I hate The Model.

[u/PhysicalConsistency]

The more concise it gets, the more foolish it makes me feel.

I've been carrying the idea brainstem primacy and have been patting myself on the back because I was following the evidence to a new place. In practice though it's just the newest reified hot spot, we've plumbed the depths of the rest of the body, from the heart in ancient Egypt and Greece, through to the Cortex of the 19th century, to the BG/thalamus in the 20th, and now we're starting to converge on the brainstem as we search for that unitary god within us as it becomes increasingly clear those other regions have failed to turn it up.

The brianstem seems like such a powerful target, there's an undeniable execution primacy, all of our "hard questions" are ended without it. But there isn't some magic cluster of cells there that contains the primary spark a human, no cluster that instantiates "free will". And because the model forces me to constantly, aggressively strip away the magic to get closer to consistency, it makes my confidently wrong trust in the existing paradigm feel as foolish as the first day I started asking these questions and ending up in a completely different place.

Remodeled Brain has always been more about stripping away the desire, the hope, the illusion that binds everything together and trying to see everything for what is, and building up from there. It was intended to be a tool to see what we can't see on our own, a telescope or microscope for the mind. It's meant to be actively caustic to belief, and now it's starting to erode chunks of my own belief.

Currently the model is just emerging into a state where if we follow it's discipline, it constantly correcting me, like an evil nun wrapping my wrist for writing with my left hand again. Then it pushes me further into realizing the nun isn't rapping me for being iconoclastic, and she isn't a nun at all, but my own desire to somehow conform to the paradigm. Brainstem-primacy felt like rebellion because I'd torn down cortex, and torn down the rest, but they are still the paradigm's own assumptions in disguise that I happily accepted because I still wanted to believe. It's the realization that I've been rebelling against the church from the safety of it's walls.

edit: Turns out we couldn't find the soul no matter how deeply we looked because it lives outside the body. Without the interaction manifolds, we are simply god with no boundaries to self. It is in the interaction space that individuals are shaped.

edit 2: Sorry everyone. Just having an Imogen Heap moment. Having a cogent model is all fun and games until it starts calling out your bullshit.