The idea
The book starts from a thought experiment: a contemporary Einstein entrusts his intellectual traces to an assistant. Not to resurrect him, but to ask what a system could actually model — and what it could never reconstruct.
The question then expands to a collective mirror: our digital traces become data; models extract world representations from them. The text offers tools to distinguish what is established, inferred, hypothetical, or still unknown.
What the book refuses
- Confusing a person with the traces they leave.
- Taking a fluent answer as proof.
- Presenting a simulation as an identity or a consciousness.
- Turning a conditional scenario into a prediction.