Mapping a fruit fly brain shows mind complexity scales with connections, not neuron count.

Human brains have synaptic connections equivalent to 10 million flies.

The drive to "know" reality reflects psychological needs more than objective evidence.

Like the lunar landing, the mapping of the familiar fruit fly in 2024—bane of humid groceries and kitchen cringe—represents a major accomplishment. Other creatures have been mapped, but Mr. Fly is so iconic, now living within a simplified computer simulation since March of 2026... unaware it is not real. After years of work and the kind of machine learning that can trace a single circuit through a fog of tissue, researchers completed the first full wiring diagram of a fruit fly brain—139,255 neurons, some 50 million connections between them.

The fly's 139,000 neurons stand against our 86 billion, yet the gap is one of scale, not of kind. If a fly can be mapped, so—by a sufficiently advanced system—can a human. It's a tall order, but conceivable, particularly with the kind of technological advances AI might soon catalyze.

Tell someone their mind could be mapped and the next thought tends to arrive unbidden: that maybe none of this is real, that we are already inside someone else's simulation, the way Mr. Fly is inside ours.

The reach is understandable—I love the idea of reality glitching as much as anyone—but why suppose in the first........

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