The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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Okay.

So, this world, this world is complicated.

We grapple with it as best we can.

And the systems we live in, environmental, economic systems, they're just staggeringly complex.

Economist once said to me,

like no one understands the economy.

And our brain, you know,

this is one researcher, Wolf Singer.

The more we learn about the brain, he says, the more abstract will the descriptions become,

because we shall be dealing with increasingly complex assemblies of neurons and the spatiotemporal patterns generated by these assemblies.

These patterns are with all likelihood non-stationary and best described as dynamic trajectories of a highly non-linear system.

We'll have to consider more than one, more and more that the brain is a member of a sociocultural network,

and that some of the phenomena that seem to be so difficult to explain in pure neuronal terms

will have their explanation only when considering interactions among brains or networks of brains.

Many of the constructs that are so difficult to relate to brain processes like value systems,

consciousness, intentionality, and so forth, have only come into the world because brains mirror themselves reciprocally in other brains and assign properties to then, that then gained experiences.

Obviously, the complexity of these networks formed by interacting brains by far exceeds the complexity of individual brains.

And so even our own life in certain respects is beyond our comprehension.

We desperately try to explain our life, you know, to explain how we got to be the way we are, to explain why we love or do not love another person, to explain

a mood, a momentary, why we're feeling like this right now, to explain our moral commitments,

...