5/5: The distribution of energy (maintenance of a ratio between capacitance and adaptation)
Mindedness starts as no mind at all: nothing more than the inherent bias in biological systems against an ocean of random noise. Mind in the sense of direction. The bias is fundamentally one that first is directed towards a source of energy, then enclosing and storing it. The enclosing structure facilitates the very harnessing of energy: both the structure and the function are catalytic to processes that time and randomness would otherwise unravel. No single agent can be considered protean: the matrix is an assemblage of relations between the macromolecular structures and their substrates. Energy is the key to health and fulfils a determinant role: not just the supply of energy but its liberation and distribution. Assuming adequate substrate these processes require the catalytic matrices but also the non–enzymatic co–factors to be in place with reserve. Without this reserve: without, that is, buffers and ballast (and these can be quantified), no matrix could be robust and resilient. The greater the reserve the greater the manoeuvrability for the organism because the “choices” it has to make between predictable, compressible information and random fluctuations is incalculable and so needs a platform, as it were, from which to operate. What might look like choice is of course no more than a bias, one that may become a disposition, depending upon circumstances. Without a buffer, which is the fundamental requirement of capacitance, no adaptation that is capable of permanence would be possible.
Detailed biochemical pathways of animals and plants in all their intricate beauty can be found in the textbooks. Underneath these descriptions of energy transformation the relations between quantities of substances fall within the province of mathematics, especially that of non–linear systems. The beauty of mathematics is that equations allow a situation to be written succinctly and so reduce the tendency for repetition in the futile striving to expunge the ambiguity and circularity from words and sentences. This note of regret may be misplaced as I am not a mathematician and my subject is to try to formulate how the medicinal plants that I have prescribed might operate and to draw attention to their best use.
When energy reserves are depleted in the human body, the most readily available retardant to the traject is spasm. It is a global reflex action that will conserve materials: spasm will reduce demand for calcium, magnesium and other co–factors in the smooth–muscle lining of all blood vessels, especially in the musculature. As it will do the same in the highly vascular organs, spasm necessarily causes congestion. In so doing the resultant congestion causes a very wide range of symptoms very quickly, prominent among them being pain. The location of pain and discomfort, whether cranial or thoracic, abdominal or pelvic is a poor guide to the real source because the retardant action of the spasm is global. A primary response will be the wall of the digestive tube itself, along with its contents, its receptors and adnexial organs. The response of the clinical phytotherapist should be as global as the circumstance demands: merely to reduce spasm would be to frustrate the recovery of capacitance. The great gift of medicinal plants lies in their ability to accomplish gentle32 change across a range of systems.
The central cholinergic, aminergic, and serotinergic circuits attempt to compensate for the congestion and to modify it. Notable among these compensations stands histamine, with its provocation from peripheral reservoirs (in the stomach, skin and small intestine, for example, and from the exposed epithelia of the ears, nose and throat). The phenomena thus generated—hay fever, sore throat and malaise, gastritis, diarrhoea, hives amongst others—serve to distress the person into slowing up, changing plans or using other strategies to increase working reserves in a dwindling capacitance. Again, one must look beyond the prescription of anti–histaminic plants to resolve the crisis: histamine is not the problem in the sense that a fire–alarm should not be mistaken for a fire. By slowing the person histamine provides part of a painful solution.
While attention to the clinical situation belongs to a later part of the book, it might be helpful to pause here briefly to anticipate the place to which this biological discussion hopes to lead. The following preliminary list concerns our primary focus of attention if we are to practise constitutional medicine, with the developmental and family history of the patient always in mind:
• Current anabolic or catabolic preponderance and, and if it has switched in the past, noting the phase of life at which that occurred
• Preponderant tendencies of the Autonomic Nervous response as a disposition
• Dominances within cholinergic, aminergic, histaminergic and serotinergic expression
• Digestive function and transit characteristics with an attempt to separate out parotid, pancreatic, gastric and hepatic performance and the state of the small intestine
• Lung and colon function
• Sleep patterns and history.
I suppose it goes without saying that a full discussion of the patient's diet and patterns of eating, and approach to sunlight, fresh air, exercise and rest must form an integral part of the clinical assessment. Nor do the reciprocal effects between all these factors and the emotional life call for emphasis. How these factors emerge or are adduced, are witnessed by the patient, and then integrated into a treatment plan create and sustain the art of medicine.
Recapitulation of Section 3–The biological basis of the adaptive response
The mindedness hypothesis (1/5): Recapitulation
1. The essential bias of a cell tends to reduce the randomness of the “choices” it makes (with choice asymmetric33 and binary at first). The bias is maintained by the separation of the elements of a cell into paired opposite poles. This separation is at the basis of charge, and asymmetry the basis of the consequent binary structure of a stimulating pole coupled with a receptive centre.
2. The primitive informatic circle of stimulus–response becomes interrupted by organisation to become the “three–body” structure of stimulus–organisation–response. Given the complexity of the environment in which the cell is bathed and therefore the multiplicity of inputs, multiplicities of S–O–R's are generated, creating a series of interdependent networks. The increase in processing space implied from this escalation gives rise to the emergence of a higher order of organisation, as if a third pole arises from bipolarity that binds the mindedness34 of the system.
3. The informatic circle is cyclical and phasic because the s–o–r circle is entrained by geophysical and astronomical cycles.
4. The increase in complexity of these interdependent networks creates so much charge and surplus of energy that a new supra–network or matrix inevitably emerges. The claim of inevitability must be less controversial if linked to physical and mathematical explanations.
5. Each matrix is interpenetrated by those before and after it in time and complexity.
6. Matrices can only form by the incorporation at each level and in each structure of an operating surplus. Charge separation can only happen in the presence of such a surplus: without a surplus there can be no integration, and integration forms the basis of informatic biological structure of which function is the manifestation. Information without integration loses charge and power and so dissipates. Once the organism passes the threshold of reversibility, death follows.
7. If Mindedness is embodied within an integrated series of matrices and if the integration of these collective biases absolutely require an informatic and energetic surplus, then Mindedness leads to Mind at all its different levels of complexity and integration. If the obligatory presence of such a surplus leads to the formation of Minds within each structure and at each level of integration, mental structures will proceed from physical ones.
8. Although it seems like a qualitative leap, it leads the way for the conscious mind to derive from anterior physical minds. While the bias in the single cell may choose between two or a very few alternatives at one time, the conscious mind is able to maintain a virtually infinite set of alternatives in place from second to second. This is its characteristic ability. The informatic state is so vast and yet requires an even vaster operating surplus that the ineffability of the conscious experience must