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"But even if the map came to match the territory in the spookiest possible way, there would still be a few hippies, philosophers and romantics who would insist that there was a real city under all that paper, a city of experience, lost in translation. The map makers would reply that there was indeed a city, the city described by Francis Crick where, 'You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.'"

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Author

A Clue to the Exit

Place of Publication

London

Publisher

Chatto & Windus

Date

2000

Metaphor

"But even if the map came to match the territory in the spookiest possible way, there would still be a few hippies, philosophers and romantics who would insist that there was a real city under all that paper, a city of experience, lost in translation. The map makers would reply that there was indeed a city, the city described by Francis Crick where, 'You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.'"

Metaphor in Context

All the agony about how consciousness related to the simultaneous firing of neurons seemed to Crystal relatively trivial. The correlations would become more compelling, there would be ever more bizarre brain lesions for the angel of empathy, Oliver Sacks, to describe. But even if the map came to match the territory in the spookiest possible way, there would still be a few hippies, philosophers and romantics who would insist that there was a real city under all that paper, a city of experience, lost in translation. The map makers would reply that there was indeed a city, the city described by Francis Crick where, 'You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.' Everybody would be back where they started but with more suggestive details. What was neuroscience worth in the consciousness debate when consciousness had its life in experience and she could never experience her neurons firing?
(p. 136)