Silicon-Based Destruction of the Dao

Mo Danxin had explained it many times. In the end, it always came down to one simple idea: a thought is a group of neurons agreeing to light up together within the same brief moment.

The hard part is that they coordinate quickly, and not very neatly. Some fire half a beat early, some half a beat late; some flash once and go dark, while others light up and refuse to stop. To turn all this chaos in a room into a line you can read, you first have to number every star, then record the time of every flash, and finally replay that patch of light exactly as it was.

How fast? So fast that, in the time it takes someone to blink, the brain has already undergone countless millions of these collisions. And how slow? Slow in the reading. Reading is a tug-of-war with time. The machine in your hands has to be many times faster than that patch of light just to catch its tail. If you can't catch it, it becomes a shadow on the wall, flickers, and disappears.