Dear Plamen,
Thanks for the synthetic attempt. You have put together pretty complex
strands of thought that become too demanding for a general response. I
will concentrate in a few points.
What is Medicine? In what extent is it amenable to "integration"? Is
reductionism an anathema in medicine? Can we regularly ascend from
cellular info flows to organs/systems, and to healthy
individuals/environments?
The history of Medicine shows messiness in the highest degree. To note
that it was not included in the Trivium/Quadrivium medieval scheme of
knowledge, and was only accepted within the "mechanical arts" after Hugh
of St. Victor compilation (XIII Century), many decades after the first
Faculties of Medicine were created in Italy. Why medicine is so messy?
Just go the wiki pages on the topic: hundreds of subspecialties are
listed, and under all those terms we imply all the internal and external
("natural") phenomena that can derail and put out of track the
advancement of a life cycle. Each one of those specialties has to
arrange its own world of knowledge, with lots of analytical and
synthetic avenues not amenable to neat overall schemes and to formal
approaches except in some reduced pockets. Successful reductionist
strategies and analytical techniques are piled up with holistic views,
and reams of tacit knowledge (indeed medicine is a very stratified small
world of "lords", "masters", "disciples", "servants", and "beginners").
So, like in engineering, one has to be suspicious of far reaching
implications for the term "integrative". Not necessarily in this case
with the "3φ" connotation. But the strong reliance on criticality could
be subject to scrutiny. Quite many cellular / biomolecular phenomena do
not especially rely on criticality --perhaps the most essential ones,
related to "codes", genomic maintenance, protein synthesis, protein
degradation, signaling, apoptosis, etc. Why the integrative strategy
should rely on a term that notwithstanding strong physical grounds,has
relatively thin explanatory capability in the biological? It is a long
story of looking for responses "where the physical/math light is" and
not where the biol. problems are.
My view, I can be wrong but I have worked considerably on the matter, is
that cellular signaling, the crisscrossing of info flows that provide
the singular intelligence and adaptability of organisms, is not well
articulated yet. Neither in evo-devo, nor in physiology, medicine and
health. In this regard all the present parlance on information
processing that accompanies the tremendous technological info-tech
revolution does not represent a help, maybe the opposite. The deep info
problems are taken as already solved and articulated synthesis are
undertaken as mere agglutinations. Maybe the problem is too deeply
complex, and medicine is as always too messy.
Sorry if seemingly I have joined the "Cassandra" club!
Best--Pedro
El 14/05/2016 a las 9:49, Dr. Plamen L. Simeonov escribió:
Dear Colleagues,
My contribution will finalize the discussion on phenomenology in the
domains of biology, mathematics, cyber/biosemiotics and physics by the
previous speakers (Maxine, Lou, Sœren and Alex) with a “challenging
topic” in _3φ integrative medicine_. *You may wish to skip the small
font text notes following each underscored phrase like the one below.*
_Note 1:_Although this term is often used as synonym for holistic
healing (s. ref. list A), its meaning in this context with the prefix
3φ goes much “deeper” into the disciplines’ integration leaving no
room for speculations by mainstream scientists. The concept is a
linguistic choice of mine for the intended merge of the complexity
sciences _ph_ysics and _ph_ysiology with _ph_enomenology for
application in modern medicine along the line of integral biomathics
(s. ref. list B).
It is rooted in the last presentation of Alex Hankey, since it
naturally provides the link from physics to physiology and medicine,
and thus to an anthropocentric domain implying a leading part of
phenomenological studies. To begin, I compiled a précis of Alex’
thesis about self-organized criticality (s. ref. list C) from his
paper “A New Approach to Biology and Medicine” -- the download link to
it was distributed in a previous email of him -- and extended it with
my reflections including some questions I hope you will resonate on.
I am curious of your opinion about how to apply the scientific method,
and in particular mathematics and information science, to study
illness and recovery as complex phenomena.
*Alex Hankey: self-organized criticality and regulation in living systems*
*There is a continuous growth and change at the end of a phase
transition in an organism, i.e. at its critical point, which is the
end point of phase equilibrium.*
**
*Both endo and exo, genetics and epigenetics are important for life.*
**
*Self-organized criticality*is a characteristic state of
