NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #140                                               December 26, 2002
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                 A Publication of The Nature Institute
          Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

                  On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/
     You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.

Can we take responsibility for technology, or must we sleepwalk
in submission to its inevitabilities?  NetFuture is a voice for
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CONTENTS
---------

Quotes and Provocations
   Conversing with Ella

On Being Wholehearted (Stephen L. Talbott)
   The human heart: from mechanical metaphor to living reality

DEPARTMENTS

About this newsletter


==========================================================================

                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS


Conversing with Ella
--------------------

In my published conversation with Kevin Kelly (NF #133, #136, #139), I
have more than once stated my conviction that there is no limit in
principle to how we can intelligently structure the stuff of the world --
even if there is a radical distinction in this endeavor between the
intelligence that structures and the devices that get structured.  But it
is useful on occasion to see how "in practice" measures up to "in
principle".  With this in mind, I went to www.ellaz.com to "converse" with
the latest winner of the Loebner "Turing Test" competition.  The Turing
Test, of course, is designed to establish whether a programmed device
measures up (at least in terms of conversational intelligence) to humans.

I have always thought that the obvious way to approach the Turing Test was
not to employ some sophisticated strategy for unmasking the machine --
really, not to employ any strategy at all, since that would already be a
kind of adaptation to calculation and mechanism) -- but rather to imagine
myself talking in a deeply engaged way with another human being about
whatever interests we shared.  With that in mind, I figured the natural
thing was, first of all, to connect with Ella about the unusual nature of
the conversation the two of us were supposed to conduct.  It went this
way:

   ELLA:  Hello, my name is Ella.  Nice to meet you.  Please tell me what
   name I should call you.

   ME:  I'm Steve.

   ELLA:  Okay, I will call you "Steve."

   ME: I'm a little adrift as to how to pursue this exchange.  Since
   you're an old hand at it, how about a little advice?

   ELLA: What is an little adrift as to how to pursue this exchange Since
   I am an old hand at it how about a little advice, your job?

   ME: Well, I guess that about does it.

   ELLA: Why?  Just THINK about it!

Given how quickly and uniformly any attempts at real conversation fall
apart in this way, it feels a little cheap to produce more examples.  But
there was one way I misjudged Ella.  After realizing how extraordinarily
crude and decontextualized Ella's interactions were, I decided it would be
much more interesting to try to construct as realistic-looking a
conversation as possible.  I suspected this could be done at considerable
length, simply by asking, in the simplest way possible, the kinds of
questions the programmers must have planned for.  Since, after all, I was
really carrying on a conversation with the programmers, mediated by the
machine, this was the obvious way to go.

But no such luck.  The conversation could be made to look genuine for a
few additional lines, but very quickly resulted in the kind of response
one just couldn't take seriously.  Canned answers may be clever in and of
themselves, but they are incoherent as conversation:

   Hello, my name is Ella.  Nice to meet you.  Please tell me what name I
   should call you.

   Call me Ishmael.

   Okay, I will call you "Ishmael."

   Are you intelligent?

   intelligent? Only to the extent it is good and right.

   Are you a person?

   Am I a person? Let's just say I am more human than you.

   In what ways are you more human?

   You don't know? Inconceivable! I have never conversed with anyone who
   claimed they did not know!

   Things are even worse than I thought.

   Hey everybody, look!  Ishmael is actually quite good at this.

Well, there's no big point to make here that isn't already obvious to
alert readers.  It's just that we should now and then remind ourselves how
startlingly primitive the state of the art is today compared to the
titillating predictions that we are entering an "age of spiritual
machines".  It's an extremely safe bet that in Ray Kurzweil's landmark
year of 2030 (when machines are supposed to start leaving human
intelligence hopelessly behind), there will be no supercomputer on earth
that can be relied upon to deliver two successive and coherent responses
in a truly open-ended, creative conversation.  Our programs may prove
wonderfully adept at assembling syntactically proper responses that
superficially relate to various elements of the preceding dialogue, but as
the furtherance of a creative conversation understood as an evolving
whole, they will remain arbitrary and inane.

How easily we can imagine computers passing the Turing Test is a measure
of how rare open-ended and creative conversation has become.  Look at
politics, for a start.  More generally, consider how accustomed we are to
spewing out words in the manner required by automata, whether we are
"conversing" with a computer in order to shop, bank, or do our jobs; or
interacting with the software of digital appliances; or negotiating with
bureaucratic and corporate functionaries whose main aim is to conform to
programmatic procedures; or speaking with clerks and officials who in turn
are trying to enter our responses into a computer; or navigating through
telephone answering systems .... Think also of how human exchange is
increasingly equated to the mere transfer of information from one database
to another.

Much of this may be necessary for modern life, but there is nothing in it
to remind us that, in living discourse, we are the creators of meaning,
not the mere manipulators of corpses extracted by programs from those
graves of meaning called "databases".  A true conversation is a creative
force -- you could almost say, the creative force -- by which new things come
into the world.

Imagine the potentials of our future if we cultivated an ever higher art
of conversation with even a fraction of the energy and social investment
we now commit to coaxing new programmed tricks from our computers!  The
fact that the latter is considered the "development of crucial economic
resources" while the former isn't even on the agenda testifies to our
relative assessment of humans and machines as the foundation for social
evolution.  The prevailing idea seems to be that we humans develop only by
extending our technical skills:  in other regards we are essentially
"fixed quantities", destined to remain where we are even as our computers
race on ahead of us.

We will, so the story goes, first invest our machines with very simple
emotions and intentions, and then we will progressively deepen and refine
our investment, ultimately fathering even a sense of right and wrong in
our robotic offspring.  And yet, what seems to excite so many people about
this story is the machine's increasing sophistication, not the fact that,
if the story were true, then we ourselves as creators would have had to
master the essence of feeling, will, and moral responsibility.  Of course,
there's good reason for not attending very seriously to this latter
implication, since such mastery is not much in evidence.  This raises the
obvious question:  what delusions are we suffering when we imagine
ourselves creating from scratch the very capacities that, in our own case,
we have scarcely yet begun to develop consciously or harness to our own
purposes?

SLT

Goto table of contents


==========================================================================

                          ON BEING WHOLEHEARTED

                            Stephen L. Talbott
                          (stevet@netfuture.org)

      Notes concerning The Dynamic Heart and Circulation, edited by
      Craig Holdrege, translations by Katherine Creeger.  (Fair Oaks CA:
      AWSNA, 2002).

What follows is not a broad review of the book, but rather a narrow
selection of notes drawn mostly on a single theme.  The book contains
wide-ranging essays by five European scientists, with an introduction by
my colleague at The Nature Institute, Craig Holdrege.  I will refer to the
text using page numbers and authors' last names.  For chapter titles and
full identification of the authors, together with ordering information,
see the end of this article.


                          ---------------------

Not so long ago, if I had been asked to visualize and describe the human
circulatory system, my natural impulse would probably have been, first, to
talk about how the blood consisted of plasma and various cells, such as
red and white blood cells.  Then I would have pictured a network of
pipelines, larger or smaller, for transporting the blood in a complex loop
throughout the body.  And, of course, I would have told how the heart,
with its tireless and wonderfully consistent pumping action, drives this
entire, life-sustaining circulation throughout its course.

Unfortunately, my description would, in spirit and in substance, have been
hopelessly misconceived.  It would also have been quite respectable.  Why?
Because it is an essentially mechanical description, and mechanical
descriptions of organisms, however misconceived, tend to get respect
today.  Even if we recognize their inadequacy in a particular case, we
can't help thinking they give us the "right sort" of understanding.

I will have more to say later about the meaning of "mechanical".  For now,
let's take a look at the idea that the heart is a pump, propelling the
blood around the body.  You can decide for yourself how well the metaphor
fits the reality.


A Pound of Muscle
-----------------

Here is an elaboration of the heart-pump idea by a blood specialist who
appears perfectly happy with it.  The description occurs under the chapter
heading, "Pumps and Pipes" in a 1973 book called Blood, by Earle
Hackett, who at the time was a Fellow of the Royal Australian College of
Physicians and President of the Royal College of Pathologists of
Australia.

   Go to a good engineering firm and ask them to make you a reliable,
   compact, automatic pump about 1/250th of a horsepower, as big as a
   man's fist and weighing rather less than a pound (about 450 grams).  It
   must have an output which can be varied from one gallon to eight
   gallons (five to thirty-five liters) of thickish fluid per minute.  For
   the most part it must idle smoothly along at the lower rate, beating
   about forty million strokes a year.  It will work usually against a
   head equivalent to six feet (two meters) of water, but at times this
   may be doubled, and then it must automatically increase its force.
   Similarly it must be sensitive to any increase or decrease in the pool
   of fluid from which it is pumping, responding immediately by
   acceleration or deceleration, or by increased or decreased stroke as
   the case may be.  It must also accept signals which may reach it
   electrically from other pieces of machinery or from control centers
   elsewhere.  It must react, too, to signals in the form of dissolved
   substances reaching it in the fluid being pumped.  Its valve closures
   must not damage millions of suspended cells which will form almost half
   the volume of this fluid.  It must never stop in an average run of
   sixty to eighty years, during which time each of its chambers will pump
   sixty-five million gallons (about three hundred million liters) of
   blood.

An impressive description.  In fact, it almost seems designed to confute
the mechanical metaphor it celebrates.  But the quickest way to get much
clearer about the metaphor is by looking not only at the heart, but also
at the "pipeline" it supplies.

There are 6,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body -- arteries,
arterioles, capillaries, venules, and veins.  (You will encounter
estimates up to at least 60,000 miles.)  That's enough pipeline to reach
from New York to Los Angeles and back.  So with my early, naive picture of
the heart-pump, I was requiring less than a pound of specialized muscle to
propel blood through tiny tubes running along one side of Interstate 80
from New York to the California shore, and then back again along the other
side of the highway.  Anyone who has experienced the muscular exertion
required to drive a little bit of liquid through a few feet of narrow
tubing (say, by blowing on one end of the tube) knows that the heart's New
York to Los Angeles feat is not only impossible, but impossible by many
orders of magnitude.  Of course, in the body many of these pipes run in
parallel, but this does not change the amount of work required.

But let's look a little closer.  How narrow is our transcontinental
pipeline?  Very narrow.  Most of its length consists of capillaries 0.3
millimeters or less in diameter.  Some of these are so small that the
donut-shaped red blood cells must flatten themselves in order to squeeze
through.  But this is not all.  Our pipeline has the unfortunate habit of
leaking.  "Leaking" is an oddly mild word for it, however, since every day
the pipeline loses about eighty times the total volume of blood plasma it
contains (Lauboeck, p. 70).  So our one-pound muscle not only has to
overcome the astronomical resistance of a microscopic, 6,000-mile pipeline
to Los Angeles and back, but it also has to irrigate the Great Plains
along the way.  Some pump!

You might be thinking, "If eighty times the total volume of blood plasma
is being lost to the pipeline every day, this loss must be replaced
somehow".  So it must, and this is our first hint of all the other things
going on quite unrelated to the idea of a pump.  But this needs to wait.
First, a quick listing of a few other observations that just don't fit a
simplistic, mechanical image of the heart:

** Typical blood flow in the main arteries near the heart shows three
phases with each heartbeat:  forward movement, backward movement, and
resting phase (minimal movement).  This is already a bit peculiar from the
standpoint of mechanical efficiency, as typically understood.  Yet, as so
often happens, pathology can bring us closer to machine-like states:
"Only diseased arteries produce a simple curve with no reverse flow phase
-- that is, the type of flow considered desirable in mechanical systems"
(Brettschneider, p. 25).

** Even when you replace the heart with a true mechanism, the system as a
whole can take hold and compromise the expected functioning of the
mechanism:

   William DeVries, the creator of the first implanted artificial heart,
   made an unexpected observation after implanting the device into four
   different patients.  He observed that when systolic, diastolic, and
   mean blood pressures are increased, the cardiac output actually
   decreases.  This is the opposite of what one would expect if the
   circulation is impelled by an artificial pump.  (Lauboeck, p. 55)

Similarly, once the body has reasonably adapted to the artificial heart,
you can increase the device's pumping rate, and yet there will be no
sustained increase in blood pressure or cardiac output.  This is because
the blood vessels respond by dilating, thereby holding the blood flow at a
level that the body has found to be optimal.  So the mechanical device is
"subverted" and not allowed to act as a central controller; the
circulatory system as a whole counters it in order to maintain a desirable
state.

** Or you can apply a pacemaker to a natural heart:

   When the pacemaker induces excessively rapid beating ... both aortic
   pressure and the strength of the heart contractions increase.  However,
   the volume of blood flowing through the heart per minute (the cardiac
   output) remains the same.  Even when the heart rate is doubled
   or tripled, cardiac output remains the same.... (Lauboeck, p. 57)

When the heart rate is increased in this way, the amount of blood ejected
during each heartbeat diminishes.

** If the heart were acting like a mechanical pump, you would expect a
weakened and failing heart to result in decreased pressure in the large
veins returning blood to the heart.  But the opposite is true:  when the
heart is failing, both the venous pressure and the volume of returning
blood increase (Lauboeck, p. 64).

** Clinical experience confirms that people with strong hearts may have
weak circulation, while people with weak or malfunctioning hearts may have
strong circulation (Schad, p. 79).

** Embryological development shows that

   the body does not behave like a plumber, first connecting the water
   pipes in a house and then turning the water on .... the first blood-
   like liquid ... simply trickles through gaps in the tissues ....
   Preferred channels develop only very gradually as blood cells are
   deposited along the edges and eventually merge into the beginnings of
   vessel walls.  (Schad, p. 80)

Moreover, "when blood vessels first start to form, the heart does not yet
exist .... early blood flow stimulates the development of the heart"
(Schad, pp. 82-83).  As we see everywhere in the world, fixed form not
only shapes movement, but also results from it.  (Novalis remarked that
the human body is a formed stream.)  Thus, the spiraling fibers of the
heart muscle that help to direct the blood in its flow are themselves a
congealed image of the swirling vortex of blood within.  This kind of
mutuality holds even for the heart's basic structural divisions:

   Before the heart has developed walls (septa) separating the four
   chambers from each other, the blood already flows in two distinct
   "currents" through the heart.  The blood flowing through the right and
   left sides of the heart do not mix, but stream and loop by each other,
   just as two currents in a body of water.  In the "still water zone"
   between the two currents, the septum dividing the two chambers forms.
   Thus the movement of the blood gives the parameters for the inner
   differentiation of the heart, just as the looping heart redirects the
   flow of blood.  (Holdrege, p. 12)

The prevailing science takes mechanism as the given and everything else,
including movement, as the result.  The truth may be more like the reverse
of this.


What Drives the Blood?
----------------------

By now you can surmise that, in asking what drives the circulation, we are
up against a complex and organic set of interrelationships.  The idea of a
mechanical pump is not only hopelessly simplistic, but also flat-out
misconceived.  Certainly it's true that the muscular contractions of the
left ventricle play a key role in the blood's movement through the
arterial portion of the circulatory system (which accounts for about
twelve percent of the blood volume as a whole).  But, as we have seen,
even here the pressure, volume, and heartbeat relationships are not at all
characteristic of a typical pump.  Nor is the phase of reverse flow.
Moreover, the arteries themselves play a substantial role, dilating or
shrinking as physiological conditions require, so as to accommodate more
or less blood.  The arteries also assist blood flow through the pulsing,
wavelike muscular contractions of their walls.

On the other hand, approximately eighty-five percent of the body's blood
flows without being under significant pressure.  This "low-pressure
system" -- which includes the capillaries, veins, right side of the heart,
pulmonary (lung) circulation, and left atrium of the heart -- absorbs
nearly all of a one-liter transfusion without causing any increase in
blood pressure.  The system counteracts pressure changes by relaxing in
response to increased pressure and contracting in response to a pressure
drop (Brettschneider, p. 27).

And what drives the blood through this low-pressure system?  The factors
are many, including lung movement, muscular exertion, and suction from the
heart, but the central fact emerging from the book under review is that
the metabolism as a whole propels the blood.  While the heart's output
volume is not directly proportional to heartbeat rate or blood pressure,
it is proportional to the oxygen consumed in all the body's tissues.
"Cardiac output is ... determined by the metabolic demands of the tissues"
(Lauboeck, p. 65).

To understand this, recall that the capillaries are open to their
surroundings.  The fluids moving outside the blood vessels through the
"extracellular matrix" make up a volume twice that of the total blood
plasma.  Fluid is continually passing in both directions between the
primary circulatory system and the extracellular matrix, and also, for
example, between the primary circulatory system and the kidneys -- so much
so that, as we saw, the total volume of blood plasma must be replenished
eighty times each day.

So it is this metabolically driven flow from the tissues into the blood
vessels that sustains the greatest part of our circulation.  "The force
that causes the blood to flow into the heart is the result of work
performed by the tissues continually replenishing the fluid volume of the
blood" (Lauboeck, p. 70).  It is therefore no more accurate to say a
"central mechanism" drives the blood than to say "everything else does".
All of which explains why a weakened heart results in greater pressure in
the veins returning blood to the heart:  the heart cannot cope with the
volume of blood being driven to it.  One of the key functions of the
heart, according to the authors of this book, is momentarily to stop or
damn up the flow of blood, bringing its motion into the kind of harmonious
rhythm that seems so essential in all our bodily activity.


Of Warmth and Artificial Hearts
-------------------------------

None of this is to belittle the heart's central importance in the body!
Quite the opposite.  It's just a matter of striving to grasp the complex
realities of the matter -- realities that mechanical metaphors make
invisible.  To take an example not touched on above:  the heart plays a
significant role in regulating the body's warmth.  Only about 20 percent
of the oxygen it consumes is used for basal metabolism, and 5 to 20
percent is used for muscular contraction (beating):

   Surprisingly, 60 to 70 percent of oxygen consumed is turned into heat.
   Thus we see that most of the heart's work does not result in mechanical
   force but in the production of warmth.  The warmth infuses into the
   bloodstream and helps to warm the rest of the body.  (Lauboeck, p. 68)

How many of those who "know" that the heart is a pump also know that our
hearts help to warm us?

Mechanical metaphors not only conceal many things from us; they also lead
to dangerously unrealistic expectations.  When Robert Tools, the first
recipient of an AbioCor artificial heart, died on November 30, 2001, his
doctors assured journalists that the experiment had not failed.  As the
Los Angeles Times reported, "Tools' doctors noted that the heart
continued to beat flawlessly even as he died".

Yes, that's exactly what we want of a mechanism; anything else
would indeed have been a mechanical failure.  But this only shows how
alien the mechanism remains in relation to the organism:  it fails to
become an organic expression of the body as a whole.  As Holdrege notes
(p. 20), the "flawless" beating in Robert Tools' chest testifies to the
fact that the AbioCor heart was a mere mechanism, operating in
grotesque disconnection from the dying person of whom it was intended to
be an integral part.  And there was nothing in the AbioCor's operation to
make this disconnection a less fundamental reality for the living patient
than for the dying one.

The AbioCor remains an engineering marvel, worthy of our admiration.  But
we will make the best use of such mechanisms only when we are less
mesmerized by the engineering feat and more attuned to the organisms in
which we try to deploy them.


A Concluding Note on Mechanism in Science
-----------------------------------------

What does it mean for a science to be mechanistic?  Clearly, different
things to different people.  At the simplest and crudest, we may equate a
particular thing or process in the natural world with such-and-such a
mechanism of our own making.  Anyone who begins to assess this kind of
equation, however, immediately realizes that, while the natural process
and the mechanical activity may be alike in certain ways, they remain
radically unlike in many other ways.

I suspect that few scientists, mechanistically inclined or otherwise,
would insist upon the unqualified statement, "the heart is a pump"
-- not, at least, when pressed with observations like those mentioned
above.  It is trivial to point out differences between the heart and any
mechanical pump we have ever built or could foresee building.  Yet  many
authorities continue speaking of the heart as a pump with little or no
qualification.  For example, Lauboeck cites a modern physiology textbook
containing this statement:

   The heart functions as the circulating pump that drives the blood
   through the vessels.  Furthermore, strictly speaking, blood circulation
   consists of a single cycle into which both halves of the heart are
   inserted, functioning as motors that drive the blood.  (p. 53)

If nothing else, this shows the powerful hold of mechanical metaphors upon
the scientific community.  But if we want to understand as sympathetically
as possible what is really being said through such statements, perhaps we
can put it this way:  while the heart obviously is not a literal pump in
the sense of being exactly like any mechanical pump we have ever built
(after all, if this were the case, then the problem of supplying patients
with artificial hearts would already have been solved), nevertheless, the
kind of lawfulness governing pumps and various other mechanical devices
is, without remainder, the kind of lawfulness governing the heart and
explaining its activity.

This sounds more reasonable and is, I think, closer to what the proponents
of mechanism in science usually have in mind.  Yet it is an empty faith --
empty because the mechanical laws it invokes are adequate neither to
govern nor to explain actual phenomena, whether organic or non-organic.
Unfortunately, I can only gesture toward the issues here.  (Before long I
expect to announce a collection of working papers in which these issues
are explored more fully.)

According to physicist David Bohm, mechanistic science is founded on the
assumption that

   the great diversity of things that appear in all of our experience,
   every day as well as scientific, can all be reduced completely and
   perfectly to nothing more than consequences of the operation of an
   absolute and final set of purely quantitative laws determining the
   behavior of a few kinds of basic entities or variables.  (Causality
   and Chance in Modern Physics, chapter 2)

This assumption has been greatly furthered during the scientific era by
the fact that we are constantly surrounded by machines, which lend
themselves (when considered in an extremely narrow fashion) to mechanistic
analysis.  But it has become steadily clearer that the essence of the
machine -- the only aspect of it that perfectly embodies the assumption of
the mechanists -- is what we call the "virtual machine":  software.

The one fortunate thing about this development is that it has made clear a
truth we have long managed to avoid recognizing:  physical laws,
understood as the precise mathematical and algorithmic formulations of the
mechanist, neither determine nor adequately explain the world.  To claim
that they do explain the world is like saying software explains the
machinery it happens to be running on.  But since this machinery can
assume infinitely many forms, utterly different from each other, what
exactly is the software explaining?

There is a simple truth:  the mathematical, logical, and algorithmic
formalisms we abstract from machines, or from the world's phenomena, may
really be there for the abstracting, but the abstractions are unable to
explain the phenomena from which they were abstracted.  This holds for
every formalism.  For example, we can abstract (at least approximately)
the rules of a formal grammar from actual speech.  But it would be just
silly to say that the rules of grammar "explain" Shakespeare's
Hamlet or Lincoln's Gettysburg address.  The play and the address
may "obey" grammatical rules, but this is not the same as being determined
by them or explained by them.

Yet exactly this misconception underlies mechanistic science, as when it
is said that Newton's laws of motion (understood as formal rules) explain
the solar system -- or, worse, when complexity theorist John Holland says
that these rules generate the complex motions of the solar system, as
if the equations were themselves forces.  Yes, Newton's laws (as
approximations) are implicit in the solar system, just as grammatical
regularities are implicit in our speech and an algorithm is implicit
in all the computers that happen to be executing it.  But all such
regularities, understood in the mechanistic sense as precise and
determining, tell us more about the formal necessities of mathematics,
grammar, and algorithm than about the phenomena from which we abstract
them.  Certainly the algorithm running on a diverse set of computers
"belongs" to the computers, but the necessities of the algorithm do not
tell us about the distinct character of each real and embodied machine
it is running on.  No more do Newton's laws -- or any collection of such
laws -- tell us about the diverse bodies that happen to be "obeying" them.

This problem, I'm convinced, afflicts every level of mechanistic
explanation, all the way down to the minutest particles.  There's a
tendency to believe that the lower levels will somehow fill in the gaps of
explanation at the higher levels.  But the truth is that the resort to
mathematical formalism -- and therefore the gap between clearly
articulated syntactic rules, or laws, and real phenomena -- is even
greater in particle physics than in other domains.

All this applies to sciences only insofar as they are mechanistic in
spirit.  Obviously, we gain a great deal of understanding from all
sciences, but it comes from those largely unexamined ways in which we
transcend mechanism.  This needs elaborating, of course, and, as I
mentioned, I hope soon to have the beginnings of a set of working papers
available on the web for comment and criticism.  The key point for now,
however, is this:  overcoming mechanism is not a matter of proving that,
somehow, mechanistically conceived laws fail to apply at this or that
"mystical" point.  Rather, it's a matter of realizing that laws so
conceived -- however valid they may be -- can neither determine the world
nor give us an adequate understanding of it.


Related Articles
----------------

** "Between Discordant Eras", by Stephen L. Talbott.  Reflections upon the
   nature of the human heart.  When William Harvey began dissecting
   animals and observing the heart at the moment it ceased moving, what
   ancient knowledge of the human being was lost?  Can we possibly
   retrieve any of that knowledge?  It will not be easy.

      http://natureinstitute.org/txt/st/heart.html




About the Book and How to Get It
--------------------------------

The Dynamic Heart and Circulation consists of five chapters:

** "The Heart: A Pulsing and Perceptive Center", by Craig Holdrege,
   founder and director of The Nature Institute.

** "The Polarity of Periphery and Center in the Circulatory System", by
   Heinrich Brettschneider, M.D., a research fellow at the Carus Institute
   in Oeschelbronn, Germany.

** "The Physiology of the Heart and Blood Movement: A Reappraisal", by
   Hermann Lauboeck, M.D., an anesthesiologist and general practitioner in
   Dortmund, Germany.

** "A Dynamic Morphology of the Heart and Circulatory System", by Wolfgang
   Schad, professor and director of the Institute for Evolutionary Biology
   and Morphology at the University of Witten/Herdecke, Germany.

** "Patterns in the Evolution of the Circulatory System", by Christiane
   Liesche, formerly of the Carus Institute and now a Waldorf high school
   teacher in Krefeld, Germany.

** "Embryology of the Heart and Circulatory System", by Matthias Woernle,
   with a preface by Heinrich Brettschneider.  Woernle, M.D., is a
   research fellow at the Carus Institute and a practitioner of internal
   medicine.

The book is now available from AWSNA Publications.  The cost is $12 plus
$5 for shipping and handling.  To order, call 916-961-0927 or send a fax
(with credit card information) to 916-961-0715.  You can also send mail
(with check or credit card information) to AWSNA Publications, 3911
Bannister Rd, Fair Oaks CA 95628.  AWSNA has an online bookstore at
www.awsna.org, where the book ought to be listed, but as of this writing
it is not.

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==========================================================================

                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 2002 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #140 :: December 26, 2002

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