Other thought experiments are less rigorous but often just as effective: little stories designed to provoke a heartfelt, table-thumping intuition—“Yes, of course, it has to be so!”—about whatever thesis is being defended. I have called these intuition pumps. ... They are the philosophers’ version of Aesop’s fables, which have been recognized as wonderful thinking tools since before there were philosophers.

Then what might the self be? I propose that it is the same kind of thing as a center of gravity, an abstraction that is, in spite of its abstractness, tightly coupled to the physical world. ... It is a mathematical point, not an atom or molecule.

You drive down the highway at sixty miles per hour, unperturbed by the fact that another car is coming your way in the opposite lane at the same speed. How do you know there won’t be a terrible collision? You unthinkingly assume that the driver (whom you can’t even see, and almost certainly don’t know) wants to stay alive and knows that the best way of doing that is staying on the right side of the road.