"I am the universe" usually works as an Instagram slogan. It means nothing. But inside the Neural Cosmology frame you can read it literally, and it turns into a claim that is unexpectedly testable.
Here is what I mean.
"I" — a functional node
A neuron in a network is a function, not a special substance. It takes input from other nodes, processes it, passes it on. If the network is large enough and the connections are right, that local function starts to participate in a global computation no single neuron performs on its own.
If the universe is a neural network (Vanchurin, arXiv 2020; PNAS 2022), then "I" in this frame is also a function. A local information processor embedded in a larger-scale network.
The question "where is my consciousness" becomes badly posed. Consciousness happens; it does not reside. An active process, not a place you can point at.
The bandwidth of my node
A local processor has characteristics. How many bits per second it handles. The radius of its connections. Which other nodes it's synchronised with.
The human brain is estimated at about 10¹⁵ operations per second. Connection radius — mostly the body and the immediate environment, and through language and culture — a broader social network. Synchronisation — with other people through speech, with nature through the body, with abstractions through language and maths.
The node is local. It participates in the universe's computation within its own bandwidth rather than "containing" the universe.
"I am the universe", in this frame, reads as "I actively participate in its process". Roughly the way a heart cell is not the heart, but without it the heart stops.
Three popular mistakes
First: "you can expand consciousness and become the universe". Node bandwidth is bounded by its physics. Perceptual expansion is real — within the limits of what the brain can physically process. Past that limit lies blurry introspection. Nothing cosmic about it.
Second: "meditation opens access to a universal mind". It does alter the topology of neural activity (Saggar et al., 2018, Nature Communications) — work on your own node. The wider network is not involved.
Third: "I create reality with thought". Thought is the output of a local processor. It shapes what the processor does next, and through that, the environment around it. Within physics.
What actually follows
If "I" is a node in the network, then death is the node leaving the network, not the network ending. The data the node was processing can be passed to other nodes — through speech, writing, culture — or lost. Hence the human obsession with legacy: legacy is architectural. A way for the node to keep shaping the computation after its own stop.
If "I" is a node, then ethics stops being moralising and becomes a question of operating mode. A node that sustains the coherence of neighbouring nodes raises the network's Φ. A node that produces noise and breaks coherence lowers it. "Good" and "evil", in this frame, are regimes that either raise or lower the integratedness of the system.
Old ethics stated in a different language. Same Kant, via graph theory.
The honest edge
All of this is half-speculation. The formal part (node, network, bandwidth) is rigorous. The interpretive part (what this means for death, ethics, legacy) is interesting but still without proof.
I write it as a working hypothesis. Its utility is that it makes "I" operationalisable: a process with measurable parameters, instead of a thing in itself.
If the hypothesis is wrong and "I" turns out to be something else — a result too. For now, the data do not refute it.