Peter McCormack is banging out some great podcasts, none so fine as the recent interview on Fountain with physicist, Dr Melvin Vopson, who is making a great case for us living in the matrix. Recently, a fruit fly brain was sliced, scanned, digitised and set free in a virtual simulation, acting exactly like a fly - with no training. It’s environment was controllable by humans. Doing the same to humans, turning our brains into bits of data and drppng us in a simulation is still sci-fi, or is it? Think about where we are now with data collection and AI crunching all those bits so Big Everything can manipulate us.

A fly’s brain was mapped, turned into bits, and dropped into a simulated world — doors, wind, obstacles, everything — and, without any further training, it behaved like a fly. That single fact should stop us in our tracks. The people who did the work are not claiming they improved on the fly; the startling thing is that something we call a brain was converted into data and then observed behaving as if it were still in the “real” world. A dead insect on a bench becomes an active agent again inside a computer, and we can watch it, prod its world, and change how it acts. So at some point in the future, science will have scaled the mapping process from 140,000 neurons in 10 years to 90 billion in a day. The humans who want to be digitised at death should be careful what they wish for. The person controlling their virtual environment may well make living conditions hard for them – because they can!

This fly brain breakthrough is not just a technological party trick. It is a mind fuck. For centuries we’ve lumped intelligence, mind, and life into a special category — mysterious, essentially biological, and beyond the reach of mere numbers. Turning a brain into data and placing it in a digital environment challenges that intuition. If the fly’s behavior continues when the substrate changes from meat to silicon, then behavior depends more on structure and relations than on the particular physical medium. The simulation doesn’t prove that the fly is identical in every metaphysical sense to its biological self, but it does show that behavior — the thing we most care about when we ask what a mind does — can be represented and reproduced.

The mapping itself was performed with powerful algorithms. That point is important and should not be misunderstood. It’s not hubris to acknowledge that tools can do calculations humans cannot; it’s simply truth. Everything has its talent! AI functions well, but within very narrow parameters. Humans are excellent at creating abstractions and working with data in blunt, pragmatic ways. Our 90-billion-neuron brains give us the capacity to be hunters, artists, teachers, engineers and understand a huge range of topics, and operate in all environments - but we can’t react like flies. A fly has condensed its 250 million years of experience into a 140,000-neuron brain honed for survival – as far as we can tell, now.

What we are only beginning to grasp is that brains can be rendered into those abstractions in far greater detail than we expected. A model that walks like a fly and reacts like a fly does not give us a deeper understanding of the fly’s inner life; it is, at minimum, a faithful operational description of how the fly behaves under conditions we can control and observe. But once behavior is represented as data and run in a controlled environment, the implications multiply.

In the physical world, an organism acts and is acted upon; in simulation, the designer can change the environment with painless precision. Move a wall, alter an airflow, tweak a sensory mapping — and the simulated fly changes. The same principle would apply on a grander scale if more complex brains could be digitized: observation becomes intervention, replication becomes editing, and the line separating “inside” from “outside” grows dangerously thin.

That leads us to two unsettling but distinct thoughts. First, if minds are patterns that can be modeled, then they are, in principle, observable and manipulable from the outside. That does not mean the self dissolves on cue; it does mean that autonomy may be far less mysterious and far more vulnerable than daily life suggests.

Second, the success of a fly upload makes the simulation hypothesis — the idea that our reality might itself be a generated environment — feel less like sci-fi hair-splitting and more like a reasonable philosophical possibility. If we can create entities that behave convincingly from mapped neural data, how confident are we that our own sensations cannot be the product of deeper informational architecture we simply haven’t learned to recognize? After all, none of us can see the addictive substances in cigarettes or food, but they are put there by someone else’s hand, and we have to adapt to the consequences, blind to the causes.

None of this fly brain pioneering work proves that humans are already simulations, or that consciousness reduces cleanly to code. These are hypotheses worth testing, not dogmas to accept without evidence. But the fly experiment changes the stakes. It forces us to consider that intelligence and life might be substrate-independent (they work the same on meat or silicone ) in ways that matter ethically, politically, and existentially. Whoever can turn minds into data — and then observe, predict, or influence them — will hold power unlike any before.

The proper response is not technophobia, nor uncritical triumphalism. It is humility and clarity. Celebrate the achievement: converting a brain into a working, observable model is a stunning scientific and engineering feat. But do not confuse the model with the whole. Use this new capability to probe the limits of understanding, not to assert premature metaphysical conclusions. And above all, start asking the hard questions about consent, agency, and control now, because the moment when brains—human or otherwise—can be digitized will be the moment those questions stop being merely philosophical. Will digital versions of intelligent beings have rights? In the future could you go to jail for murdering a digitised humanoid?

Before we get lost in the sci-fi weeds, let’s start connecting the fly experiment to something concrete and urgent: today’s data-collecting infrastructure is already treating minds as data to be modeled and influenced. That’s the real-world prelude to the philosophical shock described.

Social media and ad-tech don’t just “make you think about” certain topics; they collect enough behavioral signal to predict and nudge choices in ways that can be highly effective. The old claim that platforms only shape what you focus on is a smokescreen. When you have enough data on a person—what they click, how long they linger, what they avoid, when they’re vulnerable—you can crunch that data, those bits, and estimate preferences, fears, and tendencies and then target stimuli that shift behavior. That’s not mind control in the sci‑fi sense, it’s control through prediction and micro‑influence. But it’s a bridge to a Matrix.

Right now, the deeper worry is a battle of control versus autonomy. If data collectors win, humans will act more like robots: not because we lose “free will” forever, but because our choices become increasingly shaped by external models that know us better than we know ourselves. Agency becomes a function of how much of our data is in someone else’s hands and how well they can act on it.

The fly experiment sharpens this problem. It shows that behavior can be represented as data and reproduced in a different environment. If that principle scales—if more complex minds can be modeled and influenced with high precision—then the power dynamic changes dramatically. The entity that can model you can predict you, and once you can predict someone reliably, you can steer them with far less friction. Logan’s Run, anyone?

So the data age isn’t just about convenience or ads. It’s a grab for the levers of attention, preference, and behavior. The more minds are turned into data, the thinner the line between observation and manipulation. Autonomy survives only if we keep the models weak, the data minimal, and the right to say no to being modeled. Otherwise, we drift toward a world where people act like robots not because they’re programmed from above, but because they’re pre‑programmed by data models that live outside their heads.

Many of those who have caved into privacy-invasive practices by social media say they have “nothing to hide”. Maybe not in the legal sense, but that is not the same as “nothing to protect”. When you understand that your mind can be mapped and digitised from afar, and you can be reprogrammed by a third party with the sole intention of monetising you, you might want to think again.

Demand stronger privacy laws, limit data collection to what’s strictly necessary, and support tools that let you opt out of profiling. Treat your attention as property, not something free for the taking. If we don’t act now, autonomy becomes a luxury few can afford and we’ll find ourselves queuing to entertain the data controllers—those who convinced us that fighting to the death in a ring was a great idea.