“But we’ve shown—” Mike begins but Kierk interrupts him, speaking so fast it’s like the words are liquid pouring out of his mouth.

“You’ve shown what? In neural terms we still don’t know what a thought is, or what a feeling is, nor an action or decision. To really figure any of that out you need to recognize that localization of all but the grossest modular function is wrong. Then start paying attention to mesoscale dynamical trajectories through continuously remade and shifting neural attractor ruins, which makes predicting or decoding brain activity as difficult as long-term prediction of the weather, but these positive Lyapunov exponents are blowing up the prediction at the order of milliseconds, not weeks. You can’t take the thing apart like a combustion engine. It’s been mathematically proven that no one can understand in any precise way the workings of even small artificial neural networks and yet everyone still thinks they can understand the brain? The only real question in all of neuroscience is: why are some neural states correlated with conscious experience? Why is any physical event accompanied by any subjective experience at all? That’s how you carve the brain at its joints. And once you have a fundamental theory of consciousness, you should be content. Let it rest. The best kind of neuroscience is the kind of neuroscience that lets you stop doing neuroscience. Why stay in the field when it’s all over, when the theoretical underpinnings are established? Why be a glorified cartographer when the borders are always changing, plastic, fractal, individuated?”

“Take a chill pill, Kierk,” Mike says as he lines up his shot.

“Take a nootropic, Mike,” Kierk bites back.

Mike makes a face like: what the fuck does that mean?

Carmen quickly calls out—“Kierk, listen for a second. Biology didn’t stop when Darwin and Wallace invented the theory of evolution by natural selection.”

“Yeah, the whole thing isn’t going to be over when we figure out how consciousness works,” Alex says.

Mike sinks the ten, but he ends up with no line of sight and is forced to split a pair of stripes and solids sitting against the far wall.

“Why not? The main task of the brain is to be conscious,” Kierk says as he looks around for a shot. “The categories cognitive neuroscience places on mental activity are just the latest in a series of fads that has been the history of psychology. Now it’s medieval humorism all over again, but this time it’s levels of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. An imbalance of the humors made me do it!”

He positions himself into a tight bow, his cue at a steep angle, and bounces the cue ball over the eleven to gently nudge the five into a pocket.

“Oh, what the fuck,” Mike says, his face flushing.