Under all the complexity of the human body, one very simple idea stands out: any change within one matrix will result in adjustments in all the rest. Metabolism expresses the need to change constantly as the organism responds to the inevitability of change. I suggest that we best discuss human health from the point of view of metabolism and, with our clinical and medicinal purpose in mind, need to explore the state of the metabolism of our patients. You want separation from a surgeon and from any processor of materials, whether a cook or a herbalist, but the whole needs to haunt our minds as we dissect out parts of it. Keeping in mind the interconnected and interdependent reality of the matrices helps us avoid emphasis of one aspect over another even though we have little choice temporarily to separate the part from the whole out of a convenience tantamount to necessity. Analysis demands it. We cannot forever talk about the inseparable if we want to explore, but some degree of synthesis is demanded if we are to arrive at an integrated view of health.
The necessity of coherence to poise requires us to conceive health in a unitary (albeit federated) sense if we want to construct one that is founded upon consciousness, upon the subjective sense of well-being. Consciousness strives for a cohesive state and a single identity. The fitting of a conscious state, however fictitious, onto a biological unit must implicate psychosocial phenomena. We are trinitarian as in the original theological sense: as technical and biological beings, we beget an expressive self. As all events are lost to time, memory is our tool to reinvent past events, the better to predict future outcomes and so raise our capacitance. Social memory manifests as culture, a virtual matrix with visible artefacts and hidden relations: pathways to remembered events or imagined ones—they are both much the same thing. There can no more be a gap between all biological phenomena than there can be in the fabric of space-time. Sociality is a derived characteristic and is co–extensive with the matrices. It is easier to formulate borders than control traffic across them.
While no single writer or clinician can hope to have special expertise in all the fields implied, these must remain always in sight for the correct referrals to be made when needed. Ironically, mathematics is the one integrator which excludes most people from the discussion yet possibly the ultimate description requires to be mathematical. The mathematics of non–linear systems demonstrates the self–similarity of living and geophysical systems and shows that separation is both permanent and temporary. This paradox says only that while we cannot retrace our steps along the dimension of time, time does recreate us anew, self–similar to our past.
3/5: Life as trajectory
If mindedness is witness to the inherent bias in biological systems against a sea of random noise and if the sequentiality of day and night reinforces and exhibits as behaviour this binary oscillatory potential (on which summer and winter and other binary sequences may be superimposed), Human Drives complicate (and may obscure) this simple pattern by the emergence of a higher order of duality in the tension between individuation of the psyche and sociality.
From the perspective of a physicist, biology is a foreign territory which has produced very few generalising theories that may be tested in the physical world. From the perspective of a biologist, Human Drives are deemed outside the field of investigation. The social sciences are called soft sciences because their adoption of scientific experimental methods does not generate any hard facts. With the naive enthusiasm of the amateur, I would suggest that, whatever they may be, Human Drives are a function of time. The sequential operation of the physical world, the Time Series, implies a choice of outcomes whether those outcomes are determined or not, predictable or not (and by whom)? Whether Time is a perceptual construct or a real constraint on the physical world, neither psychology nor social sciences consider Time to be their primary province.
Psychological descriptions of Drive, for example those of Freud and his intimate dissidents, Rank, Ferenczi, Adler23 and Jung, are classifications which have exerted enormous influence on the bias of intellectual and cultural life, if the criterion of influence is that they are not commonly faced with a neutral or indifferent response. Perhaps less well known from this era are the alternative explanations offered by Leopold Szondi and Robert Zajonc or Viktor Frankl's logotherapy.24 Besides their pervasive influence, they have spawned special fields of their own and Freud, especially, has inseminated other disciplines, such as literature and existentialist philosophies.
In their practice and theories, however, they have either avoided excursion into biology or have been hostile to any physicalist discussion of the psyche. Of course it is absurd (and potentially dangerous) to think that animal ethology “explains” human development but it is just as fatuous to think that it illuminates nothing, that biological constants are not amenable to analysis and that the boundaries of disciplines should be guardians of the hard practical work that goes on within. These very boundaries are fertile for the imagination. We may think of speculation as tunnelling into the unknown with the hope that parties from different starting points may meet or at least be within earshot of one another. Perhaps Freud was bored by the routine of the practical science in which he was trained as he became entranced by the drama of clinical practice and the enticements of theoretical speculation.
Before I edge further into self irony, let me make the modest suggestion that if health is primarily about integration, talking about health should not start from a position of demarcation. The three regions of the physical body, the psyche and the person in the sociolinguistic world should of course be distinguished clearly but we cannot speak about health without describing the relations between these three rather than the distinctions to be made between them, distinctions which modern neuroanatomy show to be outdated and unhelpful fictions. The communicative arc between the physical, psychic and social reads like a meta–matrix of the human condition and a prelude to human consciousness itself. If health is an index of coherence, we should try to speak about it as coherently as we can.
Human drives as a function of time
I should like to present a short schedule to express the notion that Human Drives (however we may categorise the behaviours they engender) are a function of time. I aim only to emphasise the dependent link between physics, biology and human psychology as a necessary ground to any discussion of health, even if we cannot and may never be able to “explain” the detail. Delineating the links between human life and the rest of what we seem to know of existence seems to me more important for a discussion of health than permitting these links to be broken out of a fear of crossing boundaries.
• The Physical World in which we live is dominated by proximal astronomical rhythmic events of which our earth is both product and contributor.
• The Living World likewise is dominated by such events, notably the sun and moon and the tides they create on earth, the magnetic and convection forces beneath the earth's mantle and the atmospheric events they create including, most important for biological rhythms, the photosphere. Anything that lives, participates.
• Living beings depend upon a source of energy which they transduce for their own purposes. Biological discussion cannot get far without considering the energy economy of an organism or a system or habitat.
• All living systems are structured at all levels upon a circuit of input, processing and output. In this sense it is useful to say that all living things have a Mind25 of their own, or rather a composite set of minds, though mind is a bad choice of word; perhaps Responder is a little better. This Mind or Responder samples the environment as the environment takes random samples of living structures, responding towards replete areas and away from depleted toxic zones. Light and chemical Nutrients, the sources of material and energy are also sources of information. Mind is a tropism; however blind it might be, its process is a succession of a web of “choices” that are initially binary. If the emphasis on binaries seems simplistic, physics seems to recognise bipolarity in charge and in velocity, in positive and negative, acceleration and deceleration. All without reference to biology. Some derived binary phases will be found in Circadian Binaries & Transition Zones in the following