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    place in the greater whole. We hunt, over the next days or weeks, for

    the event it forecasts.

    If movements of stars don't fit into our belief system, however, a

    casual observation of some stellar movement may never make it into

    the brain's circuitry at all.4

    A neural network like this takes a lifetime to build.  Without a

    web of cell assemblies, it would be impossible to recall the myriad

    events that parade past our eyes and ears, much less to make sense of

    them. It's easy to see why humans are willing to fight to the death to

    defend the memes that constitute their belief systems. To allow a faith

    or ideology to be overthrown would be to abandon a massive neural

    fabric into which you've invested an entire life, a network that cannot

    easily be replaced, perhaps that cannot be replaced at all.

    When T.H. Huxley's favorite son died, a friend advised him to

    abandon his "blasted agnosticism" and accept the comfort of

    Christianity.  Huxley answered that he couldn't "alter a set of principles

    established after so much thought and deliberation merely to assuage

    his... grief."5  He refused to toss away a system of beliefs he'd built up

    over a lifetime.  Early Christian martyrs felt the same way.  They

    preferred dying riddled with arrows or torn apart by beasts to

    forsaking their world views.

    With a neural net of enormous size, humans "see" the invisible

    forces ruling their lives.  Neural networks helped the Eskimos invent

    the igloo, the Balinese create their irrigation system, and Einstein and

    Bernhard Riemann to paint a four-dimensional universe.  Neural nets

    and the conceptual webs they hold give us our illusion of control over

    those things which elude our grasp.  In fact, they are the imprecise

    mechanisms which sometimes give us control's reality.

      tched into an outstretched web of neural connections and takes its

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