Shufflebrain
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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.
***
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.
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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Internet contact:pietsch@indiana.edu
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.
Julius had become a pain the neck for me. In those days, I feed my animals exclusively on tubifex worms which had to be flown in fresh from New York every week or so. The shipping costs made the worms several orders of magnitude more expensive per unit weight than filet mignon. In few minutes, Julius could devour two weeks' supply of worms for the entire colony. I'd tried feeding him on guppies, on which I was overrun. But the clever little fish, which cohabited one of my sinks with him, were far too quick for Julius. Carl, too, had a guppy over-supply problem. He asked if axolotls can catch guppies. "Too stupid," I said. Carl frowned and his ears blushed. Although he said nothing, I had the distinct impression that he disliked my remark about Julius's cognitive ability.
One afternoon some weeks after he saved me from recycling Julius through the snapping turtles by accepting my gift, Carl burst into my lab, took me by the sleeve, and dragged me back to his quarters. He wanted to show me something but wouldn't say just what. I knew it had to be good.
Carl netted a guppy and transferred it into a small beaker of water. He flicked off the overhead light. The room turned an eerie brownish color in indirect light from the machines and indicators. Carl turned on a spotlight and aimed it at one corner of Julius's pan. The axolotl alerted and in a few seconds glided to the spot and parked right at its edge. Carl poured the guppy through the mesh, into the spot of light. Bam! The guppy vanish virtually as it hit the water.
"That's not fair!" I protested. I thought I could make at a grin on Carl's face. He ignored my remark, but as he netted another guppy he told me that Julius had learned that trick on the first day.
Carl poured the second guppy into the pan, but this time over on the opposite end from Julius and the pernicious spot of light. The axolotl's massive bush of external gills seemed to tense ever so slightly, but he remained parked. Now light strongly attracts guppies. And what do you suppose this poor guppy in the tank with Julius did? It swam to the spot and virtually into Julius's waiting jaws.
"Maybe," I conceded.
Carl turned off the spotlight, flicked on the overheads and went for a third guppy. Carl definitely was grinning, I noticed. In went the third guppy, again at the opposite end of the pan from Julius. This time there was no spot of light to attract the victim or hold Julius's attention. But shortly after the fish went into the tank, Julius turned. He began to chase the guppy all over the pan. Just as I was about to call him stupid again, I became aware of a change in the beast's behavior. He wasn't putting his fury into the chase, as he did back in my lab, wasn't lunging and thrashing and flopping ineffectual--isn't really trying to catch the guppy, I realized. Now his purpose was almost casual: a lazy flick of the gills here, a swush! of the giant tail there--just enough to keep the guppy frantically on the move, up and down and back and forth across the pan. The chase continued for perhaps two minutes, the fish moving flat-out almost constantly. Then smoothness began to disappear from the fish's movements. It's becoming fatigued, I thought. Just then, Julius began to close in, steadily, inexorably, boxing the worn-out little fish into a corner. Suddenly the water churned as though a volcano had erupted in its depths. Julius feinted to his left with his gills. The guppy darted to the right. But Julius was already on the ill-fated path. And the fish was suddenly gone.
Carl had trained Julius to associate light with the imminent presence of food. But the beast had somehow managed to learn the rest of the hunt by himself. Conventional tests of learning would not even hint at such capabilities. Carl had allowed Julius's behavior to determine the training. Like the ethologists, Carl respected behavior in the large, which made him a master of it in the small.
***
Carl often came to my lab around ten in the morning for his coffee break. We'd sometimes spend hours or even the rest of the day chewing and speculating about anything from the chemical transfer of memory to the social behavior of apes to war, which was on everyone's mind at the time.
One morning, he arrived a little earlier than usual. Squatting, balancing a coffee cup on one knee and using the floor drain as an ashtray (even scientists smoked in those days), he asked, "How hard is it to add an extra eye to a salamander?" He went into a coughing spasm but, between paroxysms and drags on his cigarette, managed to phrase a very interesting idea.
There is an important principle in sensory physiology known by some as the psychophysical law. First suggested in the 1830's by Ernst Weber, it was perfected and verified in 1860 by philosopher-biologist, Gustav Fechner. (Today, some people call it the Weber-Fechner law.) Experimenting, Fechner found that a change in the strength of a stimulus up or down elicits a corresponding increase or decrease in the intensity of a sensation. If H is the change in the sensation, k a constant and S the change in the strength of the stimulus, then H equals k times the logarithm of S (H = klogS). The law may not hold close to threshold or at extremely high intensities, and it's easier to demonstate with some senses than others. But in the range where most sensations occur (with the possible exception of hearing), the law holds remarkably well. There was even speculation that learning fit into the eye-to-one rule. Thus a one-to-one rule ought to exist in changes of sensation to perception to learning--within limits, of course.
Law or no law, Carl insisted, sensory physiology had not settled a fundamental question: given the inherant capabilities of a brain, are the refining constraints imposed out at the sense organs or up in the brain. He'd thought the critical test was impossible until he ran across the eye transplant experiments made famous by Roger Sperry.[4] Adding and subtracting eyes was the approach, Carl thought.
After much procrastination on my part, we launched the study during the following spring. I'd conducted extensive pilot series, and had concluded that the best approach was to mount the extra eye on top of the animal's head just above the pineal body, the vestigial third eye. I'd cut a window in the top of the skill and then aim the stump of the optic nerve directly at the roof of the diencephalon. I called these animals, collectively, Triclops.
Our main controls were animals with an eye transplanted atop the head, like Triclops, but with both natural eyes removed. I tried calling them "monoclops"; then "uniclops"; but (to keep from swallowing my tongue during oral discourse) eventually went with "Cyclops." Cyclops would inform us not only whether but also when: whether the experiment was worth carrying to a conclusion, and, if so, when training could and should begin.
The one-to-one principle applies to increments of change, not static levels of sensation, perception or learning. (Thus, for example, if one pinch begets an ouch, two pinches won't necessarily bring forth two ouches. But the differences between one and two when added onto two should tell you what three pinches will elicit.) We had no way of knowing a priori just what those increments might possibly be in the visual system of the salamander larva. But if one-to-one works, then a normal salamander with two natural eyes would learn faster than a sibling with one eye removed. If the latter held up, the difference would equal our increment. The increment (difference between one- and two-eyed), when added to the two-eyed animals' scores would predict the performance Triclops--if one-to-one was valid. The latter statement became the basic prediction of our study.[5]
Carl, meanwhile, had developed and perfected the training apparatus and the evaluation routines, which he called the "light-shock avoidance test." In principle like the ding of the bell in Pavlov's experiments, a spot light provided the conditioned stimulus (CS is the standard abbreviation). The shock, the unconditioned stimulus (US) was what the animal had to learn to avoid: 10 volts of direct current at 10 Hz for 10 milliseconds. The rig itself was a marvel of simplicity and ingenuity: two low cylindrical dishes, one larger than the other by a little more than the width of anAmblystoma punctatum larva's body, the smaller inverted in the larger, thus creating a circular alley in which the animal would swim. Platinum wires around the two walls served as electrodes, the mediators of the shock. Carl would reposition the light wherever the animal stopped. The circular geometry of the alley meant that every starting point was of the same shape as any other. Animals would not have to be dragged back to a starting point as in a conventional apparatus.
In training, a salamander had 10 seconds to escape from the light before receiving a shock. Carl performed 25 trials one an animal, per session, 2 sessions a day, for 4 days. He randomly varied the intervals between trials from 10 to 25 seconds, to make sure the animals did not cue on the tempo instead of the light .
Experimental psychologists have learned to take great care to eliminate what is called pseudo-conditioning: a positive response by the subject when there's no actual association between two the putative stimuli. One measure is known as the extinction test. After an animal has apparently made a specific association (gets the test right in, say,
90-95 percent of the trials), its performance will drop upon withdrawal of the reward or punishment (US) in direct relationship to the number of trials made with only the conditioned stimulus (CS). If the animal associates the CS with an extraneous variable its performance will not drop off when you terminate the US.
Carl applied the extinction test to every subject. All passed. He also stimulated animals with light alone or shock alone, as an additional control against pseudo-conditioning. In addition, we included eyeless animals in the study. Controls for mental telepathy? You might wonder. But a few years later, excellent evidence came along to show that animals, in fact, have some non-visual perception of light. Our eyeless animals didn't learn Carl's test.[6]
I'd personally raised every animal in the colony from early embryonic stages. All were Ambylstoma punctatumm from two large clutches of eggs (those in a clutch have the same parents). I kept accurate records on individuals; later we ran comparisons of data from the two clutches and eliminated egg clutch (pedigree) as a factor in our findings. I made sure each animal had developed simultaneously through the same embryonic stages. Size and mass? Animals were of the same snout-tail length (in millimeters) and displaced the same volume of fluid (which beats trying to weigh an aquatic animal on the pan of a balance).
Given all the controls Carl had insisted upon, and the numbers of each type of subject necessary to make learning difference statistically significant, he could not train and test the entire group all at one time. Therefore (to avoid the variables implicit in the latter fact), I organized the animals into working squads, each squad with at least one representative of each type of animal. All members of a squad went under anesthesia at the same time and I revived them all together. Squad members lived in individual dishes, but I kept the dishes in the same stack, and where one dish went all the others in the stack went, too. Their spring water came from the same carboy, and even their tubifex worms came from the same culture. I spaced the operation for different squads over a period of days to give Carl some latitude. At the conclusion of the study we ran analyses and found no difference attributable to the particular squad an animal belonged to.