A question of spirits/souls

MISHLOVE: To the average layman, why would they be interested in this? Is there some significance to people in their everyday lives, or in their workaday worlds, in the business of life?

PRIBRAM: Sure, and this is the critical thing -- that if indeed we're right that these quantum-like phenomena, or the rules of quantum mechanics, apply all the way through to our psychological processes, to what's going on in the nervous system -- then we have an explanation perhaps, certainly we have a parallel, to the kind of experiences that people have called spiritual experiences. Because the descriptions you get with spiritual experiences seem to parallel the descriptions of quantum physics. That's why Fritjof Capra wrote The Tao of Physics, why we have The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and all of this sort of thing that's come along. And in fact Bohr and Heisenberg already knew; Schroedinger talked about the Upanishads, and Bohr used the yin and yang as his symbol. Because the conceptions that grew out of watching the quantum level -- and therefore now the neurological and psychophysical level, now that it's a psychological level as well -- seem to have a great deal in common with our spiritual experience. Now what do I mean by spiritual experience? You talked about mental activity, calling it the mind. That aspect of mental activity, which is very human -- it may be true of other species as well, but we don't know -- but in human endeavor many of us at least seem to need to get in contact with larger issues, whether they're cosmology, or some kind of biological larger issue, or a social one, or it's formalized in some kind of religious activity. But we want to belong. And that is what I define as the spiritual aspects of man's nature.

http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~sai/pribram.htm

You know, I really liked this interview, except this part of it. It seems to me this is a non sequitur. At the same time he is only defining "spiritual experience" as "want to belong" in some "formalized... religious activity".

To me, that isn't spiritual, that's social. How does the distributed processing of the brain, even if it's computationally similar to quantum fluctuations, how does that mean we have "spirits"?

I think they are taking these computational methods that hint of past principles like "Yin Yan" and make the assumption that proves all of chinese philosophy, or at least the parts chosen by Pribram.

I just don't see the connection. Maybe he means something completely different by spirituality. But it does not follow from computational models that spirits exist, and in this interview he only suggests that it might be true. He's not as sure of it as you are.

Here is another great Mishlove interview with a completely different prespective from a Nobel Laureate in theoretical physics.
http://www.williamjames.com/transcripts/gell1.htm

GELL-MANN: Yes, it's confused them. For instance, one very distinguished physicist, student of quantum mechanics, has said that he doesn't like any such approach, because if it were right, then you should be encouraged to play Russian roulette for high stakes, since in one of the equally real worlds you would win. Well, it's kind of silly, because we experience, of course, at every branching only one branch, and to talk about the others being real is confusing.

MISHLOVE: But these confusions and paradoxes seem to come up everywhere in quantum physics.

GELL-MANN: Well, I don't think it's necessary. I think one can try to reduce the amount of confusion, and also to reduce the amount of nonsense that's talked about quantum mechanics. I have a chapter in my book called "Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle," because people have talked a great deal of nonsense about quantum mechanics.

MISHLOVE: But these people, as I understand it, are some of the great physicists. You mentioned Niels Bohr.

GELL-MANN: I didn't say that Niels Bohr had said anything foolish. I said that his Copenhagen interpretation may now be regarded as partial and approximate, but not wrong.

MISHLOVE: I understand that.

GELL-MANN: And not foolish, either.

MISHLOVE: I certainly didn't mean to imply that. I think we would agree that he's one of the founders of quantum physics, and he's universally honored. But didn't he say that if you look at quantum physics and you don't get dizzy by it, you don't understand it?

GELL-MANN: Let's see if I can translate the sentence carefully. If someone says that he can think or talk about quantum physics without becoming dizzy, that shows only that he has not understood anything whatever about it.

http://www.williamjames.com/transcripts/gell1.htm

MISHLOVE: The paradox here, if I understand it, is that in quantum theory the probabilistic event is sort of viewed as a probability function, or sometimes I've even heard the term a probability cloud. It's as if both true and false are occurring at the same time.

GELL-MANN: Yes, and that's what I think is very misleading, and my colleagues think is very misleading. In the Schroedinger cat story, for example, the part I told is very reasonable and simply illustrates that a probabilistic quantum event can be coupled to some classical change in the heavy, macroscopic objects around us. That's fine. But the other thing people say is, "Well, suppose the cat is in a box, and the quantum event occurs, but you don't know which way it went, and the cat is dead if it went one way and alive if it went the other, and so until you open the box and see, well, the cat is in some sort of funny quantum-mechanical, coherent mixture of being dead and being alive. That's very strange and paradoxical and weird, and so on." It isn't really true.

MISHLOVE: That was the point Schroedinger tried to make.

GELL-MANN: Well, I don't know exactly what he was after, but it's a point that people have belabored after Schroedinger, and I think it's not really a very good way to look at it, because a live cat certainly is in interaction with its environment. It's not isolated.

MISHLOVE: That's right.

GELL-MANN: Even the dead cat is in interaction with its environment. It's decaying, emanating various chemicals. The live cat of course is breathing and in contact with its environment. Even if the cat is in a box, the box is in contact with the environment. It's being hit by photons from elsewhere in the universe. It's radiating a certain number of photons because it's not at absolute zero; if it were at absolute zero it would certainly not contain a live cat. And so on and so forth. Therefore, whatever it is that we're talking about, it's in interaction with other things, and those other things are being averaged over and integrated over and not seen. And under those conditions, the two situations, alive and dead, decohere, as we say. There is no interference between them; they are simply alternatives -- just like the alternatives at the race track when either one horse wins or another horse wins; there's nothing mysterious or peculiar about it. And when you open the box it's no different from the experience that you may actually have of going to the airport and accepting a cat box and not knowing whether the poor animal is alive or dead until you open the box. It's exactly the same. The two situations are on different branches of history. They are not coherent with each other because of the interaction with the rest of the world that's averaged over.

MISHLOVE: This is very deep material. I can't claim to understand everything that you've said, Dr. Gell-Mann, but it seems as if you're saying the environment itself is affecting the situation.

GELL-MANN: Well, that's how the alternatives become decoherent with one another.

MISHLOVE: What does decoherent mean? We only have a minute now.

GELL-MANN: It means that you can assign a probability to each alternative, and you don't have interference terms that prevent you from assigning those probabilities. In other words, it means that the situation is no different from that at the race track.

MISHLOVE: OK, and a quantum system is coherent, which means you can't separate it out.

GELL-MANN: If you treat a system in too much detail -- too fine-grained a history -- then you will end up with these interference problems, and you cannot assign probabilities to such fine-grained histories, and you mustn't do so. You cannot discuss them as alternatives.

MISHLOVE: I suppose in summary one might say that the fine-grained, quantum world is really very, very different from the coarse world.

GELL-MANN: And the coarse world is the only one that can be dealt with, and the only one that is dealt with. The other one is just in the background.

Gary Cottrell's face recognition ANN uses "holonic" imagery. This work by Pribram reminded me of it. I think that's more or less the aplication of Pribram's work. It relates to how the brain represents information. That is all.

Pribram's scientific magnum opus: "The Theory"

Collaborating with quantum physicist David Bohm from the University of London, Pribram began to develop the Holographic Brain Theory in the late 1960s. His famous model of the brain contrasted with the conventional model of the brain, which suggested that the brain stores memory in one location. With his Holographic model, however, Pribram suggested that memory is distributed throughout the brain. His theory is based on the invention of holography by Dr. Dennis Gabor, a physicist who received the 1971 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention and development of the holographic method. Holography is the science that underlies the production of a hologram: a three-dimensional image that is recorded and stored for retrieval.

Pribram's theory suggests that the memories stored throughout the brain are initially received as holograms and then coded for storage. This means the brain acts much like a camera: Like the lens of your eye, the lens of a camera focuses the light reflected from the object to create an image; later, after you download (or print) your photos, you determine what the object is. Your retina, the neural cells in the back of the eye, performs a Fourier transformation that maps point spread functions. This Fourier transformation taking place in the brain compresses the information the lens transmits, just as a camera compresses a captured image for storage.

Objects are seen because of the light that they reflect. The eye focuses that light from its "blurry" state, into an image that you can recognize and thus give meaning. The brain establishes initial identification based on information gathered from the physical environment. Not unlike the Hollywood Blockbuster "The Matrix " with Keanu Reeves, the world that we recognize is called into question - but Pribram is not the character Morpheus, suggesting that people can dodge bullets or fly if you "free your mind." However, he does pose the idea of two realities - the world of the blur (the images we see without focusing) and the world of the focused images (the world that we perceive).

The input of images into the brain, and their initial identification, creates memories, like photos in an album. Our brain codes these memories for interpretation. Pribram suggests that the brain turns what we experience into signs and symbols, also known as codes. In 1970, in his lecture, "What Makes Man Human," about the evolution of the human brain, Pribram stated that humans code and recode all the time, even for profit - that all our work and artistic endeavors are a product of coding and our perception of the environment around us. For example, artists may see a fruit basket and draw it in a way that fits their interpretation of what is in the fruit basket and what the fruit basket represents to them. A fruit basket may be just a fruit basket, but to you it may mean something more. Or a photo of a woman dressed in red may provide a good memory for some and a bad memory for others.

http://www.ostina.org/content/view/2329/755/

I guess I'm still missing the part where Pribram says that there are metaphysical spirits that transcend the human body and integrate into the oneness of the universe, or however the babble goes.

The types of theories are like this:

Color Opponent Cells, you have 3 of them and 3 receptors (R,G,B) I think I've shown this before. If each axis has 20 different positions, then the total possible combinations - in a vector coding scheme - is approx. 10,000. Which is coherent with the total number of colors we can actually see.

That theory works out and this is the kind of distributed processing that Pribram describes. How anyone gets anything else out of that is beyond me. Wishful thinking I think.