“We have been beguiled, as has been common throughout our technological development, by the metaphors generated by our machines. Nowhere is this more apparent than in current ideas about the brain, which is not now and has never been a separate organ except that our purposes frame it thus.

The onset of computational technologies has been one of the most compelling of recent developments, but I must here emphasize that neurons are not ‘processing units’ in a computational architecture… nor can they be. Like all other cells, they are organisms in a living environment, which begins with the entire body, but extends into the entire environment of life on Earth, and, indeed, the universe itself.

No organism is ‘a processing unit’, and all organisms are participants in communities, ecologies, and worlds. This extends far beyond the localized environments familiar to us. Whatever neurons may be, they are nothing like our technological models… because organisms are animalian, and have less in common with machines than you do with photographs.”

— an anonymous informant