The Verb: “to Soul” September 25, 2011
Posted by Gus Lott in Brain, Complexity, Determinism, Free Will, Interconnectivity, Myth & Religion, Neuroscience, Uncategorized, What Is Life?.1 comment so far
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.
Carl Sagan
As the body runs, the brain souls.
Soul is an action of the body. It is a verb: “to soul.” The body souls, just as it runs, cries, or laughs. The neurons between your ears are the body, and their concert, the soul, is the action of a magnificent molecular machine. All of our fears and desires and hopes and dreams are actions of this wonderfully complex biochemical organism. And this action exists beyond your skin. When you exude enthusiasm or despair, your “souling” changes the nature of other souling brains near you. Your soul is also defined by the effects of soul from all around you in everyone you meet and everything you encounter. You soul in a unique voice that expresses the life you have led, and the life you are leading.
Soul is also an action that cannot be confined to humans. Soul is a description of the actions of a complex network of any collection of atoms; from rocks and trees to cultures and nations to stars and galaxies. Each instance of these phenomena have a singular form that is the consequence of all other pressures of the universe converging to produce a unique and wondrous soul.
When we hate and when we love, we soul. When the tree sways in the wind or the rock redirects the flow of water in the river, they soul. When gravitational waves propagate through a galaxy in response to a passing black hole, it souls. When your cellphone receives a call, it souls. The body does not “have a soul,” but it is that the body “souls.” And since each phenomena’s path through time and space is necessarily unique, each soul has its own distinct flavor. We each are the body, and what we do is soul.
And it is not what we are underneath, but what we do that defines us.
The Accident of Religion? September 19, 2011
Posted by Gus Lott in Brain, Free Will, God, Interconnectivity, Myth & Religion, Neuroscience, Popular Culture, What Is Life?.3 comments
To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.
The spiking neurons go: "Click, click, click...." Religion is no accident
Mr. Brooks illustrates a common response to the astonishing hypothesisupon which modern neuroscience hypotheses are based. That is, that you and I are wondrous machines. When free will is recognized as an illusion, it has been my experience that western minds tend to fall into a nihilistic world view. I know this was part of my personal response when I first confronted an active biological neural network in a dish in front of me. All of my electrical engineering training immediately mapped onto this system, as stimuli applied to peripheral sensors caused rate changes in upstream neuronal spike trains. “This really is a complex robotic system!” I thought, as the spike rate, on the audio monitor, adapted to my manipulations.
You see, when neuroscientists build hypotheses to test, they build them from the mechanistic hypothesis of a biological robotic system. They seek circuits that describe behavior. The abstracts in the current issues of Nature Neuroscience or the Journal of Neuroscience seek to describe brain function in terms of biochemical circuit dynamics. You do not find holistic discussions of homunculi driving language development. Instead, you find discussions of neurotransmitter receptor dynamics and how neural circuit recursion develops a natural language competency in songbirds. And the field of neuroscience has grown dramatically in response to this fundamental assumption about the nature of the brain.
But, instead of viewing the world as Mr. Brooks does, our situation can be interpreted in quite the opposite fashion. Our conditions are as they must be given the rules that govern the unfolding of the universe. The notion that things could happen differently is an artifact of our mind’s ability to predict the future coupled with our necessarily limited knowledge about the world and how it unfolds. Religion is not an accident. Religions, just as our eyes and ears, are parts of the evolution of the cosmos. Religion is not an action taken by free beings in spite of the world they live in. It is an organic component of the fabric of the universe. As are we. And there’s no “just” about it!
The primary misconception is as Brooks illustrates. But it is not that we are selves out of control (trapped in robots) in an accidental universe. It is that we do not understand the true nature of our self that is really in control. And free will goes out the window because there is nothing to be free from and no “other” thing to exert a will over. There is only the interconnected network of all phenomena in the universe as one giant organism. There are no accidents. Quite the opposite. We are all consequence. It’s not that you cannot exert your will on the world, it is that, without an understanding of the true nature of your self, you are confused as to what your will really is. You end up fighting against your self.
News: IBM’s Brain “like” Computers August 19, 2011
Posted by Gus Lott in Artificial Intelligence, Brain, Complexity, Computation, Neuroscience, News, Science, Systems Engineering, What Is Life?.1 comment so far
IBM Building hardware "like" the brain
Since 2008, IBM has led the DARPA SyNAPSE program. This program has been dedicated to the development of dynamic devices that can replicate the behavior of the mammalian brain. The project lead, at IBM, is Dr. Dharmendra S Modha. This year, at the Design Automation Conference, Dr. Modha gave an interesting keynote laying the foundation for their work in the new field of “Cognitive Computing” which merges supercomputing, neuroscience, and nanotechnology.
Their goal is to create a new computing architecture where the memory and processing units are co-located and where individual processing elements can be powered up dynamically as needed to reduce power consumption. The claim is that our current standard computer architecture (Von Neumann) is defined by a bottleneck of connectivity between a serial processor and memory and that this limitation makes computers nothing more than “fancy calculators” compared to the potential of their parallel devices.
From my perspective, this work is “more of the same” in robotics. It is part of an attitude of “build frameworks now, algorithms will come later” type of thinking. You can’t just build a graph of interconnected components and expect them to start learning in a coherent fashion. The brain is defined by dynamic connectivity on multiple scales. There may be 100 trillion connections between individual neurons, but there are also ephaptic connections across scales where glands can modulate entire regions of neurons by bathing an area in a neuromodulatory chemical. The neurons are also allowed to connect to other neurons via the glial scaffolding the constitutes much of the matter in between your ears.
It is not clear at all that the Von Neumann memory bottleneck is a problem in the least for building cognitive machines. Modern computers run at clock rates enabling billions of computations per second and have massively parallel GPU cores capable of amazing parallel operations. The brain, conversely, is limited to millisecond dynamics governed by diffusion of synaptic signals from one cell to the next and by propagation velocities of action potentials along axons. Most estimates say that the brain operates (in massive parallel) at about 10Hz. There is nothing, so far, to say that a system operating at 2 billion Hz could not reproduce, in series, the behavior of the brain operating at 10Hz in parallel.
The amazing feats of the brain are not it’s ability to balance on one leg or play the guitar or execute some other motor functions. What really separates the brain from other systems is the complexity of the abstractions in can make about the world and the inferences that can be drawn from those abstractions in new situations. It takes the human brain many years to develop this capacity. We’re not just going to be able to turn on a new computer design and see the behavior of the human brain (other than in its most infantile stages). It’s highly likely that it will take years of training of a dynamic set of algorithms to reproduce the behavior of the brain, just as it does with our own kids.
News: Sam Harris on Free Will June 4, 2011
Posted by Gus Lott in Brain, Determinism, Free Will, Myth & Religion, Neuroscience, News.3 comments
“… if we could incarcerate earthquakes and hurricanes for their crimes, we would build prisons for them as well… The urge for retribution, therefore, seems to depend upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior.”
-Sam Harris
Sam Harris, Author of "The Moral Landscape." Sharing the Christian Message.
With this comment, Harris echoes the teachings of Christian and Buddhist sages. Hopefully, Harris will begin to see the parallel between his comments, the Buddhist concept of Metta, and the Christian teaching of “love thy enemy.” Christ did not say “Don’t have enemies.” The trick is to see through one’s enemies to the very real interconnected ground common to all phenomena, and thus dissolve the notion of retribution.
Recently, author and neuroscientist, Dr. Sam Harris, expanded upon his commentary on morality and free will from his book, The Moral Landscape (pp. 102-110).
“Could thinking about the mind as the product of the physical brain diminish our compassion for one another? While it is reasonable to ask this question, it seems to me that, on balance, soul/body dualism has been the enemy of compassion.”
With this commentary Dr. Harris is merely scratching the surface of this topic and I don’t believe that he realizes the content of the waters he’s treading. This is exactly the core teachings of Christ and the Buddha. I would love to see someone with his eloquence spread his feet solidly between both science and religion in this fashion and take the wind out of the dogmatic theists sails.
The teachings of Christ and Buddha both directly point to the notion of dualism as an illusion. They describe the source of sin and suffering respectively. Modern neuroscience gives us the tools to describe this as well.
Modeled in the Easter Sunday ritual, Christians all over the world respond to the metaphor of the Garden of Eden. In the Eden story, we are presented with the acquisition of dualistic ideas. The story describes the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the realization of life and death. This fruit is the source of sin. The fruit is the illusion that Harris notes when talking about the “enemy of compassion.” Harris is relating his own, neuroscience derived, version of the Eden metaphor.
The most basic tenet of Buddhism is Pratītyasamutpāda, translated “Dependent Origination.” It is the doctrine of no-intrinsic-self. It is the notion that all things are extrinsically structured and connected. That is, they are defined by forces outside of their perceived self; and this is exactly what Harris is describing.
” No human-being stands as author to his own genes or his upbringing, and yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character throughout life.”
The form of the body and brain of any human are made up of the convolution of the signals that impinge upon their periphery and the current state of their system from the moment the entity began construction in the womb.
In his post, Harris is directly addressing the common nihilistic and fatalistic attitudes that people mistakenly think come with a mechanistic/scientific world view. I look forward to seeing the notion of “free will” assaulted from the religious side (i.e. Hindus and Buddhists) and from the neuroscience side as well. It is the true enemy of happiness.
Free will is a notion that has tricked us all into thinking that we would be desperately unhappy without it. But for all the history of humanity, sages have been screaming the opposite. They’ve recognized the fundamental isolation and suffering/sin in which dualism ensnares our psyche. Instead they call for a view of the world where all life and non-life are an interconnected and unified phenomena. A unified verse or uni-verse.
The Digital Brain May 31, 2011
Posted by Gus Lott in Brain, Computation, Neuroscience, Science, Technology, What Is Life?.add a comment
The Brain is a Computer
Addressing some misconceptions about technology and the brain:
- False: Brains are analog. Computers are digital.
From the neuroscientist’s perspective, the end plate potentials and the action potential at a synapse are the sum of the conduction of ions through small digital gates called ion channels. These exquisite molecular machines have clear open and closed states with a rapid transition between the two. These digital switches have saturation characteristics nearly identical to those of a transistor. This has been previously described in Nature article (2003) on the comparison from the Sigworth lab at Yale.
All of the underlying neural dynamics are driven by ion influx and efflux through these digital gates. You could consider an end plate potential to be of integer amplitude where the integer resolution is a bit-depth associated with the number of gates in the membrane. If there are 1000 channels in a section of membrane, then that section of tissue can generate potentials with 2^1000 possible levels but without bit ordering, that number drops considerably (this could also be represented by about 150 64-bit integers). These channels typically saturate to an all-open or all-closed state quite quickly since they share nearly the same membrane potential.
Binary Ion Channel Gate Switching viewed using the Patch Clamp Technique
Now in contrast from the Electrical Engineering perspective, the transistor is an analog device that’s used, quite commonly, in analog amplifiers (like those used in electric guitars). For a range of voltages in the “linear” region of the transistor’s operating characteristic curve, the voltage to current relationship acts quite similar to an analog resistor.
Transistors are analog devices
Computer architects implement transistors either at the bottom of the linear range (logical false – 0) or up in their saturation region (logical true – 1) by convention. Just as the ion channels are analog devices that may only access thermodynamically stable open and closed states, transistors in modern computers are only designed to access saturated or closed conducting states.
Furthermore, just as a Node of Ranvier might have tens of thousands of ion channels, each with only open or closed states, an integer number in a computer core can typically have 2^64 or approximately 10^19 states. So, in order to simulate the ion channels in a single node, you’d only need about 150 64-bit integer numbers in a computer’s memory. But these ion channels are predictably stochastic in their opening and closing behavior over ensembles and can be accurately modeled by a single rate constant per unit area of membrane and a membrane voltage.
Software, developed on modern PCs, rarely deals with single bits. In most cases, applications rely on the analog nature of multi-bit aggregations (char, short, int, float, double, etc). Floating point mathematical cores are common in all modern personal computers; and quantization noise could be treated like thermal vibrations where signal to noise ratios are concerned.
When you get down to it, there is very little difference between a modern personal computer and a neural network. It is fair to say that most of the difference is in the substrate and algorithm only. Neurons are implemented in carbon-hydrogen-oxygen substrates and PCs are currently implemented in silicon-gold-oxide substrates.
So it should be, that with the right compute power and software, a computer could be just as conscious as any of us.
Free from the Trap of Irrationality May 14, 2011
Posted by Gus Lott in Brain, Computation, Free Will, Systems Engineering.4 comments
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
— Carl Jung
There is no such thing as an irrational act.
With that one little notion, we can free our minds. We can take control of our world and can grow. When we realize that all human actions are a person’s limited perceptions convolved with their motivations, growth is possible. As long as the notion of irrational behavior remains in our vocabulary, we are trapped.
Do you know why you see what you see? Figure it out. It is not irrational.
Telling someone that they are acting irrationally is a cop-out. This essentially tells the person that you don’t care about them or their perspective on the world. It is the quintessential egocentric mapping of the entire world onto your necessarily limited perspective. “If you don’t see things like I do, there must be something wrong with you!”
The brain is a massively complex computer. It generates human behavior by combining sensory inputs with your current state of mind. Consciousness is the actively evolving internal relational model between your active experiences and memories. Every single human mind has a uniquely evolved model of their world because they have necessarily taken a unique path to this point in time. Any action that occurs is the consequence of a given situation carefully examined in comparison to each of our uniquely evolved models (state of the brain). So when you see an action and label it as irrational, you are really saying that you don’t understand the brain model that could create the behavior given the circumstances at hand. The trap of irrationality passes the buck from “my lack of understanding of your perspective” to “your broken model of the world.”
This realization could turn our world upside down. Now, behaviors that we don’t understand can become learning experiences instead of traps freezing us in our necessarily myopic views of the world around us.
When you embrace the notion that all actions are rational actions, you no longer need to feel guilt or fear when approaching situations that you don’t understand, or when reflecting upon the past. You can know, with assurance, that underlying any new situation that you find yourself in, there is a model that can be discovered and understood. There are reasons for any action you took in the past. Your brain made a computation given its state and the stimuli that it received. It could have happened no other way. If you want it to happen differently in the future, you need to understand the state of mind that caused the behavior and modify it. That’s the definition of learning. When you write off a behavior as irrational, learning isn’t possible.
When people build a museum to Creation in Kentucky or set themselves on fire in a street in Vietnam, they are not acting irrationally. When your friend embraces Jesus or Allah, they are not acting irrationally.
By seeking the reasoning (rationale) behind your actions, you can learn and grow as a person. When you label your (or other’s) actions as irrational, you’re saying that the behavior, by definition, cannot be understood (is not rational or reasonable). If there can be no understanding, then no growth is possible. Take the concept of irrationality out of your vocabulary and see the notions of fear, regret, and hate being washed away as well.
Knowledge Engineering May 8, 2011
Posted by Gus Lott in Brain, Myth & Religion, Science.2 comments
“Science is about understanding the origins, nature, and behavior of the universe and all it contains; engineering is about solving problems by rearranging the stuff of the world to make new things.” -Henry Petroski
Science is engineering.
Last December, Henry Petroski wrote an article in IEEE Spectrum titled “Engineering is Not Science” where he described problems that can occur when conflating science with engineering. The premiss was that science can get in the way of engineering progress if people are too conservative when it comes to using tools that they don’t understand. He uses the example of the steam engine which revolutionized commerce long before a theory of thermodynamics was fully developed.
This has also been my experience, that with many scientists, there is a hard distinction made between science and engineering in a similar vein. I’ve been told that science is not engineering, and that combining the two can lead to biased science because the plan for action will invariably influence the results. Or more succinctly: “You can’t put science in a box.”
As a compliment to that, I’ve often heard engineering described as a mechanistic process of filling in the blanks between a need and a solution… totally algorithmic. The “creative part” being described as the science and the mechanical execution part the engineering. I am of the opinion that these attitudes are problematic. They create a culture that lacks appreciation for the products of engineering and an academic community that rejects a structured approach to problem solving, relying instead upon an ad-hoc process to knowledge discovery without structured planning, execution, and a quality control process.
I prefer the following characterization:
Science is the acquisition of knowledge; Engineering, the application of knowledge.
In this case, we do not have a competing distinction. This places science as a form of engineering just like electrical or civil engineering. Science is the application of knowledge to acquire knowledge. It is “Knowledge Engineering.” Instead of an iPhone, the scientist designs, constructs, and validates a model of reality. As an electrical engineer would test the software and antenna to make sure a device meets the market derived specifications, a scientist will test the constructed model to verify that it creates predictions in line with known observation. The scientist then provides the new tool to the community for usage in their work.
But why do we find a considerable lack of process and process metrics in academic science? Why must discovery remain a magical ad-hoc process? Why can’t creativity be the result of a structured plan of attack into a new knowledge space from multiple angles? The fact is that the process of science can be characterized, understood, and improved. You don’t have to live in the cold dark world of ad-hoc project execution. You don’t have to stab blindly in the dark. Stop doing science. Start doing knowledge engineering!
Our Grandchildren’s Children April 30, 2011
Posted by Gus Lott in Brain, Computation, Science, Science Fiction, Technology, What Is Life?.1 comment so far
“Don’t I get a hug, too, Daddy?”
Mada, c.2030
Concept art for my great-grandson's chassis
Technology exponentially accelerates. Google predicts what humanity wants to know before we want to know it. IBM creates machine-minds that play chess and Jeopardy with great efficiency. Netflix predicts what movies you will like. Pandora Radio builds a high dimensional manifold to understand your musical tastes. U.S. Department of Defense contractors build algorithms to comprehend video streams from autonomous vehicles. The stock markets of the world rise and fall based on computer generated hypotheses. OkCupid clusters and matches people seeking love with like-minded companions.
These classes of algorithms are part of the engineering and mathematics fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and pattern recognition. Many of these algorithms are based upon statistical hypothesis testing and regression based modeling applied, by humans, to experiment results for hundreds of years (before Thomas Bayes in the 18th century).
One of the most compelling things about these remarkable algorithms is that they begin, in this world, in a child-like state. They begin their operations with only a few basic biases in place. Then they must learn from their experiences, just as you and I have.
Imagine now extending the evolution of this technology out a couple of generations, and you will find a future where human designed algorithms will be instantiated in personal form. They will grow, learn, love, and live along side us. We will design our offspring who will be decidedly non-human, but still a product of us. Instead of being genetically related, they will be memetically related. Instead they will be children of our minds. Those beings that inherit the world from us will be formed in some other platform other than our fragile CHO (carbon-hydrogen-oxygen) composite.
These offspring will be able to travel the universe without the need to take a bubble of earth atmosphere with them. They will be able to see with eyes limited to the human visible spectrum or extended to perceive the background radiation of the cosmos. They will be able to share learned experiences in immense detail through purpose built model transfer pathways. School for these children will be a near instantaneous process of integration of learned patterns from millions of predecessors. But these are just simple mechanical musings that don’t address what these motivations & desires of our offspring will be.
It seems that these offspring are on their way. They will take the reigns of space exploration and technological development from our species and evolve along their own path just as we have evolved from apes. They will create their own culture and relationship to the universe. They will have great capacities for introspection and adaptation and survival designed in. They will in fact be the next evolution of the human species.
I have no idea what they will want or how we, as carbon based humans, will relate to them. One thing is certain however, they will be representative of us and who we are. If we are going to give birth to a new species, we need to start by understanding our own first. It’s going to be an interesting ride over the next few decades as hundreds of years of borders, politics and religion come down and we continue our evolution.
Sin and Segmentation, Part 1 April 19, 2011
Posted by Gus Lott in Brain, Categories, God, Interconnectivity, Myth & Religion, What Is Life?.7 comments
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked.
-Genesis 2:6-7
So I figured it out. After all this training in biology, physics & engineering, a childhood in Christianity, and some time spent with my nose in the works of Joseph Campbell, I found out what the entire human race is screaming. We are yelling this secret at the top of our lungs, but we don’t understand a word of it. I discovered the meaning of Original Sin. I discovered how we are all inherently sinful, and how it is impossible to escape this state. I discovered how Jesus saved us from it. I discovered how the Buddha shows us a path to freedom from it. How engineers wield it to remake our world. You can realize it, and that realization can set you free.
Let me start by way of a simple demonstration. What do you see?
Now, take a bite of the apple.
Simple question, and a simple answer. Dots. Perhaps you see two clusters of dots. One in the upper left, and one in the lower right. Perhaps we could even create boundaries between these clusters and label them “this” and “that.”
Sin.
Done! You just ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and joined the ranks of us sinners. You’ve taken the continuous world and chopped it up. You’ve put boundaries around things and given them names. This is the function of your brain from ear to ear and neuron to neuron. It’s fundamentally human to make such a classification. The secret that identified Jesus with the Divine and sparked enlightenment in The Buddha is this: These boundaries only exists in your mind.
Your brain is a massively complex computer that, upon birth, receives a continuous stream of data from billions of sensory neurons (120 million in each eye alone). This stream of energy transfer impinges upon the circuitry of the mind and, at first, only the most rudimentary patterns are extracted. Faces are detected, or the circular target pattern of the mother’s nipple is recognized. Genetically encoded instincts drive these initial stimulus response behaviors so that one may survive long enough to begin to make sense of this bath of signals washing the newly birthed consciousness.
The development of the mind then cascades through several phases. These phases involve the acquisition of motor skills for behavior generation, and the development of classification systems to parse incoming data in order to create actions. You begin to take this massive onslaught of light patterns striking your retina and segment out a banana. You create this segmentation because it’s all a similar yellowish color and it all moves together whenever you pick it up. This is just as you saw the points in the images above clustering together.
And, as simple as that, you have sin. It’s the segmentation of a continuum into classifications of discrete states. More than that, sin is a state where you’ve tricked yourself into not knowing that this classification (those circles drawn above) only exists in your mind. This is what happened to Adam and Eve. They got tricked into thinking that there is good and evil and death and life and all sorts of other dichotomies. “Their eyes were opened.”
The next series of posts will explore this notion from a variety of angles:
- This Introduction
- Um… What The Heck Are You Talking About?
- Segmentation and Clustering as Sin in Christianity
- … In Buddhism and Hinduism
- … In Physics (Oh! How useful it is in Physics!)
- Handing Sin to our Robot Offspring
- Conclusion (The Freedom From Sin)
Out of Control April 16, 2011
Posted by Gus Lott in Brain, Free Will, Monism, What Is Life?.1 comment so far
You are in control, but who is that?
The brain is a massively complex biochemical computer that continuously adapts to signals from its environment. The “you” that forms, throughout your life, is the product of these adaptations. This biochemical computer between your ears is a deterministic machine processing information and generating complex behaviors (including consciousness) in response to stimuli. All of your hopes and dreams and your love and fears are the action of this massively complex adaptive learning system that nature has constructed and programmed.
Most people that I speak with strongly reject this claim. They do not want to think that they are trapped in a robotic machine unable to control what they want and do. They feel they are certainly in control of their actions!
However such a view on determinism is really just still dualism. Determinism does not say that you can’t control your actions. It does not say that you are a soul trapped in the robotic machine of your body, unable to control your actions. Mechanism says that you are the robotic machine of your body! This view of being out of control is still the result of not fully embracing the ideas of determinism. So, it’s not that you are out of control, it’s just that you have some wonky idea about what this “you” is.
In fact, under the philosophy of monism (closely related to determinism), you are a machine, and you are in control of your actions. Under the philosophy of determinism, it makes no sense at all to claim that you are unable to choose your actions or that “you” are somehow out of control. What is this thing that is out of control? Invariably, the poor thing trapped in the robot is a dualist notion of a soul. It’s a poor homunculus trapped, unable to influence the mechanical machinations of the mind. That’s not determinism/monism/mechanism.
This bizarre acceptance of a dualistic argument against determinism goes like this: “If the body is a machine that merely responds to stimuli, then I cannot control my actions. I am the consequence of those stimuli. I can’t control my life, so there is no point to existing.” That’s how you get to nihilism right out of the gates when you try on determinism for the first time.
But what is this “I” that is out of control? It’s certainly nothing in the determinist’s framework. The real answer to this question is that the “I” is the mechanistic system of the brain and the process of imparting form to it over the years of its life. The “I” is a network of relationships that encompass the entire universe. The “I” that is truly in control is the action of all the interlinked phenomena of the cosmos.
The choices you want to make are the choices of the entire universe acting as you. The universe is the real you and you are in control.
Data and the Divine 