...Science had been founded on the belief that the proper route to
understanding a complex system, such as the movement of the heavens,
the mixing of chemicals, or the emergence of life, was to break it
down into a collection of parts linked by simple mathematical
formulae. You wanted a list of bits and the rules that put them back
together again. And if the essence of a system could be reduced to an
equation that fitted comfortably on the front of a T-shirt - something
like Einstein's famous e = mc^2 - then that was perfect.

But reductionism depends on the assumption that the world is
discontinuous, that it is made of discrete bits. However, real life
does not have sharp boundaries. For instance, even our own bodies are
not...

Immortalist yahoo.com> wrote:

Wrong, most obviously with biological and medical science.

Wrong, most obviously with biological and medical science.

Just a tiny part of real science.

Wrong again.

And real science handles that fine.

===

I actually agree with alot of your points, But there a couple of
places where you and that author were saying the same thing, but you
were choosy about the particular terms. But systems theory is bigger
than his ideas, and he was trying to apply it to nerve cells.

The assumption was that brain cells were also basically digital
devices. The brain might be a pink handful of gloopy mush; brain cells
themselves might be rather unsightly tangles of protoplasm, no two
ever shaped the same; but it was believed that information processing
in the brain must somehow rise above this organic squalor. There might
be no engineer to draw neat circuit diagrams, but something about
neurons had to allow them to act together with logic and precision.

- Elaboration Upon Brain Cell Features & Electro-Chemical Properties

Brain cells certainly had a few suggestive features. To start with,
the very fact that they have a separate input and output end says
there is a direction in which information flows. Signals arrive at...

Immortalist yahoo.com> wrote

Bugger, now I will have to do a reversal.

Have you no sense of common decency and decorum what so ever ?

Nope, not one.

Wrong again.

And doing that is a complete wank, as I said.

They arent, and nothing like it either.

Yours may well be a gloopy mush, but thats because of all that substance abuse you get up to.

Nope.

Nothing unsightly about that.