Billy Buffington, MD⚕️

A Biological Case for God Within natural ecosystems, all organisms coordinate via bioelectric fields. That coordination sustains homeostasis through a nested hierarchy of cognitive homeostats. All organisms within natural ecosystems are part of what we can think of as a transjective cognitive process, a kind of intelligence that arises from top-down relationships between parts and wholes. It’s not just that individual organisms process information, but that the ecosystem itself does, through patterns of coordination and feedback that entwine biological, atmospheric, hydrological, and geoelectric processes into a single self-regulating system. That’s how both ecosystem and organisms maintain non-equilibrium steady state. Unlike a closed system that runs down to equilibrium, a living system stays far from equilibrium by constantly exchanging energy and information with its environment. It maintains itself through dynamic balance, continuously adapting to flux while preserving coherence and vitality. The medium and the message, in this view, is bioelectric. Every cell, tissue, and organism communicates through voltage gradients and electrical fields. These nested Markovian bioelectric fields (so called because their changes depend probabilistically on their prior states) form feedback networks that store and transmit information about the system as a whole. In systems theory, these networks can be described as Markov blankets—boundaries that separate a system from its environment while still allowing the exchange of information and energy. Each level of biological organization, from the cell membrane to the organism to the ecosystem, maintains its own Markov blanket. These layers are nested within one another, forming a hierarchy of self-organizing boundaries that both define and connect living systems. This organization begins even below the level of the cell. As @drmichaellevin’s work has shown, ionic networks and cytoskeletal conduction pathways form electrical gradients that prefigure the emergence of cellular boundaries and later tissue patterning. From there, the same bioelectric logic extends upward through nested fields of coherence: cells couple electrically into tissues, tissues synchronize into organ-level oscillations, and those oscillations integrate within the organism through large-scale electrical rhythms, think cardiac and neural waves as examples. When we say the process is scale invariant, we mean that the same basic principles repeat across these levels. The same self-organizing rules that govern electrical signaling between cells also appear, in transformed form, in the interactions between organs, between organisms, and ultimately between species within an ecosystem. In this way, life expresses a fractal logic: patterns of coordination that hold true from the micro to the macro. This electrical patterning is as essential to biological order as DNA or the biochemistry that sustains it, the medium through which matter becomes coherent. So everything within an organism communicates using a synchronized network of such bioelectric fields, what we might call intersubjective communication at the horizontal level (cell to cell, organ to organ, across) and transjective communication at higher levels (whole to part, organism to environment, up and down). If we apply the principle of scale invariance, the idea that the same organizing laws repeat at multiple levels of structure, then the same kind of communication that coordinates a body also coordinates an ecosystem. In other words, ecosystems themselves are bioelectrically synchronized organisms, composed of smaller organisms whose fields are nested within a larger field. 1/

a wild experiment in really well-controlled conditions showing that focusing attention on a laboratory-induced histamine skin prick dramatically reduced and improved the resolution of the inflammatory response

New York, I love you

"Despair is a development of pride so great that it chooses one's certitude rather than admit God is more creative than we are. " –Ernst Toller (played by Ethan Hawke) paraphrasing Merton in Paul Schrader's "First Reformed"

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