Human Health and its Maintenance with the Aid of Medicinal Plants. Julian Barker
they can never be seen as a whole but only piecemeal and by snapshot. Illness follows from their derangement but it is these unseen structures which most need to be assessed in order to help someone regain and maintain good health. These unseen structures form the basis of the ideas behind the concept of Poise.
Let me now list the Interlocking Ideas upon which the Idea of Poise–as–Health is built; I shall follow this outline with greater detail.
Five crucial interlocking ideas
1. Mindedness
A product of the circularity and recursiveness of Life: the culmination of informatic system processes, mostly self–limiting by negative feedback. The circularity is founded upon a signal and response and the intervention within this circuit by an organisation of the signal (S–O–R).
These circuits are at once the reciprocal source and product of:
2. The interconnected matrices
These are nothing less than the underlying architectural fabrics (most of them in solution) upon which the visible fabric is laid.
3. The trajectory
A Fast–Forward and a Positive Feedback path along which all living beings (along with their Mindedness) travel.
4. Capacitance
The index of our ability to hold a charge and, with it, a reserve of energy.
Capacitance denotes a response of the whole system to the constantly fluctuating condition of the Matrices.
This flux is a constant load upon Capacitance and must be attuned to the Cyclicity of the world. The signals within the matrices are amplified and entrained by circadian rhythms. Adaptation is the overall measure of our success in dealing with the flux to the extent that we escape illness. Illness may in some circumstances operate as a brake upon loss of capacitance.
5. The distribution of energy
(maintenance of an effective ratio between Capacitance and Adaptation)
“Mindedness” is really just a term for biological interdependence. It is entirely energy–dependent. The distribution of energy between operator and reserves is the proximal source of the quality of subjective states in humans (whatever its ultimate nature might be).
The “operator” is notional only: a pointer to the culmination of functions embedded within the mindedness of the matrices. It is not contrived to be an entity in any anatomical sense; it mimics the sense of self that we experience as both certain and elusive at the same time. Psychologically it is an imperative; physiologically it may be a fiction.
1/5: Mindedness
I have come to use the paradoxical term mindedness to express the constant directional oscillations of cellular and multicellular life not because I want to introject a sense of volition to the small scale but rather the opposite: to suggest that the willed or at least seemingly deliberate actions of any multicellular creature are based upon a myriad of stacked connected cellular operations that are contingent upon external conditions and are, at least initially, binary. Later on, I suggest that the biphasic circadian oscillation—within which all living things participate—is coextensive with that structure.
Primitive creatures—amoebae, for example—react and move away from toxic environments towards those that are nutrient–rich. This binary condition of contrasting states is multiplied and multilayered in what I call the matrices that make up complex beings and, though irreversibly shuffled by them, the binary foundation remains intact. It is a very long way from amoebae to the discriminations and movements that we make in our lives between Approach–and–Reward and Avoidance–and–Pain but I would suggest, given the unbroken though divergent thread of evolutionary history, that this fundamental template is conserved. Mathematical modelling in chaos theory shows the deep simplicity that underlies and generates complexity.
By mindedness I mean an outcome and do not want to imply any intention. It is rather a direction: Mind in the conscious sense is not meant at all. If one wanted to overcome the suggestion of teleology, a better term for mindedness might be the biased automaton. I am referring to the assemblage of communicative and reflex arcs within and between living cells and their products that respond to the external world and to the internal milieu that they themselves create. These assemblages of micro-minds are themselves the operators of the arcs of which they are part and also the operators of the assemblage of matrices that hold the assemblage of micro-minds in place. Put another way and consistent with modern biology, the single cell can be viewed as a system of nested information circuits the outputs of which are part of the inputs. The circuits are incorporated into nested matrices unified by an enzyme–substrate matrix and so extends to multicellular tissues and whole organisms. What may look like a hierarchy I would rather want to describe as a unitary organism of stacked recursiveness linked obligatorily with other such organisms. Cellular life, then, is conceived as a system of nested information circuits the outputs of which are part of the inputs; these generate and ramify into more extensive networks or matrices all made possible and unified by the primary “circuits” of the enzyme–substrate matrix. Two further notes could be added here to be amplified later:
1. Inputs to cells, tissues and organs are generated and regulated by circadian rhythms; the output is the trajectory we call Life. (If the trajectory is viewed as a time series of multicellular states, the outcomes are products of the operation of a nested series of micro-minds.)
2. These processes are entirely energy–dependent, some more costly than others. The successive conditions of the management of the economy of the trajectory correlates with subjective states.
Life is taken to be a trajectory from conception to death. Living beings are bordered states which extract energy from the environment and so maintain themselves upon the trajectory. They are able to do this only by virtue of an extensive structure of interrelated and interdependent enzyme complexes. So extraordinary and pervasive is this that some scientists have even questioned whether the complexity of this fundamental matrix of life (even more than that of the nucleotides) could have arisen by natural selection.
The presiding matrix is the catalytic network without which metabolism, the very continuation of life, would be impossible.
This primary or presiding matrix is in effect an informatic loop that permits the primitive binary operation of biological movement: towards and away from. This movement (which may seem to simulate “choice” and “decision”) is the template for the micro-mind: communicative arcs, an assemblage of which responds to the external milieu. Form and function within the living entity are therefore co–constructed as a constellation of matrices. Being and operation are both the product of congregated negative feedback loops within and between the matrices. Mindedness or the biased automaton will culminate at higher levels of order and will manifest as neural circuits and reflex arcs. These in turn will contribute to the matrix that I will later call the thalamic mind. Here we do get a little closer to Mind in the usual sense.
To repeat: the trajectory is generated in and by time. This generator is composed of a few positive feedback loops and is modified and regulated by the four closest astronomical cycles. Inputs are generated and regulated by circadian rhythms; the output is a trajectory we call Life. Generation and discharge is the source of the essential pulsatility of life.
The sequence of human development follows (in common with all living creatures from bacteria and amoebae upwards) this essentially binary operation upon the environment from which the matrices are constructed, first the cellular then the embryonic then the foetal (or their equivalents in other life forms). As the matrices grow in number along with their micro–minds, the binary nature (though conserved) allows for complex summative outcomes which of course are very far from binary, although depolarisation of individual neurones remains “all or nothing”. Life as an attempt to obtain and maintain resources is composed of movement within circuits which are binary at their source. A large number of semi–autonomous centres for driving behaviour profoundly modify the response of the micro-minds to the generator.