A question for all!
DON MIKULECKY (MIKULECKY%VCUVAX.BITNET@letterbox.rl.ac.uk)
Mon, 9 Oct 1995 11:26:42 -0400
Don Mikulecky, MCV/VCU, Mikulecky@gems.vcu.edu
Here's a start in the direction of explaining what I am trying to do.
Please chop away at these ideas as I have little interaction about
them outside this forum.
Having been trained in physiology, I was given a very mechanistic view of
living systems. I began work in neurophysiology and progressed down the
reductionist ladder from CNS to axons to membanes to molecules. Oddly enough,
doing my graduate work at Chicago simultaneously exposed me to the Rosen,
Rashevsky, relational biology point of view. I also got interested in why
cancer research seemed to keep turning up "causes" but could not find the
mechanism. Over a period of time, the relational biology message began to
sink in and I started to ask whether or not diseases like cancer had no real
"mechanistic" explanation but were a manifestation of special quality
of living systems "gone astray". Over time I read and reread Rosen, Capra,
Levins and Lewontin and others and became more and more concvinced that
this might be the case.
Recently, Jeff Prideaux created a model of a tumor population under my
guidance and that of a pathologist working on human prostate cancer, Dr. Joy
Ware. We obtained some interesting results, but then became very conscious
of the need to be sure about what we are doing. This was followed by a lot
of study, among other things, the Santa Fe institute's work, and artificial
neural networks.
One big question still looms overhead: how much of this kind of "complex
ity"
can really be caught by computer simulation, if any? Hence our focus on
Rosen's ideas (if he is wrong it is actually to our advantage on this one!)
the nature of the non-computable, etc. I also discovered that an old idea
about cancer, etc. was being written about in immune systems (Perelson, for
example and Varela et al.) In a nutshell, this idea is that networks of
cells communicating with each other are cabable of "learning" "memory" and a
lot of other things we generally associate with higher cognitive systems.
These ideas intertwine with an idea of Rosen's that we measure things
convenient to us inspite of the possibility that the natural system is not
using those observables in any meaningful way at all! Hence, we look for an
approach that will help us discover whether or not the living system is
doing things with non-computable, semantic character which we have
systematically missed by our mechanistic orientation and approach. This
turns out to be much harder than it even seemed at first, and that was bad
enough!
O.K. That's a start. Any ideas out here? Not even Rosen helps us much with
this one! The answer may be staring us in the face, but I don't see it yet!
Best regards,
Don Mikulecky