Jist of this is that at that all biological systems are based on repeatable, predictive chemical reactions. Biological systems have a complex set of interacting reactions, however we should be able to scale the predictiveness and repeatability of that chemistry even into human cognitive processes. This foundation also provides some interesting pathways for simplification of the underlying complexity, as there are only a limited number of ways that chemicals are able to interact.
Rather than describing the elephant by it’s parts, we can describe the elephant in terms of the same underlying terms we describe all life with, and each blind man has a point of commonality to conform their description against, and a mathematical path to calculate the differences between each.
More later…
Edit: Okay, so maybe a lot more emphasis on the later than the more part. The focus of this is that cellular architecture looks the way it does because of the underlying physical requirements of the underlying chemical reactions that make up life. Microtubules and vesicles and such all provide very specific metabolic functions, including aligning proteins etc in the correct orientation to facilitate the next stage of the reaction.
In order for a reaction to occur in biological systems, orientation and activation energy are huge considerations, and our cellular pump systems must produce a minimum amount of force to bridge the intercellular gap while keeping the particle oriented correctly to it’s target.
Imagine playing darts with a foam dart against a foam dart board. Every single cell attempts to communicate with each other by throwing the darts at each other. In order for the dart to stick to the other cell in a way that starts a reaction (or stick to the dartboard), the dart has to be thrown hard enough to stick, but not so hard that the kinetic energy prevents sticking, and it has to be oriented so the sticky part of the dart is aligned with the sticky part of the board.
When we think of “dopamine” being a transmitter for example, it’s not a simple task of just creating the chemical, it also has to be fired at it’s target continually until it “sticks”. This is a REALLY important task of astrocytes for example, chaperoning this intercellular toss. Oligodendrocytes perform similarly in making sure the alignment and energy level is consistent enough to stick messengers to other cells.
The general conceit of all this is that what the elephant looks like is far less important than how the elephant does what it does, and we can create a common language for “does what it does” based on current biophysical understandings.
Edit 2: Also, the links below are obviously a fucking mouthful and take a lot of decoding, will take a bit of time and do a decode on them soon.
The effective deficiency of biochemical networks
A fork in the road to differentiation
Topological chaos in active nematics