Shufflebrain

Chapter 11 provides a glimpse of the meaning of intelligence from the vantage of hologramic theory. Can we describe and define intelligence in a hologramic mind?

During the late 1960s, when my work on shufflebrain was beginning, I worked with Carl Schneider, brilliant physiological psychologist and remarkable person. Our joint investigations were very rewarding, and Carl and I also became friends. But on the question of Lashley's work, Carl and I had deep philosophical differences at the time. To preserve our collaboration, I did not involve Carl in shufflebrain experiments. Yet, unwittingly, our joint projects were producing the very evidence that would, years later, place hologramic theory in a wider context. And that wider context is the purpose of Chapter 12, the conclusion of the book. I think one of the first phrases a novice scientist or philosopher must learn is, "What do you mean by . . . ?" Some scholars never quite outgrow the definitions game. Few of us need to be reminded of the ambiguities built into language. But protracted definitions rarely correct the problem, often render a serious work solemn, and frequently preempt splendid general words for narrow and polemical purposes. When our discussion requires careful definitions, we will build up to them rather than proceed from them. Otherwise, the lexicographer has already done a much better job than an anatomist can hope to accomplish. Generally, I defer to him or her.

But two terms do warrant special note here: Theory and memory. Solely to minimize confusion, I will employ theory in the sense of explanation.

The usages of memory differ in empirical versus rational schools of philosophy and psychology. Empiricists, the intellectual heirs of John Locke, who believe that experience is the source of all knowledge, define memory in terms of learning. Rationalists, the followers of René Descartes, who believe in innate ideas and hold that reason is the source of knowledge, do not accept experience, and thus learning, as the principal source of the brain's stores of information. Well into this book, I develop the point that how the brain acquires information is of little significance in hologramic theory. Meanwhile, believing that empiricists and rationalists both have their rights, I use the term memory in reference to all the brain's stored information, whether learned, innate, or installed by some still unknown means. I use the term interchangeably with stored mind. In fact, if you look in a dictionary, you will find memory given as one definition of mind.

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chapter two

The Mind-Brain Conundrum

We have a genuine dilemma on our hands, the logician tells us, when we can assert the truth of two mutually incompatible propositions or statements. By this standard, science could have been in a perilous philosophical position, had any of its critics seized upon memory research. On the one hand, specific functions, and presumably memory, seemed to be localized in particular parts of the brain. On the other, memory defied careful attempts to isolate or fraction it with a scalpel. Two equally convincing and opposite conclusions had emerged from the clinics and the laboratories. Because these conclusions represented the entire memory-brain universe of discourse, their simultaneous validity created a conundrum.

I don't mean to suggest that scientists sat around in smoking parlors, speakeasies, or faculty clubs lamenting (or trying to solve) the dilemma that memory posed. Judging from my own former frame of mind, I doubt that anyone was fully aware of the philosophical problem. If scientists assumed any position at all, it was at either of two poles, structuralists at the one, holists at the other, atomization and localization the summon bonum of the former, distributiveness and equipotentiality that of the latter.

Holism, as a generic doctrine, asserts that a universe as a whole cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts; try to dissect the parts and, as with the value of 22/7 or 3.14 ,you don't come out with discrete numbers or elements but with a left-over fraction. Holism entered the study of brain in the 1820s, following the experiments and speculations of Pierre Flourens.[1]

A structuralism, idealistic or materialistic, can be identified by the idea that wholes are indeed the sums of discrete parts--atoms. Thus the neural structuralist would insist that memories reduce to individual units or bits--like 22 or 23 rather than 22/7. And to a structuralist, a memory would be a structure of such discrete elements. Add materialism to the theory and you'd want to store those elements, each in its own structure of the brain.