Like landing on the moon, mapping the familiar fruit fly in 2024 – wet food and kitchen folds – represents a major breakthrough. The other creatures are mapped out, but Mr. Fly is awesome, now living in a simplified computer simulation from March 2026… unaware that it’s not real. After many years of work and some machine learning Able to trace a single outline through a haze of tissue, the researchers completed the first complete wiring diagram of a fruit fly brain — 139,255 neurons with nearly 50 million connections between them.
A fly’s 139,000 neurons stand against our 86 billion, but the gap isn’t specific, it’s scale. If a fly can be mapped, then, with a sufficiently advanced system, so can a person. That’s a tall order, but one that’s conceivable, especially with the technological advances that AI may soon catalyze.
Are you mapping me?
Tell someone that their mind can be mapped, and the next thought comes immediately: maybe none of this is real, we’re already inside someone else’s simulation, Mr. Flay inside us.
The application is clear – I love the idea of reality warping as much as anyone – but why do we think reality is a simulation in the first place when we can attribute what we experience to the properties of the human brain? There is no other way to prove or disprove a simulation hypothesis than the familiar, lying flying spaghetti monster. Consider what the hypothesis implies: if the simulation hypothesis is true, then there is something “real” beyond the simulation. This does not invalidate the truth; moves it to one floor and leaves endless opportunities for repetition. Mind mapping, even operable, is not properly used to support the simulation hypothesis of reality. What remains is a largely belief-based system, driven more by the individual’s psychology and feelings about himself and the world than anything objective. Maybe wishful thinking. But what do you want? The mask of objectivity is just shiny, people do not fully recognize our own limitations. We make up stories to get us through the day, but when reality knocks, we are often at a loss for words.
Readers may be familiar with cases of being shocked by something they were so sure of, often in positive, but sometimes in very unfortunate ways.
Humble pie
Of importance to the human condition is a useful humility about how complex we are. The neurons of the fly require a global power and a multi-year machine attention; we carry 86 billion, and what they do is more difficult to tune than the wires that do it – the brain takes reality and produces new reality, within a limited framework, with a vague understanding of our situation, to freely use the word truth. A connectome is a picture of a mechanism; the thing itself is a means to the realization of the reality we begin to understand.
However, the number of neurons does not do the situation justice. by neuron count, you are about 620,000 fruit flies. If you calm that many people, they will fill about a 2 liter bottle, a small bucket. This bucket holds all the neurons in your skull. Dump it and it’s just a fly, and when they warm up again, they noisily take up more space. The account is not counted.
The mind is what the neurons are connected to, and the measurement that really matters is the connections, not the cells – and you need a bigger bucket. Counting synapses – connections between neurons, which are roughly comparable to the number of parameters of a threshold AI model – you’re closer to 10 million flies than half a million. In order to unite this swarm into a single consciousness, rather than a collection of insects, each fly had to make new connections with the others – more than 100 million to 1 billion each, more than a fly can carry. Neurons are in some ways the easy part, the hard part. Links – can somehow turn a swarm into someone – like the delicate wings of fruit flies.
Vertigo and soil
There is a second shift, it is more difficult to hold. We can simulate and be outside of them, as with the fruit fly – and this is an important perspective change. We are out for now. This is one step closer to a brain state where we load the human mind and they may or may not know they are loaded. If I’m a bootloader, I don’t know – but I’d like to know. do you want What if I’m not a simulation, but a swarm of flies? Is it another flying spaghetti monster?
Either way, wanting to know is a choice and we make choices and they have consequences. Here’s where the part we can’t catch is the most important: if we pay attention to what’s going on in our psyche, we get important information about ourselves and the outside world, and the better we are at it, the earlier we become aware of time-sensitive information, windows of opportunity, and the long-term chain of events that lead us to where we want to be. So we live in the “best possible world”. According to some philosophers, it may have little effect on us—which is precisely where attention is most helpful in transforming raw experience into useful thinking.
