Biological processing.

Abstract

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.