Last night, I was briefly watching a show called The Brain: Perception Deception.

I have studied neuroscience as a person with terrible curiosity for many years. I work with a neuroscientist with whom I have spent some hundreds of hours discussing not merely neuroscience, but the philosophical underpinnings of neuroscience.

By which I mean to say: I am fascinated and concerned with all the questions that surround such a broad topic. After all, in some senses, it’s a metatopic. The kind of topic that supervenes, at least potentially, over »all topics.

This is due to the idea that neuroscience is both epistomologically (how we know what we claim to know or think) valid (to varying degrees), yet, it’s a simultaneous attempt to ‘capture the terrain’ from ontology (what things/beings/relationships »are, most fundamentally).

This is what I mean by a metatopic.

It’s a dangerously powerful union of agendas, specifically the agenda to encompass the known with a model. To »represent the foundations of experience, from a largely dissociated ‘objective’, (i.e mechanistic. utilitarian (focused on the function of ‘parts’) or the intentional narrowing of perspective for the purposes of ‘clinical or formal understanding)’.

This seems and sometimes is a useful purpose, until it becomes a domineering ‘religion’, in the sense of a pervading stereotype.

All of this to introduce my problem. The apparently brilliant scientists and researchers in the Nova video, referred to the brain as ‘a machine’.

They actually did this. All throughout the video. “it’s an amazing machine that … ” “There’s this wonderful machine in my head…”.

And so on.

How could it be true that the very people we authorize to educate us about the peculiarities of one of our organs… be so hypnotized by the idea of »computation… that they would »reimagine one of our organs as ‘a machine’?

How could it be true that those who study the brain no longer discriminate, or actively mis-discriminate the organ »with which they are discriminating?

Sometimes, a meta-topic can get things literally backwards. Backwards in the way of presuming that the origin is, in fact, its consequent. Its sequelae. That is to say that because we invent machines, we ourselves should be seen as ‘nothing more than this’; an array of mechanical ‘functions’ available to cataloguing and dissection.

Yet this is, and »always will be—not the case.

Whatever machines might ‘be’ they are not the supervening model of reality. Organisms aren’t either. But organisms arise without machines. Humans, and only humans, make physical machines. They are not biological entities as are cells, virii, insects, animals, plants and living places.

The Amazon rainforest is not, if it is not »anything, a machine!
The whales are not machines. The sky is not a machine. Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to pretend that living beings in absolutely physical relation over time… was »just an array of machines?

Honestly, I can see how the ability to »adopt this perspective for the sake of careful ‘scientific’ inquiry might be useful or even necessary… but to declare it as a fact… is, at best, delusional. And at worst, a symptom of something malignant worming its way through our modern minds.

Metatopics require vastly more »nuanced perspective and awareness than comparatively ordinary topics. It’s absurd to ignore the ontological difference between an organism and a machine. By the time »this has become common practice, something is wrong »with our lexicons. ‘We’ have undergone another iteration of the cycles of damage that ‘clinical’ intelligence naturally inflicts on us by its practice of para-‘objective’ inquiry and diagnosis. Or rather, by over-authorizing such findings and pretending that their findings are authoritative.

Whatever your heart may »be, it cannot be »merely a pump. In point of fact, if your heart stops ‘pumping’, your »brain will die. Which means that your »heart is required to »allow your brain to be a brain at all. So is the ‘wondrous machine’, the »heart, or the »brain? Which comes »first? Whatever the heart may be, it has many »ways of being that machines »cannot have (if qualities are possessions, as my language implies).

Which comes first is also the wrong question. It’s the »synergy of your organs that allows us to even entertain such questions as ‘what is the brain »doing? And this is the peculiar opposite of the question »who is the brain »being?

The nature of organisms has little to do with machines, and much to do with symbiosis; a sacred ‘re-integration’ of memory, ancestry, relationships… and «cells. These cells are beings, not machines. And so, too, our organs, our brains… our minds… and our living planet.