Biological Information Processing Using the Concept of Interpenetrating Domains
In any meaningful discussion of information processing in the nervous system there will inevitably be aspects of theory, of experimental data or experiment and of ultimate application. Almost invariably, however, we will, without conscious plan, adjust th
- PDF / 1,006,001 Bytes
- 7 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 49 Downloads / 210 Views
18 · Biological Information Processing Using the Concept of Interpenetrating Domains
In any meaningful discussion of information processing in the nervous system there will inevitably be aspects of theory, of experimental data or experiment and of ultimate application. Almost invariably, however, we will, without conscious plan, adjust the informational system in which we discuss the problem to be stationary in all aspects except that which we are exercising in our discussion. We may, for example, take a particular set of experimental facts and try to fit them into an existing theoretical framework or we may plan a new set of experiments to test an established or newly formulated theoretical idea. Alternatively we may use a body of experimental knowledge formulated in terms of available theoretical formulations to design a new laboratory technique or to achieve a "useful" social or economic purpose. It is remarkable that an equally valid and very important class of stationarity occupies so small a part in our intellectual designs. We each have a limited repertoire of tried and true ways of thinking, mechanical skills, effective insights and persuasive techniques which taken together constitute our individual packages of expertise. This bag of tricks we exploit time and again and gradually enlarge, improve and weed out as an accidental byproduct of our regular "legitimate" activities, theoretical, experimental, technological, educational or whatever. Almost none of our attention is directed deliberately toward building a 325 K. N. Leibovic (ed.), Information Processing in The Nervous System © Springer Science+Business Media New York 1969
326
PART V: MODELS AND THEORY
new set of figures of thought in which to examine, efficiently and easily, our various technical, theoretical and experimental endeavors. It is my desire here to make an initial effort toward gathering together a set of new figures of thought that seem to bear on the problem of information processing in the nervous system, in that they suggest new theory or experiment, they embody ideas clumsily expressed in conventional physical science formalisms, or they conform to known physiology, neuroanatomy, psychophysics or even to simple biological intuition at the perceptual level. Whenever possible they should embody the idea of meaningful quantitation; that is to say that the formalism should lend itself to computation at the engineering level of accuracy and precision. It should not be oversimplified into mere good-bad, true-false, nor should it be so ponderously exact as to be unwieldy. We can begin with an examination of the ordinary, local space-time world in which we and all of our experiments are immersed. We very inflexibly formalize all of our representations of biological information processing in terms of a single time and geometric space coordinate set. We are, of course, at liberty to differentiate or integrate one of these with respect to another, to combine and to choose stretched or twisted metric scales, but we lose intimate intuitive u
Data Loading...
