Quotes
By
Karl Pribram
From
"What the Fuss is All About"
In
The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes
(pp. 27-34)
Thus modern physicists and modern perceptual psychologists have converged onto a set of issues that neither can solve alone. If the psychologist is interested in the nature of the conditions which produce the world of appearances, he must attend to the inquiries of the physicist. If the physicist is to understand the observations which he is attempting to systematize, he must learn something of the nature of the psychological process of making observations (p. 29).
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Relationships among observations are mental phenomena, since observations and perceptions are mental. Perhaps the very fundamental properties of the universe are therefore mental and not material. Nuclear physicists remind themselves of this possibility when they attribute charm, colors and flavors to their “relationships among observations,” the quarks, bosons and other most elementary particles that constitute the nucleus of atoms. And from time to time philosophers such as Leibnitz and Whitehead have proposed panpsychic ontologies to account for similar views obtained by following through to a logical conclusion the reasoning of their mathematical insights into the basic order of the universe.
The following statements place these two basic views into succinct apposition:
Paradoxically, almost all behavioral and neuro-scientists would today subscribe to some form of statement one, while, as noted above, statement two reflects the belief of many of the most influential theoretical physicists. Mathematicians have faced the dilemma more directly: how is it that the operations of their brains so often describe faithfully the basic order of the universe they perceive? (pp. 29-30).
The following statements place these two basic views into succinct apposition:
1) Brain, by organizing the input from the physical world, as obtained through the senses, constructs mental properties.
2) Mental properties are the pervasive organizing principles of the universe, which includes the brain.
Paradoxically, almost all behavioral and neuro-scientists would today subscribe to some form of statement one, while, as noted above, statement two reflects the belief of many of the most influential theoretical physicists. Mathematicians have faced the dilemma more directly: how is it that the operations of their brains so often describe faithfully the basic order of the universe they perceive? (pp. 29-30).
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Essentially, the theory reads that the brain at one stage of processing performs its analyses in the frequency domain. This is accomplished at the junctions between neurons not within neurons. Thus graded local waxings and wanings of neural potentials (waves) rather than nerve impulses are responsible. Nerve impulses are generated within neurons and are used to propagate the signals that constitute information over long distances via long nerve fibers. Graded local potential changes, waves, are constituted at the ends of these nerve fibers where they adjoin shorter branches that form a feltwork of interconnections among neurons. Some neurons, now called local circuit neurons, have no long fibers and display no nerve impulses. They function in the graded wave mode primarily and are especially responsible for horizontal connectivities in sheets of neural tissue, connectivities in which holographic-like interference patterns can become constructed (p. 32).
*
The answer to the initial question as to whether mind, consciousness and psychological properties in general are emergents or expressions of some basic ordering principle, rests on which of two reciprocally related domains is considered primary, the image/object or the implicate holographic. Scientists are, as yet, only barely acquainted with the implicate order which has, however, apparently been explored experimentally by mystics, psychics and others delving into paranormal phenomena. Perhaps if the rules for “tuning in” on the holographic, implicate domain could be made more explicit, we would come to some agreement as to what constitutes the primary basic order of the universe. At the moment this order appears so indistinguishable from the mental operations by which we operate on that universe that we must conclude either that our science is a huge mirage, a construct of the emergence of our convoluted brains, or that, indeed, as proclaimed by all great religious convictions, a unity characterizes this emergent and the basic order of the universe (p. 34).
