number of elements to pass through (porosity), or a coherent density of components which are globally porous but which hinder the entry and exit of certain chemical components. These two conceptions lead to quite different visions – including therapeutic ones – in the way the skin plays its protective role.
Increasingly, this leads to a migration towards a systemic and holistic vision of the functioning of the body, including the brain, the consciousness and intelligence of the subject, and their environment, physical, social, psychic, their eating habits, etc. We are then faced with an abyss of complexity which calls for humility and the prudence which is characteristic of the great researchers in medicine and biology, unlike many in the so-called exact or computer sciences.
This illustrates the fact that, to date, there is no epistemological continuity in the whole field of science (we will return to this point) and that science does exist as a differentiated cultural object. The frame of reference, which in this case can be referred to as the scientific culture of the biologist, is different from the scientific culture of the computer scientist, physicist or mathematician, and is therefore exercised within a set of fundamentally different representations. We are finally at the heart of the ancient debate between two ever-opposing philosophical systems: the Platonic one, where the pure idea dominates and determines perception of the sentient being, and the more Aristotelian one, where it is the being itself which consubstantially includes this force of increasing determination of the material cause (matter) by the form entirely drawn towards the final cause. From this, it can be said that a fundamental difference distinguishes biology from the exact sciences ruled by mathematical and physical laws, the living as opposed to the inert, and it is the existence of a force of conservation which is constantly asserting itself and overriding the focus of chance towards this contingent necessity. It tends towards ever greater complexity and diversity. We will return to this in the next chapter which is devoted to an epistemological approach to the two notions of EXD and END.
However, we will see that Bailly and Longo (2011) attempt to overcome this epistemological divide between biology and mathematics, and thus basically attempt to reconcile Plato and Aristotle, by envisaging an upstream recasting of the scientific concepts in play in the two fields of physics and biology, in order to analyze them with overarching concepts but also, in so doing, to distinguish them clearly.
They are thus declaring themselves to be monistic, i.e. in search of a single guiding principle for the understanding and mathematization of sensory phenomena, from inert matter to living systems.
1.2. Our relationship to power is in question
In a system whose design is exo-distributive (EXD), an “Intelligence” outside this system is capable of experimenting and intervening in it in order to control its transformations, understand certain phenomena and perceive movement. The term “Intelligence” with a capital “I” designates any activity leading to the arrival at a decision/action by taking into account elements that it is able to interpret. This ranges from homeostasis1 to the decision of an artificial intelligence or the conscious decision of a human group. This “intelligence”, external to the system, can extract or address certain subsets/sub-assemblies of the system, conceptually or physically, such as a group of places interacting. It can interpret their principles of operation and interaction with other subsets/sub-assemblies, in other words the laws governing the observed phenomena. These phenomena can also be foreseen or even induced by “the intelligence”. The latter will be able to experiment and transform parts of the system from outside in order to distribute the results of the transformation within it. It will be able to do so wholly and radically and will plan how to take control of, and master, the overall dynamic. To do so, it will reduce the system to its representation or modeling, as well as to the laws it will have developed that govern the interworking of the subsets extracted conceptually or physically. The latter will thus be considered isolable in terms of properties. The whole will be interpreted by it as a finite set of interactions.
This intelligence will be able to take risks because it will think it is capable of massively intervening in order to carry out repairs following an intervention that would have caused significant damage to the system. We can then say that the “Intelligence” has become the master of the system by dominating it from the outside. I would describe this conception of intelligent intervention as exo-distributive. Indeed, as an intelligent entity external to the system (exogenous), it has addressed a finite, isolable, reduced set of the structure. It has understood it, transformed it, and then distributed conceptually or physically within it the results of this transformation.
In such a conception, the human–nature relationship, for example, will be thought of as a human–machine relationship, where the human will be outside the machine, i.e. can be described entirely by isolable components and explicit operating rules. Indeed, everything that makes up the unique human characteristic (consciousness, emotions, intuition, spirituality, love, etc.) of a part of the system will be conceptually excluded or neglected by the formal categorization of its functioning. This “Intelligence” will be exercised on concepts or categories of universal scope, therefore free of peculiarities inducing a variable context. It will be by nature a-personal and will seek to permanently tend towards the objectivity and universality of the rules it creates, of classification, substantiation, laws of causality. It will therefore be reductionist and mechanistic by nature.
It could then be said with some confidence that in the exo-distributive conceptions there is inherently a form of arrogance in the power of intervention. On the other hand, in an entirely tissue-based and therefore endo-contributive (ENC) conception, the system takes the form of a 3D tissue, through which force fields (magnetic or light fields, for example) pass in general but whose mesh escapes exhaustive description. The more you magnify the view of this mesh, the more you discover smaller meshes within each mesh and so on (infinite complexity): a fabric with an infinite mesh, permanently connected in its entirety by an energy field. In quantum physics, we can imagine this constitution, for example, for the “Bose–Einstein condensate” which, very close to absolute zero, is neither gaseous, nor liquid, nor solid but an interwoven fabric of vibrations. Each mesh is in relation to all the others at the same time. There is no longer any logic of proximity.
Place is then only an appearance due to the fact that the densification of the links appears darker on observation and therefore depends on the observation device itself. The bodies of matter are no longer made up of agglomerated grains enclosed within a membrane, a shell, but of more or less dense and more or less stable meshes. The shells are no longer hermetically sealed by a “boundary” membrane but by a porous continuum between the densest and the least dense. We are faced with an infinitely complex system partly constructed by the experimental device that allows its observation (meshes of infinite meshes).
I wrote at the beginning of this chapter:
We are faced with two conceptions and therefore two “ways of observing”, without one or the other being able to claim to be more in line with the reality of real than the other. The way of observing somehow creates the intelligibility of the object and thus creates the object, in particular when it is too small or too big to be tackled by the sensory experience of a human being.
This leads to a form of humility in the face of the complexity of reality. Science provides a representation that is never definitively complete. In this case, the intervention intelligence will always have to take into account the incompleteness of its models and the risk linked to its approximations when it wishes to intervene radically and extensively in reality.
In such a system, there is no external “intelligence”, unlike the exo-distributive design. This “Intelligence” is distributed, a diffuse part of the web of links itself. To take the example of driverless cars, we are in the case where the network has no central intelligence, and where each vehicle carries its own intelligence and is responsible for adjusting to its environment to which it is permanently connected.
