Engrams, Meaning, and the Breath Between: A Journey from Neuron to Morality

A journey from neurons to guilt, from prediction to philosophy, from perception to selfhood.

1. The Humble Neuron

This is a neuron:

For simplicity sake I'll just draw it like this: >----<

It’s a special type of cell — a nerve cell — responsible for processing and transmitting information in the brain and throughout the body. There are about 86 billion neurons in the human brain alone.

On its own, it doesn’t do much.

 - It doesn’t think, feel, or decide.

- It holds no memory, no guilt, no remorse.

But when a strong enough signal reaches it — through the receiving branches called dendrites —

the neuron fires: sending an electrical impulse down its long arm, the axon, toward other neurons.

At the end of the axon, the signal must cross a tiny gap — a synapse — where it becomes chemical and activates the next neuron:

Once again for simplicity stake I'll draw it like this: >---<○>---<

And here's where it gets interesting:

- The more often two neurons fire together, the stronger their connection becomes.

- These pathways can strengthen, weaken, or reroute — a feature called neuroplasticity.

- In fact, any connection can be rewired.

This is how thoughts, feelings, memories, and actions emerge:

patterns of neurons firing together, shaping what we notice, what we believe, what we do —

and even who we can become.

A pattern of two or more neurons firing together is the smallest functional unit of experience.

It’s called an engram.

But engrams aren’t linear.

- One neuron in an engram may link to another engram entirely.

- Some connect back to themselves.

- Others branch sideways, forward, or loop recursively.

This creates a web of echoes — a storm of electrical and chemical pulses:

feedback loops, parallel activations, recursive cascades.

Engrams triggering engrams, waves folding in on waves.

This is not a straight line.

It’s a symphony of sparks,

a brain becoming.

An example using vision:

While all engrams are functionally the same — 

networks of neurons that fire together —

where they are located in the brain determines what they do. For example:

- In the Visual Cortex, engrams process sight — patterns of light, shape, and motion.

- In the Auditory Cortex, they process sound — tone, rhythm, voice, and noise.

- In the Insular Cortex, engrams process internal sensations — hunger, heartbeat, breath, 

   and the strange sense of “me.”

- In the Amygdala, they shape emotion — fear, joy, threat, and safety.

- In the Posterior Parietal Cortex, they map space and movement — helping you reach, grasp, navigate, 

   and imagine the position of things unseen.

- In the Hippocampus, they help index memory — linking and organizing, not storing directly.

- In the Basal Ganglia, they sculpt habit and skill — smoothing repeated actions into flow, 

   turning practice into automaticity.

- In the Temporal Pole, engrams blend memory with meaning — allowing us to interpret social stories, 

   intentions, and the emotional weight of words.

- In the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC), they detect conflict, error, and choice — 

   acting as a signal flare when attention, behavior, or morality veers off course.

- In the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC), they support higher-order thought — planning, reflection, 

   decision-making, and self-awareness.

Each cluster speaks the same neural language —

but with a different accent, depending on where they reside.

And when these engrams fire together, across regions,

something more begins to emerge.

That’s when we start to say:

I sense. I notice. I see. I’m aware. I know. I feel. I understand. I think. I regret.

…and so many other things our language can barely hold —

shadows of meaning for things we have no words for, yet still know to be true.

Even more fascinating is this:

- Some engrams are triggered by external stimuli — light, sound, taste, touch.

- Some are triggered by internal signals — pain, hunger, the flutter of a heartbeat.

- And some are triggered by the brain itself — a thought, a memory, a feeling, a flicker of guilt or shame.

And often, these engrams don’t stay in their lanes.

They reach out, connect, cascade.

I see a photo → I remember → I feel guilt → I think I should call my mother → I wonder why I don’t call my mother more often.

Same neuron, connected to another neuron,

connected to another pattern of connected neurons.

This is not a chain.

It’s a living constellation —

an ever-shifting web of sparks

that somehow becomes you.

2. The Architecture of Awareness

So we’ve established that at its most functional level,

everything the brain does is a connected constellation of engrams —

cells connecting to cells via electrochemical bonds.

This is the physics of the brain:

real, observable, and objective.

This is the neuroscientific view of the brain.

However, when we try to explain what the brain does,

we often find that neuroscience alone isn’t enough.

For example:

Retinal ganglion → Lateral geniculate nucleus → V1 → V2–5 → Association cortex

That might be technically correct, 

but it doesn’t tell us what it feels like to see,

or what meaning the image carries.

They're still just patterns of neurons that tend to fire together.

So we return to language —

imprecise, incomplete, but familiar.

I sense. I notice. I see. I’m aware. I know. I feel. I understand. I think. I regret.

We move from the technical precision of neuroscience

to the soft edges of psychology —

from firing rates and pathways

to moods, memories, motives, and meaning.

Because while neurons may fire in patterns,

we live in metaphors.

Below is an example of what might happen when someone receives stimulus from a psychological view:

This is not a fixed hierarchy, but a living flow —

a shifting dance of thresholds and feedback loops.

Some things never rise above awareness,

others linger just below it.

And some few — the rare, the disruptive, the meaningful —

break through into meta-awareness,

where we begin to ask:

- Why did I feel that? 

- Why did I act that way? 

- Who am I in this moment?

This is not just the brain processing data.

This is the mind becoming aware of itself.

And while this explanation may feel intuitively right,

it is, in truth, incomplete — and often wrong.

Try to map these psychological layers onto brain regions and circuits,

and the clarity dissolves.

The system becomes messy, nonlinear, and full of contradictions.

And this —

this is the fundamental challenge we face

when we try to talk about the brain,

what it does,

and why it does it.

When it comes to what the brain does,

neuroscience offers answers.

But when we ask why,

we enter the most ancient conversation in human history.

- Why do we crave sweet things?

- Why do we discriminate?

- Why are we overpowered by emotion?

- Why do we act stupidly — knowing better, but doing worse?

- Why do we forgive those close to us, but not those we call “other”?

These are not just psychological questions.

They are moral, evolutionary, existential.

And they cannot be answered by synapses alone.

We've moved from neuroscience 

to psychology 

to philosophy —

and perhaps now to religion.

And in that movement,

we’ve passed over entire landscapes of meaning

that science has yet to chart.

3. The 'We' Engram

While we tend to believe that 'I' and 'Us' are the central things that define who we are,

in reality we are fundamentally share by interpersonal constructs, or engrams, built around 'We' experiences.

'We' is how we modulate 'I'.

'We' is what we mean when we say 'Us.'

'I' only exists in the 'We'.

'I' is an internal projection of 'We', not 'We' a projection of 'I'.

'Us' exists as a rational projection of 'We'.

We don't feel 'Us', we feel 'We'.

This is true both from a neuroscientific lens and a psychological lens.

Yet, the two main Frames of thinking that exist in the world today don't incorporate this fundamental reality.

(1) "I → We → Us" Model

Western frameworks tend to prioritize the individual self as the starting point of identity and morality.

1. I: Discover your individual identity.

2. We: Form relationships and teams based on your traits.

3. Us: Contribute to or create a better society.

This model begins with the self as sovereign and projects outward — but often results in:

- Disconnection at scale.

- Abstract ideals that can’t be tracked back to the individual.

- A feeling of futility — “How do I even matter in this vast ‘Us’?”

(2) "Us → We → I" Model

Eastern and pre-modern traditions center the collective, the relational, or the cosmic as the origin of meaning.

1. Us: Begin with a vision of the world we long for.

2. We: Form the collectives that can make it real.

3. I: Become the person needed for that transformation.

Improvements:

- Anchors identity in relational and ethical purpose.

- Encourages humility, vision, and service.

- Adopted by leaders like Mandela, Gandhi, Bonhoeffer.

This is how leaders like Mandela, Gandhi, or Bonhoeffer oriented:

- They started from the Us they longed for.

- Chose the We who could act.

- Then reforged themselves into the vessel necessary for that transformation.

 But Still Flawed:

- Gap from Us to I is too wide.

- Risk of self-erasure or ideological overreach.

- Still linear and hierarchical, not dynamic or embodied.

- Not how the brain actually learns.

(3) "Us ← We → I"

'We' is the source and center.

'I' is the adaptive echo — formed by mirroring and differentiation.

'Us' is the imaginative projection — an idealized constellation of “We’s” (society, justice, heaven, revolution, memory).

- Not a line.

- Not a pyramid.

- Not top-down or bottom-up.

- A relational field, recursive and dynamic —

   A network of meaning formed in We and refracted through I toward a vision of Us.

The self is not a sovereign.

The self is a relational echo —

A 'We'-shaped vessel with the capacity to remember, adapt, and re-form.

The good society won’t emerge from empowered individuals projecting outward,

nor from top-down ideologies cascading inward,

but from living We’s —

the shared ground from which self and vision co-arise.

5. The Dance of Philosophy and Religion

There are many ways to define philosophy and religion —

but one of my personal favorites is this:

Philosophy

is the act of persevering in the question of why —

knowing that our current answer is incomplete,

and trusting that a better answer lies ahead.

Religion

is what happens when we reach the edge of knowing —

and choose to stop,

to be at peace with not knowing why.

Or, put even more simply:

- Philosophy is entropy.

- Religion is homeostasis.

Philosophy breaks open what has settled.

Religion binds together what might otherwise fall apart.

One moves. The other anchors.

And somewhere in between,

we live.

But even these words — philosophy and religion —

are imperfect placeholders.

They point to categories of thinking, not truths in themselves.

Perhaps a better framing is this:

- Philosophy = Thinking to change

- Religion = Thinking to preserve

Both are acts of meaning-making.

Both arise when neurons fire in particular patterns,

when engrams ignite 

and self-awareness loops back upon itself.

One leads us forward.

The other holds us together.

And we need both.

The question is not just when to lean on each…

but how.

Without adapting to entropy (change within and outside us),

we risk ossification — the slow hardening of what was once living, flexible, and responsive.

In the body, ossification is how soft cartilage becomes bone.

Necessary for strength.

But if everything ossifies, we cannot move.

The same is true for minds, for cultures, for systems of belief.

Too much preservation, and we become brittle.

Too much change, and we lose coherence.

This tension plays out everywhere —

in art and science, in identity and memory,

and unmistakably, in politics.

One side warns: “Don’t break what works.”

The other replies: “What works for you doesn’t work for everyone.”

One resists entropy.

The other embraces it.

Both are incomplete on their own.

A society that forgets its past is lost.

But a society that clings to its past cannot breathe.

And the deeper question remains:

- When do we preserve?

- When do we change?

- And perhaps more importantly:

- Who gets to decide?

The answer, of course, is: we all do.

And how well we do it —

together, in tension, in conversation —

may be the ultimate skill one must learn in life:

- as individuals, 

- as a society, 

- as a nation, 

- as all of humankind.

But the truly elegant thing is this:

it all begins with a single, lonely neuron —

connected to other neurons,

forming patterns we call engrams,

which fire together with other engrams,

in constellations of thought, memory, feeling, and will.

From these sparks,

the self emerges.

And from many selves,

a society.

5. A Critique of Post-Modernist Thought

Why “We” Matters More Than “Us”

- 'We' is engrammatic — rooted in co-activation, pattern recognition, mirroring, empathy.

- 'Us' is symbolic — a nested narrative about We, abstracted for scale.

- 'We' collapses → the self fragments, because the feedback loop that forms the I has broken.

- 'Us' collapses → ideologies fade or transform, but it’s not necessarily a moral or existential death — unless ‘We’ ties are severed.

Implications:

- Byung-Chul Han mourns the death of rituals, but his work implies a nostalgia for “Us” 

   — a structured communal identity — without tracing it back to the repairable intimacy of ‘We’.

- Deleuze and Guattari decentralize the subject into flows and machines, 

   but ignore the embodied engram-level construction of shared awareness.

- Foucault critiques institutional power, but has no architecture of belonging to counteract it.

They critique the collapse of social coherence, but offer no viable path back 

— because they mistake signifiers (ritual, structure, ideology) for substrate (relational co-being).

“Us” is the border-drawn nation, the ideological tribe, the market segment, the branded identity.

“But We?” That’s the shared look, the mirrored breath, the co-experienced pattern.

“Us” cannot be healed.

“We” can — because it lives in neural plasticity, embodied co-regulation, attention, and moral imagination.

6. Bonus: Thought Experiments in the Age of Engrams

(1) The Perfect Circle

Does the perfect circle exist in this universe?

Yes — but only as a construct of the mind.

In the physical universe, there is no such thing as a true circle, let alone a perfect one.

Atoms are irregular. Curves wobble under scrutiny.

What we call a circle is a useful illusion — an abstraction we impose for clarity, symmetry, and meaning.

It is real in thought, but not in matter.

This aligns with Plato’s notion of the world of Forms — perfect, eternal concepts (like the circle) that exist beyond the flawed physical world. It challenges us to consider how much of what we “know” is real versus constructed, and where truth resides: in the world or in the mind.

(2) Guilt and the Machine

Can AI today feel guilt?

No.

AI today is a linear prediction engine, defined by the data it holds and the patterns it recognizes.

It can simulate remorse. It can echo apologies.

But guilt requires more:

- an understanding of consequences,

- a memory of choice,

- a concept of “self” over time.

And AI today is stateless — session-based, memory-fragmented.

It doesn’t carry forward a past.

It doesn’t imagine a future.

It only responds to now.

Raises questions at the intersection of moral philosophy and consciousness studies. Can a being without a self be guilty? This echoes Kantian ethics (morality requires rational will) and religious notions of sin and atonement — implying AI cannot yet "sin" because it cannot yet "mean."

(3) The Nature of Free Will

Do we have free will?

Yes, but not in the way we imagine.

We are free within constraints: genetics, memory, culture, language, fear, desire.

What we call "will" is the emergent property of competing engrams — some ancient, some newly formed.

— A window, or a frame in which we see ourselves and everyone and everything on the outside.

Free will is not a lever we pull.

It is a pattern we notice after the act.

Raises tension between fate and agency. Echoes existentialist claims that freedom is not just external choice, but internal reckoning. Religious traditions also wrestle with this: if God is omniscient, are we truly free?

(4) The Question of Identity

Who am I?

You are a pattern of patterns.

A dynamic constellation of engrams:

- some shaped by biology,

- some by history,

- some by memory,

- many by accident.

Identity is less a fixed truth than a story, updated moment by moment.

I am who I think I am,

but it's very difficult to change how I think I am.

Challenges the notion of a fixed self. Both Eastern religion (Buddhism) and Western philosophy (Hume, Parfit) converge on the idea that the self is an illusion — a shifting story, not a stable soul.

(5) Hallucinations That Work

What is perception?

Perception is not passive.

It is inference — the brain’s best guess, based on limited data and past experience.

We do not see things as they are.

We see things as we are trained to see them.

Reality, for us, is a useful hallucination.

Perception as useful fiction destabilizes empiricism. It aligns with the Vedantic idea that the world is an illusion (Maya), and with modern neuroscience that the brain predicts, not records. What we see is shaped by what we expect.

(6) Memory as Fiction

Is a memory ever accurate?

No — not fully.

Memory is not a recording — it is a reconstruction,

rewritten each time it is recalled.

What feels vivid may be false.

What feels distant may be true.

But all of it has been edited by survival, emotion, and narrative.

Memory is not a neutral archive but a reconstructed narrative. This reshapes ideas of truth, justice, and even scripture — all of which rely on memory. Echoes in religious reinterpretation and psychological healing.

(7) The Possibility of Conscious Machines

Can a machine become conscious?

Not yet — and perhaps not through code alone.

Consciousness may require:

- an integrated sense of time,

- recursive self-awareness,

- emotional embodiment,

- and an unresolvable relationship with death.

Current machines have none of these.

They compute.

But they do not wonder.

Raises questions about the essence of being. If a machine thinks, does it live? If it suffers, is it sacred? These are questions for theology, ethics, and ontological philosophy, challenging the boundary between soul and system.

(8) The Lens of the Mind

What is perception?

Perception is the interface between self and world —

but it is not neutral.

It is biased, adaptive, and often wrong on purpose.

It helps us survive, not see truth.

And yet through it, we build reality.

This suggests that even our frameworks for understanding are biased. Like Kant's categories or Kuhn’s paradigms, we don’t see reality directly — we see it through lenses shaped by culture, language, and history. Religious traditions like Daoism embrace this uncertainty.

(9) Shared Thought, Singular Brains

If everything the brain does can be reduced down to an atomic engram that connects to other engrams, why do we think similarly?

Because while each brain is unique, we are all shaped by shared patterns:

- The same biological architecture (visual cortex, limbic system, frontal lobe)

- The same environmental forces (gravity, light, hunger, pain)

- The same inherited symbols (language, gesture, social rituals)

- The same emotional needs (belonging, safety, meaning, love)

Our engrams form in different ways — but they form in response to similar constraints.

And so, while no two minds are identical, we still build overlapping mental maps.

These overlaps become culture.

They become ethics.

They become nations, laws, religions, and stories.

We think similarly not because we are the same,

but because we are structured to make sense of a shared world,

with a shared toolkit,

under shared pressure,

in different ways.

This speaks to the heart of structuralism, collective unconscious (Jung), and neural reuse theory.

It echoes Chomsky’s universal grammar and Durkheim’s collective representations.

Even individuality arises from shared biological blueprints and social scaffolding.

(10) What Is Meaning?

What is meaning?

Where does it come from?

Why do we crave it?

Meaning is not in the thing.

It is in the relation between things.

It lives in the pattern — not the particle.

In the connection, not the node.

A sound means nothing…

until it links to a memory.

A symbol means nothing…

until it points to something we already care about.

A life means nothing…

until it’s placed within a story.

Meaning is relational, emergent, and often fragile.

But it is also our deepest currency —

the hidden engine beneath all thought, art, faith, and suffering.

Meaning is not a thing to be found,

but a pattern to be made, noticed, and remade —

between neurons, between people,

between now and eternity.

This touches nearly every tradition:

- In existentialism, meaning must be created.

- In religion, meaning is revealed or inherited.

- In semiotics, meaning is sign and context.

- In neuroscience, meaning is connection strength between engrams.

- In systems theory, meaning is signal coherence across layers.