By the Late John Brockman

by John Brockman

  We are dealing with activity integrated on the neural, the brain level, i.e., the present. Thus, when discussing information, we are talking about the brain’s response in terms of present, direct experience. This response is always effected without consent or awareness. There is no choice. There is no information unless there is a change. “Information does not exist as information until it is within the higher levels of abstraction of each of the minds and computed as such. Up to the point at which it becomes perceived as information, it is signals. These signals travel through the external reality between the two bodies, and travel as signals within the brain substances themselves. Till the complex patterns of traveling neuronal impulses in the brain are computed as information within the cerebral cortex, they are not yet information. Information is the result of a long series of computations based on data signal inputs, data signal transmissions to the brain substance, and recomputations of these data.”5 Information is an abstraction to be used for measuring the communication of pattern, order, and neural inhibition.

  What is the information from an electric light bulb? No information. What is the information from a book? No information. “To speak of a change as giving information implies that there is somewhere a receiver able to react appropriately to the change.”6 Be concerned only with the changes in the operations of the receiver, the brain, in terms of the transactional present. Do not confuse information with signals or the source of signals. “The mind of the observer-participant is where the information is constructed, by and through his own programs, his own rules of perception, his own cognitive and logical processes, his own metaprogram of priorities among programs. His own vast internal computer constructs information from signals and stored bits of signals.”7 Information is a process. There are no sources of information; there are no linear movements of information to the brain.

  Information is an abstraction. Information is a measure of effect. Information is a concept that allows for relationships not previously possible. Effect deals with the construction of information from both incoming signals and bits of signals stored in the operant circuits of the brain. The incoming signals are transmitted by both internal and external receptors. “Effect involves the total situation and not a single level of information movement.”8 There are no single levels of information movement. The total situation is the neural situation, the process of the nervous system. This system is operational. “All that’s traceably happening is a shimmering array of pattern shifting occurring in a centerless, edgeless network. It’s measurable piecemeal: trivial. The whole is unmeasurable indeed except through effects.”9 Information is the measure of effect, the measure of the ordering of the brain’s activity in the transactional present.

  Communications theory is the study of messages. In this system, the message is nonlinear. The communication, the message, is pattern, order, neural inhibition. The message is the change in neural activity. It can be considered as a program, and a “program is nothing else but a set of commands: “do this; do that . . .” which in other words means: “don’t do this; don’t do that . . .”10 We are dealing with the transmission of neural pattern from “a brain and its outputs, through a specifiable set of processes to the external world, through a portion of that world with specifiable modes, media and artificial means to another body, another brain.”11 We are dealing with a set of relationships which allows us to conceptualize the communication of neural experience. The difference between human experience and neural experience is the difference between illusion and reality, between choice and no choice.

  In talking about the state of consciousness, do not deal in there-and-then considerations of interpretation of the ordering and arrangement of the direct experience of the brain. The ordering and arrangement are a continual functional happening. The ordering and arrangement are all that is actually happening. Nothing else ever happens. The ordering and arrangement are to be measured in terms of information.

  The most significant, the most critical, inventions of man were not those ever considered to be inventions but those which appeared to be innate and natural. Man never understood to what degree all of nature was man-made. One such major and crucial invention was talking. Talking was probably man’s most important invention. It was, undoubtedly, considered to be innate and natural until a man, making a new observation, exclaimed, “We’re talking.”12 At that point no one had ever heard of such a thing. Still, talking was an invention that changed the way the brain worked. Talking, a man-made invention, provided information modifying the operation of the brain without any awareness. There was no choice. For thousands of years man was molding himself in a certain manner, but the pattern was not invented until a man said, “We’re talking.”

  Man is dead. Credit his death to an invention. The invention was the grasping of a conceptual whole, a set of relationships which had not been previously recognized. The invention was man-made. It was the recognition that reality was communicable. The process was the transmission of neural pattern. Such patterns are electrical not mental. The system of communication and control functioned without individual awareness or consent. The message in the system was not words, ideas, images, etc. The message was nonlinear: operant neural pattern. It became clear that “new concepts of communication and control involved a new interpretation of man, of man’s knowledge of the universe, and of society.”13 Man is dead. “We’re talking.”

  The system can be comprehended only by killing off man. We are not destroying a phenomenon. We are replacing one system of abstraction with another system of abstraction. Man was nothing but a model, a technique. It is now necessary to construct a new model, to invoke a new system of abstraction, no more truthful than the old one, no closer to any ultimate answer. An abstraction is only an abstraction. The insanity of man is that he believed in his humanity as the very basis of reality, as the ultimate end to evolution. But “it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions. A civilization which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress.”14 Man is dead.

  This is the end of the doctrine of specific causation. There are only the simultaneous neural operations of the present, the all-at-once, the here-and now. No more talk about the environment. The only total situation is in what the brain is doing. There is no past, there is no future, there is no time, there is no space. The beginnings, the endings, are all bound up in the multiplicity of neural operations. The unity is methodological. Break through the limited framework of subjects and objects. It’s all happening at once, bound up in a universe of simultaneity.

  Who’s crazy? Mankind went out of its mind. There is no mind out of which to go. Who’s crazy?

  “The supreme abstraction of the brain was indeed the mind. . . . From the confusion of metaphysics and psychoanalysis, abstractions of abstractions, the thinking brain has turned to the first possible glimpses of itself.”15 For years man understood that animals did not act through a consciousness; now it is evident that man himself, the human animal, did not act with a conscious sensibility. It’s all a question of breaking through to new systems of abstraction.

  “Neither the presence nor absence of consciousness can serve as an exclusive criterion either for the presence or absence of any other characteristic in a particular thing. . . . The only way a particular individual can be determined to be conscious is with reference to his observable behavior.”16 Behavior is a consideration of the past. The present is in the activity of the brain. Analyzing the patterns of the present turned the world of man inside out and upside down. Insanity. Who’s crazy?

  “Cogito ergo sum.”17 I think therefore I am. But the only conclusion to be derived from thought is that the brain has direct experience. We are not concerned with the existence of thought but with the activity of the brain.

  There is no consci
ous self, there is no subconscious, there is no mind. Indeed, the word mental is an “unfortunate word, a word whose function in our culture is often only to stand in lieu of an intelligent explanation, and which connotes rather a foggy limbo than a cosmic structural order characterized by patterning.”18 Be concerned with discerning operant patterns on the neural level. All experience can be accounted for in terms of neural operations. “Only by renouncing an explanation of life in the ordinary sense do we gain a possibility of taking into account its characteristics.”19

  This system of abstraction, based as it is on operant considerations, goes beyond linear systems. Nonlinear processes are composed of interacting elements. Common Western language lends itself to pictorial interpretations. But, “the description of many aspects of human existence demands a terminology which is not immediately founded on simple physical pictures.”20 Nonlinear processes can be represented by operant mathematical symbols. Common language is a poor substitute. Pure mathematical symbolism allows us to “represent relations for which ordinary verbal expression is imprecise or cumbersome. In this connection, it may be stressed that, just by avoiding the reference to the conscious subject which infiltrates daily language, the use of mathematical symbols secures the unambiguity of definition required for objective description.”21

  “A measure of the sum of the parts is larger than the sum of the measure of the parts.

  F(a +b) >F(a) +F(b)

  F = measure function of squaring

  F(a +b) = (a +b)2=a2+b2+2ab

  and

  F(a)= a2, F(b)=b2

  therefore

  a2 +b2 +2ab > a2 +b2

  The product 2ab is nothing else but the measure of the interaction of the two parts a and b, namely the interaction of a with b and b with a.”22 To consider this interaction, start with effect and work backward.

  The operation of the brain is a nonlinear process. It is a system of self-organization where given sets of oscillations pull themselves together into a particular frequency band.

  Man is dead. We are now concerned with the concept of process. “In return for the renunciation of accustomed demands on explanation, it offers a logical means of comprehending wider fields of experience, necessitating proper attention to the placing of object-subject separation.”23 Instead of “man” and “not man,” move the object-subject separation one step back to objectify a universe of simultaneous operations: the process of interaction of “man” and “not man,” integrated on the level of the neural activity of “man.” In this system there is “not only a universe, but there are also elements capable of observing this universe.”24 The observation is through a nervous system similar to that of the observer-participant in the universe under consideration. Reality is no longer to be found hidden in the subjects and objects of “man” and “not man.”

  For discussing integration at the neural level we must look to the interval. The only way to capture that moment is with the death of man, the death of the concept of the individual. It has been demonstrated that the brain responds to change in terms of the information it has already received. “The past experience of the person determines the manner of his response to a given stimulus. The primary direct effects of stimuli commonly have little bearing on their ultimate expressions.”25 The brain continually functions during the moment man termed the interval, this functioning being dependent on its physiological construction and stored information. There is no interval. There is only what the brain is doing.

  Media do not exist. Media must be considered as a single level of information movement, which is a consideration of the world of the past. There are no linear movements of information. Information is a process. Its whole is measurable only by effect. Be concerned with process, with transaction, not with media. Media are in the world of the past. They are the received signals from there-and-then. The medium is not the message. The medium is the confusion. The message is operational. It is a process.

  Information is a process. Not words or ideas, or “I like it,” “I don’t like it,” but the total effect of experience, of the brain’s operation. Not ideas or opinions, but the changes brought about by the experience, the neural involvement. Information is a nonlinear relationship established between output and input, the simultaneous universe of experiential feedback of information. Points of view are beside the point.

  If media do not exist, neither do separations such as form and content, concepts which belong to the treatment of signals there-and-then. In the simultaneous operations of the brain there is neither form nor content. There is information that directs the brain’s activity. All imagined considerations of form and content are considerations of the interpretation of the ordering of direct experience. This is in the past. Be concerned only with the ordering, with the present.

  No more talk about media, no more talk of the senses, of perception, etc. Such considerations are presented within a conceptual framework that does not allow us to account for contemporary experience. Be concerned with activity integrated on the neural level. It is a process. “The only unit of currency in the process is the neural impulse or permeability wave.”26 In studying the transmission pattern of these waves we learn that “each local area of the cortex interprets the message according to its local pattern of response. Nothing in the message itself can indicate its source of origin.”27 On the integrative neural level there are no visual images, no sounds, no taste, no physical feeling, no odor. “It matters nothing whether these trains of neural impulse arise in the ear, the eye, or any other sense organ; they are all the same, they have no more individuality than the elemental dots and dashes of the telegraph code. There is no more of a sound or sight or pain in a nerve impulse during transmission than there is love or grief in the underground lines of the telegraph.”28

  “The qualities of a neural impulse bear no relation to the sensory stimulus which sends them on their way. Only the quantity or frequency varies.”29 Forget about signal source; forget about sensory source. The eyes see nothing; the ears hear nothing. Our sensory receptors are capable of transmitting neural impulses that are variable only in two ways—“namely, the diameter of the conducting fiber and the strength of the sensory stimulus. The former determines the speed of travel; the latter, the frequency, or distance between members of the procession.”30 The eyes see nothing; the ears hear nothing. Give credit to the brain, where there are no pictures, no sounds. There are only electrical neural impulses. “It is these purely physical phenomena, whose qualities are fully prescribed by certain numerical data and determined by the semipermanent structures of the anatomy, which constitute the unit of currency in the nervous system. There is no other form of activity of nerve, no other physical movement in the tissues of the brain, out of which the processes of thought may be constructed.”31

  The brain is the organizer. Seeing, hearing, perception—all take place in the brain. The brain, which sees nothing, hears nothing, knows nothing. Each of the sensory receptors has a reception area in the cortex where neural impulses are received and acted upon in terms of a local pattern of response. “If an operation could be devised to change the pathway of the optic nerves so that they delivered their messages to the auditory reception areas of the cortex, and to divert the auditory nerves to the visual area, the patient would hear noises when the lights were turned up, and see patterns and colors when the bell was rung.”32

  “The mechanism whereby a sensory receptor which has important information to convey can transmit this information to the cortex of the brain, along a neural axone which is as featureless as a telegraph wire, has interesting properties of a quantitative nature. Two methods are available whereby the stark yes or-no, which is all that the nerve can carry, may be elaborated into the wealth of sensory detail which actually reaches the brain. One method is to vary the number of nerve fibers engaged in the work of transmission: twenty fibers will convey a message more efficiently than ten fibers. The other method is by modulation of the frequency of the impulses as they fol
low each other along the single track.”33 It becomes a question of frequencies, or numbers.

  Man created a dehumanized, computerized world, a world in which he was nothing more than a number. But it was really the other way around: numbers representing neural patterns had somehow become humanized. From an unambiguous and objective representation of patterns of activity, the number became transformed into “man” and “not man.” This arbitrary object-subject separation assured ambiguity, vagueness, and illusion.

  How does the picture get put together? It doesn’t. All that is happening are volleys of neural impulses. What is the point of attempting to correlate patterns of neural activity to mind, feelings, emotions, etc.? Dispense with these abstractions. They are from another epoch. They are of little usefulness in dealing with operant phenomena.

  The basis of living systems is self-organization. The brain organizes its activity in a continuous fashion, always in the present. It incarnates the operations it has performed as operant circuits. It exists and can be talked about only in operant terms on what it does. What it does depends on information it constantly receives informing it about changes in itself, environmental forces, the physiological functions of the body. It uses this information to adapt, to change, to maintain its stability and continuity. Information is not to be confused with the source of information. It is not power. It is an abstraction. It is not energy. It is an invention.