I have recounted the story of the half-real, half-unreal marble inside the box of envelopes to suggest a metaphor for the type of reality that applies to our undeniable feeling that something “solid” or “real” resides at the core of ourselves, a powerful feeling that makes the pronoun “I” indispensable and central to our existence. The thesis of this book is that in a non-embryonic, non-infantile human brain, there is a special type of abstract structure or pattern that plays the same role as does that precise alignment of layers of paper and glue — an abstract
