On Thursday, October 24, 1996 2:16 AM, Chris Hind replied:
<The organism is living inside your head feeding off of your blood like a
paracite while it replaces neurons with organic pointers to locations of
stored data inside the virtual world [snip] Neuron impulses would bounce
between real neurons and virtual neurons seamlessly until the entire brain
had become converted. Explain the actions of glia cells though.>
Monday, October 28, 1996 11:06 AM, Anders Sandberg replied:
<They are the non-firing cells that make up 90% of the brain mass. Some of
them seem to give neurons nutrient and isolate them from each other. Others
buffer their electrical activity, taking up ions and
neurotransmittors. And some, the microglia, appear to work as immune cells,
eating junk or damaged cells. There is plenty going on among the cells!>
There's also a whole theory of glial cells as the agents of consciousness
in the brain (sort of like the arty counterparts of the nerdy neurons).
Physicist & writer Fred Alan Wolf expounds this theory in the final
chapters of his 1994 book _The Dreaming Universe: A Journey Into the Realm
Where Psyche and Physics Meet_. Wolf builds on the ideas of physicist
Renato Nobili who has described quantum physical wave equations modeling
the movement of ions in glial cells ("Schrodinger Wave Holography in Brain
Cortex," Physical Review A 32, no.6, 12/85). To Wolf, I think, trying to
develop a holographic model of memory and the mind, neurons are simply the
hardware while the software and memory storage are encoded in the glial
cells.
The pioneer of the 'holographic mind' meme was neurophysicist Karl Pribram.
Wolf refers to Pribram's work when he says: "there is no evidence that
anything like computer file management occurs in the brain and mnemonic
recalls do not seem to involve searches through tree patterns or files or
pages." I'm not sure if this is still *completely* true or not (I'm hoping
to read Bill Calvin's new book _The Cerebral Code_ soon). Anyway, Wolf
cites evidence that "cortical waves are not directly correlated to cortical
activity. They appear to persist even when neural activity is
suppressed."
Wolf admits that the problem with holographic theories of memory retrieval
is that "EEG patterns do not show a sufficiency of small-wavelength
components [and] the smaller the wavelength the greater the amount of
information the wave may encode." Another problem is the lack of a focusing
mechanism in the brain to project and retrieve holographically stored
information.
Well, Wolf's theory rests on Nobili's equations which supposedly show that
"contrary to light-wave holography, Schrodinger wave holography was far
more efficient in producing holograms in brain tissue ... The key here is
that the whole cortical column [via the quantum actions of ion movements in
the wetware of the glial cells] participates in both the generation of the
holographic wave and its detection. This is quite different from
light-wave holograms, which are primarily surface or area recordings.
Next, Schrodinger waves propagate through the medium in a different manner
from light waves ... Thirdly, when Schrodinger waves diffract through the
medium ... they evoke different images from the fixed stored information in
the glial cells. This amounts to producing time-resolved holograms ...
Fourthly, time-varying information that is recorded in the medium finds its
way to a number of resonators [that] act as transmitters ... so there is no
need to have any focalization devices present."
This is all very interesting (and even somewhat appealing IMO), BUT, I find
it hard to believe there is so little role for neural nets and the many
functional organs of the brain as Wolf seems to imply.
_If_ this theory were correct, I wonder how much effect it would have on
cryonic procedures (*none* I suspect), and on upload scanning protocols
(*alot* I suspect).
If these 'holographic mind' ideas have been *completely* debunked, thanks
for your patience and fire away.
Mark Crosby