldn't read? The discipline was littered with examples like these: bizarre pathologies that cut against our deepest assumptions regarding self and experience.

'So you're saying their brains can see, even though they can't?' A plaintive note had entered her voice. 'Like the way Gyges's brain could recognize Neil's face even though Gyges himself couldn't.'

'Exactly.'

'Too, too weird.'

'There's other forms as well. People who tap their toes, even though they find music unintelligible. People who grimace in agony, even though they feel no pain.'

Thomas looked out his window, glimpsed several children disappearing beneath the bowers of the woods that made a canyon of the road. He craned his head to peer between the trunks, but the trail—or whatever it was they followed—dropped away too quickly.

'There's actually no one place where consciousness comes together in the brain,' he continued, 'but in terms of the information it can access, it's very localized. It seems particularly hard for us North Americans to swallow given our bogus can-do indoctrination, but if you really attend to the decisions you make, even things like dragging your ass off the couch, you can clearly see how after the fact conscious experience is. You wanna get off the couch, then suddenly you are off the couch, and you credit yourself after the fact. So much of what we do—all of it in fact—simply pops into conscious experience, where "we" take credit for it.'

'But it can't be as bad as all that,' Sam said. 'It just can't. I mean I think, therefore I am, right? I feel stupid saying it, but doesn't that have to be true?'

'I'll admit it certainly seems to be the case. But it's a philosophical claim, and scientific research suggests otherwise. Something like "it thinks, therefore I was," would probably be more accurate.'

Sam seemed to scowl in slow motion. 'We're back to the self again, aren't we?'

Her voice had an edge.