From: dionysus-AT-bway.net Date: Tue, 27 Aug 1996 13:08:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Quantum Brain For most people giving another map of a map suffices as an explanation. Even for philosophers. It doesn't occur to them that they have just spoken a tautology. Godel's undecidability theorem and Girard/Derrida's theory of the sacrificial foundation of the law or truth (the hidden prime mover or unsupported assertion) is relevant here. As a child I realized that the dictionary was only tautologies, so I resigned never to use it. It's context that matters I said. Now I understand this further. What can get us out of the impasse of tautology? Transversality. Seeing how maps translate doesn't give us the answer - it shows us "how it happens." Not what but how. Which is why the mapping of existence scientifically doesn't destroy faith, meaning, or ecstasy - unless that faith was falsely essential in the first place. No matter how many maps we construct there will still be the question "why must there be what I know" as Bataille said. Recent research in neuroscience points to transversality as our bridge. Is it evolution, morphogenesis, desire, or a just another strange attractor? The nervous system beginning as an awareness system at the basic level of attraction/repulsion has evolved in human beings to a brain infinitely more complex than any computer imaginable, let alone constructible. DNA specifies cells including neurons but in each human being cells including neurons are "selected" or formed through their own unpredictable drift into groups and networks (topobiology). In the development of an organism such as a human through physical and social environmental interaction the mapping of networks and groups are formed or "selected" still further by the burning of recurrent maps of perception and sensation. Some neurons are activated - others are not. Different groups of networks map different events and they communicate. A multidimensional event-concrescence is formed and stored in micro quanta (not even bits of informations) which includes the constant linking of abstract perceptual facts (time-space) with bodily sensation (energy-momentum). (Emotions and feelings partake of the same process as cognition and consciousness.) All there is is disposition or tendency or possibility or virtuality which becomes actualized or realized out of the the possible (entropy - chaos) by the resonance of (external evocation)/(internal predetermination). We may experience only what we already "know" unless we "know" how to be open or suprised or look for the other - or unless an other or event knows how to break the will to perceive what's already in us (the Image(inary) of the Other which determines our "symptoms"). This "seduction" is constantly constructing our subjectivity but the older we get, the rarer it is to change. In this sense Guattari has learned Lacan's lesson so well that he's carried it forward where Lacan himself and even more his followers have failed at their own understanding. The human system appears to be most rich and complex at perceiving multi-dimensions such as color, but the latest word is that things such as sound and color are broken down into microphysical quanta and reassembled into wholes ad hoc according to the above variable conditions which include "desire" - the history of sensation/perception experience mapped over a lifetime with respect to "drive" - appetitive, gustataory, sensational, sexual, safety, containment, rest, diversity . . . With respect to Pribram and Prigogine, there is an idea that the self-organizing wholes (concresences in Whitehead's sense) may be formed in our brain - our subjectivity - as momentarily stable events based on "attractors". Perturbations from within or without break the ongoing and unconscious patterns of our brains/lives and attract us to the new event making us conscious or attentive and burning new maps which then move toward stability and habituated pattern until the next moment of innovation. The perturbations also make previously accumulated dispositional maps light up with conscious novelty as they suddenly take on a new light. Desiring production is order out of chaos is the chaosmic movement between chaos and complexity. Now if it is possible to get people live what these scientist/philosophers might know then . . . All political activism and psychoanalysis hitherto has been only a prolegomena. Nietzsche said he was a bridge. We must cross that bridge. swg
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