Shufflebrain

Yet one-to-one doesn't always hold up, not even in exactingly controlled psychophysical experiments. At the lowest limits of delectability the relationship between stimulus and response appears nonlinear. At intolerable agony, there's no simple one-to-one relationship between the change in stimulus and the change in how the torture feels. When we are at our outer limits of terror, a little extra "boo!" can come across with the import of the growl of a famished werewolf looking into the kitchen window from the black of night. Reducing dissonance won't work at the extremes, either. If our analysis becomes abstract enough, standard logic also fails. But if we view one-to-one as an effect rather than a cause, then its failure at the limits makes sense. One-to-one is the mind's attempt to flatten out the world--even though the world is not flat, even though the universe is not linear, even though mind-brain is a curved, nonlinear continuum.

To conceptualize the one-to-one principle, imagine that you're on an invisible but gently curved surface. You don't know you're on it, but below you is a visible flat map. Where your surface curves close to the map, your world and everything about it seems nice and flat and linear and--one-to-one! And the one-to-one is where you spend most of your time. Thus most of your experiences reinforce what the flat map indicates, namely that one-to-one is the governing principle of your world. But as you move off in the direction of your surface's extremes, and the map's boundaries, as you travel away from the zone where your surface and the map converge, your linear rules begin to fail.

[18]

Then when you try to gauge distances with the T-square or the straight ruler, things begin to seem screwy. At the limits error really counts. And if you move far enough out, everything goes haywire. For you haven't been on one-to-one surface, after all. You just didn't know it.

***

What are we living creatures, then? A bunch of stupidos set loose like honey ants in delicate machinery to gum up the grand design of a logical universe? Is living intelligence some form of transcendental stupidity? Are we an insult to beloved Nature? Maybe. But let's consider the following argument before you make up your mind and I make up mine.

The curvature of our Earth is very gentle over the distances even the largest living creature walks. A charging bull elephant runs across a perceptually flat surface. If he didn't treat the savanna top as linear, he'd fall on his tusks. And how could we treat time if we fused it into a four-dimensional continuum with space? We can't sit down and perform tensor calculus to tell how long to warm the baby's bottle. For us to deal in seconds, minutes, years...time must seem constant. Our time must seem constant in order for us to live in it. If one tick were not identical to the next, it wouldn't be our time anymore. Our time must be immutable. Our space must be Euclidean. Our coordinates must be Cartesian, or else linear transformations thereof. Our information must be in the form of linear bits. Our logic must be standard. Our world must be flat and straight. Our reality must be one-to-one or we would not survive it.

No! I for one cannot pronounce the one-to-one principle unintelligent, in spite of the error. One-to-one is the automatic artist in each of us, the transformationist of our theory, the telescope and microscope to fit the world to us and us to our world. One-to-one is a by-product of a continuous, indeterminate--and living and delicate--intelligence, striving to exist. In the end, the survival of our species may be the only true measure of how smart we are (or were).

***

From my office early one morning, I watched a winter day arrive while thinking about human capability. How could Riemann or Einstein embrace one-to-one, as persons, and at the same time unlimber imagination and intellect from innate constraints? What glory happens in Nature when we consider hologramic mind while savoring the virgin olive oil on a slice of pizza? I could feel an answer but not articulate it.

Reflections from snow covering the trees and rooftops announced the sun a little ahead of schedule. Soon students would be crossing the white fields. Cars would be rolling tentatively along slippery streets. Human intelligence would begin another day. I turned for a look at Triclops's picture on my bulletin board. Then, I sat at my desk and tried to picture Carl at work in my inner sanctum on one of the rare occasions when he allowed me to watch.

***