Doctrine of Limitation

Dear colleagues,

Some of the recent messages were dealing with the behavioral (and
philosophical) consequences of our nervous system limitations. I am
liberally mixing up these ideas with some of my own already presented here.

The 'doctrine of limitation' may be another way to approach basic
information problems that appear everywhere. They pervade the whole edifice
of science, our nervous system dynamics, the behavior of firms, or the way
the cellular signaling system criss-crosses its pathways. Thus, my way to
respond to Jerry's question weeks ago (about the lack of a central theory
of Nervous Systems and its impact on biological communication) is that it
is the opposite side what needs to be argued. The neuronal information
processing capabilities are built exclusively upon cellular building blocks
that continuously instantiate their signaling abilities. The cellular use
of electric fields becomes a prolongation of the transgenerational
processing of genomes, both mapping into terribly different time scales,
material substrates and 'topological' processes the overall fitness of the
organism. Unfortunately we cannot go too far on this idea, but I really
believe that the slowly changing 'code' on DNA and the fast 'code' on
excitable neuronal surfaces are susceptible of being contemplated
fruitfully from a parsimonious info perspective.

The cellular limitations emerge from a plurality of factors (first among
them, protein synthesis-degradation), the neuro-behavioral ones do
recapitulate the former and add a new repertoire of problems and problem
solving strategies (eg, sensory specializations)... not much differently on
why we have divided up the world of learning into specializations --and
continuously have to suffer from the 'interdisciplinary problem' I was
mentioning weeks ago. Everywhere distributed populations, collectively
enacting an 'invisible hand' through optimization processes in an 'economy'
where information-entropy games are endlessly played.

For my taste, it was the philosopher Ortega y Gasset who best captured some
general aspects of the above idea (Mary Midgley --Science and Poetry, 2001,
Routledge, is quite ad hoc too). 'Perspectivism' is not merely a postmodern
catchword but a decent philosophy not properly developed yet.

Thanks for the patience on those abstruse comments!

Pedro
Received on Fri Sep 27 14:46:27 2002