Listening to a professor Sam Wang from Princeton talk about neurology in a Teaching Company set of lectures. He talks of one part of the brain as "interpreting" a "signal" from another part. This manner of talk is too homuncular. One needs a vocabulary that tips its hat, as it were, to human operation as the source of analogies by which we understand the processes taking place within our bodies. But that vocab must also distinguish the processes/states occurring in this or that part of the human FROM properly human operation. Perhaps one should speak of this part of the brain as "sub-interpreting" the "sub-signal" from another part? Uh, perhaps that is more distracting than illuninating (hmnmmm).
How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
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