Orchestra
Originally shared by David Amerland
Orchestra
We are a paradox. We walk and talk, look, absorb information and process it with a clear sense of agency (https://goo.gl/szWO1), a feeling that “I”, the same entity that looks and hears and thinks and feels, is initiating every thought and every action from within a single, indivisible and therefore solid body.
But that’s not what’s happening at all.
As the philosopher Julian Baggini says the answer to the question of “who is the real us” may be very surprising indeed: https://goo.gl/EFOSNX. Baggini talks about the mind, but the body, similarly is a collection of systems (https://goo.gl/LkggEg) working cooperatively together (https://goo.gl/xX17N1).
Despite medicine being over 3,000 years old it is only these days that we begin to formally look at medical ontologies (https://goo.gl/j8mjFN) and treat the body as a collection of discreet systems working in a holistic way with a multitude of interactions between them (https://goo.gl/RpYjTT). The complexity of these interactions are informing a more granular picture of the human body (https://goo.gl/LYb9nd) that allows us to understand that the tiniest differences in our make up are amplified as they travel through the complexity of our systems and produce significantly different results.
From a purely practical perspective, our widening and advancing knowledge of these complexities may allow us to create modularized, trustworthy, cyber-physical systems (https://goo.gl/WyGHmr) to augment or replace some of our capabilities. The changing perspective has allowed for some ground-breaking research to take place that bridges the connection between the micro and macro worlds through quantum physical phenomena taking place at macro level: https://goo.gl/ArnmER.
The moment we discuss quantum physics, the mind comes in: https://goo.gl/2RABUe and in the inexorable chain of logic statements that arise we begin to encounter consciousness: https://goo.gl/2Z2Yby which then takes down a route where everything is energy (https://goo.gl/sVsXt6) and therefore interwoven which might, paradoxically again, give rise to a new dualism (https://goo.gl/nY226U) or it might just be an additional layer of overall complexity that just needs to be analyzed better: https://goo.gl/ZmSQaR.
Just as new research adds more layers to the body’s interconnectivity map (https://goo.gl/GCfqR2), fresh breakthroughs (https://goo.gl/L8ytAq) are beginning to show how to fix us better when we are broken. And that is just the entire point of medicine and the need to better understand the human body.
The conceptual, rarefied approach we’re now taking when it comes to medicine and the human body allows us to use mathematics to better model everything (https://goo.gl/7HfbwC). The human body has always inspired us: https://goo.gl/zoPDrn and as the growing number of TED Talks indicates (https://goo.gl/lwRqiW) it continues to do so.
We are at the very beginning. We have only just begun to explore the body and what it can really do, how it really works. Yet, we inhabit this complex world of interactions, living like ghosts inhabiting a quantum cloud of probabilities, some physical, others mental – all energy based, while telling ourselves with confidence that we understand what it is we live in and who it is that looks out at the world through our eyes.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The paradox of our existence is underpinned by the twin paradoxes of what actually makes us alive (https://goo.gl/PDqxfv) and what makes us conscious (https://goo.gl/YZop9c). We struggle to truly understand either which means that right now we really understand neither. Yet, we persist. We struggle on, working most times, with the pretense that we do understand, that we do know what the “I” is and where it lives. So, we make decisions and make choices (https://goo.gl/d8hgrV) take action and create empires and build civilizations and all the while we feel that we are in control of ourselves when maybe, perhaps, we are not: https://goo.gl/EkQrXh.
We are each, in truth, complex melodies, the result of orchestras barely glimpsed much less understood, striving to not only see whence we arise from but capture and analyze the very notes we are made of. Succeed or fail, that in itself is a miracle we can be proud of.
This has been a deep and complex dive out of necessity. Hopefully, by now, you know enough to have plenty of coffee and mountains of sugary treats without which this day (and our body) fails to feel special. Have an awesome Sunday, wherever you are.