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Rising
    everywhere. For instance, the software "in" my brain also exists
    outside my brain in such forms as, say, a book I read twenty
    years ago, which was an English translation of various signals
    transmitted by Plato 2400 years ago. Other parts of my software
    are made up of the software of Confucius, James Joyce, my
    second-grade teacher, the Three Stooges, Beethoven, my mother
    and father, Richard Nixon, my various dogs and cats, Dr. Carl
    Sagan, and anybody and (to some extent) any-thing that has ever
    impacted upon my brain. This may sound strange, but that's the
    way software (or information) functions.
    Of course, if consciousness consisted of nothing but this
    undifferentiated tapioca of timeless, spaceless software, we
    would have no individuality, no center, no Self.
    We want to know, then, how out of this universal software
    ocean a specific person emerges.
    What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.
    Because the human brain, like other animal brains, acts as an
    electro-colloidal computer, not a solid-state computer, it follows
    the same laws as other animal brains. That is, the programs get
    into the brain, as electro-chemical bonds, in discrete quantum
    stages.
    Each set of programs consists of four basic parts:
    1 . Genetic Imperatives. Totally hard-wired programs or
    "instincts."
    2. Imprints. These are more-or-less hard wired programs
    which the brain is genetically designed to accept only at certain
    points in its development. These points are known, in ethology,
    as times of imprint vulnerability.
    3. Conditioning. These are programs built onto the imprints.
    They are looser and fairly easy to change with counter-conditioning.
    4. Learning. This is even looser and "softer" than conditioning.
    In general, the primordial imprint can always over-rule any
    subsequent conditioning or learning. An imprint is a species of
    software that has become built-in hardware, being impressed on
    the tender neurons when they are peculiarly open and vulnerable.
    Imprints (software frozen into hardware) are the non-negotiable
    aspects of our individuality. Out of the infinity of possible
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    programs existing as potential software, the imprint establishes
    the limits, parameters, perimeters within which all subsequent
    conditioning and learning occurs.
    YOUR HARDWARE IS LOCALIZED:
    BRAIN CELLS RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.
    YOUR SOFTWARE IS NON-LOCAL:
    POINT-EVENTS EVERYWHERE, EVERYWHEN.
    Before the first imprint, the consciousness of the infant is
    "formless and void"—like the universe at the beginning of
    Genesis, or the descriptions of unconditioned ("enlightened" i.e.,
    exploded) consciousness in the mystic traditions. As soon as the
    first imprint is made, structure emerges out of the creative void.
    The growing mind, alas, becomes trapped within this structure. It
    identifies with the structure; in a sense, it becomes the structure.
    This entire process is analyzed in G. Spencer Brown's Laws
    of Form; and Brown was writing about the foundations of mathematics
    and logic. But every sensitive reader knows that Brown
    is also talking about a process we have all passed through in
    creating, out of an infinite ocean of signals, those particular
    constructs we call "myself and "my world." Not surprisingly,
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    many acid-heads have said that Brown's math is the best description
    ever written of an LSD trip.
    Each successive imprint complicates the software which
    programs our experience and which we experience as "reality."
    Conditioning and learning build further networks onto this
    bedrock of imprinted software. The total structure of this braincircuitry
    makes up our map of the world. It is what our Thinker
    thinks, and our Prover mechanically fits all incoming signals to
    the limitations of this map.
    Following Dr. Timothy Leary (with a few modifications) we
    shall divide this brain hardware into eight circuits for convenience.
    ("For convenience" means that this is the best map I