If you would like to have a friendly internal intellectual wrestling match with your own mathematical heritage and linguistic roots, try some vintery evening when you have spare time, to take the square root of 17.3 by hand in Roman numeral nomenclature. You can probably remember, with a little memory coaxing or by reconstruction of the basic theory, how to do this in decimal form without a hand calculator. You may even be able, from some machine language programming experience, to do it in binary or octal, but just try it in Roman numeral nomenclature. It can drive you up the wall!
My thesis today, that could easily be expanded into a whole year's seminar theme, is that we are doing much this same kind of linguistic contortion in our advanced thinking and implementation of biophysical, biomedical and basic biological research, development and engineering, completely without realizing our handicap and are making practically no effort beyond inevitable evolutionary growth to build a conforming family of figures of thought, imagery, algorithmic mathematics and computer architectonics and programming that comes more directly out of life experience itself.
Like any form of mental therapy, the most difficult and time consuming effort is that of convincing the patient that he or she is not right, and the rest of the world wrong and that therapy is needed and available. Here we deal with a whole scientific culture that has to be persuaded to look at its roots and available alternatives and to risk loss of face by examining unorthodox alternatives.
It would be foolhardy for me to expect a strong favorable response to my presentation of these somewhat unconventional concepts on the spot, but by persistent rerepresentation of the core ideas, always in slightly revised terminology to keep them interesting, we can hope for the classical sequence of responses from an intelligent listeners 1) What silly stuff; 2) where have I heard that before?, 3) the idea that is going around is - -, 4) now I would like to tell you this new concept I have invented. If we can get this response we have won.
Now in trying to put together some notes for this presentation, I scribbled out some 27 topic cards, each fit for the usual page or two of elaboration, and you know that in a forty five minute - 1 hour presentation it is stupid to try to deal with more than seven or eight topics at most, so I shall focus on a few key points in different disguises and leave the rest for questions and discussion, possibly for future detailed examination.
First let me pursue the “gradualness” principle for a few minutes. Just about a half century ago as a rambunctious eager youngster in the Biophysical Science field, I thought I saw an opportunity to generate an “obviously” needed new science unifying, not exchanging at arm's
Length- between biology, Physics, Mathematics and computer science. I thought
that with a few show-and-tell productive examples in theory, biomedical applicability
and engineering application that success was inevitable.
What came of it? An interesting analog computer simulation of nerve that worked beautifully but had to be faked with diodes to prevent it from showing reversed transmeimbrane potential during the action potential which experts in the field at that time (1936) know couldn't happen; a trigger circuit that eventually caught on, active membrane channels with negative equivalent resistance and a thesis committee of 17 members from Physics, Biology and Mathematics, basic and applied, plus a professor of Greek and one of music to make a public oral Ph.D. exam a Roman Holiday.
At that time I had not yet seen the elegant simulated illuminated medieval memoir attributed to Pavlov in which he realized that a new scientific idea, especially in Biology, had to he insinuated slowly and gradually over a period of years. This gradualness token was passed out to attendees at the Moscow International Physiological Congress about a half century ago.
The idea that scientific concepts must be merchandized, marketed and sold, not just published, certainly never hit me hard until a very personally educational session with the Chief Corporate Economist at Proctor and Gamble while sitting at poolside at Stanford during an NSF Automation Research Council meeting about a dozen years ago. In a two hour tutorial he showed me the error of my ways in my presentation of the personally portable whole life medical history concept that I had made that morning. Saying or publishing it does not make it so!
That dream of a decade ago is now fully available with the laser pit technology fully available at a. density on a rugged portable card that will hold 700 pages of alpha numeric data in a single stripe including graphic and image data if desired and expandable by at least a factor of 5.
Clearly one must give a name, a symbol, an acronym, an unique “image” if a new concept is to be marketed successfully. One must even create Heroes and High Priests.
The first name I tried for my Biomimetic imagery was Biological Engineering. This was a play on the fact that my brother Francis, in accepting chairmanship of the Biology Department at MIT, insisted that a Division of Biological Engineering be removed elsewhere as inappropriate to good Biology, along with a section on Food Technology.
I wrote an article adopting this title for Honeywell's “Flightlines” journal
describing this new effort. It got scant response beyond a few letters and telephone
calls. That was in 19__.
In l960 we had another try at it. Major Steele at Wright Patterson Air Force Base cooked up the name “Bionic” science because it linked “Bio” to “ic” which hinted at electronics, which was then the current high technology buzzword name before “computer” became endemic. I helped him plan and conduct the meeting, he found money, and a book of papers was published. The result -- Bionic women and dogs but no new science.
Norbert Wiener introduced the term “Cybernetics” to convey the idea of control theory as practiced by the human as an inspiration for life imitating science with marked success in a special area, but it strongly incorporated the special biological and psychiatric brain models of his life science advisors, especially McCulloch and Rosenblueth.
Since then there is an attempt to incorporate biological modeling into Robotics, but it is remarkably anthropomorphic, because most engineers know only one organism, homo, in everyday detail. Even a kangaroo-based tripod robot comes as a surprise.
We are now seeing Artificial Intelligence and attempts at solid state simulation of simple brain models in bulk as promising.
The one I have currently been trying is “Biomimetics” which is clear in its etymology and not hard to say, but hard to convert into an acronym. It has yet to sell widely but it goes. A project on biomimetic sensors is currently starting at Honeywell as a corporate initiative.
But let us get down to brass tacks. I recall vividly a sudden insight into
the topology of information processing, technically and mentally, while listening
rather idly to a presentation in a brain modeling session at UCLA Brain Research
Center organized by Jack French and Molly Frazier in the early 1950's. I realized
that for a message to be transmissible, information process able, or even storable,
there must be a code branch to couple input to output and to make symbols meaningful.
This has been grossly neglected as what “everybody knows” that needs no analysis.
My most urgent plea is for us to investigate and enrich this code branch of
imagery and thought-tools to put into it the honest biology we hope to develop
and not cling to “laundered” images begged, borrowed or stolen from conventional
physics and math.
If you will trace back this imagery branch, it will probably become evident that it ultimately uses a genomic start-up symbiology and operational character-set that we may never be able to escape. We may be forever bound by the limits of our inherent brain-mind “set” to look at only a part of the universe.
Let me present this diagrammatically in an updated version.
You will see that the upper row of boxes is the standard conceptual transduction-communicative data processing-information storage and translation model of so-called “knowledge science”. The lower branch is hardly ever even acknowledged. It may, of course, originate at either end or somewhere else - even in a shared genome as in man's ability to communicate effectively with dogs and other animals, symbolically or even more subtly.
Let me practice what I preach and pick from my list of 27 a choice set of images that we may reframe to lead us toward a Biomimetic Science with efficient mathematical, theoretical, biomedical and even biomimetic social algorithmic capability. Each of these, as I have said, could be a seminar session.
1) The biomathematics — computer image — Creative biomimetic mathematics could be child's play.
2) The Perceptive consciousness taboo image. Let's admit that we experience conscious perception at least occasionally.
3) The Spirit—taboo image, higher and shared consciousness, paranormal —is obnoxious and to be avoided.
4) The Biological — Time Space Image as contrasted to physical time—space imagery and theory.
5) The interpenetrating domain model of biochemical, macromolecular, neural cooperative interaction in a multidimensional imitative -Impeditive, even holographic logic imagery. This key tool is needed if brain, mind, or even syncitial tissue anywhere is to progress.
6) The Technological Recapitulation of Phylogeny Imagery. This is a new tool of predictive modeling in engineering, science and government.
7) The Santosha imagery of quantitative evolution and design of co optimal health and productivity, quality of life guidelines especially hanging on strand epidemiology of individual life trajectories and whole life medical portable histories and computer aided health care in the home.
8) Deliberate matrix inversion Biomimetic Engineering imagery Medical care
and modeling, teaching to permit utilization of youthful windows of opportunity
in internal linguistic im