What do we imagine when we think about the shape of a thinking thing? It’s far from trivial. Just think of other instances where shape has turned out to matter. The shape of an atom spells out its very properties and functions, and our models of it have had to shift and iterate over time to accommodate new knowledge about its behaviours. Before the architecture of neurones and their galaxy-scale interconnectivity was revealed, the brain seemed insignificant to a study of mind. The study of something so elementary as shape even has the potential to make some of the most hitherto relevant debates redundant. For example, people used to ask whether the Earth was finite or infinite, whether you could travel in one direction forever, or risked falling off one of its edges. Although it is hard for us to put ourselves in their shoes today, this is an entirely commonsensical argument to have if you assume the world to be flat. The concept of a round Earth came to be a radical transformation, or transcendence, of that debate. It is revealing to observe in so plain an example how a question can contain within itself a misleading vocabulary ill-fitted to the phenomenon at hand. This is because it is a question that prematurely answers itself by way of an underlying assumption, curtailing access to a more enabling inquiry. What if something akin to a ‘round Earth’ could be applied to today’s debates about agents, selves, or thinking things – debates which manifest diversely, from discussing artificial intelligence, to negotiating politics of identity? Just like the finite/infinite earth example, the things people do and say in relation to thinking things reveals that they already have a certain shape for them in mind, whether or not they reflect upon it.

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