The Square Root of a Sonnet: A Brief Treatise on Pedicure and Metaphysics

"You're reading these lines now. Light bounces off a screen or a piece of paper. It converts into electrical signals in your retina. Those signals travel through your optic nerve and trigger a chain of electrochemical impulses that ascend, with admirable diligence, to the visual cortex inside your skull. There, in the discreet shadows of your brain—that moist, wrinkled, and rather unphotogenic organ in which we tend to place, with excessive confidence, our metaphysical dignity—something rather extraordinary occurs: it doesn't just register signs; it understands. It doesn't just process contrasts; it perceives meaning. And perhaps, if the day catches you in the right mood, you even feel the familiar pang of the great questions: Are we a biological machine of extraordinary complexity, shaped by millions of years of blind evolution, executing algorithms that the universe wrote without any intention? Or is there something in us that isn't captured by that description, something that—to use the phrase that has irritated philosophers for centuries and continues to irritate them—what it feels like to be us?" An artificial intelligence engineer arrives in Cadaqués with the methodical confidence of someone who believes that the mind will, sooner or later, surrender to the vocabulary of biology, computation, and equations. But the summer has other plans. Between a loquacious barber, a physical therapist who practices pedicures with too much insight, and a series of conversations that begin on the surface and end with questions that no era manages to close, his certainties begin to crack. What follows is a novel of encounters threaded with essay: an inquiry into consciousness, will, the body, machines, and the limits of scientism. From David Chalmers and Mark Solms to Husserl, Eddington, C. S. Lewis, and Carl Jung, the book traverses the old tension between Athens and Jerusalem, between explanation and experience, between the reason that analyzes and that in human life which resists being entirely reduced to calculation, mechanism, and function. More than a defense of mystery, this work proposes a discipline of attention: to remember that there is no theory of mind that is not also a theory of the human.