The Absurd Behavior of Electrons:
Science on the edge: Technology on the edge: Yet, as the best and brightest—they being the only ones who can afford candor—admit, we have got nowhere, absolutely nowhere, with the only phenomenon that matters: Consciousness. For all our cleverness at manipulating molecules, when push comes to shove, we still kill each other. If the pushing and shoving happens on a sidewalk, the result is one death. If the pushing and shoving happens in a century, a lot of deaths result. We are in almost total denial about the reality of our violence. How many of the celebratory obsequies of the recently ended mentioned the total number of war dead between 1900 and 2000? How many people even know the number? Even those who know it treat it mostly as just another bit of interesting culture trivia. So we killed 200,000,000 people last century, so what else is new? Surely that number should give us more than a brief pause. Surely 200,000,000 dead bodies indicate that something is amiss, civilization-wise. The fact that we don't pay serious, long-range attention to that number indicates how deep the denial is.
Suggestion: Buy a wig. Apply heavy, concealing make-up, and visit your local New Age book store. We want you to do a bit of shopping there, using as careful an eye as you do when you go to REI. As in any other field of endeavor, 99% of New Age stuff is at best fluff and at worst money-grubbing capitalist exploitation. That’s why you have to shop as carefully at a New Age bookstore as you do at Barney. Anyway, if you shop with great discrimination, you will find in the 1% at the New Age bookstore a truly astounding accumulation of hard, verifiable data from various fields of consciousness research. What’s peculiar is, a New Age bookstore is the ONLY place you’ll find this data. Why? Because 1) it doesn’t fit at all in the reductive schemata of orthodox science, and 2) it is a direct and powerful threat to the intellectual parties who have a strong vested interest in seeing that the old science-boat is not rocked at all. What data? Too much to summarize in a brief essay, but for starters we can mention: Lucid dreams. Please go back and think about your reaction to those words. If it was a knee-jerk rejection, a "What a bunch of b.s." reaction, may I suggest that your world view is no more rational than that of a religious fundamentalist who unthinkingly rejects anything not covered in her or his own particular holy book. But, you say, my mind is open. Show me proof, verifiable, repeatable experiments demonstrating the existence of any of those phenomena. And I say, done and done. The data is there. Yes, it’s hard to find, because it’s surrounded by so much claptrap (does the name "Deepak Chopra" say anything to you?), the blathering of mountebanks out for a fast buck, quacks hyping old snake oil in new bottles. But the data is there. It's hard data, and it's alarming. How alarming is it? So alarming that we consign it to, well, New Age bookstores. The stuff of crackpots, mass delusion, the madness of crowds. It's alarming because it indicates that electrons, not to mention the zoo of sub-atomic particles the quantumists have snared, may be up to more than our orthodox sciencists are willing to even think about. That other 1% can also be dangerous for the thoughtful person willing to seek it out. It can lead to the end of respectable orthodox careers (Timothy Leary, John Lilly, John E. Mack, etc.). Even cautious, well-intentioned orthodox investigators have trouble breaking out of the reductive orthogonal box of traditional analysis. Robert G. Jahn at Princeton has for years been sort of sneaking up on this problem area. Just a few hundred meters from Einstein’s old haunts, he even has a research facility going, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR), which is producing intriguingly results which fall outside present-day orthodoxy. What to do?
Let’s zoom out on the history of science and technology for a moment. As McLuhan pointed out, that history is the history of extending the reach of human senses. We have eyes exploring the solar system. We got our nose onto the Martian surface with the Rover’s chemical analyses. The Internet puts the world’s knowledge at my fingertips. Closer to home, the camera reproduces the physiology of the eye, the car that of the body (put food in the front so I can move, waste comes out that back), microphones and loudspeakers that of the ear. To try to get it down to one concept, we can say that progress consists in the expansion, extension, and externalization of body structure and behavior. And we have indeed been very, very clever at doing this. Not only can we see down to the atomic level—in three dimensions yet, we have even constructed tiny, tiny fingers that allow us to move single atoms. The computer, as we have it now, is clearly a crude externalization of the brain, or at least a small part of the brain. There seems little doubt that on some very primitive level current computers do, very clumsily, mimic a kind of extremely low-level brain behavior. Input-process-output. But it's hardly more than the kind of reactive behavior exhibited by an amoeba. If we back up, to the macro level, to the gross anatomy of the human body, there’s something we’re overlooking: Why the two lobes? Our current grasp of computer science would indicate that one lobe, one computer, should do just fine. But there they are, the old left and right computers, churning away. What we haven’t yet done is try to replicate the gross physiology of the brain, namely its puzzling bicamerality.* We haven’t, of course, because we don’t have a clue about it. We study brain-damaged people and see odd results. We even take a scalpel and cut the connection between the two lobes. But as far as consciousness is concerned, we remain completely, 100% ignorant about what is going on up there. Why two computers? Surely that structure is a huge hint, suggesting that the path to take, if we’re going to continue, is replication of the brain’s bicamerality. How? I don’t know. No more than Volta knew what to do when he discovered that wires immersed in certain chemical mixtures and then applied to frog legs would cause the legs to twitch. No more than Bohr and Heisenberg knew at first what to make of the fact that light behaves as if it were both wave and particle. The gross structure of the brain is a hint. Lobe-lobe. Not just one computer, but, two computers somehow talking (?) to each other. The image of two facing mirrors comes to mind, and the phrase: infinite regress. Is there perhaps some unexpected "quantum" leap if two computers are connected in some kind of regressive way? What kinds of surprises from the strange behavior of electrons await the researcher who replicates our gross cranial anatomy? What unexpected (quantum?) behavior arises out of the primeval murk of infinite neural regress? Many questions... One more step. Let’s zoom out again, another order of magnitude. What do we see? We see me, you, each of us a "self", faced with the seemingly infinite "other" of everything outside of "self". Here I am, and out there is you, along with a lot of other "you’s" and a whole bunch of "everything else’" spreading as far as our super-eyes can now see. So. My last unanswered question: Is our bicamerality in some way an anatomical replication of that duality? Self-Other. Lobe 1 - Lobe 2. Who knows to what strange behavior electrons resort when immersed in a closed cauldron of infinite neural regress. END *Ah-ha, you say. We're going off into Julian Jaynes territory. Not at all. His ideas are based on the breakdown of bicamerality. I'm suggesting that the key to a replication of consciousness is the development of bicamerality.
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Ah, the wonders of modern life:
