Dear FISers,
Continuing with the comments on the "how" versus the "what", it is an important
topic in mammalian (&vertebrate) nervous systems. They are subtended by mostly
separate neural tracts (though partially interconnected), it is the dorsal
stream, specialized in the how & where, and the ventral stream stream about the
what. In the case of C elegans, endowed with one of the simplest invertebrate
nervous systems, I do not know whether the previous distinction makes sense
there. The what, the identity of the "object" is in this case heavily
dependendent on the genetic wiring of axons and on specialized molecular
receptors... But whatever the case, both the what and the how/where resolve in
flows of electrical discharges through a series of neural networks. They "are"
but the same flux of evanescent stuff, several hundred of spikes flowing for a
few seconds.
About the deterministic outlook of both models, the cellular and the neuronal,
I think there is an important problem of bulk complexity non tractable at the
time being. Putting in stochastic form those hundreds of coupled differential
equations with the whole cellular kinetics becomes too tough a demand. During
these weeks we have also witnessed the resolution of the ENCODE project, what
looks quite worryings is the highly specialized nature of the numeorus results,
almost unreadable except for people with a strong background in bioinformatics
and systems biology. People outside the field, theoretical biologists for
instance, will have a very difficult time. Are we witnessing the birth of
another esoteric realm like particle physics? Bad news for bio-information
afficionados indeed.
These "milestones", and similar ones during very recent years (in "network
science" specially), whatever their virtues and defects, have dramatically
altered our information science panorama. One of the things we can do, in my
view, is to carefully explore the concepts related to information flows.
Cellularly, Neurally, Socially, the respective information items generally
travel in waves, along channels that self-modify with the ongoing flux, and
continuously alter the respective material/informational structures in
communication. Does it make sense contemplating the neuron as an information
flow entity? I think so. And the people within an organization too.
Somehow, the challenge is to bring a corpus of fundamental ideas in line with
the complex communication experiences of our time (and of all times!)
best greetings
---Pedro
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