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If these examples are too far-fetched or too technological for your taste, then just think of the lowly hammerhead shark. The poor thing has eyes on opposite sides of its head, which look out, quite often, on two completely unrelated scenes. So which scene is the shark really seeing? Where does it consider itself to be, really? Of course no one would ask such a question. We just accept the idea that the shark can “sort of” be in those two different worlds at the same time, mainly because we think to ourselves that no matter how different those scenes look, they nonetheless are contiguous pieces of the underwater world in the shark’s vicinity, so there is no genuine problem about whereness. But this is glib, and sidesteps the point.

To put things in somewhat sharper focus, let’s invent a variation on the hammerhead shark. We’ll posit a creature whose eyes are taking in one situation (say in Bloomington) and whose ears are taking in another, unrelated situation (say in Stanford). The same brain is going to process these inputs at the same time. I hope you won’t claim that this is an impossible feat! If that’s your inclination, please first recall that you drive your car while reacting to other cars, scenery, billboards, and roadsigns, and also while talking with a far-off friend on your cell phone (and the topics covered in the conversation may vividly transport you to yet other places), and all during that very same period a recently-heard tune is running through your head, your strained back is bugging you, you smell cow manure wafting through the air, and your stomach is shouting to you, “I am hungry!” You manage to process all those different simultaneous worlds perfectly well — and in that same spirit, nothing is going to prevent a human brain from dealing simultaneously with the two unrelated worlds of Stanford sounds and Bloomington sights, no more than the hammerhead shark’s brain protests, “Does not compute!” So the idea “I cannot be simultaneously here and there” goes down in flames. We are simultaneously here and there all the time, even in our everyday lives.

Sympathetic Vibrations

But perhaps you feel that what I’ve just described doesn’t address the question originally posed about which of many brains you are really in — that being either here or there means that no matter how emotionally close you are to someone else, their feelings are always theirs, yours are always yours, and never the twain shall meet. This is once again the caged-bird imagery with which the chapter opened, and it will certainly not cease to rear its ugly head no matter how many times I try to cut it off. But let us nonetheless try tackling this medusa in yet another fashion.

If I claim that I am partially in my sister Laura and she is partly in me, it seems nonetheless obvious that if she happens to drive by our favorite falafel place in San Jose and stops to eat a falafel, I’m not going to taste that falafel as I sit here slaving away in my study in Bloomington, Indiana. And therefore I am not there, but here! And therefore my consciousness is local, not global, not spread out! And therefore that’s the end of the story!

But things are not quite that simple. I might receive news of Laura’s falafel an hour later, by a telephone call. When she describes it vividly (or not even vividly, since I know it so well), my mouth starts watering as I recall the exact texture of the little crunchy balls and the delicious red hot sauce. I know those falafels like the back of my teeth. Although my tongue is not caressing those little chunky deep-fried bits, something in my brain is taking a sensual delight in what I could call (in imitation of the phrase “sympathetic pain”) “sympathetic pleasure”. Albeit in a feeble way and an hour after the fact, I am sharing Laura’s pleasure. But so what if it’s a feeble imitation and is not exactly simultaneous? Even if my pleasure is a low-resolution copy of hers and is displaced in time, it is nonetheless pleasure, and it is pleasure that is “about