Working Notes: Current Working Notes These notes are the contents of a whiteboard in Tinderbox that I'm using to map out my (more . . .)

Need and Want: Two general business strategy books have continued to resonate with me over the last several years. I've had trouble understanding (more . . .)

Lakoff and Nunez: Where Mathematics Comes From: How the embodied mind brings mathematics into being: Lakoff , a linguist, and Nunez, a psychologist, take on the question of whether mathematics is discovered or invented. They (more . . .)

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My personal website is at ODBlog . I write about decision theory at my site On Deciding . . . Better . This site is a hyperlinked set of essays using Tinderbox.

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Steven Strogatz has been one of the leading figures in the mathematics of biological systems. While synchronization of independent elements is the thread that brings the book together, it's all in the context of the new systems view of biology. I love reading about his process of framing a question and then testing answers by running computer simulations of the process. When order emerges in the simulation, he and colleagues try to discern the mathematics underlying the order.

As a scientist, I gained some insight into why its so easy to manipulate the state of some biological systems. I spent many years in the lab studying mechanisms of cell death. I could never understand why so many investigators were able to find so many different ways to halt the process once it had been set in motion by an experimental perturbation. Surely all of these processes couldn't be independently responsible for the cell death. If they were independent, then blocking just one wouldn't help cells survive. Other, unaffected processes would carry out the deed.

The many interactions within a cell place some events at nodes that have broader effects. The other day, an accident on a highway here in Baltimore managed to tie up much of the traffic north of the city. There were cascading events as traffic was shunted first here and then there by blockage and congestion in one key pathway after another. Similarly, cell processes or cell state can be shifted from one state to another by strategic triggers.

Tools like network maps and simulations promise to provide a means for understanding complexity that won't yield to simple cause and effect diagrams. Strogatz ends the book with some contemplation of how consciousness arises from the network of neural connections. It may be that syncronization across the cerebral cortex is responsible for the binding of shape and color of visual objects or the binding of object and word.

Of course, its this idea of mind and meaning as the emergent effect of complex systems that has interested me for some time now. As a neurobiologist, calling meaning an emergent quality of brain is a neat way to bridge the material with the immaterial worlds.

Copyright 2003 by James J. Vornov