Page 88 - Vol. VI #2

Pinky Swear (continued from page 18)
what does it means to be here or there, and espe- cal nature of science, I don’t think I would have cially when one makes, as quantum physics does, seen the evidence that is everywhere, that wood life and death nebulous, you are leaving the world bees and every other creature around us has a of science and approaching the world of philosophy. mind and, probably, a unique world-view.
~ The bee brain is made up of about one million
The house boasted an indoor bathroom. The boy would not have known there was any other pos- sibility than indoor plumbing except he had visited relatives in Kentucky who were not so lucky.
neurons. The human brain is made up of about one hundred billion neurons (about one hundred thousand times as many as are in the bee brain) and many more neuroglia (or glial cells) which serve to support and protect the neurons.
The second bedroom was his parents’, or rather, his mother’s and his stepfather’s. The boy did not like his stepfather.
When the boy entered the house, he could bear to the left and access the other half of his home. His parents liked to call this the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen. A better name would have been living room dining room kitchen.
The living room contained a comfortable beige reclining chair and a large white sofa with big pil- lows. There was a single picture in an oval frame on the wall, a picture of a haloed Jesus. A bookcase that reached almost to the ceiling stood between the living room and dining room.
The dining room held one of the more expensive pieces of furniture in the house, a wooden dining room table with eight matching chairs. No one no- ticed as they were eating the clear view of the back of the bookcase.
When we have a group of neurons as in the hu- man brain, the subject of neural networks arises. We need to consider the many different combi- nations of “excited” neurons that are possible, whether these neurons are in bee or man. I would like to have this discussion, in part, because of the current belief that our memories, thoughts, and even our being self-aware, is a product of neural networks. I am going to use the term “neural net- works,” but what I say will also apply if it is later discovered that glial cells play a greater part than we now think. I don’t know if bee brains contain something like glial cells (bug scientists may know), but it doesn’t really matter. In fact, what I say would apply if it is discovered (by whatever scientists that studies really, really small things) that large groups of “similar molecules within a cell” are behaving in a neural network like man- ner.
The most expensive furniture item, a mahogany china cabinet holding one of the boy’s mother’s prize possessions—“the good china,” separated the dining room from the kitchen.
Whenever he thought of the kitchen, the boy could not think of or describe the sink or the stove or the ice box or anything else—he just thought that his mother was the best cook in the whole world. Even vegetables, straight from the garden, were unbe- lievably delicious. ~
If quantum physics hadn’t shown the philosophi- 79
~
The boy was mowing near the chicken coop. The ground was dry and lumpy. An old fence had once run through the area and he was near a rotted fence post. The boy, though still pouting, knew to watch for strands of rusted bob wire. Hitting bob wire with a power mower could be disastrous.
The chicken coop was about one-third the size of the house, better painted, more substantial. Since his parents had bought the farm, a time the boy could barely remember, the chicken coop had not known a chicken. It had a good roof—its sides
Such a discovery might support a theory that INDIVIDUAL CELLS COULD BE SELF-AWARE.