Kierk is looking at Greg the way one might look at a hideously deformed child, pity and disgust warring on his face.

“What did you just say?”

“That my advisor—”

“No, about the brain. Being a computer.”

Carmen shaking her head “no” at Kierk. Alex puts his head in his palms.

“Well, like, okay maybe it doesn’t have von Neumann architecture, but instead like a parallel processor. It’s definitionally an information processor.”

“That’s totally vacuous. Everything can be described as an information processor. Literally any system. Information processor just means change occurs.”

“But, hmm, but computers systematically transform inputs into outputs.”

“Again, totally vacuous. Rocks do that.”

“What, how do rocks do that?”

“They take in all the forces acting on them and produce an output based on their previous state.”

“Yeah, but those aren’t symbols. Like a symbol processor.”

Kierk’s voice is slightly slurred. “Oh come on. The representational structure of those symbols is only there because humans designate it. Because consciousness fixes it. You could read out Shakespeare from a rock with the right reference codes. Brains are about as much computers as rocks are.”

Greg, flushing a bit—“But computationally brains are much more complex.”

Kierk sighs, shaking his head—“Greg, something being a computer or not has nothing to do with complexity. You can build a universal Turing machine out of like a hundred Legos.”

“I know that!”

“Do you think a Turing machine made out of one hundred Legos is a mind, or a brain?”

“. . . No.”

“So why would you claim any kind of an identity relationship?”

Mike has purposefully started up another conversation with Jessica.

“Listen, I see what you’re driving at,” Greg says over them in his adenoidal voice, rubbing the carbuncle on his nose, “but, well . . . I’m an eliminativist anyways. Consciousness is an illusion.”

When the server comes up Atif waves him away. He wants this to play out.

“And I stand by that,” Greg is saying, defiantly.

“How? How can you possibly?” Carmen is replying, exhaling hookah smoke.

“Listen, don’t ah, don’t treat me like the enemy. I just think consciousness is basically an illusion.”

Carmen, after passing the pipe—“Greg, you just denied the very thing we are all here to study. An illusion for whom? Illusions are perceptions.”

“People used to think the Earth was at the center of the universe too!”

Carmen is shaking her head—“That doesn’t follow at all.”

Kierk sets down his glass hard. “Galileo took observers out of science on purpose. He bracketed them to the side to make it simpler. Now we’re the ones adding observers back in.”

“But I would say that—”

“I would question your ability to say anything once you have denied your own consciousness. You must not cut off the branch you are sitting on.”