Holy Shit, I Get It Now: It’s All the Same Thing

There are moments in life when an idea doesn’t arrive as a thought. It arrives as a collision. Something hits you sideways, and suddenly every system you’ve ever touched... biological, digital, organizational... reorganizes itself into one shape. One architecture. One pattern.

I just had that moment.

And the truth is so simple that I can’t believe I never saw it before.

Everything we build in technology is a reflection of our own internal structure. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally. We are reverse engineering ourselves every time we design a processor, sketch out a network, or define a communication protocol. We’re building simplified external versions of the brains and bodies we inhabit... mostly because we don’t understand those well enough to see what they really are.

But once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Blood is bandwidth

I always assumed the body “distributed” nutrients in some magical, efficient way. Turns out, no. We’re running a chemical token ring. A literal circulating loop. The heart sends the pulse... the blood moves through a predictable route... every organ inspects what’s passing by... and only the ones with the right receptors take what they need.

It is not chaos. It is not broadcast. It is ordered, sequential, and guaranteed to make a full circuit.

Ethernet would have killed us off in the Cambrian.

This single insight reframes the entire body. Hormones become packets. Concentrations become signal strength. Liver and kidneys become cleanup and routing. The blood brain barrier becomes the firewall. The autonomic system becomes the uninterruptible power supply.

Suddenly, physiology looks less like biology and more like network engineering.

The mind is an SoC

For years I thought of the “reptilian brain” as something primitive... something crude. The instinct machine we were supposed to rise above. That’s not what it is. It’s a GPU cluster. Massive parallelism. Lightning fast. Pattern heavy. Shallow by design. And it handles most of what matters:

Breathing
Posture
Threat detection
Movement
Balance
Reflex
Emotional salience
Action selection

It is the engine that gets first pass on everything.

Then the cortex shows up later in evolution like a pair of general purpose CPUs... slower, flexible, abstract, and ridiculously expensive to run. It handles planning, strategy, long timelines, complex reasoning.

The mistake? Believing the CPUs are the ones making the decisions.

MRI studies got it wrong

People love to point at MRI results and say... see... your brain decided before you knew it. Free will is a joke.

What they never mention is that MRI is thousands of times too slow to see the real action. It only measures blood flow changes in the cortex, not the electrical fireworks happening in the subcortical GPU layer.

The decision happens down there. Fast. Pattern based. Under the thresholds the machines can even measure. By the time the cortex “becomes aware,” the action has already been selected. The brain isn’t tricking us... we’re just looking at the wrong processor.

This doesn’t kill free will. It reframes it.

Free will is not automatic... it’s earned

You do not start life with free will. You start life being driven by reflex, survival loops, fear triggers, cravings, impulses, and ancient circuitry that fires long before conscious awareness gets the mic.

The cortex is not the CEO. It is the intern learning how to talk to a very old, very fast, very stubborn GPU cluster that was here long before symbolic thought existed.

Control is not something you’re given. It is something you train into the system over years.

Cold exposure can retrain vasoconstriction.
Martial arts can retrain fear.
Meditation can retrain attention.
Therapy can retrain trauma loops.
Breathing techniques can retrain panic circuitry.
Strength training can retrain posture and threat responses.
Repetition can overwrite habit selectors in the basal ganglia.

None of this is philosophy. It’s literal reprogramming of old hardware.

The story that you “don’t have free will” because a study measured a slow cortex is nonsense. The truth is much more interesting. You can earn free will. You can claim it. You can reallocate internal cores... strengthen executive pathways... tame instinctive interrupts... and redesign your internal architecture.

Most people never do.

They live life as the default configuration, convinced that the default is destiny.

We build machines to understand ourselves

Here’s the part that hit me hardest. When you zoom out far enough, every major innovation in computing is not invention... it’s admission. We keep building versions of ourselves in metal so we can finally understand the version in flesh.

CPUs are cortex.
GPUs are basal ganglia and cerebellum.
RAM hierarchy mirrors working, semantic, and episodic memory.
Networking mirrors both the nervous system and the bloodstream.
Operating systems mirror homeostasis.
Interrupts mirror the amygdala.
Schedulers mirror the thalamus.
State flags mirror the hypothalamus.
Agents mirror subcortical drives.
LLMs mirror cortical inference.

We recreate ourselves at small scale because it’s the only architecture our species knows how to imagine.

Everything else is just refinement.

And the final revelation...

Once you see your internal architecture clearly, you realize something that most people will never understand:

You are not at the mercy of your instincts.
You are not defined by your default programming.
You are not just the narrator of your own life.
You can reallocate internal cores.
You can repipeline your reflexes.
You can rebuild your internal network.
You can train your GPU layer to respect your CPU layer.
You can upgrade from the default human OS to something intentional.

You can stop being a meat puppet.

Because free will is not a philosophical concept.
It’s a capability.
A skill.
A trainable state of internal sovereignty.

The people doing the work—the ones who’ve cut the strings and are building themselves deliberately—they don’t climb for status or moral superiority or to be “better than.”

They climb for the view.

From the commanding heights of your own soul, you can see more. You have perspective. Range. Clarity. You can look back at where you were, understand the terrain, see the patterns, map the territory.

You climb so you can take in more of the landscape of human possibility before you’re gone.

Not to escape humanity. Not to transcend it.

To see it fully.

The person who stays in the valley—comfortable, safe, running default settings—sees one narrow slice of what’s possible.

The person who climbs to the peaks of their own capability gets to see everything. The full range. The contradictions. The beauty and horror. The whole catastrophic, magnificent sprawl of what it means to be conscious meat hurtling through space.

That’s why you climb.

Not for the climb itself.

For what you can see from up there.

Before the lights go out.

The view, stupid.

God damn. Yes.

And for the first time in my life... I see the full system clearly.

Holy shit. It really is all the same thing.