• The afferent stimulus and the efferent response create the architecture of mind and are reflected in all the controlling matrices in complex animals: the endocrine feedback loop and the reflex arc in the nervous system provide the clearest examples. Such an arc or loop is modified at points along its path, amplified, diminished or interrupted by negotiation with many other organs and operators. One outcome for the adaptive state, at least in a momentary sense, could be visualised as the height of the step between stimulus and response and the balance between rhythmic and chaotic events, symmetrical and asymmetric responses.26 Whether it could be measured and act as an index of health rather evades the point that health must be construed in time and as a product of time.
• As the physical world operates incessantly in Time, which we perceive as unidirectional, we are constrained, in common with other living systems, to be pushed effectively by a Feed–Forward Generational system.27
• The oscillating nature of the primitive Mind28 is superimposed upon the oscillations of the photosphere. The alternation between night and day is a pilot cycle for all the other dependent cycles. Life is thus intrinsically waveform.
• It follows, then, that Life is polycyclic, phasic, patterned, and sequential. Cellular life is pulsatile and lives on a sea of waves: solar, lunisolar, lunar, tidal, lunitidal.
• The Trajectory of an individual life is a series of responses by “Mind” to the feed-forward of time. However complex and conflicted the “choices” might be, from a meta–view, the set of linked sequential choices leads to outcomes which are essentially binary. Perhaps “turns” might be a better word than either “choices” or “decisions”. Anything to avoid inverted commas, dead leaves on top of trees.
• The Trajectory of a human life is directed ultimately by the sun and the moon and all manner of things under them and is diverted by events both outside themselves and stored within. Randomness in the universe is our only way out of determinism.
• This Line of life, which is also a line of “decisions”/“reckonings” made by our composite Minds must primarily store and utilise energy, create structure and operate as far away as possible from chemical equilibrium. The “rebound” from this displacement from equilibrium is another way of construing the pulse that drives the trajectory. This series of “turns” creates waves in turn.
• Our trajectory is stabilised and protected from the fluctuations in the outside world and from our inner responses by ballast, buffers and shields. Our line of minds must be stable in its own oscillations to face the perturbations from within and without.
• For an energy/information event to provide us with a coherent signal to our proprioceptive sense and to our conscious mind (in the usual sense), we must be in an adequately stabilised and buffered state. If we are not, we will feel ill in some way. The way in which we tend to feel ill depends upon factors that to some extent can be systematised.29
It can be seen from the above that these are ideas without data, without quantities. Drs Duraffourd and Lapraz fully appreciated that their analyses and sets of axioms that formed the neuroendocrine theory of terrain30 had no predictive value and was limited as a clinical tool unless some measurements were brought to bear upon the model. They would insist that to make a measurement of any biological material implies the measurement of a set of relations, the point that I have tried to make in the schedule above. After years of application and research, they devised the Biologie des Fonctions, a mathematical tool to guide prescription and assess treatment outcomes. The Biologie, a most ambitious and remarkable product of great conceptual daring, is a series of algorithms derived from certain numerical values from a set of blood test results obtained from an individual patient. In modern medicine, biochemical measurements are mostly used to ascertain the presence or absence of disease or the inference of metabolic states defined by ranges that have been established by statistical analysis. It provides a binary assessment of each index: within or outside a range. This exclusionary procedure provides the clinician with vital clues in the diagnosis and management of the patient's condition but does not claim to establish an index of health.
4/5: Capacitance
Bounded states ➤ charge separation ➤ energy storage/ ⇒ living entity
Modern physiology has demonstrated that the survival of an organism depends upon homeostasis, but health has always been taken to mean more than survival. Living entities are bounded states constructed of matrices which behave like a connected array of circuits that constitute what I have called the micro-minds but might be better thought of as a biased automaton. These structures hold whether the entity be composed of a single cell, a colony of cells or a multicellular being. The living entity is composed therefore of three interrelated levels of structure; if one is true, the others must be truisms:
The communicative and reflex arcs
An assemblage which is structurally responsive so that it must respond to the external milieu and to internal conditions.
The assemblage of micro-minds
As the operators of the arcs that aggregate to a matrix.
The assemblage of matrices
Holding the assemblage of minds in place
These are inherently fractal so that the reflex arc in the gross anatomical sense reflects its earlier and microscopic structure at the cellular level. At a certain degree of size and complexity, the organism (or colony) has for its survival to respond to internal states. Out of the need for the operator31 at all levels to incorporate both internal and external demands without challenging reserves, a growing autonomy of decision–making arises in the later sets of micro-mind at each level of assemblage.
All levels of assemblage are energy-dependent and so the primordial function of the Living Entity is to obtain that energy (to feed), then, immediately after feeding, to extend and stabilise. Extension (building) starts with mitosis and cell division then proceeds to cell growth, tissue growth: these are the first forms of reproduction. Without stabilisation, neither energy extraction nor reproduction could continue. Collectivity and connectivity are each a form of stabilisation.
The co–emergent unity from the arcs constellates or in a sense reproduces a higher order of organisation allowing for the eventual emergence of self–consciousness. Many of the matrices are effectively macro-minds, constellations of micro-minds. “Mind” is always a plurality but collapses to a collective unity when a decision is implemented, from which a behaviour derives. 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 complex beings but the binary foundation remains intact.
At the human level, we make binary discriminations and movements between Approach–and–Reward and Avoidance–and–Pain. Interest, Attention and Drive all likewise have their contrary states. As social beings we make judgements that, for all the complexity and ambiguity that may attend them, usually reduce in the end to binary decisions. It may be that when we learn we make incremental micro–adjustments that are committed not only to memory in the central nervous system but also to the memory states of the matrices, the basis of the putative “tissue memory”. An adjustment at one level inevitably alters even if by a tiny amount subsequent state cycles in all the others.
When the requirements for homeostasis no longer hold, the entity dies. When the reserves built up by capacitance are exceeded, the entity suffers in some way. If we want to use shorthand, we might define health as surviving well. Later sections of this book try to elaborate on the construction of wellness for people who present with symptoms that are poorly defined in the orthodox clinical setting, but in this section I am at pains to imagine the theoretical basis for observations that the clinician might make and the medicinal plants that she or he might prescribe.
The discussion of charge separation and our ability to hold a charge will be found in Appendix