But in Plato’s myth, the point is that one of the captives eventually escapes. And this is where Metzinger differs from Plato: ‘I claim that there is no one in the cave. There is no one who could leave… I claim that the conscious self is not a thing, but a shaded surface. It is not an individual object, but a process: the ongoing process of shading’. (549) Or as he puts it at least twice in the book: ‘The cave is empty’. (551) Yet there are some ambiguities in Metzinger’s claims about the myth. For one thing, it is not quite relevant whether the cave is empty. After all, we are willing to concede his point that everything that appears in consciousness is a flickering shadow, and we would never expect a shadow to escape the shadowy realm. The point is not whether the cave is empty (we conceded this point long ago) but whether anyone is watching the wall. And in Metzinger’s model, what seems to be watching the wall is the cave itself, the same cave that we heard him define as follows: ‘What is the cave? The cave, according to [the self-model theory] is simply the physical organism as a whole, including, in particular, its brain’. (548) But this ‘physical organism as a whole’ is not merely a collection of parts; it is a whole, after all. And it is this whole that we can call a self. This self observes the wall of the cave, mistaking itself for the shadow of itself that it sees there, and mistaking objects for the shadow of objects it sees there. But this does not entail that it does not exist. If the self cannot escape the cave, this is not because there is no self that could escape, but because the very nature of perception entails that it must occur in a cave: to encounter anything, including ourselves, can only mean to simulate it, not to witness it directly. Why does Metzinger fail to see this? Because his hardheaded reductionism does not allow him to grasp that even if the self is causally generated by the physical-organism-as-a-whole, this does not mean that it is nothing but a group of disconnected nerves and cells. The entire ‘ominous’ dimension of Metzinger’s book, which has made it so especially appealing to nihilistic younger males who enjoy breaking things into pieces, is therefore based not on some devastating insight into a scary ‘nemocentric’ world where selves do not exist, but on a simple a priori dogma that if something has causal antecedents, then only those antecedents can have independent reality. But this is simply a familiar and platitudinous form of materialism applied to neurophysics, not a philosophical insight with any sort of pathbreaking rigor. When on the final page of the book Metzinger says that ‘there is no one whose illusion the conscious self could be, no one who is confusing herself with anything’ (634), this is a mere bit of melodrama as the curtain falls, with half of the audience frightened by the man in the Jack-o’-lantern mask, and the other half wanting to be just like him.