Brains on the edge..

Folks,

Unfortunately I have been too busy to keep up with the discussion over the
past few weeks. I just returned from a week long conference on
consciousness and the brain, "Tucson III", which has inspired to at least
get a word or two in before we move on.

My paper (along with Stanley Krippner, and David Kahn of Allan Hobson's
REM study group at Harvard) was on the spontaneous organization of brain
activity during dreaming. In preparing it I was considering the hi level
of organization that is sometimes seen in cellular automata, such as in
the Game of Life (which can logically be carried on into neural networks),
along beside the energy driven self-organization processes of the type
Prigogine originally talked about. The interesting point that came to me
in all of this was that the brain is not only a system "on the edge of
chaos" in the Kauffman sense (between chaos and Newtonian order), but it
is also a system at the boundary between information-driven dynamics
(complex "computational" processes such as seen in cellular automata and
neural networks), and energetically-driven dynamics (in which
thermodynamics leads to complexification in the service of minimizing
energy flows). We do not ordinarily measure the wattage of a computer to
gage its level of organization, nor do we compute the number of binary
bits in a complex chemical reaction (thought of course there are efforts
to convert between energy and information).

I have no conclusion to offer at this time, but am struck with the
uniqueness of the situation.

--Allan Combs

PS--Thanks for the remarks, Morris, which I am afraid I did not address in
this note.
Received on Thu May 7 19:21:31 1998