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So I know my feelings don't particularly matter, but I was having this complicated emotional reaction while being regaled with the tale of the undead leech last night in class.  I guess one way of assimilating this new information could make us feel more powerful.  If our brain is acting on the world as much as reacting to the world, we have less reason to feel like cogs in a deterministic machine.  But I'm afraid the language being used to talk about the nervous system as something "active" was somehow personifying it, projecting this nice, human sense of agency that doesn't really seem to be telling the whole story. 

As has been noted, all of us gathered here presumably care about education, think it's worth thinking about, theorizing, improving.  So I wonder if anyone else was simultaneously a little awed and a lot repulsed by this pretty gruesome, science-fiction image of the brain in the jar... outputting, all by itself.  I wouldn't ordinarily think of that activity as "acting" on the world.  Little sparks are being emitted.  And the brain runs some "tests" to see if those sparks have the anticipated effects... but that's less like active inquiry than an ongoing, equilibrium-seeking impulse to reorient oneself in an environment that's always going to have some fluidity to it.  Which means always taking baby steps, and always playing catch-up.  No room for boldness or vision there (meaningless mission-statement words, we should learn to do away with?).  Because the brain isn't really asking questions... or if it is, it's not choosing what questions it wants to ask, or articulating those questions itself.  Maybe I'm the one personifying where I shouldn't be now, but it does seem like understanding personness wants to be somewhere near the heart of this course.