The Double Helix of the Mind, Stan Gooch, 1981
Chapter Eight
Computers and the Life Force
An important objection was raised to an aspect of the material of the previous chapter while the book was still in draft stage. It ran something like this.
You are quite adamant that computers and other such modern electronic devices, powered by electricity, are inanimate – that is, not alive. And yet in the same breath you speak of consciousness itself as an electro-magnetic field, describing it sometimes as an actual battery and sometimes as an electro-magnet. You even consider than when the corpus callosum joining the two cerebral hemispheres is cut we are left with two adjacent electromagnets or batteries, which then interfere with each other, literally, as do conventional electro-magnetic emissions. In brief, since you consider that the very basis of life and consciousness itself are electro-magnetic, how can you then so unequivocally deny life and consciousness to the computer, which likewise has an electro-magnetic basis to its functioning? Such fundamental criticism led me to look very carefully indeed at the whole basis of my theorising in this area.
Now, it is true that computers conduct, and in a sense are conducted by, an electrical charge (but then so are electric fires). Computers also store ‘information’ on reels of magnetic tape. I have put ‘information’ in quotes, because what is stored is very much not information. All that exist on the reels or discs or microchips are a large number of the two possibilities ‘closed’ or ‘open’. At these points the probing current is either allowed further progress, or progress is blocked, so that an alternative route must be chosen. We can and do call these alternatives ‘yes’ and ‘no’, or affirmative and negative or whatever. But only we understand anything by these words as applied to these events, and by such labels as information. More particularly, the psychological reality which these terms refer to and reflect is ours and ours alone.
So what we have in respect of a computer – all that we have – is a system which with a large number of ‘gates’ blocks or permits the further flow of an electro-magnetic impulse. There is no information.
Even if the flow and not flow gates ‘meant’ anything in themselves, which they do not, we have to understand that these are in any case absolutely fixed points. They cannot in any way move around or relate to each other in the way living cells, ort he internal contents of a cell, can. Nothing is actually passed on from one computer ‘information’ blip to another. There isn’t anything which could be passed on – only an electric current. This electrical charge is in no way changed or altered by the permitting or blocking gate of the blip.
We best understand the arrangement involved here by taking, say, a large number of marbles, most of which are white and a few of which are red, I can set these out in rows and columns in such a way that the red marbles make a line, or a curve, or a series of interrelated lines which, even, perhaps ‘write’ the number 4774 or the word TIME. But none of these patterns have any meaning for the marbles themselves. Nothing is added to the marbles as such by the arrangement. They are just marbles and nothing but marbles, as they were before.
If the blips on the magnetic tape or the micro-chip had any kind of separate existence of their own and were in some way mobile, we might begin to have a different story – for reasons which we come to in a moment.
I have suggested repeatedly that the positive and negative principles of electro-magnetism are present everywhere by construction in our universe. Or, more accurately, that the widespread phenomenon of polarized electro-magnetism is one actual, expressed instance of the omni-present underlying principles of polarity (yin-yang) on which the universe is no clearly based.
The basic polarity of the universe acts on all events contained in it, from the microscopically small to the astronomically large. Thus both our planet as a whole as well as each individual atom of it (and even the sub-atomic particles of the atomic nucleus) possess a north and south magnetic pole or charge.
In respect of life in particular, however, it seems that the universal organizing principle of negative-positive (yin-yang) prefers to work initially at the microscopic level. The first living creatures are minute specks of matter, and the first true animals and plants are equally small. Later, by increasing aggregations of such minute living cells, sizeable animals and plants are created.
Now, whilst I have condemned today’s computer as inanimate, it does seem to me that it might well be possible to grow an organic computer. Perhaps we would first need to synthesise new kinds of (simple) cell, or perhaps we could work with some already existing cell. But more importantly still we would need as a corollary to acquire some further understanding of the precise nature of the yin-yang force or forces which apparently act on organic molecules and whole cells. We would then be in a position to manipulate this force or these forces to cause our experimental cells to organise themselves in particular ways.
What we would be doing here is ‘gathering’ and applying the organizing forces of the universe to produce sentient cell masses or ‘creatures’ designed to solve particular problems, in much the same way as we today gather electricity and put it to work for us. And let us be clear, incidentally, that actual living organisms, including ourselves, whatever else they may be, are also machines for solving certain kinds of problems.
Once in possession of such and organic computer, we might legitimately begin to speak of it as if it had intelligence and sentience. It might experience its own information. But there is not the slightest reason or justification for applying any such terms to the sophisticated, but wholly inanimate, meccano sets and adding machines called computers.
My proposal far an organic computer does have, I must admit, a certain Frankensteinian and macabre quality. Have we the right to bring such sentient but ‘tailored’ and ‘improved’ creatures into being? Perhaps not. But the life force has not hesitated to bring such creatures into being in our own case. We, after all, are the Frankenstein monsters of God, created and set to work here, whether we like it or not, with no real idea of the purpose or point of operation, and the victims of all its limitations and mistakes.
There are some further important points. The actual cells which make up the human brain are in general static, though the complex hormonal messengers which travel among them are not. The information the cells store is, however, by no means so static, as we shall see in a moment. And finally and most importantly, the conscious events generated by the brain as a whole are emphatically not in the least static.
It is true that repeated electrical stimulation of minute points in the cortex by experimenters can result in the conscious experience of the same memory over and over again, suggesting (on first analysis) that the memory trace is actually physically stored at that point. And yet, as is now generally agreed, loss of that particular part of the cortex by no means necessarily results in the loss of the memory concerned! Removal of ninety per cent of a rat’s cerebral cortex, for example, does not result in significant forgetting of learned tasks. It would seem that memories are stored in more than one part of the cortex simultaneously – evidence of which, in human beings, comes also from hemispherectomy operations (see chapter 5). In fact, memories seem to be stored in the cortex (or its electro-magnetic field) as a whole, perhaps in something of the way that the whole picture in carried by every grain of a hologram photograph.
The conscious experience of memories, as also of sensory stimulation, dreams and other conscious contents is, in any case, quite emphatically a condition of dynamic flux. Even if particular memory traces are principally stored in particular circuits or complexes of neurones (which, as I say, seems to be too simple an idea), it is still the case that we can have ‘photocopies’ of such traces delivered to consciousness at a moment’s notice. Moreover, consciousness then can and does manipulate the copies. It then can and does dissect and recombine them in any way it thinks fit. (Simultaneously, memory often lays down new permanent traces of these new combinations also. Opponents of the concept of mind have no explanation how the ‘non-existent’ mind can create memories of events that have only ever taken place inside an individual’s head – whose only existence ever has been that of mind.)
So, for example, I now take the memory of myself as a small boy – I have him clearly at this moment in my mind’s eye – and I now imagine that he is here in this familiar room where, however, I have only lived as an adult. In my mind the boy wanders about looking at the books. The mental vision I have is as real and clear as a picture. (And yet academic psychologists want to deny even the existence of mind.)
This extraordinary mobility and flux of the conscious contents of mind leads on to another very intriguing possibility – or rather, actuality. For conscious mental contents meet the very requirement I proposed earlier of (in origin) microscopic and dynamic events that could be acted upon by the yin-yang forces of the universe.
So could we not use the contents of our consciousness as the basis for an empirical, though sentient, computer? Yes, I think we could. And, in fact, I think the Chinese Book of Changes, the astonishing I Ching, has done and continues to do just that.
What is the I Ching? It is an ancient Chinese oracle, which we today possess in book form, although originally it existed as a verbal tradition and practice long before writing was conceived. The I Ching as we have it today consists basically of sixty-four hexagrams (patterns or designs made up of six lines). The lines, in the case of the I Ching, may be broken (thus - - ) or solid (thus -). The broken lines are called or represent ‘yin’ and the solid lines ‘yang’. I have myself suggested that the two kinds of line are, respectively, two highly stylized renderings of the female and male sex organs – and the etymological history of the words ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ also lends some support to this idea. But in any case, ‘yin’ does indicate ‘female’, and ‘yang’ does indicate ‘male’.
One consults the I Ching on any problem or outcome on which one desires advice. The consultation is obtained either by randomly manipulating a number of yarrow stalks, or by throwing three coins in the air six times and allowing them to fall at will. These totally random and uncontrolled operations (for a full description of them see any edition of the I Ching) produce a series of numbers from six to nine inclusive, and these numbers are then used to build the answering hexagram: numbers six and eight, in fact, represent broken lines, seven and nine are solid lines. Turning in the book to the appropriate hexagram, one finds in respect of each several pages of interpretation and commentary, all of which is relevant to your question in a general sense, but some of which (as indicated by the precise structure of the hexagram) is particularly relevant.
I tried to convey some sense of the miraculous accuracy and achievement of the I Ching in responding to our questions in an earlier book, The Paranormal. I do not want to go over that ground again here, but want instead to consider how the I Ching may work. And in any case by far and away the best road to the appreciation of the I Ching is for you to begin using it for yourself. That the oracle does work against all normal logical argument that it could work, you must discover for yourself. In the meantime, however, you have the testimony on that point of individuals as eminent as Jung and Leibniz, along with that of virtually every ‘new wave’ writer and thinker of the present day – Colin Wilson, Alan Watts, Lyall Watson, Robert Temple, Peter Redgrove, and a host of others.
What I am offering here is an explanation of how the I Ching works.
First a tangential point. Computer lovers may be intrigued to realize that the I Ching is a binary system. At every choice point in obtaining or selecting an answer, there are two possibilities – yin and yang. And there are always only these two alternatives.
The ancient Chinese, realizing intuitively that the whole universe, from first principles upwards, is based on the dynamic electro-magnetic tension of negative and positive (with also no possibility whatsoever of the one existing without the other), reasoned that any attempt to question or explain the universe must likewise be founded on this same duality. The method of questioning had itself to be dualistic, in order to receive and accommodate the necessarily dualistic answer. This, then, was one cornerstone in the thinking of the original devisers of the I Ching oracle.
A further intuitive judgment made by the devisers was that any given event at any moment in space/time partakes of all other events present in that same space/time. They further judged that human consciousness was an integral part of the fabric of any moment in space/time. Here, of course, they pursued an exactly opposite path to that of the modern scientist, who attempts to detach his mind from the events he is studying and to stand outside them. He strives to examine them in neutral, detached and objective terms. This attempt certainly exceeds brilliantly up to a point – hence the remarkable achievements of modern science.
But that diametrically opposite approach succeeds equally brilliantly. Far from attempting to detach their minds from the events studied (i.e. the universe), the devisers of the I Ching insisted on their own continuous and contiguous oneness with the events of the universe. They mentally surrendered themselves to that universe, voluntarily giving up all idea of separateness from other events, becoming at that point totally part and parcel of the flux and flow of the universe they were attempting to understand.
At this point and in this state of surrender, they said (just how explicitly is hard to be sure) that the contents of the consciousness will be a reliable guide to the present flow of all events at this moment in the evolution of the universe.
Let me use here my image which will appeal to the scientific reader. Suppose I have a river passing through my land. I want to know if the water is drinkable without treatment. I call in an expert. He takes out a tiny flask, which he dips randomly into the flow of the river, capturing one or two ccs of water. These he takes off to a laboratory. Next day he rings me. Yes, the water is perfectly drinkable.
The points are these. The tester took only the tiniest sample of the water at random. But with it he was able to pronounce reliable judgement on all the water currently flowing through my land. Of course, his judgement is reliable only in respect of the moment of sampling. As we move away from the moment in time the judgement necessarily becomes less and less reliable. For events in the surrounding universe change continuously. Up river someone may begin dumping effluent, or reduced rainfall may cause the river to become sluggish and foul. And so on.
I am using the idea of the river as a metaphor here, not an explanation. And yet it is more than a metaphor. Consciousness, as far as the devisers of the I Ching were concerned, is part of the unceasing flow of the events of the universe. The sampling of consciousness at any point can and does give us a read-out on the total flow.
Exactly how does the I Ching sample consciousness? In several ways. For example, you have decided that you have a question which needs answering. Your desire to question and your wish to find an answer are already part of the ‘moment’ or equation concerned. Certainly you may carry this feeling about with you for some days before actually picking up the I Ching, but this already ripening moment has then reached its climax.
The ritual of the yarrow stalks or the coins allows the turbulence of the river (of your mind) to become momentarily still. Now you can take the reading. ‘Reading’ is a good word here, because it suggests the action also of reading the dial of a voltmeter or other electro-magnetic device. One takes a localized reading of the yin-yang potential of the moment, which yields a reliable estimation of the present yin-yang potential of the greater moment, which is, in fact, the universe.
We are almost using our own consciousness as a dowsing rod or a voltmeter. Allowing consciousness and its contents to swirl and drift at will as part of the flow of all events, we let it pick up the potential (again this word has a useful double meaning) of the total flow.
These various metaphors I have used are, I am sure, as well in part a true account and explanation of how the I Ching functions. But they are only a partial account, for amongst other things we have to consider also the printed text of the book itself.
So what exactly is this text? It is, I think, a further remarkable product of the intuitive method.
Having reflected on the ‘separate’ natures of yin and yang (they can, of course, never be truly separate, for a battery must always have two poles, and there is no such thing as a battery with only one pole) and reached substantially correct conclusions about them, the devisers of the I Ching then set about wondering how these two sets of potentials would affect each other if present in differing strengths and at differing levels of activity.
The later producers of the I Ching took as their unit a group of six lines (the earlier compilers had taken only three) in which any line could be either positive or negative. Ringing the changes on all the combinations possible, these later compilers produced the sixty-four hexagrams of the present book. These, they felt, sufficiently reflected possible situations to be found in human life – although there is no suggestion, really, that they felt they had exhausted the possibilities.
The very first compilers had used only three lines in all possible combinations, producing instead of sixty-four hexagrams only eight trigrams. In those early days the eight trigrams had seemed – and apparently were – sufficient to deal with life’s complexities. But the further evolution of consciousness and society, it seems, called for a more sensitive instrument. Perhaps today we might usefully extend the six lines to nine or twelve?
The printed text of the I Ching represents the collective intuitive judgements of a large number of highly gifted individuals down through the ages (of whom Confucius was one) on the meaning of each hexagram. These, I want to emphasise, are both real and fixed judgements.
There is in additional an aspect of the I Ching text which resembles the working of a Rorschach ink-blot as employed by psychologists and psychiatrists. A Rorschach ink-blot is a random, meaningless shape which, however, we individually nevertheless tend to see as a meaningful shape. We each individually project a meaning into the shape where in objective reality none actually is. And our projections tell the psychologist something about the present state and structure of our personal consciousness.
Because the I Ching is both poetically and gnomically written, the text does also allow us to do a certain amount of projecting. There is, however, nothing at all wrong with this. For once again our very projections here are but another aspect of the truth, the psychological truth, of the moment.
But I cannot emphasise too strongly that the text of the I Ching is not just a series of verbal Rorschach ink-blots. Those who want to argue this are in serious error. But in the final analysis the only way to understand that view to be erroneous is for you to make your own personal experience of the book. You will discover that the reading you obtain is tailor-made for your objective situation at that moment as well as your subjective one, and that the other readings, though they remain wise and to some extent amorphous, are not.
Consciousness
Consciousness is a binary phenomenon – or, at any rate, extended consciousness is a binary phenomenon. ‘Extended consciousness’ can be taken to mean simply ‘consciousness-as-we-find-it’, consciousness as we experience it.
[There are grounds for considering that ‘unextended consciousness’ might exist outside the frame of reference of our space/time universe as we normally know it. In unextended form consciousness might exist both before life and after death and so be, in that sense, immortal. For some further discussion of these aspects of consciousness see chapters 7 and 10 of Personality and Evolution and chapters 4 and 7 of The Paranormal]
The Self and the Ego represent the macro-polarity of consciousness. But as we have seen, each of these is also polarized internally. Physiologically the Self is represented by or generated in the cerebellum, which has two hemispheres. The Ego is represented by or generated in the cerebrum, which likewise has two hemispheres. As discussed in chapter 4, the two hemispheres in each case appear to represent and to be the actual seat of the within-Self, within-Ego sub-polarities. Referring to the total Ego as System A, then the left (but dominant) hemisphere represents sub-pole A1 and the right hemisphere sub-pole A2. Referring to the total Self as System B, then the left cerebellar hemisphere represents sub-pole B1 and the right cerebellar hemisphere sub-pole B2.
It will be recalled that sensory impulses from the two sides of the body cross over, in the case of the cerebrum, to reach the opposite cerebral hemisphere. Sensory impulses from the two sides of the body to the cerebellum do not cross, but reach the same-sided cerebellar hemisphere – so that a crossing of efferent impulses from cerebellum to cerebrum is needed when these two structures interact.
Now, let us replace the notation of A1, A2, B1, B2 with the positive-negative terminology of physics. Let us label the left cerebral hemisphere plus (that is, yang) and the right cerebral hemisphere minus (that is, yin); and again the left cerebellar hemisphere plus and the right cerebellar hemisphere minus. This labeling is shown diagrammatically in Figure 16a:
Figure 16a: The Macro-Polarities of the Personality/Nervous System
This arrangement, as we see at a glance, works exactly as it should: a positive pole must always be paired with a negative pole, and vice versa. Like poles can never be paired.
There are further sub-polarities. As we know from the surgical data reported in chapter 5, both hemispheres of the cerebrum contain or represent (at least potentially) both within-Ego poles. For an individual with one hemisphere entirely removed nevertheless retains (or very soon develops) all body and mind functions previously shared between the two hemispheres.
The same probably holds true for the hemispheres of the cerebellum – though here we have no actual surgical data to back up the proposal. Nevertheless, this is a reasonable assumption and, in fact, the most reasonable assumption we can make.
So now we have the still more complex notation of figure 16b:
Figure 16b: Further Sub-Polarities of the Personality/Nervous System
Again we have the potential arrangement needed. The latent negative polarity of the positive (left) cerebral hemisphere is matched by the latent positive polarity of the negative (right) hemisphere, and so on.
I have conceptualized consciousness in many ways in earlier books. But consciousness is a well of wonders, a phenomenon we can never finish describing. The more metaphors we can generate to describe its nature the better. Each brings us a little nearer understanding the nature of this our most prized, most central, most uniquely human possession. Here are two of my own earlier metaphors:
Consciousness seems more closely associated with recently evolved parts of the nervous system than it is with older parts. We may think in terms of a coral bank. Coral flourishes best just below the surface of the sea. Where the sea bed is gradually sinking, as in parts of the Pacific, the lower coral dies, while the still living coral builds further upwards towards the receding light, on the myriad skeletons of its own ancestors. Hence arise coral reefs and coral banks. We may liken consciousness to the few feet of living coral atop perhaps hundreds of feet of dead coral. This analogy is by no means perfect. For I do not suggest that the lower levels of the brain are dead. They are of course alive, but merely, for the most part, not illuminated by consciousness. Yet the facts of the coral’s life, plus the further fact that is textural structure is not dissimilar in immediate appearance to that of any brain, plus the yet further fact that the sea has in its own right any number of associations with the unconscious – these are the explanation of our great interest in coral.
A further subjective perception of consciousness involves the firefly or will-o’-the-wisp. This tiny point of brilliant light moving in a void of surrounding darkness, dipping and rising, alternately flaring and waning or lost to view, very much reminds us of the behaviour of consciousness in the ‘blackness’ of the inactivated cortex. As does also a man who carries a flickering lantern along endless rows of subterranean files, choosing one here and one there to illuminate momentarily.
But I want to state the conception of consciousness which has given rise to the title of this book. I believe that consciousness is, this time literally, composed of a very large number of inter-combined positive and negative sub-divisions or sub-structures. The larger polarities contain the smaller polarities in something of the manner of a series of Russian dolls, or a nest of tables. This sub-polarity reaches down ultimately even to the molecular and atomic levels, and in a slightly transferred sense down to all levels of evolution also (see Figures 7a and b, page 24).
So let us think of consciousness also as a double spiral or double helix of paired negative and positive, yin and yang, potentials, reaching from the infinite depths and rising always towards the infinite heights of an unguessable future.
We, mankind, are as a species ascending the rungs of this evolutionary spiral or ladder. But we carry too a strong sense of this process and situation within us individually, for so too are the very organs of our awareness constructed.
Re-produced here with the author's kind permission.