The extraordinary topography of the human brain is exemplified in a new image of one cubic millimetre of the brain cortex of a 45 year old woman, created from electron microscope images of 5,000 slices. (Nature Research Report)
There is something important to be said about this image. It is one cubic mm of human cortex. Here is where and how we learn. This image represents the very similar image that can be drawn from any 45 year old woman or man on the planet. Yet there is no person in this image. There is no depiction of another person in this image. There is no culture or religion or race in this image. This image puts lie to any reason anyone might have that someone else is actually different, someone else is not human, someone else doesn’t deserve to be treated with the utmost care as a human. I put to lie the idea that one human can’t get along with another human, really. It does tell us that our cultures, religions, tribes etc, are made up. They are virtual representations designed from the firing of these plastic networks. And just as we can design a horror story, we can as easily design a romance. Some people make an argument for a horror story. And from that story they unleash real weapons on real life. I prefer a romance, a story of flourishing and abundance and love.
Indeed, what this image shows is that the image itself, while itself is not a made up virtual reality, is a rendering, a depiction, of the forms that the same neurology can create from its own capacity. The neurology doesn’t have direct access to thing-of-itself. It is not necessarily everything related to the ‘structure’ of the brain or mind. Even as it makes a rendering of a whole structure and then associates it with a completely virtual story called “I”, we can easily see that there is no “I” in the brain, just neurones. And we can only see, even in this marvelously detailed image these are only the neuronal structures those neuronal structures can make a representation.
We live in a circular virtual argument about who we are. And then we choose to kill each other over it.
Could it be that there are un-rendered aspects of reality that offer another story of who we are altogether. Could those aspects of reality show us that the things we call “I” are simply units of emergent consensus from an enormous topography of even more varied structures that can’t be replicated in the neurology we see here, i.e the neurology that makes up a certain awareness of its own output and only its own output. And in the more enormous topography from which the story of “I” emerges, all beings are represented, all humans, all creatures.
And could it further be that such topography is not limited to the 3 space and 1 time dimension, but flows into infinite dimensions of space and time.
“We” are most likely to be small renderings of an infinite being. And from our small rendering we form an attachment story so limited in scope, so impoverished, that we would kill over it. The flourishing story reaches out into the topography we don’t have access, right now. It reaches into worlds we don’t have access right now.
Owen's Meanderings 