brain, mind, soul: the metaphysics of neurons

By Riccardo Fesce

From a rigorous discussion of the properties of the neurons and the brain
to the mechanisms through which this grayish jelly
generates and explains the emotional life, consciousness, thought,
the sense of beauty and justice, the need for infinity
and almost all that we love to call "soul"
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This is an ambitious and playful attempt at examining how neurons and the brain work, on one side, and the properties of consciousness and emotional life, on the other, in search for the origin of that need of ours for infinity, our perception that something in us - something we love calling 'soul' - transcends ourselves and expands in space and time, beyond the limits of our body and our life.
It is a need for infinity.
Precisely. Infinity, not all, or everything... Infinity.
Because 'all' implies a limit that encloses. Like a photograph, a cage, four walls to guard what is inside. Infinity, instead, is freedom; it may be difficult, hard, full of obstacles, but it is always open to navigate, discover, conquer. Infinity blooms into further infinities, in ever new directions and dimensions: countless interpretations and viewpoints, on reality, emotions, life, their variety and novelty.
The organization of our brain suggests where this longing for infinity, knowledge and freedom arises from. In fact, there are no photographs in our mind, no drawings that fix or enclose reality. Only relations are recorded in the brain, and they are used to assemble an internal model - not a mere depiction - of reality and life, and to keep modifying it, over and over again.
In our mind reality is but an intricate network of relations, over many planes and along many independent and orthogonal dimensions: a network that includes a constantly rebuilt image of ourselves, centered in space and time. Not the time we perceive, but a time that we create, invent within ourselves by composing it as an intersection of experiences, sequences, threads that run, slow down, vanish and reappear.
The countless viewpoints on this network of relations constitute our reality, our time, our life. It can be seen as the product of metaphysical consciousness, but the multiple views, and their being centered on oneself, are the crucial intrinsic features of neuronal processing.
Everything that happens to a living organism is evaluated in terms of its possible relevance for survival and well-being. This may produce specific bodily responses and changes in the operating mode of the nervous system, what has been defined as the body marker of emotion. Meanwhile, neural circuits never rest and the brain will keep elaborating the incoming information and the one it contains, through an activity that sustains thought and imagination.
In the complex interplay of perception, imagination and emotion consciousness arises as a subjective model and a personal and private experience of reality, as a path among threads a thousand intuitions.
This way, the esthetic (ecstatic?) attitude emerges: sensitivity to multiplicity, to the harmonic convergence of many dimensions. It is our pleasure in perceiving ourselves growing and expanding in ever new, unexplored territories, in directing our gaze to catch novel abstract essentialities, abstract but as real as objects are for us.
The soul, anima, appears here as the subject of a legendary translation of reality that this complex and deep gaze makes possible, a legendary translation of things, facts and events, love, commitment, work, sociality, of ideal life as well as everyday life. A translation that does not subtract concreteness or truth to reality, time, life, but simply animates ('anima'...) them, changes them from sobs into poetry, from sounds into music.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0DMWNHJX3
• ISBN13: 9798345638149
• Release Date: November 2024
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 298 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"