Thought-entity

The purpose of this little digression is not to claim any understanding of how the brain is constituted and actually works it is simply to present a model of information processing in engineering terms that can make it plausible that partitioning of a complex thought-entity could be an inherent feature of the brain, and so make the system concept more real for engineers. 

The value of M compared to N is a measure of the complexity of the thought-entity, but for this simple demonstration of the model we shall assume the lowest complexity possible, i.e. M = N -1, or a linear structure. 

We shall need one further model parameter - the assurance level, a. This is the probability of not having a single unit of information failure within a thought-entity, and is given by... 

In this example, we examine differences in the floral aroma chemistry of three species of Cypripedium as determined by Bergstrom et al. (1992). Before the recognition of the North American species (C. parviflorum with two or three varieties), C. calceolus L. was thought to consist of three entities, whether varieties or subspecies is not relevant, the European calceolus, and two North American entities, parviflorum and pubescens. ... 

The primary donor in Photosystem I P700 is thought to be a special pair of chlorophyll a molecules. Katz and Hindman (18) have reviewed a number of systems designed to mimic the properties of P700 ranging from chlorophyll a in certain solvents under special conditions where dimers form spontaneously (19) to covalently linked chlorophylls (20). Using these models it has been possible to mimic many of the optical, EPR and redox properties of the in vivo P700 entity. 

Respiratory Effects. Pulmonary edema was observed in a patient after an attempted suicide with endrin and was thought to be due to chemical pneumonitis following aspiration of aromatic hydrocarbons contained in the ingested formulation. The authors state that the hydrocarbons may have been the cause of the pulmonary effects (Runhaar et al. 1985), since hydrocarbon-induced chemical pneumonitis is a well established clinical entity. 

The answer, Meyer thought, lies in the kinetic theory of heat and matter. This physical theory had been given explicit chemical meaning by Williamson s inference from studies of the synthesis of diethyl ether that atoms in chemical compounds must be continually changing places.56 Molecules are not empty boxes in translation or rotation but little Pandora-like boxes filled with active entities. The goal of chemistry must be the understanding of chemical phenomena using theories of motion, not just theories of species or types. 

It is thought that the micelle surface is undulating to some degree, so it is not a perfect entity. However, it is described well by double-layer theory, which requires some order. It is not easy to describe a micelle as nobody has ever seen one it is something that is projected from all its properties. 

For example, let us consider the common cold, often thought of as a disease entity of great economic importance because so many people are afflicted. Medical science has been searching for decades, and for the most part in vain, for a treatment for this affliction. Many, many measures have been enthusiastically embraced, one after another, and have then been discarded because they do not work, generally speaking. 

An agent can be thought of as a sfand-alone entity with individual parameters, which govern or track its behavior through the drug development process, as conceptualized in Figure 35.13. 

A potential factor affecting the catalytic power of enzyme-catalyzed reactions in which the enzyme forces the attacking moiety into the valence shell of the entity under attack. Compression is thought to be manifested in the transition state complex. The results of kinetic isotope effect measurements have suggested that compression events factor in the catechol methyltransferase re-actionh... 

It might turn out that no ultimate theory will ever be discovered, that scientists will find themselves probing the workings of nature at ever deeper levels. After all this is what has always happened before. Scientists originally thought that the chemical elements were the fundamental components of the universe. Then the physicists showed that they were not, by discovering first that atoms were composed of smaller particles and then that some of these particles themselves had components. Then superstring theory introduced the idea that even smaller entities were fundamental. 

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