There is a habit of mind so embedded in Western intellectual history that we barely notice it anymore: when we want to understand the brain, we reach for the most sophisticated machine available and say, in effect, the brain is something like that. This is not merely a rhetorical convenience. It is a cognitive strategy — perhaps the only one available to us — for peering into an organ that cannot be fully observed from the inside, from the outside, or from anywhere in between. The machine metaphor is the mind’s mirror, and like all mirrors, it tells us something true and something distorted at the same time.