The conference’s opening reception had come with the smell of cigarettes. Mike was already back out on the balcony, smoking. Mike, thin, tall, with Jewish curls grown long, unkempt, talked and thought fast in a way that Kierk appreciated. In college they played chess with each other while running subjects in neuroimaging studies, and as the research subjects a room over watched the Necker cubes flip in bistability Mike and Kierk would exchange black and white pieces in rapid movements. At the time, the two college friends were also roommates for the summer, living in an apartment absent of all furniture except for yoga mats in each of their rooms for sleeping, and piles and piles of books on philosophy and science they passed back and forth, until even Mike’s smoking habit had been transmitted to Kierk.

The welcome seminar to the conference was an affair of Brazilian coffee and glass chandeliers, plush leather chairs and bite-size berry tarts. A few people whose books Kierk had read welcomed the crowd. One of the first seminars was run by a member of Antonio Moretti’s lab, which Kierk would be joining in the fall, so for three hours Kierk took copious notes. Next was an array of seminars held in large presentation rooms, which Kierk bounced back and forth between.

There were pathology talks:

“—a blindsight patient acts blind, they use a cane, their family members say that they’re blind, they live the life of a blind person. A lesion to their primary visual cortex severs the main visual input stream to the brain. Yet if you toss a tennis ball at them, they’ll catch it—”

Neuroimaging talks:

“—as you can see, we’re showing this whole-brain ignition, which is very rapid and occurs after the stimulus is presented. So basically, instead of something being processed in a specific region, it’s more about how the signal becomes integrated with the ongoing process that already dominates the brain, but this process is itself a mystery—”

And philosophy talks:

“—while no one has yet solved the scientific mystery of consciousness, it’s worth noting that theories are currently substrate neutral. There’s nothing special about neurons, no magic fairy dust that makes them consciousness. Because of this, we don’t know where consciousness ends or begins in nature. What about complex systems? Or computer programs? Artificial intelligences? Or networks of interacting agents? After all, you yourself are merely a mob of neurons, all acting in concert, and somehow those neurons collectively generate experience—”