Nautil.us - Your Brain Is On the Brink of Chaos

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    • Published: 07-23-2015 02:41 am
    • http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/your-brain-is-on-the-brink-of-chaos

      "In one important way, the recipient of a heart transplant ignores its new organ: Its nervous system usually doesn’t rewire to communicate with it. The 40,000 neurons controlling a heart operate so perfectly, and are so self-contained, that a heart can be cut out of one body, placed into another, and continue to function perfectly, even in the absence of external control, for a decade or more. This seems necessary: The parts of our nervous system managing our most essential functions behave like a Swiss watch, precisely timed and impervious to perturbations. Chaotic behavior has been throttled out."

      My comment: A positivistic epistemology doesn't exclude a holistic / organic mechanism. Positivsm is the nature-scentific way of structuring information for understanding, not neccesary the way things work in reality. If you use an Abstract (rationalised) positivism you can explain probalistic / distributed patterns / holistic patterns using atomic / quantitative / analytic / reductionistic expressions without losing it's holistic quality. But possibly the Organic encoding would be much better at getting that job done.

      Mechanic and Organic are just encodings, not what reality neccesary consists of, it's more the way reality is understood.
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