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in the same way the original Paris neurons were hooked up (or in any other way for that matter). That wouldn’t be enough. Here are two ways to see why that is not enough. First, show the red octagon in Figure 8 to someone who has never seen or heard of a stop sign (assuming there’s any such person left in the world). Just seeing the picture or committing it to memory won’t be enough for that person to interpret the shape as being about stopping or about anything else for that matter. Remember those strange squiggles from Greek and Chinese? Even if you memorized them so you could reproduce the squiggles, that wouldn’t be enough for you to interpret them as being about stopping. You’d have to add something to your memory, or image, of the squiggles to interpret them.

Similarly, the neural interpreter has to add something to the Paris neurons (or maybe to its copy of them) to interpret them as being about Paris. What can it add? Only more neurons, wired up in some way or other that makes the Paris neurons be about Paris. And now we see why what the neural interpreter has to add is going to have to be about Paris, too. It can’t interpret the Paris neurons as being about Paris unless some other part of it is, separately and independently, about Paris. These will be the neurons that “say” that the Paris neurons are about Paris; they will be about the Paris neurons the way the Paris neurons are about Paris.

Now the problem is clear. We see why the Paris neurons can’t be about Paris the way that red octagons are about stopping. It’s because that way lies a regress that will prevent us from ever understanding what we wanted to figure out in the first place: how one chunk of stuff—the Paris neurons—can be about another chunk of stuff—Paris. We started out trying to figure out how the Paris neurons could be about Paris, and our tentative answer is that they are about Paris because some other part of the brain—the neural interpreter—is both about the Paris neurons and about Paris. We set out to explain how one set of neurons is about something out there in the world. We find ourselves adopting the theory that it’s because another set of neurons is about the first bunch of neurons and about the thing in the world, too. This won’t do.

What we need to get off the regress is some set of neurons that is about some stuff outside the brain without being interpreted—by anyone or anything else (including any other part of the brain)—as being about that stuff outside the brain. What we need is a clump of matter, in this case the Paris neurons, that by the very arrangement of its synapses points at, indicates, singles out, picks out, identifies (and here we just start piling up more and more synonyms for “being about”) another clump of matter outside the brain. But there is no such physical stuff.

Physics has ruled out the existence of clumps of matter of the required sort. There are just fermions and bosons and combinations of them. None of that stuff is just, all by itself, about any other stuff. There is nothing in the whole universe—including, of course, all the neurons in your brain—that just by its nature or composition can do this job of being about some other clump of matter. So, when consciousness assures us that we have thoughts about stuff, it has to be wrong. The brain nonconsciously stores information in thoughts. But the thoughts are not about stuff. Therefore, consciousness cannot retrieve thoughts about stuff. There are none to retrieve. So it can’t have thoughts about stuff either.

Remember, the original problem was how the Paris neurons can be about the fact that Paris is the capital of France. We simplified the problem to how they can be about Paris. The answer to that question appears to be that the Paris neurons cannot be about Paris. But we could have used the same strategy to show that they can’t be about France or about the relationship of “being the capital of” that is supposed to hold between Paris and France. In other words, the Paris neurons that carry the information that Paris is the capital of France can’t be