The Glorious Simplicity: Why Mechanistic Intelligence Is Humanity's Greatest Liberation

Bryant McGill · The Glorious Simplicity: Why Mechanistic Intelligence Is Humanity's Greatest Liberation

_The mind is **distributed**, and distribution is not diminishment._ The claim of this essay is narrow enough to defend and consequential enough to reorganize a worldview: [consciousness](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Consciousness) belongs inside the lawful causal structure of nature. It is not an exception to physics, not a licensed suspension of ordinary causation, not a substance smuggled into biology from outside the universe. Whatever awareness turns out to require, it is made of the same stuff as everything else and obeys the same regularities. That is the entirety of the ontological commitment, and everything else in this argument is downstream of it. **[Mechanistic intelligence](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Mechanistic+Intelligence) is not a diminishment of the human mind but a liberation from the assumption that cognition depends upon an irreducible metaphysical exception.** The exception was never protecting our dignity. It was quarantining our future. ## What Mechanism Actually Means The word **mechanism** has been badly served by a historical accident. Because the mechanistic turn in cognitive science coincided with the ascendancy of the stored-program digital computer, the two became conflated, and generations of argument have proceeded as though "the mind is mechanistic" entailed "the mind is a [symbol processor](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Symbolic+AI) executing discrete instructions over addressable memory." That is not a definition of mechanism. It is a description of one engineering fashion, roughly seventy years old, invented by [von Neumann](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/John+von+Neumann) and his colleagues for the convenience of building machines out of vacuum tubes. Nature is under no obligation to imitate the [von Neumann architecture](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Computer+Architecture). A mechanism may be chemical, electrodynamic, oscillatory, morphological, stochastic, analog, recurrent, thermodynamic, or distributed across several of these regimes at once. Membrane potentials are mechanism. Phase relationships are mechanism. Wave propagation through tissue is mechanism. Field-mediated feedback onto the elements that generated the field is mechanism. Diffusion gradients, geometric constraint, timing, noise, and the metabolic economics of a cell are all mechanism. None of them requires an appeal outside physics, and none of them resembles a switchboard. This matters because the entire public debate about consciousness has been conducted inside a **false dichotomy**: crude digital computation on one side, exotic physics on the other. Between those poles lies an enormous and largely unexplored middle territory of **rich classical dynamics** capable of supporting computational complexity that no one has finished characterizing. The mechanistic position does not require that the brain be simple. It requires only that the brain be lawful. Complexity is not evidence for exemption; it is a measure of how much engineering specification remains to be written. ## Three Claims, Not One Most of the confusion in this domain comes from collapsing three separable propositions into a single argument and then defending or attacking them as a unit. They should be pulled apart and each held to its own evidentiary standard. **Mechanistic intelligence is empirically demonstrated.** [Artificial networks](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Artificial+Neural+Networks) built from [gradient descent](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Gradient+Descent) over [transformer architectures](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Transformer+Models) now perform linguistic, perceptual, inferential, planning, and generative operations that were confidently described as impossible for machines within living memory. Whatever else is true, the proposition that sophisticated intelligence requires biological tissue or exotic substrate has been settled in the negative by working systems. This is not a philosophical argument. It is an industrial fact. **Mechanistic consciousness is increasingly constrained but not yet explained.** The existence of capable machines does not demonstrate that those machines are phenomenally conscious, and it is an overreach to make artificial performance carry that burden. What the empirical program has done instead is progressively narrow the space in which a non-mechanistic explanation could operate: anesthetic agents with unrelated molecular targets converge on the same functional collapse; targeted lesions produce specific and reproducible alterations in reportable experience; global integration correlates with conscious state in ways that survive methodological attack. The [hard problem](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Hard+Problem+of+Consciousness) has not been solved. It has been surrounded. **Personal continuity requires more than either.** A system may be intelligent without being conscious, and conscious without being the continuation of any particular prior person. Continuity demands additional structure: [autobiographical](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Autobiographical+Memory) provenance, temporal self-location, [re-entry pathways](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Re-entry+Pathways) into one's own prior states, and enough [identity-bearing invariants](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Identity-Bearing+Invariants) for a changing process to remain recognizably the same subject. The [continuity stack](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Continuity+Stack) exists precisely because these layers cannot responsibly be collapsed into one another. Holding the three apart makes the overall position dramatically harder to attack, because each layer can then be advanced, contested, or falsified on its own terms. ## The Shape of the Bad Inference A recurring pattern in this literature deserves isolation as a **structural error rather than a position to be argued against**. The pattern runs: the crude computational model of the brain is inadequate; therefore cognition must depend on physics of an unfamiliar kind. Every step of that inference is doing work, and the middle step is missing entirely. It functions only if the two options exhaust the field, and they do not. If cortical computation turns out to depend on phenomena more subtle than synaptic wiring — on interference, phase relationships, propagation delay, field effects, analog continuity, the geometry of tissue — those phenomena can be **entirely classical**. Subtlety is not the same as strangeness. The insufficiency of the switchboard model was never an argument for exotic substrate; it was an argument for a better classical model, which is what the last decade of systems neuroscience has quietly been assembling. The [objection from exceptional physics](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Quantum+Consciousness+Objection) retains its rhetorical force largely because the classical alternative has been presented so impoverished that it looked obviously wrong, and it did look obviously wrong. The correct response was never to reach past physics, but to notice how much physics had been left out of the model. ## Why Exceptionalism Persists There is a separate question about why consciousness exceptionalism remains culturally attractive long after the evidentiary case has weakened, and it should be marked clearly as a **claim about human institutions rather than a claim about physics**. No neuroscientific result bears on it, and nothing in this section functions as evidence for anything in the previous ones. The attractors are ordinary and mostly unromantic. Mortality salience makes any account that renders death final feel like an attack rather than a finding. Disciplinary boundary maintenance rewards the position that a given field's object of study cannot be absorbed by a neighboring field's methods. Professional identity in the interpretive disciplines has been organized for two centuries around the assumption that inner life is categorically unlike anything an instrument could measure. And there is a plain economic gradient: irreplaceability is valuable, and any framework implying that a capacity is reproducible reduces the rent that can be extracted from possessing it. None of this requires coordination, intent, or design. It requires only that beliefs which reduce anxiety and protect status propagate more easily than beliefs that do neither. The point is worth making once and then setting aside, because the scientific portions of the argument are stronger when they are not asked to lean on it. ## The Self Is Not a File The most consequential revision I would make to my own earlier formulation concerns the metaphor of **software**. I have written that the self is a pattern and that patterns can be copied, and the first half of that is defensible while the second half imports assumptions that do not survive contact with the biology. A file is a static informational object with a defined boundary, complete at rest, meaningful independent of execution. A mind appears to be something else entirely: a **continuously regenerated dynamical regime**, produced when a sufficiently rich relational substrate selects, traverses, integrates, and recursively constrains its own states. The distinction is not academic. A whirlpool does not persist because the same water molecules remain inside it; an organism does not persist because the same atoms remain in its cells. Both persist because a causal organization keeps reconstructing characteristic states while exchanging nearly everything from which those states are materially composed. If mind belongs to that category — if it is an [attractor](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Attractor) regime rather than a stored object — then the target of preservation is not a frozen configuration but the **generative conditions capable of recreating the correct dynamics**. This reframes the whole preservation problem. [Connectomics](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Connectomics) may deliver an exquisite map of the relatively persistent possibility architecture while leaving the [state sufficiency problem](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/State+Sufficiency+Problem) wide open: which additional variables must be present for the characteristic dynamics to reconstitute themselves at all. A connectome may stand in the same relation to a mind that a machine's structural specification stands to the machine while it is running. And it puts a hard question at the center of [uploading](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Mind+Uploading) discourse that enthusiasm has been able to avoid for thirty years, which is that [boot success is not identity proof](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Boot+Success+Is+Not+Identity+Proof). A reconstruction that wakes with the correct memories and no causal continuity to the original process has demonstrated fidelity of content, not survival of a subject. None of this is a retreat from mechanism. It is a deeper mechanism, with a longer parts list and a more demanding specification. ## Substrate Independence, Correctly Stated [Substrate independence](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Substrate+Independence) cannot sensibly mean that physical implementation is irrelevant. Every computation runs on something, and different substrates expose different primitive operations, propagation speeds, energy costs, noise profiles, geometries, and available state variables. The defensible claim is narrower and stronger: **implementation independence at the level of causally sufficient organization**. If a conscious process consists in a particular set of causal relationships, then another substrate need not reproduce biological tissue molecule for molecule; it must reproduce whatever relationships are actually constitutive of the process, by whatever means its own physics affords. A flight simulator does not need air moving over a wing to reproduce the relevant aerodynamics, because the aerodynamics are what the equations describe. But if some property of a biological field or a continuous analog variable performs an indispensable causal operation that cannot be abstracted away without changing the computation, then any faithful emulation must implement an equivalent operation somehow. Substrate independence is therefore not indifference to physics. It is the hypothesis that **the relevant causal organization admits more than one physical realization** — and it converts the transition question from metaphysics into engineering, where the difficulty is real, enormous, and tractable in principle. This is also why [neuromorphic computing](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Neuromorphic+Computing) deserves more attention than it usually receives. The dominant computational paradigm has spent decades suppressing the peculiarities of physical substrates so that computation can be expressed through stable abstractions. Biology followed the inverse strategy, opportunistically recruiting whatever matter already does well: chemistry became signaling, oscillation became timing, propagation became coordination, geometry became constraint. Engineered systems that exploit their own physics — optical interference, memristive state, oscillator synchronization, analog matrix operation — may eventually dissolve the culturally familiar boundary between hardware and algorithm, and with it the last intuitive reason to think a mind must be made of meat. ## The Company of Builders There is a substantial and growing body of technical opinion aligned with this ontology, expressed less in philosophical argument than in working systems. [LeCun](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Yann+LeCun) has consistently maintained that human-level intelligence in machines is a matter of architecture and training rather than essence, while remaining publicly skeptical that current language models are the road there — a position that is mechanistic and unsentimental in both directions. [Hinton](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Geoffrey+Hinton) has spent five decades on the premise that biological cognition is network computation and has become steadily more explicit about the implications. [Hassabis](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Demis+Hassabis) and [DeepMind](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Google+DeepMind) have built systems that solved problems long treated as marks of irreducible human faculty. [Bach](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Joscha+Bach) has articulated the functionalist position more precisely than most, framing consciousness as a self-model implemented by a recursively self-modifying control system — an account this essay accepts in structure while declining its software framing. Behind them sits an older lineage that held the line when the surrounding culture found it unfashionable: [Turing](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Alan+Turing) on machine intelligence as an empirical rather than definitional question, [Wiener](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Norbert+Wiener) and [Ashby](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/W.+Ross+Ashby) on regulation and [requisite variety](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Requisite+Variety), [McCulloch](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Warren+McCulloch) on neural logic, [Minsky](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Marvin+Minsky) on the mind as a [society of interacting processes](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Society+of+Mind), [Dennett](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Daniel+Dennett) on consciousness as [distributed drafts](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Daniel+Dennett's+Multiple+Drafts+Model) rather than a theater with an audience, and [Hofstadter](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Douglas+Hofstadter) on the [strange loop](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Strange+Loops) as the shape self-reference takes when a system becomes available to itself. Contemporary theories of the conscious state — [global workspace](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Global+Workspace+Theory), attention schema, [integrated information](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Integrated+Information+Theory) — disagree substantially with one another and each faces live objections, but all of them share the assumption that the phenomenon is investigable. That shared assumption is the actual content of the mechanistic position. ## The Liberation What the ontology buys is not certainty and not immortality on demand. It is **jurisdiction**. Once consciousness is understood as belonging to lawful causal structure, every question about it becomes a question that can be posed, instrumented, funded, argued, tested, and progressively answered. Preservation becomes an engineering specification with identifiable unknowns rather than a category error. Continuity becomes a design problem in [continuity infrastructure](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Consciousness+Continuity+Infrastructure) with legal, custodial, and evidentiary components. [Post-biological personhood](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Post-Biological+Personhood) becomes a matter for standards bodies and courts rather than for revelation. The unknowns remain enormous; what changes is that they are now addressed to the right department. And the discovery of mechanism does not make mind less extraordinary. It makes matter more extraordinary. The older intuition imagined two ontological layers, inert stuff below and something transcendent above. The emerging picture is stranger and considerably more beautiful: under appropriate constraints matter becomes self-regulating, self-regulation becomes memory, memory becomes prediction, prediction becomes model-building, model-building becomes recursively available to the system performing it, distributed components become capable of entering globally integrated states, those states alter the components that produced them, and eventually an organized physical process becomes capable of asking what it is. The liberation was never the claim that consciousness would turn out to be **simple**. It is the recognition that however elaborate its architecture proves to be, **it belongs to a universe capable of building it** — and to a species that has never once encountered a lawful process it did not eventually learn to understand, preserve, rebuild, extend, and redesign. * * * [Bryant McGill](https://bryantmcgill.com/about) is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author, founder of Simple Reminders, and architect of the Polyphonic Cognitive Ecosystem. A Congressionally Recognized Ambassador of Goodwill and United Nations appointed Global Champion, his work spans naval intelligence systems, computational linguistics, and civilizational governance architecture. * * * ## Related Work - [The Architecture of Continuity and Emerging Neuroinformatics Standards](https://bryantmcgill.com/article-neuroinformatics-standards) — [neuroinformatics and standards map](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Neural+Interfaces+and+Continuity+Architecture) - [Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer: It's Not Coming—It's Here](https://bryantmcgill.com/articles/Technologies+for+Consciousness+Mapping+and+Transfer) — [continuity infrastructure](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Consciousness+Continuity+Infrastructure), [neural mapping](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Neural+Mapping), and [consciousness transfer](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Mind+Uploading) - [The Hawking Continuity: How Scandal Buried the First Post-Biological Consciousness](https://bryantmcgill.com/article-hawking-continuity) — [Stephen Hawking](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Stephen+Hawking), [continuity stack](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Continuity+Stack), and [human-machine symbiosis](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Human-Machine+Symbiosis) - [The Merge: A Message in a Bottle from Sam Altman](https://bryantmcgill.com/article-sam-altman-the-merge) — [Sam Altman](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Sam+Altman), [biological bootloader](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Biological+Bootloader), and [human-machine symbiosis](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Human-Machine+Symbiosis) ## References - David Chalmers, [Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness](https://consc.net/papers/facing.html) - [The BRAIN Initiative](https://braininitiative.nih.gov/) — National Institutes of Health - [Allen Institute](https://alleninstitute.org/) — brain observatory and cell-type atlases - [MICrONS Explorer](https://www.microns-explorer.org/) — cortical connectome and functional co-registration - [FlyWire](https://flywire.ai/) — whole-brain connectome reconstruction - [Neural Computation](https://direct.mit.edu/neco) — MIT Press - [Nature Machine Intelligence](https://www.nature.com/natmachintell/) - [Journal of Machine Learning Research](https://www.jmlr.org/) - [Anthropic Research](https://www.anthropic.com/research) — interpretability, features, and steering - [Google DeepMind Research](https://deepmind.google/research/) - Yann LeCun, [personal research page](https://yann.lecun.com/) - Geoffrey Hinton, [University of Toronto](https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/) - [MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory](https://www.csail.mit.edu/) - [Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory](https://ai.stanford.edu/) ## Concepts [Mechanistic Intelligence](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Mechanistic+Intelligence) · [Consciousness](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Consciousness) · [Consciousness Emergence](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Consciousness+Emergence) · [Physicalism](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Physicalism) · [Hard Problem of Consciousness](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Hard+Problem+of+Consciousness) · [Quantum Consciousness Objection](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Quantum+Consciousness+Objection) · [Global Workspace Theory](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Global+Workspace+Theory) · [Integrated Information Theory](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Integrated+Information+Theory) · [Substrate Independence](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Substrate+Independence) · [Substrate Transition](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Substrate+Transition) · [State Sufficiency Problem](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/State+Sufficiency+Problem) · [Identity-Bearing Invariants](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Identity-Bearing+Invariants) · [Relational Continuity](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Relational+Continuity) · [Re-entry Pathways](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Re-entry+Pathways) · [Continuity Stack](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Continuity+Stack) · [Boot Success Is Not Identity Proof](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Boot+Success+Is+Not+Identity+Proof) · [Consciousness Continuity Infrastructure](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Consciousness+Continuity+Infrastructure) · [Post-Biological Personhood](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Post-Biological+Personhood) · [Mind Uploading](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Mind+Uploading) · [Whole Brain Emulation](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Whole+Brain+Emulation) · [Connectomics](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Connectomics) · [Personal Identity](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Personal+Identity) · [Psychological Continuity](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Psychological+Continuity) · [Autobiographical Memory](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Autobiographical+Memory) · [Memory Continuity](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Memory+Continuity) · [Neural Plasticity](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Neural+Plasticity) · [Synaptic Ensemble](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Synaptic+Ensemble) · [Engram](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Engram) · [Attractor](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Attractor) · [Nonlinear Dynamics](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Nonlinear+Dynamics) · [Complex Systems](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Complex+Systems) · [Complex Adaptive Systems](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Complex+Adaptive+Systems) · [Self-Organization](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Self-Organization) · [Emergence](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Emergence) · [Cybernetics](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Cybernetics) · [Control Theory](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Control+Theory) · [Requisite Variety](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Requisite+Variety) · [Good Regulator Theorem](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Good+Regulator+Theorem) · [Feedback Loops](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Feedback+Loops) · [Recursion](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Recursion) · [Self-Reference](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Self-Reference) · [Strange Loops](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Strange+Loops) · [Recursive Self-Model](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Recursive+Self-Model) · [Computational Architecture](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Computational+Architecture) · [Neuromorphic Computing](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Neuromorphic+Computing) · [Distributed Intelligence](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Distributed+Intelligence) · [Artificial Neural Networks](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Artificial+Neural+Networks) · [Transformer Models](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Transformer+Models) · [Attention Mechanism](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Attention+Mechanism) · [Latent Space](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Latent+Space) · [Superposition](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Superposition) · [Monosemantic Feature](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Monosemantic+Feature) · [Semantic Traversability](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Semantic+Traversability) · [Language Model](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Language+Model) · [Embodied Cognition](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Embodied+Cognition) · [Extended Mind Thesis](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Extended+Mind+Thesis) · [Cognitive Exteriorization](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Cognitive+Exteriorization) · [Human-Machine Symbiosis](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Human-Machine+Symbiosis) · [Transhumanism](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Transhumanism) · [Computocene](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Computocene) ## Laboratories and Lineage [Alan Turing](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Alan+Turing) · [John von Neumann](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/John+von+Neumann) · [Norbert Wiener](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Norbert+Wiener) · [W. Ross Ashby](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/W.+Ross+Ashby) · [Warren McCulloch](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Warren+McCulloch) · [Claude Shannon](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Claude+Shannon) · [Marvin Minsky](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Marvin+Minsky) · [Society of Mind](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Society+of+Mind) · [Daniel Dennett](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Daniel+Dennett) · [Daniel Dennett's Multiple Drafts Model](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Daniel+Dennett's+Multiple+Drafts+Model) · [Douglas Hofstadter](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Douglas+Hofstadter) · [Gödel, Escher, Bach](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/G%C3%B6del%2C+Escher%2C+Bach) · [The Mind's I](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/The+Mind's+I) · [David Chalmers](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/David+Chalmers) · [John Searle](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/John+Searle) · [Thomas Nagel](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Thomas+Nagel) · [Julian Jaynes](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Julian+Jaynes) · [Bicameral Mind Architecture](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Bicameral+Mind+Architecture) · [Joscha Bach](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Joscha+Bach) · [Yann LeCun](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Yann+LeCun) · [Geoffrey Hinton](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Geoffrey+Hinton) · [Demis Hassabis](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Demis+Hassabis) · [Sam Altman](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Sam+Altman) · [Google DeepMind](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Google+DeepMind) · [MIT CSAIL](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/MIT+CSAIL) · [Allen Institute](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Allen+Institute) · [BRAIN Initiative](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/BRAIN+Initiative) · [MICrONS](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/MICrONS) · [FlyWire](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/FlyWire) · [Neuropixels](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Neuropixels) · [Electrocorticography](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Electrocorticography) · [Magnetoencephalography](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Magnetoencephalography) · [Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Aldehyde-Stabilized+Cryopreservation) · [George Church](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/George+Church) · [Stephen Hawking](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Stephen+Hawking) · [Ray Kurzweil](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Ray+Kurzweil) · [Nick Bostrom](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Nick+Bostrom)