Sebastian Seung is a professor of computational neuroscience and
physics at MIT. His research in the neuroscience field involves
“connectomes,” or the map of connections between and among
neurons. The endeavor of investigating and mapping connectomes
began in the 1980s and jumped off with the elucidation of the
complete connectome of the worm C. elegans in 1986. While C.
elegans has about 300 neurons, humans have about 10 billion
neurons and ten times that number of connections. These
connections can grow and change with and from neural activity
and experience, combining to permutations exponentially greater
that those of DNA and its four bases. Seung proposes that we
“are our connectomes” rather than our genomes, implying that our
thoughts, experiences, emotions, and consciousness itself may
have a purely neural basis. To refrain from any more spoilers,
he artfully expands and explains his hypothesis in the above TED
talk that it is surely worth viewing. For a greater
philosophical inquiry inspired by his id