By the Late John Brockman Read Online Free PDF

deluded himself into thinking he was conscious, and then proclaimed that
     this consciousness, this delusion, was reality. There are several stumbling blocks
     to communication between linear and nonlinear systems. The major one is that linear
     systems do not exist. All that exists are the operations of the brain, the direct
     experience, a nonlinear oscillation.

     
    Instead of looking to the world of man, to the linear abstractions, to the conscious
     motivations, etc., attention must be turned to a universe of control patterns, patterns
     of complete control, the nonlinear process of neural activity. The message in this
     system is the communication of pattern. “A message need not be the result of a conscious
     human effort for the transmission of ideas.” 42 Work on the level of deciphering the patterns that have always existed but that man
     hardly even suspected. Consider the notion of power engineering: “The main function
     of power engineering is transmission of energy or power from one place to another
     with its generation by appropriate generators and its employment by appropriate motors
     or lamps or other such apparatus. So long as this is not associated with transmission
     of a particular pattern, as for example in processes of automatic control, power engineering
     remains a separate entity with its own technique.” 43 Man was a separate entity with its own technique. The unity is methodological. Concentrate
     on communication of operant pattern. The only experience that is real is in the operations
     of the brain. The individual experience, the private experience, the personal experience:
     illusion. The end of the individual.

     
    Man concerned himself with meaning. His books, plays, movies, television programs,
     were considered only in terms of what they had to say, what they had to communicate
     in ideas. But experience was itself the communication, what the brain did. Man was
     oblivious to these changes. A story was a story—complete with plots, morals, points
     of view, and ultimate meanings—to fit within preestablished value systems. Considerations
     of story on the neural level are another story. Recent research has shown that “the
     parts of the brain from which memories are evoked so easily and regularly are those
     we find most liable to exaggerated electrical discharge during flicker, and it is
     here too that in normal subjects the pattern of incoming stimuli can be seen abstracted
     and preserved for some time after the stimulation has ceased.” 44

     
    The movie experience is a flicker experience of a frequency of twenty-four times per
     second, slightly higher and safer than the level considered dangerous for certain
     brains. The reflection of projected light from a treated surface, a surface encompassing
     up to eighty percent of the visual field, can have the effect on the neural level
     of an electronic brain message. Where is the meaning when we realize the emotional
     response is a function of the flicker experience reactivating memory imprints stored
     in the operant circuits of the brain? The implications of such a hypothesis are obvious.
     How can we merely discuss “I like it / I don’t like it” without reference to questions
     about the brain’s activity, a universe without I’s.

     
    Neural energy is not produced by the major receptors for sensory stimuli. The sources
     for neural energy are the gravitational receptors, the stretchingtype muscles. “The
     visual receptors, bringing in up to two-thirds of the sensory stimuli for the brain,
     are useless as a source of neural energy.” 45 In this light, look to the transaction between the environmental force and the organism
     in terms of the information provided to the brain. The visual receptors tend to pick
     up light as motion. “The human eye has economically confined its best form and color
     vision to a relatively small fovea, while its perception of motion is better on the
     periphery. When peripheral