After Carmen has stuffed the napkins containing summaries of their conversation into her clutch they order another martini and Kierk fills Carmen in on what happened between him and Ben, which he tells in a humorous manner, but it is clear that he intends Carmen get the serious subtext of it. He also tells her about what he overheard at Williams’ office door, to which Carmen perks up, fascinated, and then Kierk tells her that he confirmed that Williams really was at the conference, news that disappoints her. Finally, he also tells her about his revelation during the blackout last night.

“As long as you’re still doing that first paper you said you’d do, right?”

“It’s just not what I’m focusing on right now.”

“Because I think Karen is kind of pissed at you right now.”

“I know, I know. Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, while you were deciding all this, during the outage I was just sitting in my apartment reading. To candlelight. It was very romantic.”

“What were you reading?”

“Some of Descartes’ correspondence, actually. But anyways, tell me some of your preliminary ideas.”

They spend some time going over some of Kierk’s thoughts, sketching things out in the notebook that he brought, their eyes serious as they talk.

“In the end the problems go back to Hume. We can observe the brute physical objects of the world, but we can’t directly observe the relations they have, only infer them. Relations like function, or computation, or representation. The world is like this big user interface that we read into. Take the brain and its neurons. That description, the neuroscientific one, is just one functional description of many. A physicist might see the same pinkish blob as a quark cloud, an economist might see it as an agent. All performing different functions.”

“So something that always bothered me was how many different kinds of neuroimaging techniques there are, and how, um, diverse they all are. Across space and time. A correlation at one level might not be there at another.”

“Yes! A neuron could be firing an action potential or not. Are these its states? What about its physical location, its temperature, its receptivity, the damn . . . the damn internal decay rate of calcium signals. So its states depend on your level of description. Which you chose! And what function is it performing? Depends on how far back you look and where you look. Maybe it’s firing so you think it’s ‘on,’ but then you zoom out, and as part of a group of neurons, or a module, it’s actually ‘off.’ See, it’s like we, as conscious observers, are highlighting some set of relations. And by imagining them—”

“Wait, imagining is a strong word. How about selecting?”

“Okay, by selecting them, we form our model, but at its heart it’s still based on us conscious observers.”