Shufflebrain

Our live players? Their informational universe is still being calculated; it is still fluid. Their coordinates are not yet defined-- and won't be while they're still alive. Our live actors' minds are continuously indeterminate. This feature--continuous indeterminacy (ugh!)--accounts for the addition of new dimensions, as well as for our uncertainty about the outcome of the experiments with live players.

Let me review this argument from a different perspective. Remember that any segment of a curve (and our continuum is curves) is an infinite continuum between any limits. In a determinate system, where the calculations have already been made, we know which points along a curve connect with independent dimensions. In our indeterminate system, we never know just which points will suddenly sprout new axes or discard old ones. Indeterminacy is the principle feature of living intelligence!

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So far, only living minds let today continuously blend with yesterday. Maybe topologists of the future will teach holographers of their day how to deal with infinitely continuous indeterminacy in an N-dimensional universe. A friend of mine placed a cartoon about holograms in my mailbox a few years back. It depicts a receptionist standing with a visitor next to an open laboratory door. The door has on it "Holography" and "Dr. Zakheim." Dr. Zakheim is apparently standing in the room looking out and at the visitor. But in the caption, the receptionist is warning, "Oh that's not Dr. Zakheim. That's a hologram."

Should holographers and practitioners of chaos theory team up to endow holograms with continuous indeterminacy, it won't make any difference whether Dr. Zakheim is actually there or not--except to Dr. Zakheim. For then holograms would be as unpredictable as we are. Maybe even more so! Now my own hunch on the subject (rather than what we can logically deduce from theory) is that it will always make a difference whether it's Dr. Zakheim or a holographic reconstruction of him. My hunch is that nobody will figure out just what to do with local constants (quirks). But this is pure hunch. And many a savant far more sophisticated than this poor old anatomist had similar things to say about phase information, before Gabor.

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Leon Brillouin presents two concepts that will be useful to our discussion: tensor density and tensor capacity. Density and capacity are two independent properties, conceptually. (How much hot air is in the bladder, and how much can the bladder hold?) Density, in a sense, is what while capacity is where. In Brillouin's words, "the product of a density and a capacity gives a true tensor."[2]

An incredible thing happens when density and capacity combine to produce a tensor. The operators of their respective independence eliminate each other. When we have the true tensor, we have the product of density and capacity yet the two independent properties themselves have vanished. Only in Brillouin's calculations can we conceive of density and capacity as discrete entities. The same is true of hologramic intelligence: when we have the tensors of intelligence, we don't have independent capacity over here and independent density over there. Yet without density and capacity--what and where--there is no intelligence at all.

Can we conceptualize the density and capacity of intelligence apart from each other? I know of nothing in science, nor philosophy that can help us out. Nor can we pray or ride a magic carpet to the answer. But the artist can help..

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce gives us a look at the genesis of a genius. His hero is a mirror of Joyce's own boundless inner world. He does in words what Brillouin achieves with calculations. Joyce reinstates the operators and dissects the tensors of intelligence into capacity free of density. It is capacity that seems to intrigue Joyce. He sprinkles density like a few stingy grains of talc, just enough top bring out the invisible surfaces of capacity. If you want waxed, red-gray mustaches wet with warm ale or cod-grease stains on brown derby hats or the sight of spring heather or the musk scent of a pubmaid's unshaven armpits, you'll have to put them there yourself. Yet the capacity awaits. Reading Joyce's Portrait is like looking into a universe of glass. How can you see it at all. Yet there it is, anyway. Artistically, capacities mean dimensions awaiting only densities to occupy them and give life to the intelligence we know.