[opening paragraph] -- Clark: The ‘astonishing hypothesis’ which you put forward in your book, and which you obviously feel is very controversial, is that ‘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. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: ‘You're nothing but a pack of neurons’.’ But it seems to me that this is not so astonishing a statement for a scientist to make. Isn't this what reductionist science has always believed?