By the Late John Brockman (3 page)

“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 conscious 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.

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
follow 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.

A mathematical theorem holds that for any formal system capable of producing arithmetic
there is a truism proving the system which cannot be proven within the system. For
man there was consciousness, the system for which there was a truism proving the system
which could not be shown to be true within the system.
³⁴
All man was sure of was that he was conscious. End of discussion. He could never
tell whether this consciousness was the result of a digital computer, religious incantation,
etc.

Information is a measure of effect. Start with effect and work backward. Information
is a measure of the operant response the brain makes in terms of its nonlinear experience.
Information relates to direct neural coding, to brain imprinting. Understanding the
nature of nonlinear communication through the process of information closes the gap,
gets rid of the interval. Every instant becomes the ordering of the brain in the simultaneous,
continuous present. Even the notion of instants, of time, disappears.

The evolutionary significance of all this is unbelievable, for man. It is the end
of importance. It is the end of man.

This exercise merely presents a system, a methodology. No truths are to be found here.
The author doesn’t believe a word of what is set forth and is not interested in formulation
of new dogma. It is the formulation of a system, an abstraction from reality not to
be confused with reality. Reality as a whole is unmeasurable except through effect.
The unity is in the methodology, in the writing, reading, in the navigation. This
system cannot provide us with ultimate answers, nor does it present the ultimate questions.
There are none.