Shufflebrain

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chapter nine

The Holological Continuum

NORBERT WIENER, the mathematician who founded cybernetics just after World War II, once observed about computers, "the energy spent per individual operation is almost vanishingly small," and he went on to warn contemporary science that "Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day."[1] Reduction of the message to the medium, he realized, would eventually force scientists to do something they wouldn't (and don't) want to do: repeal the powerful and indispensable laws of thermodynamics. Wiener of course knew that information can't exist on nothing. But to stamp your foot and insist that information and mass-energy are one in the very same thing would quickly put the natural sciences in an untenable philosophical position. Wiener knew in his bones that abstract relationships--ratios-- within mass-energy are what create, encode and store information, not matter or energy as measured by the pound or erg.

With respect to the hologram, we have already arrived at Wiener's conclusion ourselves: functional relationships within the media encode phase information. Thus quite different physical entities, widely varying absolute energies or basically dissimilar chemical reactions can construct, store and decode the same hologram--as information! Initially, and by force of implication, we extended this principle of information to hologramic mind. But at the end of the last chapter, we came to this same conclusion directly, from hologramic theory, itself. A mind, the theory asserts, is not specific molecules, particular cells, certain physiological mechanisms or whatever may serve as the mind's media. Mind is phase information--relationships displayed in time and in perceptual space but stored as a function of time and a function of perceptual space in transform space. We have a subtle but pivotal distinction to make, then: molecules, cells, mechanisms, and the like are necessary to create, maintain or display those phase relationships. But the relationships are not reducible to a molecule, cell or mechanism any more than the message on a printed page is reducible to ink and paper. And when we investigate mind in molecules, on cells or via mechanisms, we have to be very careful about the words we chose to describe our results. Conjugates and equivalents of the verb "to do" are what we want when we employ test tubes, microscopes or electrodes. But when we ask the mind is, then we must turn to theory.

Does hologramic theory demand that different constituents and mechanisms of brain house memory? As Bertrand Russell maintained, theory is general. The moment we begin to talk about specific parts, we shift to the particular, to issues the experimentalist (e. g., the brain shuffler) must pursue. What hologramic theory does, though, is account for,say, how more than one class of things or events can serve as a medium for the very same memory. If a protein encodes the same spectrum of phase variations as occur in, for instance, a feedback loop around the hippocampus, then the same memory exists in or on both the protein and the feedback loop.

Again: the test tube, the microscope and the electrode work only in perceptual space. Of course, this restriction doesn't minimize their value, nor does it undermine the importance of experience. But to get inside the hologramic mind, to unravel its logic, to discover its plan, to figure out how the mind actually works, we must use abstract tools. Only with reason, with an assist from imagination, can we cross the boundary between the real and the ideal.

Yet we can use our imaginations to resynthesize in our own reality the relationships our reason uncovers in realms beyond. We were doing this with transforms, convolution theorem and Fourier series. The holographic engineer also does it with reconstruction beams. Pribram did it in the living, remembering brains of monkeys. I did it with shufflebrain, albeit unwittingly at first. If we use the theory with art as well as science, and exercise a little humility en passant, not only can we extend our comprehension beyond experience, but we can avoid imprisonment within the ideal and exile from our own reality. Hologramic theory does not dispense with the brain. Activated, mind perceives, thinks and drives behavior in perceptual space.