УМСТВЕННАЯ ОБСТАНОВКА (№ 12) — Сперанский: Элементы построения теории медицины

MENTAL FURNITURE #12 - Speransky: A Basis for the Theory of Medicine

From Body and Mature Behaviour. "The most fundamental property of the scientific method is that it always leads up to a point where only experiment, i.e., confronting theory with reality, gives weight to the true argument and then discards the others that may have seemed equally or more plausible. It generally brings to light phenomena that were considered trifling and unimportant.”

"We are not surprised to find that we know in fact very little of the properties of the nervous tissue, and discover with Speransky and his school many unexpected phenomena. For instance, the body reacts physiologically almost as a fundamentally new entity after certain irritations of the nervous tissue. (Body and Mature Behaviour, 4-5)

"[Speransky] has built a theory of medicine on these premises, namely, that the reaction depends on the sum of irritations of the system preceding it; the nervous system reacts as a new entity after each irritation. (Body and Mature Behaviour, 26)

"One thing seems to be established beyond doubt, namely, that the previous history of a particular nervous system, i.e., the kind of irritations it has actually undergone, has the most profound influence on its biological properties. ... Owing to the unique capacity of man to form new responses, the kind of irritations to which every nervous system is submitted, varies from individual to individual. The responses of each nervous system are therefore different even to identical physical, chemical, or any other stimuli. Closer scrutiny throws singular light on human nature and behaviour." (Body and Mature Behaviour, 157)

New theories about the nature of life, the nature of the universe, and the nature of consciousness can be found everywhere. Each new theory proclaims itself to explain nearly everything and thereby to constitute a new world view or paradigm. New paradigms -- Buddy, can you paradigm? -- are de rigueur. The new paradigms rely on the mathematics of non-linear dynamics to describe the surprising, sudden and seemingly a-causal qualitative shifts in a system. Non-linear dynamics are the basis for Chaos theory, Catastrophe theory, complexity theory, fractals, strange attractors, neural Darwinism, autopoiesis, etc. It is seen as the key to understanding the spontaneous emergence of qualitative different processes, properties and forms in living and non-living systems. The various theories deal with how life or some part of it came about and what it is. Some of the hottest new theories concern the notion of self-organizing systems. By appealing to the notion of self-organization the conditions for the emergence of life forms and their temporal existence can now be specified. For example, the Santiago School of NeuroEpistemology and its proponents Varela, Maturana and von Foerster have given us the notion of autopoiesis, self-making, to describe the realization of a living entity on its own terms. Autopoiesis specifies the way an organism is bounded and how that boundedness can maintain itself in relation to a medium (the milieu in which it appears). Their rigorous description of the character of any living entity and its relationship to other entities has shifted the primary emphasis away from the species as the engine driving evolution and onto the individual. In older evolutionary theories individuals were seen as dispensable to the greater good of the species. In autopoietic theory, individuals are not dispensable but central to evolution.