F. Eugene Yates

From InterSciWiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Home page

Wikipedia:Chaotic hysteresis

Contents

Biography

Yates as a lad

Urquhart, John. 2009. Living History: F. Eugene Yates. Advances in Physiological Education. 33: 234-242.

Video and podcast

See: Streaming video (which includes conversion to slidecast)

http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/swf/yatespptfortalk2.swf-100311171810-phpapp02&stripped_title=f-e-yates-conjectures-on-consciousness

Consciousness

In his talk, Yates referred to a possible role of quantum theory in human consciousness. Doug 15:55, 21 June 2010 (PDT) found a useful quote from Niels Bohr: 1954 Unity of Knowledge, reprinted as Chapter 6 in Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge.

pp. 76: "...in our knowledge of the structure and functioning of organisms, and in particular it has become evident that quantum regularities in may respects here play a fundamental role. ... research on mutations produced by exposing organisms to penetrating radiation offers a striking application of the statistical laws of quantum physics. Also, the sensitivity of perceptive organ s, so important for the integrity of organisms, has been found to approach the level of individual quantum processes...."

pp. 77: "an essentially complementary description of the content of our mind has been used since the origin of languages. In fact the rich terminology adapted to such communication does not point to an unbroken course of events, but rather to mutually exclusive experiences characterized by different separations between the content on which attention is focused and the background indicated by the word ourselves."

"...the impossibility of providing an unambiguous content to the idea of subconsciousness corresponds to the impossibility of pictorial representation of the quantum-mechanical formalism."

Interview

Living history My Career in Science F Eugene Yates. Interviewed by John Urquhart

Books Mentioned:
The Logic of Life: Challenge of Integrative Physiology. 1993. (Paperback) by Sir James Black (Foreword), C.A.R. Boyd and D. Noble (Editors)
Advice for a Young Investigator. 2004. By Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Neely Swanson, Larry W. Swanson. Dover.
Advice to a young scientist. 1979. By Peter Brian Medawar. Perseus Publishing. "Pick a problem that is soluable"
The Way of an Investigator. 1966. The American Journal of the Medical Sciences 251(3): p. 373 BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTICES: PDF. Cannon, Walter Bradford M.D.

Some publications

  • Yates, F. Eugene 2008. Homeokinetics/Homeodynamics: A Physical Heuristic for Life and Complexity. Ecological Psychology, Volume 20 Issue 2 Pages 148 – 179.
  • Abstract. This essay addresses the puzzlement, the missing piece, sensed when attempts are made to build a bridge from the synchronic, informational genotype to the diachronic, dynamic phenotype—a regular mapping that seems to be extraphysical. There is no formal, dynamic foundation for the bridge. Albert Einstein, Max Delbruumlck, and Erwin Schroumldinger all expressed acute awareness of limitations of contemporary physics when considering biology because physics addresses much simpler systems. As a proposed remedy, a new physical heuristic, homeokinetics, developed by Arthur Iberall and Harry Soodak (and later recast for biology by me as homeodynamics) is introduced here as a foundation for comprehending energy flows and transformations in complex systems, including those in metabolic networks of living systems. Their individual dynamic stability is flexible and marginal—it must allow for adaptations and changes in physiological and behavioral states to occur in an orderly fashion as external circumstances change. At the population level, stability must allow for evolvability of chemical networks that have energized terrestrial living systems for about 3.9 billion years. Homeokinetics/homeodynamics emphasizes that persistent, marginally stable metabolic networks, as open thermodynamic systems, necessarily organize energy processing as cyclic, physical action modes. Conceptually, that organization is under 2 kinds of biological time pressure—time as a cycle that daily closes the thermodynamic books and time as an arrow orthogonally pressing the cycles into the future, creating joint time as a helix. In most animals, after maturity, the helix is additionally shaped into a tapered ellipsoid by a senescence process that gains influence as dynamic degrees of freedom are frozen out by the constructions of development.


Yates, F. Eugene 1999. On the Dynamics of Development and Aging Handbook of Theories of Aging.

Yates, F. Eugene 1992. Order and complexity in dynamical systems: Homeodynamics as general mechanism for biology. In Mikulecky/Witten, Dynamics and Thermodynamics of Complex Systems, #—#. theoretical biology

Yates, F. Eugene, ed. 1988. Self-organizing Systems: The Emergence of Order. New York: Plenum.

Yates, F. Eugene 1985. Semiotics as bridge between information (biology) and dynamics (physics). 'Recherches Sémiotique/Semiotic Inquiry 5: 347—360. theoretical biology

homeokinetics

Yates on Iberall's Reynold's number


What is consciousness?

"We physiologists notice that some of the greats in our science achieved that stature by finding the organism that in the laboratory or field would permit them (cleverly) to extract answers to important questions. Some examples are: 

Darwin (beetles and finches)
Mendel (pea plant)
Starling (dogs - heart/lung circulation model)
Morgan (fruit fly)
Hodgkin-Huxley (squid)
Brenner (worm)
Hubel and Wiesel (cat)
Kandel (sea slug)
Delbruck, Luria et al. (bacteriophages)
McClintock (maize)......
(Lots of Nobelists on this list.)
The question then is: What is the ideal organism for the study of consciousness?" (email 7/7/09)

Insert non-formatted text here

Reflectional Model

Date: Wed, February 17, 2010 6:48 am

Doug -

I have decided to include my "model" in my talk, and have an improved slide for it. (You'll get the slides by Friday, as promised.) In addition, I have been seeking a metaphor to help explain my model. I have settled on the following:

Your "mind" is related to your brain as your reflection in a mirror is related to you (neglecting the L/R reversal). In this metaphor, you are the material brain; your reflection is your immaterial mind. You can act on the material, physical world, as in moving your chair. Your reflection -mind can show that you have done that, but cannot itself move a chair (or you). There is no physical brain/mind interaction to be accounted for mechanistically, and your reflection does not "emerge" from you. It's just there.

And what serves as the mirror? It is a real, material set of brain neurons reporting to other brain-states on 

the one currently acitve in the special brain-state you have when you are

consciously "aware". (Recall my son's story about his night in a neuroscience lab, decribed in my Essay.)

What some folks (not thinking deeply) refer to as brain/mind interactions, or mind as an "emergent property" of the brain, have got it all wrong and are looking in the wrong place in the wrong way. (I won't be that aggressive in the talk itself - but I do hope to "scrarmble people's brains" and make them reconside their "thoughts on the matter".)

Of course, metaphors are purely poetry: " The road was a ribbon of moonlight.....", but I am impressed with the use of metaphors by some of the greats in physics : Einstein and moving trains, Maxwell and vortices, Eddington and his surface of an inflating balloon....These chaps created their physics VISUALLY. Thus, my mind as a "reflection" in a neuronal "mirror".

The model and the metaphor condensed out of all the reading and thinking I have been doing in the year since I (foolishly) agreed to talk on consciousness. They feel original to me - but I well know that now I have sharpened their presentation so at last I realize what I am trying to say, it will turn out that they are old ideas. They are probably latent in the Alice stories!

Regards, Gene

Retrieved from "http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php?title=F._Eugene_Yates&oldid=37129"
Personal tools