Todays lecture focuses on Chaos theory. The assigned book is Chaos by James Gleick. Part of whats analyzed is reductive science, which is basically the concept that we can dig deeper and to ever smaller portions of a thing and ultimately gain knowledge about that thing. So we can go from saying people have feelings, to people have limbic systems to people have neurotransmitters and on down the line and at each level we come closer to the fundamental building blocks. These blocks are then believed to be consistent - figure them out scientifically and you can reproduce the results. Part of chaos theory is that there is no end to the potential for reducing (think quarks) and that at a certain point we hit the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and end up with randomness. As he goes through the lecture, prior themes will come to mind, such as the earlier points about the frontal cortex, the most complex part of humans, being the least constrained by genes. But it doesnt work this way for everything. Hubel and Weisel - theory of individual grandmother neurons, dot, line, curves...The thinking being that one neuron stores one thing, from simple to complex. Yet, the cortex seems to work in systems and networks. This is where bifurcation illuminates us. Bifurcating systems are scale free. All the branch points on neurons are bifurcating (dendritic trees). The circulatory system is also bifurcating. As is the pulmonary system. Just like neurons, there arent enough genes to code for the bifurcating system gene by gene. It cannot be a reductive, point for point solution. https://youtube/watch?v=_njf8jwEGRo&index=21&list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 23:58:34 +0000
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