Shufflebrain

The creative process itself shows us the meaning of expanding, contracting and transforming dimensions of the mind. Physical holograms don't create for the same basic reason they ignored our gorilla. The property that allows for expansions, contractions and transformations at all--that lets the living mind enjoy an intelligence the physical holograms lacks--is continuous indeterminacy. Hologramic mind is a continuum of relative phase spectra, yes! But we must set the continuum into perpetual, complex and unpredictable fluid motion in order for it to yield intelligence.

The artist is the transformationist of themes too large, too small, too remote, too abstract, too subjective, too personal for science--but too critical to culture to be ignored. The artist creates the telescope or the microscope and the appropriate angle of view to enable a human mind to operate within a cosmos where it has no philosophical right to go, but goes anyway.

***

So where does our discussion take us? What does our theory show us ?

First of all, it would be silly even to attempt a rigorous definition of intelligence. The calculation is always in progress, and we are always ignorant of the coordinate system.

But description is something else. And hologramic theory does deliver this.

Hologramic intelligence turns out to depend on: independent dimensions, which we've already dealt with; indeterminacy, which we'll soon go back to the lab to examine; and rectification--the correction of size or shape or complexity to fit the mind to the context and the context to the mind.

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chapter twelve

Smart Eyes

I MENTIONED MY PARTNER CARL SCHNEIDER in connection with Arrowhead, The monkey Boss. Carl and I began collaborating many years ago, even before I became a true believer of hologramic theory. He did the behavioral side of our work and I performed the operations. One of our joint ventures brought out hidden features of intelligence I'd only began to appreciate because of hologramic theory. This chapter is about some parts of that research. But first let me tell you a little about Carl because he started it.

Carl's training was in physiological psychology (which Lashley founded), and his formal field of inquiry was the physiology of vision. Half his lab was a forest of multiplex stimulators, stereotaxic apparatuses, oscilloscopes and the like-- the sophisticated contraptions and gizmos of contemporary brain science. But the other half belonged to behavior, Carl's abiding love and his reason for being in science in the first place.

Carl knew very little about larval salamanders when he joined the research outfit where I'd been working for a few years. His ignorance vanished fast. Did they prefer light to darkness? he asked on his very first visit. I confidently misinformed him with the conventional wisdom that Ambystoma larvae (the genus I use) avoid light. I recall his bending down, hands clasped behind his back for a long pensive moment as he observed a few animals swim around in their finger bowls. Was it okay if he took a couple of these little squirts back to his lab? I had over a thousand Amblystoma punctatum[1] larvae in stock at the time. Sure he could take as many as he wanted.

Carl invented a miniature Y maze, as it's called because of its shape. Swimming down the stem, the animal has a simple choice between left and right when it reaches the confluence. Carl used the Y maze to find out if punctatum would choose a lighted versus a dark alley. (By randomly switching the lighted and darkened alleys, he eliminated left- versus right-handed preferences.) In the article he soon published in Animal Behavior,[2] Carl reported, that Amblystoma punctatum larvae, "approach the illuminated arm in 92 percent...of the trials."[3] The animals avoided heat, he observed.

Carl had been profoundly influenced by the ethologists, especially Jane Goodall. Like them, he'd spend hours, days and even weeks observing his animals perform freely before designing an experiment. He believed in shaping the test to the subject, not the other way around. "It's arrogant to do otherwise, " he once told me. And he could coax the most unexpected behavior from the most unlikely-looking creatures. Naturally, he was a devotee of Worm-Runner's Digest.

I remember a big axolotl I gave Carl as a birthday present while the beast was a big but still juvenile animal. A greedy and aggressive monster, Carl named him Julius.