<div dir="ltr"><div><br></div>Dear Lou, Pedro and All,<br><br>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">I am going to present a few opportunistic ideas related to
what was said before in this session. Coming back to Pivar’s speculative mechano-topological
model of life excluding genetics I wish to turn your attention to another
author with a similar idea but on a sound mathematical base, Davide Ambrosi
with his resume at </span><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"><a href="https://www.uni-muenster.de/imperia/md/content/cim/events/cim-mathmod-workshop-2015_abstracts.pdf">https://www.uni-muenster.de/imperia/md/content/cim/events/cim-mathmod-workshop-2015_abstracts.pdf</a></span><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">“</span><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Davide Ambrosi:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">A role for mechanics in the
growth, remodelling and morphogenesis of living systems <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In the XX Century the interactions between
mechanics in biology were much <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>biased by
a bioengineering attitude: people were mainly interested in <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>evaluating the state of stress that bones and
tissues undergo in order to <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>properly
design prosthesis and devices. However in the last decades a new vision is
emerging. "Mechano-biology" is changing the point of view, with respect
to "Bio-mechanics", emphasizing the biological feedback. Cells, tissues
and organs do not only deform when loaded: they reorganize, they duplicate,
they actively produce dynamic patterns that apparently have multiple biological
aims. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">In this talk I will
concentrate on two paradigmatic systems where the interplay between mechanics
and biology is, in my opinion, particularly challenging: the homeostatic stress
as a driver for remodeling of soft tissue and the tension as a mechanism to
transmit information about the size of organs during morphogenesis. In both
cases it seems that mechanics plays a role which at least accompanies and
enforces the biochemical signaling.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Some more details about this
approach can be found here:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"><a href="http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/367/1902/3335">http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/367/1902/3335</a>
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"><a href="http://biomechanics.stanford.edu/paper/MFOreport.pdf">http://biomechanics.stanford.edu/paper/MFOreport.pdf</a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">In other words, for the core information theorists in
FIS, the question is: is there really only (epi)genetic evolution communication
in living organisms. Stan Salthe and Lou Kauffman already provided some answers.
I begin to believe that the transition from abiotic to biotic structures, incl.
Maturana-Varela.-Uribe’s autopoiesis may, really have some underlying matrix/”skeleton”/”programme”
which has nothing in common with the nature of DNA, and that DNA and RNA as we
know them today</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519314006778">http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519314006778</a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519316001260">http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519316001260</a>
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US"><a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150107101405.htm">https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150107101405.htm</a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">may have emerged as secondary or even tertiary “memory”
of something underlying deeper below the microbiological surface. It is at
least worth thinking in this direction. I do not mean necessarily the role of
the number concept and Platonic origin of the universe, but something probably
much more “physical” or at least staying at the edge between physical/material
and immaterial such as David Deutsch’s constructor theory (<a href="http://constructortheory.org/">http://constructortheory.org/</a>) and
Brian Josephson’s “structural/circular theory” (<a href="http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1502/1502.02429.pdf">http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1502/1502.02429.pdf</a>;
<a href="http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1506/1506.06774.pdf">http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1506/1506.06774.pdf</a>;
<a href="http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.4860.pdf">http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.4860.pdf</a>)
searching for the theories underpinning the foundations of the physical laws (and
following Wheeler’s definition for a “Law without Law”. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Some of you may say that QT and Gravitation Theory are
responsible for such kind of strange effects, but I would rather leave the brackets
open, because the recent discussion about potentialities and actualities in QM
brings up the idea that there are still different ways of looking at those
concepts (although they are strictly defined in their core domains). This was
actually also the lesson from the last special issue on integral biomathics
(2015) dedicated to phenomenology, with the different opinions of scientists
and philosophers on obviously clear matters in their domains. This is why also
the question of what we define as science needs to be probably revised in
future to include also such issues that are “felt” rather than “reasoned”, even
if we do not have the “proofs” yet, because the proofs also emerge as subjective
(or perhaps “suggested”! – ask the psychologists for that aspect) thoughts in
the minds of the mathematicians. I am really glad that we began such a
phenomenological discussion on this aspect such as Hipolito’s paper (<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610715000899">http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610715000899</a>)
that was widely commented in the reviewer’s circle. In many cases when we have
a “fuzzy” intuition about a certain relationship or analogy we miss the correct
definitions and concepts, and so in a creative act to hold down the flying
thought we move to using examples, metaphors, pictures. Pedro correctly
addressed the explanatory problem of science which presupposes a certain causative
and predicative “workflow” to derive a conclusion from the facts, and this is
the way in which also proofs are (selectively) made. As a young scholar I often
wondered how artificially people like Gauss, Cauchy and Weierstrass <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>design their proofs, but then I got used to
that style. I am thankful to Lou for his response on my question about using
adequate “resonant” methods to model developmental biology, because this is also
an important aspect of the biology (and physics as well) including the
phenomenological/first-person view of an “observer-participant” (to use Vrobel’s
term) which is crucial for understanding the process of self-reflection/recursion/cycle
in science, which is usually led by what?: the intuition, also well recognized by
such giants like Poincare and Einstein. Isn’t not “resonance” in the core of detecting
such vibration between the observer and the observed? Because logic, back
trace, prove come later. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">And finally, when looking at the clear simple mathematical
abstractions of numbers, vectors, directions, sets, algebras, geometries, etc. used
by many without scrutinizing when developing system (biological) models of yet
another kind of mechanics/automation/machinery of the physical reality, I am
asking myself which are the premises for using such tools to describe a model:
the parameters, or the idea behind? It is probably not a commonly known fact (even
for those who are engaged with such exciting disciplines as algebraic geometry
and geometrical algebra, now considered to be very close to what we wish to
express in biology) that William Hamilton, the inventor of the quaternions did
not simply use the already known concept of “vector” in his method. Instead he
used “step” with “direction” to express a duration of time (or “duree” as Husserl
called it from the other side of the phenomenological divide) and action (to
move from A to B): two very biology-related concepts at that time (although
they may be considered as physical or computational today). He actually stated
that if there is geometry as a pure science of space, then algebra must be the
pure science of time [1]. What did we actually gain for biology from merging
space and time in physics?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Reference:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">[1] W. R. Hamilton,
1835. Theory of Conjugate Functions, or Algebraic Couples; with a Preliminary
or Elementary Essay on Algebra as the Science of Pure Time. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Trans. Royal Irish Acad</i>., Vol. XVII,
Part II. 292-422.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Best,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Plamen</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">I have a few provoking notes related to
what was said before in this session. Coming back to Pivar’s speculative mechano-topological
model of life excluding genetics I wish to turn your attention to another
author with a similar idea but on a sound mathematical base, Davide Ambrosi
with his resume at </span><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"><a href="https://www.uni-muenster.de/imperia/md/content/cim/events/cim-mathmod-workshop-2015_abstracts.pdf">https://www.uni-muenster.de/imperia/md/content/cim/events/cim-mathmod-workshop-2015_abstracts.pdf</a></span><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">“</span><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Davide Ambrosi:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">A role for mechanics in the
growth, remodelling and morphogenesis of living systems <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In the XX Century the interactions between
mechanics in biology were much <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>biased by
a bioengineering attitude: people were mainly interested in <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>evaluating the state of stress that bones and
tissues undergo in order to <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>properly
design prosthesis and devices. However in the last decades a new vision is
emerging. "Mechano-biology" is changing the point of view, with respect
to "Bio-mechanics", emphasizing the biological feedback. Cells, tissues
and organs do not only deform when loaded: they reorganize, they duplicate,
they actively produce dynamic patterns that apparently have multiple biological
aims. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">In this talk I will
concentrate on two paradigmatic systems where the interplay between mechanics
and biology is, in my opinion, particularly challenging: the homeostatic stress
as a driver for remodeling of soft tissue and the tension as a mechanism to
transmit information about the size of organs during morphogenesis. In both
cases it seems that mechanics plays a role which at least accompanies and
enforces the biochemical signaling.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Some more details about this
approach can be found here:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"><a href="http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/367/1902/3335">http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/367/1902/3335</a>
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"><a href="http://biomechanics.stanford.edu/paper/MFOreport.pdf">http://biomechanics.stanford.edu/paper/MFOreport.pdf</a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">In other words, for the core information theorists in
FIS, the question is: is there really only (epi)genetic evolution communication
in living organisms. Stan Salthe and Lou Kauffman already provided some answers.
I begin to believe that the transition from abiotic to biotic structures, incl.
Maturana-Varela.-Uribe’s autopoiesis may, really have some underlying matrix/”skeleton”/”programme”
which has nothing in common with the nature of DNA, and that DNA and RNA as we
know them today</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519314006778">http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519314006778</a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519316001260">http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519316001260</a>
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US"><a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150107101405.htm">https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150107101405.htm</a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">may have emerged as secondary or even tertiary “memory”
of something underlying deeper below the microbiological surface. It is at
least worth thinking in this direction. I do not mean necessarily the role of
the number concept and Platonic origin of the universe, but something probably
much more “physical” or at least staying at the edge between physical/material
and immaterial such as David Deutsch’s constructor theory (<a href="http://constructortheory.org/">http://constructortheory.org/</a>) and
Brian Josephson’s “structural/circular theory” (<a href="http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1502/1502.02429.pdf">http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1502/1502.02429.pdf</a>;
<a href="http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1506/1506.06774.pdf">http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1506/1506.06774.pdf</a>;
<a href="http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.4860.pdf">http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.4860.pdf</a>)
searching for the theories underpinning the foundations of the physical laws (and
following Wheeler’s definition for a “Law without Law”. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Some of you may say that QT and Gravitation Theory are
responsible for such kind of strange effects, but I would rather leave the brackets
open, because the recent discussion about potentialities and actualities in QM
brings up the idea that there are still different ways of looking at those
concepts (although they are strictly defined in their core domains). This was
actually also the lesson from the last special issue on integral biomathics
(2015) dedicated to phenomenology, with the different opinions of scientists
and philosophers on obviously clear matters in their domains. This is why also
the question of what we define as science needs to be probably revised in
future to include also such issues that are “felt” rather than “reasoned”, even
if we do not have the “proofs” yet, because the proofs also emerge as subjective
(or perhaps “suggested”! – ask the psychologists for that aspect) thoughts in
the minds of the mathematicians. I am really glad that we began such a
phenomenological discussion on this aspect such as Hipolito’s paper (<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610715000899">http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610715000899</a>)
that was widely commented in the reviewer’s circle. In many cases when we have
a “fuzzy” intuition about a certain relationship or analogy we miss the correct
definitions and concepts, and so in a creative act to hold down the flying
thought we move to using examples, metaphors, pictures. Pedro correctly
addressed the explanatory problem of science which presupposes a certain causative
and predicative “workflow” to derive a conclusion from the facts, and this is
the way in which also proofs are (selectively) made. As a young scholar I often
wondered how artificially people like Gauss, Cauchy and Weierstrass <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>design their proofs, but then I got used to
that style. It was a question of overall convention. I am thankful to Lou for his response on my question about using
adequate “resonant” methods to model developmental biology, because this is also
an important aspect of the biology (and physics as well) including the
phenomenological/first-person view of an “observer-participant” (to use Vrobel’s
term) which is crucial for understanding the process of self-reflection/recursion/cycle
in science, which is usually led by what?: the intuition, also well recognized by
such giants like Poincare and Einstein. Isn’t not “resonance” in the core of detecting
such vibration between the observer and the observed? Because logic, backtracing and proof come later. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> <br></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"><br></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">And finally, when looking at the clear simple mathematical
abstractions of numbers, vectors, directions, sets, algebras, geometries, etc. used
by many without scrutinizing when developing system (biological) models of yet
another kind of mechanics/automation/machinery of the physical reality, I am
asking myself which are the premises for using such tools to describe a model:
the parameters, or the idea behind? It is probably not a commonly known fact (even
for those who are engaged with such exciting disciplines as algebraic geometry
and geometrical algebra, now considered to be very close to what we wish to
express in biology) that William Hamilton, the inventor of the quaternions did
not simply use the already known concept of “vector” in his method. Instead he
used “step” with “direction” to express a duration of time (or “duree” as Husserl
called it from the other side of the phenomenological divide) and action (to
move from A to B): two very biology-related concepts at that time (although
they may be considered as physical or computational today). He actually stated
that if there is geometry as a pure science of space, then algebra must be the
pure science of time [1]. What did we actually gain for biology from merging
space and time in physics? And if we apply a specific mathematical-computational technique what is the key idea/intuition behind it?. Because, as a colleague pathologist told me this morning about the model correctness when predicting the development of tumors: the model can be assumed for being correct based on the interpretation of some (limited) set of data, but Ptolemy's system was also considered to be correct in its rather complex way of predicting the movement of the celestial bodies. </span><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:107%;font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Where is the difference? </span>I am curious about your opinion.<br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"><br></span></b></p><b>
</b><p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Reference:</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">[1] W. R. Hamilton,
1835. Theory of Conjugate Functions, or Algebraic Couples; with a Preliminary
or Elementary Essay on Algebra as the Science of Pure Time. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Trans. Royal Irish Acad</i>., Vol. XVII,
Part II. 292-422.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Best,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Arial Narrow",sans-serif" lang="EN-US">Plamen</span></p>
<div><div><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">______________________<br><div dir="ltr"><div><span style="font-family:georgia,serif"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-family:georgia,serif"><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00796107/119/3" target="_blank">2015 JPBMB Special Issue on Integral Biomathics: Life Sciences, Mathematics and Phenomenological Philosophy</a> </span></div><div><span style="font-family:georgia,serif">(note: free access to all articles until July 19th, 2016)</span></div><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
</div></div>