Читать книгу The Form Within - Karl H Pribram - Страница 65

Gabor warned against thinking that the “quantum of information” means that communication is actually going on at the quantum scale. I have also cautioned against assuming that the receptive fields we map in the sensory cortex are quantum-scale fields. But when communication is wireless (or uses optical fibers) the medium of communication is operating at the quantum scale. The same may be true for the brain. I noted earlier that the retina is sensitive to individual quanta of radiation. Therefore, for the past decade or more my colleague, Menas Kafatos and I have explored the variety of scales at which brain processes that mediate the organization of receptive fields could actually be quantum-scale and not just quantum-like.

Thus, Mari Jibu and Kunio Yasui, an anesthesiologist and a physicist from Notre Dame Seishen University in Okayama, Japan, and I have suggested that the membranes of the fine fibers, the media in which the receptive fields are mapped, may have quantum-scale properties. The membranes are made up of phospholipids, oscillating molecules that are arranged in parallel, like rows of gently waving poplar trees. The lipid, fatty water- repellent part makes up the middle, the trunks of the ”trees,” and the phosphorus water-seeking parts make up the inside and outside of the membrane. These characteristics suggest that water molecules become trapped and aligned in the phosphorus part of the membrane. Aligned water molecules can show super-liquidity and are thus super-conductive; that is, they act as if they had quantum-scale properties.

34. Logons, Gabor Elementary Functions: Quanta of Information

35. Top row: illustrations of cat simple 2-D receptive field profiles. Middle row: best-fitting 2-D Gabor wavelet for each neuron. Bottom row: residual error of the fit, which for 97% of the cells studied was indistinguishable from random error in the Chi-squared sense. from: Daugman, J.G. (1990.)

Another interesting consequence of Gabor’s use of the “quantum of information” is the very fact that the form of quantum theory becomes extended to communication. My colleagues in quantum physics at George Mason University in Northern Virginia claim that this means that the laws of quantum physics actually cross all scales from the subatomic to cosmic. My reaction has been: of course, since much of what we know comes to us via our senses and thus through the “lenses” that process spectra such as those named “light” and “heat.” But it also means that if quantum laws operate at every scale, then despite their weirdness, these laws should have an explanation at an everyday scale of inquiry. My suggestion is that weirdness originates in the coordinates within which quantum laws are formulated: the creation of a computational region that has spectrum for one axis and space-time for the other. Conceptually, explanations seesaw from spectra (and more often their origins in waveforms) to space-time and particles. We can sort out the weirdness by coming back to the Fourier transform that clearly distinguishes space-time explanations from holographic-spectral explanations.