“Then you are alive, and conscious. The proof of it is your awareness of it. That’s all. Consciousness is awareness. I would say, Don’t doubt yourself—but the fact you have a self that can doubt it is a self proves the existence of that self. So, go ahead and doubt yourself.”

Evrim said, “I’m all right.”

“No, you aren’t all right. I know when someone isn’t all right—because I’ve spent a good portion of my life not being all right. Doubting myself and doubting my connections with others. I know it when I see these things in someone else.”

“Really, I—”

“Shut up. I have more to say. You’re more than conscious. You are also human. It doesn’t matter what you are made of, or how you are born. That isn’t what determines it. What determines you are human is that you fully participate in human interaction and the human symbolic world. You live in the world humans created, perceiving that world as humans perceive it, processing information as humans process it. What more is there? Being human means perceiving the world in a human way. That’s all. So, you are human. You may also be more than that, but you are certainly as human as most people I have known. More human than some.”

“I want to believe what you say.”

“Then believe it. Because we’re all we’ve got on this island: the three of us. And we need to do a better job of communicating with one another if we are going to get through this. We need the practice, for one thing. If we can’t even make ourselves understood to one another, we’ll never make ourselves understood to them.”

Evrim shut the terminal off. “I want to believe what you say—but I have doubts.”

“Then have doubts,” Ha said. “We all have doubts. That only brings us right back to where I started. If you can doubt you’re real—you’re real. Doubt is a part of life. Now—I need to get out of this damp ruin of a hotel and go for a walk in the sun. Would you like to join me?”

“Yes, I would.”

Chapter 36

Are we trapped, then, in the world our language makes for us, unable to see beyond the boundaries of it? I say we are not. Anyone who has watched their dog dance its happiness in the sand and felt that joy themselves—anyone who has looked into a neighboring car and seen a driver there lost in thought, and smiled and seen the image of themselves in that person—knows the way out of the maze: Empathy. Identity with perspectives outside our own. The liberating, sympathetic vibrations of fellow-feeling.

Only those incapable of empathy are truly caged.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

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