A systems view of biological health

Section 1: Introduction

1 : Orienting towards Health

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It is possible to take a watch or a car to pieces, put it back together again, and (provided there are no nuts and bolts remaining unused on the table) – they will work as they should.

We all know that a living organism cannot be similarly dismembered and glued back together. Not only that, the definition of a "part" does not exist in the same clean-cut way that it does for a man-made object. Human-made artefacts are constructed of objects that tend to have one function, are not self-repairing, are things rather than processes. Living systems have honed their efficiency over a period of four billion years, so many "parts" have multiple functions, and sometimes almost infinitely complex and constantly shifting relationships with each other. To take just one example of a living "part", the myelin sheath of nerves physically protects the nerve, somehow (we don’t really know how, yet) increases the speed of transmission along the nerve up to 100x, but also produces coherent biophotons that coordinate activity across large volumes of neural tissue. Maybe it does other things besides that we so far have no knowledge of.

Most scientific ways of understanding the body and mind are largely based on an investigation of pathology, and/or via a reductionist approach (anatomy based on dissection, biochemistry, genetics). This way of seeing leads to not being able to experience anything other than a re-constructed whole. Which – for a living organism that grew out of itself, entwined within an ecosystem that also grew out of itself - is inevitably missing something of the initial integrated wholeness that existed before the deconstruction took place.

Francisco Varela [1] described this as the "cut here" approach to investigating complexity - likening the irreducibility of living systems to an impossibly tangled and knotted ball of string that somebody cuts in several places to find and more closely inspect a straight length. The result is that the string-ness (the "pieces" that the method of cutting appears toreveal as being separate building blocks) may be inspected more easily by that reduction. But the entangledness and all its meanings, processes and interactions have been lost in ways that can never be fully established – even if one were to cut and dissect [2] many equivalent balls of string in lots of different ways. Science written in the English language has helped us understand the world very well in terms of nouns (physical things). But it does not so well describe the softer, more nuanced, and infinitely variable conversations of verbs / processes and the multiply layered subtle and constantly shifting relationships [3] that exist in living organisms and ecosystems. Varela’s analogy is almost prescient considering more recent discoveries about the way DNA packages itself into a multiply twisted knot and somehow unravels and exposes small sections as and when they are needed[4].

The subsequent observations and conclusions arising out of of this deconstructed view can never lead to a full understanding of wholeness - because wholeness was not the starting point. The same is not true of human-made things, which are constructed from un-relational parts. We culturally tend to make this mistake of deconstruction as a way of understanding because - being immersed in a human-built environment from birth we have subliminally learned the "rules" of that constructed world rather than the rules of the Living world.

Understanding Health requires that instead of zooming into detail, we step back and find some general universal organisational principles. The following discussion therefore takes a Vitalist point of view, in which Innately Intelligent Organic Health as the fundamental starting point from which to understand how our body-mind functions in all circumstances. As an intelligent living organism the body is actively interested in its own Health. The Living body-mind knows far better than I do what is best for it and how it might get there – and it just sometimes needs a small amount of help to do so. This non-forceful approach works remarkably well in many situations. Successful application requires that the rules by which the body-mind runs itself (and NOT the rules of a human-constructed technological world) are respected, actively engaged with, and supported.

As such, the body is not something to hack, but rather a vast intelligence that is master of its own domain. We can offer it a small amount of help and run the "top" end (thoughts, attention, etc) according to the body’s rules, and it then gravitates towards health in ways that are not familiar to (and far exceed the expectations of) techno-scientific medical ways of thinking. Taking a biological (in the largest sense of the word) view of Health requires a re-frame of familiar medicalised and anthropocentric viewpoints, to bring them back into the far broader set of questions as to how "Life" at all scales, in all its wondrous forms, takes care of itself. A Health-oriented view leads to a different understanding of what is happening when health appears to diminish. Leading to a sometimes very different interpretation of "symptoms", and different strategies and tactics for optimising health and restoring it – even diametrically opposite the ones commonly employed by a pathology-informed medical knowledge-base.

The body has a large fuzzy zone of physical, physiological, symbiotic and immunological Health that is optimised as a whole, contingently on circumstance. Mental-emotional health is equally diverse and intimately tied into the body’s physical health (and vice versa!). Spiritual Health is also intimately tied into both the body and mind. Health of the body, the psychological, the spirit/soul, and the community and environment they live in and interact with are all intimately bound together. Of all those factors I will focus more on the interface between conscious mind and biology because this is badly misrepresented in Western culture, and is probably – of all the interactions - the simplest and most direct to "leverage".

Regardless of the impossibility of defining a single healthy state, we instinctively know health when we encounter it. Some traits can be measured and quantified – flexibility, heart rate recovery, strength, emotional intelligence, blood parameters, and so on. But all of these are single numbers that provide a tiny glimpse of a far greater whole. They are used as indicators exactly because homeostatic optimisation makes it so that if one parameter is pretty good, the rest will also tend on average to be similarly good. However, these numbers give little indication as to how the entire human organism – the total package of body and mind (and spirit) – organises itself towards that health or might be made healthier. And certainly don’t indicate anything about resilience or resourcefulness of the total body and mind. And the average everything is compared to is that of a modern population who are actually not healthy at all.