Shufflebrain

How do we really account for the results of shufflebrain experiments? How could Buster's fish codes blend in smoothly with his own? How was it that Punky's salamander medulla could receive the tadpole message from the frog part of his brain? The same questions exist for "looking up." Why weren't all my experiments like pounding a square peg in a round hole? Continuity had to exist. And phase transformations had to define the coordinate system, rather than the other way around.

Consider another question, now that I've mentioned salamanders and mixing species. How can we explain the similarities and differences between them and us? Hologramic mind, constructed as a version of Riemann's universe, supplies the answer in two words: curvature and dimension. We share with all living creatures the rule of curvature, but we and they are vastly different universes by virtue of dimension. (I will return to dimension in the next chapter when discussion the cerebral cortex.)

And how can we sum together phase codes of learned and instinctive origins, if fundamentally different abstract rules govern, say, a reflex kick of a leg and a 6/8-time tarantella? We'd move like jack-jointed robots if our inner universe were a series of bolted-together but discontinuous parts. How could we condition a reflect if we couldn't smoothly blend the new information with what's already there?

Speaking of robots, we are different from the digital computer in more than the obvious ways. The computer's mind is a creature of the linear, Euclidean world of its origin. It was invented to be just that. Its memory reduces to discrete bits. A bit is a choice (usually binary)--a clean, crisp, clear, no-nonesense yes-no, on-off, either-or, black-white (or red-black) choice. And it is efficient. A computer's memories are clean, crisp, clear, linear arrays of efficient choices. By definition! By design!

By contrast, the hologramic mind is not linear; not either-or; not efficient. Hologramic mind acts flat and Euclidean and imitates the computer only when the items of discrete, discontinuous data are few. We're quickly swamped when we try to remember or manipulate an array of, say,100 individual digits, a simple task for the computer. Yet ask the digital computer to distinguish between your face and a dozen randomly sampled faces--with and without eyeglasses, lipstick and mustaches, and from various angles and distances--and it fails. Brains and computers operate on fundamentally different principles, and they mimic each other only when the task is trivial.

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Now consider the problem that arises in perceptual vis-à-vis physical time and space. People, the author included, have reported dreaming ten-year scenes within the span of a few minutes. The reverse is probably more common: a horror lived during a second of physical time can protract into a very long perceptual interval. To the scuba diver who runs out of air, a few minutes hardly seem like a few. And time compresses during a race to the airport when we're just a few of those minutes behind schedule.

Space can do some wacky things, too. A character in a Neil Simon play tells how, during a bout of depression, he couldn't cross the street because the other side was too far away.[14]

What do we do about subjective phenomena, anyway? Discount them from Nature because they're "only in the mind."

In Fourier (and kindred) transforms, the time-dependent features of relative phase became space-dependent. But the relationships in transform space obey what time-dependent ones do in perceptual space: the axes don't contract and expand. Tensors, on the other hand, aren't constrained by presumptions about coordinate axes. In the curved continuum, time-dependent ratios may turn up on an elastic axis. And because the hologramic universe is a continuum, we lose the distinction between perceptual and some other kind of space; or we may have the conscious impression that time is expanding or that distances will not close. Yes, it's ideal, subjective, illusory. Subjective time and space are informational transforms of what the clock gauges and the meter stick plots. The constraints on the clock and meter stick are physical. Constraints on the transformations of the mind are ideal. But both belong to Nature.

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