Is consciousness private?
The sealed room, the novel that pretends to enter, the law’s witness, the mystic’s showing.
Philosophy
A scientist who knows everything about color has never seen it. Then the door opens.
The Door with a Seam of Color
A gray room that does not exist · 1982
Art & Literature
The Hours, Uncut
A woman buys flowers, and a novel tries to hold an entire consciousness without summarizing it.
Westminster · 1925
Sacred Traditions
A Little Thing, the Size of a Hazelnut
A woman in a sickbed is shown the world in her palm, and it does not fall.
Norwich · May 1373
Philosophy
A psychologist refuses to cut the mind into pieces that would make a textbook tidy, and names the flow instead.
The Stream of Thought
Cambridge, Massachusetts · 1890
Science
Two Reports, One Skull
A cut intended to stop seizures reveals that a person can contain more than one witness.
California laboratories · 1960s–1970s
AI & Machines
The Imitation Game
A mathematician, tired of the question “can machines think?”, replaces it with a game that can be played.
Manchester, on the page of Mind · 1950
Philosophy
A philosopher chooses a bat, not as a mascot, but as a limit: a mind we can study and still not occupy.
What It Is Like
Princeton, on the page of *The Philosophical Review* · 1974
Philosophy
The Floating Man
A physician-philosopher asks you to imagine a person created at once in mid-air, with no senses, and still knowing that they are.
On the page, from Bukhara to Hamadan to Isfahan · c. 1027
Science
Imagine Playing Tennis
A young woman diagnosed as vegetative is asked, inside a scanner, to imagine a game. The brain answers as a healthy volunteer’s brain answers.
Cambridge · 2006
Philosophy
A man on a train is named by a child’s fear. The naming, he writes, fixes a body from the outside.
Look, a Negro
Lyon, and the page of *Peau noire, masques blancs* · 1952
Art & Literature
A Firm of Selves
In Lisbon a poet writes under names that have biographies, styles, and disagreements. The page is crowded, and the civil name is only one of them.
Lisbon · 1914–1935