A Note Before We Go On

We are aware — acutely — that the preceding chapters have asked a great deal of some readers. To propose that the body's signals can be read, that presence can be made legible, that a currency could be minted from the quality of our attention to one another: this is not a small set of claims, and we would be foolish not to expect that some of you are reading with your guard up, and a few of you with genuine alarm. We do not ask you to set that down. We ask you to aim it well.

Remember what this book is. We said at the outset that it is a nest — the second of them — woven deliberately incomplete, built not to be admired but to be finished by the hands that come to it. A nest is not a fortress; you are not meant to lay siege to it. You are meant, if you are willing, to help build it stronger. So if what you have read provokes you, we ask first for the thing dismissal skips: the research. The studies we have been able to find — the ones these claims actually rest on — are collected in the appendix at the end of this volume. Read them. Press on them. Put them in front of an AI and ask it to find where we have overreached. We would rather be corrected by a careful reader than agreed with by an incurious one.

And then we ask for something harder than scrutiny. To pioneer anything is to think ahead of the evidence that will eventually confirm or refute it — to act, in the literal sense of the word that names this work, with providence: with foresight, before the future has arrived to settle the matter. That is what we are attempting here, and it cannot be done without error. So where you find us missing something — and you will — we hope you will not simply close the book satisfied that you have caught us out. We hope you will improve it. The alternative to building something like this is not safety. It is the clearly perilous future we are otherwise drifting toward, accepted by default because too few people with the capacity to imagine a better one decided it was worth the risk of trying. Dismissal is easy and costs nothing today. It is also, on the evidence of history, how the worst futures tend to get built: not chosen, but allowed.