The authors defend their proposal that natural selection favors nonveridical perceptions tuned to fitness, contrary to the textbook view that perception is normally veridical. They thank commentators who offered counterarguments and those who suggested ways to test and develop the idea, responding to each in alphabetical order. The exchange aims to advance scientific understanding of perception and its evolution.
Conscious subjects and experiences are entities beyond spacetime, not within it. Their dynamics are described by Markov chains. Agents can combine into more complex agents, fuse into simpler agents, and qualia fuse to create new qualia. The possible dynamics of n agents form an n(n-1)-dimensional polytope with n^n vertices, the Markov polytope M_n. The total fusions of n agents and qualia form an (n-1)-dimensional simplex, the fusion simplex F_n. Projecting these dynamics onto spacetime yields scattering processes: a new map from Markov chains to decorated permutations encodes physical information for scattering amplitudes. Spacetime and scattering processes are a data structure coding for interactions of conscious agents; a particle in spacetime is a projection of the Markovian dynamics of a communicating class of conscious agents.