"ralph" <ralph@eddlewood.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:AY2fG0BxBGGEFwai@eddlewood.demon.co.uk...

In message <y8PRf.126843$4l5.122843@dukeread05>, Immortalist
<Reanimater_2000@yahoo.com> writes

I believe that probability or "randomness" is a psychic instinct or
Jungian archetype or mental trend that helps us organize our perceptions
and memories and most of all our expectations

And do you think a pollen grain following Brownian movement shares this
psychic instinct?

Because most mathematical discussions of algorithms focus on their
guaranteed or mathematically provable powers, people sometimes make the
elementary mistake of thinking that a process that makes use of chance for
randomness is not an algorithm. But even long division makes good use of
randomness

326574 ÷ 47 = 7?

Does the divisor go into the dividend six or seven times? Who knows? Who
cares? You don't have to know; youu don't have any wit or descernment to
do
long division. The algorithm directs you just to choose a digit--at
random,
if you like--and check out the result. If the chosen number turns out to
be
too small, increase it by one and start over; if too large, decrease it.
the
good thing about long division is that it always works eventually, even if
you are maximally stupid in making your first choice, in which case it
just
takes a little longer. Achieving success on hard tasks in spite of utter
stupidity is what makes computers seem magical--how could something as
mindless as a machine do something as smart as that? Not surprisingly,
then,
the tactic of finessing ignorance by randomly generating a candidate and
then testing it out mechanically is a ubiquitous feature of interesting
algorithms. Not only does it not interfere with their provable powers as
algorithms, it is often the key to their power.

When looking at an E-Coli bacterium swimming around, it is easier to see
how
randomness can buy food.

Organisms are problem sovers seeking better conditiions -- even the lowest
organism performs trial and error mearsurements with a distinct aim. This
image brought to mind Berg's striking film of chemotaxic bacteria. He
showed
how:

A bacterium's flagellar motor makes it run and tumble randomly until the
bacterium senses a gradient of nutrient. The bacterium then reduces the
frequency of tumbling and lengthens the runs towards a greater
concentration
of nutrient.

The random element is the tumbling: the new direction of swimming bears
little relationship to the previous path before the tumble. And so the
cell's path is a random walk unless something else happens. And the
something else is simply suppressing the tumbling: When finding mare and
more food, the bacterium swims longer on its current straight path. This
enables it to home in on the food source, perhaps a decaying morsal whose
organic molecules are diffusing away into the water near the bottom of the
pond (remember what a sugar cube looks like when disolving in the bottom
of
a cup, how the sugar gradually spreads out).

Now most philosophers looking through a magnifying glass at that food
finding path would have ascribed intelligence to that purposeful
performance
of the little bacterium.

At such a marginal magnification, it would seem to home in on the morsal.
But the bacterium has no brain: It's just a single cell with some
inherited
simple abilities such as swimming, tumbling, and sensing increasing yield.

One the Most basic form of multicellular creatures, consisting only of
SOCIALIZING CELLS sensing each other. Advanced organisms such as the one
reading these words comprise many billions of cells that are organized
into
enormously elaborate structures during the process of development from egg
to offspring. Nonlinear mathematics can provide a qualitative sketch of
the
self organization of a community of cells, as we can illustrate with the
help of a strange creature called slime mold.

The slime mold lies halfway between a collection of single cells and an
organism. Like the ant hive Dictyostelium discoideum is a superorganism.
At
times it is multicellular (with around 100,00 cells), while at others, its
cells wander independently. When the bacteria that make up its food are
plentiful, individual cells feed voraciously, behaving like solitary
wanderers and multiplying by direct cell division.

Eventually, however, the colony runs short of food. Now the cells "notice"
each other. For nonlinear reasons not yet fully understood, certain cells
in
the colony become active and act as pacemakers, "ringleaders" that send
out
rhythmic pulses of a chemical called cyclic adenosine monophosphate
(cAMP).
This is a ubiquitous molecule in biology that acts as a molecular message
between neighboring cells. It is a glucose distress signal, announcing
they
have run out of food.

This clarion call to close ranks and organize travels at a few microns a
second. Cells amplify and pass on the message, a form of feedback
mechanism
providing the nonlinearity that induces still more cells to hone in on the
pacemaker centers.

There are two additional ingredients:

Once a cell has released a burst of cAMP it cannot immediately respond to
another signal, going into a "refractory state" before returning to an
excitable condition.

The cells also exude another enzyme -- phosphodiesterase -- that destroys
cAMP, setting up a gradient of the chemical that provides a signpost.

The starving cells slither toward the pacemaker cells, in the direction of
increasing cAMP concentration. Aggregating populations can produce
concentric and spiral waves that bear a compelling resemblance to the
spiral
waves occurring in the BZ reaction. This is no surprise: though the
details,
the positive and negative feedback processes are the same.

Once the cells have formed a slimy mass, they begin to differentiate and a
tip forms that secretes cAMP continuously. The whole mass becomes
organized
into a glistening multicellular "slug," with a head and a tail, that
wriggles in search of light and water.

All in all, it takes several hours for these cells to form this simple
organism. Between one and two millimeters long, it crawls along under the
leadership of the pulsating source at its tip. It then rights itself to
form
a hard stalk above which perches a small head containing spores;
eventually,
the head breaks open and the wind casts its spores far and wide. If they
settle in a suitable place, they can germinate and begin the cycle of this
strange organism's life anew.

Since the early part of the century it has been known that the pattern of
organization of a living system is always a network pattern. However, we
also know that not all networks are living systems. According to Maturana
and Varela, the key characteristic of a living network is that it
continually produces itself.

Thus "the being and doing of [living systems] are inseparable, and this is
their specific mode of organization." Autopoiesis, or "self making," is a
network pattern in which the function of each component is to participate
in
the production or transformation of other components in the network. In
this
way the network continually makes itself. It is produced by its components
and in turn produces those components.

Since all components of an autopoietic network are produced by other
components in the network, the entire system is organizationally closed,
even though it is open with regard to the flow of energy and matter. This
organizational closure implies that a living system is self organizing in
the sense that its order and behavior are not imposed by the environment
but
are established by the system itself. In other words, living systems are
autonomous.

They interact with the environment through a continual exchange of energy
and matter. But this interaction does not determine their organization --
they are self organizing.

An autopoietic network is not a set of relations among static components
(like for example the pattern of organization of a crystal), but a set of
relations among processes of production of components. If these processes
stop, so does the entire organization. In other words, autopoietic
networks
must continually regenerate themselves to maintain their organization.

In the emerging theory of living systems the process of life -- the
continual embodiment of an autopoietic pattern of organization in a
dissipative structure -- is identified with cognition, the process of
knowing. This implies a radically new concept of mind, which is perhaps
the
most revolutionary and most exciting aspect of this theory, as it promises
finally to overcome the Cartesian division between mind and matter.

According to the theory of living systems, mind is not a thing but a
process -- the very process of life. In other words, the organizing
activity
of living systems, at all levels of life, is mental activity.

The interactions of a living organism -- plant, animal, or human -o with
its
environment are cognitive, or mental interactions. Thus life and cognition
become inseparably connected. Mind -- or, more accurately, mental
process --
is immanent in matter at all levels of life.

Bateson listed a set of criteria that systems have to satisfy for mind to
occur. Any system that satisfies those criteria will be able to develop
the
processes we associate with mind -- learning, memory, decision making, and
so on. In Bateson's view these mental processes are a necessary and
inevitable consequence of a certain complexity that begins long before
organisms develop brains and higher nervous systems. He also emphasized
that
mind is manifest not only in individual organisms, but also in social
systems and ecosystems.

Nature's language is a language of relationships. Biological form consists
of relationships, not of parts.

The Santiago theory is the same as Bateson's -- the identification of
cognition, the process of knowing, with the process of life. This
represents
a radical expansion of the traditional concept of mind. According to the
Santiago theory, the brain is not necessary for mind to exist. A
bacterium,
or a plant, has no brain but has a mind. The simplest organisms are
capable
of perception and thus of cognition. They do not see, but they
nevertheless
perceive changes, hot and cold, higher and lower concentrations of some
chemical, and the like.

The new concept of cognition, the process of knowing, is thus much broader
than that of thinking. It involves perception, emotion, and action -- the
entire process of life. In the human realm cognition also includes
language,
conceptual thinking, and all the other attributes of human consciousness.
The general concept, however, is much broader and does not necessarily
involve thinking.

The Santiago theory provides, in my view, the first coherent scientific
framework that really overcomes the Cartesian split. Mind and matter no
longer appear to belong to two separate categories but are seen as
representing merely different aspects, or dimensions, of the same
phenomenon
of life.

Descartes's characterization of mind as "the thinking thing" is finally
abandoned. Mind is not a thing but a process -- the process of cognition,
which is identified with the process of life. The brain is a specific
structure through which this process operates. The relationship between
mind
and brain, therefore, is one between process and structure.

The brain is, of course, not the only structure through which the process
of
cognition operates. The entire dissipative structure of the organism
participate in the process of cognition, whether or not the organism has a
brain and a higher nervous system.

Moreover, recent research indicates strongly that in the human organism
the
nervous system, the immune system, and the endocrine system, which
traditionally have been viewed as three separate systems, in fact form a
single cognitive network.

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.skeptic/browse_frm/thread/4219f97fc6dbae5a/b55b54bd3468436a?hl=en#b55b54bd3468436a

--
ralph

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Mz_cYSO7sqk&search=six%20feet%20under
http://youtube.com/watch?v=h0uxlfR7F1w&search=six%20feet%20under