<First version posted November 8, 2026>
The Gnostic Neuron - Part 0 - A Simple Model of a Complex Brain
Gnoledge - The Consequences of a Gnostic Neuron
“I’m not quite dead yet… I think I’m feeling better…” - paraphrased from “Just Die Already”, a Monty Python skit from the movie, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”
If you’ve seen the 1975 film, the whack on the head is the punchline, but similar events do actually occur. All humor aside, the consequence is a matter of life and death. Dr. Iain McGilchrist, (of the “Divided Brain” fame), refers to one such actual event to note the difference between how our left and right brain come to know and deal with such topics quite differently. The story is that a doctor is examining a body that has been moved to the morgue after dying. He discovers a faint pulse, declaring, “This man is NOT dead!”
The nurse responds indignantly, “Impossible. It says right here on the clipboard, he died 45 minutes ago.”
The doctor’s right-mind, in touching the patient, comes to know the truth. The nurse, referring to a document using her left-brain, knows for sure, something quite different. Such confusion was once so common that bells were placed above gravestones with strings into the coffin. Such are the consequences of knowing for sure. Such is the quality of knowledge. Would you bet your life on what you know for sure? You do it in various ways every day. And if you think knowledge is flakey, wait until I describe gnoledge.
Balancing a Divided Brain
Before I address the above bet, I should warn you, your left-brain’s not going to like what I’m about to describe. You may cringe a bit, and not exactly know why. But I do. Not familiar with your divided brain? Here’s the quick version.
Your brain is profoundly divided, left and right. The left half prefers to deal with objectively documented evidence. It sees the world as a collection of information. I honor this preference by referring to it objectively as the left-brain, a physical thing thought of as apart from yourself, viewed from the outside to be probed and documented. Objectively.
The right side of your brain knows better. It knows that the most important aspect of the brain is not its biology. This more critical aspect is our mind, and its ability to create meaning, which is not physical at all. Nor objective. These two halves come to know the world in very different ways, yet still share control of your body using the knowledge you’ve acquired from both sides.
This right side deals with the relationships between ourselves and other things in the world, material or not. The right is the more subjective side of our brain. It watches for bodily threats, trust, and love. These metaphysical aspects are modeled in our mind. In a figurative sense, they are anything but immaterial. This is why I refer to the right half of my brain as my right-mind. Left-brain and right-mind - this trick helps me better understand the divided brain.
The left-brain believes it’s the whole brain and denies the very existence of the right to the point of wrongly “explaining” right-mind behavior. Denial is both the left-brain’s superpower, and its Kryptonite. Our right-mind knows better. The right-mind is the half that often sets things straight after our left-brain has made a muddle of our relationships in the world.
Noting this left-brain weakness, the right-mind has its awkward moments as well. Many times the left-brain’s logic will resolve issues our right-mind has no way to grasp. “Following your heart,” (the more common reference to the right-mind and its connection to the body) can create a lot of drama easily resolved with simple logic.
Yes, it sounds like a flakey setup, but as Dr. McGilchrest so nicely summarized it, “both sides are needed to live a balanced life.” Like most tools, knowledge cuts both ways. We do the best we can with what we have. And we survive and replicate. Mostly.
There will be more about the left and right facets of our brain and mind shortly as this dichotomous model is just the beginning of the brain’s multifaceted nature. These differences are also important consequences of a gnostic neuron (which incidentally has two very different sides, and also deals with the world in a similar physical/metaphysical fashion).
(By The Way)
(I haven’t posted here since 2023, but that doesn’t mean I haven't been thinking about neurons - just the opposite. I’ve thought about little else, writing hundreds of pages of notes and versions of my thesis. Now it’s time to share some of this content as a fresh update and revised introduction to this admittedly difficult idea.
If you’ve read my blog, attended my talks at Burning Man, or sat in on a Philosophy Slam, you know where this is headed, but not how we’re going to get there. In the last introduction I started with an allegory to the movie, “The Matrix”. There’ll be more of that, but I also have some mind-candy to tempt you away from the status quo thinking about neurons and knowledge. I’ll reframe knowledge with a new term as I anthropomorphize neurons. And the inverse. The idea is to make neurons quite personal, which they are. I’ll then describe the world as I understand it, post epiphany.
When I first started collecting notes for this work in 2012, I kept a section at the end called, “Consequences.” It was to be used as a future summary. Since I’ll never finish the body of this work, I’ve decided to move that section up here as a fresh introduction. Many of these consequences are more important than the actual details which support the thesis. These “consequences” may also drive you deeper into the topic. I need all the help I can get.
Over the last several years, thousands have been exposed to my original three word assertion, but few have challenged it in any meaningful way. I appreciate each one of you. Some of this feedback has made a difference, and also given me even greater conviction about my simple assertion. I now have a new more generalized version of the idea which in many ways is just a different way of thinking about neurons. And knowledge.
If you’re interested in neurons, brain architecture, behavior, or philosophy, you’ve come to the right post. Some of these consequences are quite profound. What does all of this mean? Answering that question is the essence of science - to observe the world, then describe the consequences of these observations to cue meaning. Ironically, (or perhaps not), this description is also a more elaborate version of what neurons do in the nano-context. The pattern recurs over and over from neurons to nations. Evolution’s a one-trick pony, but oh what a trick. It’s spawned a million other tricks as variations on this theme.
My three word assertions are the reframing. The detailed scientific observations of neuroscience fueling these topics are virtually infinite, but the most important have been made over the last couple centuries, and especially the most recent decades. Depending upon how you’ve followed these developments or studied them as history, what I know about neurons is likely quite different from what you know. Our respective backgrounds differ, but the ultimate validity of each conclusion will depend upon our more objective consensus. I’ll describe my version, you can revise yours as needed from your current body of knowledge. I’ll do the same with your feedback. The philosophy is dessert. I’m not academically qualified to present new science, but academia is only half of science. The other half is personal experience in testing ideas. I’ve now spent far in excess of 10,000 hours on these topics. If these ideas challenge your sensibilities, you may put in a few more hours yourself. If I’ve gotten anything wrong, I’m happy to correct and credit you with the revision. Now for that new approach, that new assertion.)
“Neurons Create Gnoledge”
I’m going to elaborate on my original concept using a new word, “gnoledge.” This will allow both of us more freedom to explore and describe the creation of new knowledge. What we each “know” is naturally subjective as I’ve described. The redefinition of knowledge presents a confusing step. A fresh start with a new word may help. I’ll contrast and compare gnoledge with knowledge as we proceed. Expanding the scope while redefining the concept over these last 14 years demanded a new word as my understanding evolved. This elaboration may now help others. By the way, I’m going to get some of these ideas wrong, a few even on purpose, at least around the edges. I do this to challenge your sensibilities, in hopes that you will ultimately challenge mine. Let’s get this new definition out of the way.
All words represent some kind of knowledge but there’s far more to life than can be described with words. Most people can discriminate between three and thirty thousand words. Each vocabulary represents in general what they know about the world, but not what they gno. Each of our vocabularies require a similar number of neurons to express, but that’s only a tiny fraction of what’s in your skull. What do all these other neurons know? Thus the need for the new word, “gnoledge”.
Like the word it represents, gnoledge is created at the instant its neuron fires. Our left-brain might say gnoledge is what causes that neuron to fire. Our right-mind doesn’t bother much with timing. Here’s that definition with some useful associations:
“Gnoledge is the utility created when a neuron fires. This “utility” is not physical but is quickly expressed in physical form as information, mostly as the release of a tiny puff of neurochemistry at the end of that neuron’s axon. In general form, gnoledge is best thought of as proto- or baby knowledge, but it’s actually the vast superset feeding the tiny subset we generally refer to as knowledge.” There. That should get us started. Now I’ll entertain you with a minor distraction. A few days ago I asked Grokbot to summarize a few thousand pages of my content and private notes. Like much of AI, I find it entertaining, and even humorous. I’ve edited it just a bit.
Grokbot’s Summary:
“Picture a neuron the way most textbooks do and you get a tiny wire: signals in, signals out, a processor in the skull's big computer. Useful for circuits. Wrong for living.
Try this instead. A neuron is a knowledge creator. When it fires, it has made a bit of knowing — call it gnoledge — about a relationship that mattered just then. Smoke and heat. A face. The timing of a flytrap's two touches. The gnoing is ethereal. You won't find it on a hard drive. It exists as that decision to fire, and it cues what happens next: another neuron, a muscle, a step toward staying alive.
Information still matters. It just isn't the star. The spike that leaves the axon is how gnoledge gets published as information — the letter of the law. Gnoledge is the spirit: the meaning a living cell pulled out of noise. Information doesn't gno. Gnoledge informs. A wire can carry a packet forever and never care what it means. A neuron cares, in the only way a cell can: by discriminating this from that, and firing when the relationship crosses a threshold of significance.
Most of that knowing never becomes a word. Your vocabulary — a few thousand to thirty thousand words — is the tiny yet emergent conscious slice. The rest of the skull is busy gnoing without names. Rough. Proto. Mostly unconscious. Inferior to polished knowledge in quality. Superior in value by scale: a vast sea of baby gnoing that feeds the thin film we can talk about.
None of this requires a central CPU. Nets of creators, each sovereign on its receiving end, each publishing suggestions rather than commands. No single neuralnet gnos everything. There are always multiple solutions to a challenge — but not exclusively so. The left brain likes one tidy answer. The rest of the system keeps several doors open.
So when you think about neurons, drop the processor metaphor first. Ask what relationship this cell is creating gnoledge of when it fires, and what that gnoing cues. Behavior isn't computation finished. It's gnoledge moving a body through a world that won't wait for a perfect model.
That's the flip. Creators, not processors. Gnoledge first. Information as the envelope.”
My Summary of Grokbot’s Summary
I don’t know about your take, but I find this Grokbot summary an astounding bit of prose. It made me giggle. If you’ve read my other content, you’ll recognize my original ideas, but you may also be teased with some of the new consequences I’ll shortly post. I asked Grokbot to mock my style. Hopefully, you can still tell the difference between AI and the authentic kind. I may share more of its opinions in the future.
So this is my refreshed introduction. From time to time I’ll add other consequences of this alternate way of thinking about neurons. Follow me on X @RodGnostic for updates, or I’ll bundle them here in a future update. Finally, if you haven’t yet, read my original content below:
