STUDY - Technical - New Dacian's Medicine

How it Works... Our "Body" (4).

Translation Draft

Contrary to my custom so far, I see myself "obliged" to begin with some kind of conclusion. Any effort I make to describe "detailed" (on landmarks such as the brain, vegetative nervous system, heart, lungs, stomach, etc.) the functioning of our body seems to be downright "global", subject to permanent processing of information and adaptation to "data obtained".

Moreover, it is impossible not to notice that living beings are strange "objects", which defy some fundamental principles of modern physics, namely the principle of entropy postulated by the second law of thermodynamics. L. Prigogine, Nobel laureate for the study of the thermodynamics of living organisms, believes in this respect that, in essence, life cannot be fully inferred from the laws of thermodynamics and static mechanics. The closure of life between the two poles, necessity and hazard, which have become paradigms of modern science, would be an attempt to rigidly apply the laws of physics in the field of biology.

To understand the difficulty of inferring biological properties from the laws of physics, Prigogine exemplifies suggestively: "If one were to study the complex molecule of benzene through quantum mechanics based on Schrodinger's equation, then, in order to deduce the properties of benzene, the most perfected computing machine would need a time that would exceed the age of the Universe"... Let us also take into "calculation" the extension of this effort to the level of the living being?!?

Returning to "our body", it is obvious that it is organized on systems. The whole matter is organized on systems. And, the notion of the system was introduced by L. Beratalanffy, who defines the system as a set of elements linked to each other and in interaction. The interaction of the parts of the system results in properties that represent more than their sum. The new quality of the system is therefore achieved by integration and not by summarizing each element of the system. With the study of these emerging properties, different from the sum of parts of a system deals synergistically. It distinguishes: 1. insulated systems, which do not exchange with the outside or perform a small, insignificant one, and 2. systems that maintain a permanent exchange of substances, energy and information with the environment.

Therefore, all living systems are open systems. The cell, the molecule, the body are examples of open systems. Each being is therefore a system consisting of a series of subsystems and contained, in turn, in other larger systems (area, biosphere, universe). In all these systems there are permanent two-way links, both between the subsystems in the structure of an organism and between the organism and the subsystems in which they fall. These intra and intersystemic links were referred to by V. Săhleanu as informational links. The whole life (we will detail later) is based on these informational links, including its integration in the great order, into the great system we call the Universe.

Returning to the entropy that I was "talking about" at the beginning of this post, according to the assertions, life is negentropy. Why is this so important? When talking today about the phenomenon of life, reference is often made to the second principle of thermodynamics, in the idea of making, of pointing out, the difference between a living organism and a physical, inorganic one. The principle posits that any macroscopic system can only evolve towards the degradation of the order that characterizes it.

In other words, if the Universe were at "zero degrees absolute" (-273 degrees Celsius or 0 degrees Kelvin), as we have shown in previous posts, the state of thermal agitation would cease completely and the atoms, the atomic components, everything, would disintegrate and, would no longer exist in the sense known to us, so to disintegrate as a coherent, stable system, tending towards disorder. The size of these disorders has been called entropy. Biological systems are generally open systems that oppose disintegration, disorder. Their entropy will therefore be negative, hence the name of The Negentropy given by Schrodinger. Thus, they differ from all physical systems to which positive entropy is characteristic.

In a kind of conclusion, life represents order in an entropic universe. Every moment of our lives is a victory against the factors that incessantly tend to disintegrate. This order in disarray, i.e. the integrity of biological systems, is maintained by the intake and exchange of substance, energy and information with the environment. Depending on the information contained in the genetic code, represented by DNA and cells, what we import from outside of us takes structural-functional or consumtive destinations, fulfilling the miracle we call life. This exchange reveals that life is an oscillation around a point of equilibrium. That's because, being open systems where energy exchanges with the outside are constantly taking place, living structures cannot be in a stable balance. They constantly "waste" energy and matter, which led Prigogine to call them "dissipative structures".

Despite what one might suggest by creating the term "internal constants", living organisms are never in a static balance, but in a dynamic one. Hence the idea of defining life as a continuous oscillation around a point of equilibrium. Maintaining functionality in a continuous balance adapted to the needs of the moment as well as to that of the body's prospective needs is achieved through mechanisms, self-regulation processes, at the base of which are inverse connections (feedback). Through these possibilities of self-regulation, antientropic, living systems differ from physical ones, where the "meaning of flow" is unambiguous, entropic.

So life is largely information processing. The definition of self-regulation mechanisms (feedback) by many authors, many of whom today considered as the founders of cybernetics, has determined new orientations in modern biology. Their inferences "drew" the conclusion that at the end of the 19th century the body was spending life force, by the end of the 20th century it was spending energy, and nowadays, we add, it processes information. The destiny of this organism depends on many factors, including the repetition of the environmental conditions laid down in the memory of the species, the duration of life possibly inscribed in the genetic code, the ability to orientate according to information from the environment as well as from its own system.

We cannot conceive of life as possible at any level of organization, including monocellular, without the biosystem having the ability to detect the environment, i.e. to emit, receive and process information. Any being without the possibility of perceiving the environment is doomed. if we follow the evolutionary chain of biosystems we find that as it unfolds. increase in organizational complexity, there is an increase in the capacity to process information.

The more complex the organization of the system, the more evolved the structures capable of processing information, one necessarily involving the other. And with the development of the capacity to process information, the capacity of the being to adapt, to achieve its optimal functionality, also increases its autonomy from the environment, also increases. if we reason from this point of view, then the whole evolution of the living appears to us as an evolution, first of all, of its capacity for information, an evolution which therefore in itself, implicitly, the tendency towards freedom of the being from the bondage of the environment. And, man has in his existence the greatest degree of freedom, the right to keep it and among his fellows being inscribed in his evolution as a condition of life.

And so, we have come to the need to address information. In an intuitive sense, information is considered a "news", a novelty that can come from any field of knowledge. Specialists give it a much more precise and at the same time more abstract meaning, representing information as a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events, distributed over time. Information is also considered a message or a suite of messages about variations in the internal or external environment. The message, composed in turn of the signals, becomes an information after its reception and decoding, so after it has become a phenomenon of knowledge.

Moving on to living beings, information becomes bioinformation. The circulation of information at the level of the living has some peculiarities from which the following will be noted. The source or transmitter can be represented by any structure. A living organism receives and emits information, while being both source and receiver, receiving information both inside and outside it. The space around us is studded with information, starting from very diverse sources. From this informational universe, the body will receive only data that bears a meaning for itself for which it obviously has receiving organs.

It should be noted that the significance of the information and the possibility of receiving it is very important. Information may have significance for a being, for example the waves that precede a earthquake, a storm, but they may not have the possibility to decode it. It's the case of the human being, but it doesn't seem to be the same for many other living things. The agitation of birds before the storm, the change of weather, the restlessness and even the tendency to leave the closed space they were in before the earthquake are examples of this.

This information is not used by biological systems at random, but is subjected to processing formulas according to certain algorithms. From the development of these information processing programs results the purpose of the system expressed by functionality and self-preservation. And in order to be circulated at the level of organisms, information needs energy support. In biology, the energies that serve as informational support can be extremely small in relation to the effect generated. For example, exposure to a light lasting one thousandth of a second (in a laboratory experiment) is sufficient for the hatching of Drosophila flies to occur in all specimens at once.

Examples of this kind are very numerous in the functioning of biological systems (let us remember here only the action of enzymes and hormones). There are enough small amounts of more or less for the effects to be totally different (life or death). Brain currents have millivolt values, but their effects on the body are thousands of times greater if we consider only the muscle force developed by an individual.

And earlier, I made the claim about algorithms, about programs. Programs can be inherited (innate programs) or purchased through training (acquired during life). Man and, to some extent, some of the other animals themselves, are trained beings and can form new conduct through education. The development of human civilization was made possible precisely by this attribute. This is why man is the only being who, under the same natural conditions of his appearance, has managed to change his life "with this quality". Hereditary programmes contain the experience of the species stored in them. In explaining their genesis it is accepted that they occur with the species as a result of repeatable environmental conditions.

In order to achieve the purpose of the species (its preservation and perpetuation) the body is armed with programs that mirror the environmental conditions in which it will live. Among the purchased programs, in which elements with "rational" coloration intervene, and those transmitted hereditary, instinctively, the latter best fulfill the purposes of the species and less those of the individual. That's why they're "blind," automatic, forcing the wearer to execute them exactly, regardless of the obstacles they oppose. Valid especially for animals inferior to humans, two attitudes can be adopted towards the significance of information: yes or no, favorable or harmful to the body, depending on past experience, recorded in the memory of the species.

Animals of a certain species will chase those they live on, but they will flee from those who are their enemies. In this respect, many of them also have individual experience. In the place where man has entered less often the birds do not run away from him, but do so as soon as he "learns" his habits. There have also been successful in the training of peaceful cohabitation between animals that the memory of the species has declared "enemies", such as the dog with the cat, the snake with the man, etc. But unlike other animals. man also has a third option, choice. He can choose and yes and no, somewhere in the middle, or more of one and less of the other. Therefore, this behavior is difficult to quantify, to be contained within precise limits, in classical mathematical formulas.

We can conclude on the basis of what has been presented that information is a sine qua non for the existence of any organism, any living system. Without information, there can be no life. This means that all living systems, regardless of the level of organization, have the possibility to receive, transmit, process and issue information in order to develop behaviour appropriate to the environmental conditions in which they live.

In the next post I will address the "problem" of structures capable of processing information focusing on the nervous system, the structure specialized in the functioning of information (whose activity is purely informational - from my point of view, and you will see it at the right time, it is not so but... to give Caesar what is Caesar's, materialists being the predominant readers of my current posts)...

Love, Understanding and Gratitude (a little more order change)!!!

Dorin, Merticaru