God is in the neuron, revisited

Years ago I wrote that God is in the neuron. I meant it as a provocation: that whatever we call soul might be nothing more, and nothing less, than the firing of cells. I was nineteen, and certain.

Now I build the neuron's cheaper cousins for a living. Weights, not cells. Matmuls, not synapses. The certainty is gone, but the question has not aged a day: does mind emerge from mechanism, or do we only call it mind once the mechanism grows complicated enough to flatter us?

What changed is the vantage point. At nineteen I asked from the outside, as philosophy. Now I ask from inside the machine, one layer down, where the abstraction leaks and you can watch, in plain arithmetic, exactly how the trick is done.

I expected that to shrink the mystery. It did the opposite. Watching a stack of linear algebra do something that looks, for a moment, like thought has only made the question larger. I went looking for the place where the magic stops being magic. I have not found it. I am beginning to suspect the search is the point.