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place in the greater whole. We hunt, over the next days or weeks, for
the event it forecasts.
If movements of stars don't fit into our belief system, however, a
casual observation of some stellar movement may never make it into
the brain's circuitry at all.4
A neural network like this takes a lifetime to build. Without a
web of cell assemblies, it would be impossible to recall the myriad
events that parade past our eyes and ears, much less to make sense of
them. It's easy to see why humans are willing to fight to the death to
defend the memes that constitute their belief systems. To allow a faith
or ideology to be overthrown would be to abandon a massive neural
fabric into which you've invested an entire life, a network that cannot
easily be replaced, perhaps that cannot be replaced at all.
When T.H. Huxley's favorite son died, a friend advised him to
abandon his "blasted agnosticism" and accept the comfort of
Christianity. Huxley answered that he couldn't "alter a set of principles
established after so much thought and deliberation merely to assuage
his... grief."5 He refused to toss away a system of beliefs he'd built up
over a lifetime. Early Christian martyrs felt the same way. They
preferred dying riddled with arrows or torn apart by beasts to
forsaking their world views.
With a neural net of enormous size, humans "see" the invisible
forces ruling their lives. Neural networks helped the Eskimos invent
the igloo, the Balinese create their irrigation system, and Einstein and
Bernhard Riemann to paint a four-dimensional universe. Neural nets
and the conceptual webs they hold give us our illusion of control over
those things which elude our grasp. In fact, they are the imprecise
mechanisms which sometimes give us control's reality.
tched into an outstretched web of neural connections and takes its
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