AJP - Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, Vol 246, Issue 6 860-R867, Copyright © 1984 by American Physiological Society
Biological processing
K. L. Bellman and D. O. Walter
The organization of brain processes leading to language and movement show
important parallels with one another and also express important aspects of
biological organization in general. Four major differences between
biological processes and their commonly proposed analogues, machine
processes, are as follows. 1) Reduction is not simplification in biological
analysis; rather the subsystems that result from separation of parts of a
biological system are themselves complex, often potentially viable,
systems. 2) Machine processes are typically generalized, or, if
specialized, they are specialized by connecting general-type subsystems in
special ways. But biological systems are typically specialized at many
levels, both in subsystems and their connections. 3) The history of a
biological system is often an intimate and inseparable part of its
structure. Furthermore biological systems never develop alone or de novo.
Not only do they develop in clusters of contemporaries, they also develop
in the presence of an older generation and a "culture." 4) Not only do
formal logics have some constraints that biological minds may not have
(e.g., internal consistency and universality), formal logics require
descriptions of qualitative phenomena in a language that is inadequate and
(as a deeper issue) may always require parsing a meaningful whole into
approximate parts (e.g., as in writing this abstract). Instances of
contrasts between biological systems and machine-type systems are seen in
language and movement phenomena, such as embodying a distinction between
purposes and causes and having flexibly reorganizable subassemblies,
multiple goals, and motor equivalence.
