Categories
Philosophy

Pale Blue You: a Beautiful Brain

Beautiful. Gazing upon this kind of creative cartography of the embodied, material form and home of our mental selves is evocative in ways reminiscent of Carl Sagan’s wistful soliloquy on Voyager 1’s famous Pale Blue Dot image. Why? Because our whole lives and all our memories, all of our aspirations, our loves and fears, our friendships and disagreements, all our inventions, all belief and asserted value, every wonder of human imagination and every improbable dream exists in and as the complex neuroanatomical architecture and networked electrochemical connectome that resides there, jellyfish-like, behind our eyes and between our ears. Every thing you have ever experienced in some sense happened there in your brain and every time we look at a map like this, we gaze upon the location and presence of a perennially distant yet viscerally intimate essence that we may be able to name but that I doubt that we will ever completely understand.

The Pale Blue Dot

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