Shufflebrain

But hologramic theory suffers a major deficit, and we will have to correct it. Our construct is too perfect, too ball-bearing smooth, too devoid of errors, for twig missing from the nest or the freckles on a face. We can't see ourselves in the picture. We must account in our theory for what doesn't transform, what won't remain invariant in all other coordinates. Our pictures requires precisely what the pure theoretician goes to great pains to get out of the way--parochial conditions, particular features, local constants! Physiologist E. Roy John, recall (from chapter 2) identifies local constants as noise. I believe we must also put amplitude among our local constants. (Experimentation may uncover others.)

Local constants make perception distinct from recollection of the original percept. They make a kiss different from a reminiscence of it. They put subtle but critical shades of difference on the spoken versus the written word. (Notice some time when you're listening to a correspondent deliver the news from a script the subtle change that occurs when he or she shifts to the ad lib to answering of questions from the anchor person.) Local constants become essential when the general becomes the particular; when the ideal, abstract, informational hologramic mind transduces into experiences; where theory stops and experiments take over.

Because they are strictly parochial, the local constants necessarily vary with each individual. And the more dimensions a mind uses, the greater the impact of local constants on the collective behavior of the species. Hologramic theory, thus, is a self-limiting theory.

We should not underestimate a theory's implications merely because the theory limits itself (as any scientific theory eventually must). A little humility can actually go a long way, as Riemann found. The latter is true of hologramic theory. Let me illustrate what I'm driving at by calling upon the checkerboard metaphor.

To the red squares, let's assign relative phase tensors and everything else we explicitly use in hologramc theory. To the black squares, let's assign our local constants--which we can't directly treat from hologramic theory. To guarantee that the theory continues to restrict itself, let's maintain the rule that we cannot enter a black square from a red square, and vice verse. With this rule in mind, let's subdivide squares again and again, as we did before, and let's pose the same question: is the infinite square red or black? Just as before, it has to be both red and black. We still can't enter the infinite square. But this time, it's not the math book that bars us from infinity. It's our own rule. Both black and red exist at infinity. If one up from infinity is red, and we're there, we can't enter the next set (infinity) because it contains black and is off limits. (Note that how red and black got to infinity in the first place isn't our affair. We didn't put infinity there, since we couldn't reach it in the first place.) Thus the infinite square precludes hologramic theory (red) from using local constants (black) and vice versa.

When we're on the red square, the "mechanism" that inhibits our movement into the infinite square is the corresponding black square, also a step up from infinity. Ironically, the very self-limiting nature of hologramic theory establishes the existence--the Existenz--of the domain with our local constants.[15]

In formal terms, the incompleteness of hologramic theory makes local constants an existential necessity. The term existential refers to existence.

The very incompleteness of the theory allows us to use it to resolve the mind-brain conundrum. Hologramic theory deals explicitly with mind. Yet it can do so only because it implicates local constants. And local constants exist in the brain. In other words, hologramic theory must work within a mind-brain system. A corollary of the last statement is that the source of the mind-brain conundrum was the fallacy, inherent in holism and structuralism alike, that a unipolar view can let us comprehend the mind-brain cosmos. Once we remove this fallacy and allow mind and brain to get back together again, the conundrum vanishes. Mind endows brain with the abstract universe in which to contain the realm of thought. But brain, in turn, gives life to the mind.

We must reach outside hologramic theory to give perspective to our conclusions. And I know of no system of thought more perfectly suited to our needs than Hegelian dialectics, in which a thesis merge with its antithesis to create a synthesis.

What is the mind-brain synthesis? You and I are! They are! It is general and ideal, as we all are. And it is particular and real, as we are too.

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chapter ten

Microminds and Macrominds