"Sean Williams - Metak Fatigue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Sean)

He shrugged. " lkll right then. Have you ever heard of -something called
'syncritical path analysis'?"
No. "Flow about the Boss Voice theory?" Never, " Ba rney said. "Well, neither
had I until Keith explained them to me." He stniled. "it helps if you imagine
the brain to b
e
a collection of many parts working in concert rather than a coherent whole;
more like the organs in a body .',,or the species of an ecosystem than the
components of a machine. Some parts keep you breathing, others ,monitor your
use of language or memory recall; there might be thousands of individual parts
in your head, each evolved to perform a particular function, and they all
interact: a portion of one will play a role in the function of another, and
vice versa. With me so far?"
Barney nodded. "I think so." She had taken a term of basic psychology back in
high school, and the general principle rang a bell. "The whole thing is
moving, right? Even when we're asleep?" "As I understand it, yes. Everything
in the brain is cyclic and chaotic. You have oscillations that appear
regular, but arise Purely by chance; if the parts - tthjye pattern generators
- were rearranged in even a sligh different way, the end result would be quite
different. So the closest you get to stillness is when you meditate and reveal
the standing wave, the holding pattern, beneath the mess. But the sum of this
'mess', not the holdin pattern, is what we call consciousness; if you add all
theg processes together, in other words, what you get is 'P, the Boss Voice in
our heads."
Roads glanced at Barney to confirm she was still keeping up. She nodded,
although less certainly than before.
He went on: "Researchers back in Morrow's day apparently knew how the brain
uses chaos to encode and transmit information along neurons; that's how they
built the implants used in berserkers. Decoding the parts of the brain and the
way they interact involved similar principles. It was the sum of the
interactions between the parts - the syncritical path, as they called it -
that Morrow's pet scientists set out to measure." "Like brainwaves?" "No,
although there is a relation. Electrical and magnetic activity of the
individual parts could be measured, and their relation to the whole could be
approximated. Apparently. " "So - - - " Barney prompted. "They copied the
parts?" "They copied the chaotic way Keith's parts behaved the functions
governing their behaviour, at least - onto an enormous neural net, an
electrical analog of a human brain. This was much easier than building a
virtual model of his entire brain, neuron for neuron. Even though they often
didn't know what the individual parts did, they in effect made a copy of his
consciousness in the process. As long as the parts were there, with their
strange artractors and their links to each other, the whole thing worked. And
is still working today."
32
what about his memory?" Barney broke in. not a process, is it?" me memories
were, mainly the ones that related sory perception. Those that didn't were
supted by notes he made before he died. Otherwise, actly the same as he ever
was - except that he's
11.1"'. ally immortal, and far better off than he ever P, @
so he says." incy shook her head. "I think I'm going to have to @- your word