Shufflebrain

Adult axolotl involved in 'swap' experiment shown on 60 Minutes. Looking-up remained intact after its cerebrum had been replaced by the entire brain of a young and naive larva. The animal in the picture had been taught to look up (to earn a juicy hunk of liver). The larva in question--the recipient of this animal's original cerebrum--became a Looker-up without any training. Larvae because of their small feed on brine shrimp, not liver. [The handwriting on the masking tape (label) is '7-3-72 Whole baby...'; the crop-off part says, '...brain #2]

CBS broadcast the show a year later. In the interim, I had carried out enough testing and had conducted sufficient control experiments to be sure of the results. Within about one week, a previously naive recipient of a trained Looking-up animal's cerebrum becomes a Looker-up itself, without training. And these animals retain the Looking-up trait for the remaining months, or even years, of their lives. Controls, animals with transplants from the brains of naive animals, do not show this response. While the initial experiments--like those I performed on camera--were with the cerebrum, I obtained the same results with pieces of midbrain and diencephalon.

The trained cerebrum donors were very interesting. As soon as the effects of anesthesia wore off, these animals demonstrated that they remembered the signal to look up. In other words, Looking-up memories existed in the donated as well as the retained parts of these animals' brains. What was true of innate feeding behavior also worked for Looking-up: memory wasn't confined to a single location in the brain.

I also repeated Mike Wallace's "loser" experiment. I found that, true to the principle of independence (adding to the hologramic deck), the extra brain parts did not "confuse" the host.

Meanwhile, a group of Israelis, working with the brains of adult newts, had demonstrated that dark-avoidance memories can be transplanted from one animal to another[1] When the "60 Minutes" show did air, I had no doubts about Looking-up. Sitting in my living room, a member of Igor's audience myself, I felt that someone else was on the screen doing my experiments. Indeed, someone else was at the microscope. The intervening year had been very full.

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chapter seven

Waves of Theory

UNTIL NOW, we have been investigating hologramic theory from the outside, looking at its implications in terms of what we can understand in the realm of experience, testing its predictions to see if they can possibly work, asking ourselves if the hologram mimics the living brain sufficiently to warrant a serious probe into the subject's rational core. Until now, our questions have concentrated on what a hologramic mind can do, and we have been able to pursue the answers in the world most real to us. But now we must turn to the question, What is hologramic mind? To find the answer, we must enter the ideal, abstract, unfamiliar domain of the hologram itself. And to make the journey, we need to borrow concepts from mathematics.

What is mathematics, anyway? The American philosopher Charles Peirce, who gave contemporary science its philosophical backbone, observed, "The common definition ...is that mathematics is the science of quantity.[1] But, citing his own mathematician father, Benjamin Peirce, Charles went on to assert that it is actually "The science which draws necessary conclusions." Thus the numbers are not what make a mathematical statement our of 1 + 1 = 2; rather, it's the necessary conclusion forced from 1 and 1 by the plus sign. If we extrapolate Peirce's characterization to our own quest, the payoff ought to be a clear understanding not only of what we mean by "hologramic mind" but also of why hologramic mind does what it does when it does it.

The reader probably can think of many specific examples, though, in which adding one thing to another does not necessarily yield two (even when we keep apples and oranges straight). With scrambled eggs, for example, combining two beaten yolks produces one entity. Bertrand Russell helps us with problems like this, and in so doing furnishes us with an essential caveat: "The problem arises through the fact that such knowledge [mathematical ideas] is general, whereas all experience [egg yolks or salamander brains] is particular.[2]